Actifio is powering new application development and testing services from Net3 Technologies (N3T), a managed cloud services provider. N3T's new Symmetry DevOps™ service builds on its existing Palmetto Virtual Data Center (PvDC) Cloud services for data backup and disaster recovery (DR) based on the Actifio Copy Data Virtualization platform. Previously, N3T's data protection and DR services were challenged by overlapping and inefficient legacy hardware and software platforms from multiple vendors, which meant higher costs in licensing and management overhead, and difficulty in responding rapidly to client needs. It was also time consuming for N3T staff needing to perform manual operations across all of these point tools. Shifting these services to Actifio's platform replaced the inefficiency of multiple backup and replication tools with one simple, manageable access point. For N3T, this enabled it to free up staff time, improve customer satisfaction with a new self-service portal that integrates with the Actifio Foresight™ API, and allow for increased revenues from expanded service offerings.
Our resident Cognizant digital/mobile expert, Peter Rogers, asked me to recommend a digital strategies topic to share, and I suggested Beacons for this week. I confess to reading about them daily without knowing much about them, so I want to thank Peter for this article! Enjoy! Beacons do not push out notifications. They broadcast an advertisement of themselves (traditionally their UUID, major and minor values) and can be detected by Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices.
As competitive organizations move away from quarterly software releases to faster releases, they are being forced to face the inevitable adoption of DevOps processes and efficiencies. Businesses today want to deliver software improvements at weekly and even daily intervals, especially in SaaS environments, for mobile apps, and for cloud-based workloads. Yet those kinds of delivery speeds are inconceivable with any kind of manual software development processes.
Cloud computing is unquestionably one of the driving forces of DevOps, as the automation of operations transforms enterprise software development. DevOps, however, is more than a technology trend, as it represents a move toward silo-busting, self-organizing horizontal teams that drive business velocity. At the same time, enterprise Digital Transformation represents an upheaval across the enterprise, as customer preferences and behavior drive enterprise technology decisions. This transformation extends well beyond technology, however, as companies must rethink their organizational structure, moving toward silo-busting, self-organizing horizontal teams... sound familiar?
There are over 120 breakout sessions in all, with Keynotes, General Sessions, and Power Panels adding to three days of incredibly rich presentations and content. Join @ThingsExpo conference chair Roger Strukhoff (@IoT2040), June 7-9, 2016 in New York City, for three days of intense 'Internet of Things' discussion and focus, including Big Data's indespensable role in IoT, Smart Grids and Industrial Internet of Things, Wearables and Consumer IoT, as well as (new) IoT's use in Vertical Markets.
The web app is agile. The REST API is agile. The testing and planning are agile. But alas, data infrastructures certainly are not. Once an application matures, changing the shape or indexing scheme of data often forces at best a top down planning exercise and at worst includes schema changes that force downtime. The time has come for a new approach that fundamentally advances the agility of distributed data infrastructures. Learn about a new solution to the problems faced by software organizations as their products become successful and the data grows beyond the initial scope of the database, whether it starts out as relational SQL, NoSQL, or somewhere in between.
Automation is a big part of the DevOps approach, to the point where some people (incorrectly) define DevOps exclusively as automation. While many discuss automating the deployment pipeline process for build->test->deploy, few talk about utility automation for the intermediate steps of that process. There are different aspects of end-to-end processes that can help improve the adoption of DevOps principals by developers. There are on-call responsibilities, development-centric monitoring and process automation for developers. One of the great techniques for the latter is commit/push hooks that can be implemented as part of the version control system. Unfortunately, many people are either not familiar with pre/post commit hooks or not using them to their advantage. As a result, I thought it might be helpful to outline a few of the most common use cases for commit/push hooks that I’ve implemented on different projects that help to streamline the development process and reduce a number of points of failure along the way.
If you’re a vendor of a cybersecurity product and you’re hammering out your value proposition, you might assume that prevention is a stronger value proposition than deterrence, and mitigation is the weakest of the three. After all, mitigation presumes a successful attack, right? In reality, however, the reverse is true. Mitigation is actually the strongest of the three cybersecurity value propositions, because it is not wholly counterfactual, and furthermore leads to deterrence and thus prevention as well.
In demand-intensive mobile and web applications, an emerging pattern is to host the Systems of Engagement in the cloud (for maximum responsiveness) but keep the Systems of Record with the other important business systems in the company datacenter, often on a tightly secured mainframe. But what about the space in between? In this IBM Redpaper publication, we show that the IBM Bluemix cloud platform offers technologies that make it easy for cloud-based SoEs to securely connect to on-premises IBM mainframes, creating a fully secure, end-to-end, SoE-SoR environment.
Electric power utilities face relentless pressure on their financial performance, and reducing distribution grid losses is one of the last untapped opportunities to meet their business goals. Combining IoT-enabled sensors and cloud-based data analytics, utilities now are able to find, quantify and reduce losses faster – and with a smaller IT footprint. Solutions exist using Internet-enabled sensors deployed temporarily at strategic locations within the distribution grid to measure actual line loads.
Today, most enterprises have some type of cloud-based solutions or are looking at cloud-based infrastructure for some of their enterprise applications. What is lacking in many organizations is the strategic design focus and sophisticated implementation for very secure infrastructure which not susceptible to cyberattacks. Hardening data centers as well as enterprise networks (and clouds) is a critical step to ensure an organization’s business continuity. Forget “disaster recovery” as it is a dated term and dated concept. Disaster recovery refers to the organized shutdown of systems and then when the disaster (event) is over, a systematic restart of the total application is initiated.
"We enable organizations to solve the key challenges around the security and compliance of hybrid clouds. We like to also capitalize on this new phenomenon called DevSecOps, which is making sure that security is built in as you release these platforms into the cloud," explained JD Sherry, CEO of Cavirin, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 17th Cloud Expo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
For it to be SOA – let alone SOA done right – we need to pin down just what "SOA done wrong" might be. First-generation SOA with Web Services and ESBs, perhaps? But then there's second-generation, REST-based SOA. More lightweight and cloud-friendly, but many REST-based SOA practices predate the microservices wave. Today, microservices and containers go hand in hand – only the details of "container-oriented architecture" are largely on the drawing board – and are not likely to look much like SOA in any case. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Jason Bloomberg, President of Intellyx, provided an insightful look into the nature of microservices architecture.
In order to be ready for the Christmas season, online retailers typically bring their shops into shape right before Black Friday. Together with Cyber Monday this is the most important day in the retailer’s year. Stilnest.com (@Stilnest) is a publishing house for designer jewelry, running their online shop on Magento. While the guys at Stilnest did a good job of preparing their environment, the interest in their products and, therefore, the traffic on their site, was much higher than expected. The shop even went down after one of the YouTube stars released a new video showing off her new jewelry line powered by Stilnest.
Monitoring Node.js Applications has special challenges. The dynamic nature of the language provides many “opportunities” for developers to produce memory leaks, and a single function blocking the event queue can have a huge impact on the overall application performance. Parallel execution of jobs is done using multiple worker processes using the “cluster” functionality to take full advantage of multi-core CPUs – but the master and worker processes belong to a single application, which means that they should be monitored together. Let’s have a deep look at the Top Metrics in Node.js Applications to get a better understanding of why they are so important to monitor.
You may have heard about the pets vs. cattle discussion – a reference to the way application servers are deployed in the cloud native world. If an application server goes down it can simply be dropped from the mix and a new server added in its place. The practice so far has mostly been applied to application deployments. Management software on the other hand is treated in a very special manner. Dedicated resources are set aside to run the management software components and several alerting systems are deployed to watch the health of those components. Administrators spend hours each day managing the management infrastructure.
As more intelligent IoT applications shift into gear, they’re merging into the ever-increasing traffic flow of the Internet. It won’t be long before we experience bottlenecks, as IoT traffic peaks during rush hours. Organizations that are unprepared will find themselves by the side of the road unable to cross back into the fast lane. As billions of new devices begin to communicate and exchange data – will your infrastructure be scalable enough to handle this new interconnected world?
At year-end, we often consider where we’ve fallen short over the last twelve months – and how we can do better over the next twelve. For IT leaders, DevOps is likely to be a primary concern for 2016. As application awesomeness becomes more important to the business, IT must get great code into production faster. DevOps success is thus imperative – especially if you’re competing against digital-first market disrupters. DevOps, though, isn’t just about engineering better processes. It’s also about cultural transformation. This reality makes some IT leaders uneasy, because excellence at operational management – rather than cultural leadership – got them where they are today.
"We've made it easy for customers that want to build their own cloud infrastructure by delivering a fully integrated software and hardware in a rack," explained Stefaan Vervaet, Director of Strategic Alliances at HGST, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 17th Cloud Expo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Today, most enterprises have some type of cloud-based solutions or are looking at cloud-based infrastructure for some of their enterprise applications. What is lacking in many organizations is the strategic design focus and sophisticated implementation for very secure infrastructure which not susceptible to cyberattacks. Hardening data centers as well as enterprise networks (and clouds) is a critical step to ensure an organization’s business continuity. Forget “disaster recovery” as it is a dated term and dated concept. Disaster recovery refers to the organized shutdown of systems and then when the disaster (event) is over, a systematic restart of the total application is initiated.
As organizations shift towards IT-as-a-service models, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and now cloud environments grows with it. CommVault can ensure protection and E-Discovery of your data – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist - Windows Products and Microsoft Partnerships at CommVault, will discuss how to cut costs, scale easily, and unleash insight with CommVault Simpana software, the only singular data and information management solution for cloud data protection and beyond.
"We enable organizations to solve the key challenges around the security and compliance of hybrid clouds. We like to also capitalize on this new phenomenon called DevSecOps, which is making sure that security is built in as you release these platforms into the cloud," explained JD Sherry, CEO of Cavirin, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 17th Cloud Expo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
For it to be SOA – let alone SOA done right – we need to pin down just what "SOA done wrong" might be. First-generation SOA with Web Services and ESBs, perhaps? But then there's second-generation, REST-based SOA. More lightweight and cloud-friendly, but many REST-based SOA practices predate the microservices wave. Today, microservices and containers go hand in hand – only the details of "container-oriented architecture" are largely on the drawing board – and are not likely to look much like SOA in any case. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Jason Bloomberg, President of Intellyx, provided an insightful look into the nature of microservices architecture.
Most of the IoT Gateway scenarios involve collecting data from machines/processing and pushing data upstream to cloud for further analytics. The gateway hardware varies from Raspberry Pi to Industrial PCs. The document states the process of allowing deploying polyglot data pipelining software with the clear notion of supporting immutability. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Shashank Jain, a development architect for SAP Labs, discussed the objective, which is to automate the IoT deployment process from development to production scenarios using Docker containers.
The purpose of the maturity model is to enable accelerated adoption of the new Cloud technologies that make disruptive business models possible, faster, the headline reference example being the ‘Platform Business Model’. Gartner says senior IT executives should be “digitally remastering” their organizations, and central to this digital leadership is the ‘Platform Business Model‘, described in detail through pioneering MIT research work.