Apptio, which knows how to gauge the total cost of IT services, has gotten a mighty $45 million E round that it means to invest in its platform and its international expansion, immediately in Western Europe.
Counting the new money the company has now seen $136 million in funding since late 2007.
The latest round was led by new investments from funds managed by Janus Capital, the Hillman Company, and a secret unnamed global institutional investor.
Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Shasta Ventures and T. Rowe Price also kicked in.
Apptio figures “IT costs are moving from fixed to variable, computing assets are shifting from owned to shared, and business executives increasingly expect the CIO to play a more strategic role, spending less resources ‘keeping the lights on’ and more on innovation that drives the business forward.” It positions its TBM widgetry as a “must have” set of business management applications and analytics for the Global 2000.
Archivo mensual: mayo 2013
Cloud Expo New York: Many Clouds and APIs but One OpenStack and jclouds
In an ideal developer/systems administrator’s world, most applications would deploy seamlessly to multiple platforms and scale elastically with minimal effort bringing the unprecedented agility of the cloud within immediate reach of developer teams and IT organizations.
OpenStack, a RackSpace and NASA initiative, is now managed by an independent foundation and is supported by multiple vendors. It defines APIs for compute, storage, networking, services, monitoring, and additional infrastructure services.
jclouds is an open source library that helps you get started in the cloud and utilizes your Java or Clojure development skills. The jclouds API gives you the freedom to use portable abstractions for cloud-specific features. It’s a cross-cloud toolkit that works with both public and private clouds, enabling hybrid cloud workloads.
IPv6: Two Years after Implementation in Parallels Plesk Panel
Following the North American IPv6 Summit, I received some questions on what Parallels take is on the IPv6 market and our implementation of this technology.
At Parallels, we believe that it is important to stay on top of internet technology when delivering hosting solutions to thousands of customers. Leveraging the latest stacks can help improve product security, deliver value to customers and give technology companies time to (with feedback from customers) mature and perfect their technology.
For some technology, urgency of implementation is farther driven by hard market requirements. For example, the need for implementation of IPv6 technology is exacerbated by the fact that in some geographies, IPv4 has simply sold out.
Parallels implemented IPv6 starting in Parallels Plesk Panel 10.2 two years ago because of the IPv6 ability to improve security and reliability, the ability to offer IPs to a global market, and built-in functionality for Mobile IP. This implementation now fully matured with all versions of Parallels Plesk 10 and Parallels Plesk 11 and it will now be a battle tested mainstream feature in Parallels Plesk 11.5.
We originally selected and will maintain a hybrid IPv6 implementation. The hybrid or dual stack implementation is important because most countries expect that IPv4 and IPv6 will co-exist for several years, so it will be important for sites to be represented in both versions of IP. Parallels Plesk Panel also supports “pure IPv6” for when no IPv4 is available.
Parallels implementation of IPv6 is designed to support hosters’ needs regardless of the underlying OS and therefore supports multiple Linux OSs including Debian, Ubuntu, CenOS, RedHat, OpenSUSE, CloudLinux and multiple versions of Windows. We use the same multi-OS strategy for Server Name Indication (SNI), a technology which lets hosters have multiple SSL Certs on a single IPv4 address, stretching the dwindling supply of IPv4 addresses.
IPv6 is an important technology today. Any company that is only now considering implementation of IPv6 is already behind the innovation game as it is a must have feature of the networked hosting world.
Adam Bogobowicz
Sr. Director of Product Marketing
Cloud Computing and Data Residency Laws
Cloud service providers store data all over the globe, and are constantly moving that data from one datacenter to the next for reasons as wide-ranging as cost considerations and redundancy requirements. Does this mean that the requirements outlined in varying data residency laws and privacy regulations are directly at odds with how cloud computing works?
The question is an especially delicate one when the cloud service provider stores and processes data in a jurisdiction that is perceived to have far less stringent privacy and data protection requirements – or may allow government agencies far broader data subpoena powers. Since the cloud computing model relies on distributed infrastructure to generate cost and flexibility benefits for customers, building a datacenter in each data residency jurisdiction quickly becomes cost-prohibitive. And, applying a set of constraints to the movement of data introduces an additional layer of complexity that further erodes the value proposition of cloud computing for customers.
File Shares & Microsoft SharePoint: Collaboration Without Limitations
Guest Post by Eric Burniche of AvePoint.
File Shares can be a blessing and a curse when it comes to storing large quantities of data for business use. Yes, you enable a large number of users to access the data as if it were on their local machines, without actually having the data stored where disc space may be at a premium. But native management capabilities of file shares aren’t always ideal, so a third-party solution is necessary to fully optimize your file shares.
The primary benefit of file shares is simple, quick, and easy access to large volumes of data for large volumes of users at marginal infrastructure cost. With little or no training required, users can easily access file shares that consist of individual documents to large files and rich media like videos, audio and other formats than can range up to gigabytes (GB) in size.
The Simple Truth: Organizations are quickly realizing native file share limitations, including notoriously poor content management capabilities for search, permissions, metadata, and remote access. As a result, many have turned to Microsoft SharePoint to manage and collaborate on their most business-critical information and valued data.
The Problem: Organizations have various types of unstructured content on their file servers, which is data characterized as non-relational data– e.g. Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) — that when uploaded into SharePoint, are stored by default with the platform’s Microsoft SQL Server database. Once file share content is uploaded, the overall time taken to remove unstructured content from a structured database is inefficient, resulting in poor performance for SharePoint end-users and exponential storage cost increases for IT administrators.
Difficulty often arises when determining what content is business critical and should be integrated with SharePoint as compared to what content should be left alone in file shares, decommissioned, or archived according to business need. File types and sizes also create difficulty when integrating file share content with SharePoint because SharePoint itself blocks content types like Microsoft Access project files, .exe, .msi, .chm help files, and file sizes exceeding 2 GB violate SharePoint software boundaries and limitations.
The Main Questions: How can my organization utilize SharePoint to retire our legacy file share networks while avoiding migration projects and performance issues? How can my organization utilize SharePoint’s full content management functionality if my business-critical assets are blocked file types or larger than Microsoft’s 2 GB support contracts?
One Solution: Enter DocAve File Share Navigator 3.0 from AvePoint. DocAve File Share Navigator 3.0 enables organizations to increase file share activity and take full advantage of SharePoint’s content management capabilities, all while avoiding costs and disruptions associated with migration plans.
With DocAve File Share Navigator, organizations can:
- Expose large files, rich media via list links, including blocked files more than 2 GB, into SharePoint without violating Microsoft support contracts to truly consolidate access to all enterprise-wide content
- Decrease costs associated with migrating file share content into SharePoint’s SQL Server content databases by accessing file share content through SharePoint
- Allow remote users to view, access, and manage network files through SharePoint without requiring a VPN connection
- Direct access for local file-servers through SharePoint without burden on web front end servers
- Increase file share content discoverability by utilizing SharePoint’s full metadata-based search across multiple, distributed file servers
- Allow read-only previews of documents for read-only file servers
The native capabilities of file shares are unlikely to improve, but fortunately there are third-party solutions such as DocAve File Share Navigator that can help turn your file share from a headache to an asset, allowing you to continue to collaborate with confidence.
Eric Burniche is a Product Marketing Manager at AvePoint.
Cloud Expo New York: Introducing the Open Cloud Exchange
The cloud-enabled data center sits at the center of IT transformation. It facilitates the interconnection and communities that come together, propelling growth for both buyers and sellers.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Gerry Fassig, CoreSite’s Vice President of Sales, will discuss how CoreSite is bringing together best-of-breed partners through the Open Cloud Exchange resulting in public, private, and hybrid cloud interconnection and management as well as connectivity to AWS direct connect.
Gerry Fassig is CoreSite’s Vice President of Sales for the cloud/hosting service provider industry. He possesses more than 20 years of enterprise and start-up sales leadership experience and leads a national team responsible for acquiring, retaining and managing service providers of all sizes. Prior to joining CoreSite, he held senior sales and management positions with Savvis, helping drive strategic growth throughout the organization during the Exodus/Cable and Wireless acquisitions. Before Savvis, he held various leadership roles at Wheelhouse, a CRM strategy consultancy and at Gartner.
Wal-Mart Buys OneOps
@Walmart Labs, the Silicon Valley-based technology arm of Wal-Mart global e-commerce, has bought OneOps, which automates and accelerates processes related to environment management, application deployment and data center operations monitoring.
It’s supposed to have re-imagined application management in the era of cloud computing and comes with a Platform-as-a-Service capability that should accelerate Wal-Mart’s PaaS and private cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) strategies.
Wal-Mart will doubtless get cloud applications out of it. It said, “We are innovating on a very large scale, and OneOps brings us tools that will allow us to move even faster toward a global platform.”
Zyrion Named “Entrance Carpet Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that Zyrion Inc., the leading provider of Cloud and IT Monitoring software solutions, has been named “Entrance Carpet Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Zyrion is the leading provider of integrated Cloud and Network monitoring software for distributed and complex datacenter environments, and offers the most scalable monitoring platform in the industry. Zyrion’s flagship Traverse software provides correlated, end-to-end, application service-oriented views of the IT infrastructure. Zyrion’s monitoring software is used by large enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) worldwide. Zyrion has its corporate offices in Sunnyvale, California.
Part 2 | Understand the Impact of IT on Business
Part 2 of a two part blog series looking at the journey enterprise IT departments take as they increasingly seek to understand the relationships and impact of IT infrastructure performance on application performance and business services.
Through observation, Fred notices that even though his alarms, based on dynamic baselines, catch problems in his environment, they’re also catching busy days, quiet days, and even slightly odd days. He starts to realize that just looking at the level of metrics is necessary, but not sufficient. Fred also needs to look at how the metrics work together – he needs statistical correlation.
Cloud Expo NY: Adopting Cloud Solutions from the Couch to the Corporation
Enterprise cloud adoption revolves around pushing the BYOD movement and focusing on data security.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Ross Brouse, COO and President of Solar VPS, will cover how cloud adoption is driven by consumerism, humanity’s need to socialize, our addiction to new gadgets and the ability of data to stay secure in a growing collaborative world. The cloud is a drug and we’re just getting hooked.
Ross Brouse is the COO and President of Solar VPS. He is a true creative thinker. He believes the solution to most challenges involves discipline, positive reinforcement and innovative problem solving. As an industry leader, he draws from decades of experience in film and television production, graphic design and development, and managed IT. A graduate of New York University, Ross founded FortressITX’s subsidiary company, Solar VPS, in 2005.