The Internet of Things is not new. Historically, smart businesses have used its basic concept of leveraging data to drive better decision making and have capitalized on those insights to realize additional revenue opportunities. So, what has changed to make the Internet of Things one of the hottest topics in tech? In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Gray, Director, Embedded and Internet of Things, discussed the underlying factors that are driving the economics of intelligent systems. Discover how hardware commoditization, the ubiquitous nature of connectivity, and the emergence of Big Data and analysis are providing the pull to meet customer expectations of a widely connected, multi-dimensional universe of people, things, and information.
One of the great things about PagerDuty is our API. With our API, you can integrate with a wide variety of partners, and also extend and customize your PagerDuty experience. Our customers have done a number of cool things, including creating custom reports and dashboards, creating status pages to let customers and internal stakeholders know about incidents, and automating the details of their incident response. The PagerDuty API helps you respond to incidents more efficiently. But where do you get started? We’ve highlighted some great add-ons below to help you make the most of PagerDuty. Some have been created by our in-house engineers, and some have come from our talented community. We publish code samples of our favorites add-ons on our tools page, so if you’ve built a PagerDuty tool, we want to know about it! Send it to developers@pagerduty.com.
As the largest financial institution in Northern Europe, for Nordea time is money. Their decision to insource IT from IBM meant a huge project in terms of organization and potential for transitional disruption. Speaking at the Automate Your World conference in London, Nordea Chief IT Infrastructure Specialist Jesper Christensen cited automation as critical in saving time and money on a project of such scale.
After a couple of false starts, cloud-based desktop solutions are picking up steam, driven by trends such as BYOD and pervasive high-speed connectivity. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Seth Bostock, CEO of IndependenceIT, cut through the hype and the acronyms, and discussed the emergence of full-featured cloud workspaces that do for the desktop what cloud infrastructure did for the server. He also discussed VDI vs DaaS, implementation strategies and evaluation criteria.
The many analysts who participated as part of the GigaOm cadre of contributors are in a strange limbo. Many have not been paid for recent work with GigaOm, meaning they too are creditors, just not ones with very much legal standing. So far there has been no insights reported on the 100's (possibly 1000's) of companies with access to the special research only sections of GigaOm behind their paywall. Many of these firms will have paid in advance for their access. They are now, in at least spirit, creditors who are owed something. As companies evaluate how to fill their technology research needs we encourage all to consider our CTOvision Pro offering. All current GigaOm Research members are eligible for a 90 day free trial.
The Open Compute Project is a collective effort by Facebook and a number of players in the datacenter industry to bring lessons learned from the social media giant's giant IT deployment to the rest of the world. Datacenters account for 3% of global electricity consumption – about the same as all of Switzerland or the Czech Republic -- according to people I met at the recent Open Compute Summit in San Jose. With increasing mobility at the edge of the cloud and vast new dataflows being predicted with the growth of the Internet of Things (and The Coming Age of Many Zettabytes) in the near future, the carbon footprint of the datacenter industry has become an important issue. Jay Parikh, VP of Engineering at Facebook, Canonical CEO and sometime astronaut Mark Shuttleworth, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, and HP Enterprise Group SVP Antonio Neri were among the keynote speakers. Also speaking was OpenStack co-founder Cole Crawford, who now heads a startup called Vapor.io that's dedicated to reforming the datacenter hardware industry. Open Compute CEO Corey Bell, who was named to this position in December, was also promiment during the conference. Two Worlds, Meeting Datacenter professionals are obsessed with the cost of electricity per kilowatt-hour, and talk in terms of PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness, the relative amount of power needed to keep all that iron in a datacenter running cool). The number of kilowatts that can be stuffed into a rack, the cost per megawatt to build a new center, and whether buildings really need to feel like meat lockers are all major topics of discussion. Meanwhile, software professionals – like the thousands who've been trekking to New York and Santa Clara for Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo – think about hybrid cloud, lean and agile programming, the new trend toward microservices, and the revival of containers. These two worlds meet in pieces of a couple of Venn diagrams—the first in their commitments to transparency and open source, the second in their renewed thinking about containers. Open Up! Three of the four largest datacenter operators in the world are anything but open, according to a number of speakers at the Open Compute Summit. The fourth, Facebook, was lauded for its willingness to break from the pack. It is, of course, in any datacenter operator's interest to share knowledge, as even small increments in improved performance and best practices can have millions of dollars of operational impact annually to a major operator. The impacts are also important to smaller players as well. All of IT collectively uses about 10 percent of global electricity, according to several sources I've seen. Additionally, the emergence of smart meters, smart grids, and smart appliances will, in theory, allow a magnified impact on electricity use if the IT itself can lower electricity use by all those things attached to the IoT. To Dream the Impossible Dream The research I've led at our Tau Institute for the past three years shows that dramatic increases in societal development throughout the world will not occur unless humanity as a whole vastly improves its energy efficiency. Most developing nations use 3 to 5% of the electricity per-person as the developed world, and it will simply be impossible, economically and physically, to replicate developed levels of energy use on a global scale. Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo More specifically, and in the short term, I need to note that we have just opened some key speaking opportunities on the topic of microservices and containers on the Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo program. Please visit the website or contact me via Twitter to learn more. The Open Compute Project is large, ambitious, and peopled with passionate proponents. But it is just one way to make a difference. Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo are another. Please let me know any other ideas you have!
SYS-CON Events announced today that BroadSoft, the leading global provider of Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) services to operators worldwide, has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON's WebRTC Summit, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. BroadSoft is the leading provider of software and services that enable mobile, fixed-line and cable service providers to offer Unified Communications over their Internet Protocol networks. The Company’s core communications platform enables the delivery of a range of enterprise and consumer calling, messaging and collaboration communication services, including private branch exchanges, video calling, text messaging and converged mobile and fixed-line services.
In today's digital world, change is the one constant. Disruptive innovations like cloud, mobility, social media, and the Internet of Things have reshaped the market and set new standards in customer expectations. To remain competitive, businesses must tap the potential of emerging technologies and markets through the rapid release of new products and services. However, the rigid and siloed structures of traditional IT platforms and processes are slowing them down – resulting in lengthy delivery cycles and a poor customer experience.
GENBAND introduced its Real Time Communications (RTC) Client for Lync* to seamlessly combine real-time communications with Lync Instant Messaging (IM) and Presence. “We’re shaking up the economics of delivering Unified Communications (UC) and offering a compelling way to integrate previously bespoke communications technologies,” said Carl Baptiste, GENBAND’s Senior Vice President, Enterprise Solutions. “We’re offering enterprises the best of both worlds by combining our own high availability voice, video and collaboration with Lync’s IM and Presence; creating a single, web centric, client. Our RTC Client for Lync is delivered like a web page but operates like a traditional desktop or mobile application. More importantly, it looks familiar to Lync users so they don’t need to be retrained and IT organizations aren’t burdened with the cost and complexity of expanding Lync infrastructure to support real-time communications.”
SYS-CON Events announced today that Liaison Technologies, a leading provider of data management and integration cloud services and solutions, has been named "Silver Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York, NY. Liaison Technologies is a recognized market leader in providing cloud-enabled data integration and data management solutions to break down complex information barriers, enabling enterprises to make smarter decisions, faster.
"Programmability in the network" is a wordy yet simpler way to describe the extension of network capabilities through the use of software-defined techniques.
See what I mean?
In any case, whatever you want to call it, there are two distinct methods of leveraging programmability in the network. One is specifically tied to SDN, using the extensible capability of an SDN controller supportive of a plug-in, module or app-based model. The second is more broadly applicable (in that it can be used for SDN but also as part of traditional or legacy architectural approaches as well) and implements an in-path model for executing logic (programmability) on inbound and outbound traffic.
As usual, I think a picture can probably suffice to explain it fully instead of inundating you with words, words and more words.
If you’ve spent any time at leading cloud computing conferences, you may have come across the meme “pets vs cattle.” (Here is a lengthy slideshare presentation by Randy Bias of EMC/Cloudscaling discussing the difference between pets and cattle in a cloud computing world.) The message associated with this meme is that we should have different attitudes about traditional infrastructure versus today’s cloud infrastructure. Traditional infrastructure is expensive and individuated – we give servers names, we lavish attention on them, and when they suffer problems we do evaluation, diagnosis, and nurse them back to health via hands-on administration. In other words, we treat them as part of a family. This is true whether the server is physical or virtual; they are long-lived and stable, and therefore deserve personal attention and emotional attachment – just like a pet.
Bring the world's best IaaS to the world's best PaaS. In their session at 15th Cloud Expo, Animesh Singh, a Senior Cloud Architect and Strategist for IBM Cloud Labs, and Jason Anderson, a Cloud Architect for IBM Cloud Labs, shared their experiences running Cloud Foundry on OpenStack. They focused on how Cloud Foundry and OpenStack complement each other, how they technically integrate using cloud provider interface (CPI), how we could automate an OpenStack setup for Cloud Foundry deployments, and some of the best practices for configuring a scalable environment.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloudian, Inc., the leading provider of hybrid cloud storage 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., 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. Cloudian, Inc., is a Foster City, California - based software company specializing in cloud storage software. The main product is Cloudian, an Amazon S3-compliant cloud object storage platform, the bedrock of cloud computing systems, that enables cloud service providers and enterprises to build reliable, affordable and scalable cloud storage solutions. In addition, Cloudian is actively partnering with the leading cloud computing environments including Citrix Cloud Platform and OpenStack, cloud on-ramp providers, and the vast ecosystem of tools and applications that is afforded through true S3 compatibility. Cloudian's customers include Alcatel-Lucent, Vodafone, Nextel, Docomo, NTT, SoftBank, Telecom Italia, Nifty, LunaCloud, Constant Hosting, and Clara Online. The company has additional offices in China and Japan.
Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture. We have released our logentries_agent cookbook to supermarket.chef.io! You can check out the docs here, or I've developed the following brief tutorial to walk you through how to automate your installation of the Logentries Linux Agentin your own infrastructure. First off, I assume you have a basic understanding of Chef and its technologies; if you're unfamiliar with Chef I recommend having a look at this overview. (Also, if you dont have a Logentries account, you can get create a free account here in just a couple of minutes.)
Last week I explored how small data, rather than big data, can be a critical component of the Internet of Things. To drive the point home I went looking for more examples of companies using both small and big data to improve decision-making. I stumbled across an innovative startup out of Boston named Ovuline who has built a mobile app for women trying to have children. The app uses data to predict when they are most likely to conceive. You heard that right. Women provide a variety of personal and heal
After a couple of false starts, cloud-based desktop solutions are picking up steam, driven by trends such as BYOD and pervasive high-speed connectivity. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Seth Bostock, CEO of IndependenceIT, cut through the hype and the acronyms, and discussed the emergence of full-featured cloud workspaces that do for the desktop what cloud infrastructure did for the server. He also discussed VDI vs DaaS, implementation strategies and evaluation criteria.
"Vormetric is a data security company. We secure information at rest and our customers are some of the largest organizations in the world. The threats that are coming around today are either from state-sponsored activities and organized crime, and the intent is to steal information," explained Derek Tumulak, Vice President of Product Management at Vormetric, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
In this demo at 15th Cloud Expo, John Meza, Product Engineer at Esri, showed how Esri products hook into Hadoop cluster to allow you to do spatial analysis on the spatial data within your cluster, and he demonstrated rendering from a data center with ArcGIS Pro, a new product that has a brand new rendering engine.
As enterprises look to take advantage of the cloud, they need to understand the importance of safeguarding their confidential and sensitive data in cloud environments. Enterprises must protect their data from (i) system administrators who don't need to see the data in the clear and (ii) adversaries who become system administrators from stolen credentials. In short, enterprises must take control of their data: The best way to do this is by using advanced encryption, centralized key management and cutting edge access controls and policies. When an outside party owns, controls, and manages infrastructure and computational resources, how can you be assured that sensitive data remains private and secure, that your organization is protected from damaging data breaches, and that you can still satisfy the full range of reporting, compliance and regulatory requirements?
With Levi’s Stadium as a backdrop, I share a bit about the Internet of Things and the strain it will place on the Domain Name System (DNS) along with a preview of his DNS of Things session at CloudExpo/ThingsExpo at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Reporting from Silicon Valley.
SYS-CON Events announced today that AIC, a leading provider of OEM/ODM server and storage 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. AIC is a leading provider of both standard OTS, off-the-shelf, and OEM/ODM server and storage solutions. With expert in-house design capabilities, validation, manufacturing and production, AIC's broad selection of products are highly flexible and are configurable to any form factor or custom configuration. AIC leads the industry with nearly 20 years of experience in mechanical, electronic, system-level engineering as well as a dedication to product innovation and customer support. Headquartered in Taiwan, AIC has offices and operations throughout the United States, Asia and Europe.
Bugs. Once upon a time – and not so very long ago – that word had only one meaning: annoying little critters that crawl, sting, bite, and can generally make your life a misery. But in today’s modern technological age, the word bug has a new meaning: flaws in software applications. Though the word is the same, the two meanings are quite different. However, both terms represent a common theme: annoyances.
Everyone in the OpenStack community has a vested interested in making it work. Without a strong guiding hand, the open source community runs the risk of becoming so fragmented that compatibility and integration suffer. This is a bigger challenge than most people realize because the line between opens source "customer" and "developer" is very thin. As Gigaom's Paul Miller points out in his latest research report, local configuration changes and code alterations have a way of moving the enterprise installation away from the community release, and the problem is compounded with each new release of the platform. Over time, the initial cost-savings of turning to an open source solution can be eaten up by complex patching and maintenance requirements and the user becomes further isolated from an increasingly fragmented ecosystem.
SYS-CON Events announced today that IndependenceIT, a leading software provider of simplified IT management solutions for workspaces, applications and desktops-as-a-service, 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. IndependenceIT's Cloud Workspace® Suite combines application, end-user and infrastructure management into a seamless, easy-to-manage platform, with a unified management interface and robust API for ease of integration with existing systems, simplifying deployment and increasing responsiveness.