Log analysis is a unique use case that is being leveraged in multiple ways to gain deep insight into activities generated by multiple sources.
A common theme heard in the IT marketplace is that innovative technologies are enabling new insights to be harvested from data. Cloud computing provides the necessary infrastructure that allows smaller organizations to enjoy the value from these insights. As cloud computing becomes mainstream, analytics driven by new sources are leveraged by formation of new partnerships. GE and Google recently announced a partnership for the utility business that integrates Google map functions with GE’s geospatial analytical tools to improve visualization. Any way you look at it, integrating consumer and industrial assets with speed and ease is game changing.
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Amazon Makes Virtual Private Clouds Its Default
Amazon has dropped more crumbs in the forest to entice the enterprise to ultimately abandon its own infrastructure for its doubtlessly cheaper public cloud.
It’s making its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which used to be separate service, a free default.
It said in a blog that the announcement was so important “If you use or plan to use Amazon EC2, you need to read this post!”
Undoubtedly VMware and other cloud merchants won’t care much for this turn of events.
Amazon is starting what it called its EC2-VPC roll-out in its regions in Sydney (Asia-Pacific) and São Paulo (South America). It’ll branch out elsewhere in the next few weeks.
A Pivotal or Cloudy Moment for EMC and VMware?
EMC and VMware (who is majority owned by EMC) have announced a new joint initiative called Pivotal (read more here and here) as part of their software defined data center strategies and architecture.
Is this a pivotal moment for both EMC and VMware signaling that they will be going head to head (via their new initiative based company) with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, HP Cloud services, Rackspace and a long list of others?
Part of the answer to that question would be based on what is meant by going head to head, and which aspects of those services. For Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) along with big data analytics related I would say yes. In terms of other Cloud AaaS or SaaS or IaaS probably not as much so at this time.
Cloud Expo New York: Lowering Storage TCO
The rise of cloud computing has exposed hard drive-based storage as the new data center bottleneck. Combating this, data center managers have deployed SSDs to gain the performance needed to provide real-time access to data. However, due to budget constraints, many have turned to consumer-grade SSDs without understanding that they wear out quickly when processing enterprise workloads
In her session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Esther Spanjer, Director of SSD Technical Marketing at SMART Storage Systems, will discuss recent endurance advancements in SSD technology that enable usage of low cost, enterprise-class SSDs, and how this helps organizations lower their storage TCO by avoiding frequent replacements.
Telecommuting and Cloud Computing
Home is where the cloud is.
The work-at-home movement has given some momentum recently to cloud computing, as well as finding itself in the middle of the debate on whether companies should allow their employees to work from home.
It’s understood that a public cloud platform are typically better at providing IT services over the open Internet than enterprise IT is capable of doing. The public cloud can better serve a workforce that’s as likely to work at the local Starbucks as the corner conference room because they can push processing, storage and enterprise applications to a middle tier between the company and the user. In other words, connectivity, security, capacity management and resiliency become somebody else’s problem, according to an article on Infoworld.com.
The more distributed your workforce, the more public cloud computing can benefit the support of that workforce.
While a remote workforce issue is typically not the only benefit that drives business to the cloud, it’s often on the radar. Companies innovative enough to create a strong remote workforce are typically the organizations that accept cloud computing. If they trust people to work poolside, writes Infoworld’s David Linthicum, then trusting public clouds is not much of a stretch.
Citrix Receives High Rating for Enterprise File Synchronization & Sharing
Citrix on Thursday announced it has received the highest possible rating of “Strong Positive” in Gartner Inc.’s “MarketScope for Enterprise File Synchronization & Sharing (EFSS).”¹ The report assesses Citrix ShareFile™, the foundation of the company’s follow-me data strategy. Citrix was evaluated for its corporate viability, product, business and product strategy, innovation and customer experience.
«We’re seeing strong customer adoption of Citrix ShareFile, with 300 percent growth in enterprise licenses over the past six months,» said Jesse Lipson, VP & GM, Data Sharing, Citrix.
According to report authors, Monica Basso, vice president at Gartner and Jeffrey Mann, vice president at Gartner, “File synchronization and sharing is a critical capability for mobile workforces whose organizations have ongoing mobility initiatives with media tablets and BYOD programs. We expect IT organizations will face increasing demand for these capabilities, with deeper focus on security and compliance by regulated or security-conscious enterprises.”
Overview of the OpenStack Cloud
OpenStack is an Infrastructure as a Service offering. (see my prior post for an explanation of IaaS).
OpenStack is an OpenSource project, founded by RackSpace, NASA and others.
OpenStack can be deployed as a public or private cloud.
Project NOVA, or OpenStack Compute, provisions and manages on-demand virtual machines and associated resources: CPU, Memory, Disk and Network.
Virtual machines can be started, stopped, suspended, created and deleted, while network options for a virtual machine are static, DHCP, or IPv6.
What You Read Says a Lot About You
It is interesting, talking with people about what they read, and seeing how what they read is reflected in their daily lives. Even the occasional reader of this blog would not be surprised to find that I spend some amount of time with my nose buried in epic fantasy books and military history books. It shows in much of how I carry myself, what I do for hobbies, and even the examples I choose in this blog.
But a far greater percentage of my time has been spent reading about computer science. Since I was a young teen, those were avocations, I wanted computers to be my vocation. So it should surprise no one that I devoured what can arguably be called the classics of our field – Norton’s hardware programming books, compiler theory books (used one book in each of my post-secondary degrees, own dozens, literally. Compilers and OS Design fascinate me), some of the Cisco stuff, MicroC/OS, the dragon book (worth mentioning separate from the other compiler books), the J2EE books by BEA, Norton’s security book, the list goes on and on, and gets pretty eclectic. I read “Implementing CIFS with relish, though I may be the only person on the planet that did, and I have several releases of CORBA docs, all read at one time or another in the past…
Cloud: Impact of DNS on Performance
One of the ramifications of relying on off-premise cloud infrastructure is that you’re necessarily stuck with some of the idiosyncrasies that come with it. For example, it’s not your network, and thus topologically-related identifiers such as host names and IP address are not within your purview. But you certainly aren’t going to ask your customers to visit «host111-east-virginia-zone3-subnet5.cloudproivder.com». At least not if you want them visit, you won’t.
Luckily, you control your own DNS destiny, so you’ll just CNAME that crazy long host name provided by the provider to be something more catchy and inline with your branding, say, «coolappz.com».
While certainly more appealing to everyone (easy to remember, fits better on a bumper sticker and on branded swag) it does have a downside: double the latency.
HP Cloud Compute: A Quick Overview
HP has done an amazing job at creating cloud solutions for customers throughout the marketplace. From small to medium-sized businesses through the enterprise and beyond, HP cloud products do the job and do it well.
One product in HP’s portfolio that can provide opportunities for businesses of just about any size is HP Cloud Compute. Cloud Compute allows the organization to:
- Roll out compute instances on an on-demand basis.
- Create customized instances in order to handle unique workloads.
- Add additional instances via the UI or via the RESTful API.
Instances can be configured for many potential uses, including:
- Development and test instances.
- Web-based applications.
- Large-scale, intermittent data processing.
Cloud Compute combines the power of HP’s solid, reliable and highly-functional hardware and software along with some of the most important aspects of HP Converged Infrastructure. Cloud Compute relies on the OpenStack Nova platform and API, which means organizations can still use their OpenStack-compatible applications with Cloud Compute.
HP Cloud Compute provides a number of distinct benefits to organizations, including:
- Help for developers. The developer experience is highly-functional as well as intuitive. This helps developers decrease time in coding.
- Vendor independence. HP Cloud Compute uses open source architecture as well as standards-based APIs to insure that your applications can interoperate the way they need to.
- Secure instance deployment. Instances can be deployed securely on an on-demand basis. They can be scaled up or down quickly, and they can be configured or customized for any number of uses.
- You only pay for what you use. This helps control costs and make sure that service levels can still be maintained.
- Comprehensive support. HP Cloud Services Customer Support gives you life and fully responsive support.
HP Cloud Compute offers instance types in a wide range of sizes. An instance can be as simple as a single virtual core with 1 GB of RAM and 30 GB of local disk space. It can also be as large as 8 virtual cores with 32 GB of RAM and 960 GB of local disk space. The size of the instance matches your implementation’s need.
