WHIPTAIL has been chosen by Datalogix to improve the performance of applications running on its statistical analysis grid. Leveraging WHIPTAIL’s ACCELA flash storage array, Datalogix has reduced application response times and storage costs.
“Being chosen by an industry leader like Datalogix is a testament to our application acceleration go to market strategy, as Datalogix realizes the inherent value of faster, consistent and more reliable application performance,” said Erik Hardy, executive vice president of worldwide sales at WHIPTAIL.
As it worked to process massive levels of analytical data, Datalogix required a solution to improve its overall speed and efficiency, while staying compatible with its existing storage technology. It was essential for the company to sustain 2GB per second of Write/Read throughput with low latency. After reviewing a number of flash-storage solutions, Datalogix chose the WHIPTAIL ACCELA solution to run all statistical analysis system (SAS) jobs.
Monthly Archives: July 2013
Five Steps to Making the Right Cloud Provider Choice
Choosing a cloud vendor is all too often an exercise in what you’re willing to give up, instead of what you are able to gain.
The truth is, just with any business relationship, there is a necessary give and take. But with infrastructure, the degree of importance to that relationship has real claims on your ability to do business the way you need to.
In that light, choosing a cloud provider who is best able to understand and map solutions to your goals is the most important metric in your decision making. However, there are a few other key considerations that are important to factor into a final decision.
Where’s the Cloud Taking IT Next?
What are the remaining barriers perhaps still preventing some companies from moving some of their on-premise computing to the Cloud, in whole or part? What specific Cloud implementations can we be most proud of, to date? In this CEO Power Panel at 12th Cloud Expo, moderated by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid; Brian Patrick Donaghy, CEO of Appcore; Fausto Bernardini, IBM Vice President & Distinguished Engineer at IBM SmartCloud; Ross Brouse, COO and President of Solar VPS; and Terry Woloszyn, Founder of Leeward Security discussed these topics and more.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Why Worry About Public Cloud and AWS Cost Optimization?
Most users moved to the cloud to save money — and they are saving relative to building and operating a data center. However, the story does not end there. Detailed user analysis shows that public cloud users are still leaving a lot of savings on the table – on average 40%. Here is ‘why’ and the ‘what to do’ to reduce cloud costs without sacrificing performance.
Cost optimization is a hot topic because of the enormous opportunities for the average user to reduce AWS costs. CloudCheckr surveyed 400 of its users and found that the average potential saving exceeded 40%.
UnboundID Research: Real Identity Data Is More Valuable
“There’s great value for corporations who choose to properly use digital identity data to market to individuals, not segments,” said Andy Land, Vice President of Marketing at UnboundID, on the release of new research by UnboundID that offers insight into the value of a consumer’s digital identity.
“Consumers already know that companies use their data,” Land observed, “the key is to use their data to create a better experience for the consumer. Tying multi-source data together with user consent creates a comprehensive identity profile, resulting in enhanced, more personalized marketing to the end user.”
The report, “Valuing Identity in Today’s Digital World,” shows that using real identity data increases a consumer’s profile value by up to 100 times when compared to aggregated, anonymous data. Real identity data is valued in the hundreds of dollars (up to $124 per identity) as compared to pennies on the dollar for aggregated, anonymous data.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: From the Data Center to the Cloud
“In AppZero what we do is we pick up applications and move them from one machine to another and the cloud context is the big use case is to move stuff from the data center to the cloud,” explained Greg O’Connor, President & CEO of AppZero, in this interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at our Times Square Studio in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
MetraTech, Saugatuck Report Highlights Limitations of Subscription Billing
MetraTech on Tuesday released the report, “Monetization that Fits the Business: The Limitations of Subscription Billing,” published in conjunction with research and advisory firm Saugatuck Technology. The report examines the past decade’s evolution of monetization strategies driven by the adoption of cloud solutions, and recommends a continued growth beyond subscriptions to yield maximum profits and differentiation. Enterprise customers are demanding bills that are better aligned with their actual consumption. Furthermore, they want the services they consume to be personalized and not simply multiple features bundled by the service provider to justify a single flat subscription price. Billing done right is a strategic business enabler that supports service personalization and stickiness; billing done wrong is a business inhibitor that leads to service commoditization.
Why the Cloud May Require You to Learn Multiple Words for Snow
Cloud is at the center of a convergence trend that is impacting people across all of ICT. This convergence is breaking down the walls that separated the traditional silos of IT, networking, storage and security. But with this breaking down of the walls we also need to better understand the subtleties of each other’s domains in more details.
A famous urban legend is that Eskimos have many words for snow, as it makes sense to – if you spend your whole day in snow – to distinguish the subtle and not so subtle differences.
Similar in IT, where others simply refer to IT as IT, the people living in IT tend to distinguish between operations, development, support (helpdesk), testing, portfolio management, information and master data management, etc.
Five Things to Consider Before Choosing your Professional Services Automation Tool
By Alyson Gallant, PMP, Project Administrator, LogicsOne
Choosing a Professional Services Automation (PSA) tool can be an arduous task. There are a number of options out there, and everyone’s business and workflows are unique. Also, the potential cost and time of evaluating a number of tools and running a proof of concept can be overwhelming.
Why do you need a PSA tool? A PSA tool is crucial to understanding where your resources are spending their time and the profitability of projects. A suitable PSA tool should allow your organization to continuously evaluate performance in order to improve and scale.
Like any Professional Services organization (or any organization looking to track time and budget on large internal projects), we’ve evaluated and used a number of different PSA tools. During the implementation of our current PSA tool, the Project Management Office (PMO) was lucky enough to have significant input into our PSA tool selection as well as the rollout to our Professional Services organization.
There is no one size fits all when it comes to a PSA tool, and there are many methods of evaluation, which we won’t get into here. However, here’s some food for thought based on our experiences for anyone preparing to search for a new PSA tool:
1) Can you consolidate your applications?
Do you have a lot of applications? Will your new PSA tool be an additional application for your users to use? Are your users experiencing application overload?? If so, have you investigated what your current CRM application already offers? A number of PSA applications are part of a larger suite, and the more modules you use, the better your data flows through.
2) Are you trying too hard to reinvent the wheel? Customization vs. integration.
One of the potential cons of going to a tool that you cannot customize is that you may have to change your workflow to fit the tool rather than having a tool that works with your existing workflow. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Using an application that hundreds or thousands of other customers are using can help provide a baseline for what your organization should be doing if your current workflow has a number of inefficiencies. Also, if you customize your tool, how does that affect future upgrades? Be open to revaluating your workflow. Look for a tool that is open to integrations with your other applications as an alternative to customization.
3) Is there an active community of users?
A great feature of a PSA tool is the energy and enthusiasm of the community of users. We did not have this with our first PSA tool, and it wasn’t until our second PSA tool that we recognized the value of this. Through an online community, users actively discuss new releases and provide feedback on forums open to all users. Users are encouraged to enter “New Feature Requests” and vote on them. We all know our time is highly prized during the workday, but sometimes it can be a good gut check when you’re running into an issue or workflow conundrum to take a look at what others are seeing or experiencing to see if you’re on the right track.
4) Are you able to roll out your tool in a staged approach?
If you have the luxury of rolling out a PSA in a staged fashion, this may be an easier way to encourage adoption of your users, as well as ensure you’re getting accurate data entered by your users. As we all know, change can be difficult, and when users are overwhelmed and unsure of a new process, it may not be the best setting for the most accurate information to be entered. If you have the ability to roll out a single module of your new PSA at a time, your users can focus on getting each process down correctly before moving onto the next new process. A staged approach may not always work for your rollout, but it is worth considering to ensure you have “good data”.
5) Are you willing to perform constant evaluation on the new tool and provide recurring training?
As rollouts can take time, there can be quite a gap between inputting your data into your new PSA tool and evaluating the data that you extract. What happens when you extract data that isn’t useful? What if the information is incorrect? You’ll need to constantly gauge how well your workflow is providing your management with information, and changing that workflow can require new training. Make sure to factor this in with the rollout of your PSA tool – the work is never done.
Are you in the market for a new tool to track your projects? What do you use currently, and what are your pain points?
If you do have any questions, this is something we can help with as part of our On Demand Project Management Offering, so feel free to reach out!
Why the cloud may require you to learn multiple words for snow
Cloud is at the centre of a convergence trend that is impacting people across all of ICT. This convergence is breaking down the walls that separated the traditional silos of IT, networking, storage and security. But with this breaking down of the walls we also need to better understand the subtleties of each others domains in more details.
A famous urban legend is that eskimos have many words for snow, as it makes sense to – if you spend your whole day in snow – to distinguish the subtle and not so subtle differences.
Similar in IT, where others simply refer to IT as IT, the people living in IT tend to distiguish between operations, development, support (helpdesk), testing, portfolio management, information and master data management, etc. etc.
And the same is true for networking, where others see the network (or even the internet) as a homogenous blob, the people running and …