The Internet of Things is here. In the coming years, billions of devices like sensors, meters or actuators will be connected to the network, sharing information and taking instructions. These connected devices will sense and deliver more data, respond to control inputs and provide more information to help people and machines make decisions. Examples of “things”’ include IPTV cameras in major metropolitan areas, crop-growing water detection systems, smart meters that communicate energy consumption and smart transportation systems that adapt to traffic conditions. These are all computing systems that are Internet-connected and operate with no human intervention.

read more

DevOps is about increasing efficiency, but nothing is more inefficient than building the same application twice. However, this is a routine occurrence with enterprise applications that need both a rich desktop web interface and strong mobile support. With recent technological advances from Isomorphic Software and others, rich desktop and tuned mobile experiences can now be created with a single codebase – without compromising functionality, performance or usability.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Charles Kendrick, CTO and Chief Architect at Isomorphic Software, demonstrated examples of complex UI widgets that behave differently in desktop vs. mobile context, and described the API and code structures that enable these capabilities.

read more

(c)iStock.com/4X-Image

The push is on to better streamline unused data centre capacity – and according to a missive from network provider Emerson Network Power, 2016 will see a greater emphasis on shared service distributed cloud computing models.

According to the company’s five trends shaping the data centre landscape for 2016, enterprises which have data centres either as ‘comatose’ – buildings which have not delivered computing services for at least six months – or data centres with free room will be able to sell excess capacity on the open market as the evolution from basic software as a service to more hybrid environments intensifies. Recent Stanford research found 30% of physical servers were comatose.

This greater use of resources is seen elsewhere in Emerson Network Power’s predictions. No longer are companies focused on efficiency, but a greater emphasis on sustainability and social responsibility is key – and the company argues this trend will not just be limited to on-premise technology decisions.

A related survey, opining on the data centre of 2025, argues that data centres will in general be smaller than they are now; more than half (58%) of respondents expect data centres to be half the size of current facilities, while one in 10 argues the enterprise data centre of 2025 will be one tenth the size.

With regard to data centre cooling, the move towards sustainability was again noted. Chris Molloy, a distinguished engineer at IBM, argued data centre equipment will not need as much heat removal as it will either generate less heat, or tolerate much higher temperatures, or both. “As IT equipment becomes more resilient, we will see ASHRAE A3/A4-based data centres operating with temperatures in the cold aisle rising to above 100°F, reducing the need for cooling,” he said. More natural cooling methods, such as provided by the Node Pole facility in Sweden, are a major USP for those providers.

The Internet of Things (IoT) will also play a part in 2016 data centre trends, Emerson Network Power argues. Some of these predictions are self-fulfilling. The IoT will force data centre providers to use a common language, as currently thousands of devices speak a host of languages including IPMI, SNMP, and Mod Bus. The alternative the network provider proposes, Redfish, is one of their projects alongside Intel, Dell, and HP. Similarly, another prediction focuses on the ‘neighbourhood data centre’; large data centres which are supported by edge facilities for low latency content for IoT networks.

What do you make of these ideas for the future of the data centre?

Developers generally like to share their code, and many of them do so by open sourcing it on GitHub, a social code hosting and collaboration service. Many companies also use GitHub as a convenient place to host both private and public code repositories by creating GitHub organizations where employees can be joined. Sometimes Employee might publish things that might be sensitive in nature and these things might lead to compromise of a system.

read more

Wearable technology has come a long way since the calculator watch. In the past whenever I thought of the term “wearable technology” the first things I would like of were always calculator watches and pedometers, but boy have things changed! Even if you’re a skeptic, this blogger thinks that pretty much everyone will be using some type of wearable tech by 2020.
It seems like wearable technology is everywhere. Whether it is Google Glass, or the Samsung Galaxy Gear, there seems to be nothing that you can’t tech out. There is Colour Change Couture, fabric that changes color when wet, The Programmable T-shirt, which, when combined with the smartphone app, allows the wearer to display tweets, Facebook statuses, and pictures. Celebs are even getting on the wearable tech bandwagon; Nicole Scherzinger wore a dress made of silk, Swarovski crystals, and 2,000 LED lights that displayed tweets in real time when the hashtag #tweetthedress was used. For more on the future of fashion, check out this slideshow (you really should, there’s some pretty cool stuff in there).

read more

In today’s pharmaceutical supply chain, counterfeit activity is thriving. As pharma companies have expanded target markets and outsourced production over the last decade, the supply chain has become increasingly global, virtual, and vulnerable. Illicit activity has thrived, and patients have suffered, with hundreds of thousands dying each year from counterfeit and contaminated drugs.
More than 40 countries have responded with new laws that regulate prescription medications as they travel through the supply chain. While this is a quantum leap forward for patient health, the implications for supply chain stakeholders, from pharmaceutical companies and their contract manufacturing partners to the pharmacies that serve patients are daunting: they must master each country’s disparate track and trace requirements; create a system architecture capable of generating, managing, and storing what will be unprecedented volumes of regulated data; and figure out how to efficiently exchange that data with hundreds to tens of thousands of direct and indirect supply chain partners.

read more

How often do you get questions like ‘Have you gone to the cloud yet?’, or ‘Why aren’t we in the cloud?’, or a myriad of others along those same lines. People still talk like the cloud is a destination. I discussed this tendency last year in a blog, “The Cloud – Is It Your Actual Destination?” For all the hype surrounding cloud, the benefits are real. IDC forecasts global public IT Cloud services spending to reach nearly $108B by 2017. Gartner expects that by 2016 the bulk of IT spend will be for the cloud. Those are pretty impressive numbers. The challenge is to remember, cloud is technology, it’s a vehicle, a conduit to help you provide value to the business.

read more