Monthly Archives: March 2015

Corey Bell, Datacentre, IBM, Ken King, News & Analysis, Open Compute, OpenPower, OpenStack, Power8, Vendor

OpenPower members reveal open source cloud tech mashups

OpenPower members have been busy creating open source server specs based on the Power8 architecture

OpenPower members have been busy creating open source server specs based on the Power8 architecture

OpenPower Foundation members pulled the curtain back on a number of open source cloud datacentre technologies including the first commercially available OpenPower-based server, and the first open server spec that combines OpenStack, Open Compute and OpenPower architectures.

Members of the open source hardware community, which IBM – the community’s founding organisation – said now numbers over 110 organisations, revealed a number of joint hardware initiatives falling under the OpenPower umbrella.

The Foundation announced the first OpenPower-based servers, developed by Chinese ODM Tyan (TYAN TN71-BP012), a variant of those IBM recently said it would add to its SoftLayer datacentres. The servers will be commercially available in the second half of 2015.

IBM and Wistron also revealed an OpenPower-based server using GPU and networking technology from Nvidia and Mellanox, respectively, which is being aimed at high performance compute workloads.

The foundation also announced the first server spec and motherboard mock-up combining the design concepts of the Facebook-led open source hardware project, Open Compute, with OpenStack and OpenPower technologies, an initiative Rackspace – among other service providers with a vested interest all three open source projects – was keen to bring to fruition.

“Collaborating across our open development communities will accelerate and broaden the raw potential of a fully open datacentre. We have a running start together and look forward to technical collaboration and events to engage our broader community,” said Corey Bell, chief executive officer of the Open Compute Project.

In an interview with BCN earlier this month Brad McCredie, IBM fellow and vice president of IBM Power Systems Development and president of the OpenPower Foundation said there is a big opportunity for Power to succeed in the market, and that IBM hopes to claim up to 30 per cent of the scale-out market in a matter of years.

Ken King, general manager OpenPower Alliances at IBM said: “OpenPower started off as an idea that immediately resonated with our technology partners to strengthen their scale out implementations like analytics.  Now, OpenPower is fundamental to every conversation IBM is having with clients — from HPC to scale out computing to cloud service providers.  Choice, freedom and better performance are strategic imperatives guiding customers around the globe, and OpenPOWER is leading the way.

Cloud & IT Management, Cloud Services

Survey Shows New Opportunities Due To Evolving Cloud Technology

The cloud computing market has greatly evolved in recent years, and many are viewing it as a mainstream and established way of handling part of doing business. A recent survey sponsored by Microsoft and conducted by 451 research found that 70 percent of the opportunity of the 1,700 cloud and hosting customers around the world focuses on application hosting, managed data services like backup and disaster recovery, and security. It also found that IT organizations want cloud solutions that go beyond their infrastructure needs.

 

451 research

 

The need for these types of services is particularly high when cloud providers can drive more business by delivering custom integrations, disaster recovery and service-level agreements that are personalized for the organizations needs.

 

Many businesses that utilize cloud services have a hybrid public-private system. This will give cloud service providers the opportunity to increase revenue by providing value-added services to the customer. Cloud service providers can also gain a reputation and become trusted cloud advisors.

 

With many businesses already using cloud services or evaluating a deployment plan, it isn’t enough for service providers to have many data centers available at a low price. Trust, uptime, security, performance and technical expertise are what separate competitors. Providers need to be able to align their own values with their customer’s values.

 

The survey also found that the decision making regarding cloud services is increasingly moving away from the IT manager and towards the higher level management. Chief Information Officers (CIO’s) and Chief Technology Offers (CTO’s) are the ones leading the transition to the cloud. Just over half of the survey participants claimed this to be true in their organization.

 

You can download the survey results on the Microsoft Website.

The post Survey Shows New Opportunities Due To Evolving Cloud Technology appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

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DevOps Foundation “Certification Track” at @DevOpsSummit New York [#DevOps]

SYS-CON Events announced today the DevOps Foundation Certification Course, being held June ?, 2015, in conjunction with DevOps Summit and 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
This sixteen (16) hour course provides an introduction to DevOps – the cultural and professional movement that stresses communication, collaboration, integration and automation in order to improve the flow of work between software developers and IT operations professionals. Improved workflows will result in an improved ability to design, develop, deploy and operate software and services faster.

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Screen Scraping Bots By @DISTIL | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

Like DDoS attacks, aggressive screen scraping can create huge spikes in traffic, cause brownouts, and even take you down for extended periods of time. Web scraping doesn’t make the headlines and most people aren’t aware of the damage it can cause to your website’s success.
Thieves and unauthorized content aggregators use screen scraping bots and cheap labor to steal your content, repackage it for sale, or place it on unauthorized sites – all of which hurt your SEO, negatively impact your brand, and reduce your ability to monetize your intellectual property. Below I’ve outlined just a few of the many ways that screen scraping can impact a company and its website.

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Storms Brewing in the Cloud By @E_deSouza | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

Recent events have taught us that everyone is vulnerable to data breaches. Now that the majority of businesses are running services in the cloud, whether sanctioned, rogue or Shadow IT, there is much work to be done in beefing up cloud security. And, with each major data breach that takes place in the cloud, trust in the cloud is further eroded.
Cloud Is an Attractive Target for Data Breaches
The increasing pervasiveness of the cloud makes it an attractive target for hackers and cybercriminals. Cloud is not only for business and leisure applications; it’s also the back end for electricity grids, water treatment plants, healthcare applications, smart cars, smart refrigerators and so much more. With each device or source that connects to the cloud it creates additional pathways or access points for unauthorized users to infiltrate. The increasing volume of data that is either stored or transacted in the cloud is a strong lure for hacktivists and cybercriminals.

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JFrog Adds Docker Support to Bintray | @JFrog @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

JFrog on Thursday announced that it has added Docker support to Bintray, its distribution-as-a-service (DaaS) platform. When combined with JFrog’s Artifactory binary repository management system, organizations can now manage Docker images with an end-to-end solution that supports all technologies.
The new version of Bintray allows organizations to create an unlimited number of private Docker repositories, and through the use of fast Akamai content delivery networks (CDNs), it decreases the download time of large Docker repositories, speeding DevOps work significantly. Bintray’s highly available service and download layer also helps Docker users eliminate service disruption and performance degradation issues.

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Win Server 2003 EOS Is Coming [New Survey] By @AppZero_Inc | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

The clock is ticking: the End of Support for Windows Server 2003, #WS2003EOS, arrives this July, as in four months from now. This means there will be no more patches or security updates and your applications and business will be at risk. New threats won’t be addressed and WS2003 systems will be a security risk and compliance nightmare. Especially for those in heavily regulated industries — pharmaceuticals, banking/finance and insurance, as well as any company that processes credit card transactions — this will cause a heavy compliance burden and could put you at risk of accruing penalties and fines.

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OpenShift Commons Latest in Battle with Cloud Foundry By @IoT2040 | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

Red Hat made the interesting times in which we live a little more interesting recently by announcing OpenShift Commons, “a place for companies using OpenShift to accelerate its success and adoption. To do this we’ll act as resources for each other, share best practices and provide a forum for peer-to-peer communication,” according to an official statement.

A total of 38 companies have committed to being part of the OpenShift Commons, including Cisco, Dell, and Docker. Others include Cloudera, Hortonworks, Iron.io, New Relic, and Zend.

The announcement is another move in the ongoing PaaS battle between OpenShift and Cloud Foundry, which got its Foundation last year.

A total of 38 companies have committed to being part of the OpenShift Commons, including Cisco, Dell, and Docker. Others include Cloudera, Hortonworks, Iron.io, New Relic, and Zend.

The announcement is another move in the ongoing PaaS battle between OpenShift and Cloud Foundry, which got its Foundation last year.

The two platforms are both OpenShift-friendly, and have an open-source nature that encourages community contributions and development.

The emerging, competing PaaS ecosystems seem to add strength to the intertwined notions of more aggressive cloud computing development in enterprises, the DevOps approach in leveraging the potential speed and flexibility of cloud, and keeping PaaS from being subsumed into major infrastructure (IaaS) providers such as Amazon and Salesforce.

Look for Jerome Pettazoni of Docker and Gordon Haff of Red Hat to cover much of the related ground in the world of PaaS at Cloud Expo & The DevOps Summit in New York June 9-11 at the Javits Center.

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Cloud Acquisition Strategy | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

This year has brought big news, significant changes and increased awareness of the adoption of cloud computing in Government. In fact Cloud computing may be the biggest and most overhyped term in Government information technology today. It is also the most discussed topic in agency strategy, cyber security forums and mission / program reviews. While lots of conversation has been devoted to technology and the benefits that government customers can derive from Cloud, in the end the biggest challenge may be the acquisition of cloud services. Cloud computing presents a different set of acquisition challenges to the federal government and this shift requires a rethinking the agency acquisition process. Smart purchasing decisions require an understanding of security requirements, service models and service level agreements.

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Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Mark Hurd, News & Analysis, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP

Oracle hits out at Salesforce as cloud revenue grows

Larry Ellison said the company's cloud revenue will eclipse Salesforce's revenue this year

Larry Ellison said the company’s cloud revenue will eclipse Salesforce’s revenue this year

Oracle reported SaaS and PaaS revenues of $375m for the third quarter 2015, up 33 per cent from the previous year, with the company’s cloud services now growing at a quicker rate than those offered by Salesforce according to Oracle chief technology officer Larry Ellison.

While Oracle reported strong growth in its cloud services segment, the company’s overall revenues, however, remained flat at $9.3bn, with a 2 per cent decline in hardware systems revenue (to $1.3bn) and operating income down 5 per cent to $3.4bn.

Nevertheless, the company’s executives were quite pleased with the results.

“In Q3, we sold nearly $200 million of new SaaS and PaaS business as measured in annual recurring revenue,” said Oracle chief executive officer Mark Hurd.

“In Q4, we expect to sell over $300 million of new SaaS and PaaS annual recurring revenue. That means we have a real chance to sell more SaaS and PaaS new business this coming quarter than any other cloud services provider. I think our hyper-growth in the cloud comes as a big surprise to a lot of people,” Hurd said.

Ellison was less inclined to mince words in a call with press and analysts this week, calling out one of its biggest direct competitors in the CRM space – Salesforce.

“Oracle now has a cloud revenue run rate of well over $2 billion a year. We’re already the world’s second-largest SaaS and PaaS company. On our last quarterly conference call, I predicted that in our fiscal year 2016 Oracle would likely sell more SaaS and PaaS new business than Salesforce.com. Well, I was way too cautious.”

“I now believe that Oracle will sell more new SaaS and PaaS business than Salesforce.com in this current calendar year, 2015,” he said.

This kind of rhetoric isn’t uncommon among the awkward yet symbiotic trio, SAP, Oracle and Salesforce, which to some extent have come to epitomise the dynamic between the large slower moving incumbent and the smaller but rapidly growing new kid on the block.

Last month Salesforce, which is led by ex-Oracle executive Marc Benioff, announced a record fourth quarter with full fiscal year 2015 revenue hitting $5.37bn. In a call with press and analysts to discuss the results Salesforce vice chairman and president Keith Block said it achieved those results “right in SAP’s backyard.”