SolidFire is a solid (and fiery) open-source company, and was at the recent Red Hat Summit. I had a chance to ask Cloud Solutions Architect Aaron Delp (pictured below) some questions about what’s going on at the company.

Roger: So, what is the future of open source? More complex environments? Bigger customers? More cloud?

Aaron: The future of Open Source Software, or OSS, is the abstraction of hardware. By abstracting away hardware into manageable pools of dynamic resources we are actually creating an environment that is less complex to operate.

OSS is making great efforts to simplify this software abstraction into more manageable projects. Examples of this from the Red Hat Summit are Project Atomic, the newly announced lightweight operating system built for containers, combined with an LXC container project such as Docker running on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) such as OpenShift.

The trend towards simplification through application containers also is seeing increased traction in OpenStack environments as well. By creating an abstracted infrastructure that is easier to maintain, greater scalability can be achieved, leading to larger customer environments and a greater adoption of cloud computing as a whole.

Roger: How critical is the real-time aspect of modern IT? How quickly is it growing?

Aaron: When I think real-time in regards to modern IT, I think of IT infrastructures and the requirement to become more agile in response to customer needs and lines of business demands.

The ability to abstract away physical data center components into flexible pools of dynamic resources will be critical going forward. Customers are demanding an agile Infrastructure. This is why we are seeing such an accelerated adoption of Open Source Software to provide abstraction and service layers.

Open Source Software adoption is growing faster now than any point in the history of our industry. Because of this, traditional IT hardware vendors will be required to develop integrations between Open Source Software and their products to remain relevant as this industry continues to grow.

Roger: How key is the role of Big Data in developing your solutions? How important is the term Big Data to you?

Aaron: Big Data is the future of analytics and the gateway to providing solutions tuned to customer needs in the fastest way possible. As this industry matures, we will see a shift in the way organizations interact with customers.

The ability to fine tune interactions with customers will be critical to remain competitive and the possibilities here are seemingly endless.

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SolidFire is a solid (and fiery) open-source company, and was at the recent Red Hat Summit. I had a chance to ask Cloud Solutions Architect Aaron Delp (pictured below) some questions about what’s going on at the company.

Roger: So, what is the future of open source? More complex environments? Bigger customers? More cloud?

Aaron: The future of Open Source Software, or OSS, is the abstraction of hardware. By abstracting away hardware into manageable pools of dynamic resources we are actually creating an environment that is less complex to operate.

OSS is making great efforts to simplify this software abstraction into more manageable projects. Examples of this from the Red Hat Summit are Project Atomic, the newly announced lightweight operating system built for containers, combined with an LXC container project such as Docker running on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) such as OpenShift.

The trend towards simplification through application containers also is seeing increased traction in OpenStack environments as well. By creating an abstracted infrastructure that is easier to maintain, greater scalability can be achieved, leading to larger customer environments and a greater adoption of cloud computing as a whole.

Roger: How critical is the real-time aspect of modern IT? How quickly is it growing?

Aaron: When I think real-time in regards to modern IT, I think of IT infrastructures and the requirement to become more agile in response to customer needs and lines of business demands.

The ability to abstract away physical data center components into flexible pools of dynamic resources will be critical going forward. Customers are demanding an agile Infrastructure. This is why we are seeing such an accelerated adoption of Open Source Software to provide abstraction and service layers.

Open Source Software adoption is growing faster now than any point in the history of our industry. Because of this, traditional IT hardware vendors will be required to develop integrations between Open Source Software and their products to remain relevant as this industry continues to grow.

Roger: How key is the role of Big Data in developing your solutions? How important is the term Big Data to you?

Aaron: Big Data is the future of analytics and the gateway to providing solutions tuned to customer needs in the fastest way possible. As this industry matures, we will see a shift in the way organizations interact with customers.

The ability to fine tune interactions with customers will be critical to remain competitive and the possibilities here are seemingly endless.

read more

Gigamon® Inc. (NYSE: GIMO), has released financial results for the first quarter ended March 29, 2014.
Revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2014 were $31.8 million, compared to $25.8 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2013, representing growth of 23% year-over-year.
GAAP gross margins were 73% in the first quarter of fiscal 2014, compared to 79% in the first quarter of fiscal 2013.

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Gigamon® Inc. (NYSE: GIMO), has released financial results for the first quarter ended March 29, 2014.
Revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2014 were $31.8 million, compared to $25.8 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2013, representing growth of 23% year-over-year.
GAAP gross margins were 73% in the first quarter of fiscal 2014, compared to 79% in the first quarter of fiscal 2013.

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File sync and share. Endpoint protection. Both are massive opportunities for today’s enterprise thanks to their business benefits and widespread user appeal. But one size does not fit all, especially user-adopted consumer technologies. Organizations must apply the right enterprise-ready tool for the job in order to properly manage and protect endpoint data.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Michael Bachman, Senior Enterprise Systems Architect at Code42, he will discuss how the synergy of an enterprise platform – where sync/share and endpoint protection converge – delivers incredible value for the business.

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SAP’s recent user event in Orlando, Florida, organized and co-hosted by WIS Pubs, drew 1,800 attendees, all keen to learn new developments surrounding SAP’s BI and HANA in-memory analytics offerings. The key theme revolved around HANA as a platform for driving business innovation through technology and process disruption – clearly, HANA continues to sit front and center in SAP’s product strategy.

SAP’s challenge is to accelerate adoption by encouraging, not forcing, undecided customers towards HANA without clear and safe migration paths, but it should remember that its IT buyers are relatively conservative and will consider new technology options and changes at their own pace, not SAP’s.

HANA both creates and solves business disruption

SAP continues to reinvent itself as an innovative software-maker. At this event it emphasized business innovation through technological disruption. SAP’s efforts to position HANA as both technological disruptor and a solution …

As Eric Reis, pioneer of the lean startup movement notes, a software startup’s ability to succeed depends solely on how quickly and inexpensively they can try new features. The challenge is if you are a typical startup, you are your ops team and development resources are the biggest determinant of time-to-market, and developers are your most expensive and highest ROI resources.
If you could save each member of a four-person developer team 10% of his/her time, you could reduce time-to-market, reduce cost, try more experiments that increase your chances of success, delay hiring, and keep your burn rate under control. A DevOps approach can hold this promise.
For this reason, improving your DevOps workflow to eliminate inefficiencies should be a top priority for every technology-driven startup, no matter how small. And doing it sooner is more beneficial than later because more can be accomplished in less time with the right workflow in place.

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Take a moment to consider the things we put up with on a daily basis because they have been understood and accepted as the status quo. Perhaps the old adage, “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” rings no truer than for traditional on-premise data storage systems. Sure, there have been numerous improvements in data storage over the years. Sure, the slower, capacity-limited storage systems of yesterday continue to be replaced by bigger, faster storage systems all the time — but has there really been much improvement to address the most common idiosyncrasies that have existed for so long?
While data storage systems and cars have very little in common, imagine what automobiles would be like if they suffered from the same constraints and requirements have become the accepted norm with storage systems. Quite simply, owning an automobile would be a vastly different experience. How different? Think about all the things you would need:

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Take a moment to consider the things we put up with on a daily basis because they have been understood and accepted as the status quo. Perhaps the old adage, “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” rings no truer than for traditional on-premise data storage systems. Sure, there have been numerous improvements in data storage over the years. Sure, the slower, capacity-limited storage systems of yesterday continue to be replaced by bigger, faster storage systems all the time — but has there really been much improvement to address the most common idiosyncrasies that have existed for so long?
While data storage systems and cars have very little in common, imagine what automobiles would be like if they suffered from the same constraints and requirements have become the accepted norm with storage systems. Quite simply, owning an automobile would be a vastly different experience. How different? Think about all the things you would need:

read more