Interested in leveling up on your Cloud Foundry skills? Join IBM for Cloud Foundry Days on June 7 at Cloud Expo New York at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Foundry Days is a free half day educational conference and networking event. Come find out why Cloud Foundry is the industry’s fastest-growing and most adopted cloud application platform.

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Automation is enabling enterprises to design, deploy, and manage more complex, hybrid cloud environments. Yet the people who manage these environments must be trained in and understanding these environments better than ever before. A new era of analytics and cognitive computing is adding intelligence, but also more complexity, to these cloud environments. How smart is your cloud? How smart should it be?
In this power panel at 20th Cloud Expo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists will look at the evolving nature of hybrid cloud, how it affects enterprise IT staffing requirements, and what skills are needed to be successful.

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To say it has been a busy week at Rackspace would be something of an understatement. The company has announced the appointment of Joe Eazor as its new chief executive while also unveiling the acquisition of enterprise app management provider TriCore Solutions.

Eazor joins Rackspace having previously headed up EarthLink. The company had specialised in dial-up internet but moved into the 21st century with the addition of a cloud and networking portfolio, a shift with which Eazor is credited, culminating in a billion dollar merger with Windstream announced in November last year.

The company’s missive indicated no strategic shift this time around, however, with Eazor saying he was ‘excited by the huge market opportunity that Rackspace has’ in managed services.

“Rackspace is uniquely well positioned to take advantage of this trend, as the only provider who can deliver expertise and exceptional customer service for all of the leading public and private clouds, along with managed hosting,” Eazor said in a statement

“Thanks to the strategy Rackspace adopted a few years ago, it’s got the early lead in the managed cloud space,” he added. “My goal here is to build on that foundation and make us the world’s preeminent IT services company.”

This was expanded upon in a blog post titled ‘Why I’m joining Rackspace’ – the valedictory post from outgoing CEO Taylor Rhodes at the beginning of this month was naturally titled ‘Why I’m leaving Rackspace’ – where Eazor discussed the importance of leaving the public arena. “As a private company, we can move more aggressively and rapidly to allocate resources for long-term growth, to enhance our product offerings, to expand into new geographies and make smart acquisitions,” he wrote.

Lo and behold, news on the latter duly arrived with intention to buy TriCore Solutions. The company serves approximately 275 managed service customers and aims to ‘deliver services on infrastructure in any location the customer chooses’. This all rings nicely with Rackspace’s ambition, announcing a partnership with Google to become its first managed cloud services support partner in March, as well as noting ‘strong demand’ for AWS cloud customers, as well as Microsoft and OpenStack private cloud in its Q216 results last August.

The transaction is expected to close in June with financial details not disclosed, while Eazor starts his new role on June 12.

Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original

The use of virtualisation has soared in the past few years. From a test lab technology, it has become one of the mainstream components in the IT industry. According to the 2016 Spiceworks State of IT report, more than 76 percent of organisations are already using virtualisation. Moreover, x86 server virtualisation had an increase of 5.7 percent (about $5.6 billion) in 2016 from the previous year, according to Gartner Inc.

The high-level penetration of virtualisation is due to the many benefits that this technology has to offer. From reduced overhead costs to quicker back-up & recovery, better business continuity to more efficient IT operations, the benefits are many. Virtualisation can be specifically beneficial for SMEs since, with a lesser number of physical hardware, the maintenance cost goes down significantly.

However, in order to make virtualisation successful, it must be integrated with certain other tools, especially project management tools. Organizations can’t afford to shut down the servers or hardware components to implement the virtualisation technology, even for one day. This is because they are the heart and soul of the IT projects and shutting them down can have a cascading effect on the business processes. Therefore, project management teams must take an active role in the virtualisation process and time the technology implementations efficiently. Project management tools such as Workzone and Scoro will help your project teams determine the status of the IT projects and successfully plan implementation of virtualisation to ensure minimal disruption of the business processes.    

If you are a small business owner and want to implement virtualisation, here are 3 best practices to follow:

Virtualisation audit

Instead of random virtualisation of servers, desktops and other hardware units, small business owners must first identify the business goals that virtualisation will help them achieve. A full IT infrastructure audit is necessary to decide the extent of virtualisation that needs to be undertaken. Infrastructure audit also includes understanding how virtualisation should be implemented, setting the right expectations and calculating the ROI. It is best to start with virtualisation of small applications that would be easy to handle if things go wrong and move to other mission-critical projects.

For instance, if you are planning server virtualisation for your organisation, then as a part of the IT audit you need to consider the following:

• Workload capacity: Servers are virtualized since they are often underutilised. Virtualisation of servers allows more than one application to run on the same server. Since the utilisation increases, you need to consider the workload capacity to ensure efficiency and high performance. Moreover, not all applications can run on virtual servers, so you need to decide which applications are suitable for running on virtual servers.
• Systems architecture: In this phase, the business owner needs to factor in the current and future business needs. Businesses need to scale their IT components depending upon the demand and work pressure. In doing so, you need to consider the CPU usage, bandwidth requirements, and the related costs.
• Security: Security issues need to be focused on since each layer of virtualisation increases the potential vulnerability or threat.
• Operational processes: Virtualisation changes the way jobs are being done within an organisation. So you need to decide how the virtual servers are going to be monitored, maintained, the kind of training employees would require to adapt to the new environment, etc.

Similar in-depth audit needs to be done for all the hardware that need to be virtualised. Scalability is the biggest strengths of a virtual environment, so you can easily be persuaded into creating endless virtual resources. But this may lead to overburdening of the physical units and make management very complicated. So understand your needs before embarking on virtualisation.

Backup must be your top priority

Back-up is important for physical and virtual systems alike. You can either back-up the entire virtual machine or the data contained in it. Backing-up data is a lot easier and allows rapid recovery compared to backing-up the entire system. Thanks to the number of software packages that make physical and virtual machine back-up easier for the small businesses.

However, traditional back-up processes might not work for virtual systems. However, back-up of the virtual systems can be performed in the following ways:

• Manual back-up. Copy the files stored in the virtual machine manually.
• Cloning the virtual machine. Give descriptive names to the clones and save them in a destination dedicated for back-ups.
• Including virtual machine files in the automatic Time Machine backups. This can be done by editing the General settings in the virtual machine.
• Using third-party back-up software.

Data or machine back-up must be done regularly to make sure the important data and information is easily available even if there is a disaster.

Know the limitations of virtualisation

Before you virtualise all your old physical systems and deploy a number of virtual servers within your IT infrastructure, you must understand the limitations of virtualisation. The limitations are very less compared to the advantages it offers, but they should be taken into consideration before implementing virtualisation within your organisation.

The main limitations are associated with server virtualisation. This is because virtualisation divides the processing power, thus if large databases are stored on the virtual servers that involve a lot of transaction processing, all other processes might get slowed down. Thus the efficiency goes down. Moreover, if the physical server unit fails for some reason, all the virtual components become unavailable. A probable solution can be using two physical servers (with the same configuration) and a centralized storage for all the virtualised components but it becomes cost-intensive and might not be feasible for small businesses with tight budgets.

Finally, setting up and managing a virtual environment is not as easy as it might sound. You may also need to employ skilled manpower to look after the virtual set-up. Therefore, it is a must that you start small scale virtualisation and then move onto more complex set-ups when you become familiar with the new system.

Conclusion

Virtualisation is set to become an even more significant IT component in the near future, therefore businesses both small and big should leverage on this technology. Transitioning to a virtual environment can be very beneficial for your organisation, but you need to know about the virtualisation best practices to reap the best benefits.

Read more: How virtualisation is a vital stepping stone to the cloud

Machine learning, AI, cognitive computing, natural language understanding, image recognition, pattern matching, autonomous devices – these are just a few of 2017’s loosely defined catchall phrases. But in practice, they each refer to a significant field of study that is guaranteed to have an impact on the way people live and how business is done. So here are five things that you, as the leader of an organization that is singularly focused on creating shareholder value (however you define it), need to know

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Machine learning, AI, cognitive computing, natural language understanding, image recognition, pattern matching, autonomous devices – these are just a few of 2017’s loosely defined catchall phrases. But in practice, they each refer to a significant field of study that is guaranteed to have an impact on the way people live and how business is done. So here are five things that you, as the leader of an organization that is singularly focused on creating shareholder value (however you define it), need to know

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SYS-CON Events announced today that EARP will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. «We are a software house, so we perfectly understand challenges that other software houses face in their projects. We can augment a team, that will work with the same standards and processes as our partners’ internal teams. Our teams will deliver the same quality within the required time and budget just as our partners’ teams would do. It helps our partners to expand their operations with our forces.»

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in compute, storage and networking technologies, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI), the leading innovator in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology, is a premier provider of advanced server Building Block Solutions® for Data Center, Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT, Hadoop/Big Data, HPC and Embedded Systems worldwide. Supermicro is committed to protecting the environment through its “We Keep IT Green®” initiative and provides customers with the most energy-efficient, environmentally friendly solutions available on the market.

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In his keynote at @ThingsExpo, Chris Matthieu, Director of IoT Engineering at Citrix and co-founder and CTO of Octoblu, focused on building an IoT platform and company. He provided a behind-the-scenes look at Octoblu’s platform, business, and pivots along the way (including the Citrix acquisition of Octoblu).

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