Regardless of what they are looking up, travelers’ first experience is on the go. Users are under pressure, trying to figure something out without wasting any precious time. They are distracted – navigating a busy ticket counter or conversing in a foreign language with a street vendor. The decisions they make at that moment really matter, and can mean the difference between a pleasant flight and a missed connection. Reliability of your app is key in these situations. If the app is slow, unresponsive, or difficult to understand, your user will give up.
Many organizations’ virtualization strategies begin and end with deploying VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V to virtualize as many servers as possible. But there’s so much more that an enterprise can do to extend the benefits of virtualization. In addition to virtualizing, a workflow-based management overlay can minimize operational costs while ensuring assets are fully utilized. Furthermore, taking advantage of applications in the public cloud can further reduce costs while ensuring agility and on-demand resources to meet changing business requirements. Here are four ways an enterprise can improve its overall cloud strategy.
Learn how you can use the CoSN SEND II Decision Tree for Education Technology to make sure that your K–12 technology initiatives create a more engaging learning experience that empowers students, teachers, and administrators alike.
DevOps is all the rage these days and with good reason as it promises to reduce the time-to-market for new applications. It also promises to improve change management, allowing teams to deploy changes to their applications quickly and efficiently. However, DevOps isn’t something you buy, install, or implement; rather it is the symptom of an appropriate organizational system. In his session at DevOps Summit, Mark Thiele, EVP, Data Center Technologies at SUPERNAP International, discussed how to get to the right organizational model that will allow DevOps practices to flourish.
Our guest on the podcast this week is Alex Polvi, CEO at CoreOS. We discuss how CoreOS fundamentally improves the security of the internet by modeling the infrastructure best practices developed by Google, Facebook and Twitter. Alex also breaks down the specifications of CoreOS’ new innovative products from Rocket to App Container to Tectonic.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Luxoft Holding, Inc., a leading provider of software development services and innovative IT solutions, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's @ThingsExpo, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Luxoft’s software development services consist of core and mission-critical custom software development and support, product engineering and testing, and technology consulting.
Performance testing is one of the most important things you can do when building a web or mobile app, and it’s only becoming more vital as the expectations of users are going up. People demand access to anything, anywhere, anytime, and they’ll switch to a competitive solution if the app they’re trying to use is slow or clunky. Performance is critical to the success of your web and mobile apps – and will be for a long time in the future. It’s not a matter of if you have to do it. It’s about how to do it best.
HP today announced the new HP ConvergedSystem 250-HC StoreVirtual, a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. Designed to attract customers on a tight budget, the HP CS 250 includes a new three-node configuration that is up to 49 percent more cost effective than comparable configurations from Nutanix, SimpliVity and other competitors, says HP. Because HP's StoreVirtual runs in VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM virtual environments, the appliance may soon come to support all those hypervisors.
SYS-CON Events announced today that the "Second Containers & Microservices Expo" will take place November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Early in my DevOps Journey, I was introduced to a book of great significance circulating within the Web Operations industry titled The Phoenix Project. (You can read our review of Gene’s book, if interested.) Written as a novel and loosely based on many of the same principles explored in The Goal, this book has been read and referenced by many who have adopted DevOps into their continuous improvement and software delivery processes around the world. As I began planning my travel schedule last summer, I learned of a workshop taking place in Nashville by Gene Kim, co-author of The Phoenix Project. I jumped at the chance to not only meet and speak with Gene, but absorb as much as possible from his workshop.
Cloud computing is emerging to solve numerous enterprise IT problems at organizations of all sizes, and Cloud Foundry has emerged as a leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to develop and launch applications in their private enterprise clouds. Cloud Foundry is open-source software, and available in “plain vanilla” code from the Cloud Foundry Foundation. It is also available in proprietary versions from a few vendors. However, it's important to understand that Cloud Foundry is not owned by a single, proprietary provider, and its availability is not limited to the small number of proprietary vendors. [section label="Common themes"] Common themes A few common themes have emerged from organizations who are working with Cloud Foundry as part of their overall cloud computing strategy: Governance, risk and compliance management Information privacy and security Flexibility, speed, and the ability to scale quickly Short deployment time Balancing agility, cost and control With those goals in mind, Cloud Foundry is being used across many industries. Brief summaries are provided below, and a series of use cases across industries can be found in this section of CF Live. Do you have a compelling use case to add to the mix? If so, please let us know! [section label="Logistics and supply chains"] Logistics & supply chains Logistics and supply chains represent an intense competitive space today. One Cloud Foundry user describes it as “a race” to develop supply chains in the cloud. This pace makes it impractical to deploy and manage new and updated applications in local data centers. There is a need for an enterprise-ready platform such as Cloud Foundry that allows for a quick expansion to meet new customer demand. A fully integrated cloud platform and infrastructure also allows Cloud Foundry clients to address major tasks such as database management and performance tuning, monitoring, security testing, patching and updating, reconfiguring servers, and testing updated environments. [section label="Real estate reality"] Real estate reality The highly competitive real estate sector is another that has benefited from the use of Cloud Foundry in an overall cloud environment. Virtual tours, work progress photos and community websites for home builders are examples of solutions that have been created. One image database, for example, has more than 10 million files, accessed by millions of visitors. Real estate firms have found that it's better for them to focus on their core competencies rather than maintaining and deploying the software and hardware requirements of their customer-facing portals. One application in this sector encompasses 25 separate servers that serve more than 50,000 agents, with increasing annual visitor traffic and new features being rolled out continuously. The development and deployment team manages source code, addresses the various hardware compatibility issues, with the ability to spin up environments as needed. The company can thus conduct constant development in an agile, flexible environment. [section label="Big manufacturing"] Big manufacturing Sometimes it's the technology manufacturers themselves who face the most daunting problems. One of them employing Cloud Foundry in it cloud strategy faces what it describes as a “sprawling collection of (almost 200) ad hoc, independently managed systems.” In this case, the company's IT department was required to offer a secure solution to internal clients, building in control, bringing about cost reductions, but without curbing agility and innovation. Before Cloud Foundry and the cloud, provisioning requests sent to IT could take two to three weeks to complete. Department managers started to circumvent the IT department, building in significant shadow IT and complicating the situation enormously. The resultant lack of visibility and control gave IT management little idea of what was really going on, often with limited knowledge of what data was being hosted offsite and where certain business assets were specifically located. Security risks therefore abounded, with no guarantees that security patches were being implemented, and significant financial waste was occurring. The development of a new IaaS initiative that integrated Cloud Foundry at the PaaS level got everything back into the corral, and now enables the company's IT department to offer internal clients a self-service environment for new resource provisioning in the cloud. This on-demand, automated suite of services supports the company's app lifecycle and also makes fabric services universally available. APIs enable access and deployment across the company’s range of services. [section label="MSBs benefit, too"] MSBs benefit, too Midsize businesses (MSBs) have been benefited from affordable, multi-tenant cloud, letting them be free of single-tenant legacy solutions. Through the use of Cloud Foundry in overall cloud environments, they are able to spin resources up quickly, scale easily, and avoid the previous approach of simply buying more servers or renting more hosted services. Particular examples include companies in the legal services business as well as logistics firms that need Warehouse Management Systems (WMSs) deployed to the cloud. [section label="Financial services' golden challenge"] Financial services' golden challenge Nothing moves and evolves more quickly than the global financial services industry. Within that context, there is a focus on mitigating operational risks and the costs associated with increasingly complex corporate actions processing. Developing a proven, automated solution continues to be a top priority and a much sought-after goal among financial institutions worldwide. One firm that was hosting its entire IT infrastructure in-house required a renewed commitment to availability, flexibility and scale. The company must be able to adjust to changes in its markets and client demands in a rapid and agile fashion, and be able to do so through mobile devices as well. The ability to provision and deploy in minutes in a virtual environment is golden.
SYS-CON Events announced today that VividCortex, the monitoring solution for the modern data system, will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. The database is the heart of most applications, but it’s also the part that’s hardest to scale, monitor, and optimize even as it’s growing 50% year over year. VividCortex is the first unified suite of database monitoring tools specifically designed for today's large-scale, polyglot persistence tier, easing this pain for the entire IT department.
When it comes to the Internet of Things, hooking up will get you only so far. If you want customers to commit, you need to go beyond simply connecting products. You need to use the devices themselves to transform how you engage with every customer and how you manage the entire product lifecycle. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Sean Lorenz, Technical Product Manager for Xively at LogMeIn, showed how “product relationship management” can help you leverage your connected devices and the data they generate about customer usage and product performance to deliver extremely compelling and reliable products, and build lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with customers.
Deploying and operating cloud technology is difficult and falls outside the core competencies of most organizations. As a result, many on-premises private cloud installations falter, casting doubt on private cloud as a solution in general. Yet private clouds come with a unique set of benefits that continue to drive widespread interest. There must be a better way. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Andre Bearfield, Senior Director of Product at Blue Box Group, gave participants a clear roadmap of private cloud implementation challenges and offered actionable ideas on how to overcome them. They also learned how private cloud as a service might work in their organization and for their application workloads.
Automic has been listed as a representative ‘established and active vendor’ in Gartner’s recent Market Guide for Application Release Automation (ARA) Solutions. Gartner has defined categories of ‘established and active’, ‘evolving’ and ‘emerging’ and categorized vendors accordingly. Automic views the growing global DevOps market as a strategic area of focus for the business. The ARA market is, “Driven by growing business demands for rapid (if not continuous) delivery of new applications, features and updates.” Furthermore, “enterprise infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders invest in ARA solutions to simultaneously improve both the quality and the velocity of application releases.”1
What if, during a snow emergency, an on-the-ground sensor could automatically trigger a relevant emergency notification related to snowfall and road impact. And then, after it’s triggered, that notification is delivered intelligently to individuals based on an extensive set of rules designed to alert the most available and capable responders. This “what if” question about “smart highways” is short-sighted. We are already there, and we are only getting started. While mainstream attention is paid to machine-to-machine communications, new technologies are being developed to make these communications even more actionable during critical situations (call it “machine-to-machine-to human”).
Graylog, Inc., has added the capability to collect, centralize and analyze application container logs from within Docker. The Graylog logging driver for Docker addresses the challenges of extracting intelligence from within Docker containers, where most workloads are dynamic and log data is not persisted or stored. Using Graylog, DevOps and IT Ops teams can pinpoint the root cause of problems to deliver new applications faster and minimize downtime.
Microsoft has announced the long-awaited launch of Windows 10, scheduled to be the iconic platform’s last numbered version. By all estimations, Windows 10 will give modern IT users everything they want, wherever and whenever they need it. The one operating system, on the surface at least, addresses all kinds of devices – from PCs and smartphones to even game consoles. For Microsoft, Windows 10 is not just another update; it promises a wholly new user experience. Seamlessness is an important theme to recognize, a vital force in an era when employees demand more flexibility in working environments. Microsoft was behind the curve when it clung to the strategy to monetize a client device OS. Dropping the numbered versions is evidence the company is moving away from Windows as a product to Windows as a service. On paper, this makes complete sense.
AI recently has come to the forefront gaining notoriety as the harbinger of 'Killer Robots'. AI at its core is machine intelligence and IBM has worked on AI since the early days of AI. We all remember the movie Space Odyssey 2001 where the computer HAL 9000 could not only understand natural language but was also able to read lips. AI cannot be all that bad and it can be most useful in answering questions of great importance, fast and accurate based on knowledge. IBM's Watson products (Watson for Oncology, Discovery Advisor and Engagement Advi sor) are based on harvesting massive amount of information and digesting them and putting them to good use by charting out actions. The information comes from many different sources structured, unstructured depending on the question Watson has to answer.
Full 360 uses big data and analytics to improve their applications support services for the financial industry -- and beyond.
Knowledge management, in business terms, refers to saving, developing, sharing, and effectively using knowledge for the benefit of organization. It refers to a multi-disciplined approach of achieving organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge. Scientia potentia est (Latin proverb meaning "knowledge is power") attributed to 16th century philosopher Sir Francis Bacon is nowadays more valid than ever. Knowledge is power and knowledge management is the key to success. Knowledge management, in business terms, refers to saving, developing, sharing, and effectively using knowledge for the benefit of organization. It refers to a multi-disciplined approach of achieving organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.
All enterprises, be they large or small, national or multinational, commercial or government agency, American or Chinese, Japanese or European, are carrying the dead weight of their history and almost certainly continuing to add unnecessary complexity and excessive cost that will progressively reduce effectiveness, with the potential to trigger existential crises. Newer enterprises including Internet platform and Cloud based companies are not immune from this effect. As Horace Dediu has commented, Nokia is a classic case of a large enterprise brought from market leadership to irrelevance and zero value in an extremely short space of time.
Unless you fully automate infrastructure and platform provisioning, application build, test and deployment phases and have them working together in sequence, you can’t realize the ideal of continuous delivery. These ‘automation tool chains’ are a mandatory element of each DevOps environment. The number of manual activities in the application test and release processes can cause a downstream bottleneck. Changes pile up at the end of development and unit test activities in agile development environments like SCRUM or Kanban, therefore rendering them less effective. Automation tool chains significantly improve application delivery and operations performance in DevOps environments.
National Savings Bank in Malaysia has implemented a sweeping enterprise content management system project and slashed paper use, increased productivity, rationalized storage and documents, and cut security risks, while adhering to compliance requirements.
Mobile, social, Big Data, and cloud have fundamentally changed the way we live. “Anytime, anywhere” access to data and information is no longer a luxury; it’s a requirement, in both our personal and professional lives. For IT organizations, this means pressure has never been greater to deliver meaningful services to the business and customers.