SYS-CON Events announced today that Intelligent Systems Services will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Established in 1994, Intelligent Systems Services Inc. is located near Washington, DC, with representatives and partners nationwide. ISS’s well-established track record is based on the continuous pursuit of excellence in designing, implementing and supporting nationwide clients’ mission-critical systems. ISS has completed many successful projects in Healthcare, Commercial, Manufacturing, Non-Profit and US Government sectors with a wide variety of operating systems, hardware, storage and data protection technologies.
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Zoomdata Integrates with Microsoft Azure HDInsight | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Zoomdata has announced that it is a certified partner on the Azure Marketplace. Microsoft Azure customers seeking to capitalize on the performance of big data can now use Azure’s one-click deployment to activate the Zoomdata Server, along with its Cloudera, Hortonworks and Spark smart connectors. Microsoft’s customers and partners seeking to deliver visual analytic solutions for big data can now take advantage of Zoomdata’s multi-tenant, distributed architecture to make business users more productive in leveraging actionable insights about their organization’s big data.
Cisco strengthens China operations with Inspur joint venture
Cisco Systems is to form a joint venture with Chinese server maker Inspur, selling networking and cloud computing products in China. Cisco and Inspur will jointly invest $100 million in the project.
The partnership comes in the face of mutual suspicion between the US and Chinese government amid claims and counter claims of state sponsored cyber security threats.
In June Cisco was forced to remove several of its senior executives in China, amid reports of falling sales slide and Chinese government fears about the foreign ownership of networking equipment.
Cisco’s China sales fell 20 per cent on the previous year in the quarter ending on April 25 at a time when its global revenue gained 5.1 per cent. As its share of the Chinese router market fell from 21.2 per cent to 9.4 per cent the lost sales went to local rival Huawei Technologies, according to Bernstein Research.
Direct selling became more challenging, The Wall Street Journal has reported, after US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden said the NSA put surveillance tools in US technology products sold overseas.
US-Chinese technology company partnerships are growing in number and Microsoft announced on Thursday an alliance with Baidu and the Chinese state-owned private investment firm Tsinghua Unigroup on cloud technology. Last week Dell unveiled plans to invest $125 billion over five years in China. Earlier this year, IBM pledged to help develop China’s advanced chip industry with a ‘Made with China’ strategy, while chipmakers Intel and Qualcomm are developing chips with smaller Chinese companies.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrived in Seattle this morning on a state visit to the US.
Chinese officials have said the partnerships will follow the pattern of car manufacturing agreements in the past, with foreign technology firms granted market access in return for shared technology and co-operation with Chinese industry.
IBM opens San Francisco office for Watson developer cloud
IBM has opened a new office in San Francisco to channel further growth in its supercomputing business as it claims 77,000 developers across the world are using its Watson Developer Cloud to pilot, test and deploy new business ideas.
The San Francisco office will open in 2016 to give local start ups access to Watson technology for their software projects. The facility will include resources dedicated to IBM’s new Spark processing technology as the vendor seeks to get Spark users interested in Watson, it said. IBM claims 100 companies have released software services based on Watson.
With a reported $100 million of venture capital fund earmarked for startups looking to build products on Watson, IBM now plans to offer its nascent partners technical support and consultancy on business plans, in addition to market making initiatives that include introductions to potential customers.
In September IBM opened a new Watson Health business centre in the Boston area to target the health sector and pharmaceutical industry. The new cloud initiative comes in the wake of reports of declining revenues in 13 consecutive quarters, while the app economy is ‘in full swing’, as IBM described it, with industry revenue projected to grow to $143 billion in 2016, according to analyst IDC. By 2018 half of all consumers will interact with services based on cognitive computing on a regular basis, according to the analyst.
IBM also announced a new expanded portfolio of application programming interfaces into Watson, bring the net total to 50. IBM’s cloud development partners have created systems for query support for card payments, customer support Q&As for financial services, live event media aggregation ‘as a service’ social marketing and apps for the entertainment and marketing industries. Early investment partners include WayBlazer, Sellpoints, Welltok, Pathway Genomics, Modernizing Medicine and Fluid.
In the UK, IBM has created three new Watson partners 50wise, Volume and SocialBro, which have created cloud apps for financial services, sales training and online marketing.
Join @ProfitBricksUSA at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #IoT #Cloud #BigData #Microservices
SYS-CON Events announced today that ProfitBricks, the provider of painless cloud infrastructure, will exhibit at 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.
ProfitBricks is the IaaS provider that offers a painless cloud experience for all IT users, with no learning curve. ProfitBricks boasts flexible cloud servers and networking, an integrated Data Center Designer tool for visual control over the cloud and the best price/performance value available. ProfitBricks was named one of the coolest Cloud Providers of 2015 by CRN and was also the recipient of two CODiE awards and a Frost & Sullivan Cloud innovation award for 2014.
Capgemini recruits Microsoft Azure in cloud service expansion push
Capgemini has added Microsoft to its cloud services programme as it seeks to give a broader range of cloud services to more clients. Microsoft is the first in a number of vendors that CapGemini is seeking to add to its cloud service portfolio, it said.
Under the new Capgemini Cloud Choice with Microsoft scheme it will offer cloud advice, managed platforms and ‘applied integrated innovation’ services. Initiatives include OneShare, which speeds the testing and development of Microsoft Azure systems and offers to control costs through usage monitoring and resource scheduling.
A second mooted offering is SkySight, which is described as an ‘Azure-like’ private cloud which aims to help enterprises to speed up the installation of new applications. Capemini says it will help clients get value for money on managed services and fine-tune the configuration process.
A third scheme will create industry-focused IP offerings, such as a system tailored to the specific needs of the banking sector, based on the experiences of Capgemini’s own in house banking specialists. The domain expertise will be offered in all major industries, including pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and the health sector.
The cloud offering will cover all solutions encompassed within hybrid, public, hosted and private cloud services using Azure.
As part of the offering, Capgemini will align activities with independent software vendors and start-ups to create new ways of delivering integrated solutions. New ventures and start-ups will also benefit from the offering, Capgemini says, as partners will become a focal point for integrating new innovations into the Capgemini solutions portfolio.
The expansion comes after Capgemini subsidiary Sogeti reported that it managed to cut the costs of one client, Dutch postal service PostNL, by 20 per cent by migrating its IT services onto the cloud with Microsoft Azure.
“Capgemini helped us to define our roadmap to migrate more than 40 applications and now operates its Cloud Platform for us,” said Marcel Krom, CIO at PostNL. “We have reduced costs and gained flexibility in handling volume variances.”
VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI: Which SDN solution is right for me?
I posted this video a while back on VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI and it’s proven to be a pretty popular topic. I will be holding a webinar on 10/6 to talk about this topic in more detail so I figured I would repost the video for people to view again. If you enjoy this video, I would highly recommend registering for the webinar. I’ll be able to go in more detail and answer any questions throughout the presentation.
If you missed Nick’s webinar, you can download it here!
By Nick Phelps, Principal Architect
VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI: Which SDN solution is right for me?
I posted this video a while back on VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI and it’s proven to be a pretty popular topic. I will be holding a webinar on 10/6 to talk about this topic in more detail so I figured I would repost the video for people to view again. If you enjoy this video, I would highly recommend registering for the webinar. I’ll be able to go in more detail and answer any questions throughout the presentation.
Register for Nick’s Webinar, “VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI: When to Use Each, When to Use Both.” In the webinar, Nick will cover:
- The current state of the SDN market
- VMware NSX & Cisco ACI overview
- When it makes sense to use each, or event both
- Next steps to get your environment prepared for SDN initiatives
By Nick Phelps, Principal Architect
Built to fail: System resiliency is not relegated to the cloud
(c)iStock.com/jj_voodoo
Advances in software architecture over the last eight to 10 years have led to more complex and dynamic software architectures in the form of distributed systems. Despite this progress, today’s software applications, web-based or not, continue to still either provide a slower response or become completely non-responsive too often.
Utilising software like Chaos Monkey, which challenges a software application’s distributed systems by taking random instances offline, allows developers and system architects to test their designs well before the unexpected, yet inevitable system failure does occur. With this, we aim to show how to design applications that contain an Agile-friendly framework to gracefully handle component failure in a distributed system to minimise downtime.
The evolution of software development – a retrograde step
It is hard to imagine today that software development in the not too distant past was focused almost entirely on coding technique and systems architecture.
Netflix engineers developed an open source software tool named Chaos Monkey – named for the way it “wreaks havoc like a wild and armed monkey set loose in a data centre”
The evolution of software development has been driven by Moore’s Law, open source software and the wave of successful technology companies who created very successful software systems focused upon optimising the user experience. Today we find ourselves with more complex and dynamic software architectures in the form of distributed systems that have a higher quality standard and are produced at a more rapid pace.
Agile development teams today utilise test-driven development, automated build scripts, iterations, user stories, retrospectives, velocity, daily stand-ups and burndown charts. These agile methodologies provide a framework for feature prioritisation, a way to focus on assumptions, help us develop constraints and key performance indicators to keep projects on schedule and this process can be used whether we are creating a minimally viable prototype (MVP) or a multiple sprint product release.
However, software systems which are developed using agile techniques and utilising modern software architectures, could still present problems. One problem we wanted to address was why do distributed systems, web-based or not, suffer all too often from a sub-optimal response or worse yet become completely non-responsive as the number of users increase?
The chaos monkey
In virtually every agile team who has created a Principal of Experience Design – a list of design rules that will define the user interaction with the application – there will be a maxim that speaks to establishing a trust between the user and the system. If the user cannot depend on the system, they simply will not trust it and will find alternatives. It is in consideration of the system-user trust relationship that drove us to rethink our approach to architecting distributed systems with the inherent ability to correctly detect and gracefully route requests around system service failures.
To test the resiliency and recoverability of their Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-based infrastructure, Netflix engineers developed an open source software tool named Chaos Monkey. According to the developers, it was named for the way it “wreaks havoc like a wild and armed monkey set loose in a data centre.”
The message queue can effectively re-route ‘around’ a non-responsive service by spawning another instance of the service then delivering a message to it
The tool allows developers and system architects to test the design and overall architecture of the system by simulating failures of instances of services running within auto scaling groups (ASG), by shutting down one or more of the virtual machines randomly and observing the result and examining the log files. The idea is that if the ASG detects the instance termination, it would automatically bring up a new, identically configured instance. Although the user would still more than likely lose their session state if they were connected to an instance that was suddenly terminated, the application would remain available to the user.
Message queue
The concept of having many of the same instances and terminating them to understand the effect upon the system architecture is ideal for large systems, but does not readily lend itself to agile development techniques where microservices are provided. After working with Chaos Monkey, we wanted to see if we could achieve the same functionality only with smaller distributed systems that provided a multitude of microservices.
The means to achieve this was to abstract out all interface and database calls and route them through multiple, persistent and redundant message queues through a message bus identified at run-time. The message queue architecture (above) shows that by augmenting the queues themselves with the ability to restart very granular preconfigured software consumer services, the message queue can effectively re-route “around” a non-responsive service by spawning another instance of the service and then delivering the message to the newly created service. In addition, a few other changes were necessary to make this work:
- All consumer services had to provide logging indicating whether a message was fully processed
- The message bus had to have the ability to re-launch message queue(s) if any of them unexpectedly terminated
ZapThink take
Message queues are a great benefit for developers working in an agile team environment. It is very easy to have different teams working together even when they are using dissimilar development tools or technology stacks because message queues can enable lightweight communication between any number of services.
Message queues are not a cure-all however, and like all software has downsides
The ability to separate an application into many small subsystems fits in well with the agile scrum software methodology as these subsystems can easily fit within development sprints. Better yet, using message queues can make a system easier to maintain, test, debug and can help an application easily scale by deploying additional message queues and service providers.
Given the positives above, message queues are not a cure-all and like all software has downsides. These include setup, complexity to maintain and can even degrade application performance if the setup is not correct. However, by explicitly building a mechanism to restart every component of a system and testing this regularly throughout development the end result will indeed be a system that is more resilient, when (not if) the unexpected, yet inevitable failure of a key subsystem occurs.
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Intel Capital Investment
According to recent reports, Intel Capital, Intel Corporation’s global investment and M&A organization, has invested roughly $67 million throughout eight Chinese technology companies. These companies represent a number of industries, including robotics, Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics and cloud technology.
The companies sharing the $67million dollar investment are Bluebank, Hampoo, Ninebot, Nuovo Film, PraFly, 99cloud Inc., and AWcloud Technology CO.Ltd, and Telink. 99cloud is based in Shanghai and provides OpenStack based solution as well as operational support. Some of these solutions include front-end optimization, core framework optimization, backend optimization and hyper-converged all-in-one solutions. AWcloud is based in Beijing and offers large scale OpenStack Cloud solutions for a multitude of industries such as oil, power, healthcare, and education. AWcloud has aided in he ransition from traditional IT services to contemporary cloud solutions through a hyper-converged “Cloud-in-a-Box” solution based on OpenStack and Intel technology. In addition, the company provides a private cloud that may be scaled out by adding more systems.
There are many obstacles for international cloud companies, such as Microsoft and IBM, which make it difficult for them to enter the cloud sector in China. For example, such companies are required to pursue partnerships with local Chinese cloud companies. Because Chinese based companies benefit from the expanding market and methods that safeguard them from international competition, they are made to be an attractive investment.
“Intel has a well-established track record working with China on the development of its technology industry over the past 30 years, during which time the country has transformed itself into a leader of global technology innovation,” Intel China president Ian Yang said in a statement. “Our investments, new products and collaborations in China support the government’s national initiative to uplift its innovation economy and continue Intel’s long-term commitment to accelerating CTE development in China and driving global innovation and entrepreneurship.”s
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