As IT departments get the green light to update systems and implement solutions, cloud computing is increasingly getting a slice of those IT budgets. Cloud computing is on the list of top IT spending priorities for next year, according to Forrester Research. Software spending worldwide will continue to grow with a big focus on the cloud, and these worldwide trends reflect the focus of midsize firms, according to an article on MidsizeInsider.com. The Forrester research found that companies and governments spent more than $2 trillion on hardware, software and services. In the most popular segment, software firms allocated budgets for improving mobile apps, analytics, security and collaboration software. Software spending increased last year by more than $540 billion; it is expected to grow 3.3 percent this year and 6.2 percent in 2014, the largest projection for technology categories.
There is a burst of creative ideas emerging in the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) space or what has become more affectionately known as the Internet-of-things world. With so many opportunities around the globe to connect devices and assets, many companies are starting to stake out claims in the M2M space. However, while much of the attention has been focused on the machine part of the equation, people are the ultimate stakeholders. After all, it is the individual who will benefit and have the power to act on the information through smart apps. Some of the most promising opportunities are in the automobile, smart metering, eHealth, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and home security industries, but many more examples are emerging. In many of these cases actual deployment is still minimal, but the potential is there for creative and exciting large-scale implementations, some of which may even start locally and grow into global solutions.
Explore how the agility goal of real-time responses is no longer good enough. What’s apparent across more business ecosystems is that businesses must do even better, to become so data-driven that they extend their knowledge and ability to react well into the future. In other words, we're now all entering the era of the predictive business. To learn more about how heightened competition amid a data revolution requires businesses and IT leaders to adjust their thinking to anticipate the next, and the next, and the next moves on their respective chess boards, join Tim Minahan, the Chief Marketing Officer for SAP Cloud, and moderator Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Introducing TraceView's latest support for Solr Server, which provides breakdown of each operation, enabling more precise performance monitoring and troubleshooting. Solr Server provides JMX statistics that show performance details such as query speed and cache hit/miss rates in a macro level, which James talked about in a previous post. However, it might be tough to trace how a particular operation; for example: how a specific query fared in the system. This week, I'd like to introduce TraceView's latest support for Solr Server, which provides breakdown of each operation, enabling more precise performance monitoring and troubleshooting. How does Solr work, anyway? Requests made to Solr Server can be roughly divided into 3 categories: queries, data indexing/update, admin operations (check server health/log, optimize server etc). Requests made to Solr server first go through the SolrDispatchFilter that looks up the corresponding Solr Core (a running instance of index/dataset along with configurations) and handler. The retrieved SolrCore and handler are then used to process the request. For SearchHandler, it is further broken down into smaller SearchComponents (for example, querying, highlighting results, calculating statistics etc).
Increasing the I/O performance of next-generation data centers and cloud computing environments is essential for supporting enterprise e-commerce, database and email applications. To successfully deploy high-performance storage, it’s essential for storage appliance software to be flash-aware and maximize solid-state drives (SSDs) for performance and hard disk drives (HDDs) for capacity, enabling an optimum price-performance storage solution. With the explosive growth in and demand for information, next-generation data centers and cloud deployments require cost-effective storage solutions that provide end users with a high quality of service (QoS) in accessing and manipulating data. Usually, data centers – either corporate or cloud-based – run specific applications, such as database indexing and email exchanges. To provide a top QoS, these applications typically run on servers with high input/output operations per second (IOPS) and in turn provide access to data stored within the storage system.
Through the use of Synthetic APIs inventive companies are able to get the best information delivered to those who can act on it with speed and at massive scale. The next BriefingsDirect innovator interview examines the improved data use benefits at Thomson Reuters in London. Part of a discussion series on how innovative companies are dodging data complexity through the use of Synthetic APIs, learn here how, from across many different industries and regions of the globe, inventive companies are able to get the best information delivered to those who can act on it with speed and at massive scale. Here to explain how improved information integration and delivery can be made into business success, we're joined by Pedro Saraiva, product manager for Content Shared Platforms and Rapid Sourcing at Thomson Reuters.
Listening to our customers when they talk about their journey from Waterfall to Agile and now adopting DevOps principles made us realize that all of them share common challenges and best practices. Our blog allows us to educate a larger audience that DevOps is nothing to be scared about but that DevOps comes with new requirements on application performance management as one common theme among our customers is the missing focus of performance and the impact on end users. Besides using our blog we also take the chance to discuss our ideas and share our feedback at conferences such as the upcoming JavaOne and StarWest: Discussing our ideas at JavaOne and StarWest
Project management analysis is a dangerous topic. It is very easy to sit back and talk about flawed project direction and targets as we point to the number of failed IT programs that seem to crop up repeatedly. If we are honest about it, do any of us even notice survey statistics claiming that 30% or 50% (or whatever percentage) of IT projects fail today? We have become immune to this scaremongering and simply regard it as par for the course. This makes the situation worse as we enter a vicious circle of IT project projections where we expect a certain amount to fail anyway.
SAP's Mobile Platform allows mobile developers to create a wide variety of different styles of enterprise mobile apps, and supports both native and HTML5/Javascript-based architectures. This article compares and contrasts the four major programming APIs that allow developers to write SMP-compatible apps.
Synthetic monitoring (active monitoring) helps reduce key blind spots for critical applications. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Synthetic monitoring (active monitoring) helps reduce key blind spots for critical applications. We just experienced a production issue on a fully instrumented critical business application that first appeared nebulous. During peak volume time the Service Desk was taking calls from users across random locations stating that they couldn't login, however if they were already on the system all was well. Even when they logged out they could still login again and continue working.
Enterprise IT organizations are under increasing pressure to do more with less. As such, they are highly motivated to leverage existing investments for maximum efficiencies rather than spend time and resources on acquiring, integrating and managing pricey new equipment. Enterprises are already deriving efficiencies through data center consolidation and virtualization initiatives. However, we know the cloud promises to offer further potency in the form of infrastructure savings on IT services and hardware expenses. In fact, according to Rackspace, 60 percent of IT professionals said the cloud has reduced the need for their IT team to maintain infrastructure, giving them more time to focus on strategy and innovation, while 88 percent point to cost savings.
SYS-CON Events announced today that BMC Software, the global leader in enterprise cloud management, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. For more than 30 years, BMC has helped thousands of companies around the world master tough IT problems. From mainframe to mobile, from the back room to the boardroom, BMC delivers the automation, integration, and sophistication that enable the business and IT to perform like never before.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Telematics Update has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Telematics Update is the reference point for automotive telematics, mobile and web industries and a cornerstone for communications within the industry. We aim to provide you with industry focused news, events, reports, updates and information.
TokBox, a Telefónica Digital company, released the results of global survey of 1,161 participants regarding developer community attitudes towards WebRTC. The report, which found rapidly emerging interest from larger organizations (1,000+ employees), also found rapid WebRTC adoption amongst smaller companies (fewer than 500 employees) where more than one in four (27.1%) developers say WebRTC is already critical to their work.
Performance is your website’s first impression to visitors. Almost 50% of users expect a web page to load within two seconds. The move from a shared server to a dedicated server can alleviate many of a website’s performance issues and improve overall revenue and user experience. Shared hosting, by contrast, has hundreds of other websites on the same server. All bandwidth, server memory, hard drive space and CPU cycles are shared with other website owners. Database servers are also shared with these hundreds of other site owners. The result can be a bottleneck at the server-level. Dedicated servers are leased or fully purchased machines completely controlled by the webmaster. All server resources and databases are dedicated to the one business. Bandwidth, which plays a major role in how quickly a page loads, is also dedicated to the server, so no other website traffic interferes with the business’ traffic.
At Usersnap we spend a lot of time thinking about optimizing the developer workflow. With great tech startups helping us with our tests, and Continuous Integration, we want to add Continuous Feedback to the dev checklist. Fortunately we don't need to stress the importance of receiving feedback from clients, co-workers and users before, during and after your development process. Let's move on to the how. We have all read Eric Ries' The Lean Startup - or at least we say we did - and its call for agile product development and validated learning. Figuring out what to build (next), instead of spending months, sometimes years, perfecting a product without ever showing the product to the prospective customer, it's all about developing a minimum viable product (MVP) to begin the process of learning as quickly as possible. Lean is about putting a process, a methodology around the development of your product. Core component is the build-measure-learn feedback loop.
Why are most Enterprise applications and trillions of dollars in Enterprise IT budgets staying out of the cloud? In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Nelson Nahum, CEO & CTO of Zadara Storage, will compare the requirements of enterprise applications with cloud offerings, from Amazon Web Services to OpenStack, and analyze the gaps that exist. We will then show how to make the cloud a much more inviting place for Enterprises. Nelson Nahum is CEO & CTO of Zadara Storage. A thought leader for software-defined storage, he brings 20+ years of storage experience to the company. Prior to co-founding Zadara, he was Fellow and VP of Software Engineering at LSI. Previously he was CTO and co-founder of StoreAge (acquired by LSI), where he invented out-of-band storage virtualization. He holds multiple patents and a BSEE from the Technion.
Is your IT organization being pushed to increase the tempo of your software release cycles? Do you currently automate application builds and the creation of staging environments? Do you always test thoroughly before pushing code out to production? Does your hair catch on fire every time you put out a new release? IT organizations large and small are turning to the set of processes, technologies, and organizational practices called DevOps as a way to deal with the need to release software more often and with less trouble by changing the way the Development and Operations teams cooperate. In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Uri Budnik, Director of Business Development at RightScale, will discuss how Ceph, a fully open source distributed object store, network block device, and file system designed for reliability, scalability and performance, is transforming DevOps.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Portal Architects, creators of SkySync will exhibit at SYS-CON's 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. SkySync enables businesses to easily Sync, Copy, or Migrate Files across any on-site or cloud-based storage platform. With SkySync’s new file virtualization capabilities, organizations can perform federated searches across any number of connected systems at once. The search results are automatically aggregated into a single folder which can then be synced, copied or moved to any defined storage destination.
Immutable Infrastructure and Continuous Deployment work great together. Completely replacing, instead of updating, an existing part of your infrastructure makes your deployments less complex. For example, instead of deploying into an existing EC2 instance, start a new server, deploy there and point your load balancer to the new server. Then remove the old server. Replacing a system at the lowest level you can forces you to automate every deployment step. Immutable infrastructure and Continuous deployment work great together. Completely replacing, instead of updating, an existing part of your infrastructure makes your deployments less complex. Test driven development, Continuous Deployment and Immutable Infrastructure are strategies we have been using on the Codeship for a long time.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Tarry Singh, Managing Partner, O&I Services, to discuss how Big Data analytics help companies make better business decisions by enable them to analyze huge amounts of data. Tarry Singh is Managing Partner, O&I Services, a European Management & Technology Consulting firm based in Netherlands with offices in Germany. An experienced, entrepreneurial and well-rounded professional with 20+ years of experience in multiple industries, he has deep multicultural experience having worked with 40+ nationalities in U.S, Brazil, Singapore, Japan and Europe.
Enterprise applications are increasing in complexity, with multi-tier and distributed applications being the new standards for dealing with high-volume, high-scale requirements. In many development environments, the ideal scenario is to enable DevOps teams to manage dev/test environments in public clouds, with on-demand, usage based billing model – and to ultimately deploy these complex applications in on-premises clouds. Achieving application portability between heterogeneous cloud environments is critical to achieve the productivity goals of DevOps – yet often requires time-consuming workarounds. This article will present examples of approaches employed today, including newer options for model-driven cloud management platforms with their emphasis on automating application portability and approach to eliminating cloud lock-in.
Sporting events are periodic events that suddenly demand lots of information technology resources and a good example where cloud technology can be applied effectively. At VMWorld, a marketing executive from a technology company asked me what kinds of workloads were inappropriate for the cloud with today's technology. Core banking and manufacturing execution systems immediately came to mind. Banks do not want their security compromised, and manufacturing plants do not want any downtime. Current cloud technology is not ideally suited for these applications.
For cloud providers, offering predictable storage performance backed by firm SLAs will become a competitive differentiator that drives greater customer affinity and a better application experience. Many providers feel that a Software Defined Storage (SDS) frameworks hold the key to delivering guaranteed performance, yet this “software abstraction layer” is only half of the solution. SDS frameworks are dependent on the virtualized resources presented to it, and without the granular abstraction of physical storage resources, these frameworks will remain limited. In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Dave Wright, Founder & CEO of SolidFire, will explore how to deliver guaranteed performance today, through intelligent storage architectures and software defined control planes of CloudStack, OpenStack, and VMware.
When you haven't got time to cook a meal there really is nothing like the convenience of picking up the phone and dialing for a home delivery kebab. You go online choose the meal deal you want and 30 minutes later there's a ring at your doorbell. So when one of our customers asked if VCE could provide them with a segregated infrastructure to their Vblock 300 for an immediate service roll out the suggested meal deal was obvious, the Vblock 200. Literally delivered to their doorstep in 30 days, the emergency project was successfully rolled out and installed on a standardised infrastructure that was pre-configured and pre-validated with minimal risk. Delivered and packaged as a single product, the Vblock 200 is made up of Cisco UCS rack servers and switches and an EMC VNX unified storage system. As well as vSphere 5.1 enterprise plus and software such as PowerPath VE, the Vblock 200 comes with the unique ‘single throat to choke' VCE Support offering.