Quantum is a leading expert in scale-out storage, archive and data protection, providing intelligent solutions for capturing, sharing and preserving digital assets over the entire data lifecyle. They help customers maximize the value of these assets to achieve their goals, whether it’s top movie studios looking to create the next blockbuster, researchers working to accelerate scientific discovery, or small businesses trying to streamline their operations. With a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class disk, tape and software solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, they enable customers to address their most demanding workflow challenges and opportunities.
Monthly Archives: October 2014
Crash Course in Open Source Cloud Computing at @CloudExpo [by @CitrixCloud]
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Senior Director, Open Source Solutions at Citrix Systems Inc., will provide overview of the open source software that can be used to deploy and manage a cloud computing environment. He will include information on storage, networking(e.g., OpenDaylight) and compute virtualization (Xen, KVM, LXC) and the orchestration(Apache CloudStack, OpenStack) of the three to build their own cloud services.
Microsoft Azure – It’s More Than Just Portability
When people discuss Microsoft Azure, they often think about portability to the cloud. One of the misnomers of the Azure cloud is that you’re just taking your on-prem virtual machines and moving them to the cloud when, in reality, Azure is much more than that. It is about VM portability, but it is also running different platforms in the cloud. It’s using instances which allows users to move, say, a web server to an instance in the Azure cloud so they don’t have to worry about the patching and management of that server from month to month. Instead, the user knows that it’s already taken care of for you. Other benefits include uptime SLAs and back up solutions.
Watch the video below with DJ Ferrara to learn more about the benefits Microsoft Azure has to offer.
Microsoft Azure – What are the benefits?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfsobUCjff0
What are your thoughts on Microsoft Azure? Has your organization utilized the platform? Any plans to use Azure in the future? Why or why not?
To hear more from DJ, watch his video blog discussing the pros and cons of different public cloud platforms and when it makes sense to use each. If you’d like to speak with DJ more about the Azure cloud, email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com.
Video with DJ Ferrara, Vice President & Enterprise Architect
Industrial Internet Consortium @IIConsortium To Sponsor @CloudExpo [#IoT]
The Industrial Internet Consortium was founded in 2014 to further development, adoption and wide-spread use of interconnected machines, intelligent analytics and people at work. Through an independently-run consortium of technology innovators, industrial companies, academia and government, the goal of the IIC is to accelerate the development and availability of intelligent industrial automation for the public good.
Opinion: What’s the real reason to do cloud, again?
By Joe Weinman, author, Cloudonomics
Cloud computing is having a dramatic impact on all aspects of our lives: as consumers, we spend our time on cloud-based social networks and using apps downloaded from the cloud; as employees, we use a variety of cloud-based software applications; as citizens, we file our taxes and even encourage social transformation via the cloud. For such a richly applicable general purpose technology, how can one begin to characterise its benefits?
The conventional answer is that cloud computing reduces costs and increases “business agility,” but the cloud is much more powerful than that. The cloud can enhance customer experience, by leveraging a dispersed footprint to increase availability, reduce latency for interactive services, and locally customize user interfaces. It can reduce cycle times and thus accelerate time to market and time to volume by offering “near-infinite” resources to speed tasks such as drug discovery. It can reduce risk by better aligning infrastructure expenses with variable and unpredictable revenue flows.
The cost and performance benefits can be quantified, using the laws of Cloudonomics as I identified in my book by the same name. For example, all other things being equal, one can identify an optimal hybrid architecture of private and public on-demand, pay-per-use resources based on the variability of resource requirements and the relative unit costs of a do-it-yourself strategy vs. public cloud provider pricing. One can associate distributed service node build-outs or on-demand resourcing with latency reduction.
All those benefits are valid, and broadly applicable. However, where the cloud—and related technologies such as big data and analytics, mobile, social, and the Internet of Things—become particularly powerful is when they are employed by companies to achieve strategic competitive advantage.
I’ve found that companies can use digital technologies in four major ways, which I call “digital disciplines.”
The first is “information excellence,” where companies can leverage information to dynamically optimize manufacturing, service, and other business processes. Traditionally, analysis was conducted offline and led to long term process improvement; now, data is accessible in real time and heuristics or algorithms can be used to reduce process costs and intervals, increase asset utilization, and reduce unintended variation.
“Solution leadership” is a strategic discipline oriented towards creating differentiated products and services, but ones that rather than being standalone are products that link across networks to cloud-enabled services. Connected cars and connected activity monitors are examples of this new generation of solutions.
“Collective intimacy” offers the ability to use collaborative filtering and detailed data from all users or customers to provide targeted, individual recommendations to each user. Movie recommendations and book upselling are good consumer entertainment examples, but other examples include generating specific therapies for patients based on their individual genetic characteristics as well as software-enhanced medical data, such as pathology results.
Finally, the cloud can be used to enable “accelerated innovation,” by enabling low cost experiments but also by creating the necessary infrastructure for new constructs such as idea markets, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and open innovation contests.
As individual clouds become increasingly interoperable, thanks to efforts such as the IEEE’s P2302 Standard for Intercloud Interoperability and Federation, and the related IEEE Intercloud Testbed initiative, additional benefits will arise. On the cost side, interoperability standards will accelerate the development of competitive cloud markets.
On the benefit side, interoperability will enable various business applications and also devices in the Internet of Things to work with each other, ushering in additional optimization and user experience benefits as well as opening up additional strategic opportunities. For example, smart cities could dynamically optimize the routes and timing for garbage collection trucks, school buses, and ambulances, given connected vehicles and the right cloud-based software.
One way to look at this is the benefits of on-demand, pay-per-use, elastic infrastructure. But a more powerful way to think about it is as globally optimal decision-making based on powerful information integration from heterogeneous systems.
Regardless of whether one takes a chief financial officer’s view or that of a chief strategy officer, the cloud and related technologies are bound to continue to have a dramatic and transformational impact on the spheres of businesses and consumers.
About the author
Joe Weinman is the author of Cloudonomics and the forthcoming Digital Disciplines, and the chair of the IEEE Intercloud Testbed Executive Committee, supported by the IEEE Cloud Computing Initiative.
More small business executives admit knowledge of the cloud is spotty
More UK executives have admitted their deeper knowledge of cloud computing is spotty at best, according to survey results from software provider Sage UK.
The survey conducted by YouGov, which polled 749 SME decision makers in the UK, found that more than half (57%) of respondents confessed to having only a partial understanding of cloud computing technology.
“While companies are becoming smarter about their use of the cloud and it continues to become a more viable option, the reality is that there’s still a pervasive knowledge gap amongst SMBs that threatens to hold back cloud adoption”, commented Rob Davis, Sage 200 Online head of technology.
Happily, 41% of execs polled said they fully understood what was going on under the bonnet. Yet there were more security concerns over migrating business data to the cloud. Data security (38%) was the most frequent fear, followed by the risk of downtime (25%), and challenges caused by a slow internet connection (19%).
Over a quarter of respondents said they were looking at a gradual implementation of cloud resources, a mixture of cloud and on-premise. “Cloud doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing decision; far from it,” Davis added.
This may all seem a little basic on the surface but it’s good, solid advice. Ivan Harris, cloud services manager at Eduserv, recently told CloudTech that hybrid clouds were “essential to the cloud migration journey”, focusing particularly on smaller businesses.
“Very few organisations are in a position to do a one-stop-shop, lift and shift their entire IT estates from physical on-premise to virtual public multi-tenancy clouds,” he said. “So you need flexibility in your infrastructure architecture to be able to deploy a changing hybrid cloud model.”
There are plenty of reasons why a business is reluctant to get rid of a private cloud for now; it’s still on the balance sheet, it’s connected to other hardware, or there might still be security concerns. Yet Harris doubts that hybrid clouds will still be around in five years’ time.
“I think most people will be in public clouds and they will choose clouds with appropriate controls in place to manage their information estate,” he said.
Previous surveys gauging knowledge of cloud computing have often met with amusing results. The most memorable was a Citrix poll of American consumers in 2012 which found, among other responses, that an advantage of the cloud was being able to access work information in your birthday suit.
Things have improved since then – but there’s still a bit of work to do.
Postscript: The Citrix poll had one remarkable survey result. As CloudTech wrote on August 29 2012, “a quarter of those surveyed said the cloud was great for keeping embarrassing videos off the hard drive.”
Given the iCloud-related celebrity hacks of the past couple of months, this is a remarkable statement.
CenturyLink expands further into Asian cloud market with Chinese managed hosting
Picture credit: CenturyLink
Communications provider CenturyLink has opened up a Shanghai data centre and announced the availability of its managed hosting service in China.
The latest expansion continues the telco’s aggressive move to the cloud, after a series of data openings this year including Toronto, Reading and Chicago. Back in May CenturyLink slashed prices on its cloud storage, in line with competitors, and in August they announced launch of CenturyLink Private Cloud, which aims to combine the security of private with the agility of public cloud.
The expanse in Asia brings the total number of data centres at CenturyLink to 57.
“For multinational corporations looking to grow their customer base, entering China presents enormous opportunities and challenges,” said Gery Messer, CenturyLink Asia Pacific managing director. “CenturyLink makes it easy for businesses to host within China’s borders, offering access to the same highly secure managed services and consistent IT experience available across our global footprint.”
The current strategy for CenturyLink is a simple one: create solutions for collocation, hybrid and cloud services on customer demand – private and public mashed together. Back in August Richard Seroter, director of CenturyLink Cloud, told CloudTech the company wanted to create a “single pane of glass” effect, whereby customers can manage a variety of agile infrastructure services in one interface.
Last year, a report on behalf of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission found there was a ‘distrust in foreign technology’, among other causes, which prohibited the growth of cloud computing in China. Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened up a Chinese region in December last year.
CenturyLink is partnering with Chinese IT solutions provider Neusoft to deliver the managed service. “This collaboration offers clients a unique opportunity to expand their IT presence into China by leveraging the resources of two world-class global IT providers to help simplify the complexities inherent in China,” said Angela Wang, Neusoft senior vice president.
Hybrid Cloud and the ‘Internet of Things’ @Cisco Keynote at @CloudExpo [#IoT]
The Internet of Things (IoT) is going to require a new way of thinking and of developing software for speed, security and innovation. This requires IT leaders to balance business as usual while anticipating for the next market and technology trends. Cloud provides the right IT asset portfolio to help today’s IT leaders manage the old and prepare for the new. Today the cloud conversation is evolving from private and public to hybrid. This session will provide use cases and insights to reinforce the value of the network in helping organizations to maximize their company’s cloud experience.
Increasing Importance of Cloud Services Brokerages | @CloudExpo
An intermediary brokerage can help companies and government agencies make the best use of commodity and targeted IaaS clouds, and not fall prey to replacing an on-premises integration problem with a cloud complexity problem.
To learn more about the role and value of the specialist cloud services brokerage, we’re joined by Todd Lyle, President of Duncan, LLC, a cloud services brokerage in Ohio, and Kevin Jackson, the Founder and CEO of GovCloud Network in Northern Virginia. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Announcing DEAC “Silver Sponsor” of @CloudExpo Silicon Valley [@DEACdc]
European data center operator DEAC is the largest in the Baltics. The activities are orientated to provide data center services and IT outsourcing on Eurasia and America scale in order to create the primary or backup or additional data center for customer in the EU, to protect its business and, most importantly, reduce costs up to 40% within 3-5 years.
DEAC is an IT outsourcing services and solutions company whose highly experienced and qualified employees offer various groups of services and bespoke solutions tailored to meet the requirements of our customers whose successful operation is ensured 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.