Oracle’s penchant for calling out its rivals in the cloud arena has got something of a response: James Hamilton, distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS), has taken issue with a comment made by Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd around the speed of the Redwood giant’s data centres.

Speaking to Fortune, Hurd said in response to a question about its capability and spend on data centres compared to other players in the market: “If I have two times faster computers, I don’t need as many data centres. If I can speed up the database, maybe I need one fourth as many data centres.”

According to the Fortune article, citing analysis from the Wall Street Journal, the three biggest public cloud vendors – AWS, Microsoft, and Google – spent between them approximately $31 billion on data centre capacity. Oracle, by comparison, spent about $1.7 billion.

AWS currently has 42 ‘availability zones’ – data centres, in other words – worldwide across eight regions, including the AWS GovCloud. Each geographic location has at least two zones, with Northern Virginia having the most with five, while new regions are being planned for Paris, Ningxia, and Stockholm.

Oracle’s complete list is more difficult to pin down, although the company said in January it had gone up to 29 geographic regions globally with expansions back in January, with regions in Reston, Virginia, London and Turkey available by mid-2017 and further plans for APAC, North America and the Middle East in 2018. It’s worth noting however that, as per a previous Fortune article, each Oracle region contains three domains, all with their own independent power and cooling, so if one failed the other would keep operating.

Hamilton’s response, on his personal blog earlier this week, disagreed with Hurd’s recent comments. “Of course, I don’t believe that Oracle has, or will ever get, servers 2x faster than the big three cloud providers,” he wrote. “I also would argue that ‘speeding up the database’ isn’t something Oracle is uniquely positioned to offer.

“All major cloud providers have deep database investments but, ignoring that, extraordinary database performance won’t change most of the factors that force successful cloud providers to offer a large multi-national data centre footprint to serve the world,” Hamilton added.

Hamilton also argues that, while the ‘most efficient number of data centres per region is one’ and there are some gains in having one large facility, it’s not wise to put all your eggs in one basket. “One facility will have some very serious and difficult-to-avoid full facility fault modes like flood and, to a lesser extent, fire,” he wrote. “It’s absolutely necessary to have two independent facilities per region and it’s actually much more efficient and easy to manage with three.

“2+1 redundancy is cheaper than 1+1 and, when there are three facilities, a single facility can experience a fault without eliminating all redundancy from the system,” Hamilton added. “Consequently, whenever AWS goes into a new region, it’s usual that three new facilities be opened rather than just one with some racks on different power domains.”

This has been rumbling on for the past several months; or specifically, since September last year, when Oracle launched its next generation data centres at its OpenWorld event, where Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief technology officer, said “Amazon’s lead is over” in infrastructure as a service.

Last month, when Oracle announced a $1.2 billion cloud quarter as part of its latest financial results, Ellison continued the theme. “Let’s say, generation two or Oracle’s infrastructure as [a] service cloud now has the ability to run customers’ largest databases, something that is impossible to do using Amazon Web Services,” he told analysts. “Many Oracle workloads now run 10 times faster in the Oracle cloud versus the Amazon cloud. It also costs less to run Oracle workloads in the Oracle cloud than the Amazon cloud.”

Hamilton’s relationship with AWS goes back further than when he joined the company in 2008; he cited the launch of S3 (Simple Storage Service) in 2006 as ‘game-changing’ and a factor in moving from his then employer.

India is one of the hottest growing economies in the world today, and its cloud storage industry is thriving as well. Almost every major cloud provider has a presence in India due to its robust economy and a burgeoning middle class.

In the light of such a scenario, the mandates released by the government of India is important to understand for all service providers and the companies that depend on it for their storage and computing needs.

One of the most important mandate was that all government data should be stored only within the territorial region of India, but other private and public data can be stored across one or more discrete sites in foreign countries. This mandate is in tune with what other countries have been doing and in many ways, it’s also a sensible move.

The current political environment of India and its relationship with surrounding countries also have a bearing in this decisions. For example, India and its neighbor Pakistan have been in a state of pseudo-war for the last six decades and there have been instances of terrorist attacks and infiltration bids that have made it necessary for India to protect itself.

On the other hand, it has been having a territorial dispute with China for the last few decades and recently, the visit of Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader to the disputed areas have increased tensions with China. In a nutshell, India is surrounded by issues from both its neighbors and this is becoming a cause of worry.

When government data is stored outside its borders, there’s always a possibility for it to fall in the hands of other countries, who can use it to their advantage. To prevent that from happening, the government of India has released this mandate.

Currently, many government departments rely on cloud service providers for a variety of services. This includes both foreign and homegrown companies. There are eleven companies that provide cloud services and they are Microsoft, Hewlett Packard (HP), IBM India, Tata Communication Services (TCS), Sify Technologies, CrtlS Data Centers, Barat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Net Magic IT Services.

These companies handle some of the most complex and high traffic sites in the world such as the Indian Railways, tax submissions, form filings and more. Such high volumes of traffic Surprisingly, top names such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud are missing from this list of companies that service the government departments.

In many ways, these details released by the government throws light on many aspects. Firstly, there’s still a ton of opportunities as cloud adoption is still only in the nascent stages at the government level. Many of the state governments and local corporations have not embraced the benefits of cloud computing. Secondly, this means there’s opportunity for both big and small players in this sphere to have a bigger role in providing services. Thirdly, all this augurs well for the Indian economy as a whole.

The post The Government of India’s New Mandate on Cloud Storage appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Multiple data types are pouring into IoT deployments. Data is coming in small packages as well as enormous files and data streams of many sizes. Widespread use of mobile devices adds to the total. In this power panel at @ThingsExpo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists will look at the tools and environments that are being put to use in IoT deployments, as well as the team skills a modern enterprise IT shop needs to keep things running, get a handle on all this data, and deliver the analytics that add value.

read more

Translating agile methodology into real-world best practices within the modern software factory has driven widespread DevOps adoption, yet much work remains to expand workflows and tooling across the enterprise. As models evolve from pockets of experimentation into wholescale organizational reinvention, practitioners find themselves challenged to incorporate the culture and architecture necessary to support DevOps at scale. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Senior Director of DevOps Solutions at CA Technologies, will discuss how existing adopters are employing unified agile and DevOps techniques to engage functional processes and toolchains that deliver increased software quality, faster time-to-market and measurably improved customer experience.

read more

First there was the Stone Age. Then we learned how to manipulate and smelt metals, which led to an Agrarian age. From there, machines helped bring about the Industrial age, then the Space Age. So where are we now?
Shall we call it the Network Age?
Metcalfe’s Law holds that the value of a connected network, telecommunications in the parlance of his day, is proportional to the square of the number of connected users. Or stated more simply, the utility of a connected ‘thing’ increases as more and more ‘things’ are connected. The telephone acts as an easy example. One phone by itself is a paperweight, but one million connected to the same network is immeasurably powerful.

read more

@ThingsExpo has been named the Most Influential ‘Smart Cities – IIoT’ Account and @BigDataExpo has been named fourteenth by Right Relevance (RR), which provides curated information and intelligence on approximately 50,000 topics. In addition, Right Relevance provides an Insights offering that combines the above Topics and Influencers information with real time conversations to provide actionable intelligence with visualizations to enable decision making. The Insights service is applicable to events like elections, emerging technologies, issues/activism, conferences, product launches, etc. Right Relevance’s report is a summary of graph analysis of engagements and conversations including retweets, mentions and replies of tweets related to the subject of ‘Industrial IoT.’

read more

We’re slowly getting used to cloud and SaaS applications in every area of our lives-including at work. Even huge enterprises are starting to move important business apps to the cloud, like Office 365 and Google Docs. That shift affects IT and end users a lot, as both adjust to using and supporting new, cloud-based tools. Sometimes those SaaS applications lack the features of their in-house counterparts.

read more

• Security-related certifications pay on average over $17,000 per year more than the median IT certification salary.
• Citrix certifications have annual salaries that range from $99,411 to $105,086 with a median salary of $102,365.
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate is paying a median salary of $125,091.
• Project Management Professional (PMP) certifications are the most pervasive, with 730,000 active PMPs in 210 countries and territories worldwide.

These and many other insights about the highest-paying certifications this year are from Global Knowledge’s latest research on the salary levels and market conditions for IT certifications. Their recent survey is summarized in the article, 15 Top Paying Certifications for 2017. This year Global Knowledge distributed the survey globally, providing the 15 top paying IT certifications for the United States recently. A certification had to have at least 115 survey responses to ensure that the data was statistically valid, and the certification exam had to be currently available.

Key insights on the 15 top paying IT certifications in 2017 include the following:

• Strong demand continues for IT professionals with Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC) certifications. Global Knowledge estimates than more than 20,000 people worldwide have earned this credential. Ninety-six percent of those who have earned it keep it current. Demand for this certification is outstripping supply, driving up salaries in 2017.

• All five AWS certifications available pay above market with the average salary being $125,591. Global Knowledge found that each of the five available AWS certifications pays above $100,000 a year. There’s clearly a shortage of certified AWS architects available today, as IT organizations often compete to hire IT professionals with this and more AWS certifications. Please see the Global Knowledge post, What It Takes To Earn a Top-Paying AWS Certification for additional details.

• Honourable mentions include Cisco and CompTIA certifications, including CompTIA+ Security which pays an average salary of $89,147. CompTIA A+ certifications pay $79,877, CompTIA Network+ certifications pay $81,601, and Cisco CCNA Routing and Switching, $83,945.

• Average income across all 15 certifications is $109,721. Certifications that specialize in security pay an average salary of $127,061 a year, over $17,000 more than the median salary across the top 15 certifications.  The three Microsoft certifications range in salary from a high of $101,150 to a low of $93,718, with a median salary of $98,142. Citrix certifications have annual salaries that range from $105,086 to $99,411, with a median salary of $102,365. The following table provides a breakout of the top 15 IT certifications in 2016 according to Global Knowledge’s salary study.

Read more: The key cloud certifications needed to boost your career in 2017

Enterprises and governments rely upon the timely transfer of mission-critical information to keep their projects and operations flowing smoothly. To do so requires a complex chain of communications hubs working efficiently, and even when they are working optimally, there can still be seconds of lag time between communications. That may not seem like much, but being able to get information a second faster than the competition (or the enemy) can make a huge difference.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that Grape Up will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct. 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Grape Up is a software company specializing in cloud native application development and professional services related to Cloud Foundry PaaS. With five expert teams that operate in various sectors of the market across the U.S. and Europe, Grape Up works with a variety of customers from emerging startups to Fortune 1000 companies.

read more