Todas las entradas hechas por Richard

Cloud computing, hybrid cloud, PaaS, Stratos, WSO2

WSO2 Opens Beta for Stratos 2.0 PaaS Offering

Today WSO2 unveiled the beta release of WSO2 Stratos 2.0. Newly re-architected, WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is a foundation for implementing a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that combines support for heterogeneous applications and service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform runtimes with native, secure multi-tenancy. WSO2 Stratos 2.0 also adds the capability to run on any cloud infrastructure, including VMware, Eucalyptus, Amazon and OpenStack.

WSO2 previewed the latest release of WSO2 Stratos at WSO2Con 2013, which runs February 13-14 in London. The company also announced that it has begun accepting customers for the WSO2 Stratos 2.0 beta program.

“Increasingly enterprises view the cloud as a platform for innovation. However, until now they’ve had to make trade-offs between using their favorite development tools and middleware or capitalizing on the multi-tenancy of a native cloud environment. With WSO2 Stratos 2.0, these organizations no longer have to compromise,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO.

The Stratos 2.0 approach to multi-tenancy goes beyond other PaaS environments to support multiple levels of virtualization—from standard virtual machines, via Linux Containers to intra-JVM isolation. This choice of sharing resources while providing the correct isolation level for multiple tenants is a significant factor in enabling lower costs, greater flexibility, and easier on-ramping into a private or public cloud environment.

The new tenant-aware elastic load balancer in Stratos 2.0 is a first-of-a-kind capability that allows the environment to provide highly tunable performance to different tenants, ranging from “economy class” for low priority workloads up to “private jet” mode for workloads that require dedicated resources.

At the heart of Version 2.0 is a new cartridge architecture for plugging software into WSO2 Stratos to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities, such as multi-tenancy, elastic scaling, self-service provisioning, metering, billing, and resource pooling, among others. As a result, WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is able to run, not only 13 WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware products, but also a choice of frameworks, databases, and other application services.

WSO2 Stratos 2.0 also significantly enhances PaaS deployment through an integration layer that uses the popular jclouds technology to allow it to run on any infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) including OpenStack, VMware, Eucalyptus and CloudStack. Additionally, use of the Puppet open source tool for infrastructure deployment in this release makes it easier than ever to install and configure Stratos in a private or public cloud environment. Like all WSO2 software, WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is 100% open source and will be made available under the Apache License 2.0.

Ideal candidates for the WSO2 Stratos 2.0 beta program are enterprise IT professionals who are planning or evaluating ways to deliver new applications and/or migrate existing ones to the cloud. Participants also must be committed to participating and giving feedback. For more information and to contact WSO2 about joining the beta program, please visit the product Web page: http://wso2.com/cloud/stratos.

Amazon, Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com, AWS, Financial analyst, Jeff Bezos, Register, Tim Horan

Yet Another Analyst Insists on AWS Spinoff, Others Disagree

Not for the first time an investment analyst, this time Oppenheimer analyst Tim Horan in a report published on Monday, insists in a report that AWS will inevitably be spun off to avoid “channel conflict”, etc.

“In our view, we believe an ultimate spin-off of AWS is inevitable due to its channel conflicts and the need to gain scale. We see the business as extremely valuable on a standalone basis…”

The Register has a useful take on Horan’s opinion, with a well-thought-out contrary view.

The crack in this bout of crystal-ball gazing is that Oppenheimer is an investment firm that by nature likes predictable cash above everything else, and Amazon’s leader Jeff Bezos is a mercurial, ambitious figure who has demonstrated time and time again a love for risky, long-term projects*.

This Reg hack believes the Oppenheimer spin-off analysis misses the temple for the gold fixtures: keeping Amazon Web Services yoked to Amazon holds a slew of major advantages, many of which could be critical in the battle for dominance of the cloud, but they will all take time to play out and are not a sure thing.

 

LineRate, M&A Activity

F5 Aqcuires LineRate

F5 Networks, Inc. today announced that it has agreed to acquire LineRate Systems, a developer of software defined networking (SDN) services. Through this acquisition, F5 gains access to LineRate’s layer 7+ networking services technology, intellectual property, and engineering talent, further building on F5’s commitment to bring superior service agility, application intelligence, and programmability to software defined data centers.

“F5’s vision is to enable application-layer SDN services for software defined data centers, providing our customers with unprecedented automation, orchestration, and control,” said Karl Triebes, EVP of Product Development and CTO at F5. “Extreme scale of applications, infrastructure, and services will be vital to SDN, core to F5, and the key to customers realizing the benefits of software defined data centers. LineRate’s programmable network capabilities and innovations in layer 7 will bolster our efforts to extend F5’s market leadership in these areas, and we are very pleased to welcome the LineRate team to F5.”

Critical to the success of SDN architectures are security, acceleration, optimization, and intelligent traffic management services at the application layer. Application-layer services will be vital to meet customers’ expectations of flexibility, scale, and performance, and to provide significant competitive advantages. The LineRate acquisition aligns with F5’s vision for application control plane architecture and goal of delivering application-layer SDN services to bring superior agility, application intelligence, and programmability to software defined data centers.

LineRate Systems, based near Boulder, Colorado, provides software that offers layer 7+ network services. LineRate’s software defined solution is an early-stage product, which will become an important part of F5’s broad range of development initiatives focused on software defined data centers.

“In order to reap the benefits of software defined data centers, programmable, scalable network services must be present throughout the entire network stack—up to the application layer,” said Manish Vachharajani, Co-Founder and Chief Software Architect at LineRate Systems. “We recognize that the SDN fabric may be good at layer 2-4, but ultimately customers care most about the applications. The LineRate team is excited to join F5 and looks forward to helping F5 accelerate development initiatives in this important market.”

HCM, Human Resources, Talent management, Ultimate

Ultimate Enhances Cloud People Management With Tablet, Smartphone Apps

Ultimate Software a cloud provider of people management solutions, today announced the delivery of global HCM enhancements, including new country localizations, and redesigned, multilingual tablet and smartphone solutions in its Fall/Winter 2012 release.

“Ultimate continues to extend its leadership for people management in the cloud for multinational businesses of all sizes. We’re increasing our commitment to serve global organizations by not only delivering additional global HCM enhancements, but also with an aggressive strategy to support country-specific requirements,” said Adam Rogers, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Ultimate Software. “As the largest cloud provider focused exclusively on HR, payroll, and talent management, Ultimate is committed to helping our customers manage their employee operations around the world with accurate employee master data in a single, comprehensive system of record.”

Benchmark Capital, Big Data, Marketing, Twitter, Venture Funding, Yelp

Sailthru Gets $19 Million for Smart Data Digital Brand Communications

Sailthru, a technology company specializing in digital brand experiences and communications, has announced a $19 million Series B investment led by Benchmark. Sailthru will use the investment to accelerate the growth of the company by increasing both staff and infrastructure and expanding the use of Smart Data™ by Fortune 500 companies. Sailthru joins Benchmark’s portfolio that currently includes other industry-leading companies such as Dropbox, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Quora, Yelp and Zillow.

Sailthru’s Smart Data is leading a major shift in how companies engage with their customers through the automatic analysis of big data sets to generate informed, personalized communications across all digital channels. Unlike Big Data, which merely exists in a passive state and can often be overwhelming, Smart Data powers decisions. Sailthru’s Smart Data allows businesses to understand, predict, and engage each consumer on an individual level in real time. Sailthru’s clients are improving their ROI, customer time on-site and are seeing strong increases to customer lifetime value from their adoption of Smart Data.

Business process, Business process reengineering, Information technology management, KPMG, KPMG International, Research

KPMG: Cloud Computing Is Harder, More Expensive Than We Thought

KPMG International’s Cloud Survey reports businesses saying cloud computing challenges are harder and more costly than they originally thought.

Why? Failure to address changes that were needed in:

  • Business-process redesign
  • IT management capabilities
  • Systems integration
  • Infrastructure management
  • IT “configurations”

GigaOM does a good overview.

Android, Application programming interface, Cloud Storage, Document Management, DropBox, iOS, Storage, Tools

Dropbox API Allows Developers to Get Sync With Less Effort

Dropbox today announced a new application programming interface for in-app synch. The new API is intended to lure developers to Dropbox by making programmers’ life  easier by letting their native iOS/Android apps treat users’ cloud-based files as if they were stored locally.

“Give your app its own private Dropbox client and leave the syncing to us.”

Learn more at Dropbox.

Android, Cloud Storage, Collaboration, Cubby, Free, iPad, iPhone, LogMeIn, Mac, Storage

Cubby cloud sync, storage service From LogMeInOut of Beta

LogMeIn Inc.  announced the general availability of its new cloud sync and storage service, Cubby. An easy-to-use, secure cloud service for sharing files across devices and with other people, Cubby offers the flexibility to turn any number of PC or Mac folders into ‘cubbies’ that can be accessed from Android phones and tablets, iPads and iPhones, as well other PCs and Macs from virtually anywhere in the world.

People can quickly share individual files or entire folders with others via a simple one-click link, or can choose to invite friends, colleagues, clients, and business partners into their ‘cubbies’ to collaborate across shared files and projects. The free version, Cubby Basic, includes Cubby’s signature sync-in-place flexibility (any folder can be a ‘cubby’), free desktop and mobile apps, 5GB of cloud storage, and the ability to share files via the cloud.

A premium version, Cubby Pro, builds on this by offering the flexibility to share content across computers with or without the cloud (via Cubby’s distinct DirectSync™ mode), additional controls for sharing your most sensitive content, multi-user accounts, and 100GB or more of cloud storage.

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Cloudyn

Cloudyn Power Tools Aim for Increased Efficiency, Savings for AWS Customers

Cloudyn has released new Amazon Web Services optimization Power Tools, aiming for increased efficiency and savings for AWS cloud deployments.

“The power tools were developed in response to what we perceive as the market’s growing need for clarity and control over cloud capacity, cost and utilization. The market is ripe for a significant overhaul with companies no longer able to ignore the fluctuating costs associated with the dynamic use of their cloud. Our data shows that 29% of customers spend $51,000-250,000 annually with AWS; only 6% of  customers spend $250,001 – $500,000, but this is the group with the largest saving potential with an average of 46%. All AWS customers Cloudyn monitors have cost optimization potential of between 34% – 46%,” commented Sharon Wagner, CEO of Cloudyn.

The popular Reserved Instance Calculator, which launched in October 2012, is being complemented with the release of the EC2 and RDS reservation detectors. Moving beyond optimal reservation pricing, Cloudyn now recommends which On-Demand instances can be relocated to unused and available reservations. When On-Demand instances don’t match any idle reservations, sell recommendations for the unused reservation are generated.

“Nextdoor’s growing social network relies heavily on AWS and managing cost is a priority for us,” comments Matt Wise, Senior Systems Architect at Nextdoor.com. “Cloudyn gives us clarity into all our cloud assets and ensures that we utilize them fully. Additionally, Cloudyn’s sizing and pricing recommendations enable us to use the cloud in the most cost-effective way possible.”

A new S3 Tracker analyzes S3 usage tracked by bucket or top-level folders and highlights inefficiencies together with step-by-step recommendations on how to optimize. A shadow version detector reveals otherwise hidden shadow S3 versions which inflate the monthly bill.

“We were surprised to learn how many companies simply don’t know what’s going on inside their S3 storage. The new tool splits S3 across buckets and allocates cost per usage providing crystal clear visibility. Interestingly, the most expensive ‘Standard’ storage type is also the most widely used, dominating with 84%. Post-optimization, this can be reduced to 60% and redistributed to the Reduced and Glacier storage alternatives,” continued Mr. Wagner.

Microsoft, Office 365 Administration, Tools

365 Command Streamlines Office 365 Administration

MessageOps today launched 365 Command, a web-based portal that makes it simple and efficient for anyone to perform common Office 365 administrative tasks without complicated scripting.

A hosted service, 365 Command replaces the command line interface of Windows® PowerShell with a rich, HTML5 graphical user interface that is easy to navigate and makes quick, point-and-click work of changing mailbox settings, monitoring usage and reporting. 365 Command scales elegantly to support a virtually unlimited number of seats for easy administration of any size Office 365 environment.

“Office 365 administration typically requires specialized skills and the use of time-consuming and complicated scripting,” said Chris Pyle with MessageOps. “365 Command offers point-and-click ease that makes Office 365 administration as simple as navigating any common website to perform routine tasks quickly and eliminate programming errors. Help desk staff can say goodbye to PowerShell scripts and now generating graphic-rich reports takes just a few clicks.”

Available on a per-seat subscription basis, 365 Command automatically populates the admin dashboard interface with Office 365 account data upon setup in minutes, with nothing to install, no special equipment and no user effort required. Once data integration is complete, 365 Command enables complete management of the Office 365 environment, including:

  • Graphical overview of user data, device access, total mailbox count and size;
  • Maps that show the specific datacenter location of mailboxes in the cloud, the number at each location, their total size, last log in and size over time;
  • Mailbox editing to easily set forwarding addresses, create shared mailboxes, change access permissions, create and set passwords, require password changes and set passwords to never expire; and
  • Report generation that illustrates hard-to-access data, such as devices by mailbox, in both graphic views and for download as Microsoft Excel or CSV data.