Decisions about budgets and resources are often made without IT even having a seat at the table. As technologist we understand the value of DevOps – but do your business counterparts? If they don’t, your DevOps initiatives could lose funding before they start.
In her session at DevOps Summit, Jeanne Morain, Strategist / Author at iSpeak Cloud, LLC, will provide insights on how to bridge the gap between business and technology leaders. Attendees will learn prescriptive guidance on balancing workloads, critical communication processes and considerations for building out a solid return-on-investment model.
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Why Open Source Software Is Taking Over By @vmTyler | @CloudExpo #Cloud
You don’t have to look far to see evidence of open source software’s impact on IT as a whole. It starts with large open source projects like OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, and Hadoop and continues to smaller but widely deployed components like OpenSSL and MySQL.
I know what you’re thinking.
But no one is making real money from open source. Red Hat is the big player and they’re still tiny.
This is something I hear often when talking about the inevitability of open source. Yes, open source software companies make less money than closed source software companies. But that’s exactly why it’s attractive to customers. Let me explain.
Interface Masters Technologies to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #Cloud
SYS-CON Events announced today that Interface Masters Technologies, provider of leading network visibility and monitoring solutions, will exhibit at the 17th International CloudExpo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Interface Masters Technologies is a leading provider of high speed networking solutions focused on Gigabit, 10 Gigabit, 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet network access and connectivity products. For over 20 years, the company has been providing innovative networking solutions with customization services to OEMs, large enterprises and sophisticated end users. Interface Masters has been an OCP member contributing multiple white box designs to the project while supporting customer SDN development.
Join @CommVault at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #Cloud #BigData #DevOps #Microservices
SYS-CON Events announced today that CommVault has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. A singular vision – a belief in a better way to address current and future data management needs – guides CommVault in the development of Singular Information Management® solutions for high-performance data protection, universal availability and simplified management of data on complex storage networks. CommVault’s exclusive single-platform architecture gives companies unprecedented control over data growth, costs and risk. CommVault’s Simpana® software suite of products was designed to work together seamlessly from the ground up, sharing a single code and common function set, to deliver superlative Data Protection, Archive, Replication, Search and Resource Management capabilities. More companies every day join those who have discovered the unparalleled efficiency, performance, reliability, and control only CommVault can offer.
For Private Cloud, No Pain Means Big Gains By @CKeene | @CloudExpo #Cloud
When virtualization took the data center, it offered huge cost savings for IT ops and zero migration pain for developers. Coming at a time when IT was being pressed by the business for savings, vSphere took the data center by storm.
This example is instructive when trying to consider why private cloud has had a slower adoption. The short answer is that cloud offers fuzzier benefits for IT ops while forcing a lot of pain on developers.
Spiceworks launches free cloud-based help desk application and monitor
Spiceworks has announced a free cloud-based one size fits all Help Desk system for enterprises. It promises to give IT professionals a custome made system with unlimited admin and end-user seats, no hosting or storage costs, constant updates, free support and access to a community of millions of peers.
This plan is to for IT professionals to waste less time on mundane tasks and more time supporting their organisations, says Spiceworks. The system has custom dashboards to give instant overviews of help desk operations and rapid analysis of events within the cloud. Auto-assignment helps IT professionals automate their help desk system with rules that assign tickets to specific technicians. This could speed the process of fixing faults and cut the time spent managing tickets, says Spiceworks.
User portals will allow end-users to submit help desk requests through a website instead of email. The option for customised user portals could help improve usability by personalising help desk experiences for end-users and clients, says Spiceworks.
“We have four IT professionals using Spiceworks’ cloud-based Help Desk system to support 27 company locations across Arkansas and Missouri,” said Galen Ransone, IT technician at Greenway Equipment. “It’s already proved effective in supporting employees who need technology assistance. The fact that it’s free makes it even more enticing.”
Spiceworks also introduced a new beta version of its mobile application for road warriors who might want to manage their cloud-based Help Desk through Google Android and Apple tablets and smartphones. Spiceworks has also launched new features and functions for its Network Monitor and cloud-based Help Desk solutions for IT professionals, which keep tabs on server and network devices in real-time.
Nicole Tanzillo, director of help desk product marketing at Spiceworks, explained that the initiative is in response to demand from clients. “IT professionals have spoken and they want great tools designed for them that work,” said Tanzillo.
Join @Sandy_Carter at @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley | #BigData #DevOps #IoT #M2M #API #InternetOfThings
Cloud Expo is the single show where delegates and technology vendors can meet to experience and discuss the entire world of the cloud.At 16th Cloud Expo in New York City, Sandy Carter keynoted on women in tech and why women need to take risks and embrace failure to give them the courage to crash through the glass ceiling. She now shares some of her own thoughts and experiences from Cloud Expo.
Internap and Akami Pair Up
Recently, Internap Corporation, which provides high performance Internet infrastructure services, and Akamai Technologies, Inc., the current global leader in Content Delivery Network services, have announced that they are teaming to provide their customers with Internap’s cloud, data center, and network services in conjunction with Akamai’s cloud security and data protection services. Underneath this alliance, Internap shall offer the Akami Cloud Security solutions to industries that require infrastructure availability, reliability, and scalability, such as the healthcare industry. The combination of these two companies will result in optimal performance for customers.
“Organizations that demand optimal web and application performance simply can’t afford the potentially business-impacting outages and downtime associated with DDoS attacks,” said Michael Ruffolo, Internap’s president and CEO. “We believe this alliance is a logical and powerful combination that uniquely addresses this problem for our joint customers. Akamai will be our sole DDoS mitigation provider, bringing market-leading security capabilities to Internap’s state-of-the-art data center facilities and to our expertise in delivering high-performance cloud, colocation and networking services.”
Akamai works to protect websites and other internet based applications from threats such as data theft. The Akamai Cloud Security solutions, constructed on the Akamai Intelligent Platform, are designed to protect against the threat of web application attacks while still providing maximum performance. In addition, the capability of adapting to shifting tactics and attack vectors is offered.
“We view the combination of Internap’s high-performance Internet infrastructure services and Akamai’s cloud security solutions as a natural extension to what has been a very synergistic alliance between our two companies,” said Brad Rinklin, Chief Marketing Officer and SVP – Global Alliances, Akamai. “Faced with an ever-changing threat landscape, organizations require comprehensive security solutions that address many different protection scenarios. These include securing mission?critical Web properties and applications from attack, as well as protecting enterprise IP applications across a data center. With this expanded alliance, Internap and Akamai are providing joint customers with both high-performing cloud and security capabilities.”
The post Internap and Akami Pair Up appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Criteo to build giant private big data platform on Huawei servers
Performance marketing specialist Criteo has chosen Huawei to supply 700 servers for its new Hadoop Cluster data centre in Pantin, Seine St Denis, near Paris.
Huawei won the tender after its FusionServer RH2288H V3 impressed in a strict comparative study, it says. The servers were chosen for their abundance of high-capacity disks, which give the Criteo data centre a better storage density and cut energy consumption by 10 per cent, it claims.
The new Hadoop platform of Huawei servers will boost Criteo’s processing performance by 30 per cent, it’s claimed. In the first stage of the project, the 700 machines in the Paris data centre outperformed Criteo’s Amsterdam data centre, in terms of computing power and storage, even though the Dutch site has 1,200 servers at its disposal, according to Criteo’s Senior Engineering Manager for Infrastructure Operations, Matthieu Blumberg.
“This is the biggest private Hadoop platform in Europe as of today,” said Blumberg, “Huawei has undeniably good ICT solutions and extensive knowledge of Big Data. We were really impressed.”
As a result, Criteo now plans to install up to 5,000 servers, taking up 350 square meters of rack space, at its Pantin data centre. The total power consumption will rise to 2 MW as the power of the Huawei server estate grows, according to Blumberg.
“We are proud to have built this partnership with Criteo: this is the kind of project we love to develop,” said Robert Yang, Head of the Huawei France Enterprise Business Group.
Apache Spark reportedly outgrowing Hadoop as users move to cloud
Apache Spark is breaking down the barriers between data scientists and engineers, making machine learning easier and is out growing Hadoop as an open source framework for cloud computing developments, a new report claims.
The 2015 Spark User Survey was conducted by Databricks, the company founded by the creators of Apache Spark.
Spark adoption is growing quickly because users are finding it easy to use, reliably fast, and aligned for future growth in analytics, the report claims, with 91 per cent of the survey citing performance as their reason for adoption. Other reasons given were ease of programming (77 per cent), easy deployment (71 per cent) advanced analytics (64 per cent) and the capacity for real time streaming (52 per cent).
The report, based on the findings of a survey of 1,400 respondents Spark stakeholders, claims that the number of Spark users with no Hadoop components doubled between 2014 and 2015. The study set out to identify how the data analytics and processing engine is being used by developers and organisations.
The Spark growth claim is based on the finding that 48 per cent of users are running Spark in standalone mode while 40 per cent run it on Hadoop’s YARN operating system. At present 11 per cent of users are running Spark on Apache Mesos. The survey also found that 51 per cent of respondents run Spark on a public cloud.
The number of contributors to Spark rose from 315 to 600 contributors in the last 12 months, which the report authors claim makes this the most active open source project in Big Data. Additionally, more than 200 organisations contribute code to Spark, which they claims makes it ‘one of’ the largest communities of engaged developers to date.
According to the report, Spark is being used for increasingly diverse applications, with data scientists particularly focused on machine learning, streaming and graph analysis projects. Spark was used to create streaming applications 56 per cent more frequently in 2015 than 2014. The use of advanced analytics, like MLib for machine learning and GraphX for graph processing, is becoming increasingly common, the report says.
According to the study, 41 per cent of those surveyed identified themselves as data engineers, while 22 per cent of respondents say they are data scientists. The most common languages used for open sourced based big data projects in cloud computing are Scala (used by 71 per cent of the survey), Python (58 per cent), SQL (36 per cent), Java (31 per cent) and R (18 per cent).