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Monthly Archives: November 2015
Huawei’s OceanStor could make European data centres deliver cloud in a flash
Huawei has launched a drive to put flash memory in Europe’s data centres in a bid to speed up the delivery of cloud services.
The OceanStor Flash Strategy in Europe aims to popularise the adoption of flash memory in data centres and drag customers into the all-flash era of high performance and reliability.
Huawei’s strategy is to concentrate on partners in the industry supply chain, persuading them to make a commitment by inventing new flash controllers, media chips and enterprise storage systems based on all-flash technology, it has said. The launch of the OceanStor Flash Strategy took place at the Huawei CIO Forum and Network Congress took place in Lisbon, Portugal last week. The European drive follows in the wake of a similar programme launched in China in September.
The core of the strategy involves Huawei integrating solid-state drives (SSDs) into the storage products sold throughout Europe. The equipment maker signed its first collaboration agreement under the new strategy with flash memory provider Micron at the 2015 Huawei Cloud Congress in Shanghai in September.
For the same price a data centre might spend on a 15000 revs per minute hard disk, they can get an SSD that’s five times faster and has less environmental impact, argued Yuan Yaun, CTO of Huawei IT Solutions Sales in Western Europe.
“Optimal user experience and low power consumption is well suited to customers’ business needs now and in the big data future,” said Yaun. Unlike conventional enterprise storage vendors, Huawei wants to future-proof software architecture, he said, because Huawei wants to keep in line with emerging data application trends, whereas traditional storage vendors have a legacy business model to protect. Huawei is free to adopt the latest technology and to work with multiple parties in the supply chain to develop new solutions, Yaun argued.
“We cannot achieve innovation by ourselves. Everything we have created, obtained and achieved would not be possible without the joint efforts of our partners and the unflinching trust of our customers,” said Yuan.
Ticketmaster VP of Engineering talks DevOps
Is there anything that Stephen Williams, VP Engineering at Ticketmaster can’t do? Whether it be leading the technology and development of the International Ticketmaster and Live Nation consumer platforms for the last 10 years or building web and apps across a heterogeneous range of technologies that include the best of breed OSS and commercial software founded on Java, PHP and .Net stacks. There is no doubt that he will be a great addition to the speaker line up and the upcoming DevOps World event on November 4th in London.
Over the last 2 years Steve has been focusing attention across all international teams to define and direct the change and implementation of co-ordinated engineering strategies in collaboration with Product and Technical Operations teams. A primary focus has been the evangelising and embracing DevOps culture: Steve led defining the aspects of Ticketmaster DevOps program, the development of a unique way to visualise the program of work and the journey they’re now on. Prior to the event Stephen shared some views on DevOps and a few other things besides.
What does your role involve and how are you involved with DevOps?
My role involves overseeing the management of two teams, in London and Sweden, working on the Ticketmaster International and Live Nation consumer platforms both supporting in 10-15 markets and growing. I’m very fortunate in having two great managers on both platforms, which enables me to also focus on larger strategic projects across our entire international engineering organisation.
I’ve been very involved with DevOps from the start within Ticketmaster International. Myself and another colleague together defined the International TM DevOps strategy. Following the release of the strategy we set up focused working groups to create some essential standards around tooling and instrumentation. From there we worked with various teams to convert the strategy into requirements and enable all teams to begin their journey. At the same time defined KPIs show where DevOps is having positive impacts and allow us to report this back to the business to promote the benefits, or if benefits are not being realised as expected then we can re-evaluate the strategies.
How have you seen DevOps affecting IT teams’ work?
Our TM DevOps Strategy has provided goals and a shared vision for our Teams. The strategy is defined in a way that allows each team to select their own path, which they select depending on the context of their needs. If you think of a roadmap, there are many ways to get from Point A to Point B – you the driver will determine which is the most appropriate route depending on various factors. Our strategy works in a similar way.
Having the right vision and ability to choose your path has created motivation and desire to succeed across our teams. It’s inspiring them to want to deploy faster and create opportunities for the business to learn quicker about new features. Having standards for tooling and best practices is helping to create a culture where more collaboration and sharing of ideas is starting to happen so we only solve problems the one time.
What is the biggest challenge you are facing with DevOps and how are you trying to overcome it?
The biggest challenges is capacity within the systems engineering team to align closer to the product delivery teams, whilst still having a large operational support requirements to service. It can be a slow process to unpick some areas and re-align teams when so many demands are coming in. There are several initiatives we’re employing such as shift left, moving operational tasks to support teams and free some capacity for the Systems Engineers to work more closely with developers. A lightweight CAB and improving demand management filtering have also been put in place to funnel requests.
Can you share a book, article, movie that you recently read/watched and inspired you?
I’m currently working on an organisational strategy to implement competency based skills frameworks to standardise the roles across the international engineering organisation, increase operational efficiency and support career progression and the satisfaction of staff. Research to develop the strategy led me to several articles and videos on Holacracy. Holacracy is attempting to define a way an organisation can be more flexible by allowing individuals to have more authority to solve problems and cut through bureaucracy.
It’s a fascinating approach to creating more autonomy, increase flow and a higher performing organisation. If Windows and MacOs are to an agile organisation then it’s more like mobile O/S for the organisation. I’m starting to ask what if we tried this, how could we, where will the benefits be. A great video to learn more about Holocracy is by Brian Robertson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJxfJGo-vkI.
What are you hoping to achieve by attending the DevOps World?
As with all conferences there is a bit of promoting our brand through the promotion of the exciting and great work we’re doing at Ticketmaster but also to use it as a learning opportunity to hear more about Devops, maybe we can use the information to extend our own DevOps strategy, or learn what not to try potential risks to watch out for, from other people and to meet new people to make relationships.
Empowering DevOps with RTC | @DevOpsSummit #RTC #WebRTC #DevOps
DevOps is a software development method that places emphasis on communications between Software Engineering, Quality Assurance and IT Operations (SEQAITO ) with the goal to produce software and services to improve, increase the operational performance for the Enterprise.
Communications is key not only between the SEQAITO team members but also the communication between the applications and the SEQAITO team. How can an organization provide the human communication and the application communication to the SEQAITO team to ensure the successful development, deployment of the application?
EMC Dell in rush to go public with Pivotal in early 2016
Software company Pivotal could be subject to an initial public offering (IPO) in early 2016, according to web site Recode, which claims to quote sources at parent company EMC involved in planning the launch. The IPO is being pushed forward to take place before the Dell acquisition of EMC goes ahead next year, with the anticipated billions raised to be used to service debt.
Big data analysis specialist Pivotal made $227 million in revenue in 2014 but posted a $106 million operating loss on revenue of $118 million for the first half of 2015, according EMC’s filed reports.
Pivotal’s joint owners, EMC and GE, are to offer a minority stake in the software company to public shareholders, says the report. This would be a repeat of a tactic previously used by EMC when it sold 19% of its shares in VMware in an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in 2007. Sources expect EMC is planning to sell around 20% of its Pivotal shares but retain the rest.
The plan involves Pivotal filing for its IPO confidentially under the auspices of the US Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, with the IPO concluded before the proposed $67 billion acquisition of EMC by computing giant Dell.
Both EMC CEO Joe Tucci and Dell CEO Michael Dell have supported the idea for a Pivotal IPO in the past. Speculators say the IPO may have been expedited because it would help to pay off some of the estimated $50 billion debt that Dell will have once the EMC takeover closes. A successful Pivotal IPO could potentially raise billions in new capital.
Meanwhile new capital from the Pivotal IPO would supplement some of the funding lost by the decline in VMware shares since the Dell-EMC deal was announced. In August, VMware shares were around $90 each but since the Dell-EMC deal was announced, their price has fallen by a third to $60.15.
Spokespeople for Dell, EMC and Silver Lake, the private equity firm that co-owns Dell, declined to comment.
GreenPages Helps Wire Belt with Managed Services & Business Transformation
Here’s a video we did with a great customer of ours, Beth Lindberg. Beth is the Director of IT at Wire Belt Company of America. Wire Belt is a multinational stainless steel conveyor system manufacturer with locations in the US, Germany, and England. At Wire Belt, Beth is in charge of keeping all systems up and running, as well as thinking strategically for the US location about ways to utilize IT to help successfully drive the company forward into the future.
In order to focus on this long term strategic vision, Beth uses GreenPages’ Managed Services to work in the background 24/7/365 to keep the lights on. Without this help, she may be too bogged down to be able to concentrate on projects that have a direct impact on Wire Belt’s users, customers, and business.
[Register for our upcoming webinar – Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality]
Along with Managed Services, Beth is also working with GreenPages on the company’s plans for business transformation.
Recently, Wire Belt experienced a major network outage that resulted in its ERP system going down. Wire Belt relies heavily on its ERP for everything from ordering, to scheduling, to shipping and invoicing. With the risk of aggravating customers by not being able to deliver orders on time, they brought in GreenPages to help solve the problem. Watch the video below to hear from Beth!
GreenPages Helps Wire Belt with Managed Services & Business Transformation
A special thank you to Beth for taking the time to do this video with us! If you have any questions about how GreenPages can help your business, reach out to us at socialmedia@greenpages.com.
Register for our upcoming webinar – Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality
Azure to lift elevators into the cloud with IoT-based maintenance service
The world’s one billion lift users could benefit from a new cloud based system which could elevate the mode of transport from ‘out of service’ to ‘as a service’, through a series of technical improvements.
Lift manager ThyssenKrupp has launched MAX, a system of ‘urban efficiency’ which runs via Microsoft Azure’s Internet of Things (IoT) enabled technology.
With 12 million lifts across the world shifting a billion people each day, downtime of this increasingly critical transport mechanism is becoming increasingly critical. However, management of lifts has not kept pacing with technology developments and service disruptions amount to over 190 million cumulative hours. The amount of time wasted, as staff are forced to walk up several floors, or wait for a crowded alternative lift, has not been calculated but is expected to be several times higher. However, the ThyssenKrupp Elevator company says its new MAX system will improve productivity by cutting lift service outages by half.
The MAX system aims to raise the reliability of lifts with a predictive and pre-emptive service that uses remote monitoring to dramatically increase the availability levels lifts. It uses intelligent agents to tell service technicians the needs of the lift, including the identification of repairs, component replacements and proactive system maintenance.
Data collected from millions of connected ThyssenKrupp elevators is sent to a system running in Microsoft’s Azure cloud, where an algorithm calculates the remaining lifetime of key systems and components in each elevator. From this ThyssenKrupp’s team of 20,000 global service engineers and technicians can inform building owners in advance when systems or components will need attention. These programmed interventions help avert life downtime, according to Andreas Schierenbeck, CEO of ThyssenKrupp Elevator.
“Our mission is to transform a century-old industry that has relied on established technology until now. We are very pleased to take ThyssenKrupp into the digital era and change the way the elevator industry offers maintenance services,” he said .
ThyssenKrupp aims to connect 180,000 units in North America and Europe, with the US, Germany, and Spain as pilot countries and other key countries in Europe, Asia and South America following shortly after. In two years, the offering will be expanded to all continents, becoming available to 80% of all elevators worldwide.
Rackspace launches Carina ‘instant container’
Rackspace has launched a new ‘instant container’ offering which it says will take the strain out of building infrastructure.
The Carina by Rackspace, unveiled at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, has now been made available as a free beta version. Carina makes containers portable and easy to use, claims Rackspace, which devised the system for making containerized applications faster. The service uses bare-metal performance, a Docker Engine, a native container tooling and Docker Swarm in order maximise processing power without sacrificing any control.
Typically a user might be a developer, data scientist or cloud operator who wants to outsource the infrastructure management to Rackspace’s experts which, says the vendor, saves time them on building, managing and updating their container environment.
With container technology being one of the fastest-growing software development tools in computing, companies adopting this unknown technology are likely to face unforeseen management challenges. Though containers consume a fraction of the computing resources of typical virtual machines, they could eat up a lot of management time, warns Scott Crenshaw, Rackspace’s SVP of strategy and product. The savings yielded by Container technology’s instant availability, application scaling and high application density, could be neutralised by the time and money spent on learning new infrastructure management skills, he said.
The Carina service will save customer from that waste, said Crenshaw. “Our mission is to support OpenStack’s position as a leading choice for enterprise clouds,” said Crenshaw, “Carina design makes containers fast, simple and accessible to developers using OpenStack.”
With no hypervisor overhead, an easy installation process and instant support, everything is designed to run faster, said Nick Stinemates, VP business development of container maker Docker. “You can get started in under a minute. The Carina beta from Rackspace makes it fast and simple to start a Docker Swarm cluster. They have put the Docker experience front and centre without any abstraction,” said Stinemates
Carina is now available as a free beta offering on the Rackspace Public Cloud for US customers.
Kibana 4 for Log Analysis | @DevOpsSummit @Logzio #DevOps #Microservices
In his General Session at DevOps Summit, Asaf Yigal, Co-Founder & VP of Product at Logz.io, will explore the value of Kibana 4 for log analysis and will give a real live, hands-on tutorial on how to set up Kibana 4 and get the most out of Apache log files.
He will examine three use cases: IT operations, business intelligence, and security and compliance. This is a hands-on session that will require participants to bring their own laptops, and we will provide the rest.
How to Play Windows Media Files on Mac
For some users still transitioning from PC to Mac, the experience can be a bit jarring. All of those new commands, programs, and file types can confuse even the most tech-savvy. Rest assured, you’ll get into the groove of things in no time. Still, there are a couple of questions that always seem to come […]
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