“We are a very unique product, being a Distributed Database as a service, kind of meeting in between Big Data, NoSQL and mobile,” explained Sam Bisbee, Director of Technical BD at Cloudant, stated, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
“Quantum is transitioning its business from being a predominantly hardware-based, on-premise data protection provider into a cloud-based managed service provider,” explained Henrik Rosendahl, Senior Vice President of Cloud Solutions at Quantum, stated, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The data center industry, especially cloud providers, has recently been in the spotlight for massive power consumption. For example, if the industry were a country, it would be in the Top 15 users of energy, somewhere between Spain and Italy. The 30+ Gigawatts pushed through data centers across the globe has a far-reaching impact, including on the enterprise bottom line. Electricity isn’t cheap and, to top it off, analyst firm IDC estimated un-utilized server capacity as equal to $140 billion, more than 20 million servers and 80 million tons of CO2 per year. Yet, using virtualization technology in a public or private cloud scenario to run many instances of operating systems simultaneously on the same piece of hardware can lead to up to 80% efficiency. Pair this with Infrastructure as a Service or cloud computing models where virtualization is the norm, and the potential for cost savings is tremendous.
One of the biggest drawbacks in IT operations is that we work in silos, with loads of attempts made to connect functional departments before but it seems like very little progress has been made. With applications being the lifeblood of businesses, it is imperative that there is a common bridge between departments to deliver fast, effective and agile solutions. But the fact is that we work in a distributed tiered environment and with these walls around functions and tiers it is difficult to get this seamless approach of delivering fast, effective solutions and when you add operations to the mix you have multiple stakeholders with conflicting agendas, delegating application performance to the firefighting exercise that ensures business is severely impacted. It is important that app developers, app owners and/or operations create a cross cultural alignment and come together to collaborate and develop an agile product. There certainly is a need for an application monitoring solution which helps in promoting a common language across the board which helps app developers, app owners and/or operations to go right to the source of the problem without requiring data from the stakeholders to find it, by doing this we have less pressure within the organization, there's less finger pointing, which enables in a rapid application lifecycles.
Businesses look to resellers for expertise on emerging technology trends and solutions that can help their organizations stay competitive. Lately, there’s been an onslaught of these trends, from virtualization to hybrid clouds and the performance and uptime challenges of complex mission-critical applications. Unfortunately, most of the tools with which IT maintains application performance were created before these trends emerged and are struggling to keep up. “The tools of the past twenty years are just too monolithic, static, and difficult to help solve today’s performance problems quickly,” says Giulio Covass, CEO of Italian reseller Kiratech.
SHI International has teamed with Ariba to streamline IT product discovery and purchasing processes for large agricultural machinery builder AGCO. A global provider of IT products, procurement, and related services, with more than $4 billion in annual sales, SHI has tapped into the networked economy to improve their business productivity and sales. To learn more about how agile procurement works well, we're joined John D’Aquila, Applications Support Manager at SHI International Corp. in Somerset, New Jersey.
Among the most important factors in finding a home for Information Technology infrastructure is location. The hurricane, or ‘Super Storm Sandy,’ as it is referred to in the New York metro market, created many calamitous events throughout the region, especially those areas close to the water or in-land surrounded by trees. While this natural disaster was not something we could have all planned extensively for, it certainly provided lessons that only a 100+year storm can teach us. First, let’s consider the location of your company’s data communications infrastructure. This is the equipment that is the core of your business. If it goes down, then everyone is down. Regardless of each end-user’s location, if they are unable to access the company’s communications systems, they can’t perform their jobs effectively. Finding the most suitable location could be challenging, particularly for those in regions with regular seismic activity, but there are other concerns in the New York metro market: rain, wind and flooding.
In the enterprise context, the missing piece of Agile Software Architecture is Agile Enterprise Architecture, where EA brings together the organization, the processes, the technology, and the information in a consistent, business-driven whole. Configurability alone doesn’t provide this consistency. Instead, true Agile Architecture – that is, architecture that supports the business agility requirement – must tie these concerns together using a balanced combination of Enterprise Architecture, governance, and Agile Software Architecture.
Historically, the end user has not been a primary focus for IT operations. While this focus is starting to change, the user continues to be supported through the service desk and enabled through the management of the devices used. This level of support alone does not give the user the ability to solve IT problems independently or provide visibility into how these people use IT. This situation is changing now because end users are beginning to play a major role in influencing IT decisions, especially regarding how IT applications are chosen, supplied, consumed and evaluated to support the business. Forward-thinking IT operations organizations are now using or investigating the use of management products that can provide greater visibility into how users consume IT. It enables IT operations to understand how the end user is experiencing IT services, irrespective of how many applications are being used or where they are sourced. However, gaining visibility into end-user activity is valuable only if IT operations measure it against end-user satisfaction metrics.
With so many stories about cloud computing, IT outsourcing, hosting, SaaS solutions and managed services, we should all be well beyond the question of whether organizations should be moving their enterprise applications to the cloud. For those companies that have not yet started to move these applications outside of their own four walls or, worse yet, have yet to develop a plan to do so, a window is ever shrinking on your ability to keep up with your competitors. Why? Because unless your value proposition to your customers is managing data centers, connectivity, routers, firewalls, servers, storage, backups, operating systems, databases, applications, etc., you’ll always be a step or maybe even two or three behind cloud service providers that do this day in and day out as part of their core business model. When an organization moves its enterprise applications to the cloud and it’s done right, the benefits are compelling and real.
“Cloud Technology Partners focuses on three key service areas: building cloud for our customers, delivering cloud native applications, and we’re migrating applications to the cloud,” explained John Treadway, SVP at Cloud Technology Partners, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The convergence of increased data stored on company networks and stricter compliance regulations dictating the length of time the information needs to be stored for have helped cloud storage explode in popularity. The cloud offers an easy-to-use, scalable and cost-effective solution for data storage. However, organizations must seriously consider how they manage their storage from a back-up and disaster recovery perspective. While there is no doubt that cloud computing can speed disaster recovery – from reducing the time it takes to restore data, to the fact that information is stored off-site, alleviating the risk of natural disasters – incorrectly managing the storage can often prove more of a hindrance than a help. Whether an employee accidently deletes a file, or a more sinister hack on the company network takes place, for most organizations it is inevitable that data recovery will need to occur at some point. Planning for disaster is essential and having in place an effective back-up and disaster recovery process can save headaches down the line.
IT has more opportunities than ever before with the growth in users, devices, data and secure cloud services. This creates not only a more enriching experience for users, but more opportunities for businesses. The key to capitalizing on these opportunities is to have the right tools in place to help scale operations. In his Day 3 Keynote at 12th Cloud Expo, Robert Crooke, corporate VP and general manager of the Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Solutions Group at Intel Corp, describes the range of products that Intel provides to support different usage models faced by IT with a specific emphasis on the advancement in SSDs.
“The thing about cloud is that a lot of it is about designing and operating for the future, so being mindful of where your providers are going and what their strategy is, is part of the decision criteria of partners that you pick. You are providing what people want but anticipating what they will need,” stated Jonathan King, VP Cloud Strategy & Business Development at Savvis, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The telecom industry provides mission-critical services, which means that the hardware and software that powers the network must be able to perform under some very extreme conditions. Servers, in particular, must be extremely reliable and function during and after everything from streams of heavy traffic to massive earthquakes. Carrier grade servers have to go through rigid testing to receive certification, and they have several characteristics that make them very important. Telecommunications, as a whole, is considered an important part of the national infrastructure. This means that any disasters that derail the service are a huge problem for everyone involved – from emergency response personnel to government officials to everyone who just wants to call and check on the people they know. This infrastructure has to be operational before, during, and after an event, which is why these servers are tested so ruthlessly. Carrier grade servers should never be the weak link that drops the ball in an emergency.
The average CIO doesn’t think with enough clarity and granularity about the type of device used by employees within the corporate data pool. Actually we hope they do. So this statement is posed as more of a question than a definitive judgement, proclamation or observation of any kind. Let’s put it another way. Given the “device form factor sprawl” currently being witnessed within the tech industry, CIOs should look more closely at the type of unit(s) being used by employees within the corporate data pool. This is because different devices lead to different data touchpoints and therefore onward to different security vulnerabilities, data management demands and application maintenance requirements. Actually the term “sprawl” is unfair. Hardware vendor OEMs and chipmakers such as Intel or Microsoft would call it something like a “widening platform of device types to suit different user requirements and computing styles” one would expect.
If you are considering learning jQuery, this is a great place to start. The author starts the book with an introduction that puts jQuery in context and then helps you set up a development environment. Although I think most people reading this book should already be at a level of experience in which they already have a development environment set up, you may want to use the author's suggestion because it is focused on HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. I am using Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate which works fine, but is a heavy install. After the introduction the author jumps right into some examples to show you the jQuery syntax in several different scenarios. If you have not used jQuery at all this chapter gets you familiar with the syntax quickly. Next the author introduces a bunch of basics. The topics include the Web, Web 2.0, XML, JSON, JavaScript's relationship to jQuery, AJAX, XMLHttpRequest, the DOM, CSS, and DHTML. The topics are not covered in detail, the author just makes sure to cover enough information about each to the level we can understand their place in relation to jQuery.
In this example, we look at how real-time Web communications can work well with a non-blocking JavaScript back-end server and a NoSQL database. Our demo is a simple drawing app. If all you use is WebSocket with simple pub-sub messaging, you can already achieve pretty amazing things with drawing. For example, you can share a drawing board among multiple browser clients and while viewing each other’s drawings in real time.
Microsoft has created Microsoft Ventures as a way to unify its sundry venture efforts by housing them under one roof and giving entrepreneurs a single point of engagement. It describes Microsoft Ventures as broad-based with a holistic approach, featuring a community evangelism program including BizSpark, which will continue to offer access to Microsoft tools and technologies, including Windows, Office, Visual Studio and Azure; an accelerator program; and a seed fund that works with start-ups worldwide.
That’s some serious savings, even in a state where just about everything seems to cost just a bit more. A recent study has found that moving common software applications used by 86 million U.S. workers to the cloud could save enough energy annually to power Los Angeles for a year. The six-month study was led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and conducted with Northwestern University. The report looks at three common business applications – email, customer relationship management software, or CRM, and bundled productivity software (spreadsheets, file sharing, word processing). Moving these software applications from local computer systems to centralized cloud services could cut IT energy consumption by up to 87 percent – about 23 billion kilowatt-hours. This is roughly the amount of electricity used each year by all the homes, businesses and industry in Los Angeles, according to an article on DailyFusion.net.
When it comes to the future impact of virtualization upon data centers and networks, we may already have experienced “the shot heard ‘round the world.” In fact, the stage is set for the next wave of the “virtualization revolution.” Most IT organizations already recognize the importance of virtual servers. Cost savings through better utilization of the underlying server hardware is well documented as are the environmental savings on power, cooling and rack space. A 2012 survey conducted by Gartner Research found that virtualization is among the top 10 highest IT technology priorities for CIOs. (“Gartner Executive Programs' Worldwide Survey of More Than 2,300 CIOs Shows Flat IT Budgets in 2012, but IT Organizations Must Deliver on Multiple Priorities,” 1/18/2012) Many IT organizations are now looking at extending those benefits to the rest of the enterprise. Virtual technologies will allow organizations to re-architect and evolve the entire enterprise network on a massive scale, dwarfing the first battle of the virtualization revolution.
The world of software applications and products is moving from on-premise to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Perpetual licence earnings are shrinking, while subscription revenue including SaaS is growing increasingly fast and at a steady pace. According to a recent PWC report, subscription revenue (including SaaS) is set to grow at a 17.5% compounded annual rate, reaching 24% of total software revenue by 2016. Approximately 40% of the turnover of 10 of the top 100 software companies globally is generated by the SaaS service. Gartner predicts that 77% of companies plan to increase their spending on SaaS in the next two years. So the big question is, how can you (as a software application or product vendor) quickly move to SaaS, test it and ride the wave of opportunity before losing your specific competitive advantage to some of the fast-progressing SaaS vendors like Workday, Oracle, Saleforce.com, SAP, Microsoft, Intuit, and Zuora.
Andreas Grabner described how he used the Compuware APM PureStack technology to identify the server-side performance issues during a recent load test run against the Compuware APM Community Portal, a production application used by our customers. He was able to quickly identify the CPU bottleneck that caused the performance degradation in the server environment, leading to an almost immediate resolution of the issue. But what about the external performance recorded during this load test? What would a customer have experienced if they had tried to access the site during this time? Well, at the peak of the test, I used WebPageTest to capture a video of the APM Community Homepage loading (Note: The video has been advanced to 50 seconds already).
In part 1 of this article, we covered writing web app load tests using multi–mechanize. This post picks up where the other left off and will discuss how to gather interesting and actionable performance data from a load-test. The big problem we had after writing load tests was that timing data gathered by multi-mechanize is inherently external to the application. This means it can tell us the response times of requests when the app is under load but doesn't identify bottlenecks or configuration problems. So we need to be gathering a bit more data about how the internals of our web application respond to the workload.
In a previous post we showed how we hooked up our blog’s WordPress application with the new Compuware APMaaS offering. Since WordPress is a PHP application we use PurePath for PHP to monitor it. We highlighted that we got an alert about a response time violation on some of our blog posts. In this follow-up article I want to show you how we get to the root cause of this problem which turns out to be a third-party WordPress PHP plugin that detects Bad Requests including requests from Bots that try to put spam messages in blog comments.