The lack of emphasis on self-service Private Clouds is a telling indicator of the state of Cloud Computing (in particular, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS) in the enterprise. If an enterprise IT shop were to truly implement a self-service Private Cloud, and actually got it to work properly, then the enterprise development teams would be able to manage the entire production environment for themselves. There’d be nothing left for the operational IT folks to do except make sure to replace bad hard drives and the like. No more server or network administration. No more break/fix. No more reason to get that healthy salary – or any salary at all, for that matter.
Monthly Archives: April 2013
Six Steps to Get Started with Windows Azure Active Directory
Windows Azure Active Directory ( WAAD ), a cloud-friendly REST-based implementation of Active Directory for identity management of cloud applications, is now generally available for production cloud apps as a FREE service. WAAD provides consistent centralized identity management for Microsoft Office 365, Windows Intune and your own cloud-based applications. In addition, WAAD can be integrated with an on-premise Windows Server Active Directory via DirSync and Active Directory Federation Services ( ADFS ) gateway components.
In this article, I’ll provide a set of resources that you can use to get started exploring and leveraging Windows Azure Active Directory for your applications …
Navigating the Crowded Cloud Market
Cost, tech, service: Which do you value most in a cloud solution?
Whenever you go shopping there are usually a few factors that determine what you buy and what you pass up.
One is obviously money (though we all wish this wasn’t the case). Price can be a deciding factor, but often we will pay a little more for something if it offers measurable value.
Another factor is trust: Do you know what’s being sold? Do you trust who’s selling it? Can you trust that it will fulfill your needs?
The flipside of trust is often chance: Are you willing to take a chance on a new product that will hopefully deliver the same or better results than your tried-and-true choice?
Private cloud drives data centre expansion, says survey
Half of those polled in the latest cloudy survey have said they will “definitely” look to expand their data centres in the coming year, with the vast majority of remaining respondents claiming they will expand in 2014.
The survey, commissioned by data bods Digital Realty Trust and conducted by Campos Research and Analysis, spoke to 300 IT execs and concluded that this explosion in data centre usage was primarily down to the proliferation of private clouds.
Three in five (61%) cited an internal cloud as an “extremely important reason” for expansion, with the main data centre driver being security (67%).
Other interesting drivers noted in the top 10 were disaster recovery (62%), new apps and services (61%) and virtualisation (57%).
The most popular place to build a new data centre is New York, according to the research, with 65% of those surveyed citing the most interest in the Big Apple …
When the Cloud Is Run on a Cloud
At first blush, it sounds like a mystic’s riddle, somewhere in the vicinity of the sound of one hand clapping. But in reality, it’s a setup that makes perfect sense: Rackspace runs its OpenStack cloud in another OpenStack cloud.
“We’re running our cloud inside of a cloud,” John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, recently told Wired.com. “All of the control nodes that are necessary to serve the customers on our cloud are running in another OpenStack cloud.”
The arrangement is only natural. “It’s a better way of doing things,” Engates said. “We’re merely eating our own dog food. The application we’re offering to customers is running on that same application.”
OpenStack is a way of pooling resources from a vast collection of machines, including processing power and storage space. Rather than running your software application on a particular server, you run it on OpenStack, a platform that spans hundreds of servers, and this platform can grab you as much processing power as you need, whenever you need it. This makes it easier to launch applications, but it also makes it easier to expand or “scale” them – to reach more users with more servers. And when a server fails, the platform is smart enough to move the machine’s work to a new one.
HP Moonshot 1500 Software Defined Capable Compute Servers
Riding the current software defined data center (SDC) wave being led by the likes of VMware and software defined networking (SDN) also championed by VMware via their acquisition of Nicera last year, Software Defined Marketing (SDM) is in full force. HP being a player in providing the core building blocks for traditional little data and big data, along with physical, virtual, converged, cloud and software defined has announced a new compute, processor or server platform called the Moonshot 1500.
GoGrid and Racemi Partner to Offer Free On-Ramp to Cloud Computing
GoGrid, a cloud infrastructure company, and Racemi, the moving company for the cloud, on Tuesday announced the availability of Cloud Path for GoGrid, a joint offering for migrating customers’ existing server workloads to GoGrid’s cloud platform free of charge.
The Cloud Path software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering is a customer self-service web portal for automated migration of existing Windows and Linux servers to GoGrid Cloud Server instances. There is no infrastructure to deploy or maintain on the customer site. Plus, the live capture of server workloads eliminates powering down servers and means no server downtime.
“This free migration solution provides an average cost savings of $800 per server migrated versus manual processes,” said Lawrence Guillory, CEO, Racemi. “Even more important, it reduces customers’ migration project timelines from days, weeks, or even months to just hours.”
Cloud Expo NY: Accelerating Cloud Computing with Intel SSD Technology
Explore SSD technology and key considerations when designing SSDs into cloud computing environments. Learn about the best known practices to overcome IO bottlenecks and accelerate cloud applications.
In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Tahmid Rahman, an Applications Engineer at Intel, and Chuck Brown, Data Center SSD Product Line Manager at Intel, will cover key aspects of storage subsystem metrics including Quality of Service (QoS) and how IOP consistency is critical to cloud storage deployment and performance; SSD endurance needs within cloud deployment and its verification methods; and Reliability and Serviceability features to ensure stress free protection of cloud storage. This session also covers new SSD caching methods for accelerating SAN storage farms, achieving breakthrough performance with existing infrastructure and Intel SSD technology.
Cost Reduction with Automation in the Cloud
Forrester analyst James Staten says that “the whole value of cloud computing is tied to areas of IT that can be standardized, automated, and shared among multiple constituents.[1]” Automation through the cloud is the next step for cloud-based innovation to reduce costs and increase productivity. But questions remain. Find out how automation from the cloud can enhance the bottom line by delivering savings on hardware and manual effort.
From the telephone to the iPad, with every bit of new modern technology that’s introduced, there are very vocal early adopters who can’t wait to try it. There is also an equally vocal group of people who are skeptical about, if not completely opposed to, its introduction. When a decision whether or not to employ the latest and greatest affects an entire company’s well-being, it’s no wonder that questions of progress are approached with such trepidation. However, being a late adopter of innovation – like automation from the cloud – can cost companies real money.
NetDNA, YC’s Leftronic Partner on Real-Time CDN Monitoring
Content delivery network provider NetDNA today announced its partnership with Y-Combinator-funded Leftronic, to develop high-performance, secure and real-time data visualization dashboards for its CDN services.
Now, NetDNA or MaxCDN customers can get a bird’s-eye view of their traffic, including daily, weekly or monthly statistics on popular files, popular file types, status codes, cache hit percentage, statistics by location and more. All of which are presented in a Web browser using Leftronic’s real-time, large screen metric dashboard platform.
The companies also worked together to provide dashboards measuring traffic on NetDNA’s Bootstrap CDN project, samples of which are available online.
“We’re excited to be partnering with Leftronic because monitoring traffic is a critical step to receiving the full benefits of our CDN service. Now they can do that in a big and beautiful way using only a browser,” said Justin Dorfman, NetDNA’s Developer Advocate.
“We could see an immediate synergy between our two companies when NetDNA shared with us the demand for better CDN reporting it saw in its customer base,” said Rajiv Ghanta, CEO of Leftronic. “The company is truly developer friendly with its well-supported API and fast customer support. We’re looking forward to a lasting relationship with the company.”
Leftronic has created a data visualization platform that helps companies monitor and track their business metrics. The platform has no software to download, instead everything is shown in a Web browser for easy accessibility and organization. The technology is combined with a simple-to-use front-end interface for visualizing the data and has an API for integrating custom company data.
With more than 10,000 customers trusting its content delivery services, NetDNA provides simple, efficient and affordable web performance optimization solutions that help customers to increase and improve their website speed. Most recently, NetDNA’s MaxCDN service has been its leading, popular solution among businesses because of its easy sign up system and versatile web performance acceleration.
