All posts by Business Cloud News

Cloud Hosting, Huawei, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud, telecoms

Huawei launches new cloud hosting services for Europe

wireless area networking cloudNetworking giant Huawei has launched a series of cloud hosting services for the European mobile service provider market. It unveiled details of the Digital inCloud programme at the MVNO Networking Congress in London, where Huawei signed a memorandum of understanding with participating partners.

Digital inCloud is to be a service aggregator and distributor which allows global carriers and partners to connect. By doing so they can build a digital ecosystem comprised of different payment, message notification, voice/cloud call centres and business operations analyses from all the carriers. Digital inCloud will be a bridge between partners and telcos in digital product distribution and trading.

The European Hosting Centre will be based in the UK and run on Huawei’s MVNX platform, which can hosts more than 1 million mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) subscribers across Europe. The European hosting centre will also include a series of off-the-shelf cloud hosting services available to all European operators.

Both content and applications will be delivered ‘as-a-service’ by bridging the gap between partners and telcos in digital product distribution and trading. Currently, Huawei has aggregated 200,000 digital content items from 2100 content partners worldwide, including digital music, 2700 mobile games, 20,000 hours of premium video, live channels, open API and traffic monetization.

The Video ‘as-a-Service’ offering aggregates film from Huawei global partners, mobile network operators and virtual mobile network operators. It will support multiple definitions including SD, HD and 4K(UHD) on devices including home TVs, smartphones and tablets.

Meanwhile telcos will be able to get business support system as a service, an offering aimed particularly at MVNOs who are less likely to have the resources to afford their own systems. Similarly, Huawei’s Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) will be a more affordable and accessible way to help operators to capture customer behaviour data.

The Huawei Digital channel will create a simpler way of delivering content and improving the user experience, it said, while the Mobile Payment service will help telcos to exploit more financial applications.

Azure, data protection, Druva, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Druva’s data protection service now available on Azure

Cybersecurity2Converged data protection firm Druva has allied itself with Microsoft Azure in a bid to expand its cloud presence to a wider public cloud and infrastructure market.

The new relationship gives Druva customers more global options for their data storage, privacy and security needs and a more impressive infrastructure vendor for companies with sensitive compliance and legal issues. Partnering with Azure helps Druva settle any regional data privacy issues that might otherwise dissuade them from using Druva as more companies realise that on-premise storage is becoming unsustainable, according to Druva.

Druva’s new Azure relationship, it says, gives customers have a wider set of choices as they try to decide how to keep up with data growth, security and regionally specific regulation requirements.

Azure will help Druva meet international and industry-specific compliance standards, such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC 1 and SOC 2. Among the country standards it meets are the Australia IRAP, UK G-Cloud and Singapore MTCS. Microsoft was also the first to adopt the uniform international code of practice for cloud privacy, ISO/IEC 27018, which governs the processing of personal information by cloud service providers. Microsoft’s data centre locations will give Druva 21 storage regions around the globe, including Canada and China which will help Druva meet data residency needs increasingly specified by clients, it claims.

Customers need stronger data protection and security in the cloud now they’re running sensitive workloads, according to Druva CEO Jaspreet Singh. Microsoft will broaden Druva’s cloud-related options and give customers additional choice for deploying in the cloud securely and conveniently. “Druva has quickly grown to become the de facto standard for data protection workloads in the public cloud,” said Singh.

Azure will extend the data storage footprint of Druva inSync, the analyst endpoint and cloud service data protection system. Druva inSync plans will begin at $6/user per month. Azure support will be generally available in 45 days.

Datacentre, Europe, Hosting, News & Analysis, OVH, Public Cloud

OVH promises undeniable public cloud service in the UK

cloud exchangeEuropean hosting giant OVH has launched a public cloud service in the UK with customisable security as protection against cyber attacks becomes a major selling point alongside open systems mobility.

The service is aimed at developers, system administrators and DevOps, and promises triple data replication, hosting in European data centres and a ‘five nines’ service level agreement (SLA). The OVH Public Cloud is based on OpenStack which, says OVH, will make integrating applications, migrating to the Cloud and moving between cloud providers easier for system builders who want to keep their options open. For this reason, it will also monthly and hourly payment mechanisms so clients aren’t forced to over commit resources. Those that can make monthly payments will get a 50% discount however.

The two main offerings will be Public Cloud Instances and Public Cloud Storage.

Public Cloud Instances provides a choice between two types of virtual machines. RAM instances (starting at £25 a month) are designed for memory-hungry apps such as software as a service (SaaS), multimedia creation and managing large databases. Cloud CPU instances, at £21/month, are designed for managing processing-heavy tasks such as data analytics, computer simulations and managing peak server loads.

The Public Cloud Storage service offers high-availability object storage, to save software developers from the complications involved in setting up network file system or file transfer protocols. Classic and high-speed storage options are also available.

All the Public Cloud packages have automatic, unlimited distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection against all types and lengths of attacks, with detection and auto-mitigation and a back up service of triple data replication. All services will have access to OVH’s global fibre optic network OVH Net.

“We want UK businesses to adopt the cloud with confidence,” said Hiren Parekh, director of sales and marketing at OVH UK. “Our aim is to give users the freedom and flexibility they need as their businesses evolve.”

Datacentre, Flash, Huawei, News & Analysis

Huawei’s OceanStor could make European data centres deliver cloud in a flash

datacentre1Huawei 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.

Content & Applications, Devops World 2015, Interviews, Ticketmaster

Ticketmaster VP of Engineering talks DevOps

Stephen Williams VP Engineering TicketmasterIs 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.

15880-DevOps-World-LogoWhat 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.

Dell, EMC, Financing, IPO, News & Analysis, Pivotal, Silver Lake

EMC Dell in rush to go public with Pivotal in early 2016

Dell office logoSoftware 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.

Internet of Things, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis, ThyssenKrupp

Azure to lift elevators into the cloud with IoT-based maintenance service

Elevator lift cloudThe 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.

Carina, containers, News & Analysis, OpenStack Summit, Rackspace

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.

containers, Dynatrace, News & Analysis, Ruxit

Companies with unmonitored Dockers could be dangerously exposed – study

Empty road and containers in harbor at sunsetWhile container technology is sweeping the board and being installed practically everywhere, its progress will be largely unmonitored, says a study. According to the research figures, the majority of Docker adopters could be sleepwalking into chaos.

The report, The State of Containers and the Docker Ecosystem 2015, found that 93% of organisations plan to use containers, with 78% of them opting for Docker.

The primary reason for using Docker was its convenience and speed, according to the survey group, of whom a massive majority (85%) nominated ‘Fast and easy deployment’ as their most important reason for using Docker. However, this haste could lead to mistakes, because over half (54%) told researchers that performance monitoring was not the major focus of attention as they rushed to adopt container technology.

The findings of the study shocked Bernd Greifeneder, CTO at performance manager Dynatrace, which commissioned the research.

“It’s crucial to monitor not just the containers themselves, but to understand how microservices and applications within the containers perform,” said Greifeneder, who works in Dynatrace’s Ruxit division, “monitoring application performance and scalability are key factors to success with container technology.”

Half the companies planning a container deployment in the coming six months to a year will do so in production, according to Greifeneder. Without monitoring, it will be difficult to manage, he said.

While most companies (56%) seem to realise the benefits of having reliable and production-ready solutions, fewer (40%) seemed to understand the flip side of the powers of automation and the dangers inherent in using ‘extraordinarily dynamic’ technology without monitoring its progress.

Since Docker was launched in 2013, more than 800 million containers have been pulled from the public Docker Hub. While container use is skyrocketing there are barriers to success that need to be addressed, Greifeneder argued.

The report was conducted by O’Reilly Media in collaboration with Ruxit. Survey participants represent 138 companies with fewer than 500 people from a variety of sectors including in software, consulting, publishing and media, education, cloud services, hardware, retail and government.

Analytics, cognitive computing, IBM, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, The Weather Company, Watson

IBM to buy The Weather Company and make it elementary to Watson

IBM The Weather Company PhotoIBM has entered an agreement to buy The Weather Company’s B2B, mobile and cloud-based web properties, in a bid to extend its Internet of Things range.

The acquired assets include WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and The Weather Company brand. The Weather Channel will not be part of the acquisition but it will license weather forecast data and analytics from IBM under a long-term contract.

IBM says the combination of technology and expertise from the two companies will be foundation for the new Watson IoT Unit and Watson IoT Cloud platform as part of its $3 billion investment strategy in this sector.

The Weather Company’s cloud data system runs the fourth most-used mobile app daily in the United States and handles 26 billion inquiries a day.

On closing the deal, IBM will acquire The Weather Company’s product and technology assets that include meteorological data science experts, precision forecasting and a cloud platform that ingests, processes, analyses and distributes petabyte sized data sets instantly. The Weather Company’s models analyse data from three billion weather forecast reference points, more than 40 million smartphones and 50,000 airplane flights per day, allowing it to offer a broad range of data-driven products and services to 5000 clients in the media, aviation, energy, insurance and government industries.

The Weather Company’s mobile and web properties serves 82 million unique monthly visitors. IBM said it plans to develop The Weather Company’s digital advertising platform and skills, commercialising weather information through data-driven advertising with additional ad-sponsored consumer and business solutions.

“The next wave of improved forecasting will come from the intersection of atmospheric science, computer science and analytics,” said Weather Company CEO David Kenny. “Upon closing of this deal, The Weather Company will continue to be able to help improve the precision of weather forecasts and deepen IBM’s Watson IoT capabilities.”