Monthly Archives: April 2015

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Azure Fabric and Microservices | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps #Microservices]

Microsoft is releasing in the near future Azure Service Fabric as a preview beta.

Azure Service Fabric is built to run microservices – a complex application consisting of smaller, interlocked components that enables updating components without disrupting service. Microsoft has used this over the past few years internally for many of its own applications and the new release is for general use, a new product.

OSIsoft is an early adopter of this system and run with it to expand into the exploding IoT market.

OSISoft’s PI: PI is a system envisaged to bring sensor data directly to the board room minus the human middle man. This is one embodiment of IoT to not only get the data but analyze so as to provide deeper insight and provide operational intelligence.

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How digital transformation drives cloud computing demand

(c)iStock.com/Daniel Spiess

Digital Business Transformation projects gained momentum in 2014, as more companies moved their legacy IT workloads to cloud computing platforms and launched a variety of new cloud-native applications. This pervasive trend will continue and accelerate for the duration of 2015.

Total cloud IT infrastructure investment (server, disk storage, and ethernet switch) is forecast to grow by 21 percent year-over-year to reach $32 billion in 2015 — accounting for about 33 percent of all IT infrastructure spending this year, which will be up from about 28 percent in 2014.

Private cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow by 16 percent year-over-year to $12 billion, while public cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow by 25 percent in 2015 to $21 billion, according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

For the full year 2014, cloud IT infrastructure spending totaled $26.4 billion, up 18.7 percent year over year from $22.3 billion — private cloud spending was just under $10.0 billion, up 20.7 percent year-over-year, while public cloud spending was $16.5 billion, up 17.5 percent year-over-year.

Regional and worldwide market forecast

In 2015, Western Europe is expected to have the highest growth in cloud IT infrastructure spending at 32 percent, followed by Latin America (23 percent), Japan (22 percent), and the U.S. market (21 percent).

For the five-year forecast period, IDC now expects that cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14 percent — both public cloud and private cloud are expected to grow at the same CAGR.

By 2019, IDC also expects worldwide cloud IT infrastructure spending to be $52 billion, or 45 percent of total IT infrastructure spend — public cloud will represent about $32 billion of that amount, and private cloud will account for the remaining $20 billion.

Given the current market development trajectory, this trend is unstoppable. It would be unwise for a legacy CIO to continue to deny the apparent benefits of cloud computing and thereby resist the Digital Business change that their more forward-thinking peers have already embraced.

Essential role of shadow IT and Open Source

“The pace of adoption of cloud-based platforms will not abate for quite some time, resulting in cloud IT infrastructure expansion continuing to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market for the foreseeable future,” said Kuba Stolarski, research manager at IDC.

In many organizations, a key driver of the rapid adoption of cloud applications and DevOps practices continues to be the unstoppable “Shadow IT” phenomena — where savvy Line of Business leadership refuses to be held back by the inherent limitations of their company’s internal IT organization.

As the global market evolves into deploying more cloud-native solutions – enabled by open source software, such as OpenStack – IDC belives that organizations of all types and sizes will discover that traditional approaches to IT management will increasingly fall short of the simplicity, flexibility, and extensibility requirements that form the core of cloud computing solutions.

Parallels, Parallels 2X, Parallels 2X RAS, Parallels 2X Remote Application server, Parallels Business Solutions, Parallels News, press releases, Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi for Business: Is Raspberry Pi Good for Companies?

Raspberry Pi is a very low-cost computer with a Linux-based OS. Parallels 2X Remote Application Server (RAS) enables you to transform this $35 device into a complete workstation. The advent of Raspberry Pi in early 2012 has created a revolution in computing circles. With a price tag of $35 and support for variants of Linux […]

The post Raspberry Pi for Business: Is Raspberry Pi Good for Companies? appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Microsoft Ignite, Parallels, Parallels 2X, Parallels 2X RAS, Parallels 2X Remote Application server, Parallels Business Solutions, Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition, Parallels Mac Management, Parallels Mac Management for Microsoft SCCM, Parallels News, press releases

Join Parallels at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in Chicago!

Screenshot courtesy of Microsoft Ignite. Parallels®, a global leader in cross-platform solutions (parallels.com/about), will exhibit at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago, IL, May 4-8 (Booth 111) and demo its new Parallels® 2X Remote Application Server (RAS), Parallels® Mac Management for Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), and Parallels Desktop® for Mac Business Edition, a […]

The post Join Parallels at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in Chicago! appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Azure, Big Data, Data lakes, Infrastructure as a Service, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Oliver Chiu

Microsoft jumps into the data lake

Azure Data LakeAt the company’s annual Build conference this week Microsoft unveiled among other things an Azure Data Lake service, which the company is pitching as a hyperscale big data repository for all kinds of data.

The data lake concept is a fairly new one, the gist of it being that data of varying types and structures is created at such a high velocity and in such large volumes that it’s prompting a necessary evolution in the applications and platforms required to handle that data.

It’s really about being able to store all that data in a volume-optimised (and cost-efficient) way that maintains the integrity of that information when you go to shift it someplace else, whether that be an application / analytics or a data warehouse.

“While the potential of the data lake can be profound, it has yet to be fully realized. Limits to storage capacity, hardware acquisition, scalability, performance and cost are all potential reasons why customers haven’t been able to implement a data lake,” explained Microsoft’s product marketing manager, Hadoop, big data and data warehousing Oliver Chiu.

The company is pitching the Azure Data Lakes service as a means of running Hadoop and advanced analytics using Microsoft’s own Azure HDInsight, as well as Revolution-R Enterprise and other Hadoop distributions developed by Hortonworks and Cloudera.

It’s built to support “massively parallel queries” so information is discoverable in a timely fashion, and built to handly high volumes of small writes, which the company said makes the service ideal for Internet of Things applications.

“Microsoft has been on a journey for broad big data adoption with a suite of big data and advanced analytics solutions like Azure HDInsight, Azure Data Factory, Revolution R Enterprise and Azure Machine Learning. We are excited for what Azure Data Lake will bring to this ecosystem, and when our customers can run all of their analysis on exabytes of data,” Chiu explained.

Pivotal is also among a handful of vendors seriously bought into the concept of data lakes. However, although Chiu alluded to cost and performance issues associated with the data lakes approach, many enterprises aren’t yet at a stage where the variety, velocity and volume of data their systems ingest are prompting a conceptual change in how that data is being perceived, stored or curated; in a nutshell, many enterprises are still too siloed – not the least of which in how they treat data.

Enterprise IT, Eugene Barbashin, Europe, IBM, Mariinsky Theatre, News & Analysis

Mariinsky Theatre taps IBM cloud to improve broadcasting

Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre is using a hybrid cloud to support live performance broadcasts

Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre is using a hybrid cloud to support live performance broadcasts

Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre is working with IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud solution that would improve its ability to stream live videos of performances to mobile devices globally.

The theatre already has more than 250,000 unique viewers around the world tuned into Mariinsky.tv, where it currently hosts webcasts of live performances and on-demand recordings.

It had previously broadcast performances on the web using its own on-premise platform to edit and stream performances, but the company said it sought a cloud-based platform for this in a bid to expand its global reach and improve its ability to withstand peaks in demand.

“To support a growing global community of loyal Theatre audiences, we needed a scalable, hybrid cloud solution that could meet the standards for quality that we and our viewers expect,” said Eugene Barbashin, head of the computer technology department, Mariinsky Theatre.

The company said at times its digital platform would need to scale to support thousands of simultaneous viewers, particularly around very popular orchestra or ballet performances, but that it was struggling to cope with demand at times.

“We tried various competitive offerings from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, but viewers still had buffering issues while streaming performances. We chose IBM Cloud to more fully meet our needs in terms of reliable performance and ease-of-use,” Barbashin added.

Amazon, ClusterK, News & Analysis

Amazon buys ClusterK to reduce AWS deployment costs

Amazon has acquired ClusterK, which offers software that optimses deployments on AWS spot instances

Amazon has acquired ClusterK, which offers software that optimses deployments on AWS spot instances

Amazon has acquired ClusterK, a provider of software that optimises deployment on AWS spot instances for cost and availability.

Amazon confirmed the acquisition to BCN but declined to offer any details about how the technology would be integrated in AWS, or the financial terms of the acquisition.

One of the challenges with EC2 spot instances is that cost and availability can vary dramatically depending on overall demand.

At the same time when these instances are used for long jobs (say, running batch jobs on large databases) and those jobs are interrupted, those instances can actually disappear from right under you – unless failovers on reserved instances or similar techniques are deployed.

Those are some of the things ClusterK aims to solve. It offers an orchestration and scaling service that uses the AWS spot market in conjunction with on-demand or reserved instances to optimise workload deployments for cost and availability – an automated way of keeping workload cost and availability in check (the company claims it can reduce cloud costs by up to 90 per cent).

While it’s not clear exactly how Amazon intends to integrate the technology it is clear the company is keen to do what it takes to keep the price of its services dropping, which is where ClusterK could certainly add value. While disclosing its cloud revenues for the first time last week the company said it has dropped the prices of its services about 50 times since AWS launched ten years ago.

M&A, Marc Benioff, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Rumour has is Salesforce is looking to sell itself

Rumour has it Salesforce is entertaining acquisition offers

Rumour has it Salesforce is entertaining acquisition offers

Cloud heavyweight Salesforce may be working with financial advisors and fielding acquisition inquiries, according to Bloomberg. The biz paper added that there is no certainty any deal will materialise.

It isn’t clear whether the inquiries are coming from a direct rival – purportedly with enough market cap and clout to takeover Salesforce (i.e. Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, or possibly even IBM) – or a bank or private equity firm; given Salesforce’s current stock price (it jumped over 11 per cent after acquisition rumours began circulating) its market cap sits just under $50bn which, given most acquisitions are priced at a premium, could put a final tab closer to $60bn.

Salesforce spokespeople told BCN the company does not comment on rumours and speculation.

If the rumours are true the potential suitor wouldn’t likely suffer much disappointment. Salesforce recently posted revenues for the quarter ending January 31, 2015 of $1.44bn, a 26 per cent year on year increase with annual revenues reaching $5bn.

The CRM giant, now the sixth largest software company in the world according to Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, is projecting full year revenues for fiscal 2016 to grow between 20 and 21 per cent to $6.475bn and $6.52bn.

It’s also had some success at positioning itself well for trends that are clearly on the up – platform-as-a-service; cloud marketing automation; the Internet of Things and wearables.

All of this is just speculation of course. Nevertheless, if Facebook’s eye-watering $19bn acquisition of WhatsApp was enough to make you shudder, a $50-60bn acquisition of Salesforce would surely leave you a bit stunned to say the least.

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Cloudy with a Chance of Security By @LMacVittie | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

We found all manner of interesting practices and trends as it relates to cloud and security in our State of Application Delivery 2015 report. One of the more fascinating data points was a relationship between security posture and cloud adoption. That is, it appears that the more applications an organization migrates to the cloud, the less strict its security posture becomes.
Really. I was a bit disturbed by that, too. At least at first.

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The New Shape of Data By @ABridgwater | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

People will tell you that ‘software is eating the world’. It’s a good line and it has a good degree of truth in it, so it’s one of those terms that tends to get repeated.
A more accurate statement might be: ‘software is eating into the core operational mechanics of the business world and the control and intelligence that it affords are reflected back on the IT function itself so that our notion of hardware systems and networks are now becoming software-defined’ – but that’s not as catchy by far now is it?

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