As 13th Cloud Expo / Cloud Expo Silicon Valley draws near, two of its major sponsors are working together in a high-profile way. Hitachi GST (HGST), a Western Digital company, and Verizon Enterprise Solutions today announced that HGST is providing solid-state storage solutions for Verizon’s recently introduced Verizon Cloud. HGST’s s800 Series Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) enterprise-class solid-state drives (SSDs) are being deployed in Verizon’s cloud servers, providing large enterprises, mid-size companies and small businesses with high-performing, highly reliable solid-state storage on a scalable platform.
Monthly Archives: October 2013
Why SoftLayer believes in a “really good” future with IBM #AppsWorld
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider SoftLayer has been making all the right noises since its acquisition by IBM back in July.
Earlier this month CloudTech reported on the health of the IBM-SoftLayer relationship, with many IBM divisions reputed to be actively collaborating with the SoftLayer team to migrate existing apps and develop new ones.
And for Jonathan Wisler, EMEA general manager, speaking at Apps World Europe earlier today, things couldn’t be any smoother.
“It’s been really good,” Wisler tells CloudTech. “In the short term, it’s opened up a lot of opportunities with customers, and the customers are asking for cloud, which is a great place to be.
“And then also IBM is deploying some of their software as a solution on their stack, which is another validation of their belief in the platform,” he adds.
It’s a straightforward enough value proposition; SoftLayer, as a “purely …
Cloud Expo: How to Accelerate the Need for Cloud-Based Applications
According to IDC Research, cloud-based applications (apps) consumed via software-as-a-service (SaaS) will grow nearly five times faster than traditional on-premise application development. SaaS-based apps address a company’s desire to increase business capabilities without the need for additional capital expenditure and/or IT resources. These next-generation apps must be configurable without the need for IT and empower the business to easily adapt to market demand, be accessible through multiple touch points (Web, Mobile, Social), and support bi-directional end-user interaction with existing enterprise systems.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Jesse Shiah, CEO & Co-Founder of AgilePoint, will highlight how AgilePoint enables customers to modernize their IT infrastructure with cloud-based applications and reap the benefits of SaaS. Our business-oriented development platform provides a collaborative environment where the business and IT can create these applications with minimal code. Come and join us to see how companies are doing more with less.
Moving Targets: Developing Cloud Apps on Rapidly Evolving Platforms
Enterprise software developers used to count on a level of stability and control over their environment that no longer exists when migrating to cloud platforms. As much hand-wringing is spent over how and what can be run in the cloud at all, little thought is given to the long-run costs of developing and optimizing applications to run in constantly-evolving cloud platforms.
Twitter Is Not a SaaS Monitoring Solution
A few weeks ago I was trying to update some files I have stored on a cloud storage service (that will remain nameless). I had moved my files there a while back as a way to make it easier to access them from my various devices and to avoid losing them during the next inevitable hard drive failure. For the most part I’ve been happy with the service, but on this day, I was unable to access the site.
Not good, as I was rushing to make some changes and send the files to a colleague.
Frustrated by my situation, I asked a co-worker to see if he was also having problems. He was, so we did the next logical thing you would expect. We went to the service provider’s status page to see what they had to say. According to it, the service was healthy and there were no current service or maintenance notices.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Encryption – Getting Peace of Mind in the Cloud
Security remains a high consideration for adoption of Cloud. Protection of data is at the center of a Cloud security strategy. Where the data is stored, how the data is secured, and who has access to the data? Encryption is one of the key technologies to address these concerns, securing data in the cloud, and to provide peace of mind to cloud adopters.
Like any other technology, no single solution fits all scenarios. Should you use full disk encryption, database encryption technologies or an encryption gateway? Is there a need to encrypt backup data? You have to address these and many other questions while planning for an encryption solution. There are many considerations related to transparency, usability, and ease of management. There are also issues related to who owns, manages and has access to encryption keys. On top of that, a solution that works well in an IaaS cloud may not work well in an SaaS environment.
IT Still Controls Most Cloud Usage: Cisco Survey
Cisco, like everybody else in IT, believes that cloud computing is central to the Internet of Things (the belief that everything with an on/off switch will eventually be wired or wirelessly connected and controlled by someone – or some thing – somewhere in the world). This isn’t a difficult concept to understand.
Naturally, all of this plays directly into the products and services that Cisco makes – all those switches, routers, random connectors, intelligent network software and so on – that link devices to systems to people and back again, according to an article on eWEEK.
Cisco estimated in an extensive research report, “The Impact of Cloud on IT Consumption Models,” that connections among people, processes, data and things will surge from 10 billion today to 50 billion by 2020.
WebRTC Summit | Interoperable WebRTC and Why It Is Important
There are many potential applications for WebRTC and for many interoperability is not a requirement. However, this does not mean that there is not a need for interoperability, particularly at the signaling level, for other applications.
Many people have dismissed interoperability as a consideration when using WebRTC – often due to the fact that their favored use cases do not require it (and in some cases are even hampered by it).
In his session at WebRTC Summit, Peter Dunkley, Technical Director at Crocodile RCS, will look at the other side and discuss the case for interoperability and explain how WebRTC can be used to enhance and extend existing services in a way provides benefits to service providers and their customers. He will conclude with a look at some of the open-source options available today for building interoperable WebRTC applications.
Roll With the Times and Grow Your Business
If you are in your 40’s you were born into a world which is now long gone. Your first date was set up via a landline phone – maybe even a rotary dial! The first music you listened to was from a tape cassette or a vinyl record; flying was not like taking a bus; e-mails were unknown and… well, you get the picture.
Then along came mobile telephony and the internet and they changed the world forever. Today our lifestyle, information and hobbies, as well as work, can be found in one single device which is permanently connected to the internet – and of course it is also in our pocket most of the time.
Cloud Expo | Platform Gravity: New Paradigm for Cloud-Based Enterprises
With the explosion of SaaS and reduced costs of changing applications, organizations have more freedom to choose between products and are no longer bound by the platform stickiness of traditional enterprise software. A new analogy – “platform gravity” – better describes today’s enterprise application market.
As apps vie for customers in the face of diminishing client lock-in, pricing, features, and ecosystems exclusively govern application traction – forcing vendors to innovate faster, listen better, and refocus efforts on users.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Patrick White, CEO at Synata, will discuss best practices for selecting and deploying applications in this world of endless choice and explore how developers can thrive in this new environment.