As healthcare providers move into mobile device applications and across enterprise and cloud technologies in the U.S. and abroad, businesses and consumers are demanding more layers of protection. And it’s needed: Recent online security breaches highlight the importance of security, especially as cloud transactions and the IoT become more commonplace. Attracting new customers and retaining old ones is paramount for most companies, and creating trust goes a long way when it comes to the monetization of online data. Concern over online security can determine what companies customers use, and that trust can be a major factor in choosing one company over another.
CommVault has announced an arrangement with NaviSite, Inc., to extend the data protection capabilities of Simpana® software to NaviSite's NaviCloud® portfolio. CommVault will provide data protection and management capabilities for customers using NaviCloud Director, an enterprise-class cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution offered directly to customers via an intuitive self-service portal, and also delivered in conjunction with NaviSite's broad portfolio of managed services. "Our clients come to us for solutions that can readily scale to meet their enterprise level requirements, while reducing risk and providing value back to the business," said David Grimes, chief technology officer, NaviSite. "Simpana software satisfies our requirements and provides the capabilities of multiple point products we were evaluating within a single solution -- providing a great degree of flexibility for our clients, while resulting in less complexity and costs for our internal organizations."
Kafka 0.8.2 has a pile of new metrics for all three main Kafka components: Producers, Brokers, and Consumers. Not only does it have a lot of new metrics, the whole metrics part of Kafka has been redone — we worked closely with Kafka developers for several weeks to bring order and structure to all Kafka metrics and make them easy to collect, parse and interpret. We could list all the Kafka metrics you can get via SPM, but in short — SPM monitors all Kafka metrics and, as with all things SPM monitors, all these metrics are nicely graphed and are filterable by server name, topic, partition, and everything else that makes sense in Kafka deployments.
I’m writing this blog on Monday, February 9th, late afternoon with a very full stomach. Last week we launched Vormetric Tokenization with Dynamic Data Masking and today we took the engineers out for a big lunch to celebrate. Now feeling full and contemplative, I thought I’d join the club and write about the big industry news: Anthem’s massive loss of customer and employee data.
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. Containerization and micro-services are changing how development and operations teams design, build and monitor systems. Containerization of environments regularly results in systems with large numbers of dynamic and ephemeral instances that autoscale to meet demands on system load. In fact, it's not uncommon to see thousands of container instances, where once there were hundreds of (cloud) server instances, where once there were tens of physical servers,
Dynatrace monitors your entire application delivery chain. All of your transactions are tracked end-to-end, from user clicks to individual lines of code, using Dynatrace PurePath technology. Dynatrace constantly monitors your servers’ host and process health, and will automatically notify you if your business-critical transactions are running slower than normal with automatic baselines. Dynatrace comes with several incidents configured out of the box, but you can also create custom incidents to get as granular as you want. However, even with all of this information, alerts are only as good as how well you can respond to them. Too often, missed or ignored incidents can lead to severe consequences, so it’s important to make sure every incident gets noticed.
In the spirit of Valentine's Day, here's a little love letter from "the Cloud" that originally appeared in our partner Parasoft's perspective guide to Service Virtualization. But we think it's especially appropriate now. Enjoy! - N.W., Ed. Hey, I know it’s been a while since we started being “a thing.” When we met, everyone said you were just mocking, and that I wasn’t real enough to make a living, with my head in the clouds. Yet, here we are, a few years later.
I recently poured over F5’s “The State of Application Delivery in 2015” and InformationWeek’s “2015 App Dev Priorities Survey” that they presented with Dr. Dobb’s. The similarity of their titles, and even their release dates made me wonder how unique each of their findings would be, and I challenged myself to flush out any interesting findings or patterns that emerged from their collective research. Both reports were really well done, and I would recommend them to anyone looking to see if your organization is on the right path of change, or to anyone who knows you’re not on the right path, but you’re willing to get on it—if you could just figure out where it is.
"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.
Microservices, for the uninitiated, are essentially the decomposition of applications into multiple services. This decomposition is often based on functional lines, with related functions being grouped together into a service. While this may sound a like SOA, it really isn't, especially given that SOA was an object-centered methodology that focused on creating services around "nouns" like customer and product. Microservices, while certainly capable of being noun-based, are just as likely to be verb-based, that is to say, based on a functional grouping like "login" or "checkout." SOA was essentially an extension of object-oriented design while microservices are more about decomposition for purposes of rapid (agile) development with the bonus of having significant scalability advantages over object-oriented architectures.
"We help companies that are using a lot of Software as a Service. We help companies manage and gain visibility into what people are using inside the company and decide to secure them or use standards to lock down or to embrace the adoption of SaaS inside the company," explained Scott Kriz, Co-founder and CEO of Bitium, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 15th Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
While layer 1 (physical) interconnection of network resources will always be required – the bits need to flow on fiber or wireless at some point, the future of carrier and service resource intercommunications must evolve to accept and acknowledge the need for user-driven, near real time provisioning of network and other service resources, on a global scale.
What happens when the gadgets you wear also control the things around you? No doubt you’ve heard of various internet-connected things like light bulbs, coffee makers and thermostats making their way into our homes. And no doubt, you’ve probably heard of such devices that you wear (or insert) to track your fitness, sleeping or even blood sugar levels. But when that sleeping monitor can alert the light bulb and coffee machine that you are about to wake up, that’s called the Internet of Self. Data from your body that is used to control the objects around you. Your body controls the your environment, without you even knowing. Cool and for me, a bit unnerving at the same time.
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. Modern infrastructure constantly generates log data at a rate faster than humans can easily analyze. And now that data centers can be built and torn down with scripts, the amount of activity and data is exponential.
Hang around any IT department (or the AppDynamics offices) and you likely won’t finish a cup of coffee before somebody brings up the cost of downtime or the ascent of DevOps. And that’s a good thing, because these are two topics that are central to the value that IT brings to enterprises today and how that value will increase in the future. IDC recently published research on these two topics in its report, “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified,” by IDC Vice President Stephen Elliot. (See the full report.) AppDynamics was happy to cooperate with the study, along with a select group of other enterprise software companies. The survey was conducted among a cross-section of IT personnel in Fortune 1000 companies.
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. The Internet of Things (IoT) is really the morphing of physical devices into a software world. This means a lot of the same things you would do with applications and servers, you can now do with devices, including leveraging data to respond faster to issues, track trends, and improve your roadmap. The Internet of Things, Internet of Everything, Machine-to-Machine (M2M), Smart Systems etc. all refer to devices or gadgets that are intelligently connected to their users and the web, in order to provide additional value. And these devices are data hogs. They leverage an array of data gathering components: embedded sensors, actuators, etc. that generate mounds of useful information. Which means there is a huge opportunity to use this data to improve future versions, and respond to the experience and needs of users.
If your business has any investment in public cloud SaaS applications, then it’s time to invest in a Cloud Access Service Broker (CASB). That’s our takeaway from the recently released Gartner security report, “Emerging Technology Analysis: Cloud Access Security Brokers.” More and more enterprises of all sizes are adopting the public cloud, thanks to the cost savings and flexibility and scalability benefits SaaS providers offer. Ninety percent of enterprises that have adopted public cloud applications plan to put more than half their spending towards enterprise SaaS applications by 2018. But they’re doing so in a time rife with public cloud security and privacy concerns, which have turned other organizations way from the cloud. According to Gartner, security and privacy continue to be the top reasons for businesses to avoid SaaS – a choice that offers some security benefits but ultimately hamstrings cloud-averse organizations.
Cloud Foundry open Platform as a Service makes it easy to operate, scale and deploy application for your dedicated cloud environments. It enables developers and operators to be significantly more agile, writing great applications and deliver them in days instead of months. Cloud Foundry takes care of all the infrastructure and network plumbing that you need to build, run and operate your applications and can do this while patching and updating systems and services without any downtime.
Software-driven innovation is becoming a primary approach to how businesses create and deliver new value to customers. A survey of 400 business and IT executives by the IBM Institute for Business Value showed businesses that are more effective at software delivery are also more profitable than their peers nearly 70 percent of the time (1). DevOps provides a way for businesses to remain competitive, applying lean and agile principles to software development to speed the delivery of software that meets new market requirements. IBM's new DevOps Innovation Services help address the challenge of scaling DevOps, enabling enterprises to transform their software delivery lifecycle. The hybrid cloud services combine IBM's industry expertise from hundreds of organizational change and application development projects with the industry's leading application development portfolio, including Bluemix, IBM's open cloud platform-as-a-service. They also apply the flexibility of IBM's enterprise-grade, hybrid cloud portfolio, which was recently ranked by Synergy Research Group as the leading hybrid and private cloud for the enterprise (2). These services are based upon SoftLayer, IBM's premier cloud infrastructure platform.
New functionality is rolling out in SPM Performance Monitoring! Watch this space for future posts on Transaction Tracing, Global and App-specific Server Views, Kafka 0.8.2 monitoring and other cool stuff. For this post, those of you who use HAProxy are in luck as we just added monitoring support for this popular TCP/HTTP load balancer. See also: Apache monitoring, and Nginx & Nginx Plus monitoring.
You may have seen last week that we partnered with Cloudera, certifying the Plexxi Switch on Cloudera’s Enterprise 5 platform. This partnership, while exciting for us and our partners, plays a larger role in the IT landscape as a whole. According to an article this week by Arthur Cole of Enterprise Networking Planet, this move embodies Cole’s belief that networking infrastructure development is increasingly being driven by Big Data applications. He cites the key challenge as not finding somewhere to store all the data (e.g., storage) but rather how to make it available to “diverse and disparate sets of resources quickly and at a relatively low cost.”
Can the spatial component of your Big Data be harnessed and visualized, adding another dimension of power and analytics to your data? In his session at Big Data Expo®, John Meza, Product Engineer and Performance Engineering Team Lead at Esri, discussed the spatial queries that can be used within the Hadoop ecosystem and their integration with GeoSpatial applications. The GIS Tools for Hadoop project was also discussed and its implementation to discover location-based patterns and relationships in Big Data to enable better decision support. This was followed by a demonstration of GIS Big Data on a live cluster with expressive web mapping visualization.
The NetBeans New File wizards greatly simplify writing boilerplate code. One specific instance is the creation of JPA Controller Classes from an Entity Classes. The class file, or files, written for you will contain all the basic methods of JPA for CRUD operations on the entity or entities that you have. The only small issue is that this class is written for a standalone environment such as what you would find in an environment that does not support Context Dependency Injection. To use this class in a GlassFish environment or other container we have to make some minor changes. When working with GlassFish the first step is to create the glassfish-resources.xml and then the persistence.xml file. If the database and its tables have not been created yet then this is the time to do this. Now create the Entity Classes from Database, also shown in the New File dialog below.
What happens when the gadgets you wear also control the things around you? No doubt you’ve heard of various internet-connected things like light bulbs, coffee makers and thermostats making their way into our homes. And no doubt, you’ve probably heard of such devices that you wear (or insert) to track your fitness, sleeping or even blood sugar levels. But when that sleeping monitor can alert the light bulb and coffee machine that you are about to wake up, that’s called the Internet of Self. Data from your body that is used to control the objects around you. Your body controls the your environment, without you even knowing. Cool and for me, a bit unnerving at the same time.
ITIL (formerly known as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library) has been the best management practices framework of choice for world class IT Operations organizations. The 5 stage framework: Service Strategy, Design, Transition, Operation, and Continual Service improvement allows for structured processes that support Enterprise Architecture, Service Delivery, and Security initiatives. Structured and controlled planning and change are the bywords here.