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Hyper-converged all flash infrastructure vendor Gridstore and application lifecycle management platform provider DCHQ have merged to launch HyperGrid, which is claimed to be the industry’s first ‘hyper-converged infrastructure as a service’ (HCIaaS) offering.

To translate, the new HyperGrid product aims to combined hyper-converged infrastructure with a pay as you consume pricing model. “HCIaaS is the first solution that bridges the needs of traditional and cloud-native developers with IT operations, delivering an AWS-like environment for your enterprise that enables complete DevOps”, the press release trumpets.

DCHQ, now HyperForm as part of the move, aims to manage existing enterprise and cloud-native applications seamlessly across any cloud or container infrastructure, including VMware, OpenStack, Azure and AWS among others. Amjad Afanah, CEO and co-founder of DCHQ, says the company is ‘thrilled’ to be part of the HyperGrid technology. “HyperGrid solves a real pain point for our customers struggling with innovation in the digital economy,” said Afanah.

“Our combined platform will dramatically simplify IT operations and help enterprises deliver applications faster and cheaper than going to the public cloud,” he added.

“Customers are demanding that vendors deliver app-centric, app-optimised, and app-aware infrastructure as a service with no upfront cost,” said Namiran Teymourian, chairman and CEO of HyperGrid. “They want to be able to use their choice of hypervisor, container or bare metal and they want the ability to build, deploy, update and manage applications at the push of a button.”

Hyper-converged is evidently an area in which vendors increasingly like to play; take Dell, whose takeover of EMC has recently been approved by shareholders, shuffling the pack and reselling EMC, VCE and VMware, as well as its own products. According to a recent Computer Weekly report, Nutanix, Maxta, Atlantis, Scale, and Simplivity are among the challengers in the market.

You can find out more about HyperGrid here.

(c)iStock.com/Sjoerd van der Wal

A survey of 200 IT professionals surveyed by IT and cloud operations provider NetEnrich has revealed that 70% are using containers today, but integration with existing IT environments remains a challenge.

The research found that while seven in 10 use container technology, with another 21% of respondents indicating they plan to move soon, more than half (55%) admitted integrating containers into current IT systems was the biggest issue. Security concerns (53% of respondents) and managing containers to avoid sprawl and cost overruns (47%) were also highly cited, along with a lack of experience in managing container technologies (42%).

The latter was a particularly interesting point; two thirds of respondents describe learning the likes of Docker, Kubernetes and Mesos as ‘moderately challenging’. CoreOS (33% of respondents) was the most popular main container technology, ahead of Kubernetes (32%), Docker (25%), and Joyent (11%).

In terms of benefits, improving flexibility for IT infrastructure was the most highly cited, according to 63% of those polled. Overall IT cost savings (53%), increased sped for developers launching code (51%), and greater responsiveness to business needs (40%) were also noted.

“The results of our survey indicate that container adoption is on the rise and leading to cost savings and efficiency gains for many IT organisations,” said Chris Joseph, vice president of product management and marketing at NetEnrich. “However, companies are still grappling with issues such as integration, security and management when it comes to container tech.

“This will likely continue until the skillsets of internal IT staff catch up to the market. In the meantime, companies are benefiting from the support of outside consultants and service providers,” Joseph added.

The research confirms trends that have been apparent for some time; container technology is infiltrating the enterprise, but with teething problems attached. Writing for this publication in April, MongoDB’s Mat Keep argued the key to getting the most out of each technology. “These are not technologies that were designed with a grand plan,” he wrote.

“Going from solo performer with a few containers to conducting a whole ‘orchestra’ is a big step but as containers become more widely adopted it will become standard. Play around now so you can get familiar with the different options and know which one will help you solve your business problems.”

This is a no-hype, pragmatic post about why I think you should consider architecting your next project the way SOA and/or microservices suggest. No matter if it’s a greenfield approach or if you’re in dire need of refactoring. Please note: considering still keeps open the option of not taking that approach. After reading this, you will have a better idea about whether building multiple small components instead of a single, large component makes sense for your project.
This post assumes that you have experience with software architecture and services (you’ll find some words about my experience on the bottom of this post). I won’t go into the details of Wikipedia’s or Martin Fowler’s definitions per se. Much more I will talk about what microservices and/or SOA could and should do for your project.

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Node.js and io.js are increasingly being used to run JavaScript on the server side for many types of applications, such as websites, real-time messaging and controllers for small devices with limited resources. For DevOps it is crucial to monitor the whole application stack and Node.js is rapidly becoming an important part of the stack in many organizations. Sematext has historically had a strong support for monitoring big data applications such as Elastic (aka Elasticsearch), Cassandra, Solr, Spark, Hadoop, and HBase, as well as more traditional databases, web servers like Nginx, Nginx Plus and Apache, Java applications, cache servers like Redis and Memcached, messaging middleware like everyone’s darling Kafka, etc. With such rapid adoption of Node.js and now io.js, we’d be remiss not to add performance monitoring, alerting, and anomaly detection for them in SPM!

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Traditional IT, great for stable systems of record, is struggling to cope with newer, agile systems of engagement requirements coming straight from the business.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, William Morrish, General Manager of Product Sales at Interoute, outlined ways of exploiting new architectures to enable both systems and building them to support your existing platforms, with an eye for the future. Technologies such as Docker and the hyper-convergence of computing, networking and storage creates a platform for consolidation, migration and enabling digital transformation.

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WebRTC is bringing significant change to the communications landscape that will bridge the worlds of web and telephony, making the Internet the new standard for communications. Cloud9 took the road less traveled and used WebRTC to create a downloadable enterprise-grade communications platform that is changing the communication dynamic in the financial sector.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Leo Papadopoulos, CTO of Cloud9, discussed the importance of WebRTC and how it enables companies to focus on building intellectual property into their platforms that support customer needs, while also providing the performance, service, and support levels expected by Fortune 100 companies.

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Machine learning, cloud services, and artificial intelligence-enabled human agents are all combining to change the way that companies can order services, buy goods, and even hire employees and contractors.
To learn more about how new trends are driving innovation into invoicing and spend management, please join me in welcoming Pierre Mitchell, Chief Research Officer and Managing Director at Azul Partners, where he leads the Spend Matters Procurement research activities. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

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Machine learning, cloud services, and artificial intelligence-enabled human agents are all combining to change the way that companies can order services, buy goods, and even hire employees and contractors.
To learn more about how new trends are driving innovation into invoicing and spend management, please join me in welcoming Pierre Mitchell, Chief Research Officer and Managing Director at Azul Partners, where he leads the Spend Matters Procurement research activities. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

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