As promised in our earlier post, here are the final predictions we saw making the rounds in the blogosphere at the start of the year.
Many are predicting that Microsoft will get more serious about the cloud. Amazon dominated the cloud news in 2013, but 2014 will be a good year for Microsoft and Google, said Dan Sullivan on Search Cloud Computing. “Microsoft is paving the way for hybrid clouds with Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack. By the end of 2014, we should have a better understanding of good practices for managing workloads across hybrid Azure clouds.
Bernard Golden on CIO echoes the sentiment. “In a way, AWS has had a free ride to this point. Most of its competition has come from the hosting world, and, as noted, is unable to take a software approach to the domain. The inevitable result: AWS has improved, and grown, much more rapidly than other CSPs. That unopposed free run will end in 2014. Both Google and Microsoft have AWS in their crosshairs and are rolling out serious competitive offerings, designed for an all-out battle royale.”
Monthly Archives: February 2014
How Data Integration Is Changing the Enterprise Landscape
Two words that are continually brought up in conversations at company meetings are “integration” and “cloud.” According to leading analyst firm Gartner, by 2016 the growth of cloud computing will increase to become the bulk of new IT spend. The relative cost of cloud services as compared to handling integration in-house has historically hindered executives’ decisions to implement cloud services and brokers. However, the undeniable benefits to cloud-based integration have now come to the forefront of consideration for C-level decision makers looking to relieve their companies of compliance challenges and security risks, while increasing the speed of data being transferred and analyzed. Putting the two words together, cloud integration is now more important than ever to tackle increasingly complex integration challenges.
As such, 2014 will be a disruptive year for integration providers, cloud services, Big Data and C-level executives looking to take full advantage of what data integration has to offer. Below are three trends companies can expect to see and incorporate into their businesses in the next year.
How Data Integration Is Changing the Enterprise Landscape
Two words that are continually brought up in conversations at company meetings are “integration” and “cloud.” According to leading analyst firm Gartner, by 2016 the growth of cloud computing will increase to become the bulk of new IT spend. The relative cost of cloud services as compared to handling integration in-house has historically hindered executives’ decisions to implement cloud services and brokers. However, the undeniable benefits to cloud-based integration have now come to the forefront of consideration for C-level decision makers looking to relieve their companies of compliance challenges and security risks, while increasing the speed of data being transferred and analyzed. Putting the two words together, cloud integration is now more important than ever to tackle increasingly complex integration challenges.
As such, 2014 will be a disruptive year for integration providers, cloud services, Big Data and C-level executives looking to take full advantage of what data integration has to offer. Below are three trends companies can expect to see and incorporate into their businesses in the next year.
Understanding EtherCloud Storage Management
Many IT teams are looking at virtualization in the Cloud where enterprise-level storage is kept in “pools” often hosted by vendors who specialize in virtual storage. Most commonly, the data and additional space is accessed via a web-based API. Coraid offers a unique storage management solution, EtherCloud Storage Manager, which is a scale-out management product for IT Admins. It utilizes a GUI, a command line interface, and a ¬ representational state transfer (REST) API.
Understanding EtherCloud Storage Management
Many IT teams are looking at virtualization in the Cloud where enterprise-level storage is kept in “pools” often hosted by vendors who specialize in virtual storage. Most commonly, the data and additional space is accessed via a web-based API. Coraid offers a unique storage management solution, EtherCloud Storage Manager, which is a scale-out management product for IT Admins. It utilizes a GUI, a command line interface, and a ¬ representational state transfer (REST) API.
OpenNebula vs. OpenStack: User Needs vs. Vendor Driven
How do you compare OpenNebula with OpenStack?…
This is indeed a complex question. There is no single answer because open-source projects and technologies present several dimensions. But we are far from afraid to answer it: the short, tl;dr version would be that they represent two different open-source models. While OpenNebula is an open-source effort focused on user needs, OpenStack is a vendor-driven effort.
SHI Feeds SMBs’ Appetite for Cloud Backup with Zetta.net
With the cloud in its sights as a fast-track strategy for growth, SHI International Corp. has partnered with Zetta.net to round out its expanding portfolio with an enterprise-grade cloud backup and disaster recovery (DR) solution.
SHI, which has transformed over the years from a $1 million “software-only” reseller into a $4 billion global provider of information technology products and services, says cloud offerings are crucial to attracting small- and medium-size businesses, which are constantly looking for ways to reduce cost, increase efficiency, and improve accessibility to mission-critical, enterprise IT systems.
SHI Feeds SMBs’ Appetite for Cloud Backup with Zetta.net
With the cloud in its sights as a fast-track strategy for growth, SHI International Corp. has partnered with Zetta.net to round out its expanding portfolio with an enterprise-grade cloud backup and disaster recovery (DR) solution.
SHI, which has transformed over the years from a $1 million “software-only” reseller into a $4 billion global provider of information technology products and services, says cloud offerings are crucial to attracting small- and medium-size businesses, which are constantly looking for ways to reduce cost, increase efficiency, and improve accessibility to mission-critical, enterprise IT systems.
Breaking Down Enterprise Silos in the Cloud
Are you re-creating existing technology silos in the cloud? If so, your entire enterprise investment in the cloud is at risk.
From the perspective of IT, organizational silos seem to be the root of all problems. Every line of business, every department, every functional area has its own requirements, its own technology preferences, and its own way of doing things. They have historically invested in specialized components for narrow purposes, which IT must then conventionally integrate via application middleware – increasing the cost, complexity, and brittleness of the overall architecture.
Now those same stakeholders want to move to the cloud. Save money with SaaS apps! Reduce data center costs with IaaS! Build a single private cloud we can all share! But breaking down the technical silos is easier said than done. There are endless problems: Static interfaces. Legacy technology. Inconsistent policies, rules, and processes. Crusty old middleware that predates the cloud. And everybody still has their own data model and their own version of the truth.
CRAM the Cloud: Creating Resilient Application Migration
As businesses aspire to move more and more application workloads outside of the boundaries of their private cloud data centers, public cloud service providers are increasingly implementing a private cloud staple: resiliency.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, John Roese, SVP and Chief CTO at EMC Corporation, will summarize the key architectural tenets of resilient private cloud architectures. These tenets can be implemented in any service provider cloud implementation, regardless of hypervisor choice (e.g., VMware, Hyper-V, Xen), cloud orchestration software (e.g., vSphere, OpenStack), network implementation (e.g., SDN, NFV), or storage implementation (file, block, object). A resilient public cloud will naturally attract increased workload migration, and the rest of the session will describe foundational technologies that facilitate not only secure and seamless application workload migration, but secure and seamless data set migration as well.