Today’s IT infrastructure is in the midst of a major transformation. In many ways, the data center is a victim of its own success. The growing number of technologies and applications residing in the data center has spawned increasing complexity, which makes IT as a whole less responsive and agile. While businesses are focused on moving faster than ever, large and complex infrastructure is inherently rigid and inefficient.
As a result, IT is moving outside the traditional data center into colocation facilities and cloud infrastructures – essentially Infrastructure Anywhere. The move to Infrastructure Anywhere is driven by the core objective of improving responsiveness and agility and reducing costs. For example, you can scale up resources through the cloud in minutes, not months. But for all of its benefits, this new Infrastructure Anywhere model presents critical challenges.
To make smart decisions about where to run applications and what kind of resources you need, you first must understand your workload: utilization, capacity, and cost. Gaining unified visibility is difficult when your application workloads are distributed across data centers and colocation facilities in different parts of the country or around the world. With limited visibility, how do you accurately align resources and capacity with workloads for efficient processing, cost control, and — more important — achieve the full business value of your IT investment?
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Calculating the Total Cost of Ownership for On-Premise and SaaS Solutions
Six months ago my boss sent me an interactive calculator that the New York Times created to help people decide whether it’s a better financial decision to buy a home or simply rent one. He shared the calculator with me because, at the time, we were looking for interesting ways to visualize data and relate it back to our work at Software Advice where we review enterprise software systems and report on enterprise tech trends. More on that in a bit.
Although I wasn’t in the market to do either, I found myself adjusting values and playing around with the calculator just to see how long I’d have to rent at my current rate to make purchasing a home worthwhile. In case you haven’t seen the calculator yet, here’s a screenshot of what it looks like.
Cloud Expo NY: Private Cloud, Public Cloud – Is There a Third Option?
As more of your enterprise IT moves into the Cloud you may find yourself asking that very question – Is there a third option? The cost benefits of the Public Cloud may be appealing, but is this the appropriate environment for your critical data? The performance and security of a Private Cloud infrastructure will make you a hero, but the costs may be prohibitive. There is a third option, however – the Hybrid Cloud. The Hybrid Cloud will give you the benefit of having a right-sized, right-provisioned data solution that will allow you the benefit of both models – a mix of dedicated and cloud services from a Cloud Services provider.
Quality of Service Is Not a Feature… It’s an Architecture
The ability to guarantee performance to thousands of applications at once has garnered praise from analysts and enterprises alike. Without this guarantee, cloud providers will not be able to meet the rising performance requirements of enterprise customers. Given the compelling advantages for performance isolation and guaranteed storage QoS, it’s no wonder that storage vendors are adding QoS features to their products. We recently discussed some of the simplistic approaches to QoS offered by storage systems, however the ability to guarantee performance to applications is not as simple as adding a new bullet point to a lengthy feature list.
Being able to guarantee application performance in all situations – including failure scenarios, system overload, variable workloads, and elastic demand – requires an architecture built from the ground up specifically to guarantee storage Quality of Service. Trying to bolt Quality of Service onto an architecture that was never designed to deliver performance guarantees is like strapping a jet engine to a VW Beetle. The wheels will come off just when you get up to speed.
Cloud Migration Tips #1: Cloud = Confusion
I get so many questions about cloud computing from friends, acquaintances and IT professionals alike. The non-technical folks usually have heard of “the cloud” but have absolutely no idea what it is or even realize how much they interact with it on a daily basis. They don’t realize that their email, phones, videos, music, online […]
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Amazon AWS and the Public Cloud Paradox
When VMware announced its hybrid cloud initiative it made perfect sense. The hybrid cloud market could provide substantial growth opportunities for VMware, as discussed in VMware Crosses the Rubicon and Hybrid is a Whole New Cloud. Yet one respected tech analyst has recently suggested that VMware’s hybrid cloud may be too late.
Amazon (AMZN) could be the clearest benefactor of the hybrid cloud operating model if it accelerates the enterprise adoption of off premise cloud services, especially if it occurs before VMware (or Microsoft) is ready with an equivalent offering.
Amazon, AWS and the Public Cloud Paradox
When VMware announced its hybrid cloud initiative it made perfect sense. The hybrid cloud market could provide substantial growth opportunities for VMware, as discussed in VMware Crosses the Rubicon and Hybrid is a Whole New Cloud. Yet one respected tech analyst has recently suggested that VMware’s hybrid cloud may be too late. Amazon (AMZN) could […]
Big Data into a Small Storage Package with Cloud Storage
This session by Nicos Vekiarides at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13, 2013] will examine in depth the problems created, common workarounds and why they fail, and how cloud storage can be a simpler, far more effective alternative. Attendees will learn about the common and often devastating issues surrounding the storage and management of data. Among the issues discussed will be offsite backup, offsite active archiving, business continuity, disaster recovery, disaster tolerance and scaling capacities in the data center and in the public cloud.
Is Cloud Safer Than Your Traditional Datacenter?
These days, it seems that every cloud provider claims that cloud is safer than your traditional datacenter. Is it though? In his General Session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York, McAfee expert Rishi Bhargava will help you explore and address the security challenges and considerations for public cloud (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS).
Yahoo Commits to Great Journalism
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has revealed her latest surprise, announcing that the company “is now committed to great journalism.”
“With almost 150 million unique visitors per month, our company is the most dominant media presence in the world,” she said. “It’s time for us to commit to serving this massive audience responsibly.”
At least one media critic applauded the move. “The decline of American journalism in the Internet Age is no secret,” said Aprile DiPesce, Associate Professor of Mass Communications at Manhattan City University. “When Yahoo lost its dominance in search to Google, journalism became a mad scramble to get the best Google rankings possible. This became a mad scramble to the bottom.”
“This devolution was accelerated by a culture of publishing things first, rather than getting them right,” DiPesce added. “An emphasis on vapid entertainment stories and misleading headlines emerged as the industry norm. Yahoo’s bold announcement may finally reverse these ugly trends.”
Mayer said the company will drop most of what she referred to as “lame” and “calorie-free” content feeds, in favor of creating “a world-class journalistic infrastructure and team. Not only will our writers and editors be required to know spelling and grammar, they will be expected to write serious, well-researched pieces with multiple sources, quotes, and facts.”
When asked where people should now seek specious gossip, uninformed opinion, and inane sports blogs, Mayer said “people can always visit MSN. The First Amendment allows companies to publish useless garbage. We have simply chosen not to do this anymore.”
A source also indicated that Yahoo comments will be closed down, with the anticipated effect of angering boors, conspiracy theorists, and lunatics throughout the world.
In related news, Google has also issued a strategic statement, saying it is re-committing itself to its original “don’t be evil” mission. The company said it expects to shed 98% of its revenue, with the impact on its stock price remaining unclear.