In this fast-moving Lunchtime Power Panel at the 11th International Cloud Expo, chaired by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, industry-leading Execs & VPs of Technology will discuss such topics as:
Which of the recent big acquisitions within the Cloud and/or Big Data space have most grabbed your attention as a sign of things to come?
In its recent «Sizing the Cloud» report Forrester Research said it expects the global cloud computing market to reach $241BN in 2020 compared to $40.7BN in 2010 – is that kind of rapid growth trajectory being reflected in your own company? Is the Forrester number too large…or maybe not large enough!?
What synergies are there between cloud computing and the Enterprise IT trend toward mobility?
Archivo mensual: octubre 2012
C12G Announces the New OpenNebula Jumpstart Packages
C12G has just announced the creation of the OpenNebula Jumstart Packages. These packages are designed to help new customers springboard their productivity, speed time to deployment, and reduce business and technical risks through professional assistance with initial set-up, configuration, support and knowledge transfer.
C12G offers three different packages where experienced C12G Engineers help you start building and operating your OpenNebula Cloud:
The Evaluation Support Program is a 30-day, no-cost, and no-commitment trial of OpenNebula.pro with the services to assess its suitability and performance in your environment
The Entry-level Support Program is a low-cost starter pack. It comprises one-year Support Subscription to OpenNebula.pro and 4 hours of remote Consulting Services
The Bootstrap Program is a fast route to have an OpenNebula cloud on your premises and to ensure that your IT staff are well equipped to operate the cloud. It comprises five days of on-site Professional Services and a one-year Support Subscription to OpenNebula.pro
Cloud Expo: Power Your Cloud Services with an Open, Scalable Hypervisor
Cloud computing is challenging the way infrastructure and applications are built, delivered and consumed. Providing an open, scalable hypervisor layer is key to designing a cloud solution that can meet the needs of next-generation IT.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Marc Trouard-Riolle, Sr. Product Manager, Cloud Platforms Group, at Citrix, will discuss how virtualization can be optimized for cloud use cases and how some of the world’s largest clouds are leveraging Citrix technologies.
Hanu Software Offers Cloud Application Assessment Tool
Hanu Software has launched the “Cloud Application Assessment” Portal as a free service to help Enterprises, Small/Medium Businesses (SMBs) and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) chart a cloud strategy. The online service delivers a recommendation report based on the answers to a series of twenty-four diagnostic questions developed through Hanu’s work with clients who have successfully adopted cloud.
As consumers and businesses demand cloud-based applications, developers must re-write the underlying code to make legacy applications cloud ready. In addition, they must select the best cloud deployment model for their application, which depends on many factors, including application data, usage patterns, compliance and security. Hanu created the Cloud Application Assessment Portal to simplify the initial decision process for application developers.
“We want to demystify the cloud and make it extremely easy for Clients to assess whether their application is a good fit for the Cloud in 10 minutes or less,” said Anil Singh, founder and CEO of Hanu Software. “It’s the first step in a systematic process. Based on the results from the online assessment, Enterprises, SMBs and ISVs can determine their best course of action.” As a Microsoft Azure Circle partner, Hanu works closely with the Microsoft Azure team to develop best practice recommendations for cloud deployment of applications. The Cloud Assessment is an outgrowth of that work, resulting in a decision tree based on application characteristics, current infrastructure, data foundation, integration and security requirements.
Through the Hanu Cloud Assessment, business or technical users answer the series of twenty-four questions based on their application’s unique characteristics. Results are tabulated and a report presented with recommendations that include:
- Whether or not the application is a good fit for the cloud.
- Which deployment model — Public, Private or Hybrid — is most appropriate.
- Whether IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or PaaS (Platform as a Service) should be considered.
“We are pleased that we’ve been able to fill a void for Clients looking for a straightforward way to get started with the cloud,” added Anil.
“It is a daunting prospect for Clients to choose the best path to the cloud because there are so many factors playing into the decision. By applying the lessons we’ve learned, we hope to make the journey a bit easier for CIOs/CTOs just getting started with cloud deployment.” In response to the growing cloud development needs of Microsoft’s extensive partner network, Hanu helps Clients with Cloud Awareness, Cloud Assessment and Cloud Adoption. Our network of Microsoft Cloud Architects brings Clients the Azure expertise they need for net new Cloud application development as well as for migrating existing applications to the Cloud. After taking the online assessment, users can sign up for the one day, onsite comprehensive Cloud Strategy Assessment followed by Architecture Design Session and Proof-of-Concept programs. For more information on the Hanu Cloud Services, visit: www.hanusoftware.com/services/cloud-services/.
IceWEB Adding NovaStor Backup to Storage Appliances
IceWEB Inc., today announced they will bundle NovaSTOR’s Advanced Backup software with IceWEB’s Unified Storage Appliances.
“NovaSTOR is an excellent companion product for our IceWEB appliances because of its broad set of market applications,” said Rob Howe, IceWEB, CEO. “Their products span the same market spaces as ours—small, medium, large and cloud-based enterprises. They cover Windows, Linux, VMWare and Unix servers and clients in a myriad of configurations, mirroring our model. Because it is not always possible or cost-effective for companies to enable total unified storage protocols everywhere in their enterprise, we are providing significant additional value to our customers by enabling them to utilize NovaStor to target an IceWEB appliance in their network in order to satisfy their backup and disaster recovery needs for every location. Enabling them to have the ability to utilize a world-class product like NovaSTOR is yet another area in which IceWEB brings them excellent value when they purchase IceWEB products,” Howe concluded.
ICO Guidance Highlights the Need for UK Data Control
The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently published a useful and informative report on cloud computing that provides key guidance for companies using or considering cloud services in the UK. The guidelines intend to help organizations comply with the 1998 Data Protection Act (DPA), and they offer welcome assistance for private and public enterprises struggling to avoid stiff non-compliance penalties from the watchdog agency.
The ICO emphasizes that cloud customers are responsible for ensuring data protection, whether they know it or not. Many businesses simply don’t realize that data protection is their responsibility when processing is outsourced to a third party (i.e., a cloud provider).
Cloud Computing: Aryaka Offers Global Application Delivery
Aryaka, the WAN Optimization as-a-Service start-up, is now offering what’s called Application Delivery-as-a-Service, which, it says, is purpose-built for the cloud.
It lets a company’s expanded circle of users – home office workers, mobile users, customers and partners – get optimized, consistent access to centralized enterprise applications and cloud resources from anywhere in the world.
That means both inside and outside the enterprise firewall.
The new widgetry accelerates Internet application response times by connecting users to the closest Aryaka POP so they can quickly access applications and critical data.
Evolving to a Broker of Technology Services: Planning the Solution
By Trevor Williamson, Director, Solutions Architecture
A 3-Part Series:
- Part 1: Understanding the Dilemma
- Part 2: Planning the Solution
- Part 3: Executing the Solution, again and again…
Part 2: Planning the Solution
As I wrote before and continuing with part 2 of this 3-part series, let’s talk about how we plan the solution for automating IT services and service management within your organization so that you can develop, deliver, and support services in a more disciplined way—which means that your customers will trust you. Of course this doesn’t mean that they won’t pursue outsourced, cloud, or other third-party services—but they will rely on you to get the most out of those services. And once you do go through this process, some of the major benefits for implementing an automated service management infrastructure are:
- Improved staff productivity that allows your business to become more competitive. Your time is too valuable to be spent fighting fires and performing repetitive tasks. If you prevent the fires and automate the repetitive tasks, you can focus on new projects and innovation instead. When you apply automation tools to good processes, productivity skyrockets to a level unachievable by manual methods.
- Heightened quality of service that improves business uptime and customer experience. Consistent execution according to a well-defined change management process, for example, can dramatically reduce errors, that in turn improves uptime and customer experience because in today’s age of continuous operations and unrelenting customer demand, downtime can erode your competitive edge quickly. Sloppy change management can cause business downtime that prevents customers from buying online or reduces the productivity of your workforce.
- Reduced operational costs to reinvest in new and innovative initiatives. It’s been said that keeping the lights on—the costs to maintain ongoing operations, systems, and equipment—eats up roughly 80% of the overall IT budget rather than going to new or innovative projects. With more standardized and automated processes, you can improve productivity and reduce operational costs allowing you the freedom to focus on more strategic initiatives.
- Improved reputation with the business. Most self-aware IT organizations acknowledge that their reputation with business stakeholders isn’t always sterling. This is a critical problem, but you can’t fix it overnight—changing an organization’s culture, institutionalized behaviors, and stereotypes takes time and energy. If you can continue to drive higher productivity and quality through automated service management, your business stakeholders will take notice.
A very important aspect of planning this new infrastructure is to look toward, in fact assume, that the range of control will necessarily span both internal and external resources…that you will be stretching into public cloud spaces—not that you will always know you’re there until after the fact—and that you will be managing them (at least monitoring them) with the same level of granularity that you do with your traditional resources.
This includes integrating the native functionality of those off-premises services—reserving virtual machines and groups of machines, extending reservations, cloning aggregate applications, provisioning storage, etc., and connecting them to an end-to-end value chain of IT services that can be assessed, monitored and followed from where the data resides to where it is used by the end user:
It is through this holistic process—rationalized, deconstructed, optimized, reconstituted and ultimately automated—that the system as a whole can be seen as a fully automated IT services management infrastructure, but believe me when I say that this is not nor will it ever be an easy task. When you are looking to plan how you automate your service management infrastructure, you need a comprehensive approach that follows a logical and tightly controlled progression. By whatever name you call the methodology (and there are many out there) it needs to be concise, comprehensive, capable, and, above all else, controlled:
1. Identify the trends, justify the business case, and assess your maturity. Before investing in an automated service management infrastructure, you have to assess the opportunity, build the business case, and understand the current state. This phase will answer the following questions:
o Why is automated service management important to my business?
o What are the business and IT benefits?
o How prepared is my organization to tackle this initiative?
2. Develop your strategic plan, staffing plan, and technology roadmaps. You translate what you learn from the prior phase into specific automated service management strategies. The goal of this phase is to help you answer these key questions:
o Do I have the right long-term strategic vision for automated service management?
o What are my stakeholders’ expectations, and how can I deliver on them?
o What technologies should I invest in and how should I prioritize them?
3. Invest in your skills and staff, policies and procedures, and technologies and services. This phase is designed to execute on your automated service management strategies. This phase will answer the following people, process, and technology questions:
o What specific skills and staff will I need, and when?
o What policies and procedures do I need to develop and enforce?
o Should I build and manage my own technology capabilities or use external service providers?
o What specific vendors and service providers should I consider?
4. Manage your performance, develop metrics, and communicate and train. Finally, to help you refine and improve your automated service management infrastructure, the goal in this phase is to help you answer these key questions:
o How should I adjust my automated service management plans and budgets?
o What metrics should I use to track my success?
o How should I communicate and train stakeholders on new automated service management policies and technologies?
These phases and the associated questions to be answered are just a taste of what is required when you are thinking of moving toward an automated service management infrastructure—and of course GreenPages is here to help—especially when you are in the planning stages. The process is not painless and it is certainly not easy but the end result, the journey in fact, is well worth the time, effort and investment to accomplish it.
Next…Part 3: Executing the Solution, again and again…
If you’re looking for more information, we will be holding free events in Boston, NYC, and Atlanta to discuss cloud computing, virtualization, VDI, clustered datacenters, and more. We’ll have a bunch of breakout sessions, and it will also be a great opportunity to network with peers.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Analyzing Big Data with Quirrel
Quirrel is designed to allow anyone to perform complex analysis of large, multi-structured data sets without the need to write code.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, John A. De Goes, CEO & CTO of Precog, will walk Cloud Expo delegates through the basics of Quirrel, the «R for Big Data» language. All participants will be provided with an online learning environment where they can follow along and learn the core syntax and features of the Quirrel analysis language. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to load, filter, correlate, group, and aggregate data using Quirrel.
The role-playing game: How enterprise IT should prepare for cloud adoption
By Paul Moxon, Senior Director, Product & Solutions Marketing
I’m often asked, “What’s the biggest thing standing in the way of enterprise IT getting on board with cloud adoption?”
My response is always the same: “The biggest thing standing in the way of enterprise IT cloud adoption is IT’s unwillingness to accept that business units (BUs) are already adopting the cloud.”
By 2012, BUs are eager to flout IT authority and circumvent IT constraints in order to solve problems now rather than see their requests languish in IT’s backlog of special projects, hostage to unreasonable wait times.
Those days are over.
IT now has two options: Get on board or get left behind.
I’m seeing this exact scenario in our customer organisations as well. Customer BUs approach IT seeking solutions, without ever involving IT in the preliminary decision making process. They prefer instead to drag IT …