The cloud has evolved quickly. Businesses have weighed the perks of private, public, and even hybrid clouds. If those options weren’t enough, here comes the open hybrid cloud.
An open hybrid cloud leverages the benefits of accessing data and processes across private and public implementations, while facilitating open source development. It is a model that has expanded within the military. In the search for costs savings, the Department of Defense has experimented with many new cloud models.
Archivo mensual: enero 2016
Meet the Sensors By @PSilvas | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #Wearables
I often write about the Internet of Things, or the soon-to-be-cliché IoT. You know, the smart-fridges, smart-cars, smart-thermostats, healthcare devices, wearables and any of those connected devices that have a sensor, gathers data and reports back to some entity. You are able to control these devices (and see the data) with mobile apps or even your own voice and gestures. They are all the rage and sitting at the top of the Gartner Hype Cycle.
But it’s all the various sensors inside those devices that are doing the actual measuring, calculating, tracking and reporting. Each has its own specialty providing specific functionality. I’ve always wondered about what’s inside some of the wearables so let’s take a look at a few.
Service-Oriented Applications | @DevOpsSummit @AppNeta #DevOps #Microservices
With microservices, SOA and distributed architectures becoming more popular, it is becoming increasingly harder to keep track of where time is spent in a distributed application when trying to diagnose performance problems. Distributed tracing systems attempt to address this problem by following application requests across service boundaries, persisting metadata along the way that provide context for fine-grained performance monitoring.
Your Business in Business | @DevOpsSummit @AppNeta #DevOps #APM #Microservices
Your business relies on your applications and your employees to stay in business. Whether you develop apps or manage business critical apps that help fuel your business, what happens when users experience sluggish performance? You and all technical teams across the organization – application, network, operations, among others, as well as, those outside the organization, like ISPs and third-party providers – are called in to solve the problem.
Gamification and IoT | @ThingsExpo #IoT #Gamification #InternetOfThings
Most people haven’t heard the word, “gamification,” even though they probably, and perhaps unwittingly, participate in it every day.
Gamification is “the process of adding games or game-like elements to something (as a task) so as to encourage participation.” Further, gamification is about bringing game mechanics – rules, constructs, processes, and methods – into the real world in an effort to engage people.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Robert Endo, owner and engagement manager of Intrepid Data, discussed how wearables, analytics, and geospatial technologies can be combined to transform the world into the ultimate game board. Organizations can grasp consumer, employee, or client intrinsic interest by setting up cool, collaborative, and rewarding systems using the IoT.
Adobe, Software AG and Wipro show how cloud can manage retail detail
Three major retail technologists have unveiled how the cloud could make retailers more responsive.
German retail technology specialist Software AG has launched a cloud based Smart Store Monitoring systems to give retailers the word from the high street in real time. By interpreting large volumes of data streaming in from sensors, tills and apps in their brick-and-mortar stores, it will help them react quicker to market conditions in the stores and instantly avert problems.
The instant insights could help retailers see how in-store promotions are working and make timely interventions to boost their impact. The intelligence will also help retailers work the Internet of Things (IoT) to maximum effect and move staff to busy areas when needed, according to Oliver Guy, Retail Industry Director at Software AG. The cloud based technology could “persuade marketing managers to fine-tune promotions on the fly and improve their response to different consumers in a particular location,” said Guy.
That calls for more flexible management of the flow of data, which would be enabled by the cloud and the IoT according to Guy. “To benefit from the store’s shifting purpose and growing shopper expectations, retail managers must be able to track, monitor, analyse and optimise all in-store activity in real-time,” said Guy.
Though retailers are optimistic about the value of IoT three common technology barriers were cited in the report: blending a disparity of data sources, choosing the best response to events or expectations and dealing with mass data diversity in real-time.
Software AG claims its Digital Business platform solves these problems by connecting all IoT-enabled data sources, briefing store staff and head-office merchandisers, instantly adjusting
signage and other automated store peripherals and modelling predictions to take pre-emptive action – such as staff or stock replenishment – to nip problems in the bud.
A Wipro study conducted with Planet Retail, which said 82% of retailers it interviewed feel that investments in digital technology and operational improvements would help them target customers as individuals. Those who fail to react to feedback and hyper-personalised offers and promotions will fall behind, it said.
To this end, Adobe has added new services to its Marketing Cloud to help retailers improve the customer experience. The additions include new ‘shoppable media advancements’, advanced push notification and extra Adobe Experience Manager Screen options.
A new emphasis on data-driven remarketing means retailers can connect consumers’ behaviour online with contextual data. Acting on this intelligence they can create user-defined remarketing triggers, such as an email, push notification or SMS, to increase the likelihood of purchase. If a consumer views women’s footwear for several minutes, for example, the retailer can send an email highlighting that product and incentivising the customer with a discount.
Big Switch Networks wins $48.5M to bring SDN to telcos, data centres and enterprises
Santa Clara based software defined networking vendor Big Switch Networks (BSN) has won another $48.5 million to bring its bare metal networking fabrics to new markets, reports Telecoms.com.
The networking specialist, which has now received $93.5m since its launch in 2010, aims to use the new cash injection to fund more R&D and to create news sales and marketing channels in the Europe, Asia Pacific, the UAE and the US.
Investors from Morgenthaler Ventures, Silver Lake Waterman, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Accton, CID Group and MSD Capital put the cash up after hearing how the company achieved 300% growth last year. Its two technology inventions have found three popular use cases among telecoms carriers, data centre companies, service providers and enterprises.
BSN offers clients a Big Monitoring Fabric and a Big Cloud Fabric, both of which are based on bare metal software defined networking principles, with a centralised product-specific controller managing a network of bare-metal Ethernet switches. The controller, the managed switches, and the links connecting to them form the network fabric. BSN defines the software for a centralised controller running on industry standard servers and the operating system that runs on the bare-metal Ethernet switches. The Big Monitoring Fabric, which connects networks with monitoring tools and Big Cloud Fabric, which provides software defined management of switching fabrics in data centres, have won telco and data centre clients in the US, APAC and EMEA. Its main vertical markets are telcos and IT, financial services, government, service providers and higher education.
In addition to the extra funding, BSN announced that it has recruited former NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven and venture capitalist Gary Morgenthaler, who have both steered companies through the transition that comes with rapid expansion.
According to IHS Research, the percentage of users of software defined networking in enterprise communications will grow from 6% to 23% in 2016. It also estimates that spending on data centre networking will reach $13 billion in 2019, up from $781 million in 2014.
“Nobody can ignore the advantages of software defined networking,” said Shawn O’Neill, MD of one Big Switch’s venture partners Silver Lake Waterman.
Big Switch is fundamentally changing the economics of data centre networking and SDN, claimed another investor, Mike Volpi, a partner at Index Ventures. “This financing will fuel significant go-to-market acceleration and geographic expansion,” said Volpi.
Actifio claims Global Manager will slash costs of managing hybrid cloud data
Virtualisation company Actifio claims its new Global Manager can create the same savings for hybrid cloud managers that its earlier systems achieved in product data management.
Actifio’s virtualisation technology inventions aim to cut costs by preventing the endless, expensive replication of massive data sets by each different DevOps team across an enterprise. The new Actifio Global Manager (AGM) offers enterprises and service providers a way to manage data more efficiently across the full lifecycle of applications in hybrid cloud environments.
Actifio claims it can scale thousands of application instances associated with petabytes of data deployed across private data centres, hybrid and public clouds. After an early access programme with 100 beta testers, Actifio has launched AGM on general release, targeting web-scale environments.
Users are evolving to multi-site, multi-appliance environments and use public cloud infrastructure like Amazon AWS as part of their data centre. At the same time data migration, load balancing and migration become increasingly fraught and expensive, according to David Chang, Actifio’s Senior VP of Solutions Development.
The new AGM system will allow companies to save on storage by obviating the need for petabytes of duplicated data, improving on service levels, cutting capital and operational expenses through software defined storage, load balancing, simplifying capacity management, deepening the integration of systems and giving managers a better view of their virtualised estate, according to Actifio.
By helping clients to ‘scale up from one to multiple instances’, Actifio said, its AGM system will manage thousands of applications, petabytes of data, independent of hardware infrastructure or physical location. This, it claims, makes for a painless application data lifecycle across private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructures.
After validation testing of Actifio Global Manager and its RESTful API this year, beta tester Net3 Technologies, a cloud service provider, is building it into its automation platform. “Now we can scale and manage the data infrastructure of clients more easily,” said Jeremy Wolfram, Director of Development at Net3 Technologies.
“Actifio Global Manager unshackles the infrastructure dependency and makes it faster and easier for our largest customers and service provider partners to access and manage their data at global web-scale,” said Actifio founder Ash Ashutosh.
IoT Trends 2016: Healthcare | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #InternetOfThings
Machine-to-machine (M2M) technology has impacted the healthcare sector heavily, unlike the trivial impact of the technology on an array of other verticals. M2M connected healthcare, which operates in an IT ecosystem, enables a range of healthcare service offerings, such as easy sharing of healthcare-related data pertaining to the medical history, personal information, diagnostic results, prescription information, clinical data, and other data regarding patients. The other uses of M2M connected healthcare lie in home monitoring, assisted living, clinical monitoring, and telemedicine.
Weekly Top 10 DevOps Blogs | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Microservices
Welcome to the first top DevOps news roundup of 2016! At the end of last year, we saw some great predictions for 2016.
While we’re excited to kick off the new year, this week’s top posts reminded us to take a second to slow down and really understand the current state of affairs. For example, do you actually know what microservices are – or aren’t? What about DevOps? Does the emphasis still fall mostly on the development side? This week’s top news definitely got the wheels turning and just might get you thinking differently about the hot topics of 2016 as well. Read on for more insights, predictions, and tips from our fellow industry influencers.
As always, stay tuned to all the news coming from @ElectricCloud on DevOps and Continuous Delivery throughout the week and retweet/favorite to get your favorite pieces featured in our weekly recap!