DevOps is often described as a combination of technology and culture. Without both, DevOps isn’t complete. However, applying the culture to outdated technology is a recipe for disaster; as response times grow and connections between teams are delayed by technology, the culture will die. A Nutanix Enterprise Cloud has many benefits that provide the needed base for a true DevOps paradigm. In his Day 3 Keynote at 20th Cloud Expo, Chris Brown, a Solutions Marketing Manager at Nutanix, will explore the ways that Nutanix technologies empower teams to react faster than ever before and connect teams in ways that were either too complex or simply impossible with traditional infrastructures.
Monthly Archives: April 2017
Why the hybrid vs multi-cloud position is not up for debate
The Cloud Industry Forum’s latest study shows some 88% of UK businesses are now using the cloud with over half of these favouring the hybrid approach whereby all data is processed and stored over a combined public and private cloud infrastructure.
At the same time there’s been a debate raging for some time over the merits of a multi-cloud approach where businesses can utilise a variety of cloud services – public and private – to deliver a ‘horses for courses’ solution.
Okay, so what’s the difference? Aren’t both approaches one and the same thing? On first pass they may appear so but the difference is that hybrid is effectively connecting a public cloud such as a Microsoft Azure, with your private on-premise cloud IT and applications. This way a business can cost-effectively access highly elastic compute resources from the chosen provider, perhaps for managing and storing additional workloads at peak times – think retailers on a ‘Black Friday’ – and for general day to applications. But all the mission critical stuff remains on-site in the private camp for various reasons, such as security and privacy regulations.
The subtle difference with multi-cloud is businesses mix and match a range of public and private clouds to achieve best of breed applications and services. In practice, however, it may well be the case that only one public cloud service such as Azure is selected for delivery of day to day applications and for soaking up additional processing and storage requirements at busy times, while several private cloud IT systems are deployed for ensuring optimum sharing of workloads using a mix of specialist apps and services.
There’s no one size fits all. One provider or cloud infrastructure may not necessarily provide the optimum solutions for each and every workload or application. In either case, there will be pros and cons and which route to take will ultimately be decided on a case specific basis.
This said there’s no longer any reason to limit your options by going for a one or the other approach. Why not have both hybrid and multi-cloud solutions at your disposal as and when? And with the availability of solutions such as Azure Stack the exact same cloud experience can be replicated privately on-premise.
Much, as always, depends on the resources of the data centre(s) being used. Whether hybrid, multi-cloud or a mix of both, there is one thing they must have in common for making everything interoperate seamlessly, securely and consistently: Connectivity.
More to the point, high speed low latency connectivity and plenty of it for ensuring sufficient redundancy and failover options. However, these multi and hybrid cloud environments are only going to be as good as the weakest link; the public cloud’s connection to the data centre.
This increasingly calls for data centres that bypass the internet with cloud gateways, allowing faster, more secure virtual private network connections directly into global public cloud network infrastructures, such as Microsoft’s Azure ExpressRoute.
Aside from this and the requisite level of scalable power to rack the other key factor to consider is a data centre’s level of engineering competence, necessary not only for configuring and interconnecting these complex environments, but also for helping businesses bring their legacy IT into the equation – older equipment and software which is still playing a critical role and just too valuable to sideline.
With the right data centre, there’s no longer a need to debate whether hybrid is better than a multi-cloud model. Businesses are free to follow a best of breed cloud strategy using a best of all worlds approach to deliver the right applications and services at the right time to exactly where they’re needed – quickly, securely and consistently.
Cloud War: Will Google Overtake AWS?
Cloud war is heating up, as the top player vie with each other to garner more market share and revenue in an ever-growing market environment. As more individuals and companies take to the cloud to make the most of what it has to offer, the top four players, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM and Google are competing with each other to offer the best services at the lowest possible rates.
The very idea of this cloud war is to ensure that one company stays on top of others when it comes to market share and revenue. Currently, AWS is the king as its revenue and market share is way more than that of Microsoft, IBM and Google. But that doesn’t mean that the others can catch up.
In fact, Google is going all out to beat AWS, IBM and Microsoft to get to the top in this cloud war. After Diane Greene took over as the head of this divisions, Google has made rapid strides in this regard. It has introduced many new products, slashed its prices heavily and has even entered into lucrative partnerships with organizations around the world – all in a bid to increase its market reach.
The latest effort in this regard is the prominent role that Google wants to play in the entertainment industry. Tariq Shaukat, a president in Google’s cloud division is one of the keynote speakers at the National Association of Broadcasters show that is happening in Las Vegas. This platform is expected to give Google and its parent company, Alphabet, a wide audience in the media and entertainment industry.
Shaukat is expected to talk about the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and how it can provide the media and entertainment industry with all that it wants to increase their revenue and make their operations more efficient. He is also expected to help this industry make the most of what one of the top tech companies in the world has to offer.
One of the products that Google plans to showcase is Zync, that can enable bandwidth-intensive projects to be rendered at high speeds. Anything ranging from virtual reality to animated TV shows can be hosted on this product, and this is precisely why Google thinks the entertainment industry platform is a good place to talk about it.
These efforts are towards a larger goal, which is to become the top cloud provider soon. In an interview to Forbes, Greene has said that there is a good chance for Google to become the number one cloud provider in five years because it is taking all out effort to make the most of every platform and opportunity.
In March of 2016, Google already announced that it was going to pour in billions of dollars into its cloud business as that’s going to be one of the key revenue drivers in the future. This also explains why it’s planning to increase the number of data centers from three to 15, by the end of 2017.
Will Google surpass AWS in five years and emerge as the winner in this cloud war? Possibilities are there, but time will tell.
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Mind the gap: User demand and IT delivery not on the same page, says Veeam
(c)iStock.com/MarioGuti
More than four in five enterprises globally are facing the dreaded ‘availability gap’ between user demand and what IT can deliver, according to a new report from disaster recovery and backup firm Veeam.
The study, the firm’s sixth annual Veeam Availability Report, polled more than 1,000 senior IT leaders across 24 countries and found that unplanned downtime costs enterprises on average $21.8 million per year, up 25% compared to the past 12 months.
More than two thirds (69%) of respondents globally forged a link between continuous access to services and digital transformation, yet downtime issues, be they cyber-attacks, infrastructure failures or natural disasters, will naturally put a crimp in those plans. Server outages last 85 minutes on average per incident, the research notes.
When it comes to UK respondents, two thirds (66%) say their digital initiatives are being held back by unplanned downtime, while a similar number (67%) added the initiatives were either ‘critical’ or ‘very important’ to lines of business and the C-suite.
This makes for interesting reading, especially when considering the issues organisations face which can have indirect effects on their revenues. 40% of respondents admitted they had experienced damage to brand integrity. Companies say they can only tolerate 72 minutes of data loss per year with ‘high priority’ applications on average, although the real figure is nearer two hours (127 minutes).
“The results of this survey show that most companies, even large, international enterprises, continue to struggle with fundamental backup/recovery capabilities, which along with affecting productivity and profitability are also hindering strategic initiatives like digital transformation,” said Jsason Buffington, principal analyst for data protection at the Enterprise Strategy Group, which conducted the report.
“In considering the startling availability and protection gaps that are prevalent today, IT is failing to meet the needs of their business units, which should gravely concern IT leaders and those who answer to the board.”
SAP continues cloud shift with new cloud bookings up 49% year on year
SAP has announced its cloud subscriptions and support hit €905 million (£768.7m) in the first quarter of 2017, up 34% from the previous year, with new cloud bookings up 49% to €215m.
It’s the continuation of a long-running theme for the German software giant, with the company trying to shift its revenue base over from traditional software to cloud for the past few years. Software licenses and support remains strong however, up to €3.42bn from €3.17bn this time last year at an 8% increase. Overall, cloud and software revenue was at €4.32bn and total revenue at €5.28bn, each up 12% from Q116.
Despite this, operating profit was down 17% year on year at €673m, while profit after tax was down 7% to €530m. SAP increased its employee base from 78,230 to 85,751 over the past 12 months.
Discussing the cloud figures, Luka Mucic, SAP chief financial officer said in a statement: “This outstanding achievement further validates our investment decisions to drive further growth. We’re off to a good start to reach our full year targets and we are confident that we will grow our profitability in 2018 and beyond.”
SAP reiterated its 2017 outlook, which argues full year 2017 non-IFRS cloud subscriptions and support revenue will be between €3.8bn and €4bn.
One of the areas SAP has been looking into of late is artificial intelligence, announcing in February the latest offering for S/4HANA, its public cloud, which aimed to provide a roadmap for the ‘next generation of cloud ERP’, as the company put it. S/4HANA was updated with a new architecture of in-memory in combination with contextual analytics, digital assistant capabilities and machine learning, aiming to help customers adopt and adjust business processes based on real-time data and insight.
Bill McDermott, SAP CEO, added: “SAP’s outstanding first quarter results are a decisive follow-on to our record setting 2016. Led by S/4HANA, we are seeing mass customer adoption of our solutions globally.
“Our inspired workforce is firmly committed to staying focused on the success of our customers and shareholders.”
You can read the full financial statement here (pdf).
Picture credit: SAP
#3 Mac Usage in the Workplace
Windows Applications on a Mac with Parallels Desktop for Mac As enablers of Mac® integration into traditional Windows® networks, Parallels® often surveys Windows IT professionals to understand the trends associated with supporting a dual platform environment. In our latest research, we wanted to understand the usage and growth of incoming Mac devices, the advantages of […]
The post #3 Mac Usage in the Workplace appeared first on Parallels Blog.
[slides] #DevOps and @Docker | @DevOpsSummit #Serverless #Microservices
Containers have changed the mind of IT in DevOps. They enable developers to work with dev, test, stage and production environments identically. Containers provide the right abstraction for microservices and many cloud platforms have integrated them into deployment pipelines. DevOps and containers together help companies achieve their business goals faster and more effectively. In his session at DevOps Summit, Ruslan Synytsky, CEO and Co-founder of Jelastic, reviewed the current landscape of DevOps with containers and the benefits. In addition, he discussed known issues and solutions for enterprise applications in containers.
Fantastic Tracks at @CloudExpo | DevOps #AI #ML #DX #IoT #IIoT #FinTech
With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing Cloud strategies, now is the perfect time to attend @CloudExpo | @ThingsExpo, June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY and October 31 – November 2, 2017, Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. Learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is on the right path to Digital Transformation.
Juniper Networks to Exhibit at @CloudExpo | #BigData #DevOps #IoT #AI #DX
SYS-CON Events announced today that Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), an industry leader in automated, scalable and secure networks, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Juniper Networks challenges the status quo with products, solutions and services that transform the economics of networking. The company co-innovates with customers and partners to deliver automated, scalable and secure networks with agility, performance and value.
Top #M2M Brand: @ThingsExpo | #IoT #IIoT #AI #ML #DL #DX #SmartCities
@GonzalezCarmen has been ranked the Number One Influencer and @ThingsExpo has been named the Number One Brand in the “M2M 2016: Top 100 Influencers and Brands” by Analytic. Onalytica analyzed tweets over the last 6 months mentioning the keywords M2M OR “Machine to Machine.” They then identified the top 100 most influential brands and individuals leading the discussion on Twitter.