One of the «rules» of application delivery (and infrastructure in general) has been that when scaling out such technologies, all components must be equal. That started with basic redundancy (deploying two of everything to avoid a single point of failure in the data path) and has remained true until recently.
Today, fabrics can be comprised of heterogeneous components. Beefy, physical hardware can be easily paired with virtualized or cloud-hosted components. This is good news for organizations seeking the means to periodically scale out infrastructure without oversubscribing the rest of the year, leaving resources idle.
Except when it’s not so good, when something goes wrong and there’s suddenly not enough capacity to handle the load because of the disparity in component capacity.
Archivo mensual: diciembre 2013
Load Aware Fabrics
One of the «rules» of application delivery (and infrastructure in general) has been that when scaling out such technologies, all components must be equal. That started with basic redundancy (deploying two of everything to avoid a single point of failure in the data path) and has remained true until recently.
Today, fabrics can be comprised of heterogeneous components. Beefy, physical hardware can be easily paired with virtualized or cloud-hosted components. This is good news for organizations seeking the means to periodically scale out infrastructure without oversubscribing the rest of the year, leaving resources idle.
Except when it’s not so good, when something goes wrong and there’s suddenly not enough capacity to handle the load because of the disparity in component capacity.
Cloud Storage Adoption Gaining Among Businesses
Cloud computing is helping businesses combat a growing problem: Too much information and not enough storage capacity.
With businesses increasingly facing the prospect of running out of storage capacity, adoption of cloud storage technologies continues to grow, according to a report from cloud-integrated storage solutions specialist TwinStrata.
The survey found that 37 percent of respondents have been using cloud computing for three or more years, more than a one-third increase over last year’s 27 percent number. When compared with last year’s survey, overall adoption of cloud services has steadily increased across all categories, with use of Software as a Service (SaaS) reaching as high as 62 percent and both cloud storage and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) edging closer to 50 percent adoption rates. Platform as a Service (PaaS) experienced the greatest increase in adoption as more organizations become increasingly comfortable with the cloud, the report indicated.
My 2013 Holiday Gift List for the Solutions Architects
By Chris Reily, Director of Solutions Architecture
Well, with the holidays upon us, I find myself in the position of having to figure out what to buy for the solutions architects this year to thank them for another great year in 2013. If you think buying gifts for Aunt Emily, Cousin Jimmy or dear old Dad is hard – try picking out gifts for one of the most exacting, technical, opinionated and outstanding group of guys you’ll ever get to know. I missed black Friday and Cyber Monday so here goes nothing…
Nick P – Practice Manager, Networking
A 48oz. bottle of Bluebeard’s Beard Wash AND some SDN (software defined networking) with Cisco Open Network Environment Platform Kit (onePK) so he can finally have comprehensive Cisco network intelligence.
Randy B – Enterprise Architect
A relaxing massage chair AND a smart phone that is truly smart, does email, contacts and a calendaring that works as well as a vintage BlackBerry. It need to hold a decent charge to last a full work day AND reminds Randy of important appointments not to be missed. Or maybe he just needs a copy of VMware View!
Harris H – Solutions Architect, Data Center
An industrial size vacuum sealer for packing homemade jerky AND a quality Cloud as a Service offering to distribute to all those in need of new technology. And it would be just wrong not to provide a great way to manage it all with CMaaS!
Randy W – Practice Manager, Data Management
A case (okay, maybe just a bottle) of 1989 Chateau Petrus Bordeaux AND some super-fast hybrid flash storage like Nimble’s C250G (oh how Randy loves 10 gig networking).
Mark H – Solutions Architect, Data Management
A St. Croix Legend Bass fishing rod AND an EMC VNX5400 array. Plenty of fast disc to store and access plenty of hi-resolution photos of all the fish he can catch.
Francis C – End User Computing, Practice Manager
A Max Brooks signed copy of The Zombie Survival Guide AND a high quality technical manual for Citrix Xen Desktop 7!
John D – XaaS Consulting Architect
Cross country saddle bags for a BMW R-1200GS motor bike AND a ticket to London to meet Sharon Taylor,ITIL Chief Examiner, for lunch.
Chris C – Solutions Architect, Data Center
A Gillette Mach-3 Razor AND a converged data center (virtual computing platform) courtesy of Nutanix. Chris is keeping it simple in 2014 by combining storage, compute and networking in a single platform.
Joel G – Solutions Architect, Microsoft Solutions
An Air Force Academy sweatshirt AND an Azure environment managed by System Center 2012 R2. Who doesn’t want infrastructure provisioning, infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, automation and self-service in the New Year?
Ralph K – Practice Manager, Unified Communications
A Harley Davidson leather jacket AND a Cisco Jabber Client. So when Ralph is ready to hit the open road, he can unchain himself from the office but stay in touch by video and voice.
Chris W – Our CTO
Front row tickets to see Metallica in Germany next summer AND a guest appearance on TLC’s NY Ink, on which a talented artist Megan Massacre will create and complete an original tattoo design incorporating the logos of VMware, Cisco and EMC on Chris chest. He’s one dedicated dude.
As an IT professional, what’s on your holiday wish list this year? My gift to you? Here’s a free ebook on how organizations can take advantage of behavior emerging in the market for IT services.
Akamai to Acquire Prolexic
Akamai Technologies, Inc. and Prolexic Technologies, Inc. announced on Monday that the two companies have signed a definitive agreement for Akamai to acquire Prolexic, a provider of cloud-based security solutions for protecting data centers and enterprise IP applications from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Faced with an ever-changing threat landscape, organizations require comprehensive security solutions that address many different protection scenarios. These include securing mission-critical Web properties and applications from attack, as well as protecting the full suite of enterprise IP applications – including email, file transfers, and VPN – across a data center.
IBM’s data discovery initiatives culminate in Project Neo
Fredrik Tunvall, Analyst, Software – Information Management
At its recent Software Analyst Insights summit in Stamford, Connecticut, IBM gave analysts an in-depth look at the products and underlying strategy of its extensive business analytics (BA) portfolio. A product that caught Ovum’s eye is IBM’s recently announced visual data discovery tool, codenamed “Project Neo.” The solution is the result of IBM Labs coalescing some of the company’s latest in-memory database, analytics, data visualization, and design initiatives.
IBM aims to attract nontechnical business users
Business analytics is front and center for IBM. Investments of nearly $20bn into R&D and M&A activity have left IBM with an impressive (and extensive) list of BA solutions. However, IBM has been somewhat underrepresented in the increasingly competitive market of visual data discovery solutions. Vendors such as Tableau, Tibco Spotfire, and QlikTech have led the way with intuitive solutions that have attracted a …
Google seriously joins the IaaS party as Compute Engine goes live
Google has announced general availability of its Compute Engine IaaS platform, with the search giant aiming to play alongside the likes of Amazon and Microsoft in infrastructure as a service.
The service was available to developers and as a preview for companies to sign up back in May. Now, it’s been fully launched – and the Mountain View giant hasn’t set the bar too high with a 99.95% SLA.
CloudTech readers will know full well the issues with claiming a 100% service agreement – so this, alongside 24/7 support, comes as refreshing news. Amazon’s EC2 and S3 clouds come in at 99.95% and 99.9% respectively.
Underpinning this step to avoid fallover, Google Compute Engine can be set up so that instances can be automatically restarted in the event of hardware failures or maintenance, meaning virtual machines can be up and running again within minutes.
Google …
Everything-as-a-Service Creates Product Catalog Blues | Part 1
As we move closer toward everything-as- a-service (XaaS), the title “Internet of Agents” seems to fit what is really happening. Agents are systems and devices that sense what is going on, and they exchange information with and act on behalf of other agents and people in ways that ultimately result in useful services being performed.
When we start to view the delivery of services as a distributed cooperative effort conducted by millions of agents, as opposed to the actions of a few dedicated and single-minded service platforms, we start to get a glimpse of the huge potential of the Internet of Agents. We also must face the challenge of keeping track of this expanding service universe: managing security and permissions, making the dynamic portfolio available and usable, and ultimately monetizing all of this and ensuring that each contributor to these increasingly complex value chains is compensated for the fragments of service capability provided.
NRRC Video Series, Video 4: Comments by Major General Eric Vollmecke, USAF
In September, the NCOIC delivered the Geospatial Community Cloud (GCC) demonstration. Sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, this demonstration showed how an interoperable, hybrid-cloud operating environment can be quickly enabled and used as a rapid response capability.While this demonstration was designed around lessons learned in the 2010 Haitian Earthquake, the effort showed how a cloud services brokerage approach could be used to quickly provide critical information technology infrastructure support to an unplanned event.
The NCOIC is an international organization for accelerating the global implementation of network centric principles and systems–to improve information sharing among various communities of interest for the betterment of their productivity, interactivity, safety, and security. The NCOIC Rapid Response Capability (NRRC) video series supports that mission by broadly disseminating information about the GCC demonstration for the good of the global community.
NRRC Video Series, Video 4: Comments by Major General Eric Vollmecke, USAF
In September, the NCOIC delivered the Geospatial Community Cloud (GCC) demonstration. Sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, this demonstration showed how an interoperable, hybrid-cloud operating environment can be quickly enabled and used as a rapid response capability.While this demonstration was designed around lessons learned in the 2010 Haitian Earthquake, the effort showed how a cloud services brokerage approach could be used to quickly provide critical information technology infrastructure support to an unplanned event.
The NCOIC is an international organization for accelerating the global implementation of network centric principles and systems–to improve information sharing among various communities of interest for the betterment of their productivity, interactivity, safety, and security. The NCOIC Rapid Response Capability (NRRC) video series supports that mission by broadly disseminating information about the GCC demonstration for the good of the global community.