Obviously Storage-as-a-Utility will never work unless people use it that way.
Cloudian, a Goldman Sachs-backed cloud storage software start-up whose technological roots go back a decade or so, means to see that they do, especially the chi-chi telecom ones and the Fortune 5000, despite their lagging concerns about data management and protection in the cloud.
Evidently Cloudian was able to dispel any fears NTT Communications might have had because it’s rebranded Cloudian’s widgetry as CloudN and sells it as a multi-petabyte Storage-as-a-Service and Backup-as-a-Service.
Besides NTT, Cloudian’s customers include Vodafone, Nextel, SoftBank, Nifty and Lunacloud and the stuff’s only been on the market for about 18 months.
Cloudian is now out to get the names of more Service Providers and big companies notched on its belt.
Monthly Archives: April 2013
SMAC, Mobile Collaboration and Google
Have you had a chance to review the full inventory of Google’s solutions and apps lately? I have been working with many of them this week and am impressed with how Google is enabling enterprises to become true social businesses. It is very interesting how they are not just demonstrating cool and innovative solutions but entirely new ways of running and managing businesses.
If fact, Jon Reed, John Appleby and myself recorded a Google+ Hangout session this week on the subject of enterprise mobility. I will post the link of the recorded session as soon as it is ready. I suggest that all businesses should study Google Hangout and understand how powerful it is. Google Hangout is now embedded in Google Docs, Sheets and other apps. Anytime you need to collaborate, simply push the Hangout button in the document. Very interesting and useful!
Analysing the road to converged infrastructure [infographic]
At the beginning of 2013, we sent out invites to our IT infrastructure monitoring community with regards to their adoption or consideration of Converged Infrastructure. As it turns out, not only is Convergence a hot topic right now; 1/3 of our respondents are already running Converged Infrastructure in their environments.
We sent our survey to over 100,000 people to truly dig in to the actual adoption rates around Converged Infrastructure, the number of real-world deployments being considered in 2013, how well current deployments are actually working, and candid insights from the innovative companies already harnessing the power that comes from convergence. You can download a copy of the full report here.
Highlights from the survey include:
The Converged Infrastructure adoption curve is quite steep at this time
- 30% of respondents are already living with Converged Infrastructure.
- Half of respondents (51%) are actively considering or planning to adopt Converged …
Real-Time Processing Solutions for Big Data Application Stacks – Integration of GigaSpaces XAP, Cassandra DB
Guest post by Yaron Parasol, Director of Product Management, GigaSpaces
GigaSpaces Technologies has developed infrastructure solutions for more than a decade and in recent years has been enabling Big Data solutions as well. The company’s latest platform release – XAP 9.5 – helps organizations that need to process Big Data fast. XAP harnesses the power of in-memory computing to enable enterprise applications to function better, whether in terms of speed, reliability, scalability or other business-critical requirements. With the new version of XAP, increased focus has been placed on real-time processing of big data streams, through improved data grid performance, better manageability and end-user visibility, and integration with other parts of your Big Data stack – in this version, integration with Cassandra.
XAP-Cassandra Integration
To build a real-time Big Data application, you need to consider several factors.
First– Can you process your Big Data in actual real-time, in order to get instant, relevant business insights? Batch processing can take too long for transactional data. This doesn’t mean that you don’t still rely on your batch processing in many ways…
Second – Can you preprocess and transform your data as it flows into the system, so that the relevant data is made digestible and routed to your batch processor, making batch more efficient as well. Finally, you also want to make sure the huge amounts of data you send to long-term storage are available for both batch processing and ad hoc querying, as needed.
XAP and Cassandra DB together can easily enable all the above to happen. With built-in event processing capabilities, full data consistency, and high-speed in-memory data access and local caching – XAP handles the real-time aspect with ease. Whereas, Cassandra is perfect for storing massive volumes of data, querying them ad hoc, and processing them offline.
Several hurdles had to be overcome to make the integration truly seamless and easy for end users – including XAP’s document-oriented model vs. Cassandra’s columnar data model, XAP’s immediate consistency (data must be able to move between models smoothly), XAP offers immediate consistency with performance, while Cassandra trades off between performance and consistency (with Cassandra as the Big Data store behind XAP processing, both consistency and performance are maintained).
Together with the Cassandra integration, XAP offers further enhancements. These include:
Data Grid Enhancements
To further optimize your queries over the data grid XAP now includes compound indices, which enable you to index multiple attributes. This way the grid scans one index instead of multiple indices to get query result candidates faster.
On the query side, new projections support enables you to query only for the attributes you’re interested in instead of whole objects/documents. All of these optimizations dramatically reduce latency and increase the throughput of the data grid in common scenarios.
The enhanced change API includes the ability to change multiple objects using a SQL query or POJO template. Replication of change operations over the WAN has also been streamlined, and it now replicates only the change commands instead of whole objects. Finally, a hook in the Space Data Persister interface enables you to optimize your DB SQL statements or ORM configuration for partial updates.
Visibility and Manageability Enhancements
A new web UI gives XAP users deep visibility into important aspects of the data grid, including event containers, client-side caches, and multi-site replication gateways.
Managing a low latency, high throughput, distributed application is always a challenge due to the amount of moving parts. The new enhanced UI helps users to maintain agility when managing their application.
The result is a powerful platform that offers the best of all worlds, while maintaining ease of use and simplicity.
Yaron Parasol is Director of Product Management for GigaSpaces, a provider of end-to-end scaling solutions for distributed, mission-critical application environments, and cloud enabling technologies.
Cloud Corner Video- Keys to Hybrid Cloud Management
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIEGDZ30H2Q
GreenPages CEO Ron Dupler and LogicsOne Executive Vice President and Managing Director Kevin Hall sit down to talk about the current state of the cloud market, challenges IT decision makers are facing today in regards to hybrid cloud environments, as well as a revolutionary new Cloud Management as a Service Offering.
If you’re looking for more information on hybrid cloud management, download this free whitepaper.
Or, if you would like someone to contact you about GreenPages Cloud Management as a Service offering, fill out this form.
21 most admired companies making IT a competitive advantage
All enterprises, regardless of what they produce or the services they deliver, are really information businesses.
The accuracy, speed and precision of IT systems means the difference between winning or losing customers, keeping supply chains profitable, and solidly translating new concepts into revenue-producing products and services. The world’s best-run services businesses have customer-driven IT as part of their DNA; it is very much who these companies are internally.
In the recently published Gartner report CEO and Senior Executive Survey 2013: 21 Top Companies Admired for Competitive IT completed between October and December, 2012, which was part of the 2013 CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey, C-level respondents were asked to name the companies they most admired in terms of their ability to apply IT-related business capabilities for competitive advantage.
Respondents were also asked to limit their responses only to their own and related industries.
391 respondents participated in the …
Cloud Migration Tips #3: Plan to Fail
Planning to deploy or migrate an application to a cloud environment is a big deal. In my last post we discussed the value of using real business and IT requirements to drive the justification of using a cloud architecture. We also explored the importance of using monitoring information to understand your before and after picture of application performance and overall success.
In this post I am going to dive deeper into the planning phase. You can’t expect to throw a half assed plan in place and just deal with problems as they pop up during an application migration. That will almost certainly result in frustration for the end users, IT staff, and the business who relies upon the application.
Ustream Cloud Platform Delivers Global Audiences to Any Broadcaster, Anytime
Ustream today unveiled its next-generation streaming technology. The core of the Ustream Cloud Platform centers around the company’s proprietary Ustream Content Delivery Network (UCDN), Ustream Media Server (UMS) and Ustream TCP Congestion Control Algorithm (UTCP). Together, this technology provides users with redundancy, resiliency, and reliability to broadcast quality live video streams.
Compared to most single-sourced CDN solutions, Ustream’s UCDN architecture aggregates the capacity of all major content delivery networks across the globe into one optimized network to guarantee the best viewer experience, from any location in the world. UMS controls the full lifecycle of live video streams and assures the ability to seamlessly scale to millions of concurrent viewers from any device; further, UTCP ensures smooth, non-buffered playthrough in adverse network conditions. Ustream’s first live video stream in 2007 engaged a small community in the hundreds; today, the most popular live video streams captivate millions concurrently. Earlier this year, Ustream powered two massively-scaled events within one week — NASA’s Russian meteor fly-by and Sony’s PlayStation 4 announcement — each reaching 8 million global viewers, with a peak of 1 million concurrent viewers. The Ustream Cloud Platform is the only global, live video streaming platform that can scale to this level and beyond.
“With the official release of the Ustream Cloud Platform, we are pushing the limits of what’s physically possible on today’s internet architecture,” said Gyula Feher, CTO of Ustream. “Since the founding of the company, our ambition has been to build the world’s most scalable and easiest to use live online video platform. With our APIs, we are inviting web and app developers to take Ustream Cloud to every mobile and web user.”
With Ustream APIs, software and hardware developers can create rich broadcasting and viewing applications that utilize the power of the Ustream Cloud Platform. Partner developers can easily create simple interfaces that connect consumer and professional streaming products to the largest live video streaming network with the click of a button; they can also expand their own network by creating and customizing channels on the fly via the API. The Ustream HTML5 player API and pre-configured libraries for iOS and Android enable interactive viewing experiences and social chat for desktop, mobile and tablets. Current users of Ustream’s Broadcasting APIs include Panasonic, Samsung, Logitech and Teradek; Sony’s new PlayStation 4 will also utilize Ustream APIs. Users of Ustream’s Viewing APIs include custom mobile apps from Mobile Roadie and Gyde.ly and custom event pages from clients such as Sony, Panasonic, Dell and Salesforce.
“We’ve designed and built a platform that will provide our user community with the highest quality streams, and we’re doing everything in our power to deliver this to viewers without buffering. The Ustream Cloud Platform automatically finds the best route to the end-user, avoiding congested paths, and uses an optimized TCP congestion control algorithm to serve content, even on lossy wireless networks, without buffering,” said Arpad Kun, Ustream’s director of network operations. “We hate the ‘spinning wheel’ as well, so we optimized the underlying protocol of RTMP and HTTP to deliver streams on-time, on-time, so users don’t have to wait for the player to fill up it’s buffer again. Our technology is unmatched and wherever we can, we are taking the single point of failure out of the equation.”
Cloud Expo NY | IaaS & Shadow-IT: Make Sure Security Isn’t an Afterthought
Let’s face it, business units are bypassing IT and are using the likes of EC2 and Rackspace. Developers are driving this trend for the sake of agility and hindrance-free innovation. Security is not their top priority and is usually an afterthought, and this makes IT cringe.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Swaroop Sayeram, Group Product Manager at McAfee, to discuss how McAfee enables IT to say yes to their business unit’s cloud computing needs.
Swaroop Sayeram is a Group Product Manager at McAfee responsible for Datacenter & Server Security. His area of focus is the design and marketing of security solutions for IaaS Public Clouds.
GigaSpaces Releases XAP 9.5: Enhanced for Cassandra Big Data Store, .NET Framework
GigaSpaces Technologies has released XAP 9.5, a new version of its in-memory computing platform that enables a quick launch of high-performance real-time analytics systems for Big Data.
At the core of the latest release of the GigaSpaces platform is XAP 9.5’s enhanced integration with NoSQL datastores, such as Cassandra. Combining the Cassandra datastore with the GigaSpaces in-memory computing platform adds real-time processing and immediate consistency to the application stack, while also guaranteeing dynamic scalability and transactionality – all necessary elements for enterprises that need real-time analytics or processing of streaming Big Data.
In this combined architecture, XAP in-memory computing provide the real-time data processing engine that is interoperable with any language or application framework, while the Cassandra DB provides long-term storage of data for use in real-time analytics.
A GigaSpaces benchmark done for the integration of XAP with Cassandra shows that this integration dramatically improves real-time performance for data retrieval operations. Putting the GigaSpaces in-memory data grid in front of the Cassandra Big Data solution resulted in performance of read that is up to 2000 times faster.
Up until XAP 9.5. this integration was only available for XAP Java users. XAP 9.5 further innovates by allowing .Net users to leverage the same built in Cassandra integration. This integration provides a seamless bi-directional translation between Cassandra’s columnar data model and the richer document and object oriented models available in XAP. This works for both Java & .NET XAP deployments allowing for .NET developers to speed up their Cassandra based big data applications.
“The GigaSpaces XAP Cassandra integration enables companies to enjoy both in-memory data grid capabilities and Big Data processing, easily and for any framework – Java or .NET,” says Uri Cohen, GigaSpaces VP of Product. “This enables companies to be more agile in meeting both current and future data processing challenges.”
