“Global spending on big data by organizations will exceed $31 billion in 2013, finds a new market forecast by ABI Research. The spending will grow at a CAGR of 29.6% over the next five years, reaching $114 billion in 2018. The forecast includes the money spent on internal salaries, professional services, technology services, internal hardware, and internal software.” This is great news to everyone who is already betting big on Big Data, and will obviously leave room for those still innovating. Clearly as our data explodes, we must manage it better, and right now Big Data innovations are managing and exploiting that data to great success. The US Federal government is investing heavily in Big Data solutions and may even drive this spend higher.
Archivo mensual: septiembre 2013
Don’t budget for cloud – budget for the solution
We know we want it, so Cloud must be a thing, right? If we’re carrying our enterprise IT shopping basket around, we know we want to stop at the Cloud shelf. Once there, we might select a nice fresh IaaS or perhaps some of this SaaS or that.
And whatever our selection, we’ll pay the bill at the register. Good thing we brought our shopping list, and with it, our budget for Cloud, right?
Such is what the Cloud marketing machines at the various vendors and service providers want you to believe. Need Cloud, budget for Cloud, pay for Cloud. Cloud is a thing, after all, and we all want that thing.
Not so fast. Cloud isn’t a thing at all. It’s in reality dozens of different things: compute, storage, network, database, development platform, business applications, and more. The value these offerings provide is similarly varied …
enStratus Introduces Multi-Cloud Deployment Automation for Cloud Foundry
enStratus announced on Wednesday the introduction of automation capabilities for managing the deployment of VMware Cloud Foundry – an open platform as a service (PaaS) – into any of the 18 clouds and cloud computing platforms managed by the enStratus cloud infrastructure management system. Support for Cloud Foundry comes with the latest enStratus release and builds on top of the enStratus service catalog functionality which provides customers with pre-bundled service catalog items that can immediately deploy Cloud Foundry environments with point and click ease.
With the Cloud Foundry service catalog item, enStratus will provide a management and automation system that manages VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud, and Cloud Foundry infrastructures – including the ability to deploy Cloud Foundry PaaS technology on top of VMware vSphere, vCloud Director, or vCloud-based clouds like Bluelock and Terremark.
How do Amazon, Google and Microsoft shape up in developer cloud usage?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads the way in terms of developers using cloud compute and storage services, with AWS on an equal footing with Microsoft as the product of choice for devs’ relational database management system (RDBMS) services.
That’s the big takeaway from the latest developer survey by Forrester Research, which certainly sheds light on preferences between the big three providers in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market.
Regarding compute services, AWS has a clear advantage on the competition. 62% of respondents have implemented AWS, with 46% saying their usage will expand in the coming year. 39% of developers are using Microsoft Azure with 25% looking to expand, with 29% on the Google Cloud Platform.
With RDBMS, the battleground is more closely defined with Microsoft holding the slight edge – 48% of overall respondents (33% expanding) for Redmond compared with 45% (35% expanding) for Amazon.
AWS also has daylight …
Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica Lead Latin America IT Rankings
In our research over the past couple of years, we’ve looked at 14 countries in Latin America. The three top performers are Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica. The first two of these also rank ahead of the United States. Chile also manages to squeak into our global Top 25, just behind Austria and just ahead of Romania.
There is a significant drop-off after Latin America’s first three. Brazil, for example, ranks 4th in the region yet only 56th in the world. The region’s top five is completed by Panama. Trailing the region are Argentina, Paraguay, and Venezuela.
Our mission is to examine national IT environments on a relative basis, and over the long term, gauge their effect on improving economies and the lives of people. We integrate a number of publicly available technology and socio-economic factors to create our rankings.
By integrating them in our uniquely weighted way, then adjusting for local cost of living, we develop relative measures that show how well a nation is doing with the resources it has. This strongly differentiates our methodology from traditional methods in which wealthier countries invariably outrank the less wealthy.
Thus, a small yet relatively dynamic country such as Costa Rica can outrank the Brazilian behemoth, which despite its economic progress is riddled with serious challenges. Costa Rica, in fact, also outranks better known developing countries Malaysia, China, South Africa, and Mexico.
In addition to our overall ranking, we’ve developed a “raw” ranking that focuses more heavily on technology, less heavily on socio-economics. In Latin America, the leaders in this ranking are Bolivia, Honduras, and Ecuador. The first two of these have per-person income levels far below most of their neighbors.
Yet Bolivia has shown potential by reaching 30% of its population with the Internet – giving it the highest ratio of access-to-income in the region and making the world’s Top 10 in this category. Honduras, for its part, is 2nd in the region in this category and has relatively high average bandwidth, given its income level.
Another way to look at things is by income tier. This enables, for example, countries in Latin America to be compared with countries of similar income in other parts of the world. Chile and Uruguay fall into our second tier (per capita income between US$13,000-$30,000), and fall in the middle of this pack. Countries with which they compete closely in this tier include Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, and Portugal.
Costa Rica falls into our third income tier (between $6,000-$13,000), and is closing in on Turkey for 4th place among the 19 countries in this group. Our fourth income tier (between $2,000-$6,000) shows Honduras in the middle of the pack.
There are thousands of ways to view our information, and to gain insight from it. We are happy to engage anyone who’s interested in learning more. And as I often say, this is not a precision engineering project – rather, it is a social-science project that aims to start conversations and improve things generally. We believe in the strength of our assumptions, algorithms, and rankings, but believe that interpreting and acting upon them is what’s important.
Countries that lead can focus on what they’re already doing and where they’d like to go. Countries that lag can see what needs to be done for them to improve. We believe there is resident potential in all nations of the world.
Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica Lead Latin America IT Rankings
In our research over the past couple of years, we’ve looked at 14 countries in Latin America. The three top performers are Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica. The first two of these also rank ahead of the United States. Chile also manages to squeak into our global Top 25, just behind Austria and just ahead of Romania.
There is a significant drop-off after Latin America’s first three. Brazil, for example, ranks 4th in the region yet only 56th in the world. The region’s top five is completed by Panama. Trailing the region are Argentina, Paraguay, and Venezuela.
Our mission is to examine national IT environments on a relative basis, and over the long term, gauge their effect on improving economies and the lives of people. We integrate a number of publicly available technology and socio-economic factors to create our rankings.
By integrating them in our uniquely weighted way, then adjusting for local cost of living, we develop relative measures that show how well a nation is doing with the resources it has. This strongly differentiates our methodology from traditional methods in which wealthier countries invariably outrank the less wealthy.
Thus, a small yet relatively dynamic country such as Costa Rica can outrank the Brazilian behemoth, which despite its economic progress is riddled with serious challenges. Costa Rica, in fact, also outranks better known developing countries Malaysia, China, South Africa, and Mexico.
In addition to our overall ranking, we’ve developed a “raw” ranking that focuses more heavily on technology, less heavily on socio-economics. In Latin America, the leaders in this ranking are Bolivia, Honduras, and Ecuador. The first two of these have per-person income levels far below most of their neighbors.
Yet Bolivia has shown potential by reaching 30% of its population with the Internet – giving it the highest ratio of access-to-income in the region and making the world’s Top 10 in this category. Honduras, for its part, is 2nd in the region in this category and has relatively high average bandwidth, given its income level.
Another way to look at things is by income tier. This enables, for example, countries in Latin America to be compared with countries of similar income in other parts of the world. Chile and Uruguay fall into our second tier (per capita income between US$13,000-$30,000), and fall in the middle of this pack. Countries with which they compete closely in this tier include Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, and Portugal.
Costa Rica falls into our third income tier (between $6,000-$13,000), and is closing in on Turkey for 4th place among the 19 countries in this group. Our fourth income tier (between $2,000-$6,000) shows Honduras in the middle of the pack.
There are thousands of ways to view our information, and to gain insight from it. We are happy to engage anyone who’s interested in learning more. And as I often say, this is not a precision engineering project – rather, it is a social-science project that aims to start conversations and improve things generally. We believe in the strength of our assumptions, algorithms, and rankings, but believe that interpreting and acting upon them is what’s important.
Countries that lead can focus on what they’re already doing and where they’d like to go. Countries that lag can see what needs to be done for them to improve. We believe there is resident potential in all nations of the world.
Don’t Budget for «Cloud»
We know we want it, so Cloud must be a thing, right? If we’re carrying our enterprise IT shopping basket around, we know we want to stop at the Cloud shelf. Once there, we might select a nice fresh IaaS or perhaps some of this SaaS or that. And whatever our selection, we’ll pay the bill at the register. Good thing we brought our shopping list, and with it, our budget for Cloud, right?
Don’t Budget for «Cloud»
We know we want it, so Cloud must be a thing, right? If we’re carrying our enterprise IT shopping basket around, we know we want to stop at the Cloud shelf. Once there, we might select a nice fresh IaaS or perhaps some of this SaaS or that. And whatever our selection, we’ll pay the bill at the register. Good thing we brought our shopping list, and with it, our budget for Cloud, right?
OpenStack Fundamentals: Guaranteed SDS Framework Performance
For cloud providers, offering predictable storage performance backed by firm SLAs will become a competitive differentiator that drives greater customer affinity and a better application experience. Many providers feel that a Software Defined Storage (SDS) frameworks hold the key to delivering guaranteed performance, yet this «software abstraction layer» is only half of the solution. SDS frameworks are dependent on the virtualized resources presented to it, and without the granular abstraction of physical storage resources, these frameworks will remain limited.
OpenStack Fundamentals: Ceph and DevOps in the Cloud
Is your IT organization being pushed to increase the tempo of your software release cycles? Do you currently automate application builds and the creation of staging environments? Do you always test thoroughly before pushing code out to production? Does your hair catch on fire every time you put out a new release? IT organizations large and small are turning to the set of processes, technologies, and organizational practices called DevOps as a way to deal with the need to release software more often and with less trouble by changing the way the Development and Operations teams cooperate.