As an SDN network provider focused on the datacenter, we spend a good amount of time understanding the state of data centers today, tomorrow and some time into the future.

There is no question that the use of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications in the cloud is growing rapidly. Plexxi itself is a shining example, few of the applications we use are in-house across all functional areas.

There are many reasons why we picked cloud-based applications for our needs. As a small company, in many cases there is a very simply economic choice to make. Paying for a cloud based service is simply cheaper than building your own infrastructure. Creating a datacenter infrastructure is not cheap, and maintaining it and the applications that run on top is a serious investment. When you are small, that overhead is hard to carry and per user based charges for a cloud based application is much easier to swallow.

read more

As an SDN network provider focused on the datacenter, we spend a good amount of time understanding the state of data centers today, tomorrow and some time into the future.

There is no question that the use of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications in the cloud is growing rapidly. Plexxi itself is a shining example, few of the applications we use are in-house across all functional areas.

There are many reasons why we picked cloud-based applications for our needs. As a small company, in many cases there is a very simply economic choice to make. Paying for a cloud based service is simply cheaper than building your own infrastructure. Creating a datacenter infrastructure is not cheap, and maintaining it and the applications that run on top is a serious investment. When you are small, that overhead is hard to carry and per user based charges for a cloud based application is much easier to swallow.

read more

After CRM and business IT provider Autotask suffered a severe outage yesterday, CloudTech caught up with VP engineering Adam Stewart to get the lowdown on what happened, and what happens from here

Exclusive Late on Monday and into part of Tuesday, cloudy IT management software provider Autotask went down for English speaking customers in Europe, Asia, Middle East and Africa, as CloudTech reported.

The root cause, according to Autotask VP engineering Adam Stewart, was a capacity spike that brought the system down and caused two separate failures. After the first downtime, engineers added more virtual cores, or more ‘CPU horsepower’ to the web tier, only for the system to go down again at approximately 0651 GMT on July 2.

“We spent a lot of time analysing what could be causing so much load on these systems,” says Stewart, who admitted that he was ‘a bit relieved’. “Basically, we went through all the things you would go through to try and discover what the cause is.”

This included the possibility of a malicious attack – a macabre, if not unexpected development given what happened to Code Spaces last week – as well as looking at various processes in the tier, yet the issue was because of the last change made to the CPU.

Autotask is like oxygen for our customers, and uptime is critically important

“After about two hours of trying many fruitless theories, we thought – although this is quite counter-intuitive – the last change we made to the system was that we added this other CPU,” Stewart explains. “It shouldn’t because we don’t believe that’s a problem, but let’s try it because it makes sense.

“So we reverted that change and, lo and behold, those servers stabilised almost immediately. We waited 10 minutes and there was no peak, no spike, no anything else, so we gradually went through and reverted the change on all the other servers, and that’s what’s stabilised the issue.

“In hindsight we now know, empirically, that change caused it,” Stewart adds. “We’re not sure why something that we’ve done dozens of times before didn’t actually stick this time.

“It was almost as if the virtualisation software was reporting to the operating system that there were eight cores in each processor, however it was only providing four cores – something like that.”

It’s a slightly worrying admission that the company doesn’t know exactly why this happened, but Stewart assures us that there is contact between Autotask and its virtualisation provider. Additional servers were added last night to expand the capacity and mitigate the risk of further problems – and all seems well for now.

The EMEA service disruption was resolved at 10:25 GMT. We’re working to ensure the issue doesn’t reoccur. Contact Autotask support with q’s.

— Autotask (@Autotask) July 2, 2014

Stewart is keen to point out that Autotask was “constantly” on the phones and on emails to customers during the outage, with some customers taking to Twitter to praise this approach:

Good call from @Autotask; checking how we managed the unexpected system outage yesterday #professional #caring

— Sytec (@Sytec) July 3, 2014

Yet Autotask’s Twitter page throughout Monday evening and Tuesday morning was a ghost town, leading to frustrated comments from customers.

“We were a little more silent there than maybe we should have been,” Stewart admits, adding: “I work out of the New York office – we were in constant contact with our UK office where most of the support was taking place for that.”

Stewart also concedes that yesterday’s downtime puts Autotask “a little bit below” the four nines SLA for the affected zones, yet adds it’s not a contractual stipulation. “It’s just the performance our customers have grown accustomed to, and rightly so,” he explains.

When outages occur, companies are quick to reassure customers it won’t happen again, and to put appropriate policies in place. It’s a similar thing for Autotask, who is collaborating with its virtualisation partner, examining additional testing procedures, as well as setting up a test environment to repeat the problem.

We spent a lot of time analysing what could be causing so much load on these systems

It’s all good development practice, yet prevention is still better than cure in these instances.

“Autotask is like oxygen for our customers, and uptime is critically important,” Stewart says.

“This is by far the worst outage we’ve had in probably five or six years,” he adds. “Overall, I’d say we still have a great record, but I’m sure in [the media’s] eyes…it’s called into question and we have to earn everybody’s trust again – which we will do.”

Cloud computing has officially hit the mainstream in the UK, according to the latest research published by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF).

The research, conducted in June 2014, found that more than three quarters (78%) of organisations had “formally” adopted at least one cloud-based service, which indicated a 15% growth since the last research undertaken in September 2013.

Of that number, almost half (45%) use only one cloud service, while 28% use two, 13% use three and 14% use four or more, indicating a fairly solid uptake up the scale.

The most popular of these services are web hosting, email, CRM, data backup and disaster recovery, with video conferencing, collaboration tools, HR apps and data storage seen as in the secondary tier.

The most popular driver of cloud computing is flexibility of delivery model among the private sector (17%), while, perhaps less surprisingly, operational cost savings (21%) drive the growth of cloud in the public sector.

Branding is also seen as an important element of this report. 79% of organisations polled now formally consider cloud as part of their IT strategy, yet a similar number (78%) reported they manage the majority of their IT in house, with the other 22% opting for a managed service provider.

It’s also worth noting, however, that the vast majority (85%) of organisations polled said they also operated part of their systems on-premise, whether it’s servers or data centres.

This means the CIF research falls in line with widespread industry opinion, which profiles the growth of cloud in a hybrid IT environment. Yet CIF chief exec Alex Hilton isn’t stopping there.

“We can also predict that 10% of businesses will likely report a primary cloud-based IT strategy, 10% will remain entirely on-premise and 80% will have a hybrid IT environment,” Hilton said.

“This means that nine out of 10 companies will continue to invest in on-premise IT alongside and integrated with cloud solutions.

“In other words, we are infact seeing the normalisation of cloud in the hybrid IT market,” he added.

The Cloud Industry Forum’s state of the market research first began in 2010 – and the 2014 report has shown UK cloud growth of 61.5% since the initial research.

You can read more here.

The advent of the application programming interface (API) economy has forced a huge, pressing need for organizations to both seek openness and improve security for accessing mobile applications, data, and services anytime, anywhere, and from any device.
Awash in inadequate passwords and battling subsequent security breaches, business and end-users alike are calling for improved identity management and federation technologies. They want workable standards to better chart the waters of identity management and federation, while preserving the need for enterprise-caliber risk remediation and security.

read more

“About two years ago Brother launched a new group called Brother Online. We thought it was a good idea for a hardware company to get into the cloud services market and our first step into that market was web conferencing,” explained Courtney Behrens, Senior Marketing Manager at Brother International, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 14th International Cloud Expo®, held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo® 2014 Silicon Valley, November 4–6, 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.

read more

Indeed the anticipated and most likely approach for organisations next year will not be a decision of whether to utilise a large existent infrastructure investment or a scalable on demand public cloud service but rather the most effective strategy to leverage both.
Despite all the marketing and promotion surrounding the benefits of dynamically bursting into a hybrid cloud from inception, this rarely seems to be the case. If anything the current trend towards building hybrid clouds still stems from an organic growth and demand that has emanated from either an existent public or private cloud deployment. Certainly private clouds are the most common origins of hybrid clouds as organisations look towards adding further agility to the many benefits they’ve attained.

read more

In the pharmaceutical industry, the drug development clock is ticking at the rate of warp-speed. As a result, companies are constantly looking for solutions to help them accelerate time to market – and many are realizing that implementing a cloud-based information management system can bring much needed clarity, organization and efficiency to the complex documentation processes and protocols required to bring a drug to market.
One such company is Singapore-based Lypanosys, an early-stage pharmaceutical company developing a clinically differentiated drug for the dermatology market. Blaine Ah Yuk-Winters, the project manager of the geographically dispersed pharmaceutical startup, describes Lypanosys as a virtual company in the sense that its manufacturing, preclinical, and clinical development activities are spread across the US, Asia, and Australia.

read more

“Dell Cloud Manager is a cloud management environment for the consumption of cloud resources and we provide a consistent interface, both in terms of API and in terms of user interface for doing a wide variety of activities core to deploying and operating software in cloud,” explained James Urquhart, Technologist & Director of Cloud Management Solutions at Dell, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 14th International Cloud Expo®, held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo® 2014 Silicon Valley, November 4–6, 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.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that the Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC ) has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The Cloud Standards Customer Council is an end user advocacy group dedicated to accelerating cloud’s successful adoption, and drilling down into the standards, security and interoperability issues surrounding the transition to the cloud.
The Council will provide cloud users with the opportunity to drive client requirements into standards development organizations and deliver materials such as best practices and use cases to assist other enterprises.

read more