Next week I’ll be speaking at Cloud Expo in New York City, one of the premier cloud industry events in the U.S. Of the 150+ sessions that will take place over the four-day conference, a handful appears to address an essential element of the cloud: the network.
The importance of an enterprise-grade network at the center of cloud services cannot be overstated. Without it, private clouds are closed systems, and public clouds are subject to unpredictable performance and potential security breaches. The optimum cloud is one that is network-based, where cloud services are actually embedded in the network. A network-based, or “virtual private cloud,” allows cloud workloads and applications to be managed and delivered as part of a total solution to any device, just like voice and data.
Monthly Archives: June 2012
Cloud Computing: Impetus to Present Big Data Strategies at Cloud Expo
Impetus Technologies (www.impetus.com), an innovation-based software R&D services company, today announced that it will present and exhibit at Cloud Expo, NYC from June 11-14, 2012. Impetus offers accelerated consulting and services for architecture audit, design and implementation to build Big Data and Analytics solutions for enterprises. Enterprises today face challenges while integrating the Big Data technologies with their existing IT setup.
Vineet Tyagi, Head of Impetus Innovation Labs, will be presenting a session on June 12th and share with companies, the strategies that would help in minimizing the risks of such integration.
Vineet has also been invited to participate in a CTO panel that will discuss the emerging trends in Big Data and Cloud Computing. Impetus is hosting a workshop at the Boot camp on ‘Big Data Analytics using AWS cloud offerings like AWS, EMR and DynamoDB’.
The Big Data Revolution
For many years, companies collected data from various sources that often found its way into relational databases like Oracle and MySQL. However, the rise of the Internet, Web 2.0, and recently social media began an enormous increase in the amount of data created as well as in the type of data. No longer was data relegated to types that easily fit into standard data fields. Instead, it now came in the form of photos, geographic information, chats, Twitter feeds, and emails. The age of Big Data is upon us.
A study by IDC titled “The Digital Universe Decade” projects a 45-fold increase in annual data by 2020. In 2010, the amount of digital information was 1.2 zettabytes (1 zettabyte equals 1 trillion gigabytes). To put that in perspective, the equivalent of 1.2 zettabytes is a full-length episode of “24” running continuously for 125 million years, according to IDC. That’s a lot of data. More important, this data has to go somewhere, and IDC’s report projects that by 2020, more than one-third of all digital information created annually will either live in or pass through the cloud. With all this data being created, the challenge will be how to collect, store, and analyze what it means.
zapp Migration to Play Central Role in appzero’s Cloud Expo Presence
appzero CEO, Greg O’Connor and CTO Giovanni Boschi will be speaking on appzero’s newly announced, patent pending zapp migration at Cloud Expo, NY, NY at 8:15 on June 12th:
Cloud migration automation; on-board complex enterprise applications
Moving production applications to the cloud takes heavy lifting. The mismatch between the current set of infrastructure tools and application requirements has been both an impediment to cloud adoption, and a call for tools that are application-centric. Join appzero CEO Greg O’Connor and CTO Giovanni Boschi as they demonstrate migration of production applications to any cloud. Find out how to automate on-boarding of complex enterprise applications and move them anywhere with the ease of an enterprise app store — without re-engineering, re-installation, or lock-in.
Citrix Acquires Mobile Data, Video Optimization Provider Bytemobile
Citrix today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Bytemobile, a leading provider of data and video optimization solutions for mobile network operators. This acquisition gives Citrix a key strategic foothold in the core infrastructure of more than 130 mobile operators in 60 countries around the world, significantly extending the company’s market reach, and enhancing the broader Citrix strategy of powering mobile workstyles and cloud services.
With the advent of the Cloud Era, mobile operators are experiencing explosive growth in network traffic, driven by the combination of new consumer devices, rich multimedia content, and high speed 3G, 4G and LTE networks. By joining forces, Citrix and Bytemobile will be able to offer these operators combined solutions that deliver a high quality user experience to mobile subscribers, while helping operators manage the exponential growth of mobile network traffic with the best performance, visibility and efficiency. The acquisition builds on a strategic partnership announced earlier this year that combined the Bytemobile Smart Capacity™ technology with the Citrix NetScaler® line of cloud networking solutions.
This transaction has been approved by the board of directors of each company and is expected to close during the third quarter of 2012. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Citrix expects to discuss the acquisition in greater detail when it reports financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2012. Upon the close of this acquisition, Bytemobile will form a new Service Provider Platforms team as part of the Citrix Cloud Networking product group.
The acquisition of Bytemobile expands the market reach of Citrix from its existing leadership position with enterprise and cloud provider customers, into the rapidly growing mobile telecommunications space. Bytemobile brings Citrix leading technology, award-winning products, a strong customer base, and 12 years of customer relationships and deployment experience in mobile telecommunications. Bytemobile customers today serve more than 2 billion subscribers and process more than 20 petabytes of data traffic through customer networks daily.
Based near Citrix Silicon Valley headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., Bytemobile has approximately 300 employees, including product, sales and services teams around the world. In addition to optimizing mobile data and video traffic, Bytemobile solutions enable mobile operators to differentiate data service plans based on a wide variety of factors, including quality of experience and subscriber usage.
“The cloud and mobile revolutions are rapidly converging, and mobile operators are at the heart of this convergence,” said Klaus Oestermann, group vice president and general manager of cloud networking at Citrix. “With the integration of Bytemobile technology, products and intellectual capital, Citrix will be uniquely positioned to be a leader in the global mobile data and video infrastructure market in the LTE era.”
Since announcing their earlier strategic partnership at Mobile World Congress in February 2012, Citrix and Bytemobile have collaborated to deliver the Bytemobile T1100 Traffic Director, which helps operators scale next-generation mobile networks and apps with the application delivery intelligence and performance of the NEBS-compliant Citrix NetScaler platform. With this acquisition, Citrix and Bytemobile will further accelerate the ability to bring mobile operators a wide range of powerful solutions to enable mobile workstyles and power cloud services.
“The integration of Bytemobile will enable us to extend our value proposition to the edge of the network, bringing content closer to the end user,” continued Oestermann. “The benefits to network operators and their subscribers include faster, more efficient, more reliable, and more manageable networks; higher performance resulting in better service and a better user experience; and scalability to process growing volumes of data traffic at a much lower cost.”
Citrix plans to build on Bytemobile as the center of its go-to-market strategy for mobile network operators – retaining and growing its investment in the Bytemobile brand, technology, products, employees and customer relationships. Bytemobile will continue as an independent product group within the Citrix cloud networking group, leveraging clear synergies with adjacent technologies such as Citrix NetScaler.
“We are excited about the significance of this transaction for the industry, our customers, our employees, and our stockholders,” said Chris Koopmans, chief operating officer of Bytemobile. “With the rollout of LTE and other next-generation networks, the mobile data market is poised to grow dramatically in the coming years. The addition of Bytemobile solutions to the Citrix portfolio will accelerate the fulfillment of our vision and investment in the future of the industry.”
Qubole Exits Stealth Mode, Introduces Auto-Scaling Big Data Platform
Qubole exited stealth mode today to introduce its auto-scaling Big Data platform, “combining the power of Apache Hadoop and Hive with the simplicity of a Cloud platform in order to accelerate time-to-value from Big Data.” Qubole, a Silver Sponsor of next week’s Hadoop Summit 2012 conference, also invites business analysts, data scientists, and data engineers to participate in the Qubole early access program.
While most well known as creators of Apache Hive and long-time contributors to Apache Hadoop, Qubole’s founders Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma also managed the Facebook data infrastructure team that was responsible for nearly 25PB of compressed data. The data services built by this team are used across business and engineering teams who submit tens of thousands of jobs, queries and ad hoc analysis requests every day. Thusoo and Sen Sarma applied their experiences and learnings to create the industry’s next generation big data platform for the cloud. With Qubole, organizations can literally begin uncovering new insights from their structured and unstructured data sources within minutes.
“We believe a new approach is needed – one that hides the complexity associated with storing and managing data and instead provides a fast, easy path to analysis and insights for business analysts, data scientists and data engineers,” said Joydeep Sen Sarma, Co-Founder of Qubole. “We gained significant experience helping a web-scale company build and manage a complex Big Data platform. We don’t want our customers to worry about choosing a flavor of Hadoop, or spinning up clusters, or trying to optimize performance. Qubole will manage all of that so that users can focus on their data and their algorithms.”
Qubole Auto-Scaling Big Data Platform for the Cloud Benefits Include:
- Fastest Path to Big Data Analytics –
Qubole handles all infrastructure complexities behind the scenes so
users can begin doing ad hoc analysis and creating data pipelines
using SQL and MapReduce within minutes. - Scalability “On the Fly” – Qubole
features the industry’s first auto-scaling Hadoop clusters so users
can get the right amount of computing power for each and every project. - Fast Query Authoring Tools – Qubole
provides fast access to sample data so that queries can be authored
and validated quickly. - Fastest Hadoop and Hive Service in the Cloud
– Using advanced caching and query acceleration techniques, Qubole has
demonstrated query speeds up to five times faster than other
Cloud-based Hadoop solutions. - Quick Connection to Data – Qubole
provides mechanisms to work with data sets stored in any format in
Amazon S3. It also allows users to easily export data to S3 or to
databases like MySQL. - Integrated Data Workflow Engine – Qubole
provides mechanisms to easily create data pipelines so users can run
their queries periodically with a high degree of reliability. - Enhanced Debugging Abilities – Qubole
provides features that helps users get to errors in Hadoop/Hive jobs
fast, thus saving time in debugging queries. - Easy Collaboration with Peers – Qubole’s
Cloud-based architecture makes it ideal for analysts working in a
geographically distributed environment to share information and
analysis.
“Companies are increasingly moving to the Cloud and for good reason. Applications hosted in the Cloud are much easier to use and manage, especially for companies without very large IT organizations. While Software as a Service (SaaS) is now the standard for many different types of applications, it has not yet been made easy for companies to use the Cloud to convert their ever-increasing volume and variety of data into useful business and product insights. Qubole makes it much easier and faster for companies to analyze and process more of their Big Data, and they will benefit tremendously,” said Ashish Thusoo, Co-Founder of Qubole.
To join the early access program, please visit www.qubole.com. Qubole is looking to add a select number of companies for early access to its service, with the intention of making the service more generally available in Q4 2012. People interested in seeing a demo of the platform can visit Qubole at the Hadoop Summit June 13 – 14 at the San Jose Convention Center, kiosk #B11.
Cloud Computing: Citrix to Buy Bytemobile
Citrix said Thursday that it has arranged to buy privately held Bytemobile for a mystery sum to get leverage in the global mobile data and video infrastructure market as LTE rolls out.
Bytemobile makes data and video optimization solutions for mobile network operators.
Citrix said the acquisition, expected to close in Q3, would give it a strategic foothold in the core infrastructure of more than 130 mobile operators in 60 countries around the world, extending its market reach, and enhancing its broader strategy of powering mobile “workstyles” and cloud services.
Cloud Computing: WHIPTAIL Talks Big Data & the Speed of Life at Cloud Expo
The 10th International Cloud Expo at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City will put a fine focus on two of the hottest topics in Enterprise IT today – Cloud Computing and Big Data. WHIPTAIL, the world leader in high performance 100 percent silicon storage arrays, will showcase their class-leading solutions on the Big Data Power Panel and the Data at the Speed of Life general session.
WHIPTAIL, the first company to introduce a family of high performance products that are scalable and offer investment protection, will be represented by Max Riggsbee, vice president of product management and CMO, and Mike Schmitt, director of product management and marketing.
Cloud Computing: QLogic to Address Cloud Storage Migration at Cloud Expo
WHAT: QLogic will exhibit and present at the 10th International Cloud Expo. QLogic experts will provide attendees with insight and practical information that will allow them to address current trends in cloud computing and better manage their storage in the cloud era.
Presentations include:
Ilker Cebeli, director of cloud computing, QLogic, will discuss “I/O Architectures for Big Data” on Thursday, June 14, at 9:55 a.m. In this session, attendees will learn how Big Data is impacting storage and networking architecture in the data center and how to build optimized infrastructure to address this trend. In addition, Cebeli will explain how to leverage cloud storage while maintaining local iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage infrastructure.
Cloud Computing: Oracle Takes to the Cloud
Oracle went indubitably cloud Wednesday when it hoisted a hundred-odd applications into the sky.
Larry Ellison, who emceed the announcement – and who’s got to be every reporter’s favorite CEO simply for the kind of copy he produces – said Oracle started on a “forced march” to the cloud seven years ago, leaving one to assume he previously belittled the hyped architecture as “complete gibberish” so Oracle could catch up.
The shift away from software that customers install internally – and the kind of support fees Oracle charges – could take a bite out of Oracle’s precious revenues. A few years ago Ellison said the cloud was a hard way to make money.