The OpenStack movement is about to release Grizzly, the seventh and latest release of the open source infrastructure cloud platform for building public, private and hybrid clouds.
Among other things it was on time. The widgetry is on an every six-month release schedule.
The changes made were across virtualization, storage, networking, security and systems engineering and are supposed to solve not only complex cloud problems, but drive the entire technology industry forward.
The initiative’s contributors are reportedly up 45% in the last six months and Grizzly is supposed to deliver the broadest support for Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and enterprise technologies, SDN being the latest techno-craze.
Monthly Archives: April 2013
Data as Paint, and the Rise of the Data Artist
Art has always been a means of communication, reflection, persuasion, storytelling, and interpretation. Artists use their imagination to create visual representations of the world, both literal and abstract. The earliest art, prehistoric cave paintings, used simple representations, such as a cross to represent a man, and a triangle for a woman.
Business Architecture and Enterprise Transformation
The Open Group’s first conference in Australia will focus on enterprise transformation. Speakers and a variety of sessions will place the transformation in the context of such vertical industries as finance, defense, exploration, mining, and minerals.
As a prelude to the event, BriefingsDirect recently interviewed two of the main speakers at the conference — Hugh Evans, the Chief Executive Officer of Enterprise Architects, a specialist enterprise architecture (EA) firm based in Melbourne, Australia, and Craig Martin, Chief Operations Officer and Chief Architect at Enterprise Architects.
As some background, Hugh is both the founder and CEO at Enterprise Architects. His professional experience blends design and business, having started out in traditional architecture, computer games design, and digital media, before moving into enterprise IT and business transformation.
In 1999, Hugh founded the IT Strategy Architecture Forum, which included chief architects from most of the top 20 companies in Australia. He has also helped found the Australian Architecture Body of Knowledge and the London Architecture Leadership Forum in the UK.
Since starting Enterprise Architects in 2002, Hugh has grown the team to more than 100 people, with offices in Australia, the UK, and the U.S.
With a career spanning more than 20 years, Craig has held executive positions in the communications, high tech, media, entertainment, and government markets and has operated as an Enterprise Architect and Chief Consulting Architect for a while.
Scaling Big Data in the Cloud
Need to scale your data tier? The foundation of every application is the database layer, and today application architects have more choices than ever. With these choices come new questions: Which database technology is best for your application? How can your application take advantage of Big Data technology? Can you run your relational database at Big Data scale? What does it take to implement a comprehensive data infrastructure, including your core database, incorporating SQL, No SQL and Big Data platforms?
What CIOs Need to Know About Enterprise Virtualization
As a CIO, it’s your responsibility to chart the technological course for your organization and to do so in a way that meets business needs while fitting inside a budget. Virtualization is one of the most significant advancements to hit the enterprise, and it can be a tremendous boon for the CIO who understands the technology and is willing to implement it across the enterprise.
There are four key areas related to virtualization that CIOs need to understand and keep on top of:
- Managing your enterprise virtualization approach. Implementing virtualization isn’t something that should be rushed. While it’s tempting to try to keep up with other organizations and earn bragging rights for being “in the cloud” or “75% virtualized,” the fact of the matter is that the approach must be cautious. Your virtualization strategy will touch every aspect of the enterprise, including desktop machines, applications, servers and other infrastructure.
- Monitoring the enterprise virtualization environment. The monitoring tools used by IT in the past aren’t quite sufficient in a virtualized environment. There are newer tools that have been used to establish what your users’ typical use patterns are throughout the day, week, month and year. These monitoring tools are essential to provisioning – making sure that every application gets the resources it needs at the right time.
- Desktop virtualization isn’t always a viable option. There was a time that enterprises were so enthralled with how effective server virtualization had been that they concluded, incorrectly, that desktop virtualization must necessarily provide the same benefits. That’s not always the case. In fact, desktop virtualization can create its own bag of problems for your business. We’re not saying to take desktop virtualization off the table, but think long and hard about how to do it. And, don’t forget the BYOD trend, which throws a whole other concern into the desktop virtualization mix.
- Supporting disaster recovery and business continuity planning. Virtualization technologies, when properly deployed, offer benefits for your disaster recovery planning. Because disaster recover rarely gets its own line item in the budget, you need to find creative ways to make your systems able to survive major catastrophes and keep business running. Virtualization offers you an opportunity to do just that.
Today’s CIO is forced to deal with virtualization, like it or not. If you want your organization to come out on top, include these principles in your virtualization decision-making processes.
Tapping in Women Tech Talent: Our Opportunity!
On March 27 2013 I had the opportunity to participate at Cisco’s Women in Technology Forum with the theme, “Think Big, Play Big!”
The event was particularly poignant as it was held under the publicity from Sheryl Sandberg’s provocative book and movement “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead”
Our CEO John Chambers kicked the Forum off with a welcome video. There were 41 Cisco execs at this venue and what can I say, an excellent start! Moving forward, I am excited that Cisco will be active globally in the celebration of Girls in ICT Day on April 25 2013. Further, I will have an opportunity to represent Cisco at the afternoon session, European Parliamentary hearing on Women in ICT.
Amazon Cuts Prices on S3
Amazon has cut the prices on its S3 cloud storage. Presumably it’s seeing the competition bearing down on it in the rear-view mirror.
Anyway, it says that it’s reducing S3 request prices in all nine of its regions.
It’s lowering the prices for GET requests by 60% and the prices for PUT, LIST, COPY and POST requests by 50%.
That means that in its US Standard Region the price for every 1,000 PUT requests will drop from $0.01 to $0.005 and the price for every 10,000 GET requests will go from $0.01 to $0.004.
The new pricing became effective on April 1 without warning.
Cloud Expo New York: Driving Customer Advantage via the Cloud
ADP delivers human capital management (HCM) solutions via the cloud to enable better business outcomes for its clients, and sees the cloud’s real value as a gateway to providing clients with easier, faster, and more cost-efficient software services and solutions that can be constantly upgraded and fine-tuned.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Mike Capone, CIO of ADP, will share how companies can leverage a proven approach, from next-level offerings such as Access to Expertise, Managed Services, and Analytic Benchmarking, to the cloud in order to unlock optimal value for their customers.
Adaptive Risk: Making Sure You Are Who You Say You Are
Implement the predictive analytic process that is designed to assess/score risk attributes during authentication so that Access Management can determine whether to require the user to complete further authentication steps.
Does this sound familiar? Ann, sitting at her desk eating lunch, is surfing the Net. She checks her personal Yahoo email account and sees a message from a purported survey company asking her about her music preferences. She opens the email and takes the survey. Seems harmless enough, but what Ann doesn’t know is that this survey company doesn’t exist and embedded in some of the survey prompts hides an undetected botnet that downloaded onto her desktop. This nasty bugger can record her keystrokes and take screen shots as she navigates through your network. Now some unauthorized entity has her login credentials, passwords…essentially her online/employee identity and access to your enterprise’s proprietary assets and other sensitive data.
910Telecom to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that 910Telecom, a carrier-neutral telecom hotel, 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.
910Telecom is a carrier-neutral telecom hotel located in the heart of Denver. Adjacent to CenturyLink, AT&T, and Denver Main, we offer connectivity to all major carriers, internet service providers, internet backbones and exchanges. The DGEB Meet Me Room™ facilities provide access to hundreds of customers as well as national and local carriers without incurring local loop fees. Passive and active panels support circuit connections from T1 to DS3, OC3-OC192, and GigE Ethernet.