This one-hour webinar will cover the core benefits and features of up.time, including how up.time proactively monitors, alerts and reports on the performance, availability, and capacity of all physical servers, virtual machines, network devices, applications, and services. We’ll take you through the up.time Dashboards, show you how alerting and action profiles work, and dive into up.time’s deep reporting capabilities, including SLA reports. In the end, you’ll know how up.time works and what up.time can do for your company.

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The recent trends like cloud computing, social, mobile and Internet of Things are forcing enterprises to modernize in order to compete in the competitive globalized markets. However, enterprises are approaching newer technologies with a more silo-ed way, gaining only sub optimal benefits. The Modern Enterprise model is presented as a newer way to think of enterprise IT, which takes a more holistic approach to embracing modern technologies. This model makes use of Composable Enterprise framework put forward by Jonathan Murray of WMG.

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The industry is heated with debates on whether adopting private or public cloud is the smartest, best, cheapest, you name it choice. But this debate is missing the mark. Businesses shouldn’t be discussing public vs. private, but rather how can they make the two work together to their greatest advantage. The ideal is to merge on-premise and off-premise into a seamless environment that can be managed as a single entity – a forward-looking stance that will eventually see major adoption. But as of late 2013, hybrid cloud was still “rare,” noted Gartner analyst Tom Bittman.

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The 4th International DevOps Summit, co-located with16th International Cloud Expo – being held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY – announces that its Call for Papers is now open.
Born out of proven success in agile development, cloud computing, and process automation, DevOps is a macro trend you cannot afford to miss. From showcase success stories from early adopters and web-scale businesses, DevOps is expanding to organizations of all sizes, including the world’s largest enterprises – and delivering real results. Among the proven benefits, DevOps is correlated with 20% faster time-to-market, 22% improvement in quality, and 18% reduction in dev and ops costs, according to research firm Vanson-Bourne. It is changing the way IT works, how businesses interact with customers, and how organizations are buying, building, and delivering software.

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Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos continues to be a profound analyst as well as industry executive, especially when he talks about beer and cloud computing. He’ll be speaking at the upcoming @CloudExpo in November in Santa Clara.

We asked him a few questions about the state of cloud computing today, and here’s what he had to say:

Cloud Computing Journal: You’ve said public and private cloud are “two dimensions of the same world.” Are you in essence saying “all the world’s a hybrid?”

Marten Mickos: I am not saying that all the world is or will be hybrid. I am saying that most application workloads will not know whether they run on public or private clouds. The workload will see uniform APIs with uniform behavior.

Perhaps beer could serve as an analogy. You have beer on tap (public cloud) and beer in a bottle (private cloud). If you pour beer into glasses, most people won’t know the difference. Even if they know, they won’t mind the difference, as long as they get cold beer.

You can say that draught beer and bottled beer are two dimensions of the same thing. The most discerning consumers will care a lot. But many will be happy with just a glass of cold beer. As the one providing beer, you must have both draught and bottled. If one delivery fails, you always have the other. And some customers are very particular on that topic.

It’s the same with cloud.

CCJ: Yes, I see. I think we can all drink that in.

Now, what are the challenges for IT execs and managers who find themselves in not only a hybrid environment, but a multi-cloud environment? That is, maybe AWS here, GCE there, with Eucalyptus in a private cloud somewhere else? It seems this can happen when one company is acquired by another.

Marten: Multi-cloud environments are tricky, because they’re so much is different. If you have AWS, GCE and Azure in use in your company, you will essentially need three different teams to work with those clouds. And you won’t be able to move workloads easily between them.

It’s conceptually not unlike the situation where you have Windows laptops, Linux laptops and MacBooks in use in a corporation. People and workloads will gravitate towards one of those camps, with little exchange of thoughts or innovation between the groups.

If you have AWS and Euca, however, you just need one set of training and one set of skill and design paradigms. You can use the same tools on both environments. And applications can run on either, irrespective of which environment (AWS or Euca) they were originally developed for.

CCJ: And now an evergreen we always need to ask: what’s your view of OpenStack and Apache CloudStack these days?

Marten: CloudStack is wonderful technology that I have always respected.

OpenStack is hugely popular, still struggling to get its design cleaned up and the code hardened. I wrote about OpenStack in two blog postings:

OpenStack love by Eucalyptus

OpenStack critical analysis

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In this episode Keith Mayer and myself kick off a special 6 part series on “Modernizing Your Infrastructure with Hybrid Cloud.” Tune in for Part 1 where they discuss the importance of planning for your organization’s move to Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft Azure.

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In this part of the Modernizing Your Infrastructure with Hybrid Cloud, we are focusing on of the great solutions we introduced with Windows Server 2012 and improved in Window Server 2012 R2, Storage Spaces.
In Windows Server 2012 Storage became a first class citizen, from storage deduplication to SMB 3.0 Windows became a great choice to be the storage platform in many organizations. In many organizations storage will represent a huge part of the IT budget. One of the key features, to help reduce the cost of storage, is the inclusion of Storage Spaces.

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Can call centers hang up the phones for good? Intuitive Solutions did. WebRTC enabled this contact center provider to eliminate antiquated telephony and desktop phone infrastructure with a pure web-based solution, allowing them to expand beyond brick-and-mortar confines to a home-based agent model. It also ensured scalability and better service for customers, including MUY! Companies, one of the country’s largest franchise restaurant companies with 232 Pizza Hut locations. This is one example of WebRTC adoption today, but the potential is limitless when powered by IoT. Attendees will learn real-world benefits of WebRTC and explore future possibilities, as WebRTC and IoT intersect to improve customer service.

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Eduserv, the not for profit public sector cloud provider, has won a contract with Bristol City Council worth an estimated £1.5m to migrate its IT infrastructure to the cloud.

The contract sees Eduserv take over the day to day running of the council’s IT, with future IT services being procured in a much more flexible manner, ensuring the council doesn’t own much of its ICT.

Bristol City Council is planning on cutting about £90m in IT costs, as local governments continue to move their resources to the cloud.

“Like every council, we are faced with the challenge of delivering high quality services while reducing our costs by 30%”, said Steven Pendleton, service manager of commissioning and supplier relationship management at Bristol City Council.

He added: “The ICT market is changing rapidly, becoming much more commoditised and consumer led, where significant economies of scale are now possible.

“Moving our IT estate to the cloud will give us a more flexible cost-effective resource which can adapt to our changing needs.”

With recent news that the Digital Marketplace, the updated one stop shop for government cloud services, is close to being prepared, the portents look good according to Eduserv, a long recognised G-Cloud vendor.

Andy Powell, head of product marketing at Eduserv, told CloudTech at the time his initial reaction to the new service, which will replace the CloudStore by the end of September, was that it had “been streamlined quite nicely”, yet added the Bath-based firm was still in a “wait and see” position.

“It’s good to see consolidation across the G-Cloud and Digital Services frameworks,” he added.