(c)iStock.com/Topp_Yimgrimm

Microsoft is giving $500,000 (£328,000) of free Azure hosting credit to Y Combinator (YC) startups, according to YC president Sam Altman.

The Redmond giant will also be offering YC firms in the Winter 2015 batch and beyond three years of Office 365 subscription, access to Microsoft developer staff, as well as one year of CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services.

In a blog post published on February 9, Altman notes the company “[doesn’t] want to leave software companies out”, after biotech startups benefited to the tune of $20,000 in Transcriptic credits and hardware firms were able to leverage a partnership with Bolt.

“This is a big deal for many startups,” Altman wrote. “It’s common for hosting to be the second largest expense after salaries.”

Naturally, Microsoft isn’t the only cloud provider to be so altruistic. November 2013 saw Rackspace launch the Rackspace Startups Programme announce support to the tune of £250,000 to give UK-based startups a foothold in the cloud, with the programme expanding globally the year after, while IBM launched the slightly less snappily titled IBM Global Entrepreneur Program for Cloud Startups, with £75,000 of potential investment on tap, a year later. At the time, Big Blue trilled in its press notes that it was offering more dollar than Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services.

This sort of move is altruistic only to a point, however. Microsoft will doubtless be ploughing this money into YC in the hope that its more successful startups will become major Redmond customers. Two of the most famous YC graduates, Dropbox and Docker, are partnering with Microsoft.

Elsewhere, Microsoft has topped the January rankings of influential cloud organisations, according to Compare the Cloud. The table, which is calculated from an analysis of “all major global news, blogs, forums and social media interaction” over 90 days, saw Microsoft finish ahead of SAP, Amazon, Apple and Oracle to make up the top five.

You may have seen last week that we partnered with Cloudera, certifying the Plexxi Switch on Cloudera’s Enterprise 5 platform.

This partnership, while exciting for us and our partners, plays a larger role in the IT landscape as a whole. According to an article this week by Arthur Cole of Enterprise Networking Planet, this move embodies Cole’s belief that networking infrastructure development is increasingly being driven by Big Data applications. He cites the key challenge as not finding somewhere to store all the data (e.g., storage) but rather how to make it available to “diverse and disparate sets of resources quickly and at a relatively low cost.”

read more

Dynatrace monitors your entire application delivery chain. All of your transactions are tracked end-to-end, from user clicks to individual lines of code, using Dynatrace PurePath technology. Dynatrace constantly monitors your servers’ host and process health, and will automatically notify you if your business-critical transactions are running slower than normal with automatic baselines. Dynatrace comes with several incidents configured out of the box, but you can also create custom incidents to get as granular as you want. However, even with all of this information, alerts are only as good as how well you can respond to them. Too often, missed or ignored incidents can lead to severe consequences, so it’s important to make sure every incident gets noticed.

read more

​I recently poured over F5’s “The State of Application Delivery in 2015” and InformationWeek’s “2015 App Dev Priorities Survey” that they presented with Dr. Dobb’s. The similarity of their titles, and even their release dates made me wonder how unique each of their findings would be, and I challenged myself to flush out any interesting findings or patterns that emerged from their collective research.

Both reports were really well done, and I would recommend them to anyone looking to see if your organization is on the right path of change, or to anyone who knows you’re not on the right path, but you’re willing to get on it—if you could just figure out where it is.

read more

The security landscape is evolving more than ever before – not only must chief information security officers (CISOs) deal with constant increasing cyber-attack threats and security breaches but they must keep up with mobility trends and concerns about access to data and protecting identities. Mobility is growing at a fast pace, and though it may be easy to construct more barriers to data access, there are much more effective approaches.

read more

ITIL (formerly known as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library) has been the best management practices framework of choice for world class IT Operations organizations. The 5 stage framework: Service Strategy, Design, Transition, Operation, and Continual Service improvement allows for structured processes that support Enterprise Architecture, Service Delivery, and Security initiatives. Structured and controlled planning and change are the bywords here.

read more

CommVault has announced an arrangement with NaviSite, Inc., to extend the data protection capabilities of Simpana® software to NaviSite’s NaviCloud® portfolio.
CommVault will provide data protection and management capabilities for customers using NaviCloud Director, an enterprise-class cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution offered directly to customers via an intuitive self-service portal, and also delivered in conjunction with NaviSite’s broad portfolio of managed services.
“Our clients come to us for solutions that can readily scale to meet their enterprise level requirements, while reducing risk and providing value back to the business,” said David Grimes, chief technology officer, NaviSite. “Simpana software satisfies our requirements and provides the capabilities of multiple point products we were evaluating within a single solution — providing a great degree of flexibility for our clients, while resulting in less complexity and costs for our internal organizations.”

read more

(c)iStock.com/RonBailey

It seems Microsoft can’t give away enough cloud storage at the minute: US-based users of Bing Rewards can grab 100GB of free OneDrive storage for two years.

Bing Rewards, as you’d expect, is an incentive-based service that allows users to collect points the more they use Microsoft’s search engine which can then be exchanged for rewards such as e-gift cards. However according to Windows Central, the OneDrive offer is completely free and is not linked to any incentive-based usage.

This continues to play into the market of commoditisation of storage; giant tech vendors being able to offer storage at extremely low prices alongside other services, putting pressure on standalone players.

Back in October Microsoft offered unlimited OneDrive storage for Office 365 customers, expanding on its June offer of 1 terabyte per customer. At the same time, storage provider Bitcasa stopped its unlimited offerings, putting the landscape into intriguing perspective. The lowest Office price plan, Office 365 Personal, amounts to approximately $7 a month, with cloud storage, while Bitcasa’s previous unlimited offer was at $10.

This isn’t to mention Microsoft’s partnership with Dropbox for cloud storage, which at the time raised eyebrows given the position of OneDrive, but it makes sense. Dropbox is in need of a more enterprise-centric focus, while analysts argued that Microsoft needed to further assure the industry it could “play nicely” with competitors; CEO Satya Nadella, building upon the availability of Office for iPads and Android tablets, has made it quite clear he wants to go as far away as possible from the previous walled garden approach Microsoft employed.

Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, told CNBC on the advent of his company’s IPO that the cost of storage going down over time benefits Box’s infrastructure costs, rather than affecting profits in an adverse way.

The move towards a service-based economy and storage as a feature, not a product, is continuing apace. You can visit here to claim your free 100GB of OneDrive storage (US only).

(c)iStock.com/baranozdemir

Whether the requirement is Internet connectivity for cloud based applications or links to a private WAN, most organisations now recognise the importance of a carrier neutral data centre. However, while the list of possible connections available may look compelling – some data centres boast hundreds of carriers – it is important to look beyond the top line promises.

When it comes to data centre connectivity organisations have diverse requirements, from cost to Quality of Service, and choice is key.  But what does that choice actually mean? Telcos routinely route traffic over each other’s physical networks – indeed, often just reselling each other’s services. So if a company opts for a connection from a given provider, the chances are that the traffic is routed over networks belonging to a variety of other telcos.

This is a great model for creating competition and offering choice, with Tier 2 providers aggregating services from different Tier 1 providers to offer different Service Level Agreements (SLA) and cost models. It is not, however, so good for resilience – especially if a company opts for primary and secondary connections from different carriers that are actually routed over the same physical infrastructure from a Tier 1 provider such as BT or Level 3. If anything happens to damage that physical cable – from road works onwards – both connections will fail.

While the list of possible connections may look promising, it’s important to look beyond the top line promises

Before making the data centre decision, therefore, it is essential to ask some pertinent questions, from the number of different entry points into the building to the number of Tier 1 and Tier 2 carriers that are providing connections within that data centre.

Digging deeper

So what are the questions you need to ask?

1. The first question for most organisations is whether the data centre has a relationship with its incumbent WAN provider. If so, it will be easy to connect into the network and get operational quickly. If not, there will be a number of challenges facing that carrier in creating a link to the data centre that could add significantly to the cost.
2. How many diverse entry points are there into the data centre building? Don’t just assume that because a data centre provider boasts hundreds of carrier relationships that there are many different physical connection points: indeed, many data centres have just two. As a result, choice is limited and the carriers will be constrained in the SLAs they can offer simply due to the limitations of the infrastructure.
3. How many Tier 1 providers & how many Tier 2 providers are there – and which is the underpinning carrier network being used by each?
   a) To ensure resilience an organisation needs to use different infrastructure coming into the building at different entry points.
   b) To ensure choice a data centre should have not only multiple entry points but also lots of Tier 2 carrier relationships – this will enable both competition and the creation of different cost/quality of service packages to meet diverse business requirements.
4. How much will it cost to get a connection from your office location to the data centre? For example, to get a 10Gb connection from a central London office to an office outside the M25 will cost significantly more, than connecting to a central London data centre that is located just around the corner.
5. What are the options for connectivity outside the UK – to Europe, the US and/or Asia Pacific? Depending on both current and predicted business requirements, access to a carrier with excellent international connectivity capacity could be an important consideration.

Planning ahead

While organisations typically only review the WAN provider every three to five years, it is important to remember that the data centre relationship is likely to last even longer. What happens in three years’ time if the company decides to change carrier for the WAN and the new provider does not have a relationship with the data centre? While it will be possible for the new carrier to connect to an existing service within the data centre, the process will not be straightforward and the company is likely to incur additional costs – costs that may undermine the business case associated with the carrier decision. Ensuring the data centre has a broad range of Tier 1 and Tier 2 providers on board is key to avoiding either additional costs or constraining carrier options further down the line.

Hoping a data centre will add carrier relationships during your tenure with them is a little risky

Indeed, during the typical life of a data centre relationship an organisation’s connectivity requirements will evolve in line with business changes – from the company looking to add cloud services to the managed services provider expanding into new markets.  Hoping that a data centre will add carrier relationships during this time may be a little risky – especially when it comes to those critical Tier 1 relationships that add resilience.

The truth is that once a data centre is in place, adding new physical connections is far from easy: it incurs all the cost, complexity and legal ramifications of digging up roads to lay fibre. So, if a data centre today only offers two physical connections into the building, the likelihood is that two is all it will ever offer. And that may be fine; it will still enable a number of Tier 2 carriers to offer a variety of services across the infrastructure – but it does limit a company’s options in the longer term.

From resiliency to cost, choice to quality of service, accurately ascertaining the true quality of the carrier relationships on offer with a data centre today should be an essential component of any decision making process.

SYS-CON Media announced that Cisco, a worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow, has launched a new ad campaign in Cloud Computing Journal.
The ad campaign, a webcast titled Business Intelligence Through Location Services, focuses on where customers go, and what they do, inside your offices, stores, and branches. It discusses the network design and solutions that can help you transform your location-based insights into real business intelligence.

read more