The revolution that happened in the server universe over the past 15 years has resulted in an eco-system that is more open, more democratically innovative and produced better results in technically challenging dimensions like scale. The underpinnings of the revolution were common hardware, standards based APIs (ex. POSIX) and a strict adherence to layering and isolation between applications, daemons and kernel drivers/modules which allowed multiple types of development happen in parallel without hindering others. Put simply, today's server model is built on a consistent x86 platform with few surprises in its core components. A kernel abstracts away the platform, so that applications and daemons are decoupled from the hardware. In contrast, networking equipment is still stuck in the mainframe era. Today, networking equipment is a single appliance, including hardware, OS, applications and user interface come as a monolithic entity from a single vendor. Switching between different vendor's hardware requires using a completely different OS, set of applications and user interface.
Are you developing or hosting PHP applications? Are you doing performance sanity checks along your delivery pipeline? No? Not Yet? Then start with a quick check. It only takes 15 minutes and it really pays off. As a developer you can improve your code, and as somebody responsible for your build pipeline you can automate these checks and enforce additional quality gates. And as a PHP Hosting company / group you will be able optimize your deployment and run more of these apps and sustain more load on the same infrastructure. Just like Java, .NET, and Ruby type applications, the top performance bottlenecks are fairly easy to spot and fixing them improves end user performance and saves compute power for your servers.
The cloud computing revolution is well underway and there are lots of benefits to be realized. According to Awesome Cloud research the industry will be worth more than $150 billion this year, compared to $46 billion just six years ago. Mirroring the general trend for SaaS solutions, cloud-based IT security systems can be an ideal fit for smaller businesses, freeing them from internal IT overhead, cutting complexity, and providing scalability. Here are five reasons that switching to a cloud-based endpoint security system makes sense for your business.
Cloud computing security can be a conundrum. The point of using the public cloud is to outsource certain infrastructure and application needs to third party providers, after all. How can you secure your data once it leaves your perimeter and your control? As puzzling as it may seem, there is hope. Luckily for organizations looking to adopt the cloud, securing sensitive information outside the corporate perimeter isn’t as daunting (or as impossible) as it may appear. Technologies exist to enable cloud computing security strong enough for companies to remain in compliance while taking full advantage of the flexibility, agility, and economies of scale of the cloud. Avoid these common pitfalls for a secure cloud experience.
Recently Google acquired the home automation company Nest. Nest is a company that sells IoT (Internet of Things) enabled devices that allow homeowners to control the temperature of their homes through their smartphones, plus it sends notifications if it detects dangerous levels of smoke or carbon monoxide. This company is a great example of how IoT is expanding beyond its industrial roots. Why would Google get involved in home automation systems? Because their real goal is to collect, analyze and utilize data to provide more personalized online and mobile experiences. Cognizant calls this strategy "Code Halos" strategies. Nest will provide Google with a much deeper understanding of consumers' "patterns of life."
Cloud scalability and performance should be at the heart of every successful Internet venture. The infrastructure needs to be resilient, flexible, and fast – it’s best not to get caught thinking about architecture until the middle of an emergency, when it's too late. In his interactive, no-holds-barred session at 14th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, will dive into how to design and build-out the right cloud infrastructure.
An entirely new security model is needed for the Internet of Things, or is it? Can we save some old and tested controls for this new and different environment? In his session at @ThingsExpo, Davi Ottenheimer, EMC Senior Director of Trust, will review hands-on lessons with IoT devices and reveal a new risk balance you might not expect. Davi Ottenheimer, EMC Senior Director of Trust, has more than nineteen years' experience managing global security operations and assessments, including a decade of leading incident response and digital forensics. He is co-author of the book "Securing the Virtual Environment: How to Defend the Enterprise Against Attack," published in May 2012 by Wiley.
Many cloud hosting providers have achieved ticket-of-entry credibility in the data warehousing industry by building simple colocation centers. A first-tier database as a service (DBaaS) contender, however, is set apart by a value-added service approach that is strategic, consultative and responsive. A first-tier provider also offers state-of-theart technology, like Microsoft SQL Server 2012, and commits to a product roadmap that expands their customers’ capabilities. Blending conscientious service, strategic insight and highly reliable technology is the way to earn customer confidence. This paper outlines principal considerations and evaluation tactics for technology professionals contemplating a migration of their databases to a cloud platform. Primary decision factors can be characterized as the “four S” considerations:
In the last year, conversations about In-Memory Computing (IMC) have become more and more prevalent in enterprise IT circles, especially with organizations feeling the pressure to process massive quantities of data at the speed that is now being demanded by the Internet. The hype around IMC is justified: tasks that once took hours to execute are streamlined down to seconds by moving the computation and data from disk, directly to RAM. Through this simple adjustment, analytics are happening in real-time, and applications (as well as the development of applications) are working at-pace with this new standard of technology and speed. Despite becoming both more cost-effective and accepted within enterprise computing, there are still a small handful of falsehoods that confuse even the most technical of individuals in enterprise IT.
While Big Data and the cloud are often thought of as going hand in hand, some enterprises still hesitate to place large amounts of proprietary data online. Enterprises decide to keep their large data sets stored locally for a variety of reasons including the possibility of security breaches, data processing errors, access issues and difficulty of meeting corporate or industry compliance / privacy requirements. Enterprises with a global presence are also finding they need to operate in an increasingly stricter data sharing environment. In fact, data residency policies from countries like the UK, Germany, Australlia and China can make housing data certain types of sensitive data within clouds in countries like the U.S. extremely challenging.
The selfie that changed the world, or at least Twitter, has been in the news for the past month. On March 2, 2014, the infamous Oscar selfie of Ellen and her celebrity friends broke a record of 2 million retweets before midnight the same night. That record was previously set by President Barack Obama, hugging first lady Michelle Obama after his 2012 re-election. The selfie caused Twitter to crash for more than 20 minutes, also breaking the record for the longest crash of the social media site. Twitter was infamous for crashing in its early days (anyone remember “Fail Whale?”), so it’s no wonder the social media giant worked extra hard to completely prepare their website infrastructure before going public in November 2013. This included building their own load testing tool, Iago, in 2012.
There are things we tend to take for granted in our everyday lives. We have certain expectations that don’t even have to be spoken, they’re just a given. If you walk into a room and turn on the light switch, the lights will go on, it’s assumed. If you turn the water faucet on, water will come out; if you pick up the telephone, there will be a dial tone. The concept of any of those things not happening does not enter the conversation. These are services we have that are ubiquitous; we don’t even think about them – they are just there. In recent years people have seen the impact Mother Nature has had on those core services such as electricity, water and phone, Storms, hurricanes, floods and blizzards have taken our expectations of these services and turned them on their head.
Have you seen this error message before “java.sql.Exception: ORA-00060: deadlock detected while waiting for resource”? This is caused when parallel updates require locks on either rows or tables in your database. I recently ran into this exception on an instance of an IBM eCommerce Server. The first thought was that there are simply too many people hitting the same functionality that updates Sales Tax Summary information – which was showing up in the call stack of the exception: The logical conclusion would be to blame this on too many folks accessing this functionality or outdated table statistics causing update statements to run too long causing others to run into that lock. It turned out to be caused by something that wasn’t that obvious and wouldn’t have shown up in any Exception stack traces or log files. A misconfigured timeout setting on the load balancer caused a re-execute of the original incoming web request. While the first app server was still updating the table and holding the lock – as it had a longer timeout specified as the load balancer – the second app server tried to do the same thing causing that exception.
SYS-CON Events announced today that SherWeb, a long-time leading provider of cloud services and Microsoft's 2013 World Hosting Partner of the Year, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. A worldwide hosted services leader ranking in the prestigious North American Deloitte Technology Fast 500TM, and Microsoft's 2013 World Hosting Partner of the Year, SherWeb provides competitive cloud solutions to businesses and partners around the world. Founded in 1998, SherWeb is a privately owned company headquartered in Quebec, Canada. Its service portfolio includes Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Dynamics CRM and more.
The world of cloud and application development is not just for the hardened developer these days. In their session at 14th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, and Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, will pull back the curtain of the architecture of a fun demo application purpose-built for the cloud. They will focus on demonstrating how they leveraged compute, storage, messaging, and other cloud elements hosted at SoftLayer to lower the effort and difficulty of putting together a useful application. This will be an active demonstration and review of simple command-line tools and resources, so don’t be afraid if you are not a seasoned developer.
HTML5 is still one of the most discussed topics amongst us technical types. The key challenge, however, has remained unanswered for a long time. How do you effectively wrap HTML5 for use in native mobile applications? Unfortunately I do not have a universal answer, but I do have a solution for Android. Firstly, I recommend looking into the use of Vellamo in order to benchmark the performance of HTML5 on Android. Vellamo is designed to be an accurate, easy to use suite of system-level benchmarks for devices based on Android 2.3 forward. Vellamo began as a mobile web benchmarking tool that today has expanded to include two primary chapters: the HTML5 chapter evaluates mobile web browser performance; and the Metal Chapter measures the CPU subsystem performance of mobile processors. Firstly, I recommend looking into the use of Vellamo in order to benchmark the performance of HTML5 on Android (http://www.quicinc.com/vellamo/). Vellamo is designed to be an accurate, easy to use suite of system-level benchmarks for devices based on Android 2.3 forward. Vellamo began as a mobile web benchmarking tool that today has expanded to include two primary chapters: the HTML5 chapter evaluates mobile web browser performance; and the Metal Chapter measures the CPU subsystem performance of mobile processors.
Database as a Service (DBaaS) is cloud database hosted and managed by the cloud service providers that can be accessed through public cloud or the hybrid cloud. The cloud provider takes care of provisioning, configuring, setup, maintenance, backups and patching the database. Customers are expected to export the database and start consuming the service through the pay-as-you-go model. There is a debate on whether Database as a Service (DBaaS) should be considered part of IaaS or PaaS. Though databases are part of almost all PaaS offerings, they are quickly becoming the key building blocks of IaaS. While customers can always launch VMs and set up a database of their choice, the DB service is different because it’s set up, configured, managed, and monitored by the infrastructure service provider. Popular databases, including MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL, are offered through these managed database services. Subscribing to these DB services enables customers to stay focused on their core application instead of managing and administering a database.
Over the last six months I met with a wide range of customers and prospects in order to understand how they understand enterprise mobility, and especially to learn whether they see it as a business opportunity or just another piece of technology. It's no secret that the past few years have seen a debate between two paradigms: whether to write specific code for different devices, or to take a wider approach. The rapid advances in mobile technology have led to a world where there is no single accepted approach, but history looks to be repeating itself from the desktop world, and I believe that application development platforms are the way forward.
The world of enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and billing, can seem boring to people who are more interested in what is going on at Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter, or the latest iPhone or Android application. In the late 1990s when ERP systems first came on the scene, there was plenty of drama and hype. The vendor marketing bravado and cut-throat competition, failed multi-million dollar projects, implementations spanning years and massive cost overruns are still fresh in the minds of many. Who can forget the legendary “moon” on the high seas between SAP’s Hasso Plattner and Larry Ellison’s Oracle boat? The infamous rivalry and competition between Oracle and SAP continues into this century with a battleground that now spans ERP and also databases. Meanwhile, in the late 2000s, certain venture capitalists (VCs) could not get enough of social media startups focused on consumers or cloud companies focused on Internet merchants. Many of the best minds of the generation were worried about how to make people click ads.
Chief Security Officers (CSO), CIOs and IT Directors are all concerned with providing a secure environment from which their business can innovate and customers can safely consume without the fear of Distributed Denial of Service attacks. To be successful in today's hyper-connected world, the enterprise needs to leverage the capabilities of the web and be ready to innovate without fear of DDoS attacks, concerns about application security and other threats. Organizations face great risk from increasingly frequent and sophisticated attempts to render web properties unavailable, and steal intellectual property or personally identifiable information. Layered security best practices extend security beyond the data center, delivering DDoS protection and maintaining site performance in the face of fast-changing threats.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, David Holmes, Vice President at OutSystems, will demonstrate the immense power that lives at the intersection of mobile apps and cloud application platforms. Attendees will participate in a live demonstration – an enterprise mobile app will be built and changed before their eyes – on their own devices. David Holmes brings over 20 years of high-tech marketing leadership to OutSystems. Prior to joining OutSystems, he was VP of Global Marketing for Damballa, a leading provider of network security solutions. Previously, he was SVP of Global Marketing for Jacada where his branding and positioning expertise helped drive the company from start-up days to a $55 million initial public offering on Nasdaq.
We all want usability, that’s a given right? We exist in an enterprise world, but we want to behave as naturally as possible with all of the technologies and devices that we come into contact with every day. The co-called ‘consumerization of information technology’ suggests that we as users have adopted powerful devices for our home and personal use. These devices will in many respects out-perform those devices that we might be using or have used in the workplace.
From data center to cloud to the network. In his session at 3rd SDDC Expo, Raul Martynek, CEO of Net Access, will identify the challenges facing both data center providers and enterprise IT as they relate to cross-platform automation. He will then provide insight into designing, building, securing and managing the technology as an integrated service offering. Topics covered include: High-density data center design Network (and SDN) integration and automation Cloud (and hosting) infrastructure considerations Monitoring and security Management approaches Self-service and automation
I was asked by Mr. Peter Hastings (NH DoIT Commissioner) about my understanding and knowledge of "End to End Solutions". I have witnessed these solutions before but I wanted to find a good definition. So, I began my research and found this definition: One supplier or one company that can provide all of your hardware and software needs in a suite of tools that meets all of the customers requirements and no other suppliers need to be involved. I think this is a good one and makes sense to me. I'm sure there are many other definitions that exist and this is simplistic in nature but I see this as a baseline definition. One could certainly branch off of this definition to encompass a variety of explanations but let’s stick with this one for this article. This idea has been around for sometime now and slowly but surely as the years go on it seems to go away and pop up and go away and pop up, etc... I have been watching and observing for a long time as well and witnessed the process and implementation of these suites over the years and have developed my own opinions about all encompassing tools. So, this has come up before
Leading Web search portals are using semantic search engines to deliver answers instead of results. That same technology is now emerging in the enterprise. It can help developers tame log data by uncovering information about application performance problems and answering the question ‘what went wrong?’. We’ve all been there: you’re looking for something on the Web, and the search engine returns a lengthy list of blue links. All of the Web pages are shown in one place, but it takes time and effort to find the right one. The same is true for many application log tools, which may centralize information but fail to identify the actual problem.