District Court Judge William Alsup told Google Monday that it can’t come in at this late date – after facts discovery has pretty much closed – with what he called an “entire fleet” of additional claims that Oracle’s Java patents are invalid. Oracle was ordered to winnow its beloved 132 claims down to 50 by June 1. Google was supposed to take its best shot at them by June 15. The judge didn’t much care how long Google dithered around saying it “suggests a lack of diligence.” “It is possible,” he wrote, “that Google simply did not have that many good invalidity theories and is now trying to fill in with whatever it can belatedly cobble together.”
When it comes to IBM Workload Deployer, I have no illusions regarding the veracity of our competitors. They are out there, and they are constantly on the attack. Their dubious claims aside, I know this because I still get asked quite frequently to explain the benefits of IBM Workload Deployer versus some other general purpose cloud provisioning and management solution. So, while I have done that many times in various forums, I figured it was time to yet again address this question.
The benefits of cloud computing are undeniable with its ability to deliver agility, elasticity, lower costs and faster time-to-market. And security concerns within the cloud can and are being fully addressed, ensuring that security breaches such as the one suffered by Sony within its video game online network last spring would never have the opportunity to occur. How? It involves a combination of People, Processes, and Technology. People need to be educated on how to support a scalable, elastic environment that can deliver the necessities of cloud, yet understand how to handle anomalies from the environment that can indicate the source of a breach. Processes need to be able to discern appropriate use of the environment, perform delivery services in a structured manner, and respond to events in a structured manner. And Technology needs to be able to detect and respond dynamically to inappropriate use and incorporate people and processes to respond to threats.
Few areas of human endeavor can match the pace of change in IT. Even by IT standards, the change being driven by cloud computing sometimes seems surprising. To refer to a virtual environment that has only recently been deployed as “legacy,” as some organizations are now doing, underscores the fact that the only thing constant in the data center is change. To deal with change of this magnitude, which can involve transforming the workload hosting model of an entire organization, some industrial-strength thinking is required. In order to tackle this challenge, it’s important to properly frame the cloud transformation problem. Many associate cloud with agility, flexibility, cost transparency and other end-user-oriented benefits. But many of these attributes are primarily associated with new infrastructure requests, and specifically, the use of self-service portals to “spin up” infrastructure to host new applications or host transient processing demands. When it comes to migrating hundreds or thousands of existing workloads into cloud infrastructure, agility is not a benefit that is typically experienced. In fact the opposite is often the case: because clouds require a higher degree of standardization (i.e., a finite catalog of sizes and software options), migrating existing physical and virtual servers into cloud models can actually be quite difficult. In other words, the very features that make clouds agile for new workload deployments can actually make them less agile from a transformation perspective.
Guess Yahoo is in the market for a new cloud/Hadoop chief having lost its chief cloud architect Todd Papaioannou to Battery Ventures where he will be entrepreneur in residence. He was only at Yahoo 14 months. According to what he told GigaOm, which broke the news, internal IT holds no allure for him. He wants to get back to the trenches selling software against the competition and eventually start his own company. Before Yahoo, he was at Teradata for about five years and before that chief architect and director of engineering at Greenplum. So he’s definitely a Big Data boy.
Reminiscent of its OpenStack move last week, Dell has teamed with Cloudera on a packaged Apache Hadoop system running Cloudera’s freebie open source distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) on Dell’s energy-efficient PowerEdge C2100 rack servers and networking components. The widgetry, which should be available in the next 30 days, includes Dell’s new cloudified open source Crowbar deployment software – although the boxes can also come with the software installed – Cloudera’s commercial Cloudera Enterprise version’s management tools and PowerConnect 6248 48-port Gigabit Ethernet Layer 3 switches. A deployment can scale from six to 720 nodes. Figure $118,000-$124,000 to start depending on support.
In an outreach to the enterprise, Amazon Web Services Thursday said its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is going to be available in all of its regions and in multiple availability zones in each region around the world. VPC, a step away from multi-tenancy and more like a hosted private cloud, lets businesses provision a private section of AWS where they can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that they define and control using the same security and management controls they already use. AWS also announced Direct Connect, a new service that lets enterprises bypass the Internet and deliver data to and from AWS through dedicated private links to Equinix’ International Business Exchange data centers and on to Amazon.
The White House Thursday tapped ex-Microsoftee Steve VanRoekel to replace the US’ very first CIO, the cloud-introducing Vivek Kundra, who’s leaving this month for a joint appointment at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. VanRoekel did 15 years at Microsoft including a three-year stint as Bill Gates’ assistant and left in 2009 when he was senior director of the Windows Server and Tools Division for the Obama administration as managing director of the Federal Communications Center, responsible for operations, finances, HR and IT.
CumuLogic, the latest Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) start-up, sent its widgetry out into public beta the other day hoping enterprises, cloud providers and ISVs use it to build and manage Java apps in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. It’s after the mid-sized and large enterprises, where Java lives, that want to develop and deploy Java apps in the cloud. And it’s not exactly going to turn away any enterprise-grade cloud vendors looking to offer their customers a Java Platform-as-a-Service. Naturally, out in the wild it’ll encounter CloudBees’ RUN@Cloud, VMware’s Cloud Foundry, Red Hat’s OpenShift and Microsoft’s Azure.
Samsung has agreed to pull its Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1 off the Australian market and cease advertising the thing pending a decision from the Australian Federal Court hearing Apple’s “look and feel” patent infringement complaint.
Google lost a bid Monday to suppress evidence that it willfully infringed on Oracle’s IP in building Android. On July 21, during the Daubert hearing Google wanted, District Court Judge William Alsup, who’s presiding over the Oracle v Google Java case, read into the record an e-mail written by Google engineer Tim Lindholm in August 2010, right before Oracle sued Google, saying that at the direction of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin alternatives to Java had been explored, that they all “sucked,” and that “We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need.”
Guess Tilera can stop all the double-talk about whether or not Facebook – and the other major-league cloud companies – except the not-invented-here-enamored Google – are interested its newfangled proprietary many-core x86-compatible servers. Facebook has just publicly admitted it’s been testing Tilera’s last-generation widgetry and rated it the industry’s best performance per watt – better than Intel at common data center apps and at running the fabled Memcached so important to Facebook et al. The social networking giant said Monday that Tilera servers are 4x better at performance per watt than classic four-core x86 Nehalem servers, leading to the logical conclusion that Facebook will start deploying Tilera servers in production once Tilera’s 64-bit next-generation machines are available.
Microsoft is closing in on VMware for virtualization market share, according to a Stratus Technologies-ITIC survey that found Hyper V use increased over 20% in 12 months. In its spring 2010 survey, 78% of the 243 respondents said they were using VMware while 38% said Microsoft Hyper-V (numbers don’t equal 100% because some respondents use multiple vendors’ products). In the 2011 survey of 250, the gap had closed to 59% for VMware compared to 53% for Hyper-V. Citrix XenServer users doubled year over year from 9% to 18%. Ninety-four percent of respondents have virtualization somewhere in their infrastructure. Seventy-four percent said they currently run business-critical applications on virtual machines and have plans to increase the number of these applications in the next 12 months.
After a couple of false starts over the last couple of years, the Open Cloud Initiative (OCI) has been resurrected to advocate for royalty-free open standards in cloud computing with a set of Open Cloud Principles (OCP) that are unlikely to be universally accepted. It says its purpose is “to provide a legal framework within which the greater cloud computing community of users and providers can reach consensus on a set of requirements for Open Cloud, as described in the document, and then apply those requirements to cloud computing products and services, again by way of community consensus.” There will be a 30-day comment period on the Open Cloud Principles, which are described as focused on “interoperability, avoiding barriers to entry or exit and ensuring technological neutrality.”
The "cloud" was one of the hottest IT terms of 2010 and continues to dominate discussions in 2011. While a solid definition of exactly what cloud computing is seems to be difficult for IT professionals and marketing departments alike to pin down, the various takes on it are shifting the way that both small and large businesses handle IT. Businesses exist to make money, and cloud vendors are pushing their products as a way to expand service offerings while reducing costs, which is good for business. While this cost savings revolution is taking place in the IT landscape, another sort of war is gaining more prominence in the IS landscape. Information Security professionals are in an all-out war with organized crime, foreign governments, inside conspirators, and hackers seeking to bring down companies and governments who they disagree with ideologically. Data security breaches cost companies billions of dollars a year.
MPEG LA, the royalty-collecting agency for AVC/H.264 and other multimedia codecs, told Streaming Media that 12 patent holders have responded to its call for submissions from folks who think the VP8 video codec, a key element in Google’s “royalty-free” WebM codec widgetry, infringes on their IP. MPEG LA has yet to name names. Patent watcher Florian Mueller calls 12 a “high number” that could increase in the future and figures there’s an “overlap between those 12 companies and the ones that contributed to MPEG LA’s AVC/H.264 pool.” MPEG LA’s next step would be to form a VP8 license pool, fix a rate and work out how to divvy up the money. Apparently negotiations are underway. It’s unclear what happened to that open source-leaning Justice Department look at whether MPEG LA was, as the Wall Street Journal described it, “trying to smother a free rival technology for delivering online video that is backed by Google.”
Gluster Wednesday materialized a Connector for OpenStack that will hitch the GlusterFS file system to the OpenStack Compute block storage controller and resolve a built-in limitation in the young open source cloud platform. See, OpenStack can store data as objects, complements of its embedded OpenStack Object Storage (a k a Swift), or it can store data as files, complements of CEPH, which has just been contributed to the effort. It can’t do both at the same time. Gluster says it can and is offering its widgetry to OpenStack as a core piece of the stack.
Some of the NASA boys mean to get a piece of this promising OpenStack action that they helped create at NASA on the taxpayers’ dime. Former NASA CTO Chris Kemp has started a company called Nebula after his NASA project that will field a customized turnkey OpenStack hardware appliance that’s supposed let businesses – and I quote – “easily, securely and inexpensively deploy large private cloud computing infrastructures from thousands of inexpensive computers with minimal effort.” It claims the widget will shift the fundamental economics of computing. Its black box is supposed to be able to configure a private cloud in minutes, even the massive clouds that used to be the private preserve of, well, NASA, that are capable of handling Big Data and running Big Analytics.
This article provides a list of general best practices to apply to any WebSphere Application Server V7 and V8 environment. However, some of the recommendations only apply to specific conditions and scenarios. These recommendations could be used to set up any WebSphere environment. All WebSphere Application processes should be running as non-admin/root user. It's not a good practice to run a process as an admin/root user. For obvious reasons, you don't want more folks to know about the admin/root password and generally the WebSphere admins are not the system admins. Create a services user account on the box and use it for the WebSphere Application's start and stop purposes.
The advent of BYOD (bring your own device) culture to the Enterprise has ushered about the “app culture” faster for IT departments than expected. Analysts agree that key to IT’s future in mobilizing today’s workforce lies with mobile device management and the move toward an Enterprise App Store model that parallels the experience consumers find today via Apple and the Android Marketplace. Prosumers (professional consumers) expect the wealth & breath of applications within the Enterprise as well as outside. Having an Enterprise App Store allows the Information Worker to see what their company suggests is a productive app for their use, which is outside of their internal developments... as well as a way of providing in-house written apps, in a manner which is natural to their Prosumer employees. This is something that SAP and Sybase believe in completely and are already working on such models.
Java SE 7, the Java Platform, Standard Edition 7 is out. It’s the first major release in five years and took 9,494 bug fixes, 1,966 enhancements, 9,018 changesets, 147 builds and four JSRs to get here. It’s also the first release of the Java platform under Oracle’s stewardship, and threatened not to happen until Oracle put its foot down and went off and wheeled and dealed and leveraged IBM. (Remember the Apache Foundation stalking off and slamming the door?) Still, it’s based on the open source OpenJDK, making it something of a novelty for a commercial release.
All in all I think this a great book. It will be on my desk for the next few years until I need to replace it with the 8th or 9th version. This book has delivered exactly what I was hoping for, an in-depth look into modern day JavaScript. I rarely use JavaScript nowadays in my day to day job. I have been lucky to avoid the messy browser applications it is usually a part of the past few years. That was my primary reason for buying the book. Although I may not like it, JavaScript is here to stay, and I need to keep current with it.
The recent spike in insider threats, coupled with a rise in compliance considerations, has forced organizations to ensure only authorized users access sensitive application functionality and data. Historically, user entitlements or authorization logic has been embedded inside an application. For example, if the user of an application meets specific conditions, such as a specific role, access to that application function will be granted at runtime. But if the definition of specific authorization conditions changes over time, then the application developer needs to modify the application’s source code, test, and re-deploy the application. Suppose a homegrown portal application must present a sensitive piece of customer information such as a Social Security Number (SSN) when a service representative views a customer’s profile. It is determined that in order to ensure compliance with various privacy regulations, only directors and senior managers may be able to view a customer’s SSN. A decision has to be dynamically made whenever the application must show an SSN as to whether the current user may view the actual data or some default value (e.g., “XXX-XX-XXXX”). The decision must take into account the user’s job title. A dozen parts of the application that can display a customer’s SSN mean a dozen places for this business logic to be applied.
This was an interesting bug… I was working on a Web application, where Adobe Flex client was sending an instance of an ActionScript WrapperObject to the Java server, which was supposed to invoke some JBDC code to run an SQL Insert statement saving the data from the Java version of WrapperObject in the database. I wrote all the pieces of Flex, Java, and SQL and started Tomcat in Eclipse IDE. The Web browser displayed my window, I filled out the form populating the ActionScript WrapperObject and pressed the button Save. Nothing happened. No errors and no data inserted in the database.
Cloud computing has now passed the stage of hype to reality. More and more enterprises are realizing the benefits of remote hosting of IT services rather than local IT management, especially as managing and operating IT networks and services is not getting any easier. Managing IT networks requires a broad set of competencies in a growing number of technologies and products. It therefore makes sense that these competencies are centralized in larger data centers providing cloud services to a number of smaller enterprises for which IT is not a core competency. Larger data centers also means larger installations with higher-speed interfaces as well as an obligation to maintain service availability. This requires extensive test and management capabilities to ensure service “up-time.” However, will test and management of cloud services differ from how they are performed today? What are the special challenges that cloud service providers face in this regard?