“ServiceMesh is an enterprise software company. Our product is the agility platform, which is an enterprise-ready cloud application management platform,” stated Frank Martinez, Chief Strategy Officer at ServiceMesh, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Monthly Archives: August 2012
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Building Secure Multi-Tenant Environments
“We are a cloud hosting provider with 14 years of experience and we are focused on building multi-tenant secure environments,” stated Aaron Hollobaugh, Vice President of Marketing at Hostway Corporation, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Cloud Computing: Cloud Storage as a Service
“Atmos is EMC’s cloud storage solution. It’s a distributed object storer that enables Enterprise IT and service providers to offer their own storage as a service offerings,” noted Brian Olson, Cloud Business Development Manager at EMC, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Nuance Introduces Nina, the Virtual Assistant for Mobile Customer Service Apps
Nuance Communications today introduced Nina, the virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps. With Nina, companies can add speech-based virtual assistant capabilities to their existing iOS and Android mobile apps, enhancing the self-service experience for their customers. Nina combines Nuance speech recognition, Text-to-Speech (TTS), voice biometrics, and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology hosted in the cloud to deliver an interactive user experience that not only understands what is said, but also can identify who is saying it.
Nuance also announced that USAA, a leading financial services provider that serves members of the U.S. military, veterans and their families, has adopted the virtual assistant for use within its popular mobile app. A pilot is planned for August and the functionality will launch to all USAA members early next year.
“USAA’s innovative solutions are designed to make life easier for our highly mobile military service members, and increasingly for all members who now expect to get things done when, where and how they want,” said Neff Hudson, assistant vice president of emerging channels for USAA. “We believe that the virtual assistant has tremendous potential to make it simpler, faster and more satisfying for our members to manage their financial affairs on their mobile devices.”
Nina is significant because it is the first virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps to incorporate both speech recognition and voice biometrics into a single integrated solution. Nina is also the first solution that provides an open software development kit (SDK) to support the rapid integration of virtual assistant capabilities into existing mobile applications. In addition, Nina is the first to allow organizations to brand their own virtual assistant persona, including the visual appearance and implementation of optional custom TTS voices.
“Nina is a watershed innovation for the automated customer service industry, not only because it brings the virtual assistant directly into an app, but because it raises the bar through its level of interactive dialog and language understanding,” said Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager of the Nuance Enterprise Division. “Nina provides our customers a major competitive differentiator by enabling more successful self-service through their mobile apps. We are especially pleased to further our partnership with USAA, a company known for its innovation and approach to delivering a premier mobile customer service experience to its members.”
Infoblox and F5 Do DNS and Global Load Balancing Right.
If you’re a large corporation, two things that are a significant challenge for your Network Administrators’ are DNS management and Global Load Balancing (GLB) configuration/management. With systems spread across a region, country, or the globe, the amount of time investment required to keep things running smoothly ranges from “near zero” during quiet times to “why am I still here at midnight?” in times of major network change or outages.
Until now.
Two market leaders – Infoblox and F5 Networks have teamed up to make DNS – including DNSSEC – and GLB less time-consuming and error prone.
Infoblox has extended their Trinzic DDI family of products with Infoblox Load Balancer Manager (LBM) for F5 Global Traffic Manager (GTM). The LBM turns a loose collection of load balancers into a dynamic, automated, Infoblox Grid.
The Operational Consistency Proxy
#devops #management #webperf Cloud makes more urgent the need to consistently manage infrastructure and its policies regardless of where that infrastructure might reside
While the potential for operational policy (performance, security, reliability, access, etc..) diaspora is often mentioned in conjunction with cloud, it remains a very real issue within the traditional data center as well. Introducing cloud-deployed resources and applications only serves to exacerbate the problem.
F5 has long offered a single-pane of glass management solution for F5 systems with Enterprise Manager (EM) and recently introduced significant updates that increase its scope into the cloud and broaden its capabilities to simplify the increasingly complex operational tasks associated with managing security, performance, and reliability in a virtual world.
AUTOMATE COMMON TASKS
The latest release of F5 EM includes enhancements to its ability to automate common tasks such as configuring and managing SSL certificates, managing policies, and enabling/disabling resources which assists in automating provisioning and de-provisioning processes as well as automating what many might consider mundane – and yet critical – maintenance window operations.
Updating policies, too, assists in maintaining operational consistency across all F5 solutions – whether in the data center or in the cloud. This is particularly important in the realm of security, where control over access to applications is often far less under the control of IT than even the business would like. Combining F5’s cloud-enabled solutions such as F5 Application Security Manager (ASM) and Access Policy Manager (APM) with the ability for F5 EM to manage such distributed instances in conjunction with data center deployed instances provides for consistent enforcement of security and access policies for applications regardless of their deployment location. For F5 ASM specifically, this extends to Live Signature updates, which can be downloaded by F5 EM and distributed to managed instances of F5 ASM to ensure the most up-to-date security across enterprise concerns.
The combination of centralized management with automation also ensures rapid response to activities such as the publication of CERT advisories. Operators can quickly determine from the centralized inventory the impact of such a vulnerability and take action to redress the situation.
INTEGRATED PERFORMANCE METRICS 
F5 EM also includes an option to provision a Centralized Analytics Module. This module builds on F5’s visibility into application performance based on its strategic location in the architecture – residing in front of the applications for which performance is a concern. Individual instances of F5 solutions can be directed to gather a plethora of application performance related statistics, which is then aggregated and reported on by application in EM’s Centralized Analytics Module.
These metrics enable capacity planning, troubleshooting and can be used in conjunction with broader business intelligence efforts to understand the performance of applications and its related impact whether those applications are in the cloud or in the data center. This global monitoring extends to F5 device health and performance, to ensure infrastructure services scale along with demand.
Monitoring includes:
- Device Level Visibility & Monitoring
- Capacity Planning
- Virtual Level & Pool Member Statistics
- Object Level Visibility
- Near Real-Time Graphics
- Reporting
In addition to monitoring, F5 EM can collect actionable data upon which thresholds can be determined and alerts can be configured.
Alerts include:
- Device status change
- SSL certificate expiration
- Software install complete
- Software copy failure
- Statistics data threshold
- Configuration synchronization
- Attack signature update
- Clock skew
When thresholds are reached, triggers send an alert via email, SNMP trap or syslog event. More sophisticated alerting and inclusion in broader automated, operational systems can be achieved by taking advantage of F5’s control-plane API, iControl. F5 EM is further able to proxy iControl-based applications, eliminating the need to communicate directly with each BIG-IP deployed.
OPERATIONAL CONSISTENCY PROXY
By acting as a centralized management and operational console for BIG-IP devices, F5 EM effectively proxies operational consistency across the data center and into the cloud. Its ability to collect and aggregate metrics provides a comprehensive view of application and infrastructure performance across the breadth and depth of the application delivery chain, enabling more rapid response to incidents whether performance or security related.
F5 EM ensures consistency in both infrastructure configuration and operational policies, and actively participates in automation and orchestration efforts that can significantly decrease the pressure on operations when managing the critical application delivery network component of a highly distributed, cross-environment architecture.
Additional Resources:
F5 Enterprise Manager Overview 
In 5 Minutes or Less – Enterprise Manager v3.0
Application Delivery Network Platform Management
Happy Managing!
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Related blogs & articles:
- Devops Proverb: Process Practice Makes Perfect
- Persistent Threat Management
- F5 Friday: ADN = SDN at Layer 4-7
- Applying ‘Centralized Control, Decentralized Execution’ to Network Architecture
- F5 Friday: Avoiding the Operational Debt of Cloud
Technorati Tags: F5,F5 Friday,MacVittie,F5 EM,enterprise,management,performance,security,cloud,monitoring,automation,devops,blog
Fusion-io Intros ION Software-Defined Storage
Fusion-io Wednesday trotted out a piece of software called ION Data Accelerator that All Things Digital says means that a server fitted with flash can replace a storage array.
It also says that “servers that run in the cloud are going all-flash” starting with the boxes in Facebook’s data centers. They’re no longer combined with hard disks.
Fusion-io says its ION Data Accelerator software transforms 1U servers into network-shared ioMemory data acceleration appliances delivering over one million IOPS, up to 6 GB/s throughput and under 0.06 millisecond access latency. Applications that need access to shared data benefit from the performance.
It’ll scale as the underlying server and networking get fancier and it won’t lose data to power outages.
Writer’s iCloud hacked as Wozniak calls cloud “horrendous”
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is hardly sitting on the fence with his opinions on the cloud
Speaking after a performance of Mike Daisey’s monologue “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”, Steve Wozniak was in uncompromising mood concerning his thoughts on cloud computing.
Wozniak reportedly told the packed theatre audience: “I think [cloud’s] going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years”.
Five years is a long time. According to Gartner, four years is all it will take for a third of consumers’ digital content to end up in the cloud.
Wozniak added: “With the cloud, you don’t own anything. The more we transfer everything onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it”.
As a result, it’s easy to sympathise with the unfortunate story of US journalist Mat …
Gartner Hype-Cycle 2012 – Cloud Computing
Let me read between the lines of Gartner Hype-Cycle for Cloud Computing – 2012. According to my reading this is what Gartner really wants to say. I agree with 4 of them, am doubtful about one and disagree with one.
Gartner has stated these points using a different language. I am being more direct.
Cloud Computing has started going down the “trough of disillusionment”!
After hovering in the “peak of inflated expectation” for last 3 years, cloud computing has started down the “trough of disillusionment”!
Apple & Google to Vie in Kodak Patent Auction
As part of its bankruptcy proceedings, Eastman Kodak has put 1,100 patents on the block.
They are expected to be sold at auction on August 8.
There was reportedly a Monday deadline for initial bids according to what “people familiar with the matter” told the Wall Street Journal.
Apple, teamed with Microsoft and Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, and Google in company with RPX, Samsung, LG and HTC are believed to be after them for protection.
Apple and Google were on opposite sides in the great Nortel patent auction last year and Apple and Microsoft et al walked off with the IP for $4.5 billion, a victory the inflated the expectations of patent holders everywhere.