Faced with competitive pressures demanding increased IT agility, Line-of-Business (LOB) managers have been increasingly relying on virtualized infrastructures to accelerate deployment of critical application workloads. Server virtualization has rapidly become the default platform for modern datacenters with some 50% of all new workloads deployed in a virtual machine (VM). Three key attributes of server virtualization have accelerated this trend. First, excellent server-to-server and resource-to-resource isolation facilitate dynamic sharing of core data center hardware, ensuring that peak demand from one LOB does not affect the service quality for other workloads. Even though they draw from a common pool of shared hardware infrastructure, there is no need for autonomous LOB IT projects to be coordinated if they all run in their own well-isolated virtual environments.
Red Hat Directory Server is an LDAP-compliant server that centralizes application settings, user profiles, group data, policies, and access control information in a network-based registry. In this webinar, you’ll learn more about how Red Hat Directory Server can: Reduce administration costs and increase availability, providing the scalability and information control to manage access across partner, supplier, and customer relationships. Simplify user management by eliminating data redundancy and automating data maintenance. Improve security, enabling administrators to store policies and access control information in the directory for a single authentication source across enterprise or extranet applications.
We keep monitoring HealthCare.gov and created a web page that shows the latest monitoring results. If you are interested check it out: HealthCare.gov Performance Status. Heat Map of Average Response Time by State Page Load Time Comparison of HealthCare.gov, US Healthcare Facilities and US Government Websites
Ensure World Class Protection: Provide zero-day threat protection to all users at any location using Cisco’s SIO global intelligence network. Analyze and sanitize web traffic in real-time. Prevent data loss. Improve Control: Control your distributed web security infrastructure from a single interface. Create and enforce centrally created policy through a simple management interface and produce actionable reports. Provide granular control over application and user behavior using context and reputation-aware inspection. Protect Your Investment: Spend less time on web security integration and IT manager training. Reduce the number of devices required and manage everything centrally. World-class support is available 24x7 to resolve issues and avoid downtime.
In the first post of this three part series I talked about distributed transactional databases being the Holy Grail of database systems. Among other things the promise of such systems is to provide on-demand capacity, continuous availability and geographically distributed operation. But the historical approaches to building distributed transactional databases have involved unacceptable trade-offs, and as a result general purpose databases systems predicated on a single-server architecture have dominated the industry for decades. In our quest for the Holy Grail of databases we acknowledge that there are folks who have given up on the highly desirable characteristic of transactional consistency in favor of a distributed operation. That is a trade-off that may be attractive if you can’t find a way to scale-out transactions, but it is a drastic choice that moves a lot of complexity and cost up the application stack. If there is a way to scale out transactional databases then that is clearly a much better outcome. Our Holy Grail discussion is specifically about distributed transactional databases because if such a thing can be built without a substantial downside then no one would want any other distributed data store.
Who doesn't love a good zombie flick, right? Hordes of undead ambling around in tattered clothing looking for something to eat. The low, drawn-out moans of a once-productive member of society, who now possesses the brainpower of a teenager on an 8-hour Call of Duty bender. While I don't believe the zombie apocalypse is happening anytime soon (at least not for another six months), there is another form of undead that is very much alive and well today. I'm talking of course about... digital data. We're at the point now where anything you do online leaves a digital footprint, whether it's a photo posted to Instagram, a purchase on Amazon, or a patient intake form completed on an iPad.
In a previous blog we introduced the topic of cloud-as-it-is versus cloud as-we’d like-it-to-be. The cloud services broker (CSB) business model is gaining momentum as one way to turn the cloud into as-we’d-like-it-to-be. CSB is a term used for the activity of brokerage and also for the software that supports that brokerage activity. What is it all about? The Gartner guys have defined it in this way: “CSB is an IT role and business model in which a company or other entity adds value to one or more (public or private) cloud services on behalf of one or more consumers of that service via three primary roles including aggregation, integration and customization brokerage. A CSB enabler provides technology to implement CSB, and a CSB provider offers combined technology, people and methodologies to implement and manage CSB-related projects.”
Consider the possibility that a small innocuous code change could go undetected, promoted through Development & QA, and then have catastrophic effects on performance once it reaches production. The environmental variants need to be minimized and closely monitored to prevent the anomalous behavior.
With a wealth of technology and online resources, many people are ditching the traditional 9-to-5 lifestyle and opting to become entrepreneurs. Unlike businesses of the past, where a large financial investment was required to get off the ground, today's startups can get the ball rolling with limited funding. They can also operate with a high level of efficiency and often compete with much large larger companies. One of the top resources that is fueling startups is cloud technology. Below are some ways that entrepreneurs can benefit and why this technology is so advantageous.
Learn why Service Virtualization is a must-have for accelerating the SDLC and bringing higher quality functionality to the market faster—at a lower cost. No matter what industry you're in, software is increasingly becoming the interface to your business. Organizations that are able to increase the speed and quality of innovative software releases will capitalize on differentiable competitive advantages; those that cannot will languish behind competitors. Not surprisingly, many enterprises have begun flirting with the idea of accelerating the SDLC to drive innovation through software. However, it's critical to realize that there's an optimal balance between speed and quality with software delivery-as with all engineered products. We're in an era in which leading organizations must reassess the true "cost of quality" for software. Remember: the cost of quality isn't the price of creating quality software-it's the penalty or risk incurred by failing to deliver quality software.
The data warehouse is essential to enterprise business intelligence, which accounts for a great part of the total enterprise cost. With the global data explosion in recent years, the business data volume grow significantly, posing a serious challenge for enterprise data warehouse to meet the diverse and complex business demands. More data, more data warehouse applications, more concurrent accesses, higher performance, and faster I/O - all these demands give more pressure on data warehouse. Every IT manager nowadays has concern over expanding the data warehouse capacity at lower cost.
Cloud computing is transforming the way businesses think about and leverage technology. As a result, the general understanding of cloud computing has come a long way in a short time. However, there are still many misconceptions about what cloud computing is and what it can do for businesses that adopt this game-changing computing model. In this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, Rex Wang, Vice President of Product Marketing at Oracle, discusses and dispels some of the common myths about cloud computing that still exist today.
I personally don’t like the term “War Room” when describing a firefighting situation that many software companies have to deal with when systems go down or have problems. The way these war rooms typically play out is that key personnel (engineers, operations, business) are summoned into a room until the problem is solved. This was the case back with the Apollo 13 mission and still is now when we look at the famous Facebook war room from Dec 2012. What’s the problem with these pictures? There are a lot of people in the room that have no clue whether the problem on hand is actually something they can fix or are responsible for. All of these people are summoned without first figuring out which people should look at the problem. Why is that? Because the collected “evidence” in the form of infrastructure monitoring data, log files, user complaints, etc., just shows symptoms but doesn’t tell us anything about the actual impact and root cause of issues.
A day in the life of the future. In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Lanlogic’s Joe Foos will show how your entire organization can: Achieve Seamless Communication – voice, video, email and messaging … without playing tag Enjoy Real Collaboration – meet, work, and share … anytime, anywhere Enable Unlimited Potential – your cloud will never run out of space, power, or capability See exactly how the California Strawberry Commission and thousands of other organizations globally, large and small, gained: Greater Productivity
Nowadays, a large number of sensors and devices are connected to the Internet. Leading-edge M2M technologies integrate various types of sensor data to create a new value for several business decision scenarios. The transparent cloud is a model of a new M2M emergence integration service platform in which many service providers store and access various types of sensor data in order to create and find out new business values by integrating such data. In their session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Ikuo Nakagawa, Executive Chief Engineer at Intec, Inc.; Shinichi Shibata, Executive Manager, Research & Development Division, Ubiquitous Corporation; and Hideaki Imaizumi, Senior Researcher, TOYOTA InfoTechnology Center USA, will introduce the concepts and challenges of the transparent cloud: transparent API to store, access and process data, policy management for protecting privacy information, and business models between service providers.
With the ever-increasing pace of change in business, line-of-business groups are demanding new application creation in days rather than weeks or months. Since the traditional IT application development cycle is ill-suited for this type of quick application development, we’re seeing CMOs and LOBs turning to “boutique shops and shadow developers” to get their applications developed more quickly: applications that are often developed by stitching together services that reside in the cloud. In this presentation, Rachel Reinitz, Distinguished Engineer and CTO of IBM Software Services, will discuss the State of the Cloud focusing on IBM’s view of what is needed in the Next Generation Cloud Platform and how new and emerging cloud technologies will affect both business groups and IT. During the presentation, Cloud Expo delegates will see a demonstration of BlueMix, an IBM strategic initiative based on Cloud Foundry that provides developers a way to quickly compose services to create applications running in a cloud environment without dealing with the underlying infrastructure, resulting in a quicker time-to-value for our customers.
A cloud security take on an old riddle: analyze risks, identify needs, develop priorities, deploy scalable model, and leave room for dessert. Security is big. It encompasses a great many definitions, confronts a great many issues and is addressed through a great many solutions using a great many formats. For many organizations, it can be an overwhelming proposition. Beyond the issues of data defense, regulatory compliance, traffic management, identity regulation, archiving, reporting, access control, intrusion detection, encryption, app administration, help desk assistance, there is the job the IT pro was hired to do…ensure the smooth technical operation of their organization. Securing the disappearing network perimeter and beyond has become more than a full-time job in itself.
This getting-started session is for any developer (beginner or intermediate) who wants to build and run a web app on OpenStack. In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Dave Nielsen, Co-Founder of CloudCamp & Founder & Principal Consultant at Platform D LLC, will demonstrate how to use Compute, Block Storage and Object Storage (also known as Nova, Swift & Cinder). He will briefly review the basic OpenStack architecture and walk through the steps to deploy a LAMP Stack-based web application on HP's OpenStack-based Public Cloud.
I recently came across Gartner research authored by analyst Colin Fletcher about the emergence of Business Value Dashboards (BVDs) that are replacing today’s conventional executive dashboards. When analyst research mentions a developing IT trend, I take note. But I pay special attention when my own experience with customers validates what the analysts are saying. We are still in the early stages but I agree that BVDs are here to stay and will eventually replace today’s bottoms up executive dashboards that, quite frankly, most executives do not use. These first-generation dashboards, driven by existing IT operations monitors, were not focused on the needs of the business owner. They may have shown the status of underlying infrastructure generally, but not specifically as it related to services or revenue-generating applications, or in ways that they could consume the data. I like an analogy used in Gartner’s research: of all the information presented on a car dashboard, what the dashboard highlights should depend on are the context and needs of the driver. A mechanic may care about oil pressure, while the race car driver cares about speed and RPMs.
Best effort networks aren’t good enough for today’s mission-critical cloud-based applications. To ensure optimal performance, developers and IT managers must have a holistic view and understanding of all the factors impacting performance. In her session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Pascale Vicat-Blanc, founder and CEO of Lyatiss, will explain how Application Defined Networking (ADN) provides this visibility and insight, delivering combined application and network awareness, and performance predictability from end-to-end. It also will show how ADN enables intelligent orchestration of networked resources and their automated (re)configuration to ensure that the application and network adapt when workloads and conditions change.
The need for storage to work with existing enterprise applications in public and private clouds, along with hybrid cloud environments, has been a gating factor for adoption. In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Anand Babu Periasamy, Co-Founder and CTO at Gluster, will discuss best practices for developing scale-out storage that works in all cloud environments, touching on subjects such as how to determine the right cloud deployment mode, as well as how to pick a service provider that meets each organization’s specific needs. He will also discuss how leveraging an open source approach can allow enterprises to deploy exactly what they need to roll out new services and increase company margins.
More customers are looking to utilize cloud computing and tightly integrated hardware will be beneficial for such customers. When I signed up to attend Enterprise 2013, a conference for IBM’s enterprise systems and storage users, I was wondering how much cloud computing information would be shared. A large number of sessions addressed how IBM has integrated OpenStack with compute, storage and network components of their hardware. While OpenStack, the open standard Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) management platform, has eight platinum founding members (as of Oct 2013), only IBM and HP are hardware manufacturers.
Customers are getting more receptive to offloading the secondary IT process to the cloud – hybrid and public. In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Murali Nambiar, Sr. Product Manager for Backup and DR Products at InMage, will cover the services that are most sought after and ways of delivering these to customers and partners. Murali Nambiar is Sr. Product Manager for Backup and DR Products at InMage. Prior to joining InMage he was an Architect at Soapstone Networks, and a Distinguished Technologist at Quark Media and Defense Research Labs, DLRL. Murali is pursuing a masters at WGU and has Bachelor’s in Electronics and Telecommunications from IETE, New Delhi.
“WebRTC and the Codec War” is the topic of just one session at the upcoming 1st WebRTC Summit, and technology giant Cisco has now given even more oomph to this huge emerging IT trend. I'll be moderating the two-day Summit, which will be held November 6-7 during the 13th International Cloud Expo next week at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley. The Codec War in particular got a recent boost with Cisco's major announcement that it will be open sourcing its H.264 codec for high-definition, online video, making the codec available as a free binary download. Mozilla announced that it will be supporting this move, by offering support for OpenH.264 to the Firefox browser. WebRTC is interesting in that it strides the worlds of both telephony and enterprise IT. For Cisco, an obvious strategy relates to video conferencing. But for the global technology development and deployment community that increasingly lives in an HTML5 world, this WebRTC move by Cisco is of overall, general importance. It's hardly the last chapter, with Google's V8 (and now V9) offering competition – thus, “the Codec War” – and Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich talking about not only leapfrogging H.264, but its planned successor H.265. But this announcement only adds to the intensity of what should be a great two days at Cloud Expo and the WebRTC Summit.
A commonly used preventative measure is storing data via RAID arrays, but it is important to understand that not all levels of RAID provide sufficient protection. Commonly, RAID 10 (combination of RAID 1 and RAID 0) for quick recovery, and RAID 6 (RAID 5 plus an additional hard disk to prevent failure at a single point) where more than one disk is at risk of failure. It is very likely that if something occurs that leaves you without your ERP system, it could be a disaster for your business. It is vital that you have a strong disaster recovery plan in place to deal with such a potential catastrophe, and minimize loss of time and money. It is when things go seriously wrong that a recovery plan is in order. It is much more secure but does not come cheaply. Creating backup files on a regular basis is standard practice for any IT operation, but the backups required in the event of a disaster recovery are different. A standard backup is created to ensure files can be restored in the event of missing or lost files. In the case of disaster recovery the backup is capable of complete restoration of your ERP software. A disaster recovery backup stores data in large blocks so that the system can be recovered and stored as quickly as possible. Data can be stored on site but it is highly advisable that additional copies be stored off-site, either by creating a backup to a remote site or by creating and storing copies on tape and then removing to a secondary location.