In my opinion, Object Storage officially broke through this month. It went from being the “next” big thing to being “the” big thing. Why? Because Larry said so. Well, technically he didn’t: someone else had to do it for him as he skipped the Oracle Open World Keynote to see Team USA win the America’s Cup in the most exciting regatta of all times. So I’ve been told. I wasn’t there and I’m not a sailor. I kite surf, like Richard Branson.
What has Larry Ellison to do with Object storage and how is he an authority on the topic? Isn’t object storage about unstructured data, rather than databases? Well, correct: I don’t expect a whole lot from Oracle’s object storage technology. They are a database company and they are pretty damn good at that. But they haven’t been exceptionally successful with the Sun storage legacy other than the tape part of that business. Oracle’s object storage technology could have been good if they had recycled some of Sun’s honeycomb technology, but it doesn’t look like that is going to be the case. The little information that is out there points to OpenStack Swift, and we all know how well Oracle and open source blend! Also, Swift isn’t exactly storage-efficient: the technology was designed to run on cheap, commodity hardware – not really Oracle’s game.
Let’s face it, developers rule. They have instantaneous access to technology resources that can be spun up easily without your knowledge. It is this pressure that is driving the inevitability of Cloud adoption across enterprise IT. If you still think of your IT organization as a cost center – presiding over a hefty annual budget and responsible for doling out dollars to the developers – then it’s time to rethink and re-imagine the business of IT.
If IT continues with the same old tired cost models and budget planning cycles, some of the best, most creative and most ingenious innovations in technology will never see the light of day. It’s a true dilemma for developers and innovators – why spend time creating, when your next great idea or project doesn’t meet the initial business case requirements for funding? But that was the old world of IT. The hard truth is that IT organizations are faced with a fundamental choice: resist or transform. CIOs can either accept the fact that they are now service providers competing with external vendors for budget dollars, or become impediments to change and lose relevance. Those choosing to become service providers are finding they need to develop a new operating model for IT, one that requires new platforms, processes, and skills.
Hostway has announced the Application Packaging Standard (APS) integration of its FlexCloud Servers (Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS), public-cloud hosting suite, in partnership with Parallels, a global leader in hosting and cloud services enablement and cross-platform solutions.
«In the rapidly evolving cloud services market, collaboration is the key to success. We’re thrilled to work with an industry leader like Parallels to give partners new ways to customize, bundle and seamlessly deliver the cloud applications and scalable infrastructure solutions customers demand,» said Todd Benjamin, Vice President of Hosted Services. «By enabling delivery of cloud services in a Parallels environment, Hostway provides ecosystem partners with a low risk, quick-to-market path to leverage their own channels to grow their businesses and offer an end-to-end solution.»
The focus shouldn’t be on threats, but rather on how those threats might change. At the technology level, this focus on change shifts the focus from a static “locked door” approach to security to the immune system metaphor I discussed last year. But there’s more to architecting for security than the technology. At the organizational level, effective EA will help resolve shadow IT issues which can lead to unmanaged security threats as an example. At the process level, EA will address social engineering challenges like phishing attacks. Securing your technology without applying a comprehensive, best practice approach to organizational and process security is tantamount to leaving some of your doors unlocked.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Plexxi, provider of the first and only affinity-driven networking solution, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Plexxi is the creator of the industry’s first affinity-driven networking solution. Plexxi’s products – Plexxi Control and the Plexxi Switch – create an optimized network that dynamically helps applications perform better. The company has raised $48+ million in venture financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Northbridge Venture Partners. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., Plexxi also has offices in Nashua, N.H. and San Francisco.
Around the world, market leaders in all industries have already deployed managed cloud services. Seeking to use business technology as a strategic lever to advance past their competition on multiple fronts, the senior executives at these leading companies are eager to learn about the next phase of cloud service development.
Worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will reach $47.4 billion in 2013 and will reach more than $107 billion by 2017, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). Over the 2013–2017 forecast period, public cloud services will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5 percent, that’s five times the IT industry growth as a whole.
As one of the key technologies enabling the industry-wide shift, cloud computing has played a crucial role in changing the way companies consume and use business technology. IDC believes that there are signs that cloud services are starting to shift into a the next phase — where the scale of cloud adoption will be much bigger and more user and solution driven.
In this phase of growth, cloud and the other 3rd Platform technologies — mobile internet, social, and Big Data — will become even more interdependent as they continue to drive growth and innovation across all industries that depend on business technology.
The Google Cloud Platform lets you build applications and websites, store data, and analyze data on Google’s infrastructure. In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, William Vambenepe, Sr. Product Manager for Big Data on Google Cloud Platform, will discuss Big Data Analytics with the Google Cloud Platform.
William Vambenepe is Sr. Product Manager for Big Data on Google Cloud Platform. Prior to joining Google he was an Architect at Oracle, and before Oracle he was a Distinguished Technologist at HP. Follow him on Twitter: @vambenepe
Cloud Expo® 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4-7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Sixty-seven percent of respondents tell Accenture/UN survey their organizations lack initiatives to align sustainability with their business goals.
Accenture and the United Nations Global Compact have released a study that shows majority of CEOs worldwide view businesses as falling short of strategies to meet sustainability requirements.
Accenture polled 1,000 CEOs and the triennial study contains interviews with 75 CEOs as well as analysis of how companies integrated sustainability into their business performance, Accenture said Friday.
Sixty-seven percent of respondents say organizations lack initiatives to align sustainability with their business goals, according to the survey.
Seventy-eight percent of responding CEOs also say sustainability leads to business growth and development of new technologies and 79 percent consider it a competitive edge.
Insufficient financial resources and tough economic conditions are among the barriers that 51 percent and 40 percent of the surveyed chief executives, respectively, say hinder their efforts to embed sustainability into their businesses.
Zetta.net, a provider of enterprise-grade cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions, has announced two new executive appointments.
Kevin J. Laughlin has joined the company as chief financial officer (CFO), and Glenn Rawlinson as vice president of business development. The addition of Laughlin and Rawlinson to the Zetta.net management team was a direct response to the dramatic growth the company has seen as it delivers a cloud backup and disaster recovery solution with enterprise-class features to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and managed service providers (MSPs).
With three decades of experience in finance and operations, Laughlin joins Zetta.net from Sensa Products, a $150 million in revenue consumer product company where he was CFO. In this position, Laughlin transitioned Sensa to an independent operating subsidiary and built the finance function previously performed by parent company Intelligent Beauty. Prior to his position at Sensa, Laughlin held CFO positions with IT services company All Covered, and management software company International Network Services.
“The Data Center operators do understand that quality does matter,” noted Barbara P. Aichinger, co-founder of FuturePlus Systems and VP of New Business Development, in this exclusive interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “When they experience failures they call the supplier and the Tier 2 and 3 vendors just blame somebody else, like the DIMM vendor or the software.”
Cloud Computing Journal: You seem to have some concerns about the actual cloud hardware can you explain?
Barbara P. Aichinger: Sure, my company FuturePlus Systems makes memory design validation equipment used by the engineers that design cloud hardware. These server and network equipment have technology standards that govern their design. The advantage of using standards is that you can buy one part from vendor A and another from vendor B and because they are all designed to the same standard they work together. The standards organizations that write these standards are international in nature and in most cases have a Compliance Standard associated with the technology standard. Vendors have to not only obey the standard itself but pass a test, specified by the compliance portion of the standard, that proves that their design meets the specification. This is a stamp of quality and interoperability. The problem we have today with cloud hardware is that at the very heart of all of this hardware is the JEDEC DDR Memory standard but this standard has no compliance specification per se. Thus there is no third party checking this very critical portion of the design for quality and compliance.