SiSense, the Big Data Analytics Company, has announced that it is introducing the first In-Chip Analytics solution in the Cloud. With SiSense Prism 10X, companies of all sizes are able to run Terabyte-range analytics workloads in the Cloud without having to worry about setting up complex clusters, acquiring or maintaining expensive hardware. The solution provides enterprise-grade service, unmatched analytics power in the Cloud and reduces the cost of Big Data Analytics to as low as $1 per Terabyte per hour.
“The current model for Big Data Analytics is broken. It is prohibitively expensive and complicated,” said SiSense CEO Amit Bendov. “By letting SiSense and Rackspace do the heavy lifting, businesses of all sizes can farm out the hassles and focus on achieving business results. We are evening the playing field by putting enterprise-grade services and software into the hands of businesses that would otherwise be shut out of the game.”
Monthly Archives: June 2013
SiSense Unveils In-Chip Analytics in the Cloud
SiSense, the Big Data Analytics Company, has announced that it is introducing the first In-Chip Analytics solution in the Cloud. With SiSense Prism 10X, companies of all sizes are able to run Terabyte-range analytics workloads in the Cloud without having to worry about setting up complex clusters, acquiring or maintaining expensive hardware. The solution provides enterprise-grade service, unmatched analytics power in the Cloud and reduces the cost of Big Data Analytics to as low as $1 per Terabyte per hour.
“The current model for Big Data Analytics is broken. It is prohibitively expensive and complicated,” said SiSense CEO Amit Bendov. “By letting SiSense and Rackspace do the heavy lifting, businesses of all sizes can farm out the hassles and focus on achieving business results. We are evening the playing field by putting enterprise-grade services and software into the hands of businesses that would otherwise be shut out of the game.”
Cloud Skills Shortage: Does It Matter?
More and more companies around the world are embracing the cloud – and that’s a good thing.
But this massive IT shift also presents a problem: With so many businesses moving to cloud, is there enough quality IT technicians available to help businesses manage the switch?
Don Reisinger from CIO Insight, among many others in the space, has identified the IT skills shortage as a real issue facing the cloud industry. With so much of the technology creating a rift between the old school IT managers of the mainframe to pure virtualization eras and the newer DevOps and Cloud engineer roles, it’s hard to see the simple path towards ample expertise.
But then again, according to Reisinger, perhaps it’s not such a problem as so many fret over. Companies are still purchasing cloud tools and services at incredible volumes, causing projections of the overall revenues of the industry to balloon to many billions of dollars over the next 10 years.
Pharmaceutical Bigs Opt for Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the game changer for the life sciences industry, according to an article on PharmaBiz.com.
Globally, pharma majors are deploying cloud technology because it provides data security, compliance and transparency, according to Vikram Anand, associate vice president, cloud-based technology & product delivery services, ArisGlobal.
“Cloud is changing the way we deploy technology. Eli Lily uses cloud services for research and development efforts. GSK has chosen to replace its existing Lotus Notes, Domino, and Postini services for its 96,500 employees worldwide, with everything being hosted on the cloud. Roche uses pre-clinical SaaS solution to consolidate several key application areas and harmonize all its sites worldwide,” he said.
The benefits of moving to the cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the Internet with “pay-as-you-go” pricing. It allows enhanced collaboration, lower upfront investment, provides increased return on investment and greater flexibility and faster scale up of operations.
Cloud computing drastically lowers the total cost of ownership, improves collaboration, operational efficiency and speeds up the R&D processes. Security of data on the cloud is better than in-house systems. Data on the cloud is secure and compliant, Anand added.
The Dangers of Dumbing Down Your Business
In Part 1 I talked about how there’s nothing new about subscription services since they’ve been around for generations.
Now I’ll relent a little and admit that there is something new about many of the subscription services out there. What’s new is what is no longer there. Traditionally, the whole point of subscription services was to create a two-way commitment in which both the service provider and the customer benefits.
The commitment benefits the customer by providing discounts, rewards, exclusive products, price stability and service guaranteed in return for a promise to pay money regularly for a period of time.
The commitment benefits the service provider by establishing a more predictable and reliable forecast of revenues for some time into the future, which facilitates both resource planning and financial planning.
Are CIOs Becoming Obsolete?
As widely reported by Gathering Clouds friend barb Darrow and others CIOs are facing some big challenges. Just look at what the CIO has to deal with today as compared to 5 years ago: diminishing budgets, the stress of securing greater results, cloud adoption, big data, legacy apps, and to top it all off increased overlap with the line of business in terms of mandate.
As we previously discussed, the CIO’s territory is increasingly shared with many among the line of business, especially in the cloud era: Whether its CRM tools like Salesforce for sales, automation platforms for marketing, BYOD or big data analytics apps for a range of different parts of the organization, the CIO has to tie everything together. On top of this, the CEO and CFO now have a greater say in how budgets and projects occur for IT. In essence, the CIO is being asked to do a lot more with a lot less for many more stakeholders.
Cloud Computing Is Getting Personal
The personal cloud will be the main catalyst in bringing services otherwise unavailable to developing nations.
While businesses have been deploying cloud technology for some time, it’s only recently that personal cloud services have emerged. The rise of the personal cloud means content, applications and computing power can move off the device.
While iPhones and iPads are unlikely to fade in popularity, the personal cloud will create opportunity, according to an article on NetworkWorld.com. Opportunity for users who have not been able to afford services historically tethered to an expensive device; opportunity for manufacturers to design lower-cost hardware to reach a new demographic in developing countries; and huge opportunity for businesses to bring a new wave of services to this previously untapped audience.
Are CIOs Becoming Obsolete?
As widely reported by Gathering Clouds friend barb Darrow and others CIOs are facing some big challenges. Just look at what the CIO has to deal with today as compared to 5 years ago: diminishing budgets, the stress of securing greater results, cloud adoption, big data, legacy apps, and to top it all off increased overlap with the line of business in terms of mandate.
As we previously discussed, the CIO’s territory is increasingly shared with many among the line of business, especially in the cloud era: Whether its CRM tools like Salesforce for sales, automation platforms for marketing, BYOD or big data analytics apps for a range of different parts of the organization, the CIO has to tie everything together. On top of this, the CEO and CFO now have a greater say in how budgets and projects occur for IT. In essence, the CIO is being asked to do a lot more with a lot less for many more stakeholders.
How RIM Can Improve Efficiency and Add Value To Your IT Ops
This is a guest post from Chris Joseph, VP, Product Management & Marketing, NetEnrich
Cloud, virtualization and hybrid IT technologies are being used in small and large IT enterprises everywhere to both modernize, and achieve business goals and objectives. As such, a top concern for today’s IT leaders is whether the investments being made in these technologies are delivering on the promise of IT modernization. Another concern is finding ways to free up IT funds currently spent on routine maintenance of IT infrastructure, so that they can invest in these new and strategic IT modernization projects.
Don’t Waste Time, Money and Talent on Blinking Lights
Everyone knows that IT organizations simply can’t afford to have a team of people dedicated to watching for blinking lights and waiting for something to fix. It’s a waste of talent and will quickly burn through even the most generous of IT budgets. Yet, according to a Gartner study, 80% of an enterprise IT budget is generally spent on routine IT, while only 20% is spent on new and strategic projects.
If this scenario sounds familiar, then you may want to consider taking a long and hard look at third-party Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) services for your IT infrastructure management. In fact, RIM services have been shown to reduce spending on routine IT operations by 30-40%, but how is this possible?
(1) First of all, RIM services rationalize, consolidate and integrate the tools that are used to power the functionality of the monitoring and management of IT infrastructure within an enterprise. According to Enterprise Management Associates, a leading IT and data management research and consulting firm, a typical enterprise has nearly 11 such tools running in its environment, and these typically include IT Operations Management (ITOM) tools and IT Service Management (ITSM) tools. As any IT professional can attest to, while there is significant overlap, some of these tools tend to be deficient in their capabilities, and they can be a significant source of noise and distraction, especially when it comes to false alerts and tickets. Yet, through RIM, IT organizations can eliminate many of these tools and consolidate their IT operations into a single pane of glass view, which can result in significant cost savings.
(2) Secondly, by leveraging RIM, IT teams can be restructured and organized into shared services delivery groups, which can result in better utilization of skilled resources, while supporting the transformation of IT into a new model that acts as a service provider to business units. Combine these elements of RIM with remote service delivery, and not only will you improve economies of scale and scope, but you will also promote cost savings.
(3) Thirdly, RIM services consistently look to automation, analytics, and best practices to promote cost savings in the enterprise. Manual processes and runbooks are not only costly, but also time consuming and error prone. Yet, to automate processes effectively, IT organizations must rely on methodologies, scripts, and tools. This is where RIM comes into play. In fact, within any enterprise, 60-80% of manual processes and runbooks can easily be automated with RIM.
Download this free whitepaper to learn how to avoid focusing on ”keeping the lights on” to allow your team to focus on strategic initiatives
Beyond Cost Savings and Greater Efficiency: Building a Case for RIM
In addition to reducing routine spending and improving the efficiency of your IT operations, there are several other benefits to leveraging third-party RIM services:
- 24×7 IT operations support. Third-party RIM services often provide 24×7 IT ops support. IT organizations benefit from around the clock monitoring and management of their IT infrastructures without additional headcount, or straining internal resources, which saves operating costs.
- Be the first to know. 24×7 IT operations support means that you are always the first to know when customer-facing IT systems such as the company’s website, online shopping portal, mobile apps and cloud-based solutions go down. And, the issue is resolved in many cases by RIM services teams before the end-user has time to notice.
- Skills and expertise. Third-party RIM services can provide your IT organization with certified engineers in various IT infrastructure domains. These engineers are responsible for monitoring, alerting, triaging, ticketing, incident management, and the escalation of critical outages or errors to you and your IT staff, if they cannot be immediately resolved. In addition, they may also be available on an on-demand basis if you are looking for skills and expertise in a specific domain.
The bottom line: by leveraging RIM services, IT organizations like yours can not only enhance their service capabilities and bolster service levels, but they can also can say goodbye to the fire drills and late night calls that plague your IT staff. Proactive management of your IT infrastructure through RIM ensures that it is always running at peak performance.
To hear more from Chris, visit the NetEnrich blog
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Replication & Erasure Coding Is the Future for Cloud Storage & Big Data
In the course of IT history, many schemes have been devised and deployed to protect data against storage system failure, especially disk drive hardware. These protection mechanisms have nearly always been variants on two themes: duplication of files or objects (backup, archiving, synchronization, remote replication come to mind); or parity-based schemes at disk level (RAID) or at object level (erasure coding, often also referred to as Reed-Solomon coding). Regardless of implementation details, the latter always consists of the computation and storage of “parity” information over a number of data entities (whether disks, blocks or objects). Many different parity schemes exist, offering a wide range of protection trade-offs between capacity overhead and protection level – hence their interest.