Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) has emerged as one of the hottest trends in today’s technology market. While most of the adoptions of MBaaS technologies have taken place in the consumer or B2C space, these platforms are starting to make serious inroads in the enterprise. In order to win in the enterprise and to overcome the firmly seeded taboos with the adoption of cloud infrastructure technologies in corporate environments, MBaaS platforms must provide very tangible solutions to the well-known challenges in the mobile enterprise.
When analyzing the characteristics of enterprise and consumer mobile applications, we can find marked differences between the backend requirements of both paradigms. While consumer mobile apps typically leverage social network profiles and public data sources, enterprise mobile solutions normally require incorporating backend capabilities residing in corporate systems.
Monthly Archives: July 2013
Software-Defined Storage for Cloud Architectures
Cloud computing environments with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources require an elastic infrastructure that can be rapidly scaled and dynamically reconfigured. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. The alternate approach to infrastructure that virtualization has enabled, referred to as the software-defined data center, uses standard, commodity, scale-out hardware building blocks to create pools of resources. These resources are abstracted and delivered as tiers of services that can be configured, managed and controlled entirely through software. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally incompatible with the dynamic software-defined data center.
Next-Generation IT Solutions
In this hypercompetitive era faced with multiple technology transitions, businesses must change the game and transform how they engage customers to promote future growth. See Cisco unveil the Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) Enterprise Networks Architecture, a game-changing technology that helps you capture new business opportunities by creating innovative experiences with greater IT simplicity and investment protection.
Hear customers discuss how they use innovative networking technologies to solve IT challenges and impact business.
Watch Rob Soderbery and Inbar Lasser-Raab introduce next-generation technology architecture unveiled at Cisco Live Orlando.
Learn about breakthrough networking solutions that will help you to stay ahead of technology transitions.
KISS Your Cloud Integration Issues Away
Cloud computing’s promise is becoming reality, but cloud integration is an ongoing challenge. As the use of cloud applications spreads throughout the enterprise, there’s just no way to escape data exchange, change management, and related user issues. Why? The fact is, most top cloud and even enterprise software solutions require integration with other applications or data sources for optimal functionality and performance.
Whether corporate performance and business management, CRM, ERP, or operational and transactional data analysis, an enormous number of applications benefit from being interconnected to maximize business value.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Education and Cloud Computing
“The Cloud Credential Council focuses on cloud training and certification so we are basically helping to fill the gap for the people who need to have the skills related to cloud,” explained Marcel Heilijgers, Executive Director of the Cloud Credential Council, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center 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.
HDDs for Cloud, Virtual and Traditional Storage Environments
HDDs will continue to be declared dead into the next decade, just as they have been for over a decade, meanwhile they are being enhanced, continued to be used in evolving roles.
SSD will continue to coexist with HDD, either as separate or converged HHDD’s. Where, where and how they are used will also continue to evolve. High IO (IOPS) or low latency activity will continue to move to some form of nand flash SSD (PCM around the corner), while storage capacity including some of which has been on tape stays on disk. Instead of more HDD capacity in a server, it moves to a SAN or NAS or to a cloud or service provider. This includes for backup/restore, BC, DR, archive and online reference or what some call active archives.
OpenStack’s Third Birthday – a Recap with a Look into the Future
Guest Post By Nati Shalom, CTO and Founder of GigaSpaces
OpenStack was first announced three years ago at the OSCON conference in Portland. I remember the first time I heard about the announcement and how it immediately caught my attention. Ever since that day, I have become a strong advocate of the technology. Looking back, I thought that it would be interesting to analyze why.
Is it the fact that it’s an open source cloud? Well partially, but that couldn’t be the main reason. OpenStack was not the first open source cloud initiative; we had Eucalyptus, then later Cloud.com and other open source cloud initiatives before OpenStack emerged.
There were two main elements missing from these previous open source cloud initiatives: the companies behind the initiatives and the commitment to a true open movement. It was clear to me that a true open source cloud movement could not turn into an industry movement, and thus meet its true potential if it was led by startups. In addition, the fact that companies whose businesses run cloud services, such as Rackspace, brought its own experience in the field and a large scale consumer of such infrastructure such as NASA, gave OpenStack a much better starting point. Also, knowing some of the main individuals behind the initiatives and their commitment to the Open Cloud made me feel much more confident that the OpenStack project would have a much higher chance for success than its predecessors. Indeed, after three years, it is now clear that the game is essentially over and it is apparent who is going to win the open source cloud war. I’m happy to say that I also had my own little share in spreading the word by advocating the OpenStack movement in our own local community which also grew extremely quickly over the past two years.
OpenStack as an Open Movement
Paul Holland, an Executive Program Manager for Cloud at HP, gave an excellent talk during the last OpenStack Summit, comparing the founding of the OpenStack Foundation to the establishment of the United States. Paul drew interesting parallelization between the factors that brought a group of thirteen individual states to unite and become the empire of today, with that of OpenStack.
Paul also drew an interesting comparison between the role of the common currency that fostered the open market and trade between the different states with its OpenStack equivalent: APIs, common language, processes, etc. Today, we take those things for granted, but the reality is that common currency isn’t yet trivial in many countries even today, yet we cannot imagine what our global economy would look like without the Dollar as a common currency or English as a common language, even if they have not been explicitly chosen as such by all countries.
As individuals, we often tend to gloss over the details of the Foundation and its governing body, but it is those details that make OpenStack an industry movement that has brought many large companies, such as Red Hat, HP, IBM, Rackspace and many others (57 in total as of today), to collaborate and contribute to a common project as noted in this report. Also, the fact that the number of individual developers has been growing steadily year after year is another strong indication of the real movement that this project has created.
Thinking Beyond Amazon AWS
OpenStack essentially started as the open source alternative to Amazon AWS. Many of the sub-projects often began as Amazon equivalents. Today, we are starting to see projects with a new level of innovation that do not have any AWS equivalent. The most notable one IMHO is the Neutron (network) and BareMetal projects. Both have huge potential to disrupt how we think about cloud infrastructure.
Only on OpenStack
We often tend to compare OpenStack with other clouds on a feature-to-feature basis.
The open source and community adoption nature of OpenStack enables us to do things that are unique to OpenStack and cannot be matched by other clouds. Here are a few examples:
- Run the same infrastructure on private and public clouds.
- Work with multiple cloud providers; have more than one OpenStack-compatible cloud provider with which to work.
- Plug in different HW as cloud platforms for private clouds from different vendors, such as HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, or use pre-packaged OpenStack distributions, such as the one from Ubuntu, Red Hat, Piston etc.
- Choose your infrastructure of choice for storage, network etc, assuming that many of the devices come with OpenStack-supported plug-ins.
All this can be done only on OpenStack; not just because it is open source, but primarily because of the level of adoption of OpenStack that has made it the de-facto industry standard.
Re-think the Cloud Layers
When cloud first came into the world, it was common to look at the stack from a three-layer approach: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.
Typically, when we designed each of the layers, we looked at the other layers as *black-boxes* and often had to create parallel stacks within each layer to manage security, metering, high availability etc.
The fact that OpenStack is an open source infrastructure allows us to break the wall between those layers and re-think where we draw the line. For example, when we design our PaaS on OpenStack, there is no reason why we wouldn’t reuse the same security, metering, messaging and provisioning that is used to manage our infrastructure. The result is a much thinner and potentially more efficient foundation across all the layers that is easier to maintain. The new Heat project and Ceilometer in OpenStack are already starting to take steps in this direction and are, therefore, becoming some of the most active projects in the upcoming Havana release of OpenStack.
Looking Into the Future
Personally, I think that the world with OpenStack is by far healthier and brighter for the entire industry, as opposed to a world in which we are dependent on one or two major cloud providers, regardless of how good of a job they may or may not do. There are still many challenges ahead in turning all this into a reality and we are still at the beginning. The good news, though, is that there is a lot of room for contribution and, as I’ve witnessed myself, everyone can help shape this new world that we are creating.
OpenStack Birthday Events
To mark OpenStack’s 3rd Birthday, there will be a variety of birthday celebrations taking place around the world. At the upcoming OSCON event in Portland from July 22-26, OpenStack will host their official birthday party on July 24th. There will also be a celebration in Israel on the 21st, marking the occasion in Tel Aviv.
For more information about the Foundation’s birthday celebrations, visit their website at www.openstack.org.
Nati Shalom is the CTO and founder of GigaSpaces and founder of the Israeli cloud.org consortium.
The Macro and Micro of Multi-tenancy Regarding Private Cloud
I was recently reviewing some sales and marketing materials regarding building out Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Part of these materials included attributes of IaaS, one of which is multi-tenancy. Having been working with some large enterprise customers lately around private cloud, this attribute really got me thinking.
In most cases for the enterprises I have been working with, the private cloud is about agility and the workloads are all owned and related to the same business line. From the macro perspective, there is effectively one tenant, yet from a micro perspective (workload) there are multiple tenants that may require some isolation for purposes of service level and resource management.
Why is this important? Multi-tenancy is expensive. It requires additional resources and overhead to manage including encryption and key management, isolation across network, compute and storage, and additional support for tenant management. Remove this overhead and those physical resources can be focused on workloads instead of overhead.
How effective identity management reins shadow IT and password sprawl
By Quinton Wall, Director of Technical Platform Marketing, Salesforce.com – @quintonwall
The cloud has sped up and simplified many aspects of IT. Enterprises and end-users alike have incredibly swift and affordable access to more applications and IT resources than ever before.
This access helps cut or keep costs low and enables businesses to innovate and respond to evolving market demands. However, in other ways, this explosion of apps and devices brings considerable new challenges to IT management.
Today there is no let up of business departments that are building their own applications, or turning to the web for cloud services, and as a result it is next to impossible for IT teams to maintain insight into where data is going or what applications employees are accessing. Additionally, an explosion of devices and cloud applications have hit enterprises in recent years—with most large organisations having hundreds of applications in use …
Cloud still number one IT investment priority, says report
Over the next five years, cloud computing is still the highest priority for investment, according to the latest piece of research from Compuware, alongside Research in Action.
16.5% of companies cite cloud as the most important area of their IT portfolio to strengthen, ahead of mobile IT (13.5%), business analytics, big data and in-memory (11.3%).
It’s not a surprise that cloud is pretty big news this year too. Cloud infrastructure (12.5%) is the top area of investment for IT in 2013. Renegotiation of outsourcing contracts (9.6%) and investing in big data and analytics (9.2%) rounded off the top three.
In terms of key tenets within the cloud computing sphere, investing in cloud for test and backup purposes is the top priority this year according to 24.1% of respondents, with private cloud implementation (17.1%) and public/hybrid investment (15%) trailing behind. Full …