Riverbed Technology on Monday announced the availability of new product capabilities, developer tools and a supporting community that allow IT professionals to customize and adapt their IT infrastructure to meet the demands of their business and improve the experience of their users. As developers and IT managers use this programmable infrastructure they create a performance platform that is highly flexible and inline with the needs of modern virtualized and software-defined IT architectures.
«We encounter customers all the time whose needs are specific to their business and their infrastructure,» said Eric Wolford, president of Riverbed Products Group. «Today, we are giving customers the ability to uniquely accelerate their business in a way that has never before been possible.»
Archivo mensual: marzo 2013
QLogic Delivers 16Gb Fibre Channel Solutions for EMC Storage Environments
QLogic on Monday announced that its 2600 Series 16Gb Fibre Channel adapters are now available through the EMCSelect program for a broad range of EMC storage platforms. EMC customers can now implement QLogic’s award-winning 16Gb Fibre Channel technology for high performance storage environments.
«For well over a decade QLogic has provided high-performance Fibre Channel solutions for EMC and its customers,» said Amit Vashi, vice president of marketing, Host Solutions Group, QLogic. «QLogic 2600 Series adapters allow customers to accelerate performance of bandwidth-hungry enterprise applications such as video streaming, databases, backup and online transaction processing. Fully compatible with 8Gb and 4Gb products, QLogic 16Gb Fibre Channel solutions protect organizations’ IT investments.»
Fighting in the Cloud Service Orchestration Wars
There are CloudStack, Eucalyptus, and a few other OpenStack competitors. With all the momentum of OpenStack, it might seem that these open source alternatives are little more than also-rans, doomed to drop further and further behind the burgeoning leader. But there’s more to this story. This is no techie my-open-source-is-better-than-your-open-source battle of principle, of interest only to the cognoscenti. On the contrary: big players are now involved, and they’re placing increasingly large bets.
Look around the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market. Notice that elephant in the corner? That’s Amazon Web Services (AWS). The IaaS market simply doesn’t make sense unless you realize that AWS essentially invented IaaS. And by invented, we mean actually got it to work. Which if you think about it, is rather atypical for most technology vendors. Your average software vendor will identify a new market opportunity, take some old stuff they’ve been struggling to sell, give it a nice new coat of PowerPoint, and shoehorn it into the new market. If customers bite, then the vendor will devote resources into making the product actually do what it’s supposed to do. Eventually. We hope.
Fighting in the Cloud Service Orchestration Wars
There are CloudStack, Eucalyptus, and a few other OpenStack competitors. With all the momentum of OpenStack, it might seem that these open source alternatives are little more than also-rans, doomed to drop further and further behind the burgeoning leader. But there’s more to this story. This is no techie my-open-source-is-better-than-your-open-source battle of principle, of interest only to the cognoscenti. On the contrary: big players are now involved, and they’re placing increasingly large bets.
Look around the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market. Notice that elephant in the corner? That’s Amazon Web Services (AWS). The IaaS market simply doesn’t make sense unless you realize that AWS essentially invented IaaS. And by invented, we mean actually got it to work. Which if you think about it, is rather atypical for most technology vendors. Your average software vendor will identify a new market opportunity, take some old stuff they’ve been struggling to sell, give it a nice new coat of PowerPoint, and shoehorn it into the new market. If customers bite, then the vendor will devote resources into making the product actually do what it’s supposed to do. Eventually. We hope.
Cloud Expo New York: Building the Case for a Cloud-Based Government
The US Government, as well as governments around the world, is looking to invest heavily in cloud computing. The cloud promises a lot of efficiencies and cost savings but it also presents a new revolutionary way to approach citizen services.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Majed Saadi, Director of the Cloud Computing Practice at SRA International, will offers insight into how cloud computing coupled with other technical advancements in mobility and security are changing government IT organizations. He will also provide general guidance and best practices for developing practical and pragmatic cloud strategies.
Industry Standards Drive Cloud Adoption
With a focus on developing affordable solutions that drive innovation for our customers’ missions, I believe that the development of cloud standards can have a positive impact on cloud adoption. The more than 370 members of the cross-domain Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) are providing customer-focused business and mission requirements that help drive the adoption and usefulness of cloud standards, especially in the areas of security, interoperability and data portability. The public and private sectors are making important contributions and we need to continue the progress industry and government have made in the development of standards.
In thinking about the way standards positively impact cloud adoption, three main themes arise.
Moving Your Company’s Application or Service into the Cloud?
A number of studies I’ve recently read indicate that more enterprises will use cloud services in 2013 than ever before. This fact is not lost on many of my software vendor clients, who are transitioning many of their on-premises products into cloud-based offerings.
The problem many of these vendors are facing is the inability to address data privacy and security demands placed upon them by their customers due to the weak contractual protections offered by the vendor’s hosting providers. As a result, the time and cost savings expected by leveraging the cloud model are lost by extended contract negotiations between the vendor, customer, and hosting provider.
Fighting in the Cloud Service Orchestration Wars
Combine the supercharged Cloud Computing marketplace with the ubergeek cred of the open source movement, and you’re bound to have some Mentos-in-Diet-Coke moments. Such is the case with today’s Cloud Service Orchestration (CSO) platforms. At this moment in time, the leading CSO platform is OpenStack. Dozens of vendors and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) have piled on this effort, from Rackspace to HP to Dell, and most recently, IBM has announced that they’re going all in as well. Fizzy to be sure, but all Coke, no Mentos.
Then there are CloudStack, Eucalyptus, and a few other OpenStack competitors. With all the momentum of OpenStack, it might seem that these open source alternatives are little more than also-rans, doomed to drop further and further behind the burgeoning leader. But there’s more to this story. This is no techie my-open-source-is-better-than-your-open-source battle of principle, of interest only to the cognoscenti …
Panama, Jordan Show Similar IT Potential
I had inquiries this week about our research in two separate but similar places: Panama and Jordan.
How are they similar? Both have relatively small populations but central locations in major regions of the world, and both seem to be poised to emerge as leaders in their regions and income tiers.
The Fundamentals
Our two fundamental research algorithms at the Tau Institute examines the underlying keys to the IT and economic infrastructures of 102 nations throughout the world. We adjust our factors for local cost-of-living. Beyond that, we can factor in the effect of specific government policy actions such as the establishment of tech centers and regions, financial incentives to foreign investors, and the like.
Looking at our first fundamental measure – the overall ranking – we find Jordan in 30th place among the 102 nations surveyed, and Panama in 57th place. (The United States sits in 34th place in our overall rankings.)
Our second measure – the raw measure – is designed to tease out diamonds in the rough, ie, those countries with the most raw potential for IT development. It finds Jordan in 35th place and Panama in 58th place. (The United States, not surprisingly, is ranked near the bottom in this ranking.)
Regional Views
This view is brought into sharper relief by looking at the 102 nations by region and income tier. Jordan leads the Middle East region, immediately ahead of Israel and the UAE. Panama ties with Brazil for 4th place in Latin America, a region that’s headed by Chile.
But it’s important to note we’ve been able to look at 10 countries in the Middle East with a total population of about 250 million people, compared to 14 Latin American countries with a total population of more than 500 million. Furthermore, Panama is literally located at the nexus between North and South America and in essence uses the US dollar as its currency.
Jordan also leads its income-tier, a group of 21 nations with per capita incomes of between $2,000 and $6,000. Panama is hindered a bit in this ranking, as its per capita income of $8,590 reflects a relative wealth and reliance on the Panama Canal and all that goes with it. Yet it still ranks above larger Latin America countries such as Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina.
Leaders, Really
Looking at all the numbers, our research shows that Jordan is the place to take most seriously in the Middle East region. Coincidentally, the government is pushing hard on technology-driven initiatives, and recently held an election designed to strengthen its parliamentary, constitutional democracy.
Panama doesn’t rank as highly, but does emerge as a country to take seriously in the Americas.
It’s obvious that a Panama vs. Jordan comparison would be an apples-to-oranges comparison. Fortunately, this is not what we’re doing. Rather, our research shows that two similar-sized countries in different parts of the world, both of which may be overlooked in discussions of the major players in their regions, deserve some attention.
Our research shows that these are two nations in which companies and individuals looking for sources, locations, or investments should take a long look.
VMware’s Reportedly Got a Public Cloud in Beta
VMware’s top management vented at Amazon last week during the company’s annual Partner Exchange conference in Las Vegas, telling the audience that they’re all doomed if the corporate world moves to Amazon’s infrastructure.
“We want to own the corporate workload,” CEO Pat Gelsinger said at the event. “We all lose if they end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both. Own the corporate workload now and forever.”
COO Carl Eschenbach told the resellers that he found it “really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books.”