It is still early in 2013, so I can make some cloud, virtualization, storage and IO related predictions, or more aptly, talk about some trends, in addition to those that I made in late 2012, looking forward and back. Common over-riding themes will continue to include convergence (people and technology), valueware, clouds (public, private, hybrid and community) among others.
Certainly, solid state drives (SSDs) will remain popular, both in terms of industry adoption, and industry deployment. Big-data (and little data) management tools and purpose-build storage systems or solutions continue to be popular, as are those for supporting little data applications. On the cloud storage front, there are many options for various use cases available. Watch for more emphasis on service-level agreements (SLA), service-level objectives (SLO), security, pricing transparency, and tiers of service.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
4 aspects to maximise mobile cloud computing
Many clients I talk to are simply not ready for the ever-changing conditions in the business world as cloud computing gains in popularity. My company started using it years ago, when we needed to expand our horizons in our IT department, to include flexibility in transferring data when our workers were away from their desks.
We quickly realised we could maximize mobile cloud computing technologies to our company’s benefit, with virtually no additional costs of buying needed equipment or extra personnel. The model we use in optimising mobile cloud computing technology can easily be incorporated into any business model.
Mobile Applications Will Be Common for the Workplace
With the ever-increasing popularity of laptops, tablets and smartphones in the workplace, the mobile network will soon replace all other preferred methods of Internet connectivity in the United States. Mobile devices are expected to increase up to over 250 million individuals by …
Firewalls in the cloud era: They improve the cloud and the cloud improves them
Firewalls will always be required as they are the sole devices that analyse and control communication of data and applications.
Firewall technology ensures networks are running the way we want them to. As a result I came to the conclusion that the question is not ‘will on-premise firewalls disappear’, but ‘how will firewalls be influenced by cloud technologies?’.
In order to address this we have to look at some of the history.
Enter Unified Threat Management
10 years ago the first perimeter architectures consisted of a fast packet processor (the firewall) and a battery of content scanning servers. Each server was dedicated to a specific task (a duty) such as locating spyware or virus scanning. Each was from a different vendor and each was managed separately – it was genuinely best of breed and from a pure performance perspective it was ideal.
However this design is a complicated multi-component perimeter infrastructure …
iScan Online Brings Opportunistic Scanning from the Cloud to the Endpoint
iScan Online officially launched today. The company has been in stealth mode since June 2012 and made its SaaS, cloud-based security scanning solution available on a limited pre-release basis. iScan Online fills the growing gap in security scanning as BYOD, remote workers and mobile technology create challenges that traditional security scanners cannot meet.
iScan Online was co-founded by Carl Banzhof and Billy Austin, both renowned security industry veterans with experience helping to guide leading security companies, including Citadel Security, SAINT and McAfee. Banzhof serves as Chief Executive Officer and Austin as President. The company has secured seed capital from a strategic investor who understands the important problem iScan Online is solving.
iScan Online Brings Opportunistic Scanning from the Cloud to the Endpoint
iScan Online officially launched today. The company has been in stealth mode since June 2012 and made its SaaS, cloud-based security scanning solution available on a limited pre-release basis. iScan Online fills the growing gap in security scanning as BYOD, remote workers and mobile technology create challenges that traditional security scanners cannot meet.
iScan Online was co-founded by Carl Banzhof and Billy Austin, both renowned security industry veterans with experience helping to guide leading security companies, including Citadel Security, SAINT and McAfee. Banzhof serves as Chief Executive Officer and Austin as President. The company has secured seed capital from a strategic investor who understands the important problem iScan Online is solving.
BillingPlatform.com to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that BillingPlatform.com, a flexible, high-volume, cloud-based billing platform, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
BillingPlatform.com is the industry’s most flexible, high-volume, cloud-based billing platform for rating any combination of metered, subscription and ad-hoc services while managing customers, products and rate plans. BillingPlatform.com makes it easy to quickly and accurately implement any pricing and rating model and roll out new products and services so customers can rapidly turn ideas into cash.
Cloud Expo NY: The Promise of an End-to-End SDN Solution: Can It Be Done?
The new open source cloud orchestration platform called OpenStack is the promise of flexible network virtualization, and network overlays are looking closer than ever. The vision of this platform is to enable the on-demand creation of many distinct networks on top of one underlying physical infrastructure in the cloud environment. The platform will support automated provisioning and management of large groups of virtual machines or compute resources, including extensive monitoring in the cloud.
There is still a lot of work to be done, as there are many concerns around the efficiency and simplicity of the management solution for the compute and storage resources. A mature solution will need to incorporate different approaches to interact within the intra-server provisioning, QoS and vNIC management. For example, by leaning on local network adapters that are capable of managing the requests by utilizing OpenFlow protocol, or by using a more standard approach which is managed by the switch. Using only one method might create performance and efficiency penalties.
Code 42 Software to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that Code 42 Software, the creator of CrashPlan, CrashPlan PRO, and CrashPlan PROe award-winning onsite, offsite and cloud backup solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Starting out as a software development company in 2001, Code 42 Software is the creator of CrashPlan, CrashPlan PRO, and CrashPlan PROe award-winning onsite, offsite and cloud backup solutions for home, businesses, and enterprise.
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.
Dimension Data Introduces Wan Optimization Across Its Global Cloud
Dimension Data announced on Tuesday that it has introduced WAN optimization capabilities to its cloud globally. By deploying WAN optimization technology in Dimension Data’s Managed Cloud Platform™ (MCP) cloud data centers, Dimension Data clients are reporting a significant increase in application performance across the entire cloud. Organizations using the cloud for database replication, file synchronization, and backup and disaster recovery between data centers have realized the greatest improvement in performance. An enhanced capability, WAN optimization is provided as part of the company’s standard public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering at no additional charge.
According to Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data’s Cloud Solutions Business Unit, “we are helping our clients overcome the latency and bandwidth constraints often associated with public cloud services.”