Quantum Corp., a proven global expert in data protection and Big Data management, has announced that Senior Vice President of Cloud Solutions Henrik Rosendahl will present a session exploring the future of cloud data protection and the impact of data reduction technologies on cloud storage at the 12th International Cloud Expo. The conference takes place June 10-13 at the Javits Center in New York City.
Rosendahl will explore trends in cloud-based backup and disaster recovery (DR) and how current approaches to cloud data protection often fall short. He will look at in-house versus subscription cloud backup as a service models and how on-premise backup for local recovery has advantages. Rosendahl will also discuss the perception versus reality of cloud-based backup and DR as a service for changing CAPEX to OPEX. Finally, the session will explore how long-term archive and big data management are converging with cloud, providing the potential for seamless backup and archive for all data types.
Monthly Archives: June 2013
Is There Such a Thing as Just-In-Time IT?
By Praveen Asthana, Chief Marketing Officer, Gravitant
The concept of “Just-in-Time” was pioneered in the manufacturing supply chain as a critical way to reduce costs by minimizing inventory. Implementing a just-in-time system that can handle unexpected demand is not a trivial undertaking. It requires the confluence of a number of disciplines such as analytics, statistics, sourcing, procurement, production management, brokerage and economics.
An interesting new idea is to take this concept pioneered in manufacturing and apply it to Information Technology resources. Doing this can provide an effective way to meet dynamically changing needs while minimizing the inventory of unused IT resources across a set of cloud services platform and providers.
Case Study: Election Day 2012.
With the growing popularity of e-voting and use of the Internet as an information resource on candidates and issues, the Secretary of State’s office for one of the most populous U.S. states knew that demand for IT resources would go up significantly on election day. But they didn’t know exactly how much, and they didn’t want to buy extra infrastructure for a temporary surge in demand. Even if they could come up with a good guess for the demand, deploying the right amount of resources in a timely manner would be challenging. Given the time it normally took (months) to deploy and provision new servers, the Secretary of State’s office knew they couldn’t use traditional means to procure compute and storage capacity to meet this demand.
As it turned out, demand went up over 1000% to over five million hits on the state voting web site by noon on Election Day.
Fortunately the state had deployed a novel capability based on a cloud brokerage and management platform to seamlessly provision IT resources in real time from multiple public cloud sources to meet the variability in demand. As a result, this demand was fully met without needing to do complicated planning or buy unneeded infrastructure. I’ll actually be speaking on a webinar with Chris Ward, CTO at GreenPages-LogicsOne and Dave Bartoletti, a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research on June 12th to talk about leveraging cloud brokerage and the impact it can have on managing your IT environment.
Minutes, not months—that’s what enterprise users want when it comes to having I.T. resources available to meet changing business needs or develop new applications.
However users find this to be an extraordinary challenge—most IT departments today struggle with rigid processes, a round-robin of tasks and approvals across multiple silos and departments, and manual provisioning steps. All this adds significant time to the deployment of I.T. resources resulting in users waiting for months before the resources they need become available.
How do users respond to such delays? By going around their IT departments and directly accessing cloud services. Often termed ‘rogue IT’ or ‘shadow IT,’ such out of process actions expose the company to financial risk, security risks, and operational risk.
The Solution: Just-in-time IT with Real-Time Governance
Just-in-time IT is not merely about using private or public cloud services. It is about engineering the end-to-end IT supply chain so it can be agile and respond immediately to dynamic business needs. To achieve this in practice, you need:
- Effective assessment and strategy
- Self-service catalog of available IT resources
- Collaborative solution design
- Rapid approval work flow
- Sourcing platform that allows you to select the right supply chain partners for your business need or workload profile.
- Single button provisioning of resources
- Transparency across the IT supply chain
- Sophisticated supply-demand analytics
- Elastic source for resources
- Governance—dynamic control of resources based on goal based optimization of budget, resource usage and SLAs.
The first critical aspect of real time supply chain is identifying, sourcing and procurement of best fit cloud platforms and providers (internal or external) to meet your unique business needs.
The second critical aspect of ensuring just-in-time IT is effective is real-time governance, for this is the mechanism by which you truly manage the elasticity of cloud resources and ensure that IT resource inventory is minimized. This also has the additional benefit of eliminating shadow or rogue I.T.
As I mentioned above, if you’re interested in learning more on this topic I would highly recommend registering for the upcoming webinar “What’s Missing In Today’s Hybrid Cloud Management – Leveraging Cloud Brokerage” being held on June 12th. This should be a great session and there will be time for Q & A at the end.
About the Author:
Praveen Asthana is Chief Marketing Officer of Gravitant (www.gravitant.com), a cloud services brokerage and management company. Prior to joining Gravitant, Praveen was Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for Dell’s $13B Enterprise Solutions Division.
Informatica aims to get its “Vibe” back
Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Enterprise Solutions
Informatica, which pioneered the current data integration tooling market, is seeking to reboot growth by targeting midmarket prospects who have traditionally perceived its solutions as too complex and expensive. The technology linchpin of this strategy is “Vibe,” a service-oriented architecture to deconstruct and make Informatica’s technologies more easily embeddable into third-party tools and/or cloud-based services.
This is not the first time that Informatica has promoted an OEM technology and go-to-market strategy for its products. But Vibe marks the first time that Informatica is enabling OEM partners to embed pieces of its capabilities, rather than entire Informatica products, opening the possibility of competing head-on with low-cost/no-cost rivals who have staked out the entry level of the ETL and data quality markets.
Technology is only the first step; to capitalize on Vibe, Informatica must adapt its sales and go-to-market model so it …
Clustrix at the 12th International Cloud Expo in New York
Cloud Expo New York is the place where the cloud and Big Data industries converge. The Expo will feature 175+ sessions from a top-notch conference faculty who represent leading industry players in the cloud computing and Big Data industries.
Presentation: Fast and Scalable Real-Time Analytics with Clustrix Database
On June 11 at 2:10 pm, Sergei Tsarev, our CTO and Founder, will deliver a presentation on “Fast and Scalable Real-Time Analytics with the Clustrix Database.”
OVH.com Announces Platinum Sponsorship, Showcases Cloud at Cloud Expo NY
OVH.com, the leading Web hosting company with the world’s largest data center, located in North America, will showcase its dedicated cloud infrastructure offerings, at Cloud Expo NY, which will be held at New York’s Javit’s Center, June 10-13, 2013.
As a leading Cloud provider since 2010, OVH.com is also proud to be a Platinum sponsor of the 12th Cloud Expo New York, regarded as the world’s top Cloud computing conference, attracting over 9,000 delegates from 48 countries and over 200 sponsors and exhibitors.
At Booth 511, event attendees will discover OVH.com’s dedicated infrastructure offering, both virtual with “Dedicated Cloud” and physical with the “Cloud Ready” dedicated servers.
With 12 data centers in the world and over 150,000 dedicated servers, OVH.com is today the largest hosting provider in Europe. OVH’s key competitive advantages include a hosting infrastructure that is scalable, secure and highly available, a dedicated global network, the best quality/price ratio available in the industry and a 24/7 multilingual support (English, Spanish and French).
“With over 14 years of experience, we are excited to meet our clients and prospects in North America and showcase our world leading capabilities,” said Germain Masse, the COO of OVH.com.
INetU’s Rich Hand to Present on Private vs Public Cloud at Cloud Expo NY
INetU, the industry’s experts in complex hosting and a global provider of business-centric managed cloud and application hosting, has announced that Cloud Architect Rich Hand will be presenting “Private Cloud, Public Cloud – Is There a Third Option?” at the 12th International Cloud Expo taking place June 10-13, 2013 in New York City.
As more enterprise IT departments move into the cloud, many executives are evaluating whether to adopt a Public or Private cloud. The cost benefits of the Public Cloud may be appealing, but is this the appropriate environment for critical data? The performance and security of a Private Cloud infrastructure will create an IT corporate hero, but the costs may be prohibitive. IT team leads are discovering that there are no easy answers found by taking a hardline on a Public or Private solution. Now, CIOs are coming to consider a third option: a Hybrid Cloud.
Accurately Identify Impact of System Issues on End-User Response Time
Triggered by current expected load projections for our community portal, our Apps Team was tasked to run a stress on our production system to verify whether we can handle 10 times the load we currently experience on our existing infrastructure. In order to have the least impact in the event the site crumbled under the load, we decided to run the first test on a Sunday afternoon. Before we ran the test we gave our Operations Team a heads-up: they could expect significant load during a two-hour window with the potential to affect other applications that also run on the same environment.
During the test, with both the Ops and Application Teams watching the live performance data, we all saw end-user response time go through the roof and the underlying infrastructure running out of resources when we hit a certain load level. What was very interesting in this exercise is that both the Application and Ops teams looked at the same data but examined the results from a different angle. However, they both relied on the recently announced Compuware PureStack Technology, the first solution that – in combination with dynaTrace PurePath – exposes how IT infrastructure impacts the performance of critical business applications in heavy production environments.
The Transition to the Cloud
“I’m careful when using terms like Big Data, because it can mean so many things to different people,” explained Eric Hanselman, Chief Analyst at 451 Research, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “There is huge value in analytics that companies can use to pull intelligence from a collection of data sources that are available in their businesses. The inexpensive storage that cloud services can offer make a great environment to pull together siloed data.”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time – agree or disagree?
Eric Hanselman: Time or money shouldn’t be the driving motivations for a jump to any cloud. Cloudy capabilities offer the opportunity to change the way IT services are delivered to an organization. Improving deployment capabilities, making application designs more resilient, and optimizing access to data are far more important goals. Yes, costs and implementation times can be reduced, with clouds, but simply doing the same things with the same processes and procedures misses the largest advantages.
Amazon’s RDS database gets unleashed, gains SLA
Although being technically in operation for three and a half years, Amazon’s RDS database never made general release until now. Along with the public unveiling, the service has gained a useful SLA for some peace of mind.
RDS stands for Relational Database Service. This hosted database service includes the full package, from set-up, to operations, and through to scaling.
Amazon note any pre-existing Applications, Tools, or Code which IT staff are already using on their databases can still be used on RDS.
One of the most appealing factors of Amazon’s solution is the SLA, which is offered for customers with databases in multiple places. This agreement means the service must meet a 99.95 uptime, equating to a maximum of 22 minutes downtime per month.
If the availability drops below this percentage, the refund is calculated as a percentage of the charge paid to Amazon on your monthly …
WSO2 and SUSE Presenters at Cloud Expo New York
WSO2 on Thursday announced that WSO2 Vice President of Technology Evangelism Chris Haddad and SUSE Business Development Manager Frank Rego will lead a joint presentation at 12 International Cloud Expo. The session, “Bridging IaaS and PaaS to Deliver the Service-Oriented Data Center,” is part of the event’s Enterprise Cloud Computing Track on Thursday, June 13, 2013. The Cloud Expo conference is being held June 10-13, 2013 at the Javits Center in New York City.
Bridging IaaS and PaaS to Deliver the Service-Oriented Data Center
Increasingly, enterprises are adopting private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility inherent in cloud environments while avoiding the security and latency issues inherent in publicly hosted settings. As a result, organizations are also reevaluating how to optimize their future application delivery models.
This session will examine how IT professionals can efficiently and flexibly tackle the challenges of the modern connected enterprise using a combination of IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS). It also will discuss how a private PaaS can leverage the automation and scalability of a private IaaS solution, such as the OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud, to deliver secure, standardized development environments that enable migration to an agile, service-oriented delivery model. The presentation will run from 8:15-9:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 13, 2013.