Providing the needed data for application development and testing is a huge headache for most organizations. The problems are often the same across companies – speed, quality, cost, and control. Provisioning data can take days or weeks, every time a refresh is required. Using dummy data leads to quality problems. Creating physical copies of large data sets and sending them to distributed teams of developers eats up expensive storage and bandwidth resources. And, all of these copies proliferating the organization can lead to inconsistent masking and exposure of sensitive data.
Monthly Archives: June 2015
The Internet of Things: Bridging the gap between devices and developers with cloud services
The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most disruptive trends in technology today but as IoT services start to hit the mainstream, the sometimes conflicting requirements of device manufacturers and developers are beginning to create tension between these two groups.
Both manufacturers and developers want many of the same things – clear standards, secure platforms and a high degree of extensibility – but, because of the nascent state of the market, don’t necessarily know how to cope with the lack of standards or clarity around how to implement effective security controls in such technically constrained environments, or how to manage interoperability. Managing the complexity of communication within heterogeneous IoT environments and vast networks at scale also makes the task of developing robust IoT services which stand up to consumer expectations all the more challenging.
These challenges need to be overcome before that tremendous value of IoT can be realised. This whitepaper, sponsored by Golgi and published by BCN, luckily, looks at how cloud-based services can help bridge the gaps between the requirements of IoT device manufacturers and application developers:
- Navigating existing IoT standards
- Managing data security and privacy
- Dealing with heterogeneous networks
- The role of cloud services in IoT
Download the whitepaper for free from BCN now…
Nokia eyes the cloud infrastructure market with OpenStack, VMware-based servers
Nokia is offering up its own blade servers to the telco world
Nokia Networks revealed its AirFrame datacentre solutions this week, high-density blade servers running a combination of OpenStack and VMware software and designed to support Nokia’s virtualised network services for telcos.
“We are taking on the IT-telco convergence with a new solution to challenge the traditional IT approach of the datacentre,” said Marc Rouanne, executive vice president, Mobile Broadband at Nokia Networks.
“This newest solution brings telcos carrier-grade high availability, security-focused reliability as well as low latency, while leveraging the company’s deep networks expertise and strong business with operators to address an increasingly cloud-focused market valued in the tens of billions of euros.”
The servers, which come pre-integrated with Nokia’s own switches, are based on Intel’s x86 chips and run OpenStack as well as VMware, and can be managed using Nokia’s purpose-built cloud management solution. The platforms are ETSI NFV / OPNFV-certified, so they can run Nokia’s own VNFs as well as those developed by certified third parties.
The company’s orchestration software can also manage the split between both virtualised and network legacy functions in either centralised or distributed network architectures.
Phil Twist, vice president of Portfolio Marketing at Nokia Networks told BCN the company designed the servers specifically for the telco world, adding things like iNICs and accelerators to handle the security, encryption, virtual routing, digital signal processing (acceleration for radio) that otherwise would tie up processor capacity in a telco network.
But he also said the servers could be leveraged for standing up its own cloud services, or for the wider scale-out market.
“Our immediate ambition is clear: to offer a better alternative for the build-out of telco clouds optimized for that world. But of course operators have other in-house IT requirements which could be hosted on this same cloud, and indeed they could then offer cloud services to their enterprise customers on this same cloud,” he explained.
“We could potentially build our own cloud to host SaaS propositions to our customers, or in theory potentially offer the servers for enterprise applications but that’s not our initial focus,” he added.
Though Twist didn’t confirm whether this was indeed Nokia’s first big move towards the broader IT infrastructure market outside networking, the announcement does mean the company will be brought into much closer competition with both familiar (Ericsson, Cisco) and less familiar (HP) incumbents offering their own OpenStack-integrated cloud kit.
Nvidia: ‘Cloud to generate $1bn for the firm in a few years’
Nvidia’s chief exec believes cloud will generate over $1bn annually for the firm in just a few years
Chip maker and GPU specialist Nvidia Corp said it expects cloud computing to generate over $1bn in revenues for the firm in the next few years, according to a report from Reuters.
Speaking to reporters at Computex Nvidia’s chief executive officer Jen-Hsun Huang also said the company expects cloud revenues to grow between 60 and 70 per cent each year.
A number of cloud service providers have borrowed from the high performance computing world to add GPU acceleration to their services in a bid to cope with diminishing returns on CPU performance.
HPC and cloud revenue at Nvidia was $79m for the recently reported Q1 2016, up 57 per cent year-on-year, and the company has over the past year or so announced some large deals with companies like Baidu, Facebook, Flickr, Microsoft and Twitter, largely around its Tesla and GRID offerings.
Last year it also struck a deal with AWS to add GPU-accelerated instances to its growing roster of services.
Nvidia has said much of its growth in recent quarters has come from datacentre, cloud, gaming and automotive, and that its deals with virtualisation incumbents VMware and Citrix are helping to give it a strong boost in the enterprise. Speaking to journalists and analysts in February this year Huang said its deal with VMware alone means about 80 per cent of the world’s enterprises now support its GRID GPU virtualisation technology.
Cloud Foundry heads to Azure
Microsoft has announced a public preview of Cloud Foundry running on Azure
Microsoft has announced a long awaited public preview of Cloud Foundry for Azure which the company said will help enable its customers with multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments.
Microsoft has been talking about adding Cloud Foundry support to Azure for the better part of a year, and earlier this month the company drew one step closer to a beta release by demoing a Cloud Foundry deployment on its public cloud service.
In a blog post explaining the move Ning Kuang, senior program manager for Microsoft Azure said Cloud Foundry can be deployed quickly using an Azure Resource Manager template, or the through open source workload lifecycle manager BOSH.
“Hybrid and Multi-cloud support is one of the key strengths of Cloud Foundry and the Azure [Cloud Provider Interface] enables you to extend your private data to Azure for running Cloud Foundry based applications. In addition, we are working to ensure that Azure CPI will in work in a private cloud environment running on Azure Stack and we will have more on that to come in the near future,” Kuang explained.
“We’re hoping to release the public Beta in a few weeks and will then upstream the code back to the community source tree in a few months prior to GA,” she added.
Cloud Foundry is one of the most popular PaaSs around today so the move to support it may help on-board more devops-types to Microsoft Azure, which is currently one of the fastest growing infrastructure as a service platforms around (at least in terms of revenue).
New to Mac? Here’s Our (Growing) List of Resources
If you’re new to Mac, we’ve got you covered. Here’s our (always growing and being added to) list of resources for Mac users, new and old: General Info & Switching to Mac Apple Support Documentation & User Manuals – Guides for learning how to set up, use and troubleshoot your Mac and/or other Apple […]
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What’s Your Favorite Place to Work Remotely?
We’ve all had those days where you’d rather work from your neighborhood coffee shop (or, you know, a tropical paradise) than your desk. And, thanks to tech like Parallels Access, it can be pretty easy to set up a remote office that actually works. (All you really need are these resources.) So, given the choice, […]
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The confusion around hybrid: Cloud isn’t for everyone, but everyone can use a bit of cloud
(c)iStock.com/Erik Khalitov
I was delighted to see so many folks attend our Tech Meet Up last week in London. Not only was it a great networking opportunity, but we also hosted a stimulating panel that generated much discussion on the night. Here I’ve captured a few takeaways.
The panel included Jeremy Bowman, Director of IT Operations at iland customer Fusion Business Solutions, and Peter Godden, Vice President EMEA for Zerto, one of our key partners. Discussion centred on the many reasons companies are increasingly turning to cloud, and in particular, what drove Fusion’s cloud adoption and strategy.
Jeremy talked about the fact that Fusion had initially considered building its own infrastructure versus outsourcing. Fusion however needed an agile, stable, fast and secure cloud and its internal set-up couldn’t match iland’s offering. Jeremy explained that when he was looking at cloud infrastructure, iland’s speed was critically important to the ongoing running of its operation. Security was also an important factor.
We also talked about the confusion around hybrid cloud in particular. It is hard to capture the real definition as hybrid means different things to different organisations, but in essence it is about moving from an on premise application to an outsourced service. You can then make more services available as required, ensuring users have the right access to the right data, while making sure it’s secure and stable.
Mobility and flexibility are key when moving to the cloud, and CIOs struggle with the idea of moving all services to a cloud-based system
Quocirca analyst, Bob Tarzey, asked whether we thought there would be a time when we will see everything in the cloud. Jeremy feels that it entirely depends on the customer and whether they are happy with a complete move of their services and whether they feel their data is secure in the cloud.Peter’s perspective is that mobility and flexibility are key when moving to the cloud and that CIOs struggle with the idea of moving all services to a cloud-based system, which could be stalling cloud adoption.
A term that I’m finding is now being used more frequently is ‘bimodal IT’. One mode is about moving existing applications to the cloud and the other is where developers are designing new apps for the cloud. In the future I see a lot more developers designing apps for the cloud using microservices to help applications run at scale rather than moving existing apps to the cloud.
In summing up, we all agreed that cloud adoption will only accelerate. That said, organisations still see the cloud as storage in data centres in a rack somewhere else. Once we get over this mind-set we can start thinking about bimodal IT and designing apps for the cloud. Cloud users are slowly changing as we move to a mobile workforce. Therefore the challenge will be around making sure cloud fits the user, and with new technologies, this is easier to do today.
Special thanks to Peter and Jeremy for making the discussion so interesting. Our next event is sponsored by London Technology Week and is taking place on June 16 at 18.00 at the Soho Hotel in London. I do hope you can make it.