The key is to develop a Cloud strategy, start planning, allocate resources and look at alternatives well in advance to allocate appropriate time for performing testing activities such as simulation and performance testing. The outcome at Wimbledon is: Mobile Cloud and Analytics – winner
In recent sporting events the focus has been on providing real time updates on mobile devices such as tablets, phones and leveraging the Cloud. Cloud is supporting this year’s Wimbledon tennis tournament in a big way. The infrastructure is hosted on IBMs Cloud that provides a scalable and on-demand environment that can be dynamically provisioned quickly, and then it can be taken down after the event. Peaks in usage are handled by the Cloud and there is real time information for fans that is available on fingertips for matches on 19 courts. During the tournament millions of users access information about favorite tennis players, matches and results. However during the rest of the year demand is lower. Since the Cloud is being leveraged, there is no need to spend time and money to provision and manage new infrastructure and to reduce capacity based on lower usage. In addition thousands of cyber security incidents are processed every day by the IBM Cloud security framework.
Archivo mensual: julio 2015
[slides] Security Practices By @HaseebBudhani | @DevOpsSummit @SohaSystems #DevOps #Microservices
How do you securely enable access to your applications in AWS without exposing any attack surfaces? The answer is usually very complicated because application environments morph over time in response to growing requirements from your employee base, your partners and your customers.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit, Haseeb Budhani, CEO and Co-founder of Soha, shared five common approaches that DevOps teams follow to secure access to applications deployed in AWS, Azure, etc., and the friction and risks they impose on the business.
Rackspace to offer support for, resell Microsoft Azure
Rackspace is set to offer support for Azure customers and resell Microsoft’s public and private cloud technology
In another move aimed at shifting its business towards managed (cloud) services Rackspace this week announced it will extend its ‘fanatical support’ services to Microsoft Azure public and private cloud infrastructure.
Rackspace said customers will be able to buy either bundled Azure infrastructure with support, or just support services. The offerings will be available first in the US, with plans for an international rollout “through early 2016.”
“Our strategy at Rackspace has always been to provide the world’s best expertise and service for industry-leading technologies — including a broad selection of Microsoft products,” said Taylor Rhodes, chief executive at Rackspace.
“We’re pleased to expand our relationship with Microsoft and the options we provide for our customers by offering Fanatical Support for Azure. By adding support for Azure to our portfolio, we can now serve customers who want public, private and hybrid cloud environments built on the Microsoft Azure Stack,” Rhodes said.
Rackspace already offers a range of Microsoft-based managed services and support but the latest move will see the company double down on the service component for the newly re-architected Azure Stack, including Microsoft’s own public cloud.
The move is also yet another step in Rackspace’s broader transformation from a pure-play hosting and cloud provider towards a managed services and managed cloud company.
Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group said: “Fanatical Support for Azure and Azure Stack adds Rackspace’s industry-leading support to Microsoft’s deep experience with the hybrid cloud, creating a win-win for customers. With this relationship, our mutual customers will have even more options for migrating their diverse IT workloads to the cloud.”
Canonical appoints ex-Microsoft UK dev lead as EVP of cloud
Krishnan will lead Canonical’s cloud efforts
Canonical has appointed former Microsoft exec Anand Krishnan to the role of executive vice president for cloud, where he will lead most of the company’s cloud-related efforts globally including business-development, marketing, engineering and customer delivery activities.
Krishnan most recently served as UK General Manager for Microsoft’s Developer Platform division where he was responsible in part for scaling the Azure business, which by most measures seems to be growing at record pace. Before joining Microsoft in 2004 he spent about five years at Trilogy, a Texas-based software firm specialising in lead generation solutions for the automotive, insurance and telecoms sectors.
“Great businesses make an extraordinary difference to the customers they serve. Canonical has the products and the momentum to do exactly that,” Krishnan said.
“I couldn’t be more excited to be joining the team at this time and helping shape the next phase of our journey”
Canonical has in recent months moved to bolster its cloud strategy with BootSack, its managed private cloud offering, and its own distribution of OpenStack. Its Linux distro Ubuntu is the most popular OS in use on AWS EC2 (though other Linux incumbents have questioned those claims), and it also recently launched Ubuntu Core, a slimmed-down, re-architected version of the Ubuntu operating system that borrows from heavily from the Linux container (isolated frameworks) and mobile (transactional updates) worlds.
Data-as-a-service specialist Delphix scores $75m in latest round
Delphix secured $75m in its latest funding round this week
Data-as-a-service specialist Delphix announced this week that the company has concluded a $75m funding round that will be used by the company to bolster its cloud and security capabilities.
The funding round, led by Fidelity Management and Research Company, brings the total amount secured by the company to just over $119m since its 2008 founding.
Delphix offers what is increasingly referred to as data-as-a-service, though a more accurate way of describing it does is offer data compression and replication-as-a-service, or the ability to virtualise, secure, optimise and move large databases – whether from an application like an ERP or a data warehouse – from on-premise to the cloud and back again.
It offers broad support for most database technologies including Oracle, Oracle RAC, Oracle Exadata, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, SAP ASE, PostgreSQL, and a range of other SQL and NewSQL technologies.
The company said the additional funding will be used to expand its marketing activities and “aggressively invest” in cloud, analytics and data security technologies in a bid to expand its service capabilities.
“Applications have become a highly contested battleground for businesses across all industries,” said Jedidiah Yueh, Delphix founder and chief executive.
“Data as a Service helps our customers complete application releases and cloud migrations in half the time, by making data fast, light, and unbreakable—a huge competitive advantage,” he said.
Tune into the Cloud: The Story So Far By @GregorPetri | @CloudExpo #Cloud
In 2014 I started publishing my series of “Tune into the Cloud” columns on the Gartner Blog Network, below some of the highlights so far.
On how time to market – enabled by ever more productive cloud platforms – is ruling the battle for cloud dominance, and how virtual servers are increasingly becoming table stakes when it comes to cloud competition.
Tech News Recap for the Week of 7/6/2015
Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 7/6/2015.
The Obama administration revealed on Thursday that 21.5 million people were swept up in a massive breach of government computer systems. On Wednesday the New York Stock Exchange was halter for more than 3 and a half hours due to a technical issue. Netflix will be raising prices to customers in Chicago due to last week’s introduction of a cloud tax. Microsoft released Office 2016 for Mac.
Tech News Recap
- Global cloud IT infrastructure market up 25% to $6.3bn in Q1
- Hacking of Government Computers Exposed 21.5 Million People
- Netflix, Inc. Price Rises For Residents Of Chicago As Cloud Tax Struck
- New York Stock Exchange Reopens After Tech Glitch
- Microsoft Releases Office 2016 for Mac
- The Second Wave of Wireless: MU-MIMO, More Data, & Bigger Pipes
- Cisco acquires sales automation software maker MaintenanceNet for $139 million
- Tech fail! Explaining today’s 3 big computer errors
- How Office 365 balances IT control with user satisfaction
- How a Silicon Valley healthcare CIO balances man and machine
- Hacking Team claims terrorists can now use its tools
- Why The Rise Of Amazon Means The End Of Wal-Mart
- 10 Things to Know About Docker
- Giving QA a Seat at the DevOps and Digital Transformation Table
- Innovation begins by Asking the Right Questions
- 2015 summer reading list for CIOs and IT pros
- Wearable technology: What employers need to know
- 5 ways CIOs are essential allies for today’s tech-savvy CMOs
- IT departments may be losing their bad reputations
- 7 Common Biases That Skew Big Data Results
- Mater Health stabilizes application environment with VDI upgrade
- Report: The Trillion-Dollar Risk Of A Cyber Attack On U.S. Power Grid
- How higher education deals with security threats
Download our latest white paper: 10 Things to Know About Docker
By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist
Workday plans pivot toward healthcare
Workday is targeting the healthcare sector for its next big service rollout
Workday is looking to extend its human capital management and financial services applications to the healthcare sector and plans to launch as early as September this year.
The company said it will combine its financial management and HCM cloud services with Workday Inventory, a recently launched supply chain management tool, and tailor the combined platform specifically for the needs of healthcare providers.
“Healthcare providers are dealing with a significant amount of complexity. New regulations, industry consolidation, and a shifting patient relationship, are changing the way they manage their organizations,” said John Webb, vice president, industry strategy and alliances, Workday.
“With Workday, healthcare providers will have the people, financial, and supply chain insights they need, all in in one system built on a flexible foundation from which they can continually adapt and grow in a dynamic industry,” Webb said.
The company is working with healthcare providers on developing niche-specific capabilities, and has already announced a partnership with the Community Health Services of Georgia, a non-profit coordinating long-term care services in the State of Georgia and existing Workday customer to expand the platform’s feature set.
“Our world today is more complex than ever before. New regulations resulting from the Affordable Care Act, evolving patient dynamics, ambitious growth plans, and increased competition for talent, are creating new challenges for our organization and workforce,” said Angela Hammack, vice president, special projects, Community Health Services of Georgia.
“By partnering with Workday, we will be able to help design a system that not only meets our future needs, but one that truly addresses the challenges facing healthcare providers today. As an existing Workday customer, we’ve already benefited from the power of one system, and can only imagine the possibilities that come with collaborating on new features and applications that help support our whole ecosystem,” Hammack said.
Like many niche sectors healthcare is dominated by just a handful of IT vendors, but in recent months big cloud vendors like Box, IBM and Google have all moved to increase their visibility in the sector through partnership, acquisition, and the development of industry-tailored offerings.
Red Hat beefs up cloud partner programme as ecosystem broadens
Red Hat is broadening its cloud partner programme
Red Hat is replacing its existing cloud provider programme with a revamped one it claims will help provide better support for distributors, managed service providers and systems integrators. The company said the move was in response to what it sees as a broadening ecosystem of partnerships in cloud.
The “Certified Cloud and Service Provider” programme will replace the existing “Certified Cloud Provider” initiative and broaden the types of members included. The company will certify and provide technical support to vendors as well as service providers offering Red Hat-based cloud services for any type of cloud deployment.
The company said the move was driven in part by the continued adoption of newer technologies and platforms like PaaS and Linux containers, and the broadening of the ecosystem of potential partners.
“Much like enterprise IT itself, the world of cloud computing is constantly evolving, especially with the growing promise of hybrid cloud approaches and Linux container-based architectures,” said Michael Ferris, senior director, Business Architecture, Red Hat.
“The Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program is designed to encompass nearly all service provider models, spanning the public cloud to on-site managed services, offering our customers a secure, stable and trusted partner ecosystem upon which to build their next-generation IT projects using Red Hat solutions.”
Red Hat said the revamped programme will launch with about 13 of the 15 service providers recognised in Gartner’s oft-cited Magic Quadrant, and has grown close to 60 per cent from the previous year. The company has close to 50 cloud providers signed up to the programme so far.
Mark Enzweiler, senior vice president, Global Partners and Alliances, Red Hat said: “The Certified Cloud and Service Provider program is an important next step for one of Red Hat’s key channels. Our partners want to develop their businesses based on enterprise-ready open source technologies, and this global program delivers new opportunities for recurring revenue to a diverse set of participating partners to expand their business with Red Hat.”
OVH adds ARM to public cloud
OVH has launched an ARM-based public cloud service just 8 months after going to market with a Power8-based cloud platform
French cloud and hosting provider OVH said this week it will add Cavium ARM-based processors to its public cloud platform by the end of next month. The move comes just 8 months after the company added the Power8 architecture to its cloud arsenal.
The company said it will add Cavium’s flagship 48 core 64-bit ARMv8-A ThunderX workload-optimized processor to its RunAbove public cloud service cloud service.
“This deployment is an example of OVH.Com’s leadership in delivering latest industry leading technologies to our customers,” said Miroslaw Klaba, vice president of research & development at OVH.
“With RunAbove ThunderX based instances, we can offer our users breakthrough performance at the lowest cost while optimizing the infrastructure for targeted compute and storage workloads delivering best in class TCO and user experience.”
OVH, which serves 700,000 customers from 17 datacentres globally, said it wanted to offer a more diversified technology stack and cater to growing demand for cloud-based high performance compute workloads, and drop the cost per VM.
“Cloud service operators are looking to gain the benefits and flexibility of end to end virtualization while managing dynamically changing workloads and massive data requirements,” said Rishi Chugh, director marketing at Cavium. “ ThunderX based RunAbove instances provide exceptional processing performance and flexibility by integrating a tremendous amount of IO along with targeted workload accelerators for compute, security, networking and storage at the lowest cost per VM for RunAbove – into a power, space and cost-optimized form factor.”
OVH is among just a handful of cloud service providers offering a variety of cloud compute platforms beyond x86. Late last year the company launched a cloud service based on IBM’s Power8 processor architecture, an open source architecture tailored specifically for big data applications, and OpenStack.
But while cloud compute is becoming more heterogeneous there are still far fewer workloads being created natively for ARM and Power8, which are both quite young, than x86, so it will likely take some time for asset utilisation (and the TCO) rates to catch up with where x86 servers are today.