Independent Health has further extended advanced testing benefits to ongoing apps production and ongoing performance monitoring by reusing proven performance scripts and replaying synthetic transactions that mimic user experience.

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In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Robert Doyle, lead architect at eCube Systems, will examine the issues and need for an agile infrastructure and show the advantages of capturing developer knowledge in an exportable file for migration into production.
He will introduce the use of NXTmonitor, a next-generation DevOps tool that captures application environments, dependencies and start/stop procedures in a portable configuration file with an easy-to-use GUI. In addition to capturing configuration information between Development, Test and Production, the case study shows how NXTmonitor can create dependencies, automate health scripts and scalable performance groups to handle peak production loads.

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From EMEA to APAC to the EU, growth in mobile devices and consumption of Internet bandwidth have grown at an incredible rate. One of the features of mobile devices that consumers like best is the ability to have their experience tailored to their geographic location, demographic profile, behaviors and preferences. These capabilities have greatly enhanced the user experience by providing users with information that is most relevant to them, whether that means finding the closest gas station, locating the best sushi restaurant within a city block or finding the best deal on a new pair of shoes while riding the bus to work.

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Without a clear strategy for cost control and an architecture designed with cloud services in mind, costs and operational performance can quickly get out of control. To avoid multiple architectural redesigns requires extensive thought and planning. Boundary (now part of BMC) launched a new public-facing multi-tenant high resolution monitoring service on Amazon AWS two years ago, facing challenges and learning best practices in the early days of the new service.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Michael Moran, a Senior Architect, TrueSight R&D, at BMC Software, will share those lessons learned and how to balance cost control with the many choices of service, storage, and compute paradigms.

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(c)iStock.com/monts11

A new digital era is here, and cloud-based technologies are colliding with traditional IT systems and hardware, driving rapid changes to infrastructure and business requirements. As organisations realise the challenges of staying apace of technological developments to meet customer demands, IT outsourcing is gaining traction. During the 2015-2019 period, Research and Markets estimates the global IT outsourcing market will grow at a CAGR of 5.84%.

The spectrum of outsourced IT support options ranges from remote support to a dedicated on-site presence. If you’re considering IT outsourcing, how do you know which option works best for your business?

Remote support

As the name suggests, remote support involves the use of remote control tools (either permanent or web based). Server support tends to use permanently installed agents to provide remote control without a customer presence. Remote support may also include services running from the cloud, which can range from cloud-hosted infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to hosted software solutions to full disaster recovery as a service (DraaS). From a support point of view, cloud servers are typically treated as normal customer servers, with the difference being that the cloud hosting company supports the hardware (which is normally virtual) and the IT support provider supports everything running on the hardware (e.g. operating systems).

Remote support usually comes at a lower cost, as engineers can work efficiently without incurring travel expenses. However, lower investment doesn’t necessarily equal less engineer availability. Some IT support vendors are able to employ 24/7 support personnel, giving you the option of round-the-clock support.

One of the drawbacks of remote support is that it depends on the connectivity of the permanently installed agent. If the device has no network connection or fails to boot, then remote support is difficult to provide without the addition of remote management cards. If the customer receives remote support via the phone, there’s also the risk of fraud, since criminals have been known to pose as support engineers to gain access to an organisation’s systems. Before granting access to any system, it’s important to establish that the engineer on the phone is from the company providing support.

On-site support

IT support provided by an engineer physically on the customer’s site can be broken down into two categories:

– Remotely based on-site support. This method involves the support engineer travelling to the customer’s site to perform the required work.

– Dedicated on-site support. This method entails a support engineer being directly embedded at the customer’s facility, working independently or alongside the customer’s IT department. Dedicated support can be provided full time, or part time as required.  

Unlike remote support, on-site support doesn’t rely on device connectivity or management interfaces. Support can be provided on all devices, both with and without connectivity issues, including devices failing to boot. Additionally, an engineer can more easily troubleshoot faults when sat in front of the device. Some issues can even be diagnosed by the sound a machine is making rather than an actual problem on the screen.

Of course, having field engineers travel on-site will add additional costs to the support contract. You can minimise these expenses by ensuring you work with an IT support provider that has engineers located near each location requiring support. 

Support will be most expensive if you choose to utilise a dedicated on-site engineer, as that person has to be paid whether or not their services are required (for this reason, dedicated support is less common than other support methods).

Because on-site support relies on the customer being available to work with the engineer, out-of-hours support can be difficult and normally includes an additional fee to cover overtime.

Which is right for you?

On-site support is not a one size fits all solution. Every organisation has its own requirements, which are influenced by industry, company size, staff skills and many more factors.

Generally speaking, however, remote support is a feasible option for companies of all sizes. Larger companies will often have their own IT staff who provide the on-site presence, meaning a remote support contract is a better fit (although these companies do often outsource their help desk or first-line support as well).

Smaller customers sometimes try to cut costs by only contracting remote support, but if something goes wrong, they often need someone to go on-site, especially if they have servers. For this reason, some small customers will pay for site visits as needed. Even if the customer is using servers provisioned by an external cloud provider – and IaaS is popular with small- to medium-sized businesses – an on-site support contract is still an option. The on-site portion would simply be provided for the workstations and other infrastructure (network switches, storage devices, etc.). The ideal scenario, however, is to receive cloud services and IT support from a single supplier.

Many organisations, regardless of size, occasionally find it necessary to contract separately charged project work for networking, cabling, server infrastructure and hardware projects.

A good IT support provider is flexible in its approach and will assist you in fixing problems, while also acting as a source of advice for improving your IT environment so you can meet technology demands and satisfy your customers’ needs. 

(c)iStock.com/JasonDoiy

Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief technical officer, has claimed that “Amazon’s lead is over” in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space after Oracle announced the launch of next generation data centres at its OpenWorld event in San Francisco.

The event came days after the software giant released its first quarter 2017 financial results, in which Oracle announced that its cloud sales were nudging $1 billion. Of that number, more than 80% was in the platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) bucket.

Consequently, the key theme of Ellison’s keynote was around Oracle’s push in IaaS. “I’ve got a lot of respect for what Amazon’s accomplished, especially in the area of infrastructure,” Ellison told delegates. “They were the innovator in this space, and I have a lot of respect for them. But now, we’re aggressively moving into infrastructure, and we have a new generation of data centres that we’re building around the world.”

The next-gen data centres were referenced by Ellison when speaking to analysts last week – as well as the requisite pops at Amazon and Workday, which Oracle sees as the main rivals in infrastructure and applications respectively – and the Redwood firm promises its latest offering has twice as many cores, twice as much memory, four times as much storage, and 10 times the IO capacity of AWS’ offerings.

Picture credit: Oracle

“We have a modern architecture for infrastructure where there’s no single point of failure,” Ellison explained. “Faults are isolated, therefore faults are tolerated. If we lose the data centre, then you won’t even know about it.”

Among the other statistics which Oracle tossed out to the audience included bare metal cloud servers claimed to be more than 11 times faster and 20% cheaper than competitors’ efforts. Ellison pointed to the firm’s six key design tenets of cost, reliability, performance, standards, compatibility and security – “some things never change” – and added that the company was “very proud” of its second generation IaaS and intended to aggressively feature it over the next couple of fiscal years.

While such bullish statements are not atypical, eyebrows are more than likely going to be raised, particularly given current market research on the cloud infrastructure market. Synergy Research’s analysis, from as recently as August, argued that between them, AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google owned more than half of the global market.

Amazon on its own holds more than 30%, compared to nearest competitor Microsoft with just over 10%, with the four companies continuing to grow faster than the overall market. Oracle, according to Synergy, sits in the next 20 vendors – including HPE, Rackspace, and Salesforce – whose combined market share is smaller than Amazon’s.

Elsewhere, among the many products launched by the Redwood firm include Oracle FastConnect, which aims to help customers connect their data centre to the cloud more easily, Oracle Ravello Cloud, which is claimed to be the first cloud service which can run VMware and Kernel-based virtual machine workloads in the public cloud without any changes, and the general availability of Docker-friendly Oracle Container Cloud Service.

It was a Monday. I was reading the Internet. Okay, I was skimming feeds. Anyway, I happened across a title that intrigued me, “Stateful Apps and Containers: Squaring the Circle.” It had all the right buzzwords (containers) and mentioned state, a topic near and dear to this application networking-oriented gal, so I happily clicked on through.
Turns out that Stateful Apps are not Stateful Apps. Seriously.

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The many IoT deployments around the world are busy integrating smart devices and sensors into their enterprise IT infrastructures. Yet all of this technology – and there are an amazing number of choices – is of no use without the software to gather, communicate, and analyze the new data flows. Without software, there is no IT.
In this power panel at @ThingsExpo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists will look at the protocols that communicate data and the emerging data analytics that bring its full value to the enterprise. The era of Big Data and «Little Big Data» has arrived, and will soon be eating an enterprise near you!

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Roundee / LinearHub will exhibit at the WebRTC Summit at @ThingsExpo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
LinearHub provides Roundee Service, a smart platform for enterprise video conferencing with enhanced features such as automatic recording and transcription service.
Slack users can integrate Roundee to their team via Slack’s App Directory, and ‘/roundee’ command lets your video conference start right from your Slack channel. Roundee gives you all the content details of your video conference to your Slack channel.

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