You are on top of your game. You have a log analysis tool churning logs from all your applications and infrastructure. And now that you have data (LOTS and lots of data…), you are able to understand your infrastructure better than you ever did before. You might even build a dashboard or two that tells you what is going on with your IOPS and utilization, at a glance.
Earlier, I wrote a bit about traffic and the IoT. It's a big topic. The traffic problems of the developed and developing worlds seem so large, complex, and intractable to significant change in any reasonable timeframe. Consider Mexico City. There are more than 20 million people in the metro area, of whom about 4 million ride the subway systtem every day. There are also about 4 million cars, all of which seem to be on the road at most given moments. The traffic there has been legendary for a long time. Mexico City, like so many other metro areas in the developing world, does not have a highly advanced multi-lane highway system. (Crawl along Manila's EDSA or any number of main thoroughfares in the developing world and you have roughly the same experience.) Yet, ask people in Los Angeles, or New York, London, or any other big place in the developed world, and you'll learn that a highly advanced highway system just seems to make things worse. Who doesn't thrill to the idea of banging one's way from the airport into mid-town Manhattan or North Michigan Ave. in Chicago early on a Tuesday morning? Blink your eyes and experience the year 2040. The IoT has had 25 years of solid development, and all traffic problems have been solved. Driverless cars, flexible tolling, real-time speed control and re-routing, and tens of thousands of sensors kicking out gigabytes of telemetry and flow data in real-time have fixed all that. Gut-wrenching commutes are gone, road rage is as common as dueling, and we're all living together in a spirit of peace and harmony. But go back to Mexico City or Manila. Or perhaps to Lima, Peru. Look at the mass of cars mingling with buses, trucks, and pedestrians in a widespread, continuous morass of humanity that seems impervious to technologically utopian dreams. Then realize the car ownership is still a dream for most people there, one that they do not realy want to give up. Back in Manila, it seems the last thing the area needs is more cars—yet that is the dream of the millions of people striving to break out of a difficult life into middle-class comforts. Unlike telco in the developing world, in which a lack of 20th century landlines allows many nations to skip over this step and move straight to mobile, it's hard to imagine societies skipping over the deam of automobile ownership in exchange for IoT-driven traffic. Run the Numbers Meanwhile, the overall picture of a comfortable life centers around electricity, not cars. This seems to be the truly big challenge. World electrical consumption in the developing world runs at 3% to 5% of the developed world. Do the arithmetic and you quickly see that bringing all of the anticipated 9-10 billion people we'll have by 2040 into a comfortable existence is simply impossible unless we achieve vast new energy efficiencies. My numbers show that it would tak about 500,000 megawatts of new capacity to bring the 3.5 billion people who live below the world's average income up to the average. It's important to note that this average is not that of the developed world; it lies somewhere around the average of Mexico and Brazil. Putting 500,000 new megawatts of power online will require the equivalent of roughly 500 power plants at a cost of at least $1 billion apiece. The total investment of $500 billion may not seem so terrifying until we realize that, off of the spreadsheet and in the real world, there needs to be more than $10 trillion in new economic development in these countries to get these plants built. How do we go about doing that? Looking at basic economics principles, what comparative advantage can exist in these places to create this new wealth? Alternatively, what massive new energy efficiencies can we wring with the IoT to address this challenge? (This is the first in a series of articles on this topic.)
SoftLayer, an IBM Company, provides cloud infrastructure as a service from a growing number of data centers and network points of presence around the world. SoftLayer's customers range from Web startups to global enterprises. Products and services include bare metal and virtual servers, networking, turnkey big data solutions, private cloud solutions, and more. SoftLayer's unique advantages include the industry's first Network-Within-a-Network topology for true out-of-band access, and an easy-to-use customer portal and robust API for full remote-access of all product and service management options. SoftLayer was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. SoftLayer was acquired by IBM in July, 2013.
Probably the most popular question during Java technical interviews is “What’s the difference between abstract classes and interfaces”. In my own three year old book I’ve offered the following answer: “An abstract class may contain code in method bodies, which is not allowed in an interface.With abstract classes you have to inherit your class from the abstract one because Java does not allow multiple inheritance. On the other hand, you can implement multiple interfaces in your class.”
Driving the freeways of Greater Los Angeles is often an experience in wave theory. Heavy traffic on one freeway can influence traffic on several others; slowdowns and stoppages ripple throughout much of the system during much of the day; and one can often feel trouble ahead well before seeing it or stopping for it. With a gross economy size approaching $1 trillion annually, the Southland loses billions upon billions of dollars in wasted transportation costs and lost productivity each year. This area should serve as a model for what the Internet of Things can achieve. Everyone has their own traffic horror stories, whether coming from elsewhere in the US, Mexico City or Sao Paulo, London or Paris, Tokyo or Beijing, Bangkok, or any of hundreds of other cities in the world. One city working the problem is Singapore, which uses a proto-IoT architecture of several GPS systems, flexible tolls, and traffic reports to traffic relatively uncongested. Add intelligent, driverless cars to the mix, a much wider use of electrical power, and more New Urbanism—the movement that combines walkable neighborhoods centered around transportation hubs—and solving the world's traffic problems will start to look less like trying to boil the ocean. The Great Change Applied globally, we can see significant reductions in energy use, which is of the essence if the virtual elimination of poverty is a goal. Most of the developing world uses only 3% to 5% of the energy per-person compared to the developed world. There is simply not enough building capacity in the human species to provide a reasonable lifestyle for everyone unless that lifestyle requires much less energy. I see this as a practical statement, not a political one. Serious reductions in the amount of energy required to grow and process food, build stuff, heat and cool buildings, and move us from place to place are required to get the expected human population peak of 9-10 billion people to live comfortably. The IoT will be integral to such a Great Change, if it comes to pass. Working on LA traffic is one of the great places to start.
Nick O'Leary is an Emerging Technology Specialist at IBM where he gets to do interesting things with interesting technologies and also play with toys. With a background in pervasive messaging, he is a developer on the Eclipse Paho project and sits on the OASIS MQTT Technical Committee. He is the creator of Node-RED, an open source tool for wiring the Internet of Things.
Virtualization has almost become a no-brainer for most major companies out there. The added benefits of greater efficiency and lower energy costs are certainly excellent reasons for adopting a virtualization strategy and the vast majority of big businesses are taking advantage of it. Trailing behind them are the small businesses which, with limited resources, have slowly but steadily been catching up to their bigger competitors. For several years now, the focus has been on how server virtualization can give small businesses a boost, but many of these same companies are beginning to realize the benefits that come from storage virtualization too. According to one report, more than half of small businesses have implemented storage virtualization already, and as the rest begin to integrate it into their operations, they'll find many of the same advantages that will help them keep up with the demands of an aggressively competitive business world.
Ever since Eric Schmidt, the Chief Executive of Google Inc. mentioned the magical term - “Cloud Computing” - in the year 2006, a gale has been crowding over the Silicon Valley. Companies across the IT industry are competing against each other to associate themselves with the cloud computing technology in one way or the other. Amazon.com Inc., for example, (hurriedly) started selling Elastic Compute Cloud service the same year, for programmers to rent the company’s giant computers.
In a Feb 2014 survey, 94 percent of organizations surveyed reported running applications or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service[1]. According to research firm Nasumi, there is over one exabyte currently stored in the cloud. An exabyte is over a billion GB[2]. Considering the amount of data in the cloud and the growing rate of adoption for sensitive use cases, it is natural that securing our data in the cloud is a concern. But, cloud security, though rightfully a central concern, should not be a hindrance to aggressively moving workloads and applications to the cloud.
It doesn't matter if your title puts you in Ops, Dev, or DevOps, being able to track down the big insights from your data is the secret-sauce every engineer is looking for. Collecting the data is a step in the right direction, but organizing, tagging, monitoring, and reporting from the data provides the insights necessary to make business decisions. Log data is a huge piece of that puzzle, and a good log management tool can really help your business run more efficiently. Our team loves log management, and internally, we use log data for a wide variety of use cases: from monitoring our own servers and software, to tracking user's behavior in our platform, as well as applying anomaly detection to let us know when something important has changed.
Logs have been around for a while, not quite as long as the wheel, but not far off. Here at Logentries, we have the mantra of evolve don’t revolve (as in don’t sit around spinning your wheels getting nowhere). We are taking this concept and looking to evolve the way you work with and think about your log data.
We’ll discuss configuring Apache and Nginx both to send JSON formatted logs and how to take advantage of the search functions, sharable dashboards, and reporting capabilities within the Logentries platform. I'm often asked on calls with our customers what is the preferred format for log data being sent to Logentries. While we pride ourselves on being the Log Management tool that is easiest to setup and use, some very important advanced features of the platform are available for logs that are formatted into Key Value Pair (KVP) or JSON. Most applications and programing languages have the ability to change their logging format. With a little bit of work, you can unlock the full potential of our advancedsearch functions. Below we'll discuss configuring Apache and Nginx both to send JSONformatted logs and how to take advantage of the search functions, sharable dashboards, and reporting capabilities within the Logentries platform.
You can't truly accelerate the SDLC without a dependable continuous testing process. Evolving from automated to continuous testing requires on-demand access to a complete, realistic test environment. Yet, such access can be extremely difficult to achieve with today's increasingly complex and interdependent applications. Consider these recent research findings from voke: On average, organizations require access to 33 systems for dev/test, but have unrestricted access to only 18 Only 4% of participants report immediate, on-demand access to dev/test lab environments
A recent Inc.com article claimed that the percentage of U.S. small businesses using cloud computing is expected to more than double during the next six years, from 37 percent to nearly 80 percent (l). This forecast was gleaned from a just released Emergent Research and Intuit study. This statement is also very scary in that it also highlights the growing importance of the cybersecurity threat to the nation’s economic livelihood.
"There's the cloud, then there's your cloud." So goes a tagline from SingleHop, which provides public and private cloud services, dedicated servers, and managed hosting to customers throughout the world. As enterprise IT organizations increasingly recognize the flexibility and agility inherent to services offered by cloud computing providers for their clouds, we can expect the market for such services to continue to grow and competition to continue to heat up. In that context, we asked a few questions of SingleHop EVP Mark Cravotta: Cloud Computing Journal: There's been a lot of talk recently of the merging of PaaS and IaaS. Where do you stand in this discussion? Mark Cravotta: SingleHop is focused on delivering IaaS solutions via our bare metal, public cloud and private cloud platforms, coupled with managed services and security services. Our focus is on the Enterprise production systems versus development platforms. The PaaS market is evolving and we will continue to look at strategies as options solidify. CCJ: You have some fairly serious competitors in your space, and one of them is now owned by one of the largest technology companies in the world. How do you differentiate and win in your marketplace? Mark: We differentiate by delivering well architected, customer IaaS solutions coupled with high touch services and support, what we call our Service Beyond Support Model. In the end our solutions address specific business needs and are not pre-packaged, are delivered rapidly which enables business agility and are priced competitively based on our underlying cost model being lower than the world's largest technology companies. We partner with our customers and are flexible and transparent at all points in the relationship. This is also hard to do as companies get larger. CCJ: On that same note, how fast do you see the need for IaaS growing in the next few years? And do you break it down by regions? For example, Southeast Asia is very dynamic, and all regions of Africa are getting some technology and economic traction these days as well. Mark: IaaS is constantly growing and that demand will continue to grow consistently. We see demand on six continents. Each market has its own drivers—economic, proximity, global, etc.—based on its sophistication in the global market. We serve customers in 124 countries today. CCJ: You received a funding round of $14.8 million a few months ago. What gives investors confidence in SingleHop, and how do you apply those investments for your customers? Mark: We are constantly evaluating and deploying the latest technologies designed to enable our customers to solve their business challenges. This includes expansion into new markets, data center improvements, platform evolution, and network expansion in both capacity and throughput. We also invest heavily in our employees, who make the difference with our customers every day.
The cloud is everywhere and growing, and with it SaaS has become an accepted means for software delivery. SaaS is more than just a technology, it is a thriving business model estimated to be worth around $53 billion dollars by 2015, according to IDC. The question is – how do you build and scale a profitable SaaS business model? In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Jason Cumberland, Vice President, SaaS Solutions at Dimension Data, will give the audience an understanding of common mistakes businesses make when transitioning to SaaS; how to avoid them; and how to build a profitable and scalable SaaS business.
In order to foster high levels of innovation that lead to adaptation to both internal and external disruption, you must foster an organization with low connectivity and furthermore, give them flexible, loosely coupled technology tools. In such environments, teams have the leeway to self-organize, and their innate creativity will foster innovations that will lead over time to the best solutions. And the role of management in this process? Give people the right tools and get out of their way.
ClusterHQ, The Data People for Docker, on Wednesday announced Flocker 0.1, a solution for running databases, key-value stores and queues inside Docker containers. An open-source volume manager, Flocker is the only container management tool designed to solve the unique set of operational challenges that come from running data-backed services inside containers. Flocker version 0.1 allows developers to define their application as a set of connected Docker containers, deploy and then easily migrate them between hosts, even when in different data centers. “Managing containers with persistent state is a significant problem today,” said Gabriel Monroy, founder and CTO of Deis. “Containerized databases are not suitable for production workloads without solutions for data migration, cloning and failover. We are excited to see the ClusterHQ team tackling these problems head-on."
If you’ve been paying close attention lately you’ll know that the “Internet of Things” has become one of the technology industry’s biggest buzz phrases. It’s not hard to figure why. The internet has been around for the last twenty years and it has truly revolutionized our lives, the way we work, and how we interact. Consider the transformations in business, commerce, culture, education, politics, and more. But experts are saying we haven’t seen anything yet. If you haven’t read the recent Digital Life in 2025 report it’s well worth your time. One of the major outcomes of this research predicts that within 10 years the internet will become “an ambient information environment where accessing the Internet will be effortless and most people will tap into it so easily it will flow through their lives ‘like electricity.’
The earliest challenge to the original homebrew microcomputer geeks was to get little indicator lights to flash. Then, by toggling several switches to turn the lights on and off, the computer would start doing other things, processing instructions within the confines of several hundred or a few thousand bytes of memory. Fast forward to today, and we're revisiting that age within the IoT, albeit with much more power and sophistication. I was struck by this thought when reading the line, “We'll help you get your Windows application running on a Galileo—and blinking LEDs in no time.” This clear nod to history is part of Microsoft's Windows Developer Program for IoT. The goal is to get Intel Galileo boards into developers' hands, and get people “to create their own cool device,” in Microsoft's words. The effort is part of the emerging Maker's Movement, a sort-of 21st century effort to create a guild culture of practicing craftsmiths, using hardware and software tools rather than gold, silver, tin, or leather. But it also appears to be more than that. Microsoft, along with every other major technology provider, is committing serious resources to the IoT, and what promises to be a mad battle for market share, if not supremacy, throughout the spectrum of what the IoT will do. The “blinking LEDs” will be found in the tens of billions of sensors expected to be deployed worldwide within just a few years. There are significant challenges in security, of course, but many others as well: Getting a a compact OS to function in the micro-micro-environment of sensors Deliver applicatino and enable real-time communications in what will be hives of IoT data generators Deliver updates and and figure out how to forestall or eliminate device obsolescence Get a handle on all the incoming data—how to process it, analyze it, act upon it, and archive it if necessary. For Microsoft's part, the company says, “if you’re a hardware developer who dabbles in software, you can bring your Arduino sketches and shields directly into your project, while leveraging Windows code for cloud connectivity and other computing-intensive tasks. If you’re already a software dev, you can write a regular Windows application that also has easy, direct access to hardware through the Arduino Wiring API set, extending your solution into the physical world.” Perhaps most important, the company also notes that “this first program is just the beginning.” Here's to a future of blinking LEDs!
In Part 6, we dove into the Nagle algorithm – perhaps (or hopefully) something you’ll never see. In Part VII, we get back to “pure” network and TCP roots as we examine how the TCP receive window interacts with WAN links. Each node participating in a TCP connection advertises its available buffer space using the TCP window size field. This value identifies the maximum amount of data a sender can transmit without receiving a window update via a TCP acknowledgement; in other words, this is the maximum number of “bytes in flight” – bytes that have been sent, are traversing the network, but remain unacknowledged. Once the sender has reached this limit and exhausted the receive window, the sender must stop and wait for a window update.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Solgenia, the global market leader in Cloud Collaboration and Cloud Infrastructure software solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Solgenia is the global market leader in Cloud Collaboration and Cloud Infrastructure software solutions. Designed to “Bridge the Gap” between personal and professional social, mobile and cloud user experiences, our solutions help large and medium-sized organizations dramatically improve productivity, reduce collaboration costs, and increase the overall enterprise value by bringing collaboration and infrastructure solutions to the cloud.
Zoom version 3.0 is our biggest release ever; featuring two key innovations: ZoomPresence and group messaging. ZoomPresence is the first conference-room collaboration solution created with the Apple experience (Mac OS and iOS) in mind. It lets anyone start a video meeting for up to 100 participants with a single tap on an iPad. Participants can easily screen-share documents, apps and photos from their desktops, tablets and other mobile devices.
Zoom version 3.0 is our biggest release ever; featuring two key innovations: ZoomPresence and group messaging. ZoomPresence is the first conference-room collaboration solution created with the Apple experience (Mac OS and iOS) in mind. It lets anyone start a video meeting for up to 100 participants with a single tap on an iPad. Participants can easily screen-share documents, apps and photos from their desktops, tablets and other mobile devices.
IBM on Monday announced it has acquired the business operations of Lighthouse Security Group, LLC, a premier cloud computing security services provider. Lighthouse Security Group's Gateway platform protects identity and data in an increasingly complex IT environment where more company information is being stored in the cloud and accessed from mobile devices. Lighthouse Security Group is a subsidiary of long-time IBM Business Partner Lighthouse Computer Services, Inc. Financial terms were not disclosed. Today's news follows IBM's acquisition of CrossIdeas, a privately held provider of security software that governs user access to applications and data across on-premise and cloud environments. CrossIdeas combines business-driven governance and analytics capabilities to give customers greater control for securing enterprises. By integrating the businesses of Lighthouse Security Group and CrossIdeas with IBM's identity and access management offering, IBM will offer a full suite of security software and services that protect and manage a user's identity.