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Dublin, Interop, News & Analysis, Taqua, Telco Cloud

Interop opens European telco cloud hub in Dublin

wireless area networking cloudVirtual infrastructure specialist Interop Technologies has opened a European HQ and network operations centre in Dublin to support the launch of Europe’s first end-to-end cloud-based IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) core and IP services suite, reports Telecoms.com.

The CorePlusXSM suite aims to give operators a platform to run Internet protocol (IP) services and exploit the opportunities of LTE networks, according to Interop. It’s needed because launching these IP services in traditional turnkey configuration is too problematic and expensive for operators. Interop said it will make offering new services, such as Wi-Fi calling, VoLTE and rich communication services (RCS), a lot easier. Interop partnered with voice-over-Wi-Fi specialist Taqua to develop the suite.

“We developed CorePlusXSM to solve real market problems for operators burdened by the extraordinary cost, complexity and expertise requirements associated with IMS and advanced IP services,” said Interop Technologies CEO John Dwyer.

“VoWiFi is an important service offering that operators can utilize to solve real-world coverage issues immediately,” said Eric Pratt, Taqua’s CEO. “We’re working with Interop to reduce the barrier of entry to advanced IP voice and messaging services for European service providers with a robust WiFi calling solution they can deploy now.”

GSMA figures show that European mobile operators invested €155 billion between 2007 and 2014, according to Dwyer, and it estimates that another €170 billion of investment is needed for the following six years. This level of network investment is the catalyst for the IP Revolution and the European telecom market is preparing the path for the all-IP network explosion, said Dwyer.

Interop Technologies’ plan is to virtualise the IP Revolution so operators of all types and sizes can participate, he said. Interop is in the deployment phase with ‘several’ customers and plans to announce the roll-out of a major project later this year, it said.

As CorePlusXSM is a complete end-to-end virtualised solution, operators can quickly and cheaply launch IP services on 2G and 3G networks, while laying the path for future advanced service evolution, according to Interop. The reduction in cost, complexity and labour intensity gives companies a quick start, without limiting their options for adding new services as the network, business and subscriber demand evolves, according to Interop.

compliance, managed security, News & Analysis, Rackspace

Rackspace launches managed security and compliance service for enterprise cloud clients

Security concept with padlock icon on digital screenRackspace has announced new managed security and compliance assistance services to protect businesses and mitigate the risk of cyber threats. These services will give Rackspace clients ‘holistic’ coverage across cover complex, multi-cloud environments, it claims.

The service will provide consultation and tailored security using Rackspace’s inhouse expertise. It can both improve security while cutting the cost of vigilance, Rackspace claimed.

The Rackspace Managed Security offering is to be backed by round the clock support from the Customer Security Operations Center (CSOC) at Rackspace headquarters and will open in October. The service comprises four elements: host and network protection, vulnerability management, threat intelligence and compliance assistance.

Host and Network Protection will protect against zero-day and non-malware attacks as well as traditional compromise tactics. Security Analytics uses a security information and event management (SIEM) system paired with big data analytics to collect and analyse security data from the customer’s environment. As part of its Vulnerability Management service Rackspace will scan its clients’ environments and tailor its responses to estimated threats. Meanwhile, its Threat Intelligence will use fuse information from 20 feeds with Rackspace’s own internal data to constantly redraw the changing threat landscape.

All this information will help clients meet their governance objectives, as part of Rackspace’s Compliance Assistance service, which offers detailed proof of configuration hardening and monitoring, patch monitoring and user observance, the service provider said.

This information, in tandem with detail about file integrity, will help cloud service managers and CIOs to keep on top of their mounting compliance challenge, claimed Brian Kelly, chief security officer at Rackspace.

“Cyber-attacks are the new normal for companies,” said Kelly. It will be a lot cheaper and quicker to use Rackspace to manage cloud services, said Kelly. “We have 16 years of first-hand knowledge managing IT infrastructure and direct experience with today’s complex threats.”

administrators, Database, developers, Internet of Things, IoT, JSON, MapR, News & Analysis

MapR claims JSON IoT development breakthrough

Cloud databaseEnterprise software vendor MapR has unveiled plans to slash the workload of IoT developers and administrators by cutting the complexity of managing its NoSQL databases.

The key to this simplification, it says, is in more creative use of the JavaScript Object Notification (JSON) format, which it claims has the potential to make significant improvements in both database scalability and the analysis of the information they contain.

“We’re seeing big changes in the way applications are developed and how data is consumed,” said MapR’s chief marketing officer Jack Norris, “the underlying data format is the key to making information sharing easier.”

Bringing out the advantages of JSON makes administration easier, according to Norris, because users can make changes easily in a database built on documents. This in turn helps developers when they are planning applications, because it is easier to create a user friendly system. Tweaking JSON will benefit system builders in their own work too, Norris argued, since a document database can now be given enterprise grade scalability, reliability and integrated analytics.

The organisational improvements include the ability to personalise and deliver better online shopping experiences, reduce risk and prevent fraud in real-time, improve manufacturing efficiencies and cut costs. Savings will come from preventing cluster sprawl, eliminating data silos and lowering the cost of ownership of data management, claims MapR. Meanwhile it has promised a productivity dividend from continuous analytics of real-time data.

The MapR-DB supports the Open JSON Application Interface (OJAITM), which is designed to be a general purpose JSON access layer across databases, file systems and message streams, enabling a flexible and unified interface to work with big data, claims MapR.

The addition of a document database capacity extends the NoSQL MapR-DB to cover more types of unstructured business data, said one analyst. This could make it faster and easier to build big data applications, without the burden of shuffling data around first.

“MapR continues to build on the innovative data platform at the core of its Hadoop distribution,” said Nik Rouda, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.

Analytics, HDS, Internet of Things, News & Analysis

Hitachi Data Systems unveils new automated IoT policing system

A new IoT system can predict crime by reading social media and analysing the public’s movements, claims Hitachi data Systems (HDS).

Hybrid cloud systems designed by HDS are to offer new automated policing systems, including predictive crime analytics and video management systems. The new public safety technologies were unveiled yesterday by HDS at the ASIS International Annual Seminar and Exhibits in Anaheim, California.

The new Hitachi Visualization Suite (HVS) (version 4.5) now includes Predictive Crime Analytics (PCA) and version 2.0 of the Video Management Platform (VMP).

The PCA predicts crime by analysing live social media and Internet data feeds to gather intelligent insights which enable the users of the system to make ‘highly accurate crime predictions’, claims HDS. Both social media and video camera data will be analysed for both historical crime and to predict potential incidents.

The HVS is a hybrid cloud-based platform that integrates disparate data and video assets from public safety systems, such as computer-aided emergency services dispatch, number plate readers and gunshot sensors. The real time info is then presented geospatially to monitors at law enforcement agencies in order to improve intelligence, support their investigations and make policing more efficient, says HDS. The geospatial visualizations will also provide better historical crime data, by presenting information on crime in several forms, including heat maps.

Blending real-time event data from public safety systems with historical and contextual crime data allows agencies to conduct more thorough analysis, using spatial and temporal prediction algorithms, that could help solve many hitherto unsolvable crimes. It could also provide underlying risk factors that generate or mitigate crime, says HDS.

The system uses natural language processing for topic intensity modelling using social media networks which, HDS claims, will deliver highly accurate crime predictions.

The systems will ultimately create faster police response times when situations develop, according to Mark Jules, HDS’s VP of Public Safety and Data Visualization. “Today, we are empowering them with the ability to take a proactive approach to crime and terrorism,” said Jules, “Public safety is a fundamental pillar of our vision for smart cities and societies.”

Cloudera, Hadoop, News & Analysis, Open Source

Cloudera announces tighter security measures for Hadoop

Cloud securityCloudera has announced a new open source project that aims to use real-time analytical applications in Hadoop and an open source security layer for unified access control enforcement.

Kudu, an in-memory store for Hadoop, aims to give developers more choice and stop them from having their options limited. Currently developers must choose between fast analytics with HDFS or updating data with HBase. Combining the two, according to Cloudera, can be potentially fatal for any developers that try, since the systems are both highly complex.

Cloudera says Kudu eliminates the complexities involved in processes like time series analysis, machine data analytics and online reporting. It does this by supporting high-performance sequential and random reads and writes, enabling fast analytics on changing data.

Cloudera co-authored Kudu with Intel, which helped it make better use of in-memory hardware and Intel’s 3D XPoint technology. Other contributors included Xiaomi, AtScale, Splice Machine and Zoomdata.

“Our infrastructure team has been working with Cloudera to develop Kudu, taking advantage of its unique ability to support columnar scans and fast inserts and updates to continue to expand our Hadoop ecosystem footprint,” Baoqiu Cui, chief architect at smartphone developer Xiaomi, told CIO magazine. “Using Kudu, alongside interactive SQL tools like Impala, has allowed us to build a next-generation data analytics platform for real-time analytics and online reporting.”

Meanwhile a new core security for Hadoop has been launched. RecordService aims to provide unified access control enforcement for Hadoop by enforcing role based access controls. It acts as a new layer that sits between Hadoop’s storage and computing engines and aims to consistently enforce the role-based access controls defined by Sentry. RecordService also provides dynamic data masking across Hadoop, protecting sensitive data as it is accessed.

“Security is a critical part of Hadoop, but for it to evolve the security needs to become universal across the platform. With RecordService, the Hadoop community fulfils the vision of unified fine-grained access controls for every Hadoop access path,” said Mike Olson, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Cloudera.

Apache, Azure, Database, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Ubuntu

Microsoft selects Ubuntu for first Linux-based Azure offering

AzureMicrosoft has announced plans to simplify Big Data and widen its use through Azure.

In a blog post, T K Rengarajan, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Data Platforms, described how the expanded Microsoft Azure Data Lake Store, available in preview later this year, will provide a single repository that captures data of any size, type and speed without forcing changes to applications as data scales. In the store, data can be securely shared for collaboration and is accessible for processing and analytics from HDFS applications and tools.

Another new addition is Azure Data Lake Analytics, a service built on Apache YARN that dynamically scales, which Microsoft says will stop people being side tracked from work by needing to know about distributed architecture. This service, available in preview later this year, will include U-SQL, a language that unifies the benefits of SQL with the expressive power of user code. U-SQL’s scalable distributed querying is intended to help users analyse data in the store and across SQL Servers in Azure, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has selected Ubuntu for its first Linux-based Azure offering. The Hadoop-based big data service offering, HDInsight, will run on Canonical’s open source browser Ubuntu.

Azure HDInsight uses a range of open source analytics engines including Hive, Spark, HBase and Storm. Microsoft says it is now on general release with a 99.9 per cent uptime service level agreement.

Meanwhile Azure Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio will provide an integrated development environment that aims to ‘dramatically’ simplify authoring, debugging and optimization for processing and analytics at any scale, according to Rengarajan. “Leading Hadoop applications that span security, governance, data preparation and analytics can be easily deployed from the Azure Marketplace on top of Azure Data Lake,” said Rengarajan.

Azure Data Lake removes the complexities of ingesting and storing all of your data while making it faster to get up and running with batch, streaming, and interactive analytics, said Rengarajan.

China Unicom, Datacentre, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud, Telefonica

China Unicom and Telefónica in global data centre sharing agreement

Reflections are seen on a logo of Spain's telecommunications giant Telefonica in MadridTelefónica and China Unicom have agreed to share their international data centre capacity for multinational clients across Europe, The Americas and Asia.

The initial agreement covers three major data centres from each operator but, the companies say, this could be the first step towards larger scale cloud cooperation.

The pooling of resources means China Unicom can support customers seeking to expand into Europe and The Americas while Telefónica can strengthen its proposition across Asia.The cloud computing aspect of the agreement includes IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) with virtual servers and multi-cloud solutions.

China Unicom’s customers can now benefit from Telefónica’s data centre presence in Sao Paolo in Brazil, Miami in the US and Alcalá de Henares in Madrid, Spain. The extent of the partnership will expand as Telefónica commits additional investment towards new infrastructure, facilities and multi-cloud solutions, it says. Conversely, Telefónica can use the cloud capacity of China Unicom’s data centres located across China in Langfang, Shanghai and Chongqing. This, it says, means it can offer end-to-end service delivery for its multinational customers.

China Unicom’s data centre provides international connectivity services including virtual private networks, multi protocol label switching (MPLS) and Global LAN. Internet access for customers’ servers can be offered as an option to the standard service. Every China Unicom Point of Presence comes with ‘meet me’ room services. The mutual colocation service also offers local support for customer equipment.

Telefónica has a presence in 21 countries and a customer base of 329 million accesses around the world, with its major markets being in Spain, Europe and Latin America. Telecom operator China Unicom offers mobile broadband (WCDMA, LTE FDD, TD-LTE), fixed-line broadband, GSM, fixed-line local access, ICT, data communications and related services. It has a total of 439 million subscribers.

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Spiceworks, Support

Spiceworks launches free cloud-based help desk application and monitor

SupportSpiceworks has announced a free cloud-based one size fits all Help Desk system for enterprises. It promises to give IT professionals a custome made system with unlimited admin and end-user seats, no hosting or storage costs, constant updates, free support and access to a community of millions of peers.

This plan is to for IT professionals to waste less time on mundane tasks and more time supporting their organisations, says Spiceworks. The system has custom dashboards to give instant overviews of help desk operations and rapid analysis of events within the cloud. Auto-assignment helps IT professionals automate their help desk system with rules that assign tickets to specific technicians. This could speed the process of fixing faults and cut the time spent managing tickets, says Spiceworks.

User portals will allow end-users to submit help desk requests through a website instead of email. The option for customised user portals could help improve usability by personalising help desk experiences for end-users and clients, says Spiceworks.

“We have four IT professionals using Spiceworks’ cloud-based Help Desk system to support 27 company locations across Arkansas and Missouri,” said Galen Ransone, IT technician at Greenway Equipment. “It’s already proved effective in supporting employees who need technology assistance. The fact that it’s free makes it even more enticing.”

Spiceworks also introduced a new beta version of its mobile application for road warriors who might want to manage their cloud-based Help Desk through Google Android and Apple tablets and smartphones. Spiceworks has also launched new features and functions for its Network Monitor and cloud-based Help Desk solutions for IT professionals, which keep tabs on server and network devices in real-time.

Nicole Tanzillo, director of help desk product marketing at Spiceworks, explained that the initiative is in response to demand from clients. “IT professionals have spoken and they want great tools designed for them that work,” said Tanzillo.

Criteo, data centre, Datacentre, France, Hadoop, News & Analysis

Criteo to build giant private big data platform on Huawei servers

datacentre cloudPerformance marketing specialist Criteo has chosen Huawei to supply 700 servers for its new Hadoop Cluster data centre in Pantin, Seine St Denis, near Paris.

Huawei won the tender after its FusionServer RH2288H V3 impressed in a strict comparative study, it says. The servers were chosen for their abundance of high-capacity disks, which give the Criteo data centre a better storage density and cut energy consumption by 10 per cent, it claims.

The new Hadoop platform of Huawei servers will boost Criteo’s processing performance by 30 per cent, it’s claimed. In the first stage of the project, the 700 machines in the Paris data centre outperformed Criteo’s Amsterdam data centre, in terms of computing power and storage, even though the Dutch site has 1,200 servers at its disposal, according to Criteo’s Senior Engineering Manager for Infrastructure Operations, Matthieu Blumberg.

“This is the biggest private Hadoop platform in Europe as of today,” said Blumberg, “Huawei has undeniably good ICT solutions and extensive knowledge of Big Data. We were really impressed.”

As a result, Criteo now plans to install up to 5,000 servers, taking up 350 square meters of rack space, at its Pantin data centre. The total power consumption will rise to 2 MW as the power of the Huawei server estate grows, according to Blumberg.

“We are proud to have built this partnership with Criteo: this is the kind of project we love to develop,” said Robert Yang, Head of the Huawei France Enterprise Business Group.

Apache, Hadoop, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Research, Spark

Apache Spark reportedly outgrowing Hadoop as users move to cloud

cloud competition trophyApache Spark is breaking down the barriers between data scientists and engineers, making machine learning easier and is out growing Hadoop as an open source framework for cloud computing developments, a new report claims.

The 2015 Spark User Survey was conducted by Databricks, the company founded by the creators of Apache Spark.

Spark adoption is growing quickly because users are finding it easy to use, reliably fast, and aligned for future growth in analytics, the report claims, with 91 per cent of the survey citing performance as their reason for adoption. Other reasons given were ease of programming (77 per cent), easy deployment (71 per cent) advanced analytics (64 per cent) and the capacity for real time streaming (52 per cent).

The report, based on the findings of a survey of 1,400 respondents Spark stakeholders, claims that the number of Spark users with no Hadoop components doubled between 2014 and 2015. The study set out to identify how the data analytics and processing engine is being used by developers and organisations.

The Spark growth claim is based on the finding that 48 per cent of users are running Spark in standalone mode while 40 per cent run it on Hadoop’s YARN operating system. At present 11 per cent of users are running Spark on Apache Mesos. The survey also found that 51 per cent of respondents run Spark on a public cloud.

The number of contributors to Spark rose from 315 to 600 contributors in the last 12 months, which the report authors claim makes this the most active open source project in Big Data. Additionally, more than 200 organisations contribute code to Spark, which they claims makes it ‘one of’ the largest communities of engaged developers to date.

According to the report, Spark is being used for increasingly diverse applications, with data scientists particularly focused on machine learning, streaming and graph analysis projects. Spark was used to create streaming applications 56 per cent more frequently in 2015 than 2014. The use of advanced analytics, like MLib for machine learning and GraphX for graph processing, is becoming increasingly common, the report says.

According to the study, 41 per cent of those surveyed identified themselves as data engineers, while 22 per cent of respondents say they are data scientists. The most common languages used for open sourced based big data projects in cloud computing are Scala (used by 71 per cent of the survey), Python (58 per cent), SQL (36 per cent), Java (31 per cent) and R (18 per cent).