Millennium Pharmacy Systems, Inc., has successfully deployed mission critical SaaS applications, and implemented advanced IT management and operational efficiency processes and systems to keep all the applications up to date, compliant, performant, and protected. Managing applications sprawl has long been a burr in the IT saddle, and the popularity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications hasn't exactly been a balm on the situation. As with on-premises applications, the key to SaaS and hybrid apps is getting better visibility and operational data on the applications' health, and then automating the processes across standardized methods and controls.
A few months ago experts predicted 2013 would be the Year of Big Data. To a large extent, those predictions have been spot on, with big data investment on the rise and success stories emerging across a variety of industries from insurance to pharma to professional basketball. The big data narrative may be shifting though, as debate around data privacy heats up. No doubt the two topics are almost inextricably linked, as the PBS News Hour points out, but it wasn’t until late last week that the issue of data privacy became a trending topic in the U.S. Citizens can vent, politicians can banter, news media can report, but the reality is big data is not going to be regulated away for the sake of privacy, so it’s incumbent upon organizations that collect big data to secure it, and ensure the data never falls into the hands of unauthorized individuals.
The pressure on enterprises to deploy applications as fast as possible has never been greater. The mobile revolution, the huge impact of cloud computing, and the BYOD trend have intensified the pressure, forcing large organizations to re-think and re-tool their approaches to app development. For many, the answer has been to embrace rapid app development. A recent survey by XebiaLabs discovered that most organizations’ delivery models are unsuitable and that application deployments fail up to 30% of the time. Much of the flaws in creating and updating apps come from human error. Partially scripted and partially manual application deployment is a huge drain on resources. It requires key IT staff with specific knowledge, and it can involve complex processes and multiple scripts. Manual scripting is not just time-consuming and error-prone, it’s also very expensive.
Last week, on the last day of HP’s Discover conference in Las Vegas, HP software chief Bill Veghte stood on stage and said that Workday, the promising HR SaaS company started by David Duffield, who also started PeopleSoft only to lose it to Oracle’ ravenous appetite for acquisitions, had left Amazon Web Services for HP’s OpenStack-based Public Cloud because enterprise customers need real support and stronger SLAs than Amazon offers. CRN captured the moment, but didn’t check it out. Veghte’s statement made tweeters sit up and take note, and Amazon denied it.
SDN is a new, dynamic network architecture that transforms traditional network backbones into more intelligent service-delivery platforms. IT leaders can use SDN as a tool to change the way they do business. For example, enterprises can foster closer relationships with their customers by offering greater online access to select data over the enterprise network. A financial services firm can give large corporate customers the opportunity for third-party reporting, governance, or even allow analytics firms to directly access enterprise credit card transactions, obviating the need for intermediate sites and cumbersome manual process steps that are needed to provide sufficient multi-level security. An SDN would create virtual network partitions governed by stringent and limited access policies, and security to decrease unauthorized access.
HP has made a big announcement around a broader vision for businesses to help them gain actionable intelligence from literally a universe of potential sources and data types. Fairly recently, only critical data was given this high-falutin' treatment for analysis, warehousing, applying business intelligence (BI) tools, making sure that it was backed up and treated almost as if it were a cherished child. But almost overnight, the savvy businesses, those who are looking for business results, are more interested in all the data of any kind so that they can run their businesses better, and find insights in the areas that they maybe didn’t understand or didn’t even know about. So what do you think has happened? Why have we moved from this BI-as-sacred ivory tower approach to now more pedestrian?
Our client TescaraHats (name changed for commercial reasons), a European market leader in manufacturing customized hats, decided to expand its market reach with an e-commerce site where its potential customers could choose, customize and order hats online. TescaraHats used an APM tool to fix a number of e-commerce application performance and usability issues we presented in this mini-series. But there was still a missing link that would ensure TescaraHats increased sales. I guess you thought we forgot about the conversion rate? Nope, here is how an application performance management (APM) tool can tell you why it is so low.
In enterprises across the globe, CIOs are looking cautiously in one direction: up – to the cloud. Migrating to the cloud changes not only the operations of the data center but also the roles of the CIO and IT staff. As a result, management must carefully weigh the pros and cons of shifting to cloud-based computing so that they can prepare their organizations and themselves for change that cascades across budgets, vendor relations, job descriptions and career paths, as well as infrastructure and processes. The benefits of moving from an on-premises model to subscription-based, cloud-hosted computing are substantial. With cloud computing, CIOs have the opportunity to capitalize on a variable-cost structure. Until recently, data centers have needed to load up with hardware, software and networking devices to prepare for peak periods, even though these investments may lie underused or dormant for significant periods. Traditionally, IT costs only go up. By employing the cloud, however, IT departments pay for only the infrastructure and applications that they use, as they need them. They can easily scale up when the business grows or during peak selling seasons, then scale back if the economy shrinks. Over time, the cost of Software-as-a-Service subscriptions is far lower than that of licensing fees for software, middleware and databases, along with expenditures on hardware and staff to maintain it all.
Many types of performance problems can result from the load created by concurrent users of web applications, and all too often these scalability bottlenecks go undetected until the application has been deployed in production. Load-testing, the generation of simulated user requests, is a great way to catch these types of issues before they get out of hand. In this two-part series, I’ll walk through generating load using the Python multi-mechanize load-testing framework, then collect and analyze data about app performance
When it comes to analyzing your web application’s performance, TraceView has already instruments a wide spectrum of Java components, such as application servers, frameworks and JDBC connections, all with the convenience of simply including TraceView Java agent jar in your JVM. However, have you come across situations that make you think, “It would have been nice if this was traced too”? You can do this with the TraceView Java API. Have you seen a slowdown in your code, and have some methods you'd like to check? The simplest way is to add the @LogMethod or @ProfileMethod annotation to those methods. Invocations to those methods will then be traced by the Java agent and reflected on your TraceView panels. Since you can assign different layer/profile names for those methods, you can easily group them and gather useful statistics from your TraceView pages! (Heat map, layer/profile summary etc). You might even turn on back trace tracking or store the method return values by tweaking various optional parameters.
For a while now I have been writing about how to analyze and optimize Hadoop jobs beyond just tweaking MapReduce options. The other day I took a look at some of our Outage Analyzer Hadoop jobs and put words into action. A simple analysis of the Outage Analyzer jobs with Compuware APM 5.5 identified three hotspots and two potential Hadoop problems in one of our biggest jobs. It took the responsible developer a couple of hours to fix it and the result is a 2x improvement overall and a 6x improvement on the Reduce part of the job. Let’s see how we achieved that.
Glitches in important IT systems — like NatWest and Google Drive — can no longer be “the cost of doing business” in this day and age. Interestingly, we're starting to see another concerning trend: more and more crashes blamed on faulty hardware or network problems, while the software itself is ignored. It's funny that the difference in incidents can be more than 10 times between applications with similar functional characteristics. Is it possible that the robustness of the software inside the applications has something to do with apparent hardware failures? I think I see a frustrated data center operator reading this and nodding violently. The business has this perception that the guys running the databases, the server racks, and the private cloud are 100 percent sure they know exactly what's running on their servers. In reality, they get a woefully incomplete view of how the system works. At every release, the data center gets a fresh load of executables from the software builds. These may be transactional applications, web services, or batch jobs that get dropped on various servers. In either case, it's impossible to take a look inside an executable. It's doubly impossible to know how different executables will interact with the CPU, the network, or each other.
As the leader of Netuitive’s dedicated professional services team, I believe I work with some of the best and the brightest in the industry. My team is focused on enabling our IT analytics software to be delivered as a turnkey solution, and we have cut our teeth doing this at the world’s largest enterprises. So I thought I would share some of the insight we have gained over the past year. Following are four key lessons learned about what it takes to successfully deploy IT analytics software for some of the world’s largest companies.
Our client TescaraHats (name changed for commercial reasons), a European market leader in manufacturing customized hats, set up an e-commerce site in hopes of increasing its market share and boost its sales. This did not happen. TescaraHats learned quickly that there is much more to e-commerce performance than simply putting an e-commerce service online. In Parts 1–3 of our e-commerce performance mini-series we discussed why focusing on page rank is not enough and that we should look at your performance at the back end and potential network-related problems. In Part 4 we will see what happens when your customers come to your e-commerce site.
Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company delivering a new generation of APM, has announced that Michael Kopp, a Technology Strategist for Compuware's application performance management (APM) business, will present a session titled: "When APM Meets Big Data – Making Your Hadoop Jobs Faster" at the 12th International Cloud Expo at the Javits Center, June 10-13, in New York City. Analyzing Hadoop jobs and speeding them up is often a tedious and time-consuming effort that requires experts. During this session, attendees will learn how proven APM techniques can be used to speed up Hadoop jobs at the core, without going through tons of log files--beyond just adding more hardware and within minutes instead of hours or days.
WSO2 on Thursday announced that WSO2 Vice President of Technology Evangelism Chris Haddad and SUSE Business Development Manager Frank Rego will lead a joint presentation at 12 International Cloud Expo. The session, "Bridging IaaS and PaaS to Deliver the Service-Oriented Data Center," is part of the event's Enterprise Cloud Computing Track on Thursday, June 13, 2013. The Cloud Expo conference is being held June 10-13, 2013 at the Javits Center in New York City. Bridging IaaS and PaaS to Deliver the Service-Oriented Data Center Increasingly, enterprises are adopting private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility inherent in cloud environments while avoiding the security and latency issues inherent in publicly hosted settings. As a result, organizations are also reevaluating how to optimize their future application delivery models. This session will examine how IT professionals can efficiently and flexibly tackle the challenges of the modern connected enterprise using a combination of IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS). It also will discuss how a private PaaS can leverage the automation and scalability of a private IaaS solution, such as the OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud, to deliver secure, standardized development environments that enable migration to an agile, service-oriented delivery model. The presentation will run from 8:15-9:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 13, 2013.
Cloud Expo New York is the place where the cloud and Big Data industries converge. The Expo will feature 175+ sessions from a top-notch conference faculty who represent leading industry players in the cloud computing and Big Data industries. Presentation: Fast and Scalable Real-Time Analytics with Clustrix Database On June 11 at 2:10 pm, Sergei Tsarev, our CTO and Founder, will deliver a presentation on “Fast and Scalable Real-Time Analytics with the Clustrix Database.”
Nowadays IT has the challenge to keep the core business systems running smoothly, bringing in as little disruption as possible while at the same time meeting the constantly growing LoB demands for new features and improved ways to access data. To make it harder – with the growth of mobile clients corporate data is now accessed primarily from outside of the realm of corporate network. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Krasimir Semerdzhiev, Principal Development Architect at SAP AG, will introduce several options that SAP HANA Cloud Platform provides for bridging the gap between the cloud and all onPremise systems.
ScaleOut Software, a provider of in-memory data grids (IMDGs), has announced that its founder and CEO Dr. William Bain will present at the upcoming Cloud Expo conference in New York City. In-memory data grids (IMDGs) have seen rapid adoption over the last several years, driven by the need to help applications scale their performance as workloads grow. Because IMDGs host fast-changing ("operational") data in memory across a cluster of servers, they also offer the ability to perform real-time analytics on this data as it flows through the grid. Recent advances in IMDG technology now enable Hadoop MapReduce-style analytics to be integrated into the IMDG's architecture, performing parallel analysis even while operational data is changing. This exciting new capability creates the opportunity for real-time analysis in financial trading systems, credit card fraud detection, power systems monitoring, and many other applications. Dr. Bain's session will explain how to use an IMDG to perform real-time analytics and will describe recent benchmark results that demonstrate its power to deliver fast results for operational systems.
The cloud security challenge is about more than new technologies, architectures and business models. It is about change. The organizational process of cloud adoption and migration executed by disparate IT teams and business units delivers point cloud and security solutions that create unnecessary gaps in an organization’s security posture. To reduce risk and maximize return on investment, organizations must take a long-term, integrated view of cloud security. They need a framework that is intelligent, comprehensive, easier to implement and identity-centric. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, McAfee identity expert Robert Craig from McAfee's Identity Center of Expertise will discuss these emerging trends and challenges and how a Security Connected approach combined with advanced threat and web protection, single sign-on and authentication can do more than provide secure access to the cloud – it can, and will, improve your user’s experience with it.
In an interesting exercise in sharing that begs to be plumbed, Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of cloud doyen Salesforce.com, has hired himself a president-cum-vice-chairman and where else would the wannabe-Larry Ellison look but among the veterans of Oracle, his alma mater. His pick is Keith Block, former EVP of North American sales at Oracle, head of a 11,000-man multibillion-dollar operation whose indiscrete Sun-knocking e-mails to a colleague where enshrined, thanks to legal discovery, in the HP v Oracle litigation over Itanium.
Quantum Corp., a proven global expert in data protection and Big Data management, has announced that Senior Vice President of Cloud Solutions Henrik Rosendahl will present a session exploring the future of cloud data protection and the impact of data reduction technologies on cloud storage at the 12th International Cloud Expo. The conference takes place June 10-13 at the Javits Center in New York City. Rosendahl will explore trends in cloud-based backup and disaster recovery (DR) and how current approaches to cloud data protection often fall short. He will look at in-house versus subscription cloud backup as a service models and how on-premise backup for local recovery has advantages. Rosendahl will also discuss the perception versus reality of cloud-based backup and DR as a service for changing CAPEX to OPEX. Finally, the session will explore how long-term archive and big data management are converging with cloud, providing the potential for seamless backup and archive for all data types.
Appcara, an innovator in cloud application management solutions, is using next week's Cloud Expo New York to spotlight technology advances for simplified launching and managing of large, distributed Hadoop workloads into both private and service provider clouds through the use of new cloud application management technologies and cloud platforms such as CA AppLogic®. As CIOs increasingly adopt Big Data-type applications such as Hadoop but struggle to deploy, manage and scale-out across hundreds or thousands of servers, the presentations and demonstrations at Cloud Expo New York will showcase approaches that will save hours of time and lower costs, to enable both technical and business end-users to more readily maximize the value of cloud-based Hadoop applications. Embracing Big Data for cloud-based applications is one thing, but when users struggle to manage these applications due to a lack of appropriate tools, both IT and end user time is squandered and the very purpose of Big Data deployment itself can be threatened. During a talk at Cloud Expo New York, Appcara and CA Technologies will discuss new techniques that enable users to deploy complex Hadoop deployments into cloud environments in minutes and also enable holistic management of these applications across their lifecycle. By elevating application management, significant productivity gains can be achieved versus the present IT practice of making one-off changes to a piecemeal collection of servers. A separate demonstration will show how IT teams have achieved a 30-50% reduction in the time required for such activities as provisioning multi-tier and distributed applications and performing ongoing lifecycle management of these apps, when using these new approaches.
Triggered by current expected load projections for our community portal, our Apps Team was tasked to run a stress on our production system to verify whether we can handle 10 times the load we currently experience on our existing infrastructure. In order to have the least impact in the event the site crumbled under the load, we decided to run the first test on a Sunday afternoon. Before we ran the test we gave our Operations Team a heads-up: they could expect significant load during a two-hour window with the potential to affect other applications that also run on the same environment. During the test, with both the Ops and Application Teams watching the live performance data, we all saw end-user response time go through the roof and the underlying infrastructure running out of resources when we hit a certain load level. What was very interesting in this exercise is that both the Application and Ops teams looked at the same data but examined the results from a different angle. However, they both relied on the recently announced Compuware PureStack Technology, the first solution that – in combination with dynaTrace PurePath – exposes how IT infrastructure impacts the performance of critical business applications in heavy production environments.
Before we talk about the cloud of tomorrow, Kevin Clarke, Director of Cloud Platform Engineering for Verizon Terremark, describes, in his General Session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, what core characteristics compose the cloud of today, and discusses three fundamental features: independent architectures, multi-tenant infrastructures and the concept of ‘different controls.’ While the cloud is able to house different applications in terms of complexity and criticality, most enterprise applications are not apt for virtualized environments, such as cloud computing. Clarke explores the challenges that exist in running enterprise applications, or what he calls the “hard stuff” and the ideal features future cloud offerings should provide enterprises. These include security, dependencies, application management and performance.