"When you think about the data center today, there's constant evolution, The evolution of the data center and the needs of the consumer of technology change, and they change constantly," stated Matt Kalmenson, VP of Sales, Service and Cloud Providers at Veeam Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
It's a big job making sure your web app works across every browser, for every resolution, running on every operating system. And every time you build or update a new feature, it might break everything else. That's a lot of "everys," so we put together a comprehensive checklist of over 50 essential functional and regression tests to ensure that your web app works before it hits production.
The next BriefingsDirect security market transformation discussion explores how airline Allegiant Air solved its payment card industry (PCI) problem -- and got a whole lot better security culture to boot. When Allegiant needed to quickly manage its compliance around the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, it embraced many technologies, including tokenization, but the company also adopted an improved position toward privacy methods in general.
Moving business critical applications, such as Microsoft SQL Server, to virtual server and cloud environments requires high availability and a solid disaster protection plan. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, David Bermingham, Director, Technical Evangelist at SIOS Technology, simplified the confusing array of availability and redundancy features offered in Windows Server Failover Clustering, SQL Server, and leading cloud and virtual server software vendors. Attendees learned how to protect SQL Server and other Windows applications from downtime and disasters, all the while ensuring configuration flexibility and infrastructure efficiency.
A revolutionary change in the industry was the foundation of cloud on the automation of virtualization technologies. Initially it was meant for infrastructure, but with the advent of new and innovative cloud services it has crossed the boundary of Infrastructure and invaded the application space. The concept of ‘as a Service' model has three pillars: IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service). Over a period of time cloud services have grown and diversified to the extent that clubbing the services into these three pillars is not only difficult but unattainable. That's the reason none of the public cloud providers classify their services in ‘as a Service' model category.
"Peak 10 is a national cloud data center solutions managed services provider, and part of that is disaster recovery. We see a growing trend in the industry where companies are coming to us looking for assistance in their DR strategy," stated Andrew Cole, Director of Solutions Engineering at Peak 10, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Machine Learning helps make complex systems more efficient. By applying advanced Machine Learning techniques such as Cognitive Fingerprinting, wind project operators can utilize these tools to learn from collected data, detect regular patterns, and optimize their own operations. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Stuart Gillen, Director of Business Development at SparkCognition, discussed how research has demonstrated the value of Machine Learning in delivering next generation analytics to improve safety, performance, and reliability in today’s modern wind turbines.
Companies can harness IoT and predictive analytics to sustain business continuity; predict and manage site performance during emergencies; minimize expensive reactive maintenance; and forecast equipment and maintenance budgets and expenditures. Providing cost-effective, uninterrupted service is challenging, particularly for organizations with geographically dispersed operations.
operations aren’t merging to become one discipline. Nor is operations simply going away. Rather, DevOps is leading software development and operations – together with other practices such as security – to collaborate and coexist with less overhead and conflict than in the past. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Gordon Haff, Red Hat Technology Evangelist, will discuss what modern operational practices look like in a world in which applications are more loosely coupled, are developed using DevOps approaches, and are deployed on software-defined, and often containerized, infrastructures – and where operations itself is increasingly another “as a service” capability from the perspective of developers.
"We are an outsourcing company, offering sysadmin and DevOps services mostly for managed service providers, cloud providers and hosting providers," stated Nikola Trajkovic, Business Development Manager at SuperAdmins, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
"We've discovered that after shows 80% if leads that people get, 80% of the conversations end up on the show floor, meaning people forget about it, people forget who they talk to, people forget that there are actual business opportunities to be had here so we try to help out and keep the conversations going," explained Jeff Mesnik, Founder and President of ContentMX, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Organizations planning enterprise data center consolidation and modernization projects are faced with a challenging, costly reality. Requirements to deploy modern, cloud-native applications simultaneously with traditional client/server applications are almost impossible to achieve with hardware-centric enterprise infrastructure. Compute and network infrastructure are fast moving down a software-defined path, but storage has been a laggard. Until now.
"There's a growing demand from users for things to be faster. When you think about all the transactions or interactions users will have with your product and everything that is between those transactions and interactions - what drives us at Catchpoint Systems is the idea to measure that and to analyze it," explained Leo Vasiliou, Director of Web Performance Engineering at Catchpoint Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
After many years of research, misfires and frightening Hollywood plotlines, artificial intelligence (AI) is finally coming into its own and beginning to demonstrate significant business value. The combined forces of big data, human expertise and AI are being used across industries as diverse as healthcare and manufacturing, as well as within all aspects of business. IT operations is one area that AI is beginning to contribute to enormously. IT infrastructures are changing rapidly today, particularly hybrid cloud environments. While they are increasingly dynamic and agile, they are also extraordinarily complex. Humans are no longer able to sift through the variety, volume and velocity of Big Data streaming out of IT infrastructures in real time, making AI – especially machine learning – a powerful and necessary tool for automating analysis and decision making. By helping teams bridge the gap between Big Data and humans, and by capturing human domain knowledge, machine learning is able to provide the necessary operational intelligence to significantly relieve this burden of near real-time, informed decision-making. Industry analysts agree. In fact, Gartner named machine learning among the top 10 strategic technologies for 2016, noting “The explosion of data sources and complexity of information makes manual classification and analysis infeasible and uneconomical.”
Microsoft took another step toward being king of the cloud hill when it announced in January that it was releasing its Azure stack to the public. There are many technical reasons why this is cool, but more importantly, it's the psychological advantage this gives Microsoft. Google has always had the ability for developers using its stack to develop locally on the same tools that run in Google App Engine. It recently forked its environments, so now the local and cloud environments are slightly different for some of the configurations -- I can't tell you how many nights I have lost sleep because of environments being slightly different! Development and hosting are two completely different things. What Microsoft did is one-upped Google and Amazon.
Let’s face it, embracing new storage technologies, capabilities and upgrading to new hardware often adds complexity and increases costs. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Seth Oxenhorn, Vice President of Business Development & Alliances at FalconStor, discussed how a truly heterogeneous software-defined storage approach can add value to legacy platforms and heterogeneous environments. The result reduces complexity, significantly lowers cost, and provides IT organizations with improved efficiencies, all while delivering real freedom and flexibility. Come learn how to #BeFree.
"My role is working with customers, helping them go through this digital transformation. I spend a lot of time talking to banks, big industries, manufacturers working through how they are integrating and transforming their IT platforms and moving them forward," explained William Morrish, General Manager Product Sales at Interoute, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
“delaPlex Software provides software outsourcing services. We have a hybrid model where we have onshore developers and project managers that we can place anywhere in the U.S. or in Europe,” explained Manish Sachdeva, CEO at delaPlex Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Large scale deployments present unique planning challenges, system commissioning hurdles between IT and OT and demand careful system hand-off orchestration. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jeff Smith, Senior Director and a founding member of Incenergy, will discuss some of the key tactics to ensure delivery success based on his experience of the last two years deploying Industrial IoT systems across four continents.
A BriefingsDirect business innovation thought leadership discussion on how companies are exploiting advances in procurement and finance services to produce new types of productivity benefits. We'll now hear from a leading industry analyst on how more data, process integration, and analysis efficiencies of cloud computing are helping companies to better manage their finances in tighter collaboration with procurement and supply-chain networks. This business-process innovation exchange comes in conjunction with the Tradeshift Innovation Day held in New York on June 22, 2016.
While many government agencies have embraced the idea of employing cloud computing as a tool for increasing the efficiency and flexibility of IT, many still struggle with large scale adoption. The challenge is mainly attributed to the federated structure of these agencies as well as the immaturity of brokerage and governance tools and models. Initiatives like FedRAMP are a great first step toward solving many of these challenges but there are a lot of unknowns that are yet to be tackled. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Majed Saadi, Chief Technology Officer at Govplace, focused on providing a quick update about the state of the cloud in the federal government with an emphasis on current trends and drivers. He also introduced a new Government Cloud Enablement Model that codifies the different functional areas that enablement must confront.
Extracting business value from Internet of Things (IoT) data doesn’t happen overnight. There are several requirements that must be satisfied, including IoT device enablement, data analysis, real-time detection of complex events and automated orchestration of actions. Unfortunately, too many companies fall short in achieving their business goals by implementing incomplete solutions or not focusing on tangible use cases. In his general session at @ThingsExpo, Dave McCarthy, Director of Products at Bsquare Corporation, will step through an integrated approach to the IoT journey, highlighting common pitfalls and successful strategies using real-world examples from the field.
As companies gain momentum, the need to maintain high quality products can outstrip their development team’s bandwidth for QA. Building out a large QA team (whether in-house or outsourced) can slow down development and significantly increases costs. This eBook takes QA profiles from 5 companies who successfully scaled up production without building a large QA team and includes: What to consider when choosing CI/CD tools How culture and communication can make or break implementation
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Yoseph Reuveni, Director of Software Engineering at Jet.com, will discuss Jet.com's journey into containerizing Microsoft-based technologies like C# and F# into Docker. He will talk about lessons learned and challenges faced, the Mono framework tryout and how they deployed everything into Azure cloud. Yoseph Reuveni is a technology leader with unique experience developing and running high throughput (over 1M tps) distributed systems with extremely low latency (under 10ms). He is working at Jet.com as a Director of Software Engineering leading key initiatives around service containerization, scaling and geo-redundancy. His extensive knowledge integrating docker, mesos, kafka, and many more pieces of the big data stack resulted in numerous performance boosts and operational cutoffs. Yoseph holds an MSc from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Math.
"Software-defined storage is a big problem in this industry because so many people have different definitions as they see fit to use it," stated Peter McCallum, VP of Datacenter Solutions at FalconStor Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.