Data centers managers and system administrators have a lot to keep up with in 2014. The way we store and process data is changing rapidly, making data centers easier to manage, more environmentally friendly, and cost effective. While this post doesn’t cover all of the ways that data centers are changing, here’s a look at some of the top data center trends going on this year:
Flash storage – Though still expensive, the cost of flash storage has been falling in recent years. It can handle data at much faster rates than conventional hard disks, which makes them an attractive option for managers weighing performance over cost.
Monthly Archives: May 2014
Bringing Your Legacy Apps to the Cloud
Getting your new applications into the cloud is a relatively simple procedure. However, enterprises are faced with a large number of existing applications in their current portfolio that may not be ready for the new cloud world. Before migrating legacy apps to the cloud, like moving to a new house, enterprises need to assess their current portfolio of apps and determine what they should consolidate, what they should get rid of and what they should keep.
But deciding what to keep is only half of the equation. Enterprises need to understand how some application properties and the development process need to change in order to have a successful migration. Companies can reduce their costs significantly by optimizing their applications development and maintenance. Moving away from the “old way” to the “new way” not only results in saving money, but will also result in saving significant time.
Bringing Your Legacy Apps to the Cloud
Getting your new applications into the cloud is a relatively simple procedure. However, enterprises are faced with a large number of existing applications in their current portfolio that may not be ready for the new cloud world. Before migrating legacy apps to the cloud, like moving to a new house, enterprises need to assess their current portfolio of apps and determine what they should consolidate, what they should get rid of and what they should keep.
But deciding what to keep is only half of the equation. Enterprises need to understand how some application properties and the development process need to change in order to have a successful migration. Companies can reduce their costs significantly by optimizing their applications development and maintenance. Moving away from the “old way” to the “new way” not only results in saving money, but will also result in saving significant time.
How Does the Network Change in a Cloud World?
Most enterprises are already considering how to enable their private clouds within their environment. The challenge today is how does the network adapt to this changing environment? How does the flexibility of a cloud operational model change the network? What does it mean for IT and network administrators?
In her session at 14th Cloud Expo, Kelly Wanser, Founder and CEO of Stateless Networks, will discuss:
The challenges with today’s networks
What the software-defined datacenter in a cloud world requires
IT’s role in building the network to power the new datacenter
Real World Private Cloud Continuous Delivery in Financial Services
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Nathan Anderson, an IT Leader – Innovation at GE Capital, will provide a look inside of a project at a large global financial services organization that embarked on an ambitious journey towards continuous delivery, private cloud, agile and DevOps. He will set aside the hype, and focus on successes, challenges, and real-world practical lessons learned.
Nathan Anderson is an IT Leader – Innovation at GE Capital.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10–12, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The Problem with Cloud SLAs
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) offered by cloud providers are too often about Specification and not Service. It should come as no surprise that vanity metrics, like Availability, are used instead of business metrics because they are simple to measure and easy to misconstrue. Metrics that truly matter, like “will I be able to delight my customer,” are about as far removed as one can imagine. It should come as no surprise, then, that in a recent survey of 740 CIOs and IT Leaders 97% wanted more than a simple Availability guarantee.
Imagine a company selling a premium new car whose warranty includes 2M piston revolutions, 10k door latch cycles, and 20k window open and closes. And even then, with 99.5% availability, you might still be unable to start the car two days a year, or during winter there might be two weeks where the doors won’t unlock until the sun melts the ice in the door locks. Ready to buy?
Wasted IT Resources
David Rubinstein’s post “Industry Watch: Be resilient as you PaaS” makes a very good point about underutilized hardware in IT data-centers.
Millions of enterprise workloads remain in data centers, where servers are 30% to 40% underutilized, and that’s if they’re virtualized. If not, they’re only using 5% to 7% of capacity.
The reason for this?
Take, for example, servers that are spun up for a project two years ago that were never decommissioned, just sitting there, waiting for a new workload that will never come. And, because the costs of blades and racks went down, cheap hardware has led to a kind of data center sprawl.
Cloud Management in a Hybrid World
In this Forrester report learn how the infrastructure/operations (I&O) role changes in a hybrid cloud world. How they accelerate the cloud application delivery life cycle to exceed the business expectations of cloud and which management capabilities must be mastered to take on the role of hybrid cloud manager.
Cloud Management in a Hybrid World
In this Forrester report learn how the infrastructure/operations (I&O) role changes in a hybrid cloud world. How they accelerate the cloud application delivery life cycle to exceed the business expectations of cloud and which management capabilities must be mastered to take on the role of hybrid cloud manager.
Red Hat to Acquire Inktank
Red Hat, Inc., on Wednesday announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Inktank, a provider of scale-out, open source storage systems. Inktank’s flagship technology, Inktank Ceph Enterprise, delivers object and block storage software to enterprises deploying public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack clouds. Combined with Red Hat’s existing GlusterFS-based storage offering, the addition of Inktank positions Red Hat as the leading provider of open software-defined storage across object, block and file system storage.