Fred Duball is the Data Center Practice Principal, Workload and Cloud Solutions at HP Enterprise Services, U.S. Public Sector. Previously he served as the Executive Director and Deputy CIO for the Commonwealth of Virginia. SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thank you for joining us again today, Fred. Before discussing HP Data Center Services in greater detail, please tell us about your background. Fred Duball: I am the practice principal for data center solutions in the U.S. Public Sector Workload and Cloud Solutions Practice, where I have strategic focus on IT transformation trends and provide oversight and contract negotiation in support of our client’s business workload delivery needs. I acquired more than 25 years of government and commercial enterprise experience in IT and IT consulting before joining HP in 2009. Previously, I served as the Executive Director and Deputy CIO for the Commonwealth of Virginia, where I led the efforts to privatize the complex state government infrastructure in a shared services initiative.
Our guest on the podcast this week is Jim Haughwout, Chief Technology Architect at Savi Technologies. We discuss Internet of Things sensors and the growing demand for data driven architectures to support the sheer volume of data being collected. It’s clear that many businesses adopting the Internet of Things are unprepared for the volume of data that needs to be processed. Listen in to learn how to put your Internet of Things strategy into place as the technology continues to evolve.
It will be interesting (perhaps quite easy) to develop a tamper-proof gun mounted camera that can automatically log all activities and stream load data to a cloud service. Such a device should be a standard official issue. In fact as gun-related violence has been on the radar, it should be mandatory for all registered guns.
Disruption in the communications ecosystem is creating a market opportunity for Cloud Real-Time Communications (RTC) platforms. We expect this market to represent a $4.5 billion opportunity by 2018. Cloud RTC Platforms are cloud services that enable mobile and web developers to integrate communications into their applications with just a few lines of code. Via REST APIs and SDKs Cloud RTC Platforms enable developers to easily integrate voice, messaging and video calling into mobile and web applications supporting more contextual conversations. These tools have the potential to change in how we interact with each other in the future.
Just to be clear, no enterprise, no matter how large, has all the capabilities in house to bring a complex IoT product or service to market without some outside help along the way. Take Nexia, an IoT service for running your connected home. Creating this offering required a number of specialized disciplines in areas such as device design, electronics, digital systems, application integration and ergonomics, to name just a few.
2015 is the 10th birthday of Ruby on Rails (or simply called Rails), the popular open source web application framework that uses the Ruby programming language. Ever since Rails burst on the scene a decade ago it has continued to scale up as an elegant way to build dynamic websites quickly and efficiently. Rails has garnered a strong following, especially among tech startups. In fact, some of the best known firms out there are using the framework to build their sites. Examples of elegant sites built on Rails are Groupon, Airbnb, and Bloomberg.
IDG Enterprise’s 2015 Big Data and Analytics survey shows that the number of organizations with deployed/implemented data-driven projects has increased by 125% over the past year. The momentum continues to build. Big Data as a concept is characterized by 3Vs: Volume, Velocity, and Variety. Big Data implies a huge amount of data. Due to the sheer size, Big Data tends to be clumsy. The dominating implementation solution is Hadoop, which is batch based. Not just a handful of companies in the market merely collect lots of data with noise blindly, but they don't know how to cleanse it, let alone how to transform, store and consume it effectively. They simply set up a HDFS cluster to dump the data gathered and then label it as their “Big Data” solution. Unfortunately, the consequence of what they did actually marks the death of Big Data.
It will be interesting (perhaps quite easy) to develop a tamper-proof gun mounted camera that can automatically log all activities and stream load data to a cloud service. Such a device should be a standard official issue. In fact as gun-related violence has been on the radar, it should be mandatory for all registered guns.
Community is an area of great interest to me. As the evangelist for VictorOps, I’m tapped with many challenges and responsibilities. Not only do I try to provide useful guidance and feedback regarding VictorOps and DevOps best practices, but also bring together customers and partners with shared interest and excitement for what we are building to make on-call suck less. If there is a group in which one could model how to build a great community after, it’s Chef and this year’s ChefConf is a testament to that.
Back in 2009 I posted about the “Great Cloud Shakeout” and the coming market consolidation into a few very large clouds. Nearly 5 1/2 years later and it’s about (long past?) time I took another look to see how I did. Back then I predicted that the market would be dominated by “mega CSPs” by the name of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Note that this was during a period of Cambrian Explosion in the CSP market – it seems like everybody in the hosting business wanted to be a cloud provider.
The concept of a ‘data lake’ was coined by James Dixon of Pentaho Corp. and this is what he said – If you think of a datamart as a store of bottled water – cleansed and packaged and structured for easy consumption – the data lake is a large body of water in a more natural state. The contents of the data lake stream in from a source to fill the lake, and various users of the lake can come to examine, dive in, or take samples. Think of a data lake as an unstructured data warehouse, a place where you pull in all of your different sources into one large “pool” of data. In contrast to a data mart, a data lake won’t “wash” the data or try to structure it or limit the use cases. Sure, you should have some use cases in mind, but the architecture of a data lake is simple: a Hadoop File System (HDFS) with lots of directories and files on it.
iot clipping”Things” and the applications/services that support them are changing the way we live. Wearables in the sports and health sectors will grow to nearly 170 million devices by 2017 — an annual growth rate of 41 percent. Specific to the enterprise, if you thought the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) craze was a headache, just wait until button cameras, smart watches, fitness trackers, and connected glasses are a daily occurrence in the office. Workplace wearables will be a huge challenge in the coming years as more devices, clothing and pretty much any ‘thing’ with a chip or sensor become commonplace in society.
In recent years, the US government has become a leading advocate for continuous monitoring of security threats and vulnerabilities. But how effectively are departments and agencies in implementing these programs? And how do we measure success? Moving Towards Continuous Monitoring Though it’s become a popular concept, continuous monitoring wasn’t always in vogue. When the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) was enacted in 2002, the law required agencies to document security practices, including taking inventory of information systems and writing security plans. External firms would audit the plans and grade departments and agencies based on their efforts.
What exactly is a cognitive application? In her session at 16th Cloud Expo, Ashley Hathaway, Product Manager at IBM Watson, will look at the services being offered by the IBM Watson Developer Cloud and what that means for developers and Big Data. She'll explore how IBM Watson and its partnerships will continue to grow and help define what it means to be a cognitive service, as well as take a look at the offerings on Bluemix. She will also check out how Watson and the Alchemy API team up to offer disruptive APIs to developers.
While DevOps most critically and famously fosters collaboration, communication, and integration through cultural change, culture is more of an output than an input. In order to actively drive cultural evolution, organizations must make substantial organizational and process changes, and adopt new technologies, to encourage a DevOps culture. Moderated by Andi Mann, panelists will discuss how to balance these three pillars of DevOps, where to focus attention (and resources), where organizations might slip up with the wrong focus, how to manage change and risk in all three areas, what is possible and what is not, where to start, and especially how new structures, processes, and technologies can help drive a new DevOps culture.
of cloud, colocation, managed services and disaster recovery solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. TierPoint, LLC, is a leading national provider of information technology and data center services, including cloud, colocation, disaster recovery and managed IT services, with corporate headquarters in St. Louis, MO. TierPoint was formed through the strategic combination of some of the country's most respected and innovative data centers and IT solution providers whose origins date back as early as 1995.
Cloud Expo New York is happening from June 9 - 11. This event brings together the worlds of Cloud Computing, DevOps, IoT, WebRTC, Big Data and SDDC. We hope to see you there-members of the Blue Box team will exhibit in booth 218 next to the DevOps area. Plus, our Chief Product Officer, Hernan Alvarez, will present his talk "The Cloud Has a Down-and-Dirty Lining" as part of the Operations track in the DevOps Summit portion of the event on June 9 at 11 am. Learn more about his session here. To schedule time to meet one-to-one with Blue Box infrastructure experts, or to discuss partnership opportunities, click here. Watch our June events page for details and updates in the coming weeks.
For most C-level executives (and most of the rest of the planet too), the concept of ‘risk’ is generally first perceived as a negative. The notion of risk as a business positive (or a ‘business enabler’ even) is fanciful, flaky and fraught with fallibility – isn’t it? This proposition is not as feeble as it sounds and there are a number of reasons why this is so. First, let’s be essentially mathematical about this for a minute. If John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, Adam Smith or (insert your favorite economics guru here) have taught us anything, it is that business should be about measurement.
A lot is written on mobile technologies, the Internet of Things, social media and analytics, but little is written on how all these might work together in a retail environment. I think best by writing, so let's think this through together. Blind spots are defined as, "Areas where a person's view is obstructed." Many business decisions today are still made based on conjecture (unsubstantiated assumptions), because the data needed to make a data-driven decision lies in an operational "blind spot."
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the set of devices and systems that interconnect real world sensors and actuators to the internet. This includes many different types of systems. These systems connect to the internet or gateway in a variety of manners including long range WiFi/Ethernet using IP protocols (tcp/udp, including cellular), short range Bluetooth low energy, short range Near Field Communications, or other types of medium range radio networks. Point to point radio links and serial lines are also used. There are many sensors that connect directly to the internet and there are others that may need specialized IoT networking hardware. Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT), for instance, is a subscribe and publish messaging protocol designed for lightweight machine to machine (M2M) communications. Originally developed by IBM, is now an open standard but its primary purpose is to allow a device to send a very short message one hop to a MQ broker and to receive commands from that broker. It needs a gateway or receiver (broker) to communicate. Basically, every message is published to a location, called a topic, clients (the sensors) subscribe to various topics and when a message is published to the topic, the client/sensor gets it.
How is unified communications transforming the way businesses operate? In his session at WebRTC Summit, Arvind Rangarajan, Director of Product Marketing at BroadSoft, will discuss how to extend unified communications experience outside the enterprise through WebRTC. He will also review use cases across different industry verticals. Arvind Rangarajan is Director, Product Marketing at BroadSoft. He has over 19 years of experience in the telecommunications industry in various roles such as Software Development, Product Management and Product Marketing, applied across Wireless, Unified Communications and in cloud-based communications.
We just finished the first O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference and the overwhelming most popular topic was microservices. Why all the hype about an architectural style? Microservices are the first post-DevOps revolution architecture. The DevOps revolution highlighted how much inadvertent friction an outdated operations mindset can cause, starting the move towards automating away manual tasks.
In my previous post, I discussed the importance of APM. The APM market has evolved substantially over the years, mostly in an attempt to adapt to changing application technologies and deployments. When we had very simple applications that directly accessed a database then APM was not much more than a performance analyzer for a database. But as applications moved to the web and we saw the first wave of application servers then APM solutions really came into their own.
How is unified communications transforming the way businesses operate? In his session at WebRTC Summit, Arvind Rangarajan, Director of Product Marketing at BroadSoft, will discuss how to extend unified communications experience outside the enterprise through WebRTC. He will also review use cases across different industry verticals. Arvind Rangarajan is Director, Product Marketing at BroadSoft. He has over 19 years of experience in the telecommunications industry in various roles such as Software Development, Product Management and Product Marketing, applied across Wireless, Unified Communications and in cloud-based communications.
SYS-CON Events announced today that ProfitBricks, the provider of painless cloud infrastructure, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY., and the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. ProfitBricks is the IaaS provider that offers a painless cloud experience for all IT users, with no learning curve. ProfitBricks boasts flexible cloud servers and networking, an integrated Data Center Designer tool for visual control over the cloud and the best price/performance value available. ProfitBricks was named one of the coolest Cloud Providers of 2015 by CRN and was also the recipient of two CODiE awards and a Frost & Sullivan Cloud innovation award for 2014.