Monthly Archives: July 2015

Intel, Jason Waxman, Jonathan Bryce, NASA, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Rackspace, Scott Crenshaw

Rackspace, Intel to coordinate ‘world’s largest OpenStack dev team’

Intel and Rackspace claim the centre will house the world's largest OpenStack development team

Intel and Rackspace claim the centre will house the world’s largest OpenStack development team

Rackspace and Intel are teaming up to launch an OpenStack Innovation Centre aimed at bolstering upstream development of the cloud platform.

The centre, housed at Rackspace’s corporate HQ in San Antonio, Texas, will bring together technical specialists from Rackspace and Intel to co-develop new features and functions for OpenStack and fix bugs in the code base, with the fruits of their efforts being contributed back upstream.

The companies will also offer OpenStack training to engineers and developers; they claim the centre will house the world’s largest dedicated OpenStack development team.

“We are excited to collaborate with Intel and look forward to working with the OpenStack community to make the world’s leading open-source cloud operating system even stronger,” said Scott Crenshaw, senior vice president of product and strategy at Rackspace.

“We don’t create proprietary OpenStack distributions.  Rackspace delivers its customers four-nines availability using entirely upstream trunk code. All of the Innovation Centre’s contributions will be made available freely, to everyone,” Crenshaw said.

Jason Waxman, vice president of the Cloud Platforms Group at Intel said: “This announcement demonstrates our continued support and commitment to open source projects. Our ongoing collaboration with Rackspace and the OpenStack community represents an ideal opportunity to accelerate the enterprise appeal of OpenStack.”

OpenStack, which this week celebrated its fifth anniversary, was founded by a few engineers from Rackspace and NASA but has since swelled to more than 520 member companies and 27,000 individual contributors globally. While the open source cloud platform is young, it has matured significantly during its brief existence and has become a defacto cloud standard embraced by many if not most of the big IT incumbents.

“The community’s goal is to foster collaboration and spur innovation that drives broad adoption,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “The depth of experience and community engagement that Rackspace and Intel offer makes this an exciting project, as the code contributions and large-scale testing will benefit everyone who uses OpenStack.”

Infographic, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop for Mac, run IE on Mac, run Internet Explorer on Mac, run PowerPoint on Mac, run windows on mac, Windows vs Mac

The Only Windows vs. Mac Comparison You’ll Ever Need

It’s that age-old question: Mac, or PC? When it comes to Windows vs. Mac, the debate can get tedious, especially when you start looking at what you might need vs. what you might want. A lot depends on your preferences as well as what you need your computer to do for you. What makes the […]

The post The Only Windows vs. Mac Comparison You’ll Ever Need appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Cloud computing, Cloud Services, News

IBM Acquires Compose

IBM has recently announced that it has acquired Compose, a startup company that began in 2010, in order to continue expansion of its cloud services. Previously known as MongoHQ, it was the first database as a service which allows application developers to easily deploy and scale data store using with backups, monitoring, performance tuning as well as full suite of management tools.

As said in an announcement, “Today we are excited to announce that Compose is joining IBM. As founders, it was the biggest and most important decision we’ve ever had to make – much more difficult than we ever would have guessed back when we only dreamed of having a successful company. While we are profitable and growing fast, we think now is the right time to team up with a larger company.”

international-business-machines-corp-invests-to-acquire-cloudbased-startup

An IBM spokesperson has relayed that users will not be affected under this deal as Compose will continue business as usual. IBM is always looking for cloud companies to acquire in order to expand its cloud services and compete with companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Derek Schoettle, general manager of IBM Cloud Data Services and former CEO of Cloudant, has commented, “Compose’s breadth of database offerings will expand IBM’s Bluemix platform for the many app developers seeking production-ready databases built on open source. Compose furthers IBM’s commitment to ensuring developers have access to the right tools for the job by offering the broadest set of DBaaS services and the flexibility of hybrid cloud deployment.”

The post IBM Acquires Compose appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

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AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google “leave rest behind” in cloud infrastructure market

(c)iStock.com/zodebala

The revenues of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM and Google in cloud infrastructure services commands more than half of the worldwide market, according to new data from Synergy Research.

The figures reveal the combined market share of the ‘big four’ at 54% of the overall cloud infrastructure market, comparing favourably with Q214 (46%) and Q213 (41%). AWS holds a 29% market share at the top, with each of the big four cloud providers increasing their share of the global market in the second quarter this year.

Quarterly revenues of the big four have for the first time surpassed $3 billion, while the overall market, including infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and private and hybrid cloud, is approaching $6bn. While it looks ominous for smaller providers, Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale argues opportunities still abound.

“The rest of the market is being left behind,” he explains. “No other company has been able to get close to these four in terms of data centre footprint, global presence and market power.”

Dinsdale adds: “The situation is not going to change any time soon. That being said, the market as a whole continues to grow quickly and there are many growth opportunities for small to medium sized cloud providers.”

Recent Synergy analysis has shown Microsoft establishing a niche in second place in the cloud infrastructure market while AWS continues to dominate. In February, the analyst house reported Amazon’s market share had hit a five year high.

The view of opportunities still pervading for smaller cloud players is one echoed by Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of OnApp. Writing for this publication in June, Bredahl argues: “Is it the end for any cloud provider without the capital of the mega-hosters? Far from it. By sharing their infrastructure they are able to offer more scale and reach than the mega-hosters combined.” However Kelly Stirman, VP strategy at MongoDB, argued at the recent Cloud World Forum event there will only be three cloud IaaS players – Amazon, Google and Microsoft – as everyone else will have run out of money.

What’s your opinion on the cloud infrastructure services market?

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[slides] Policy in Hybrid Cloud By @DerekCollison | @CloudExpo #API #DevOps #Containers #Microservices

Enterprises are turning to the hybrid cloud to drive greater scalability and cost-effectiveness. But enterprises should beware as the definition of “policy” varies wildly. Some say it’s the ability to control the resources apps’ use or where the apps run. Others view policy as governing the permissions and delivering security. Policy is all of that and more. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Derek Collison, founder and CEO of Apcera, explained what policy is, he showed how policy should be architected in a hybrid cloud operating system, and discussed the value policy can deliver.

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DRaaS, Featured

4 Ways SMBs Can Take Advantage of the Cloud

While cloud adoption among SMBs continues to rise, there are still plenty of SMB customers I speak with who are reluctant to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer. Below are four examples of how cloud adoption can help SMBs excel.

Access to Enterprise Class Features

The cloud gives SMBs access to enterprise class features that many couldn’t normally take advantage of. Geo-location and load balancing are both great examples. If an SMB puts its website up on Microsoft Azure, a click of a button can put 3 copies locally and also put 3 copies in 3 different geographical locations automatically. This way if something happened at one of the locations, all of the is data already at another data center ready to spin up. Doing this without utilizing the cloud would be extremely costly and quite unrealistic for the budgets of most SMB organizations.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

DRaaS is a cost effective insurance policy for SMBs. Instead of having to buy and maintain separate servers, SAN, storage, network, firewall, rack space, etc. I can take my backups and load them up to the cloud (Azure, vCloud Air, Cirrity, etc.). This gives me a way to have infrastructure fail over in the event of a disaster. SMBs that go this route can pay less per month to have this available than it would be buy on-prem equipment. Buying the equipment may mean that you aren’t using all of it as well.

Desktops in the Cloud

Another way SMBs can use the cloud is to host desktops. Doing this means you don’t have to buy or maintain desktops and allows for greater scalability. There are plenty of companies where users change a lot so internal IT is tasked with adding or removing users on a fairly regular basis. This means they have desktops that they need to build out manually. By hosting your desktops in the cloud, you can automatically spin up or down when needed. This not only provides cost savings, but will also save your IT department a significant amount of time.

Application Scalability

If you are running, say, Microsoft Azure, you can set Azure to utilization between 25-75% of CPU. When utilization gets above 75%, Azure is going to automatically turn up more servers and load balance them. If utilization dips below 25%, it will decommission servers. This allows for automatic scaling based on user activity. Doing this traditionally is much more expensive and in many cases not possible for SMB’s.

The bottom line is SMBs should take a closer look at cloud options that can increase efficiencies and drive down costs. If you would like to talk about this in more detail, please reach out. I’d love to have a conversation!

The corporate IT department is evolving. Has yours kept pace?

By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect

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WHOA Joined @CloudExpo New York as “Bronze Sponsor” | @WhoaCloud #IoT #M2M #InternetOfThings

SYS-CON Events announced today that WHOA.com, an ISO 27001 Certified secure cloud computing company, participated as “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo® New York, which took place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. WHOA.com is a leader in next-generation, ISO 27001 Certified secure cloud solutions. WHOA.com offers a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class cloud services for business including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Secure Cloud Desktop, Cloud Storage, Disaster Recovery, Integrated Applications and Security.

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Why Your Organization Deserves a ‘Real’ Open Cloud By @DHDeans | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Worldwide, there’s a growing appreciation for the many benefits of the Open Source way. Clearly, being truly Open is a frame of mind that can apply to just about anything in life — including the development and nurture of a progressive company culture that’s equipped for the challenges and opportunities of today’s Global Networked Economy.
Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, recently launched his new book entitled “The Open Organization” — Igniting Passion and Performance. He says, “The conventional approach to business management was not designed to foster innovation, address the needs and expectations of the current workforce that demands more of jobs, or operate at the accelerated speed of business.”

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Enterprise IT, HANA, Lufthansa, News & Analysis, SAP

Lufthansa enlists SAP to help crunch IoT data

Lufthansa's IT-focused subsidiary is analysing IoT data to optimise its operations

Lufthansa’s IT-focused subsidiary is analysing IoT data to optimise its operations

Lufthansa Systems is using SAP HANA to bridge the gap between GIS systems and Internet of Things sensors to optimise flight operations.

The IT solutions-focused subsidiary of the German airline, a longtime customer and partner of SAP, said it is using HANA SPS10 to track flight operations and combine the data with information on changes in airport and meteorological conditions, and other fleet-related data monitored and analysed in real-time.

“Together with SAP, we built a prototype of a future operational database for commercial flight support,” said Christoph Krüger, lead architect, Lufthansa Systems.

“The spatial engine in SAP HANA has given us the ability to track thousands of flights per day on a rich 3D mapping interface that includes both spatial and temporal coordinates.”

“At the same time, we were able to uncover breakthrough application scenarios that would not have been possible.”

The company is using the solution to dispatch, monitor and visualise air traffic in a bid to optimise its operations.