One of the most widely anticipated features of Parallels Desktop 11 is Always on Cortana, the first awesome feature that Microsoft built into Windows 10 that’s worth bringing to Mac, in my opinion. I’m not just a fan of Cortana because of Halo (though it doesn’t hurt for this gamer’s heart–Cortana is the AI from […]
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Still trying to decide if you want to upgrade to Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac Pro Edition? It’s definitely something worth thinking about. The Pro Edition is an all-new version that delivers the ultimate flexibility for developers, designers, and power users, so there’s a lot to consider when contemplating whether or not to make the […]
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Recently, Google data centers in Belgium have been hit by a series of lightning strikes, which not only took some of its cloud storage systems offline briefly, but caused errors in some customers cloud infrastructure. It was initially reported that lightning had struck electrical systems in one of its three data centers in a small town about fifty miles southwest of Brussels called St. Ghislain. It was later relayed that lightning had not struck the data center, but had hit the local utility grid. This had caused the data center’s power to be interrupted.
Failover systems may switch to an auxiliary power if the primary source goes offline while servers in the data centers have batteries for extra backup. The servers supporting Persistent Disk, cloud storage that acts independently of compute, were backed up with such batteries. However, some servers stilled failed because extended use of the batteries caused them to drain. The incident report stated “In almost all cases the data was successfully committed to stable storage, although manual intervention was required in order to restore the systems to their normal serving state.”
Over the five days that problems had appeared with the cloud storage systems, Google engineers had estimated that around five percent of the persistent disks in the Belgium zone had at least one I/O read or a write failure. A miniscule fraction of all the persistent disks were permanently deleted from servers, roughly 0.000001 percent according to the Google incident report.
Google’s infrastructure teams are swiftly working to replace storage systems with hardware that is more resilient against power failure in case of another emergency such as this one, so that data may be backed up. According to Google, most of the Persistent Disk Storage has already begun running on this stronger hardware.
Following this outage, Google has reminded customers that it has a multitude of cloud computing regions throughout the globe and within these regions are multiple isolated zones so users may set up resilient infrastructure that may fail over from a different zone in case of a single zone outage, like what occurred in Belgium. Google Compute Engine has three different regions: Central US in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Western Europe in St. Ghislain, and East Asia in Changhua County, Taiwan. In the Central United States region, there are four different zones while in Western Europe and East Asia there are three zones each. Because of the different zones, customers may successfully prepare for situations like the one that occurred in Belgium.
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Internationalizing software has been overlooked by companies in years past. Many available software applications lacked the ability to work with different languages or locale variations such as calendars, currency and numbering conventions. Although North America is a rich market and many companies thrive to take market share, the international market brings new opportunities for businesses – this is why more and more companies are working hard to satisfy all tastes both domestically and internationally.
Tune into: a cloud mindset One of the tenets of the cloud religion is that it should be possible – through the use of intelligent software – to build reliable systems on top of unreliable hardware. Just like you can build reliable and affordable storage systems using RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks). One of…Read more Tune into the Cloud – Losing My Religion
Red Hat is investing in Tesora, the number one contributor to OpenStack Trove Database as a Service (DBaaS) also ranked among the top 20 companies contributing to OpenStack overall.
Tesora, the company bringing OpenStack Trove Database as a Service (DBaaS) to the enterprise, has announced that Red Hat and others have invested in the company as a part of Tesora’s latest funding round.
The funding agreement expands on the ongoing collaboration between Tesora and Red Hat, which dates back to February 2014 when Tesora was re-launched with the mission to become the market leader in database as a service (DBaaS) and OpenStack Trove. Most recently, the Tesora DBaaS Platform Enterprise Edition added support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6.
HP had a tough Q3 2015
HP reported heavy losses when it revealed its third quarter 2015 financial results this week, with the enterprise IT giant raking in net revenues of $25.3bn, down 8 per cent year on year.
PC revenues were down 13 per cent year on year, printing revenue down 9 per cent and software down 6 per cent. In cloud, it’s as-a-service business was down 4 per cent.
The company’s enterprise services group also took a big tumble, with revenues dropping 11 per cent, infrastructure technology outsourcing declining 11 per cent, and application and business services revenues dropping 7 per cent.
The results were well below analyst expectations.
“HP delivered results in the third quarter that reflect very strong performance in our Enterprise Group and substantial progress in turning around Enterprise Services,” said Meg Whitman, chairman, president and chief executive officer, HP. “I am very pleased that we have continued to deliver the results we said we would, while remaining on track to execute one of the largest and most complex separations ever undertaken.”
In a call with analysts this week Whitman tried to allay any fears of its stated strategic direction – the company is on track to split up later this year – and said it saw growth in key pockets of SaaS solutions, but that this growth was offset by weaker big data and IT management revenues.
“We remained focused on aligning our portfolio to the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise strategy and driving software-led integrated solutions across EG and ES while addressing the challenges around the market shift to SaaS and internal execution challenges,” she said.
“We’ve also refined our go-to-market over a longer period of time. And part of the challenge we had prior to me was the fact that we changed our go-to-market so many times. Every CEO had a different idea about how to go to market. We just locked on one and we’re driving it.”
“There might be things we can do to optimize, but we’ve got a strategy and we’re driving it. And I think that’s given the sales force and customers a lot of confidence. And we’ve all been out with a lot of customers. The first couple years was more internally focused. We’ve been out with customers. I would say our customer and partner confidence is at an all-time high. And the backlog, by the way, going into fourth quarter is the highest backlog I’ve had since I’ve been at the company. So all signs are good, but we remain on constant alert,” she added.
AWS is opening a pop-up shop in London following other openings in San Fran and NYC
Amazon Web Services has announced plans to take its AWS Pop-up Loft programme to London in early September in a bid to reach out to local UK startups.
The temporary shops will be a place where developers, engineers and entrepreneurs can come to learn about AWS services, get trained up on the company’ services, meet clients, and receive guidance on cloud migration.
The company has opened similar pop-up shops in in San Francisco and New York City, but the most recently announced shop, which is due to open September 10, is the company’s first crack at it outside the US.
The UK is a hotbed of innovation and London is one of the main places where we see talented, ambitious entrepreneurs coming together to test ideas and start new businesses that leverage cloud computing,” said Werner Vogels, chief technical officer and vice president, Amazon.com.
“With the AWS Pop-up Loft in London we will be bringing together a host of AWS resources, and some of the brightest and most creative minds in the industry, to help startups across the UK. We look forward to working alongside the next generation of UK businesses and helping them to reach their full potential,” Vogels said.
Intel and Chef will also be supporting the pop-up shop.
Patrick Bliemer, managing director, Intel Northern Europe said: “The startup community is a fundamental driver of technology innovations fuelling the rapid growth of the digital services economy. Intel is excited to be working closely with AWS on the AWS Pop-up Loft program to help enable environments around the world where users have access to the tools and expert guidance they need to bring new ideas and innovations to market.”
We’ve come a long way in a year. Last August, we announced Parallels Desktop 10, and this year, we released Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac—including Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac Business Edition and the all-new Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac Pro Edition. Over the course of a year, so much has changed in our company, […]
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GCI has announced the purchase of Anchorage-based Network Business Systems on August 6th. They did not disclose the amount they paid. The purchase will double their cloud computing and IT services sector and can capitalize on the expanding cloud service market. The Network Business Systems will add about 30 employees to GCI’s existing infrastructure.
Network Business Systems has been offering cloud services in Alaska since 2009, but the market for the Cloud was rather sluggish. Recently, however, the demand for such services has grown.
GCI did not offer the most cash for Network Business systems, but owner Annette Jones was convinced to let GCI purchase her company for other reasons. “They did not make us the best offer, however we felt that they were the best buyer,” Jones said. “What I mean by that is we thought that our employees had the best growth opportunities with GCI and so that’s why we went with them.”
Because of this purchase, the amount of employees in GCI’s cloud sector would double from 30 to 60. Jones will continue to work with Network Business Systems as current employees will keep their jobs. GCI spokesman David Morris has said this purchase will better serve GCI’s existing customers who would like to know where their data is stored. He has stated, “Cloud computing is an emerging market, and the thing that we’ve found about Alaska businesses is that they would prefer that their data be stored in Alaska rather than some other place internationally. It makes a difference if you can come and touch and feel where your data is stored.”
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