2011 has seen the move to cloud computing gather speed, as companies start to commit budget to the technology that will change the landscape of IT. In an effort to capture the extent to which cloud has already penetrated the IT market, and at what rate we should expect it to grow, analysts have raced to release the most up-to-date market data. The latest, from Gartner, revealed that an enormous 95% of organisations are planning to invest in software as a service (SaaS), while more than a third has already started the migration from on-premise services. Furthermore, Gartner has claimed that businesses will commit to spending between 40% and 80% of their IT budgets on the cloud in the next five years. These are exceptional statistics considering that 70% of the organizations using SaaS have only begun doing so in the last three years.
Kroll Ontrack, the litigation technology, computer forensics and data recovery arm of Kroll Inc, which is probably best known for its private detectives and security consultants, is taking the widgetry it developed for finding the “gotchas” in discovery to the cloud. Lawyers often subcontract discovery processing to third parties like Kroll. In Kroll’s case it’s generally big companies. Turning it into subscription-based do-it-yourself e-discovery will help Kroll go down market to more of the mid-sized law firms and in-house legal departments at smaller firms. It will also give the high-powered types a more predictable leash on their costs. Kroll calls the hosted SaaS platform Verve.
Calxeda unwrapped its brand new 32-bit ARM-based “Server-on-a-Chip” (otherwise a SoC), dubbed the EnergyCore ECX-1000, Tuesday while HP started preparing the market for Redstone, HP-built proof-of-concept development platforms based on the Calxeda device. The Texas start-up says its quad-core chip clocking at 1.4GHz can create a server that takes less than five watts to run. It imagines HP putting 1,600 of its servers in a half a rack with two switches and 41 cables. It says it would take all of 9.9kW to run the thing and cost $1.2 million. An x86 system with 400 Xeon servers in 10 racks with 20 switches, 1,600 cables and a 91kW power budget would cost $3.3 million. Calxeda claims it can do what the x86 rig does for 89% less energy, 94% less space and 97% less complexity for 63% less money.
As soon as the market closed Thursday, AMD said it was going to lay off 1,400 people, upwards of 10% of its worldwide staff. Seems they are the wrong people and it wants to trade them in for people who can get it into low power, the cloud and emerging markets, all deemed more profitable. Otherwise the restructuring is supposed to create a more competitive cost structure and accelerate future growth, according to AMD’s new CEO Rory Read, who gets to play the heavy although AMD hinted at layoffs earlier this year. Supposedly his predecessor Dirk Meyer was ousted in January because he didn’t have a mobile strategy. For once it’s a problem Intel shares. It can’t get traction in mobile either.
When we searched for design pattern articles, we found documentation concerning "Gang of Four" patterns. They are very useful and contribute to a well-designed application. But when I discovered GRASP principles , I advised any one interested to improve his skills design to look at these principles. It gives the fundamental rules of design. In this article we will discover some GRASP principles used by Spring, and the advantages of using them. Spring is one of the most popular application developement framework for entreprise Java. The Spring Framework does not impose any specific programming model, it has become popular in the Java community as an alternative to, replacement for, or even addition to the Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) model.
Facebook Thursday set up a non-profit foundation to run its six-month-old Open Compute Project (OCP) aimed at defining the cheapest and most efficient massively web-scale infrastructure possible using the open source model. Its first OCP data center in Prineville, Oregon, managed a 38% increase in energy efficiency for 24% less than other Facebook facilities cost. The idea is to push the envelope. The Open Compute Foundation (OCF) is reportedly well enough funded to start. There is a board of directors. Hardware designs and source files will be published, IP contributed and many eyes will look for ways to improve the standard à la Linux. The idea is to speed innovation by commoditizing the baser elements.
“As more and more people become comfortable with the idea, businesses will move more workloads to Public Clouds,” stated Joe Seibel, CFA, CFO & VP of Strategic Development at Hexagrid, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “I like to compare it to the history of electricity when every business had its own generator even though there was a central utility,” Seibel continued. “Eventually, as businesses saw the stability and became comfortable, they got rid of the generator. For the immediate and mid-term future, I believe private clouds, including hosted private clouds, will be the preference.”
IBM is adding Jaspersoft to its extensive BI collection. The pair will be combining IBM’s enterprise-class Hadoop-based InfoSphere BigInsights with Jaspersoft’s BI suite to provide a complete reporting and management solution. Jaspersoft is licensing and integrating InfoSphere BigInsights under an Application Specific Licensing Agreement. The resulting Jaspersoft for InfoSphere BigInsights is supposed to combine the power of IBM’s analytics platform to manage, analyze and provide deep insight into Big Data with Jaspersoft’s ability to extract key information using reporting, dashboard and analytics views in one integrated solution.
Microsoft has persuaded yet another Android shifter to pay it patent royalties. This time it’s ODM Compal Electronics, which has agreed to pay Microsoft’s patent tax on its tablets, mobile phones, e- readers and other consumer devices running Android or Chrome. Microsoft said Sunday that it’s now got more than half of the world’s ODM industry making Android and Chrome devices under license. Compal is the tenth company to cut an Android license with Microsoft for its mystery patents. Others include Samsung, HTC, Acer and most recently Quanta, which is making the Android-based Kindle Fires for Amazon and the poorly selling PlayBooks for RIM.
HP has reversed the unpopular, hastily considered, board of directors-blessed decision to dump its $40 billion PC unit that its now purged CEO Leo Apotheker announced in August. The company said Thursday afternoon right after Wall Street closed that it would keep the business, expecting it to “deliver greater customer and shareholder value.” The new decision has the “full support of the board,” a statement that only gives HP’s much vilified board another black eye. Ostensibly HP did an “objective” evaluation of strategic alternatives for its Personal Systems Group (PSG), an exercise that reportedly involved about 100 “subject matter experts across the businesses and functions,” 18 teams that supposedly looked at all the angles of spinning the unit off.
The RichFaces team has been doing an amazing job on RichFaces 4.1 and today released Milestone 3. Many components in 4.1 have been optimized for mobile. You can see the Milestone 3 components showcase deployed to OpenShift – Red Hat’s PaaS. It uses device detection and will show the mobile optimized version if you access from a mobile device. Staying on mobile topic, if you want to build HTML5 and native mobile apps using cloud services, try Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder. With mobile support, resource handling has been improved. The goal is to reduce the number of requests as well as reduce the size of JavaScript, and CSS sent to the browser. Performance improvements will not limited to mobile, but will also give a standard Web app a boost in performance.
The term Business Transactions and Business Transaction Management is widely used in the industry but it’s not always well understood what we really mean by it. The BTM Industry Portal provides some good articles on this topic and is definitely recommended to check out. The general goal is to answer business-relevant questions that business owners have for application owners: "How much revenue is generated by a certain products?", "What are my conversion and bounce rates and what impacts them?" or “Do we meet our SLAs to our premium account users?” Challenge 1: Contextual Information Is More than just the URL In order to answer these questions we need information captured from the underlying technical transactions that get executed by your applications when users interact with your services/web site. Knowing the accessed URL, its average response time and then mapping it to a Business Transaction is the simplest form of Business Transaction Management – but doesn’t work in most cases because modern applications don’t pass the whole business transaction context in the URL.
The majority of us in IT are specialists, with the exception of a few VP of engineering who are “special” in their own “special” world of being “special”. What I mean by this is that no single person has the skills or experience to do everything well in IT. IT is too big for me to explain or summarize in a few words, other than it requires a lot of different people with different skills to make it tick along. Despite applications being the living breathing entities of the business, a large portion of folk in IT have little context of how applications are built, how they execute, and how they consume resource across the IT infrastructure. Many people simply don’t care as their responsibilities are completely void of anything application related. Thats fine, but the reality is that everyone in IT should have one eye on the business. The whole reason IT exists is so the business can be more competitive and make more money, if this happens IT gets more budget and is allowed to innovate more. IT and the business need each other to survive, which is why when applications slow down or break, both parties bitch at each other.
Jelastic, a next-generation platform‑as‑a‑service (PaaS) offering that runs any Java application in the cloud without code changes, announced on Wednesday the addition of NGINX, the second-most popular open source web server in the world – giving customers greater performance and efficiency for their applications. Using NGINX requires no extra deployment steps or pre-configuration. NGINX offers built-in Layer 7 load balancing and content caching to provide a cost-effective and highly available platform for hosted applications. NGINX delivers 10 times greater performance on existing hardware — combined with scalability, security and high efficiency in memory and CPU — making it the fastest web server in the world. With a market share of 8.5 percent across all domains, NGINX powers 43 million domains and nearly 25 percent of the top 1,000 busiest websites including Facebook, Zappos, Groupon, TechCrunch, Dropbox, LivingSocial, WordPress and Hulu. “Our customers need a Java cloud computing platform that creates the highest level of availability and efficiency for their applications,” said Ruslan Synytsky, CEO, Jelastic. “Adding NGINX as part of our technology stack provides those capabilities.”
Intel defied the post-PC naysayers Tuesday and posted record Q3 results that beat expectations, while Apple, the post-PC icon, stumbled and got badly bruised when it didn’t sell as many iPhones as everybody thought. Intel also forecast Q4 above what anybody – including itself – was expecting, but conservatively below seasonality. It’s hoping for magic from Windows 8 when it finally appears next year. Intel’s immediate tickle is coming from laptops selling particularly into emerging markets like China, Brazil, India, Turkey and Indonesia and enterprise server sales, especially to the cloud, as PC growth in the US and Europe, especially in Europe, slows or is cannibalized by tablets. However, PC sales in China were up 12%, India 21%, Turkey 14% and Indonesia 23%. Brazil is now the third-largest PC market behind China and the US.
After getting bounced out of Exadata when Oracle bought Sun, HP has teamed up with Microsoft to bring out a co-engineered pre-configured Exadata-like appliance fitted with SQL Server. HP paired up with Microsoft earlier this year on the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which runs Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse. This new HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance for SQL Server is its transactional counterpart. Microsoft describes it as the first out-of-box data consolidation widget good for rapid virtualized private cloud deployment with no software changes. It should be out next month and is supposed to deploy new database instances in minutes, reduce operating costs by maybe 75%, simplify management, save floor space, energy and infrastructure, and ultimately handle thousands of database instances in a scalable virtualized private cloud environment.
After waiting a brief interval for tears shed over Steve Jobs to dry, Google and Samsung, the biggest seller of Android phones, met in Hong Kong and unveiled Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphones powered by the brand new Ice Cream Sandwich version of the Apple-loathed Android operating system. Sales of the “co-developed” dingus are set for next month; pricing was not disclosed. The move came a few days after Apple sold a reported four million of its new iPhone 4S in 72 hours, a personal best.
HP said late Thursday that its chief strategy and technology officer Shane Robison, regarded by many inside the company as a big part of its problems, would be retiring (read he was asked) come November 1. “In an effort to drive strategy, research and development closer to the company’s businesses,” HP said, he will not be replaced. HP inherited him from Compaq and, being good at politics, if little else, he came to control HP Labs and M&A and was on the company’s Executive Council. He’s credited with buying Mercury Interactive, Opsware, EDS and 3Com. He’s also believed to have played a part in HP’s decision to exit PCs, tablets and smartphones and buy Autonomy for over $10 billion.
Dell and EMC have finally split after a profitable 10-year run. Dell’s not going to resell anymore EMC products like its Clariion SAN arrays, Celerra NAS servers, Data Domain deduplication appliances and VNX NAS/SAN combo arrays. Instead it will sell its own widgetry in competition with EMC. The Dell-EMC relationship started coming apart in 2007 when Dell bought EqualLogic. Dell’s attempt to buy 3PAR last year strained it some more and it’s buying Compellent Technologies a few months later for its Clariion-competitive mid-range storage really tore it. There’s been expectations of a divorce ever since.
Jelastic – which provides a platform as a service that enables any Java application to run in the cloud – announces an all-star cast of advisors helping the company. Jelastic allows Java applications to be uploaded in minutes without changes to code or programming language and with no need to write for specific APIs (application programming interfaces). Application developers can choose which stack components they want and need, and their application will run and scale easily on the Jelastic platform. Jelastic supports any JVM-based application including pure Java 6 or 7, JRuby, Scala and Groovy. The Jelastic beta supports these SQL databases: MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Non-SQL database support is provided for MongoDB and CouchDB. Supported application servers include Tomcat 6 and 7, GlassFish and Jetty. Jelastic provides load balancing and caching though integrated Nginx, and developer tools integration via Maven and Ant plug-ins.
District Court Judge William Alsup Wednesday postponed Google’s billion-dollar-plus trial for allegedly infringing Oracle’s Java patents and copyrights in Android that was tentatively set to start October 31. No new date has been scheduled. Judge Alsup previously warned that he might have to vacate the date reportedly to hear a murder trial that starts October 24 and could run until January or February but now he’s told Oracle and Google’s lawyers that he might shift their case to another judge. Complaining that he’s never been so overworked in the 37 years of his professional life, he told them, “Your case is huge and needs the attention of somebody who can give it more time than I can.”
What happens when mission critical Java applications slow down or keep crashing in production? The vast majority of IT Operations (Ops) today bury their heads in log files. Why? because thats what they’ve been doing since IBM invented the mainframe. Diving into the weeds feels good, everyone feels productive looking at log entries, hoping that one will eventually explain the unexplainable. IT Ops may also look at system and network metrics which tell them how server resource and network bandwidth is being consumed. Again, looking at lots of metrics feels good but what is causing those server and network metrics to change in the first place? Answer: the application. IT Ops monitor the infrastructure that applications run on, but they lack visibility of how applications actually work and utilize the infrastructure. To get this visibility, Ops must monitor the application run-time. A quick way to get started is to use the free tools that come with the application run-time. In the case of Java applications, both JConsole and VisualVM ship with the standard SDK and have proved popular choices for monitoring Java applications. When we built AppDynamics Lite we felt their was a void of free application monitoring solutions for IT Ops, the market had plenty of tools aimed at developers but many were just too verbose and intrusive for IT Ops to use in production. If we take a look at how JConsole, VisualVM and AppDynamics Lite compare, we’ll see just how different free application monitoring solutions can be.
HP is poised to backtrack on the notion of spinning off its $40 billion PC business according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper heard that “recent analyses by Hewlett-Packard and its top advisers indicate that the costs of spinning off HP’s personal-computer business might outweigh the benefits,” if for no other reason than “separating the PC division would significantly diminish HP’s buying power with component makers, complicate its supply chain and reduce product margins on some products.” We heard – well, everybody’s got leaky HP sources – that HP was “surprised at the synergies,” like nobody’s been watching the store.
Gartner says global PC shipments rose 3.2% in the third quarter to 91.8 million units, which is a lot given the deplorable world economy but the number doesn’t meet the researcher’s projection of 5.1%, suggesting that Gartner was overly exuberant. It probably won’t come as news to anybody that EMEA, particularly Western Europe at 26.6 million units, was a weak sister. Its shaken consumer confidence infected even netbooks. Lenovo got the upset it was angling for and displaced Dell as the world’s second-biggest PC vendor. Gartner figures it has 13.5% market share, up from 11.1% year-over-year passing Dell’s 11.6%, down from 12.2% on a shipment decline of 1.4%. Globally that puts Lenovo right behind HP and its 17.7%, up from 17.3%. Lenovo now means to put the squeeze on HP, which still holds the premier place. It seems to be threatening a price war, claiming more efficient production.
Citrix Thursday morning said it bought a cloud-based data storage, sharing and collaboration shop called ShareFile that will add data to its “Follow-Me” desktop and apps platform. Terms were not disclosed. Apparently the five-year-old North Carolina concern never brought in any venture capital. Citrix called the acquisition “highly strategic.” ShareFile’s widgetry, directed at business, lets users share files across multiple devices and access them from anywhere. Citrix is betting the so-called personal cloud, where people aggregate their unique apps, data, preferences and friends, will be worth billions by 2015.