The bottom line for the telcos is that Cloud-based offerings are value-added services, where the value they add is added to the plumbing. In other words, their fundamental cultural perspective is to make more money with the telecommunications infrastructure. The problem with this perspective, however, is that it’s not the best way for a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to think.
Those of us whose careers have centered on moving bits around can easily forget that telephone companies have been in existence since Alexander Graham Bell and his partners founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. For most of this century and a half of history, telecommunications has delivered plain old switched voice networks. The rise of mobile telephony, the Internet, and now the Cloud have each in turn shaken the telco world to its core. And yet, its history, and hence its culture, rest in the world of the Public Switched Telephone Network. In other words, once a phone company, always a phone company.
Monthly Archives: August 2013
Force 3 Case Study: VMware vCloud Hybrid Service
VMware vCloud Hybrid Service can greatly reduce IT capital expenditure by removing the need for a remote offsite location for DR/CO-OP operations. IT departments can simply scale up the capacity during disaster operations, greatly reducing the operational cost for maintaining a DR site.
Was Trump University the Catalyst for Cloud Computing?
When cloud computing started to materialize we learned the benefits of matching workloads to the IT resources but what customer problem prompted the need for cloud computing? This one…
In 2005, I was working at Hewlett Packard in the storage group. We were three years past the Compaq-HP merger in Houston. My product line consisted of an entry-level SAN storage product and some accompanying data protection software. One of the many product management duties was customer interface. I always enjoyed tradeshows, telephone calls and face-to-face customer briefings.
Rapid Fire Summary of Carl Eschenbach’s General Session at VMworld 2013
By Chris Ward, CTO, LogicsOne
I wrote a blog on Monday summarizing the opening keynote at VMworld 2013. Checking in again quickly to summarize Tuesday’s General Session. VMware’s COO Carl Eschenbach took the stage and informed the audience that there are 22,500 people in attendance, which is a new record for VMware. This makes it the single largest IT infrastructure event of the year. 33 of these attendees have been to all 10 VMworlds, and Carl is one of them.
Carl started the session by providing a recap of Monday’s announcements around vSphere/vCloud Suite 5.5, NSX, vSAN, vCHS, Cloud Foundry, and vCHS. The overall mantra of the session revolved around IT as a Service. The following points were key:
- Virtualization extends to ALL of IT
- IT management gives way to automation
- Compatible hybrid cloud will be ubiquitous
- Foundation is SDDC
After this, came a plethora of product demos. If you would like to watch the presentation to be able to check out the demos you can watch them here: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/us/learn/generalsessions
vCAC Demo
- Started with showing the service catalogue & showing options to deploy an app to a private or public cloud. Also showed costs of each option as well
- I’m assuming this is showing integration between vCAC & ITBM, although that was not directly mentioned
- Next they displayed the database options as part of the app – assuming this is vFabric Data Director (DB as a Service)
- Showed the auto-scale option
- Showed the health of the application after deployment…this appears to be integration with vCOPS (again, not mentioned)
- The demo showed how the product provided self-service, transparent pricing, governance, and automation
NSX Demo
- Started with a networking conversation around why there are challenges with networking being the ball and chain of the VM. After that, Carl discussed the features and functions that NSX can provide. Some key ones were:
- Route, switch, load balance, VPN, firewall, etc.
- Displayed the vSphere web client & looked at the automated actions that happened via vCAC and NSX during the app provisioning
- What was needed to deploy this demo you may ask? L2 switch, L3 router, firewall, & load balancer. All of this was automated and deployed with no human intervention
- Carl then went through the difference in physical provisioning vs. logical provisioning with NSX & abstracting the network off the physical devices.
- West Jet has deployed NSX, got to hear a little about their experiences
- There was also a demo to show you how you can take an existing VMware infrastructure and convert/migrate to an NSX virtual network. In addition, it showed how vMotion can make the network switch with zero downtime
The conversation then turned to storage. They covered the following:
- Requirements of SLAs, policies, management, etc. for mission critical apps in the storage realm
- vSAN discussion and demo
- Storage policy can be attached at the VM layer so it is mobile with the VM
- Showcased adding another host to the cluster and the local storage is auto-added to the vSAN instance
- Resiliency – can choose how many copies of the data are required
IT Operations:
- Traditional management silos have to change
- Workloads are going to scale to massive numbers and be spread across numerous environments (public and private)
- Conventional approach is scripting and rules which tend to be rigid and complex –> Answer is policy based automation via vCAC
- Showed example in vCOPS of a performance issue and drilled into the problem…then showed performance improve automatically due to automated proactive response to detected issues. (autoscaling in this case)
- Discussing hybrid and seamless movement of workloads to/from private/public cloud
- Displayed vCHS plugin to the vSphere web client
- Showed template synchronization between private on prem vSphere environment up to vCHS
- Provisioned an app from vCAC to public cloud (vCHS) (it shows up inside of vSphere Web client)
Let me know if there are questions on any of these demos.
Give Cisco 60 Minutes & Transform Your Business
Give Cisco 60 minutes – well, 52 minutes, in fact – and watch the networking giant unveil a game-changing technology to help you capture new business opportunities by creating innovative experiences with greater IT simplicity and investment protection.
That is the value proposition of the video webinar that you can see this morning, this afternoon, this evening or indeed whenever is most convenient for you. It is free and it is only one click away.
Delivering business optimisation through cloud consolidation
Increasingly business complexity, broader technology adoption and changing expectations have forced a shift in the role of the IT department and how it delivers services.
Part of this change has been driven by the advent of cloud computing, which has allowed CIOs to decrease operational budgets and focus more on designing and building applications as well as innovation.
The benefits of cloud computing are well established, but although it helps ‘do more with less’ it has drawbacks of its own. As such, what many companies are starting to realise is that a lack of integration between disparate applications and services is a major factor in the failure of organisations to achieve their larger strategic goals.
Rampant cloud adoption can lead to ‘cloud sprawl’ and IT managers can find themselves squandering the savings made when moving to cloud on managing, governing and controlling cloud adoption or dealing with confusion.
The best …
ERPfocus.com Named “Association Sponsor” of Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that ERPfocus.com has been named “Association Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
ERPfocus.com gathers together the latest thinking and research about ERP software. Whether you’re new to the world of ERP or an industry veteran, you’ll find exclusive articles, white papers and downloads designed to help you expand your expertise.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, Nov. 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.
What Retailer BCBG Learned About Cloud Security
The major retailer BCBG migrated to a cloud security platform and discovered the CloudAccess’SIEM and Log Management capabilities enhanced their abilities for enterprise security.
There was a time the only security issues retailers needed to be concerned with was theft. Put a guard in the store and a couple of video cameras and prevent as much loss as possible. Those days are long gone.
The overall security of a retail organization has grown increasingly complex. The smash and grab has been supplanted by the hack and breach. A retailer’s IT environment is at as much risk as the product on the retail shelf. Every year hundreds of retailers fall victim to electronic intrusion. Ask Raley’s, Zaxby’s, Mapco, Michaels’s and dozens of retailers about how their POS and other exposed systems were not only breached, but cost them untold millions of dollars in stolen customer credit cards, abused sensitive data, and reparations and fines.
But if you ask, most of the named companies and the hundreds and hundreds of others attest that they apply a variety of security measures to maintain the sanctity of customer information and secure the workings of their network. Industrial and regulatory compliance demands this.
VMware Case Study: City of Melrose vCloud Hybrid Service
What the City of Melrose was looking for in a hybrid cloud is scalability, compatibility, integration and familiarity of management. vCloud Hybrid Service provides a great up-to-date test environment that can easily be converted to production. It’s good for mirroring or backing up to a different geographical location for DR purposes.
Flexibility and Agility Will Drive Cloud-Computing Adoption in Australia
By David Dzienciol, Vice President and GM, Parallels Asia Pacific
2013 will be a challenging year for Australian businesses on the back of a slow US economy and Europe still struggling to find its way from political and economic uncertainties. With Australian exports impacted by a strong local currency, businesses must double their efforts to look for ways to enhance business operations, including the use of cost-effective tools to raise revenue and lower operating cost.
It is these gloomy market conditions that will further accelerate adoption of cloud computing, including hosting services, as a proven solution to helping companies expand their market reach, drive deeper customer engagements, and drive costs down.
Parallels SMB Cloud Insights™ for Australia is driving home the imperative to “profit from the cloud.” Our report on the state of cloud computing adoption in Australia shows how the market there has evolved in the past year and highlights the most important opportunities for growth over the next few years.
Despite the continued progress in educating local businesses about the inherent benefits of cloud computing, Australian small and medium businesses (SMBs) continue to trail the rest of the developed world in their use of cloud services, despite the expanding array of services and applications that continue to be rolled out in response to the unique needs of local businesses.
As of summer 2013, Parallels estimates the Australian SMB market at about $1.2B AUD. Demand for cloud-based business applications will outpace all other sectors growing at 63 percent to reach $430M AUD. The second biggest market, IaaS, will show the weakest growth at 16 percent albeit contributing $343M AUD. The other cloud-services sectors: web presence and web applications will contribute $275M AUD, while hosted communication and collaboration (consisting of hosted premium email and hosted PBX) will add $134M AUD.
Australian cloud service-providers must continue to market the transformational business benefits of cloud computing but make it clear that benefits like increased efficiency and flexibility are more important and critical to the long-term prospects of SMBs as is the short-term ‘cost-out’ to be gained the use of cloud-based services.
Respondents to the survey are clearly maturing in their understanding of the technology as they recognize the benefits will far outweigh the growing pains they experience in migrating to the cloud. This strategic view of the cloud’s capability comes from a greater focus being placed on the business and operational process redesign and business model improvements as key enablers.
The survey also highlights the rising confidence in the security of cloud providers. As government and industry regulators mature in their understanding of the impact of cloud computing, SMBs can expect to see inevitable complexities around compliance. They are also approaching the tax structure of cloud deployments more strategically, rather than an afterthought to implementation with many finding that tax planning can make a significant difference in the company’s tax position, positively impacting the business case for cloud.
Many of today’s cloud-service providers were at one point SMBs themselves. This experience should serve them well reminding them about a winning characteristic of SMBs – agility. Those who are able to stay on top of SMBs’ changing cloud needs and reach these SMBs with the right mix of services and applications will grow and profit in the years to come.