It’s finally summer, time to slow down, to plan, to learn and to discover your inner data geek!
Summer is also the time for blue skies and clouds. And although you may know everything you want to know about the white fluffy clouds that dot the sky, do you know enough about getting your data into and out of Salesforce.com – the most widely adopted cloud-based CRM?
Cloud applications like Salesforce.com have fundamentally changed how we think about and work with our customer data. However, these systems have also significantly complicated getting real-time reports that we rely on to make sound business decisions.
What is really needed is a solution that enables real-time reporting across Salesforce and your SQL-based on-premise systems.
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The Build a Layer of Social Employee Apps Around Your SAP Core
IT departments are struggling to adapt to new economic realities and a rapidly changing technology environment that includes fundamental shifts in mobile, social, and cloud computing technologies.
The lingering effects of the downturn marked by flat-to-negative IT budgets are forcing IT departments to reassess and more accurately measure the real business value delivered by both existing and future IT investments. No system or project is out of scope as IT looks for any opportunity to squeeze additional productivity from an aging portfolio and map it to a more demanding and collaborative business environment. Organizations are rethinking traditional development platforms and architectural models in favor of solutions that offer speed, economy, and agility.
Cloud Computing Moves from Fad to Foundation
As hype dies down, companies are seeing real success in their cloud deployments, and money is pouring in, according to a recent post on InfoWorld.com.
The cloud is in the process of crossing from the experimental phase to production systems that businesses can rely upon. Yet his has not been an overnight occurrence: Enterprises have been quietly getting smart about cloud computing technology and applying it where appropriate, according to InfoWorld’s David Linthicum.
Companies both big and small are making a move to the cloud.
«There are now careers, share prices and bonuses tied to the success of cloud computing in a big way. Those vested in it will hustle like hell to make cloud computing work for them. Some will fail, but the sheer amount of money riding on this technology will ensure that it functions well in the longer term,» Linthicum writes.
Private PaaS 101
For the real-world enterprise, cloud computing promises flexibility, efficiency and convenience. But those attractions mask realistic potential risks to data integrity, privacy and oversight. And that’s enough to make even the earliest of early adopters hesitate to move to the cloud.
Private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) enables the real-world enterprise to reap the benefits of cloud computing while preserving the order of on-premise managed IT.
Morphlabs Brings Hope to Private Cloud
Morphlabs just announced its latest private-cloud infrastructure product, the mCloud Helix, at the Oscon conference in Portland. Company CEO Winston Damarillo has long focused this company on what he calls “dynamic infrastructure services,” meaning that he aims to bring touted benefits of public (off-site) cloud such as flexibility and simplicity to on-site, privately controlled infrastructures. He’s also a big open-source guy, having sold GlueCode to IBM in the “early” days.
But to me, the key aspect of Morphlabs is the company’s Philippine roots. It’s headquartered in Los Angeles, but maintains developer teams in Metro Manila as well as Cebu City, the country’s “second city” and an emerging, vibrant technology hub. A sister company, Exist Software, produces custom software and maintains most of its executive and worker-bee teams in the Philippines.
There’s a beautiful word called “pagasa” in use throughout the Philippines. It means “hope,” and companies like Morphlabs bring several dimensions of pagasa to the technology world. For one thing, this developing nation of 90 million souls and counting thirsts for high-value jobs in the technology sectors.
For another, the existence of successful software-development teams in places other than Silicon Valley bring a variety of points-of-view to the task of improving the world. The ideas generated in meet-ups in Manila are often better grounded in daily reality than are the latest valley frou frou addressing the latest first-world problems.
(The present state of google searching brings despair to us all, but you can find some of my earlier writing on the topic by googling “Strukhoff Philippines technology.” )
Morphlabs’s latest is grounded in the reality of OpenStack software and Dell servers. Here’s some of the geek stuff: it high performance SSD-powered nodes and pre-integrated ZFS, to eliminate the need for expensive enterprise SANs; it allegedly sets a new energy standard for watt/virtual CPU (vCPU); its incorporation of Dell PowerEdge C servers utilize the latest hyperscale technology.
A Dell executive has touted it for providing “a simple deployment for a compact private cloud.” For his part, Winston says it “empowers customers to take home and immediately deploy private clouds using best-of-breed open source software and hardware without requiring a massive CapEx investment.” It’s also being sold to service providers, so there’s no lack of confidence about its scalability.
Where there’s pagasa, there’s opportunity, and opportunity breeds innovation. Winston and his global team continue their efforts to bring pagasa to the Philippines and the world – surely, innovation will continue to follow.
PaaS on Hadoop Yarn
This post describes a prototype implementation of a simple PAAS built on the Hadoop YARN framework and the key findings from the experiment. While there are some advantages to using Hadoop YARN, there is at least one unsolved issue that would be difficult to overcome at this point.
Hadoop is so popular these days as Big Data is one of the major hot topics people are intererested in. Similarly, PaaS (Platform as a Service) is also popular as Cloud Computing is one of the hot topics. Then naturally one question came to us: can we combine both Hadoop and PaaS to satisfy the two hot topics – Big Data and Cloud? At the same time, Hadoop YARN (i.e. MapReduce2 or MR2) architecture became much more flexible compared to the previous version that the idea seemed to become more real.
I went ahead and implemented a proof of concept with Hadoop Yarn. Here I’d like to share its architecture and interesting findings from it.
Virtustream Aligns with SafeNet
Virtustream and SafeNet on Tuesday announced that they have entered into an agreement that will incorporate SafeNet’s market-leading authentication solutions into Virtustream’s enterprise cloud platform, xStream.
“Enterprises looking to deploy the cloud want both enterprise-grade performance and security, while still benefiting from the scalability and economics of multi-tenant virtualization technology,” said Dr. Shaw Chuang, Executive Vice President of Engineering, Virtustream. “Incorporating SafeNet’s authentication platform brings another best-of-breed offering to our platform and lays the foundation for further extensive security capabilities.”
Efforts Underway to Provide Trusted Supplier Standard
This thought leadership interview examines the latest efforts to make global supply chains for technology providers more secure, verified, and therefore trusted.
The Open Group has a vision of boundaryless information flow, and that necessarily involves interoperability. But interoperability doesn’t have the effect that you want, unless you can also trust the information that you’re getting, as it flows through the system.
Therefore, it’s necessary that you be able to trust all of the links in the chain that you use to deliver your information. One thing that everybody who watches the news would acknowledge is that the threat landscape has changed. As systems become more and more interoperable, we get more and more attacks on the system.
As the value that flows through the system increases, there’s a lot more interest in cyber crime. Unfortunately, in our world, there’s now the issue of state-sponsored incursions in cyberspace, whether officially state-sponsored or not, but politically motivated ones certainly.
Cloud Computing: Coraid Unveils ZX-Series NAS
Coraid on Tuesday unveiled the new Coraid ZX-Series family of NAS servers. Designed for cloud, video and Big Data customers, this high-performance unified storage solution is powered by the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system combined with Coraid’s EtherDrive technology to enable unmatched scalability, performance and operational simplicity.
Carl Wright, executive vice president at Coraid noted that “organizations are increasingly challenged to provide predictable, cost-effective file performance in the face of uncontrolled data growth. By extending our product family to include a best-in-class NAS offering, Coraid can meet that challenge with a unified storage solution that takes full advantage of the scalability and performance of Ethernet SAN.”
Google Exec to Be Yahoo CEO
Yahoo’s going with another plainspoken blonde.
After the market closed Monday Yahoo’s board named Marissa Mayer, one of Google’s first employees and long-time protector of the stripped-down look of Google’s homepage, CEO replacing interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.
The Yahoo board is taking another flyer on Mayer, 37, considering she’s coming out of Google’s product side, responsible for the look and feel of such things as Google Mail, Google News and since 2010 Google Maps and other Google location and local services. She has no CEO or turnaround experience. She did sit on Google’s operating committee and is on the board of Wal-Mart.
It’s speculated that the Third Point contingent on Yahoo’s board, who got there recently by way of a threatened proxy fight, were instrumental in recruiting her. Presumably they think Yahoo’s products and technology need an overhaul to get more competitive with Google and Facebook.