One of the big revelations within the evolving PRISM scandal is how important a role big data and cloud computing have played in enabling the NSA to facilitate the scale of monitoring they achieved.
While there are many things to be said on both sides of the discussion around the PRISM program, its diminished presence within the 24 hour news cycle has given many within the cloud computing and big data industries pause enough to provide some analysis of the programs impact on the technology space.
Mark Milian of Bloomberg recently published a post articulating the perceived problems the PRISM fallout proposes for U.S. based cloud providers.
Citing a global survey detailing respondents’ reticence to continue with cloud providers, market projections for the cloud industry have been reduced on expectations that more businesses will jump ship.

read more

When talking about Big Data, most people talk about numbers: speed of processing and how many terabytes and petabytes the platform can handle. But deriving deep insights with the potential to change business growth trajectories relies not just on quantities, processing power and speed, but also three key ilities: portability, usability and quality of the data.
Portability, usability, and quality converge to define how well the processing power of the Big Data platform can be harnessed to deliver consistent, high quality, dependable and predictable enterprise-grade insights.
Portability: Ability to transport data and insights in and out of the system
Usability: Ability to use the system to hypothesize, collaborate, analyze, and ultimately to derive insights from data
Quality: Ability to produce highly reliable and trustworthy insights from the system

read more

In this demo at 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, Impetus Technologies looks at Ankush, a Big Data Cluster Management Solution and how to manage multiple vendor clusters from a single interface.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The growth and success of Cloud Computing will be on display at the upcoming Cloud Expo conference and exhibition in Santa Clara, California, November 4–7, 2013.

read more

Last week, I met with a number of our top clients near the GreenPages HQ in Portsmouth, NH at our annual Summit event to talk about successful adoption of cloud technologies. In this post, I’ll give a summary of my cloud adoption advice, and cover some of the feedback that I heard from customers during my discussions. Here we go…

The Market for IT Services

I see compute infrastructure looking more and more like a commodity, and that there is intense competition in the market for IT services, particularly Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

1. “Every day, Amazon installs as much computing capacity in AWS as it used to run all of Amazon in 2002, when it was a $3.9 billion company.” – CIO Journal, May 2013
2. “[Amazon] has dropped the price of renting dedicated virtual server instances on its EC2 compute cloud by up to 80 percent […]  from $10 to $2 per …

Part of 1 of a 3 part series outlining the essential components for effective cloud monitoring. This portion covers cost monitoring and presents 3 key issues that users need to address to maximize their ROI.
Cloud elasticity delivers significant increases in availability and scalability with enormous cost reductions relative to comparably functional data centers. Harnessing this strength and optimizing your cloud usage means monitoring and understanding what is occurring within your deployment – for cloud users, there is no such thing as benign neglect.
Just as data center users require solutions to assist in optimizing and controlling usage beyond the application layer, so to do public cloud users.
In fact, given the complexity and evolving innovation of cloud architecture, tools are even more critical for cloud users to avoid cost sprawl, security vulnerabilities, and service deterioration.

read more

As Cloud Computing has become the most transformative technology shift since the personal computer and the Internet, it’s apparent that migrating business to the cloud has reached a tipping point in 2013, where it is no longer a trend but rather an absolute business requirement.
In recognition of this shift, The Huffington Post has published a list of the top 100 Cloud Computing Experts on Twitter. Huffington Post noted that the “list consists of industry analysts, chief executives – including CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs, journalist, authors and keynote speakers.”
Thirty-one of the top 100 Cloud Computing experts in the Huffington Post list are contributing authors for various SYS-CON Media publications and 24 are Cloud Expo faculty members.
Out of this list of 100, SYS-CON Media and SYS-CON Events were pleased to note that , 24 of the experts have spoken at one of our International Cloud Expo® series, and 31 of the experts are writers for SYS-CON Media’s numerous online publications including Cloud Computing Journal, SDN Journal, Big Data Journal, OpenStack Journal and Virtualization Journal.

read more

Rackspace continues to expand its educational initiatives around the open cloud. This week, it launches a new network operations class as a part of the curriculum at the Open Cloud Academy, a key part of the company’s efforts to train the next generation of IT professionals for the cloud.
The class is an eight-week training program that grants certifications for network administrators, network operators and network engineers. It’s the newest addition to the lineup of professional training options available at the Open Cloud Academy, which also offers instruction in Linux system administration, software development and cyber security, according to an article on TheVarGuy.com.
The new network operations class reflects growing interest within the channel as a whole in tighter network security and enhanced network efficiency around cloud computing. It’s also evidence of Rackspace’s interest in creating a well-rounded workforce of programmers, administrators and technicians who can build and maintain the virtual servers and cloud computing infrastructure that constitute the bread and butter of Rackspace’s business.

read more

A completely new computing platform is on the horizon. They’re called Microservers by some, ARM Servers by others, and sometimes even ARM-based Servers. No matter what you call them, Microservers will have a huge impact on the data center and on server computing in general.
Although few people are familiar with Microservers today, their impact will be felt very soon. This is a new category of computing platform that is available today and is predicted to have triple-digit growth rates for some years to come – growing to over 20% of the server market by 2016 according to Oppenheimer («Cloudy With A Chance of ARM» Oppenheimer Equity Research Industry Report).

read more

Those who think cloud computing requires no forethought or planning are dead wrong. Considering the fact that cloud computing is a truly complex distributed architecture, there is a lot to think about in terms of what components are leveraged (e.g., storage, compute, database, etc.), how they are configured, governance and security, and monitoring and management. Just to scratch the surface.
Thus, those who implement cloud computing need to get smart around how to approach the architecture. Many skip this step or role and move directly to the good stuff, the technology. A lack of planning and architecture will absolutely derail your cloud implementations, short- and long-term.

read more