Category Archives: News & Analysis

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Spiceworks, Support

Spiceworks launches free cloud-based help desk application and monitor

SupportSpiceworks has announced a free cloud-based one size fits all Help Desk system for enterprises. It promises to give IT professionals a custome made system with unlimited admin and end-user seats, no hosting or storage costs, constant updates, free support and access to a community of millions of peers.

This plan is to for IT professionals to waste less time on mundane tasks and more time supporting their organisations, says Spiceworks. The system has custom dashboards to give instant overviews of help desk operations and rapid analysis of events within the cloud. Auto-assignment helps IT professionals automate their help desk system with rules that assign tickets to specific technicians. This could speed the process of fixing faults and cut the time spent managing tickets, says Spiceworks.

User portals will allow end-users to submit help desk requests through a website instead of email. The option for customised user portals could help improve usability by personalising help desk experiences for end-users and clients, says Spiceworks.

“We have four IT professionals using Spiceworks’ cloud-based Help Desk system to support 27 company locations across Arkansas and Missouri,” said Galen Ransone, IT technician at Greenway Equipment. “It’s already proved effective in supporting employees who need technology assistance. The fact that it’s free makes it even more enticing.”

Spiceworks also introduced a new beta version of its mobile application for road warriors who might want to manage their cloud-based Help Desk through Google Android and Apple tablets and smartphones. Spiceworks has also launched new features and functions for its Network Monitor and cloud-based Help Desk solutions for IT professionals, which keep tabs on server and network devices in real-time.

Nicole Tanzillo, director of help desk product marketing at Spiceworks, explained that the initiative is in response to demand from clients. “IT professionals have spoken and they want great tools designed for them that work,” said Tanzillo.

Criteo, data centre, Datacentre, France, Hadoop, News & Analysis

Criteo to build giant private big data platform on Huawei servers

datacentre cloudPerformance marketing specialist Criteo has chosen Huawei to supply 700 servers for its new Hadoop Cluster data centre in Pantin, Seine St Denis, near Paris.

Huawei won the tender after its FusionServer RH2288H V3 impressed in a strict comparative study, it says. The servers were chosen for their abundance of high-capacity disks, which give the Criteo data centre a better storage density and cut energy consumption by 10 per cent, it claims.

The new Hadoop platform of Huawei servers will boost Criteo’s processing performance by 30 per cent, it’s claimed. In the first stage of the project, the 700 machines in the Paris data centre outperformed Criteo’s Amsterdam data centre, in terms of computing power and storage, even though the Dutch site has 1,200 servers at its disposal, according to Criteo’s Senior Engineering Manager for Infrastructure Operations, Matthieu Blumberg.

“This is the biggest private Hadoop platform in Europe as of today,” said Blumberg, “Huawei has undeniably good ICT solutions and extensive knowledge of Big Data. We were really impressed.”

As a result, Criteo now plans to install up to 5,000 servers, taking up 350 square meters of rack space, at its Pantin data centre. The total power consumption will rise to 2 MW as the power of the Huawei server estate grows, according to Blumberg.

“We are proud to have built this partnership with Criteo: this is the kind of project we love to develop,” said Robert Yang, Head of the Huawei France Enterprise Business Group.

Apache, Hadoop, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Research, Spark

Apache Spark reportedly outgrowing Hadoop as users move to cloud

cloud competition trophyApache Spark is breaking down the barriers between data scientists and engineers, making machine learning easier and is out growing Hadoop as an open source framework for cloud computing developments, a new report claims.

The 2015 Spark User Survey was conducted by Databricks, the company founded by the creators of Apache Spark.

Spark adoption is growing quickly because users are finding it easy to use, reliably fast, and aligned for future growth in analytics, the report claims, with 91 per cent of the survey citing performance as their reason for adoption. Other reasons given were ease of programming (77 per cent), easy deployment (71 per cent) advanced analytics (64 per cent) and the capacity for real time streaming (52 per cent).

The report, based on the findings of a survey of 1,400 respondents Spark stakeholders, claims that the number of Spark users with no Hadoop components doubled between 2014 and 2015. The study set out to identify how the data analytics and processing engine is being used by developers and organisations.

The Spark growth claim is based on the finding that 48 per cent of users are running Spark in standalone mode while 40 per cent run it on Hadoop’s YARN operating system. At present 11 per cent of users are running Spark on Apache Mesos. The survey also found that 51 per cent of respondents run Spark on a public cloud.

The number of contributors to Spark rose from 315 to 600 contributors in the last 12 months, which the report authors claim makes this the most active open source project in Big Data. Additionally, more than 200 organisations contribute code to Spark, which they claims makes it ‘one of’ the largest communities of engaged developers to date.

According to the report, Spark is being used for increasingly diverse applications, with data scientists particularly focused on machine learning, streaming and graph analysis projects. Spark was used to create streaming applications 56 per cent more frequently in 2015 than 2014. The use of advanced analytics, like MLib for machine learning and GraphX for graph processing, is becoming increasingly common, the report says.

According to the study, 41 per cent of those surveyed identified themselves as data engineers, while 22 per cent of respondents say they are data scientists. The most common languages used for open sourced based big data projects in cloud computing are Scala (used by 71 per cent of the survey), Python (58 per cent), SQL (36 per cent), Java (31 per cent) and R (18 per cent).

China, Cisco, Enterprise IT, Inspur, Networking, Networks, News & Analysis

Cisco strengthens China operations with Inspur joint venture

Cisco corporateCisco Systems is to form a joint venture with Chinese server maker Inspur, selling networking and cloud computing products in China. Cisco and Inspur will jointly invest $100 million in the project.

The partnership comes in the face of mutual suspicion between the US and Chinese government amid claims and counter claims of state sponsored cyber security threats.

In June Cisco was forced to remove several of its senior executives in China, amid reports of falling sales slide and Chinese government fears about the foreign ownership of networking equipment.

Cisco’s China sales fell 20 per cent on the previous year in the quarter ending on April 25 at a time when its global revenue gained 5.1 per cent. As its share of the Chinese router market fell from 21.2 per cent to 9.4 per cent the lost sales went to local rival Huawei Technologies, according to Bernstein Research.

Direct selling became more challenging, The Wall Street Journal has reported, after US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden said the NSA put surveillance tools in US technology products sold overseas.

US-Chinese technology company partnerships are growing in number and Microsoft announced on Thursday an alliance with Baidu and the Chinese state-owned private investment firm Tsinghua Unigroup on cloud technology. Last week Dell unveiled plans to invest $125 billion over five years in China. Earlier this year, IBM pledged to help develop China’s advanced chip industry with a ‘Made with China’ strategy, while chipmakers Intel and Qualcomm are developing chips with smaller Chinese companies.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrived in Seattle this morning on a state visit to the US.

Chinese officials have said the partnerships will follow the pattern of car manufacturing agreements in the past, with foreign technology firms granted market access in return for shared technology and co-operation with Chinese industry.

developer, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis, Watson

IBM opens San Francisco office for Watson developer cloud

IBMIBM has opened a new office in San Francisco to channel further growth in its supercomputing business as it claims 77,000 developers across the world are using its Watson Developer Cloud to pilot, test and deploy new business ideas.

The San Francisco office will open in 2016 to give local start ups access to Watson technology for their software projects. The facility will include resources dedicated to IBM’s new Spark processing technology as the vendor seeks to get Spark users interested in Watson, it said. IBM claims 100 companies have released software services based on Watson.

With a reported $100 million of venture capital fund earmarked for startups looking to build products on Watson, IBM now plans to offer its nascent partners technical support and consultancy on business plans, in addition to market making initiatives that include introductions to potential customers.

In September IBM opened a new Watson Health business centre in the Boston area to target the health sector and pharmaceutical industry. The new cloud initiative comes in the wake of reports of declining revenues in 13 consecutive quarters, while the app economy is ‘in full swing’, as IBM described it, with industry revenue projected to grow to $143 billion in 2016, according to analyst IDC. By 2018 half of all consumers will interact with services based on cognitive computing on a regular basis, according to the analyst.

IBM also announced a new expanded portfolio of application programming interfaces into Watson, bring the net total to 50. IBM’s cloud development partners have created systems for query support for card payments, customer support Q&As for financial services, live event media aggregation ‘as a service’ social marketing and apps for the entertainment and marketing industries. Early investment partners include WayBlazer, Sellpoints, Welltok, Pathway Genomics, Modernizing Medicine and Fluid.

In the UK, IBM has created three new Watson partners 50wise, Volume and SocialBro, which have created cloud apps for financial services, sales training and online marketing.

Azure, Capgemini, Consulting, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Private Cloud

Capgemini recruits Microsoft Azure in cloud service expansion push

CloudCapgemini has added Microsoft to its cloud services programme as it seeks to give a broader range of cloud services to more clients. Microsoft is the first in a number of vendors that CapGemini is seeking to add to its cloud service portfolio, it said.

Under the new Capgemini Cloud Choice with Microsoft scheme it will offer cloud advice, managed platforms and ‘applied integrated innovation’ services. Initiatives include OneShare, which speeds the testing and development of Microsoft Azure systems and offers to control costs through usage monitoring and resource scheduling.

A second mooted offering is SkySight, which is described as an ‘Azure-like’ private cloud which aims to help enterprises to speed up the installation of new applications. Capemini says it will help clients get value for money on managed services and fine-tune the configuration process.

A third scheme will create industry-focused IP offerings, such as a system tailored to the specific needs of the banking sector, based on the experiences of Capgemini’s own in house banking specialists. The domain expertise will be offered in all major industries, including pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and the health sector.

The cloud offering will cover all solutions encompassed within hybrid, public, hosted and private cloud services using Azure.

As part of the offering, Capgemini will align activities with independent software vendors and start-ups to create new ways of delivering integrated solutions. New ventures and start-ups will also benefit from the offering, Capgemini says, as partners will become a focal point for integrating new innovations into the Capgemini solutions portfolio.

The expansion comes after Capgemini subsidiary Sogeti reported that it managed to cut the costs of one client, Dutch postal service PostNL, by 20 per cent by migrating its IT services onto the cloud with Microsoft Azure.

“Capgemini helped us to define our roadmap to migrate more than 40 applications and now operates its Cloud Platform for us,” said Marcel Krom, CIO at PostNL. “We have reduced costs and gained flexibility in handling volume variances.”

Azure, Cloud Storage, DataStax, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Storage as a Service

DataStax Enterprise delivered with Microsoft Azure to run on any cloud

AzureOpen source distributed database developer Datastax has worked with partner Microsoft to fine tune the delivery of its new cloud based system over the latter’s Azure service.

The new service, DataStax Enterprise (DSE) running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, was unveiled at the Cassandra Summit in California.

Databases no longer have to be centralised to have integrity according to Microsoft and Datastax, who claim to have created a distributed database that runs smoothly across all the varieties of the cloud. Datastax claims its DSE makes it easy to move Apache Cassandra and DSE workloads between data centres, service providers and Azure. DataStax claims customers can now build hybrid applications that can make full use of all three resources.

The new system aims to bring a stable version of a database to the cloud, overcoming the challenge of maintain one version of each record when elements of the database are stored on different computers at different locations. Datastax claims it can overcome the technical difficulties involved in both integrity and scalability so that users can enjoy the advantage of cloud computing, like flexibility of scale and cost controls, without surrendering the traditional strengths of a monolithic system.

The fine-tuning of the DSE with Azure ensures that the enterprises can have a development and production-ready ‘bring your own license’ clusters, claimed DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth. These can be launched in minutes on the Azure Marketplace platform using Azure resource management (ARM) templates, he told delegates at the summit.

Increasingly DataStax Enterprise customers use the database in hybrid cloud environments. Its alignment with Microsoft helps any company needing to build high-performance IoT, mobile and web apps quickly, said Bosworth.

“DataStax is a natural partner as it can build systems that scale across thousands of servers, which is ideal for a hyper-scale cloud environment,” said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft VP for Cloud and Enterprise.

BackBlaze, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Storage, Storage as a Service

Backblaze launches cheap cloud storage service

BackBlaze B2 screenBackup service provider Backblaze has made a cloud storage service available for beta testing. When launched it could provide businesses with a cheap alternative to the Amazon S3 and the storage services bundled with Microsoft Azure and Google’s Cloud.

According to sources, Backblaze B2 will offer a free tier of service of up to 10GB storage, with 1GB/ per day of outbound traffic and unlimited inbound bandwidth. Developers will be able to access it through an API and command-line interface, but the service will also offer a web interface for less technical users.

Launched in 2007 Backblaze stores 150 petabytes of backup data and over 10 billion files on its servers, having built its own storage pods and software as a policy. Now, it intends to use this infrastructure building knowledge to offer a competitive cloud storage service, according to CEO Gleb Budman.

“We spent 90 per cent of our time and energy on building out the cloud storage and only 10 per cent on the front end,” Glebman told Tech Crunch. The stability of its backup service technology persuaded many users to extend the service into data storage. In response to customer demand,

Backblaze’s engineers spent a year working on the software to make this possible. Now the company is preparing to launch a business to business service that, it says, can compete with the cloud storage market’s incumbents on price and availability.

Backblaze’s service, when launched, will be half the price of Amazon Glacier, and ‘about a fourth’ of Amazon’s S3 service, according to sources. “Storage is still expensive,” Glebman said.

Though the primary use for Backblaze B2 will be to store images, videos and other documents, Budman said he expects some users to use it to store large research data sets.

News & Analysis, procurement, Public Sector, Research, Sungard

Hidden cost of public sector cloud over £300m a year, says research

The UK’s public sector is spending an extra £300 million a year on maintaining cloud services and on hidden costs associated with their cloud computing projects, according to Sungard Availability Services.

The claim follows an independent study, commissioned by Sungard, that questioned 45 senior IT decision makers in the UK in public sector organisations with more than 500 employees. The average individual cloud spend of the study group, in 2014/15, was £390,000.

Sungard’s analysis of the research appears in a report, Digital by Design: Avoiding the Cloud Hangover in the UK Public Sector, which claims that unexpected costs and increasing complexity will create a ‘cloud hangover’.

The main revelation of the research is that 82 per cent UK public sector organisations (according to the study group of 45 decision makers) have encountered some form of unplanned cloud spend. The average yearly cost of maintaining cloud services (among the study group) was £139,000. A further £258,000 was spent by each, over the last five years, on unforeseen costs. External maintenance costs for hardware accounted for 41 per cent of these unexpected costs, while systems integration was the other major contributor to bill shock, accounting for 30 per cent of the unbudgeted expenditure.

According to the report, 42 per cent of UK public sector organisations use the cloud to lower the work load for their ‘IT team’, while 47 per cent expect the cloud to reduce IT costs. Some 43 per cent of the public sector’s cloud customers are allegedly struggling with the costs of personnel needed to manage cloud deployments.

Roughly half (53 per cent) of all UK public sector organisations said cost savings were the key driver for adopting cloud services, but 33 per cent believe this has not been achieved. Over half (55 per cent) of all UK public sector organisations (claims the report) complain that the cloud has increased the complexity of their IT environment and 71 per cent say that cloud computing added a new set of IT challenges. Achieving interoperability between existing IT and new cloud platforms was the most frequently mentioned challenge, cited by 44 per cent of the survey group.

“There is no silver bullet for adopting cloud computing,” said Keith Tilley, executive VP of Global Sales and Customer Services Management at Sungard Availability Services, who called for a case by case review.

cloudbolt, containerization, News & Analysis, SDN, Virtualisation

CloudBolt adds SDN, containerization and support

Network Function VirtualisationVirtual appliance maker CloudBolt Software now offers better support for microservices, software defined networking (SDN) and containerization on its platform. It is also offering compatibility with a variety of container services, it has announced.

According to CloudBolt its customers can now virtualize their networks with access to VMware NSX directly through its system. There is also new additional support for Docker and Kubernetes for customers wishing to use application containerization. The addition of new support capacity for IBM SoftLayer, HP Helion and CenturyLink Cloud means that there are now 13 cloud platforms compatible with CloudBolt.

The addition of Docker and Kubernetes marks the first time that any form of microservices management has been available on Cloudbolt’s system. The new compatibility with VMware NSX will allow customers to spin up virtual environments within the CloudBolt platform, explained CEO Jon Mittelhause. This means they can now use software defined networks and networks function virtualisation to simplify network configuration and management. The newest incarnation of CloudBolt also extends support for OpenStack and Cloud Foundry.

Meanwhile, widening the choice of cloud environments available to customers gives CloudBolt clients more options for locations from which to configure and publish capacity through the CloudBolt service catalogue, it says. New sites are available in Canada, India, Italy and Mexico.

News of the product upgrade follows a strategic decision to move the company’s corporate headquarters from Washington, DC to Silicon Valley in California as it seeks extra funding. Yesterday the 2015 Global Venture Capital Confidence Survey compiled by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) suggested that investors are most likely to put funds behind Silicon Valley start ups.

CloudBolt, founded in 2011, recently received an additional $2 million in funding from investors in a bid to cater to rising demands from customers.

“In the past year, we have seen a marked increase in the number of enterprises that want the benefits of SDN and container technologies,” said Mittelhauser, “the latest version of CloudBolt should make it easier and cheaper for enterprises to reap the benefits of these technologies.”