All posts by Business Cloud News

Datacentre, IBM, Intel, News & Analysis, OpenWorld 2015, Oracle, server

Oracle and Intel announce plans to ramp up the offensive on IBM in the cloud

Oracle openworld 2015Intel and Oracle are to build on a previous collaboration which saw them jointly take on IBM in the cloud computing hardware market. Now they are conspiring again, this time to target Oracle’s database and software customers, in a bid to get them to ditch their IBM computer servers and buy Oracle/Intel servers instead.

The new pact was announced at the opening of Oracle’s tech conference as Intel CEO Brian Krzanich took the stage of Sunday with Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. Project Apollo, in which the two manufacturers pooled engineers in a joint bid to investigate how massive cloud computing data centres can run faster using Oracle hardware with Intel chips, was pronounced mission accomplished.

On Sunday Hurd and Krzanich announced the new hardware partnership and a back up conversion programme. Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said ‘thousands’ of customers have dropped IBM for Oracle when running Oracle software. To back this up, Oracle launched a migration support programme. The ‘Exa Your Power Program’ (EYP) is aimed to help customers move their Oracle Database from IBM Power systems to Oracle Engineered Systems using Intel technology.

The EYP is a free database migration Proof of Concept study in which Oracle will assess a customer’s environment, create a database migration results report and show how it thinks the customer could significantly cut the time and costs of running critical database workloads.

“CSC has successfully migrated dozens of customers’ enterprise workloads,” said Ashish Mahadwar, Executive General Manager of Oracle’s Emerging Business Group. “We recently migrated an Oracle Database for a major insurance provider from IBM Power 7 to an Exadata X5 engineered system as a Proof of Concept.”

Mahadwar claimed that test results showed a Siebel Application runs four-to-ten times faster and ETL Processes running up to 12-times faster on Exadata.

Transformation of the enterprise is already underway with the continuous improvements in a vast software ecosystem that Intel and Oracle jointly deliver according to Mahadwar. “The Exa Your Power program will make it easier for customers to realize the benefits of moving to Intel architecture,” said Mahadwar.

Akanda, Astara, Liberty, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack

Astara is born to simplify networking for OpenStack Liberty, claims Akanda

opensourceSystems built on OpenStack now have better management options, according to Akanda, which has unveiled its new Astara Liberty system for network orchestration.

Akanda, which contributed to the recently launched OpenStack Project Astara, announced the new Liberty release at OpenStack Summit Tokyo. The new Astara Liberty release is Akanda’s debut contribution to the project. The makers claims it gives OpenStack operators vendor-agnostic network orchestration platform for everything that lies between layers three and seven on the network services stack.

The design criteria for Liberty is to cut complexity and make Neutron implementations more scalable. It achieves this by dispensing with the need for multiple plugins and software defined networking (SDN) controllers. By orchestrating these network functions from different providers on bare metal, virtual machines and containers, it has given cloud developers more options and more stability, claims Akanda.

These ‘scalability, flexibility and stability’ improvements are achieved because Akanda’s Liberty release gives developers more configuration choices, faster provisioning, smoother integration, higher levels of availability and fuller compatibility, claims the vendor. Among the mechanisms for delivering these improvements are a new type of new load balancer driver, more Neutron resources and Cumulus Networks integration and support for Dynamic Lightweight Network Virtualization.

“The goal of Astara is to make Networking and DevOps’ lives easier,” said Akanda CEO Henrik Rosendahl. The culture of traditional and expensive single vendor lock-ins must be replaced by a massively simplified OpenStack networking range, he said.

The Liberty release demonstrates the power of the big tent approach to OpenStack, claimed Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost and OpenStack Foundation board member. “It’s fantastic to see new open source projects extend and simplify the platform,” said Anderson.

Azul, Content & Applications, Internet of Things, IoT, Java, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Microsoft and Azul Systems say Zulu Embedded will encourage IoT in Windows

internet of things farmingAzul Systems and Microsoft are to give Java developers open source development tools, device I/O libraries and a Java runtime targeting Internet of Things (IoT) applications on Windows 10.

The two vendors have created Zulu Embedded for Windows 10 IoT, which is a Java Development Kit (JDK), Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and a set of device I/O libraries. The libraries are based on OpenJDK, which has been certified by Azul for use with Windows 10 IoT Core and is compliant with the Java 8 SE specification.

Microsoft Windows 10 IoT Core, is a modified version of Windows 10 that has been tailored to suit cheap, small-footprint embedded devices such as those based on Raspberry Pi 2 and Minnowboard Max.

The aim of the partnership is to ensure Zulu Embedded meets Java development and runtime requirements for Microsoft’s IoT initiatives. The success of the joint effort will be gauged by the number of Java compatibility updates, security patches and the levels of support for additional IoT device connectivity, control and communication, according to a joint statement.

There are Java developers around the world using Windows 10 IoT core, according to Steve Teixeira, Director of Program Management for the Windows Internet of Things team at Microsoft. These new initiative means they will be assured of a high-quality foundation for their Java projects if they use the latest advances in OpenJDK.

“Developers have many development and deployment choices for their IoT applications,” said Teixeira. By giving them more support, they are more likely to stay in the Microsoft cloud camp, he said. “Microsoft and Azul have made it easy for those who prefer Java to build premier IoT devices running Windows.”

Azul Systems is committed to updating and evolving Zulu Embedded to meet the specific requirements of Microsoft’s IoT platforms, said Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul Systems.

Zulu Embedded for Windows 10 IoT is free to download and use and may be distributed without restriction.

Big Data, IBM, marketing cloud, News & Analysis

IBM adds Universal Behavior Exchange into its Marketing Cloud

IBMIBM says the new Universal Behavior Exchange (UBE) in its Marketing Cloud will help businesses to understand their customers better.

The vendor and cloud service provider claims UBE can solve the problem of connect up all the different sources of information available to them. In some companies this means taking data from up to 30 different systems. Cloud service UBE aims to connect and personalise all relevant information and allow marketing staff to devise more effective campaigns on Facebook and across the Web.

UBX is supported by an open ecosystem of certified partners that includes social, mobile, CRM and paid advertising solutions. Vendor partners include MediaMath, Spredfast, MutualMind, SugarCRM and Exchange Solutions.

Features in the cloud based system include a click-to-connect integration that should simplify the getting and using of data marketers. A pre-integrated network of the vendor partner’s technology should give clients a faster access to a wide range of customer behaviour types, with event and audience data available across a range of paid, owned and earned channels. The system ultimately allows users to study the behaviour of customers and create a highly personalised interaction in response, according to IBM.

“IBM is making it simpler to understand how customers prefer to engage,” said MediaMath president Mike Lamb, “Connecting advertiser data to other channels could create more timely and relevant interactions.”

In a related announcement, mobile marketing system vendor Vibes leader has announced a complementary offering. The Vibes mobile marketing platform will now personalise mobile campaigns with IBM Campaign for targeted text messaging and mobile wallet offers. It will also work IBM Marketing Cloud systems to trigger transactional and service-oriented mobile messages, like appointment reminders and service updates.

“UBX is cracking the code on big data applied to the marketing cloud, and we’re thrilled to be a part of this emerging ecosystem,” said Vibes CEO Jack Philbin.

Amazon, AWS, Datacentre, Financial Results, News & Analysis, Q3 2015

AWS profitability quadruples as revenue surges 78%

amazon awsAmazon Web Services’ revenue grew by 78% year over year to $2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2015 and its operating profit more than quadrupled to $521 million. Its high profits – attributed to 500 new inventions and eight price cuts – contributed to earnings which surpassed analyst expectations and created a surge in parent company Amazon’s stock price.

The high growth rate in AWS profitability could be accounted for by last year’s low margins caused by a competitive price cuts on AWS services.

Meanwhile parent company Amazon reported an overall third-quarter operating profit of $406 million on $25.4 billion of sales. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky answered criticism that AWS is keeping the company profitable and that, in the face of cloud competition, it may have to cut prices again to ensure further growth.

“I will point out that this quarter showed a lot of innovation, a lot of new products and features and a lot of investment,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told analysts. “Globally we are investing very heavily in our Prime platform. We’ve launched multiple devices including e-readers, tablets priced under $50, Echo dash buttons, so there’s a lot of investment going on, and there will continue to be, especially related to prime. Innovation and investment will continue and can be lumpy over time.”

The pace of innovation in AWS and the scale of its business has allowed it to do the ‘heavy lifting for Amazon’ said one Wall Street blogger.

By constantly re-inventing itself AWS has been able to cut its prices eight times since April 2014, said Phil Hardin, Amazon director of investor relations, in an analyst conference calls. “The company rolled out 539 new features and services in the past year alone, many of which have been designed so that its customers can access enterprise-grade services for a fraction of what they would traditionally cost on-premise,” said Hardin.

Enterprise IT, HP, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

HP Helion Public Cloud to end, buyers told to go to Amazon

HPHP has revealed that the OpenStack-driven HP Helion Public Cloud will close on January 31 2016 as it looks to focus on private and managed cloud offerings, which is says it will now ramp up.

HP announced the news via its blog in which it also revealed that would invest more in the Helion OpenStack platform which, it said, has more realistic prospects for strong customer adoption. The Helion Openstack system is the foundation of its private cloud offering.

Bill Hilf, HP Cloud’s general manager, explained the logic behind the decision. “The market for hybrid infrastructure is evolving quickly. Today, our customers are consistently telling us they want a hybrid combination of efficiently managed traditional IT and private cloud,” said Hilf. They only want access to software as a service (SaaS) applications and public cloud capabilities for certain workloads, he added.

With customers pushing for private cloud to be delivered faster than ever before, the company has had to prioritise, he said.

“We will continue to innovate and grow in our areas of strength, we will continue to help our partners and to help develop the broader open cloud ecosystem, and we will continue to listen to our customers to understand how we can help them with their entire end-to-end IT strategies,” said Hilf.

HP will support its new model by expanding its partner base and integrating different public cloud environments, Hilf said. Customers who want public cloud should go to Amazon, Hilf said.

“For customers who want access to existing large-scale public cloud providers, we have already added greater support for Amazon Web Services as part of our hybrid delivery with HP Helion Eucalyptus,” said Hilf.

Azure, Dell, Enterprise IT, hybrid cloud, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Dell and Microsoft unveil joint hybrid cloud offering

Dell office logoDell has expanded its cloud portfolio with a new hybrid cloud offering with technology jointly developed with Microsoft. The new system is designed to break down the barriers to cloud adoption and offer a simpler but more secure payment system.

According to Dell’s own research, nine out of ten IT decision makers say a hybrid cloud strategy is important to achieve a Future-Ready Enterprise. The recently unveiled Dell Global Technology Adoption Index revealed that 55% of organisations around the world will use more than one type of cloud. The study also identified cost and security as the biggest barriers to adopting the cloud, with complexity being the biggest blockage associated with hybrid cloud.

The new Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft promises customers an on-premise private cloud with consistent Azure public cloud access in less than three hours. Clients are promised minimised downtime with non-disruptive, fully automated system updates that don’t impose themselves on users when not needed. It also offers workload templates to simplify service provision and governance models. The management of multiple clouds will be simplified by an out-of-the-box integration with Dell Cloud Manager (DCM) and Windows Azure Pack (WAP), Dell says.

The Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft is built around the CPS Standard, which combines optimised Dell modular infrastructure with pre-configured Microsoft CPS software. This will include Microsoft’s software stack and Azure Services for back-up, site recovery and operational insights.

Meanwhile the Dell Cloud Flex Pay programme gives customers a new flexible option to buy Dell’s Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft without making a long-term commitment. Cloud Flex Pay will eliminate the risks of being locked into paying for services that aren’t used fully says Dell.

“Customers tell us their cloud journey is too complex, the cost-risk is too high and control isn’t transparent,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager of engineered solutions and cloud at Dell. “With our new Cloud Flex Pay program, cost-risk is all but eliminated.”

Big Data, Datacentre, HPC, IBM, News & Analysis, UK

IBM to create HPC and big data centre of excellence in UK

datacenterIBM and the UK’s Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) have jointly announced they will create a centre that tests how to use high performance computing (HPC) for big data analytics.

The Hartree Power Acceleration and Design Centre (PADC) in Daresbury, Cheshire is the first UK facility to specialise in modelling and simulation and their use in Big Data Analytics. It was recently the subject of UK government investment in big data research and was tipped as the foundation for chancellor George Osborne’s northern technology powerhouse.

The new facility launch follows the government’s recently announced investment and expansion of the Hartree Centre. In June Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson unveiled a £313 million partnership with IBM to boost Big Data research in the UK. IBM said it will further support the project with a package of technology and onsite expertise worth up to £200 million.

IBM’s contributions will include access to the latest data-centric and cognitive computing technologies, with at least 24 IBM researchers to be based at the Hartree Centre to work side-by-side with existing researchers. It will also offer joint commercialization of intellectual property assets produced in partnership with the STFC.

The supporting cast have a brief to help users to cajole the fullest performance possible out of all the components of the POWER-based system, and have specialised knowledge of architecture, memory, storage, interconnects and integration. The Centre will also be supported by the expertise of other OpenPOWER partners, including Mellanox, and will host a POWER-based system with the Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform. This will provide options for using energy-efficient, high-performance NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators and enabling software.

One of the target projects will be a search for ways to boost application performance while minimising energy consumption. In the race towards exascale computing significant gains can be made if existing applications can be optimised on POWER-based systems, said Dr Peter Allan, acting Director of the Hartree Centre.

“The Design Centre will help industry and academia use IBM and NVIDIA’s technological leadership and the Hartree Centre’s expertise in delivering solutions to real-world problems,” said Allan. “The PADC will provide world-leading facilities for Modelling and Simulation and Big Data Analytics. This will develop better products and services that will boost productivity, drive growth and create jobs.”

EMC, Enterprise IT, Networks, News & Analysis, Virtustream, VMware

EMC, VMware unveil plans for Virtustream hybrid for the enterprise cloud

EMC and VMware are to combine their cloud offerings under a jointly-owned 50/50 shared Virtustream brand led by its CEO Rodney Rogers.

The cloud service will be aimed at enterprises with an emphasis on hybrid cloud, which Virtustream’s owners identify as one of the largest markets for IT infrastructure spending. The company will provide managed services for on-premises infrastructure and its enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform. The rationale is to help clients make the transition from on-premise computing to the cloud, migrating their applications to cloud-based IT environments. Since many applications are mission critical, hybrid cloud environments will be instrumental in the conversion process and Virtustream said it will set out to provide a public cloud experience for its Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud service.

Nearly one-third of all IT infrastructure spending is going to cloud-related technologies, according to a research by The 451 Group, with cloud service buyers now investing on the application stack. Enterprise adoption is increasing, says the researcher, and buyers increasingly favour private and hybrid cloud infrastructure. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is increasingly being run on cloud systems, and enterprises will spend a total of $41.2B annually on ERP software by 2020, says The 451 Group.

Virtustream will incorporate EMC Information Infrastructure, VCE and VMware into one and will offer services using VMware vCloud Air, VCE Cloud Managed Services, Virtustream’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service and EMC’s Storage Managed Services and Object Storage Services offerings. VMware will establish a Cloud Provider Software business unit led by VMware’s senior VP Ajay Patel. The unit will incorporate existing VMware cloud management offerings and Virtustream’s software assets.

The business will integrate existing on-premises EMC Federation private cloud and take them into the public cloud, according to Virtustream. The aim is to maintain a common experience for developers, managers, architects and end users. Virtustream’s cloud services will be delivered directly to customers and through partners.

Virtustream addresses the changes in buying patterns and IT cloud operation models that both vendors are encountering now, said EMC CEO Joe Tucci. “Customers consistently tell us they’re on IT journeys to the hybrid cloud. The EMC Federation is now positioned as a complete provider of hybrid cloud offerings.”

Virtustream’s financial results will be consolidated into VMware’s financial statements beginning in Q1 2016.

Big Data, Content & Applications, Devcon Construction, Egnyte, News & Analysis, Software as a service

New Egnyte service promises to impose strict version in the cloud

AppsCloud file service provider Egnyte has launched a Smart Reporting and Auditing service which promises to impose order on the way content is created, edited, viewed and shared.

The service is currently exclusive to Egnyte customers who want visibility and control over their organisation’s entire content life-cycle, whether files are in-house or in the cloud. The rationale is to help companies stop wasting money on the multiplication of effort involved when multiple versions of the same file exist across the diaspora of in-house systems, private and public clouds.

The promised returns on investment in these cloud services, the company says, are lower costs, less risk and higher productivity through visibility. Cost savings are promised on reducing bandwidth consumption, minimised support issues and less wasted employee time. Risk will be minimised, according to Egnyte, as fewer files will be leaked out of the organisation and suspicious activities – both internally and externally – can be highlighted. Visibility improvements will boost productivity by speeding the progress of projects and the prevention of unchecked document replication and mutation, which leads to multiple teams working on multiple different versions of the same project.

Companies and vendors have still not cracked version control yet, said one analyst, and the cloud will only make the task more complicated.

“Content is at the core of just about every business process today, but users are accessing files across multiple devices, anywhere, any time,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. “It is entirely too costly and there is simply too much data.”

Solving the big data analytics problem will be increasingly important, said McClure.

Devcon Construction, the largest general contractor in Silicon Valley, has used the service on trial to track confidential design plans and blueprints. “It gives complete visibility on how the files are shared and accessed, so we can effectively manage desktop and tablet device workflows out in the field,” said Joe Tan, director of IT at Devcon Construction.

The cloud service now makes detailed file analytics and insights possible, claimed Isabelle Guis, chief strategy officer at Egnyte. “It’s critical for businesses to optimise file infrastructure and protect against potential threats,” she said.