Four out of five European enterprises describe themselves as very or somewhat interested in adopting Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), reflecting rapidly increasing or spiking bandwidth requirements faced today as well as the need for a more cost-effective connectivity model. The findings were published this week in a survey carried out by Vanson Bourne on behalf of network specialist Ciena.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Okay, Let Me Say It – Generic PaaS Is Not Disruptive
This article argues whether the generic paas offerings from established giants today are not disruptive enough and at best they are incremental.
Change. Continuous change is what we have witnessed, since Computing began way back in 1960s, we have had many transformational waves on how the Software is built, deployed and accessed; From the COBOL & mainframes to Client-Server & PCs, to the web, to multi-tier and the whole 9 yards of how code was written, arranged, deployed and managed.
Rackspace Launches New Private Cloud Reference Architectures
Rackspace, co-developer of the OpenStack cloud platform, has created a more direct path for large, full-service IT providers to deploy the popular open source-based software in large-scale private cloud projects, according to an article on eWEEK.
Rackspace released three new blueprints, called Private Cloud Open Reference Architectures, to fuel the initiative, which is designed specifically for such companies as EMC, Dell, IBM, NetApp and Hewlett-Packard.
The new blueprints primarily are directed at Big Data-type private cloud projects, which are ramping up in many different verticals around the globe.
According to an article on TalkinCloud.com, “reference architectures are one way toward achieving maturity in a business technology, and that’s what Rackspace is hoping to do. At the same time, it may give it and the channel partners that deal in private OpenStack cloud infrastructure and deployments an advantage, as the references should, ideally, make it easier for them to design private clouds for their customers.”
Novell Drives Software Quality with Coverity
With more than 23,000 customers around the world, a software defect in any of Novell’s products has far-reaching ramifications. With a globally distributed development operation, Novell needed a flexible static analysis solution that could be used by its dispersed internal development teams and partners.
Leveraging Cloud and Virtualization for Disaster Recovery
With cloud computing, more users and an increase in data bring with it the challenges associated with disaster recovery and business continuity. All distributed systems have to be checked and the data points must all be monitored. In working with these more complex data centers, many administrators are turning to the cloud and virtualization to help them create a more robust DR plan, according to an article on DataCenterKnowledge.com.
A well-planned out cloud and virtualization solution can truly help any organization create a more agile environment. There are inherent benefits to working with specific types of cloud models and virtualization platforms. A large part of IT is creativity – that’s why using new types of technologies can help reduce management costs and keep an environment running longer.
One way to prepare for disaster is using cloud for replication. Site-to-site replication has become easier with the utilization of both private and public cloud technologies. With better storage systems and more control over the WAN, organizations are able to better replicate their environments. This can be entire virtual machines, specific databases or just data points.
An Introduction to Windows Azure Features
With IaaS combined with the many features Windows Azure offers, the opportunities for enterprise IT as well as small and medium businesses are real and exciting to employ cloud as a delivery platform for LOB services including media and phone apps.
Rackspace Receives $2.5 Million Job-Training Grant
Rackspace Hosting has partnered with Alamo Colleges to provide job training using a $2.5 million Skills Development Fund grant from the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC).
Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier stated that “Rackspace fully understands the importance of a highly engaged, cloud savvy workforce. We are thrilled to be partnering with Alamo Colleges and see this as an exciting step forward in our journey to bridging the IT skills gap.”
“This grant will provide training for skills that companies would have previously had to search for globally,” said state Sen. Carlos Uresti. “We are pleased that this partnership will result in good-paying jobs here in Texas.”
“This partnership is good for our families, good for our businesses, and good for San Antonio,” said state Sen. Donna Campbell. “Together, the State of Texas, Alamo Colleges, and Rackspace are creating 1,000 new jobs and providing workers with opportunities to develop the skills that will ensure Texas remains a leader in 21st Century technology.”
Google Cloud Ventures – Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
To best capture the primary value of Cloud Computing I always recommend looking at the scenario of a new entrepreneur launching their online business.
The Cloud has made entrepreneurism itself more accessible to more people, lowering the barrier to entry by lowering the costs it takes to launch a new online venture by a magnitude, while simultaneously improving the quality of the apps you can produce, and how quickly you can produce them.
Combined with the continuing explosion of online users and how much they grow their daily use of social media, e-commerce etc., this is a massively potent combination.
The Joys of Cloud Storage demoed at Parallels Summit
by, Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Parallels
If you missed all the fun at Parallels Summit in Vegas last week here is a quick recap. It was all about cloud storage. Pure software magic at its very best.
Just imagine a rack of servers converted with a software RAID device into a single storage cloud; with storage on all the nodes now available across the rack, available for any of the VMs or containers running on that rack, ready for any container of VM connected to that rack, or available as a pure store for any application or backup system connected to that rack.
Since my affinity is for virtualization, my personal favorite is the fact that software storage abstraction not only frees up all the dormant storage in the datacenter but that it enables High Availability as a simple outcome of that abstraction.
On the main stage at Caesars Palace, we demoed it using a server rack with 5 nodes. We ran a container streaming a video on node 2. Then we connected the video stream to the main projector and showed heart beats for all the nodes and the container right below.
All it took then to show High Availability was to parade unannounced in front of the audience on the main stage during the keynote and pull out both power cords from the node running a virtual container. At that point the management node, aka virtual RAID, rechecked availability of data on server and confirmed that it was down and found the container with the video stream missing. It than used distributed data from remaining nodes to restart a container on a new node and 12th seconds later re-started video streaming on the projector.
I know I should stop writing right here because it does not get much better than that, but here is a quick calc for all of you appreciating datacenter operations. If you are running mirror RAID on a single server you are probably averaging at least 4 service impacting incidents a year. If it takes you 2 hours per incident to recover the service, your customers are experiencing 8 hours of downtime a year, or about 2 “9’s” of availability on your service, leaving you with a bunch of unhappy customers, and you are a hoster who has lost business.
Now if you run High Availability cloud storage on that same rack. You will still get same number of incidents, that is just life and stuff happens, but now you are going to recover service in 10-30sec. dropping your total yearly downtime to less than 5 minutes. Now you tell me how many 9s that is.
Cloudscaling Productizes OpenStack Folsom
Cloudscaling, the cloud infrastructure software shop, has released Open Cloud System (OCS) 2.0 for general availability in production deployments.
CTO Randy Bias says, “General availability of OCS version 2.0 is a major milestone. As far as we are aware, we’re the only company to ship an elastic cloud infrastructure software solution built on OpenStack technology for public or private deployments.”
The new version adds OpenStack Folsom support and a new scale-out elastic block storage option.