Replicating the operational efficiency of the world’s top cloud providers became a much more reachable goal for the everyday enterprise last week after Akanda Inc. debuted a new iteration of its OpenStack network orchester offering to simplify the management of private clouds. The features introduced in the release aim to make it a better replacement to the plethora of different tools currently needed to handle traffic in such massively distributed environments.

Astara, as the startup’s service is called, now makes it possible to allocate network resources much faster than before to help administrators better address sudden spikes in requests to their applications. The new release also introduces a high-availability mode to prevent the underlying infrastructure from collapsing under the increased traffic, or any other operational challenges for that matter. The protection encompasses everything from the physical hardware up to the load balancer.

But Akanda wasn’t able to bask the limelight for long before the cloud spotlight shifted to Cisco Systems Inc. in the wake of its move to acquire digital video distribution startup 1 Mainstream, Inc. for an undisclosed sum. The deal marks the latest of the company’s efforts to target broadcasters, which account for a significant portion of the packets flowing through its switches and routers that is only expected to increase as media consumption continues to rise.

The growth of video traffic underscores a broader increase in the amount of information entering the corporate network that IBM Corp. is also trying to capitalize. The vendor last week introduced a managed implementation of Apache Spark for its public cloud that enables customers to harness the open-source analytics engine in order to process their unstructured data more quickly. That includes both internal records as well as metrics from external sources like Big Blue’s latest acquisition, The Weather Company.

Image via Geralt