The IT infrastructure of modern businesses require a number of seemingly never-ending cycles to track assets. As these assets go through different stages of usefulness or functionality, IT teams must constantly manage the process, which takes them away from other more important tasks and saddles them with mundane contractual obligations, maintenance reviews, cost-analysis and procurement paperwork. What’s the alternative to opening your IT komodo to a myriad of vendor pitches and the scrutiny of the finance department? Obsolescence.
No self-respecting IT person would allow their infrastructure to dissolve into obscurity and place the business at risk. Enter the domain of Infrastructure Lifecycle Management or ILM. ILM is a method of keeping the IT infrastructure aligned with a business so that it’s functional from the time it’s implemented through its retirement. The ever-present and constant specter of ILM does have the benefit of ensuring effective asset management, configuration, deployment and disposal while setting up the technology standards and maintaining continuity. However, there are many assets – with varying dates of obsolescence to contend with.
Storage Has Evolved – It Now Provides the Context & Management of Data
Information infrastructure is taking storage, which is a very fundamental part of any data center infrastructure, and putting context around it by adding value on what has been typically seen as a commodity item.
Bits in and of themselves have little value. Add context to it and assign value to that information and it becomes an information infrastructure. Organizations need to seek to add value to their datacenter environments by leveraging some advanced technologies that have become part of our landscape. These technologies include software defined storage, solid state storage, and cloud based storage. Essentially, there is a new way to deliver a datacenter application data infrastructure.
Storage has evolved
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzbwG0g-Y7c
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By Randy Weis, Practice Manager – Information Infrastructure
What are the five most common challenges new cloud customers have?
Nigel Beighton, VP Technology, Rackspace, discusses the five most common cloud problems customers face, and how businesses can overcome these.
1. Support
The most common cloud services complaint is the lack of support and management that comes when businesses are embarking on any level of cloud migration.
Businesses need to consider their wider approach to cloud operations first and ask themselves if they are going to run it internally, 24×7 or get someone else to do the hard work of scaling, automation controls and data recovery when needed.
Businesses that have a trained staff-base can do this internally, but many don’t so an understanding and sympathetic support layer cannot be overvalued.
When choosing a cloud provider, it’s crucial to know that the service delivered will offer scalable flexibility so that the customer can get on with their core business without worrying about day-to-day operations. A low-cost cloud infrastructure with no additional support will mean that the onus is always on the customer should they encounter any issues and this all means downtime which can impact your business.
In light of this, it is important to choose a provider that will offer you the appropriate level of managed cloud service with one-to-one, 24/7/365 support and monitoring. You should be able to work with your provider to ensure the infrastructure is able to cope with both expected and unexpected levels of traffic and, if there are issues, your provider should be accountable for any downtime under the Service Level Agreement (SLA) established.
2. Reliability
In terms of reliability, it all comes down to picking a provider that is reputable and proven. Understanding the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is crucial as some providers guarantee a 100% network uptime rate and reimburse users for any downtime. What’s important is that users try services before they commit. That way, if there are affected components within the operation of the cloud service or a server is lost, you can rest assured that the right support will be there to manage and compensate for any issues.
3. Performance
When considering the hosting of your website, a common problem is that many businesses focus on what they need now, rather than what they need in the future. In many instances, performance ultimately ends up being higher in the cloud because there is more available capacity and scalability. In other cases (most notably running a database server), performance may be less than on a traditional server. It is prudent for users to benchmark their application in the cloud to determine when you’re likely to have peaks in demand and take into consideration the different hosting solutions to suit your requirements.
If performance is a major determining issue, a ‘hybrid’ cloud can often be the right hosting solution, allowing the user to bring together the best of both worlds: the scalability and cost efficiencies of cloud computing and the performance of dedicated servers. A hybrid cloud solution means businesses can quickly add or ‘scale’ capacity for busy periods and reduce it when demand dies down, keeping IT costs to a minimum by only paying for the services they use. This removes the need to make large, and often risky, one-off investments, without having to compromise performance.
4. Flexibility
Flexibility can be a difficult hurdle to overcome, with many customers fearing loss of control as they shy away from the risk of getting ‘locked-in’ to one single solution. Different types of clouds offer different levels of customisation and flexibility. Clouds that implement standard technology stacks and are participating in cloud standardisation efforts are the most suitable choice to enable application mobility. The uptake of open clouds has gained huge momentum and the future will very likely involve federation between public-to-public as well as public to on premise/hosted private clouds. There are lots of options out there to fit a range of needs, it’s just a case of researching and talking to providers about what they can offer.
5. Moving everything to the cloud
Moving everything to the cloud can be a real challenge as, while cloud is here to stay, it will not replace all traditional hosting or on-premise deployments.
Rather, it will complement them. There will always be situations where security requirements, flexibility, performance or control will preclude the cloud. Taking a strategically intelligent approach to those elements of data and processing that are best suited to traditionally hosted or on-premise servers, while also planning for hybrid connection to greater depth of cloud is the way forward.
Cloud computing has grown, developed and evolved very rapidly over the last half decade and it is widely agreed that a closed, single-source, proprietary and unsupported cloud model is not necessarily a good idea. Given the option, firms can usually see that an open, multi-protocol, standards -based managed cloud option makes a lot of sense.
@CloudExpo | Making a #Cloud-Enabled SaaS Delivery Model a Reality
Fujitsu has a long and demonstrated history delivering world-class solutions that enable businesses to succeed in a highly competitive market and ever-evolving technology landscape. The Fujitsu Cloud ISV Partner Program is one more way we’re delivering exceptional value to our customers, where we focus on helping companies transform and deliver their solutions in an “as-a-service” model from our cloud. Our aim is to work closely with leading solution providers to take full advantage of not only our platform and tools, but the underlying shift in how the market consumes technology solutions today. With the Fujitsu Cloud ISV Partner Program, we offer the chance for solution providers to step into a leadership role and maximize the benefits of the latest cloud technology, including not only the transformation and delivery of their solutions as SaaS, but also for support in areas like sales, marketing, professional services, and across innovative operating and revenue models that support a “zero cost” option for the partner.
‘Internet of Things’ and The Transformation of GE (#IoT) | @ThingsExpo
General Electric (GE) has been a household name for more than a century, thanks in large part to its role in making households easier to run. Starting with the light bulb invented by its founder, Thomas Edison, GE has been selling devices (“things”) to consumers throughout its 122-year history. Last week, GE announced that it is officially leaving that job to others. While the lighting division will stay, GE will now turn its attention to selling industrial machinery and analytics as a service to other companies.
GE’s transformation to focus on building industrial machines such as aircraft engines, locomotives, gas-fired turbines and medical imaging equipment has been underway for quite some time. But for those that grew up with GE, the company’s catchy slogan, “We bring good things to life,” used between 1979 and 2003, is synonymous with what the brand stood for. Who could have imagined in 1979 when its advertising firm first came up with that memorable catchphrase how well the slogan would capture where GE was headed in the era of the industrial Internet and the Internet of Things (IoT)? GE has been systematically moving to secure its place in both of these fields. Wind turbines, locomotives, jet engines and other industrial machines are all examples of products that have successfully transitioned to being sold as a service.
Yahoo!’s @MDKail to Present at @DevOpsSummit Silicon Valley [#DevOps]
Having just joined a large technology company with 20 years of history, it would be suicidal to believe that I can immediately move the entire organization to the DevOps mindset and model. For those not familiar with the term, “Eventual Consistency” is a model used in distributed computing to ensure high availability. In this context, it’s a model for replicating best practices and automation across IT teams and business units.
The logical place to start with automation is the on-boarding of a new employee. That process should be as seamless and streamlined as possible, with a pristine source of truth. The goal is to populate a list of attributes and replicate them out to the various systems, and that’s applicable to either a new employee or an existing one who changes roles. Core infrastructure deployment is also at the base of the DevOps stack. Automate the provisioning of compute, network, and storage, and provide continuous insight into the utilization.
Moving Enterprise Applications Into a Cloud Model at @CloudExpo [by @NuoDB]
As more applications and services move “to the cloud” (public or on-premise) cloud environments are increasingly adopting and building out traditional enterprise features. This in turn is enabling and encouraging cloud adoption from enterprise users. In many ways the definition is blurring as features like continuous operation, geo-distribution or on-demand capacity become the norm. NuoDB is involved in both building enterprise software and using enterprise cloud capabilities.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Seth Proctor, CTO at NuoDB, Inc., will discuss the experiences from building, deploying and using enterprise services and suggest some ways to approach moving enterprise applications into a cloud model.
In a Cloud Economy Interoperability Matters at @CloudExpo [by @Canonical]
Every healthy ecosystem is diverse. This is especially true in cloud ecosystems, where portability and interoperability are more important than old enterprise models of proprietary ownership.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mark Baker, Server Product Manager at Canonical/Ubuntu, will discuss how single vendors used to take the lead in creating and delivering technology, but in a cloud economy, where users want tools of their preference, when and where they need them, it makes no sense.
Speaker Bio:
Mark Baker is currently working at Canonical in Product Strategy for Ubuntu Server and Cloud. He has more than 20 years of experience managing business development and marketing at leading software companies including MySQL, Red Hat and Oracle.
Red Hat CEO claims it is “only a matter of time” before cloud winners emerge
The CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst, has spoken of the “huge opportunity” to become the leader in enterprise cloud in a newsletter, describing the shift from client-server to cloud-mobile as a “once in every 20 years” change.
Whitehurst put pen to paper summing up Red Hat’s summer on a positive note with a glut of acquisitions and partner news over the past few months. The most recent of these was the buyout of Irish mobile backend as a service provider FeedHenry, as reported extensively on sister site Enterprise AppsTech last week.
The acquisition of FeedHenry made Red Hat’s third of the fiscal year, after open source storage system firm Inktank in April, and cloud services provider eNovance in June. Each acquisition, naturally, plays right into Red Hat’s strategic shift of an open hybrid cloud – and it’s also the case with strategic partnerships, including Cisco, Nokia and Google.
“When I talk to customers and partners, they are excited about the moves Red Hat is making, and they are thrilled by the leadership and enterprise open source know-how Red Hat is bringing to a promising and fast-growing project like OpenStack,” Whitehurst wrote, adding: “We want to show customers that open is better. We are bringing customers the tools they need to build their infrastructure from the ground up with open source, enabling amazing flexibility and choice.”
It’s safe to say Whitehurst’s claims to be the ‘undisputed leader in enterprise cloud’ might see raised eyebrows at IBM and SAP towers, just to name two examples. But the Red Hat chief’s vision about the state of the cloud market can be resonated by all its competitors.
“We’re staring at a huge opportunity,” he added, “the chance to become the leader in enterprise cloud, much like we are the leader in enterprise open source.
“The competition is fierce, and companies will have several choices for their cloud needs. But the prize is the chance to establish open source as the default choice of this next era, and to position Red Hat as the provider of choice for enterprises’ entire cloud infrastructure.”
Red Hat isn’t the only tech firm to ditch its hand recently. The legacy software vendors, such as IBM, SAP and Oracle – whose long-serving CEO Larry Ellison stepped down last week to move into a more technical role – are moving in the same direction.
But Red Hat is aiming to change from being the leaders of Linux to platform as a service kings. And given Amazon’s cloud services run on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the company will hope to become the power behind the throne.
Databarracks survey shows slow uptake of DRaaS – but that will change
The latest survey from cloud provider Databarracks has found that small businesses are lagging behind when it comes to disaster recovery planning and cloud exit strategies.
Only 30% of smaller businesses had a business continuity plan in place, compared to 54% of medium organisations and 73% of large businesses. The findings, which appear in Databarracks’ annual Data Health Check report (registration link here), showed a poor uptake in smaller businesses for now, but added that disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) was either the most or second most likely service to be adopted – across all business sizes.
The report firstly examined the state of cloud computing across businesses. The majority of companies (25%) still use only one cloud computing service, yet a solid amount use two (23%). The numbers trail off afterwards (three cloud services 7%, five cloud services plus 4%), yet as the report notes: “More cloud services are being used, but adoption is gradual and often discrete.”
The most popular cloud service was backup as a service (BaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) with 21% of the vote, followed by IaaS, PaaS (18%) and DRaaS (16%).
Smaller organisations aren’t putting disaster recovery plans in place, or testing their plans if they do have them, but all organisations are at risk of losing data. Hardware failure (21%), software failure (19%) and good old fashioned human error (18%) were the key reasons for data loss. Not surprisingly, lack of time (35%) is cited as the biggest reason for firms not testing their plans.
For larger organisations, 22% listed human error as the main cause of data loss over the past 12 months, compared to just 6% of smaller firms. 23% of small organisations have no data retention policy, compared to 3% of large organisations.
The overall verdict is clear: disaster recovery needs to be part of the process at any level.
“Disasters don’t discriminate when it comes to the size of your organisation,” said Peter Groucutt, Databarracks MD, adding: “And it’s not just the media-worthy incidents such as cyber-attacks or natural disasters that are a risk.
“There needs to be an attitude change. Disaster recovery is not only available and affordable to organisations of all sizes, it’s absolutely essential.”
After cloud provider Nirvanix shut down in September last year, Gartner analyst Kyle Hilgendorf noted how the research firm’s advice on cloud exit strategies were falling on deaf ears.
“I suspect it is because cloud exits are not nearly as sexy as cloud deployments – they are an afterthought,” wrote Hilgendorf. “These functions rarely receive the attention they deserve in IT, except for immediately following major events.”
The Databarracks study shows that companies are starting to pay attention to this – but it will take a little while to see through first.
Read more: Disaster Recovery as a Service: Can small businesses now benefit?