Twitchell: We actually dynamically shuffle the location of data blocks across different geographic locations to radically improve data security and integrity while improving network performance. Dispersive™ SDS underpins DispersiveStorage™; this new solution works seamlessly with Dispersive™ Virtualized Networks. Together, they comprise the web-based, virtualized global infrastructure that protects data-at-rest and data-in-motion.
Monthly Archives: May 2015
Zerto Virtual Replication 4.0 Released | @ZertoCorp @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Zerto has announced the general availability of Zerto Virtual Replication 4.0 (ZVR 4.0). The company’s enterprise-class business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) software is the first to protect, replicate, and migrate data between VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, as well as across private, hybrid and public cloud environments including Amazon Web Services (AWS). ZVR 4.0 also allows channel partners and cloud service providers to expand their offerings to grow revenues by providing Disaster Recover as a Service (DRaaS) as part of their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings.
The CISO Role in Cybersecurity By @Kevin_Jackson | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
The average length of time in the commercial sector between a network security breach and when the detection of that breach is more than 240 days, according to Gregory Touhill, deputy assistant secretary of Cybersecurity Operations and Programs for the Department of Homeland Security. What could happen to your company during that eight-month period? Could your company survive?
Node.js Performance Tips By @Monitis | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
We’ve all heard about the rapid adoption of JavaScript in recent years. To summarize, JavaScript is the #1 most-used language on GitHub and it looks like this trend will continue. In fact, as one article put it, “JavaScript is the number one language in the world; it’s the language of the web, and a starting point for so many new developers . . .” One of the major reasons behind the rapid adoption JavaScript has been the influence of Node.js. Node.js is a software platform used for building fast, scalable network applications. It’s based on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, or the Chrome browser runtime, and has gained immense popularity among major enterprises in recent years.
IBM, Facebook ink data-sharing marketing partnership
IBM and Facebook are teaming up on marketing cloud services
IBM and Facebook have inked a deal that will see IBM marketing cloud customers gain access to Facebook advertising data and capabilities.
The deal will see IBM offer access to Facebook data as part of its marketing cloud analytics services and combine IBM’s marketing cloud data with anonymised user data from Facebook’s 1.44 billion users in a bid to enable IBM clients to gain a more accurate profile of their potential customers.
“Our partnership with IBM will help top brands achieve personalisation at scale by using IBM’s marketing cloud to find and engage their target audiences on Facebook, as well as solve their vexing challenges by consulting with IBM Commerce THINKLab, ” said Blake Chandlee, vice president of partnerships for Facebook. “We will also be working closely with IBM Commerce THINKLab to help deliver people-based marketing that’s optimized to achieve each brand’s business goals.”
The two companies also announced that Facebook will be the first company to join the recently announced IBM Commerce THINKLab, a research and collaboration environment where companies can work directly with brands to customise the user experience of their services.
Neither company has commented on the financial terms of the deal, but the move could give both companies a serious boost in their respective strategic initiatives – Facebook’s bid to monetise its data, and IBM’s to offer marketers among others compelling reasons to use its cloud services over Oracle’s or other competitors combining analytics and access to social media-born data.
“Brands understand the increasing need to provide customers with powerful and personalized experiences to nurture loyalty,” said Deepak Advani, general manager, IBM Commerce. “Through this collaboration, consumer product companies and retailers will be able to quickly and easily gain deeper insight into what their customers expect and provide them with compelling experiences that bridge the physical and virtual divide.”
VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI: Which SDN solution is right for me?
In a video I did recently, I discussed steps organizations need to take to prepare their environments to be able to adopt software defined technologies when the time comes. In this video, I talk about VMware NSX and Cisco ACI.
VMware NSX and Cisco ACI are both really hot technologies that are generating a lot of conversation. Both are API driven SDN solutions. NSX and ACI are really good in their unique areas and each come at it from a unique perspective. While they are both very different solutions, they do have overlapping functionality.
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtdfHGnCovA
Are you interested in talking with Nick about VMware NSX or Cisco ACI? Let’s set up some time!
By Nick Phelps, Principal Architect
Dominos taps Capgemini, cloud to streamline ordering system
Dominos has worked with Capgemini on a number of IT-related initiatives
Dominos Pizza has enlisted outsourcing incumbent Capgemini to help implement a cloud-based equipment and supply ordering system in a move the compan said would make its online and phone ordering processes more efficient.
The system, built on the NetSuite SuiteCommerce platform, will replace its existing equipment and supply order management platform.
Dominos, which has over 1,000 independent franchises in North America alone, said the cloud-based platform is integrated with its franchisee support organisation, and will make franchisee ordering more efficient by streamlining the pizza-making process.
“As a leading global retailer in online transactions, we are well known for using innovative technologies to enhance our customer experience, but what we do for our franchisees is equally important,” said Kevin Vasconi, Domino’s Pizza executive vice president and chief information officer.
“With the help of Capgemini, we are significantly improving the efficiency, availability and functionality of our franchisee ordering system, ultimately providing an improved experience for our franchise partners and a platform for Domino’s to drive future growth opportunities,” he said.
Capgemini also worked with Dominos North America to integrate the NetSuite platform with its existing ERP platform and data warehouse, which the companies said will help Dominos sales representatives improve the accuracy and efficiency of phone orders, and better equip them to assist customers with online or phone inquires.
“We are proud to be a longstanding provider for Domino’s and are excited about our work together to further enhance their reputation as a digital leader in serving up technology innovations for franchisees and customers,” said Ted Levine, global sector leader, consumer products & retail, Capgemini. “Our extensive experience as a leading systems integrator and deep experience in the restaurant industry segment enables us to help Domino’s improve operational effectiveness through technology.”
Multi-cloud management: Is this cloud nirvana?
(c)iStock.com/Draco77
The concept of the public cloud has sparked a great deal of excitement and interest among IT executives. Many are improving business agility and achieving superior results with cloud services. This, in turn, drives further investment in cloud.
Aside from the common expectations of agility and OpEx consumption pricing, some are drawn to the idea of expansive, highly centralised multi-cloud strategies. These executives envision managing multiple vendors with ease, orchestrating all processes efficiently and seamlessly moving workloads across different clouds. And of course, they can capitalize on every new feature and price drop along the way. Central to this panacea: a third party cloud management tool, with hooks into a variety of underlying cloud providers.
However, the true value of multi-cloud management is hard to quantify. Reality and expectations don’t always match up.
The perks of multi-cloud management
There are many benefits of multi-cloud management, especially for IT execs who need help managing basic infrastructure lifecycle tasks on various clouds. This allows users to reap the efficiency benefits of a third-party provider, while removing a lot of challenges associated with traditional infrastructure. Multi-cloud management integration can give customers access to a familiar interface, usually an on-premise virtualization tool, to access instantly scalable resources in the public cloud.
While this multi-cloud scenario is not necessarily a way to gain a competitive advantage from cloud, it can make the day-to-day lives of IT staff easier.
Challenges to multi-cloud management
However, reality often comes with a host of unexpected problems. Firstly, cloud interoperabilityis not a given and can be quite difficult to achieve. Workloads cannot simply be shifted from one place to another, even if the “ideal” of cloud suggests otherwise. From managing service provider APIs, to monitoring usage, and managing identity and access requirements, there are many challenges that IT executives face when trying to make multi-cloud management a reality for them.
Keeping up to date with innovation also takes time. New features from each cloud provider need to be integrated into the 3rd party management tooling. By definition, the vendors will always be a few steps behind the latest features from each cloud provider. This results in a “lowest common denominator” UI where users typically end up only doing very basic VM operations across clouds. While this is perfectly functional, the element of competitive advantage – the whole point of cloud, and improved IT-business alignment – is notably lacking in this scenario.
Building an enterprise cloud strategy
Taking both the challenges and perks of multi-cloud management into consideration, being able to craft a practical enterprise cloud strategy remains a key concern for IT executives. Such strategies should not feature multi-cloud management focusing on portability at the infrastructure layer. Instead, leaders should focus on offering self-service and on-demand capabilities, under the backdrop of a management framework which still adheres to existing IT policies like governance, permissions, and billing transparency.
Portability is important. However, this should be a priority above the infrastructure layer, such as at the run-time, middleware, and application layers. This is where open-source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings and containers come in to play.
What makes PaaS and containers different than the multi-cloud management approach at the infrastructure layer? Consider the following three benefits often associated with multi-cloud nirvana in comparison to leveraging PaaS or container technology instead:
- Freedom from lock-in (interoperability). With Cloud Foundry and Docker, there is broad capability to easily move apps around different infrastructure providers. Both platforms are open-source to boot. That means more options for the customer.
- Access to innovation. Both services, in part because of their open source nature, have thousands of contributors working on new capabilities all the time.
- Pricing arbitrage. This is still a false promise – after all, you don’t move to cloud only for cost savings. But if you are not satisfied with a current vendor for whatever reason – service, reliability, shallow product portfolio or otherwise – PaaS and containers gives you a path to move workloads where they run best.
PaaS, therefore, rather than multi-cloud management should be an essential component to the long-term vision of any cloud strategy. The incremental gains from multi-cloud infrastructure are no doubt helpful, but are not enough on its own, and definitely not a nirvana within which to carry out a successful cloud strategy. Instead, using the benefits of a multi-cloud world through application instances and containers are where true transformative and competitive advantage lies.
How cloud is disrupting the enterprise content management industry
(c)iStock.com/hocus-focus
The significant disruption in technology today, driven by cloud, mobile, analytics and collaboration technologies, is changing the way organisations view enterprise content management (ECM), according to a report from the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM).
John Mancini, AIIM president and author of the report, described ECM as “past its prime” as a term which encompasses the revolution driven by cloud and mobile technologies. He explains: “The ECM industry is in need of a new label, and organisations are desperate for best practices to deal with the technology disruption that is occurring.”
It’s apparent that ECM isn’t doing its job – or, cloud technologies are superseding it. According to the AIIM survey, of over 400 organisations, 62% with a ‘significant’ ECM capability find their workers rely on file sharing for day to day information access. More than half (52%) of organisations polled have three or more ECM systems, with 22% having five or more. Yet 60% of respondents say user adoption has been a big problem in ECM projects. Are too many cooks spoiling the broth?
This isn’t a new theory, of course: Gartner has been proclaiming cloud, social, mobile and information as the ‘Nexus of Forces’ for IT for the last three years. And it’s concepts like formalised enterprise content management that are feeling the heat.
The report examined a variety of statements, and assessed whether they were high or low priority for organisations. Of particular interest were the three central roles of content management solutions in the future; determining the human user’s current situation, understanding precisely what that person wants, and using powerful analytical ability to make highly focused and insightful suggestions. However, when presented with the statement ‘95% of all workplace information and content will now be stored in the cloud’, organisations were more indifferent.
Mancini added organisations were ‘hungry for best practices’ in this emerging era, and three major disruptive forces were accelerating the pace of change – consumerisation, cloud and mobile, and the Internet of Things. Even though traditional ECM still had a place, he argued, more than half of those polled said within five years ECM would be an undifferentiated part of the IT infrastructure.
“All of this data points to an industry in transition,” he said. “There are still many organisations that can benefit from more traditional ECM solutions that automate document-intensive processes. But there is also an explosion of content outside the realm of these kinds of structured processes, along with a revolution occurring in how, where, and when knowledge workers do their jobs.”
NetSuite ditches AWS in Microsoft partnership
NetSuite and Microsoft are linking their cloud services, and NetSuite is moving its services onto Azure
NetSuite has inked a deal with Microsoft in a move that will see the two companies link up the cloud-based financial and ERP platform with Microsoft Office, Windows and Azure.
As part of the deal the two companies have already integrated NetSuite and Azure Active Directory to enable single sign-on (SSO) for customers using NetSuite together with Azure AD, and in the coming months plan to drive further integration between NetSuite and Office 365 – for instance, to be able to do things like connect NetSuite data to Microsoft Excel and PowerBI in a more seamless way.
The partnership will also see NetSuite move its service off Amazon Web Services, a long-time partner of the firm, as well as take its on-premise deployments and move them into Azure, now its “preferred cloud” provider, by the end of the year.
“We’re at the ‘end of the beginning’ of the cloud, in that the cloud business model that NetSuite pioneered in 1998 is becoming the de facto standard for how fast-growth businesses are run,” said Zach Nelson, NetSuite chief executive.
“We’re thrilled to work with Microsoft to deliver a fluid cloud environment across the key NetSuite and Microsoft applications that companies and their employees rely on to continually improve their day-to-day operations and run their business better and more efficiently,” Nelson said.
Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of developer platform & evangelism and chief evangelist for Microsoft also commented on the deal: “I’m excited about NetSuite’s support for Azure Active Directory for single sign-on, cloud-to-cloud integration and increasing our collaboration across mobile and cloud solutions. Our joint vision is all about giving people the freedom to get more done through the broadening set of devices they interact with that in turn helps businesses innovate and grow.”