Todas las entradas hechas por Richard

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Cloud & IT Management, Free, Rackspace Cloud, Stackdriver

Stackdriver Launches Intelligent Monitoring Service Public Beta

Stackdriver has launched the public beta  of Stackdriver Intelligent Monitoring, a flexible and intuitive SaaS offering that provides rich insight into the health of cloud-powered systems, infrastructure, and applications.  The service features seamless integration with Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud and is optimized for teams that manage complex distributed applications.  Customers can access the service immediately via the company’s website at www.stackdriver.com.

Stackdriver’s engineers set out to build a solution that:

  • Monitors applications, systems, and infrastructure components,
  • Identifies anomalies using modern analytics and machine learning, and
  • Drives remediation and automation using a proprietary policy framework.

Edmodo, a leading social learning platform that runs on AWS, has relied on Stackdriver for several months.  “The technology stack that powers Edmodo’s online learning platform is very sophisticated. We use a variety of application building blocks, including AWS services and open source server software,” noted Kimo Rosenbaum, Infrastructure Architect.  “Before Stackdriver, we monitored our stack with many disparate tools, often designed without the dynamic nature of the cloud in mind.  With Stackdriver, we can monitor our systems, AWS services, and applications with one simple interface built for cloud-based services.”

Stackdriver Intelligent Monitoring is available free of charge for companies using Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud.  Today, Stackdriver manages nearly 100,000 cloud resources and processes over 125 million measurements per day.  Nearly 100 customers, paid and non-paid, use the service, including Edmodo, Yellowhammer Media, Exablox, Atomwise, Qthru, and Webkite.

Java, Java Platform Enterprise Edition, M&A Activity, Rapid Application Development, SocialTwist, VMware, WaveMaker

VMware Sells Some WaveMaker Assets to Pramati

Pramati has acquired certain assets of WaveMaker from VMware. WaveMaker, acquired by VMware in March 2011, is a visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) software platform that will be used to grow and enhance Pramati’s cloud-based Java development capabilities. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

WaveMaker simplifies the process of building enterprise Java applications to boost both developer productivity and quality, without compromising flexibility. WaveMaker applications are cloud-ready, highly scalable, multi-device, and backed by a strong developer community that has doubled to 35,000 active monthly users over the last two years. With its long heritage of mission-critical Java application development, Pramati expects to accelerate this growth going forward.

“The acquisition of WaveMaker is integral to Pramati’s ongoing strategy to efficiently bring together skills, capital, customer relationships and leading technologies that can quickly take advantage of market opportunities,” said Vijay Pullur , President of Pramati. “WaveMaker elegantly enhances our existing Java and cloud development capabilities. Over the years, Gartner and other respected voices have recognized us as a leader in Java technologies. The WaveMaker acquisition uniquely allows us to extend our leadership, while extending the reach of Java to non-expert developers and users.”

WaveMaker uniquely helps its users build standard enterprise Java applications using a visual drag-and-drop paradigm that streamlines development time, significantly reducing written code.

“WaveMaker was designed to bring high-quality Java applications to market quickly and efficiently,” said Charles Fan , senior vice president of R&D, Storage and Application Services, VMware. “Pramati is an established technology company with expertise in cloud and Java technologies. We are delighted that WaveMaker customers are in good hands.”

The addition of WaveMaker underscores Pramati’s support for Java standards in the cloud computing era. The Pramati portfolio of companies includes SocialTwist, a social referral marketing platform focused on customer acquisition and retention, and Imaginea, a technology services company that offers advisory, strategy, product development, and implementation services.

Backup, Cloud Storage, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, PC World, Remote backup service, Storage

Protecting and Preserving Our Digital Lives is a Task We Want to Have Already Done

I once read that a favorite writer of mine, when told by people he met at cocktail parties how much they “wanted to write,” would reply, “No, you want to have written.”

Protecting and preserving our digital lives is much the same — we want to have already taken care of it. We don’t actually want to go through the hassle of doing it.

An article by Rick Broida in PC World sums it up thus:

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who have lost critical data, and those who will. In other words, if you use technology long enough and neglect to back up your data, you’re guaranteed to have at least one extremely bad day.

The article goes on to outline “How to build a bulletproof cloud backup system without spending a dime“. There’s a lot to do, it all takes effort, but he’s right. Whether you take all his recommendations or some, it’s a good place to start thinking about the steps you (we) all need to take.

Here’s an idea: Come up with a plan and implement it in pieces until you get to the point where you know you are ready for the digital disaster that is out there waiting for us all.

 

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Big Data Group, Cloudyn, Research, Webinar/Webcast/Presentation

Study Finds Enterprise Cloud Focus Shifting From Adoption to Optimization

Cloudyn together with The Big Data Group has released the latest AWS customer optimization data, reinforcing the positive growth trend expected for the year ahead.

“We set out to evaluate whether the projected 2013 ‘year of cloud optimization’ is on course and discovered that we are well into the public cloud adoption life cycle. In 2011 and 2012 the conversation centered around how and when to move to the cloud. Now it is all about companies looking for efficiencies and cost controls,” commented David Feinleib, Managing Director of The Big Data Group.

The study, based on over 450 selected AWS and Cloudyn customers, highlights a more mature approach to cloud deployments reflected by a deeper understanding of where inefficiencies lurk and how to optimize them. EC2 makes up for 62% of total AWS spend, with more than 50% of customers now using Reserved Instances in their deployment mix. However, On-Demand pricing remains the top choice for most, accounting for 71% of EC2 spend. Even for customers using reservations, there is still opportunity for further efficiency.

For example, Cloudyn’s Unused Reservation Detector has assisted customers in finding a startling 24% of unused reservations. These can be recycled by relocating matching On-Demand instances to the availability zone of the unused reservation.

There is also a shift away from large instance types to medium, where two medium instances cost the same as one large, but can produce 30% more output. However, with the low 8-9% utilization rates of the popular instance types, there is certainly more work to be done on the road to cloud optimization.

Cloudyn and The Big Data Group host a webinar on May 1, 2013 at 9:00 am PT focused on deployment efficiency.

Facebook, Infographic, Karen Leland, Marketing, Pinterest, Social, Social media, Social network, Twitter

How Businesses Can Use the Number Three Social Network (and Do You Know Which It Is?)

Pinterest is a social bookmarking site that allows users to create a visual, online pinboard with images they love organized around topics of their choice by category. It’s the fastest growing social media site in history, the third-largest network after Facebook and Twitter and has over 25 million members and 10 million unique visitors a month, nearly three-quarters of them women.

Karen Leland, author of the new book “Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business,” has created a comprehensive and easy-to-use guide to hitting the road running and quickly making Pinterest into a valuable source of prospects, promotion and profits.

“Great business brands are about telling compelling, congruent stories, and Pinterest is at its core about storytelling in pictures,” says Leland. “Pinterest has tapped into this visceral lover of visuals, and no small business, entrepreneur or corporation can afford to miss the boat on bringing what they offer beyond words and into images.”

Following her own advice resulted in this infographic:

Gmail, Google, Google Drive, Google Sync, Outage Alert

Google Details Cause of Wednesday’s Widespread Apps Outage

Google issued an incident report on the Wednesday outage that affected less than one per cent of gmail users, but was significant for other services, including half of Admin Panel and 60% of Sync login requests. As has happened in the past, it was a configuration error for a central system, in this case Google Services Login, where the configuration glitch caused too many requests to be routed to too few servers, causing them to buckle under the load:

From 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. PT, some users received errors when trying to access Gmail, Drive, Talk, Google Sync, the Admin panel, and the Cloud Console, and to a lesser extent Groups, Sites, and Contacts. At the peak of the outage, this issue affected 50% of the Admin panel and 60% of Google Sync login requests. The percentages of affected users for other services were lower such as 0.18% users for Gmail. The root cause was an issue in the system that manages login requests for Google services.

At 5:00 a.m. as login traffic increased, the misconfigured servers were unable to process the load. This began to cause errors for some users logging in to Google services. The request load, exacerbated by retry requests from users and automated systems such as IMAP clients, initially appeared as the cause of the login errors. At 5:48 a.m., the Engineering team determined that the root cause was not excess traffic but insufficient capacity

The full report is less than two pages, and clearly outlines what happened and how they hope to prevent it in the future.

 

 

Asia/Pacific Rim, Cloud & IT Management, compliance, Data Loss Prevention, High Tech Security, New Zealand

SmartRulesR DLP Thwarts email Distribution of Confidential Info

New Zealand-owned cloud email security and hosting company SMX has released SmartRules DLP, designed to safeguard confidential information against unauthorized email distribution.

SmartRules DLP (Data Loss Prevention) is one of a number of new service improvements currently being rolled out by SMX, following research and development support from Callaghan Innovation.

SMX’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Thom Hooker, says the R&D funding has enabled SMX to accelerate software development in several key areas. He says SmartRules® DLP has been given urgent priority, following the recent security breaches experienced by Government organizations.

“SMX is the leading cloud email security solution used by Government organizations with around 60 Government sector customers,” Thom Hooker says. “SmartRules® DLP meets the most stringent compliance requirements with easy-to-use rule building and related compliance processes.

“Email makes it very easy for employees to accidentally – or intentionally – send sensitive documents to recipients outside the organization,” Hooker says. “By deploying SMX’s SmartRules® DLP, customers can define rules to block and report on employees attempting to send sensitive documents externally. SmartRules® DLP can be configured to detect visible data as well as scanning for hidden metadata. The use of hidden metadata tags inside documents makes it harder for users to subvert DLP rules looking for visible text – that is, by changing the document name.”

Hooker says SMX’s SmartRules® DLP can also detect sensitive content embedded in archives – such as .zip, .rar, .tar, .gz, and so on – and can be configured to block emails containing archives that cannot be opened – for example, password protected or unknown document types.

Another significant new enhancement to the SMX Cloud Email Security Suite, Hooker says, will be beefing up the SMX email hosting platform with enterprise-grade security, reliability and new features. SMX will offer 100 percent availability, as well as enterprise-ready tools such as shared calendars, online data storage similar to Dropbox, global address books and support for ActiveSync to sync contacts, emails and calendars with mobile devices.

Forbes, Platform Services, Private Cloud, Research, Unisphere Research

How Common are Private Clouds? How About Enterprise Use of Public Cloud Services?

Joe McKendrick, who covers technology at Forbes, has good good coverage and analysis of a new survey (pdf) just published by Unisphere Research on adoption of cloud technology by corporations:

Close to two-fifths of organizations now run private clouds in one form or another, and one-fourth are using public cloud services in an enterprise capacity. Private clouds are being extended deeper into the organizations that have them — a majority expect to be running most of their workloads in the cloud within the next 12 months, especially Platform as a Service middleware.  In addition, close to one-third of public cloud users report they are employing hosted services to run their private clouds for them.

Read the full article.