Monthly Archives: December 2015

News & Analysis, Research, The Bunker

Hybrid cloud proving a struggle for enterprise – research

Velostrata is the latest hybrid cloud vendor to come out of stealth

Hosting and co-location company The Bunker says the vast majority of companies are installing hybrid cloud systems but with a massive failure rate.

The Bunker’s Completing the Hybrid Cloud Puzzle, based on market research conducted by Vanson Bourne among CIOs and IT decision-makers, indicates that though hybrid clouds are overwhelmingly popular 63% of the survey struggled to execute their vision for the cloud.

Cloud migration failures were attributed to a lack of in-house skills (49%); confusing, biased or incorrect advice (44%) and alack of integration of Cloud Infrastructure and non-Cloud resources (41%).

Out of the survey group of mid-market and large corporations, ranging in size from 1000 to over 3000 employees, 90% are in the throes of creating a hybrid of cloud and on-premise computing. Meanwhile, 96% said they expect to migrate applications or data to their cloud infrastructure within the next 5 years.

It has not been easy, however, since 70% of the 94% of organisations that have already migrated applications or data to a cloud Infrastructure have experienced a failure. For some this failure was a failed or stalled project or the lack of any return on their investment. Despite many of the survey group claiming a ‘good level of engagement; for the cloud, both internally and externally, over half of respondents (54%) confessed they hadn’t got the optimum technical solution to address their needs.

The motives for adopting a cloud solution were efficiency, flexibility and scalability (identified by 60% of the group) and lower costs (40%) and the need to turn IT spending from a capital expenditure to an operational costs (which was identified by 38% of the group).

Around half (55%) of the study identified their ideal model for IT infrastructure to involved a mixture of in-house and outsourced IT infrastructure using a mix of private and public cloud.

“The business benefits of Cloud technologies may be compelling, but organisations continue to struggle when it comes to delivering on them,” said Bunker CTO Phil Bindley. The CIOs are failing to build technology systems that meet business needs, according to Bindley, but it’s not their fault. “CIOs and IT decision-makers do not appear to be getting the advice or support they need,” he said.

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Platform as a service, RedHat

Red Hat launches OpenShift Dedicated for enterprise public cloud

redhat office logoOpen source software vendor Red Hat has launched a new cloud service for enterprise IT and development teams who want help in braving the public cloud.

OpenShift Dedicated has the Docker container and Kubernetes orchestration technologies that were included in the recent OpenShift Enterprise 3.1 release. The new cloud service aims to build on OpenShift Online, Red Hat’s vehicle to help individual developers build, launch and host their own applications in a shared public cloud that it supports.

The new cloud service includes single-tenant isolation and a resource pool of 100GB SSD-based persistent storage, 48TB network Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and nine nodes for deploying container-based applications. It offers admin and security controls to let each customer customise and secure their cloud environment using virtual private networking and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) functions. Customers will also be able to use Red Hat’s JBoss Middleware from applications developed and deployed on OpenShift.

The new cloud service gives potential customer a third option for using Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, it says. Clients can now choose between OpenShift Enterprise, OpenShift Online and the new OpenShift Dedicated cloud service.

OpenShift Enterprise is for those who want to manage their OpenShift instances on their choice of on-premise hardware or cloud provider. The Online option is for those who want to access OpenShift as a service in the public cloud. The third option, the new OpenShift Dedicated service, is for those who want to use Red Hat technology to deploy, manage and support their OpenShift instances running on AWS, it said.

The new option is for the increasing number of customers who want more control over the building and isolation process for their applications, but not complete responsibility for admin and operational management.

OpenShift Dedicated is globally available today for Red Hat customers in all AWS hosting regions, with support for other public cloud options expected in future.

Content & Applications, Mendix, News & Analysis, Platform as a service, SIG

Mendix targets technical debt avoidance with PaaS release

Mendix aPaaSApplication platform as a service (aPaaS) vendor Mendix has launched a new Application Quality Monitor service, in partnership with software quality advisor SIG. The cloud-based service will initially monitor the upkeep of Mendix applications.

Bimodal IT specialist Mendix claims to help companies create a two-tier service, combining the basic foundations of a reliable but conventional IT infrastructure with the option for ‘Mode 2 capabilities’ to provide better speed and agility. According to Mendix, many CIOs fail to pay enough attention to detail when implementing Mode 2, which can lead to mistake on refactoring and ballooning ‘technical debt’.

Technical debt is defined by researcher Gartner as the loose ends that need resolving and the refactoring required as a result of the development process. The debt may take many forms, from design debt, to documentation debt, to unused and duplicated code. Addressing technical debt will be one of the big challenges of the cloud, according to Gartner. A new genre of cloud vendors will be needed to ensure that software is well-designed, well-written and maintainable, it says.

“Anyone can go faster; the challenge is doing so sustainably,” says Gartner analyst Mary Mesaglio in an April report released by the firm.

The Mendix Application Quality Monitor performs a daily monitoring of software quality, improving maintainability and cutting lifecycle costs. The cloud service is powered by SIG, which performs a static analysis of Mendix application models according to ISO 25010 standard for maintainability. The analysis covers key aspects of the application such as the ability to analyse, modify and divide it into modules. It rates the applications on values such as volume, duplication, unit complexity and dependencies. A dashboard offers the quality rating on a scale from 1 to 5, and highlights potential areas for further investigation. The ratings are based on benchmarks of thousands of projects.

There’s a strong correlation between the cost and effort of handling issues and enhancements and the maintainability rating of an application, according to Joost Visser, head of research at SIG and Professor of Large Scale Software Systems at Radboud University. “Issue resolution time and enhancement effort increase exponentially for applications with lower ratings,” he said.

Uncategorized

Gordon Haff Joins @DevOpsSummit Faculty | @GHaff #DevOps #Microservices

The now mainstream platform changes stemming from the first Internet boom brought many changes but didn’t really change the basic relationship between servers and the applications running on them. In fact, that was sort of the point.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Gordon Haff, senior cloud strategy marketing and evangelism manager at Red Hat, will discuss how today’s workloads require a new model and a new platform for development and execution. The platform must handle a wide range of recent developments, including containers and Docker, distributed resource management, and DevOps tool chains and processes. The resulting infrastructure and management framework must be optimized for distributed and scalable applications, take advantage of innovation stemming from a wide variety of open source projects, span hybrid environments, and be adaptable to equally fundamental changes happening in hardware and elsewhere in the stack.

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Uncategorized

IoT Business Value with @VitriaTech | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #BigData

“IoT is really hitting its stride. The adoption rates are increasing and Vitria is in a good position to help people deliver on the value of IoT,” explained Mike Houston, Marketing & Product Marketing Professional at Vitria Technology, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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Customer Story, Parallels Access, Remote access, Remote Access App, Remote Desktop

Customer Story: Police Department Uses Parallels Access on Patrol

The following post is a customer story submitted to our Advocacy program by Robert Dauberman. We are incredibly thankful to Robert for sharing his story with us and allowing us to share it with you. Read on for Andy’s experience choosing and using Parallels Access to great effect! Name: Robert Dauberman Geography: South Bloomfield Police Department, Ohio USA Industry: Law Enforcement […]

The post Customer Story: Police Department Uses Parallels Access on Patrol appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Uncategorized

IoT, Smart Home and Wearables | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #Wearables

Every physical object or “thing” that can be embedded with sensors will be embedded with sensors. Whether you call it the Internet of Things, the Internet of Everything, M2M, a smarter planet, the Industrial Internet or something else, the trend is clear. With so much activity and interest, it is unfortunate that a de facto communications standard has not emerged. However, there is progress (or managed conflict) in the right direction.

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container, containers, ElasticHosts, News & Analysis

ElasticHosts launches elastic containers – could cut some running costs by 50%

containersCloud server company ElasticHosts has announced its new model of container technology can adapt automatically to fit volatile shifts in demand for resource and bill clients accordingly. The new Linux containers are designed to make management easier for resellers, service providers, web developers and web hosting companies.

ElasticHosts’ new containers are now available with cPanel v11.52, from third party control panel vendor cPanel. ElasticHosts claims it offers the first containers to integrate with cPanel v11.52, which now creates the possibility for much more precise billing according to the usage of server resources such as memory, processing power and storage. It also gives service providers the option to automatically adapt to changing circumstances, so clients only ever have to pay for what they use while there is no risk of hitting a performance barrier in periods of intense activity.

The control panel from cPanel can streamline the process of creating and managing websites, claims its vendor. Prior to the new release cPanel could only run on virtual machine servers with licensing according to the virtual private server (VPS) model. The new ability to ‘autoscale’ and the capacity for exact billing will lower costs for clients, according to ElasticHosts. The usage-based billing offered by containers means website owners no longer have to pay for periods when server capacity is underutilised or the site is idle, typically saving up to 50% on hosting costs, it claims.

“We worked closely with cPanel integrating and testing the product to make this a reality and believe our technologies complement each other well,” said ElasticHosts CEO Richard Davies, “containers are gaining real momentum.”

“Linux containers are an exciting technology and we have recognized the groundswell behind them in the internet community right now,” said Aaron Phillips, Chief Business Officer at cPanel.

Miscellaneous IT, tech gadgets

14 Tech Gift Recommendations from GreenPages’ Architects

With the holiday season upon us, I reached out to some of our experts here at GreenPages to pull together 14 tech gift recommendations. Check out answers from David Barter, Chris Ward, Randy Weis, Dan Allen, and David Jones!

 

David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

  • Microsoft Band 2 – The Microsoft Band 2 can be used for tracking for running, biking, golf and more. It has 11 sensors, including GPS, UV monitor, and barometer. It also gives you access to email, text, calendar, and call alerts on the go!
  • Surface Book – Microsoft describes the Surface Book as the ultimate laptop because it’s ultra-thin, meticulously crafted, and has incredible screen resolution.
  • Arlo Smart Home Security System

Chris Ward, CTO

  • Apple Watch – “The watch reimagined”… stainless steel or space black stainless steel cases. Sapphire crystal. Comes in a range of stylish brands
  • Some sort of drone!!!

Randy Weis, Principal Architect

Dan Allen, Architect

Editor’s Note: Dan admitted that this is, in fact, everything that is on his holiday wish list. Hint hint.

David Jones, Senior Consultant

  • Amazon Echo – The Amazon Echo plays all your music, fills the room with immersive, 360 degree omni-directional audio, and allows hands-free convenience with voice-control. It also answers questions, reads audiobooks, reports traffic and weather, provides sports updates, controls lights and switches and more!

 

Interested in learning about Docker? Here are 10 things you need to know

 

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

 

photo credit: www.techtimes.com

cognitive computing, Germany, IBM, Internet of Things Telecoms, IoT, News & Analysis, Watson

IBM aims to take Watson IoT to the next level with new global HQ

HighLight Munich Business TowersUS IT giant IBM has made a major statement of intent towards IoT by opening a global HQ dedicated to its Watson Internet of Things offering in Germany, reports Telecoms.com.

Watson is IBM’s cognitive computing unit, designed to use machine learning and natural language processing to analyse unstructured data. At the core of IoT will be the ability to collect vast amounts of data from billions of different sources and make sense of it. IBM is betting that positioning itself as one of the companies best able to help with that process is the way forward.

The Watson IoT HQ in Munich (pictured) will apparently employ 1,000 IBM developers, consultants, researchers and designers all exploring at the intersection of cognitive computing and IoT. IBM sees Europe as the hub of global IoT development and this HQ is its most extensive European investment in over 20 years.

“The Internet of Things will soon be the largest single source of data on the planet, yet almost 90 percent of that data is never acted upon,” said Harriet Green, GM of Watson IoT and Education. “With its unique abilities to sense, reason and learn, Watson opens the door for enterprises, governments and individuals to finally harness this real-time data, compare it with historical data sets and deep reservoirs of accumulated knowledge, and then find unexpected correlations that generate new insights to benefit business and society alike.”

One early Watson IoT partner is the smart building arm of Siemens. “By bringing asset management and analytics together with a deep technical understanding of how buildings perform, Siemens will make customers’ building operations more reliable, cost-optimized and sustainable,” said Matthias Rebellius, CEO of Siemens Building Technologies. “We are excited to stretch the envelope of what is possible in optimizing building performance by combining the asset management and database technologies from IBM’s Watson IoT business unit with our market leading building automation domain know-how.”

IoT is perhaps the defining technological trend for the next decade, encompassing every part of the ICT spectrum. IBM is right to say that all these embedded sensors and smart devices are pointless unless we use all the data they will generate to make useful decisions. In many ways this is the natural evolution of Big Data and it will be no less challenging to demonstrate ROI on IoT.