Explosive growth in connected devices. Enormous amounts of data for collection and analysis. Critical use of data for split-second decision making and actionable information. All three are factors in making the Internet of Things a reality. Yet, any one factor would have an IT organization pondering its infrastructure strategy.
How should your organization enhance its IT framework to enable an Internet of Things implementation? In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, James Kirkland, Chief Architect for the Internet of Things and Intelligent Systems at Red Hat, will describe how to revolutionize your architecture and create an integrated, interoperable, reliable system of thousands of devices. Using real-world examples, James will discuss the transformative process taken by companies in moving from a two-tier to a three-tier topology for IoT implementations.

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Today, almost every company has a directory that needs to be managed. Spending valuable company time monitoring servers, provisioning and deprovisioning users, auditing, and assessing security concerns takes away from the core competency of the team – building product and delivering to customers quickly. DaaS takes on the burden of those tasks, and allows the team to focus on what they do best. In his session at DevOps Summit, Rajat Bahargava, Co-Founder, Chairman, and President & CEO of JumpCloud, will talk about what DaaS is, how it eases the pain caused by AD and LDAP, and why cloud-based directories are where the industry is heading.

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BlueData aims to “democratize Big Data” with its launch of EPIC Enterprise, which it calls “the industry’s first Big Data software to enable enterprises to create a self-service cloud experience on premise.”

This self-service private cloud allows enterprises to create 100-node Hadoop and Spark clusters in less than 10 minutes. The company is also offering a Community Edition via free download.

We had a few questions for BlueData CEO Kumar Sreekanti about all this, and here’s what he had to say:

Cloud Computing Journal: It looks like you’re on a mission to simplify Big Data.

Kumar Sreekanti: Yes, simple is our goal

As the pioneer in Big Data private clouds, BlueData’s mission is to simplify, and thus democratize, Big Data by streamlining and simplifying Big Data infrastructure and eliminating complexity as a barrier to adoption.

CCJ: Who are your target customers?

Kumar: Our target customers are enterprises of all sizes that want to build agile, secure and cost-effective Big Data deployments that deliver value in days, instead of months, and at a cost savings of 50%-75% compared with traditional approaches.

By making Big Data accessible to all, enterprises can get the same value out of their on-premise Big Data as companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo at a fraction of the cost, and with far fewer resources.

Specifically, we are targeting Fortune 1000 enterprises in retail, financial services, healthcare, pharmaceutical, insurance, media, telco and federal.

These are companies with large volumes of existing structured data, such as sales transactions and supply chain metrics, as well as semi-structured and unstructured data, such as log files, emails, social media, documents, sensor data and audio/video.

These companies will have large volumes of structured and unstructured data stored in on-premise enterprise storage systems such as NAS, Gluster and Ceph

Within the companies, we’re looking at enterprise IT and line-of-business IT departments with business initiatives that require Big Data analytics and processing to validate new market opportunities and/or create new products and services.

CCJ: How do you and they define Big Data?

Kumar: The most immediate opportunity is to combine existing structured data with large volumes of underutilized unstructured data to identify patterns or insights in a cost-effective manner previously not possible with traditional data warehousing platforms.

We also see ways to continue to expand the use of Big Data. Our target customers see a tremendous opportunity to use data in new ways: to learn about customers, speed business cycles, and transform themselves to gain a competitive advantage.

CCJ: How much data are we talking about here?

Kumar: Most companies in our target market have at least 50TB of unstructured data locked away in their enterprise repositories that can be utilized for data-driven strategies.

CCJ: What are the key things you’ve done to simplify all this for people and enterprises, while also imbuing flexibility into it?

Kumar: Big data no longer means “big moves” or “big storage” so our target customers can gain immediate value from their terabytes of unstructured data in their existing storage systems at the lowest cost.

The BlueData EPIC platform can connect any enterprise data source to the big data app of choice. That means no more moving and replicating data.

The BlueData EPIC platform helps IT to deliver Big Data as a high-performing on-premise service to run any distributed application on any server from any storage.

CCJ: How does your vision interact with the IoT, which seems to be driving a lot of Big Data today?

Kumar: The IoT requires the ability to collect and reason over large volumes of real-time data generated by sensors and other embedded systems.

In addition to demanding new Big Data architectures and real-time processing run times beyond Hadoop, IoT introduces significant level of complexity to an already rigid, inflexible infrastructure that can barely meet the existing requirements for batch processing.

CCJ: And how do you address this issue?

Kumar: Our vision around enabling any application on any server with any storage provides enterprises the foundation to adapt as well as scale their infrastructure to meet Big/Fast Data characteristics of the IoT.

By supporting quick provisioning and scaling of distributed applications like Apache Spark that provide fast in-memory processing (e.g. Spark Streaming) and noSQL technologies (e.g Hbase, Cassandra), BlueData enables enterprises to support the fast data and time series processing requirements of the IoT.

Further, by enabling an agile infrastructure that can simultaneously support real-time (Spark), noSQL (Hbase) and batch (Hadoop) analytics, customers gain unprecedented levels of flexibility to create solution architectures that can easily combine IoT data with the rest of the enterprise data (e.g. transactions, social media, text/email etc) as opposed to silos.

CCJ: Please tell us more about the Community Edition. How to access it, what it does, why people should try it.

Kumar: We offer EPIC One, a full-featured community edition, which allows users to  experience the power of multi-app, multi-version instant clusters on a single physical node.

Users can deploy a Big Data private cloud in a matter of seven steps and create distributed application clusters ranging from Hadoop to Hbase and Spark in a matter of minutes versus the typical weeks or months for each type of cluster. It can be downloaded directly from www.bluedata.com

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Data is arguably the most prolific and most valuable of resources. As such, it needs to be protected both as a company asset and in keeping with data privacy laws. Data protection is most acute in healthcare, which is something of a latecomer to fast-evolving heterogeneous electronic environments in the cloud. Indeed, healthcare had to “fast forward” to meet a rush of legislation and new working methodologies. In the blink of an eye, the playing field has changed dramatically. It continues to evolve as medical practitioners bring their own devices into hospitals and surgeries, patients consult with their physicians over Skype and online chat, and Electronic Health Records transit between healthcare Business Associates and government and reimbursement agencies.

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Gridstore has announced that NAC, Inc. and Sky Tech have joined its innovative Accelerate Partner Program. Both new members cite Gridstore’s expertise in enabling the Hybrid Cloud and their solution purpose-built for Hyper-V as the key criteria for their decision to join the program. Integrating seamlessly with business clients, these new partners provide industry-proven storage solutions that promote satisfied customers, profitable businesses, and communities that thrive.

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A recent Time magazine essay on the Apple Watch said, “The Apple Watch represents a redrawing of the map that locates technology in one place and our bodies in another…  The Apple Watch signals the advent of of an “always-on Internet”, … Continue reading →

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Senior executives at large multinational enterprises are already demanding that their CIO has a plan in place to ensure that they can effectively procure public and private cloud services for their organization. In smaller companies, some IT managers are now expected to acquire the knowledge and skills to perform a similar role. Are they prepared? To find out, let’s review a current IT resource assessment.

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One of the most exciting parts of this week’s Apple Watch launch was the example of the BMW watch app. This app allows you to see the charging status of your BMWi electric car, right from your wrist. You can also check the status of the doors of your car (important information such as if they are locked or not!). Although the star of the show was the watch app, APIs had a cameo appearance, since the information shown on the watch is fetched in real-time from APIs.

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WaveMaker CEO Samir Ghosh is taking a new pass at aPaas, and leveraging the increasingly popular Docker open-source platform, with the announcement of WaveMaker Enterprise. The new version of the company’s eponymous software “enables instant, end-to-end custom web app creation and management by professional and non-professional developers (alike) and development teams,” according to the company.

We asked Samir a few questions about this, and here’s what he had to say:

Cloud Computing Journal: You’ve mentioned the previous challenge of business-side developers making that jump from design to deployment. What sort of learning curve will they still face with Wavemaker Enterprise?

Samir Ghosh: “Business-side developers” can include non-programming business users or professional developers under tight schedules or with limited mobile or front-end programming expertise. Both can use WaveMaker to meet their app development needs, but may have different deployment needs.

I think business users just want their app to run as easily as possible. In WaveMaker, they can literally click a button and their application will run, either on our public cloud or on the enterprise’s private infrastructure.

Of course, professional developers can do the same, but if they have the skills and desire, they can make direct self-service calls, such as via custom scripts, to Docker or even API calls to WaveMaker’s PaaS capabilities. And IT Operations has control over how and where WaveMaker provisions Docker containers.

CCJ: By working on CIO-sanctioned infrastructures, do you mean the Enterprise version simply won’t run with «Shadow IT» efforts? If so, what makes your solution compelling enough for people to stop trying to go around the CIO with their Shadow IT efforts?

Samir: What I mean is that I’ve seen the “Shadow IT” problem for 30 years. It probably isn’t going away, especially with Consumerization and BYO trends. But IT would prefer to see technologies used that they know and like.

Add the dimension now that data can easily end up outside the firewall in the public cloud by well-intentioned business users. Besides providing powerful RAD tooling on Java, Spring, Hibernate, AngularJS, WaveMaker helps IT ensure these apps run behind the firewall.

All else being equal, business users would rather use a technology—even “Shadow”—that IT will gladly accept. And with millions of WaveMaker downloads and loyal user base, IT can feel confident in offering WaveMaker to their users.

CCJ: Docker has certainly been gaining traction. What advantages do you see it bringing to your solution, and why will it be so compelling to enterprise developers both on the IT side and business side?

Samir: WaveMaker Enterprise is architected on Docker to simplify application stack management, version upgrades and app migration by leveraging containerization. Docker containerization also provides some unique capabilities otherwise difficult, if not impossible, via virtualization or other means.

For example, starting up a virtual machine, even a micro one, can take minutes. In contrast, because a container can be spun up within a second, WaveMaker automatically provides auto-passivation, hibernation and re-activation. We hibernate an idle app container and spin it back up only when needed. This provides significantly greater resource utilization, which is important to IT, especially for CapEx private infrastructures.

Developers on both the IT and business side then enjoy greater and faster resource availability for developing, testing and running their apps. After all, another reason for “Shadow IT” is not just lack of IT developer resources, but can be due to lack of IT compute resources.

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When it comes to the smart home, big names like Nest and Dropcam have gotten most of the attention due to their product success and lucrative acquisition figures. But as impressive as these products have been, there are a multitude of other unknown products ranging from door locks to basic thermostats that require connectivity and…

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