Ethernet storage solutions company, Coraid, recently announced they will offer support for SanDisk Optimus 1.6TB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drives (SSDs) on the EtherDrive scale-out storage platform.

The Coraid EtherDrive SRX6000 series storage appliances, loaded with Optimus 1.6TB SAS SSDs, offers a scalable network storage solution with the functionality of more than double the throughput. It also offers up to five times input/output operations per Second (IOPS) compared to previous EtherDrive SRX models. The primary audience for the EtherDrive SRX6000 includes cloud and enterprise data centers and is optimized for I/O-intensive applications, such as server virtualization and web applications, and cloud environments.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that the Wall Street Technology Association (WSTA) has been named “Association Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 15th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The Wall Street Technology Association (WSTA®) provides financial industry technology professionals, vendors, service providers, and consultants with forums to learn from and connect with each other. The WSTA facilitates seminars and networking events where members meet and exchange ideas and best practices that assist them in effectively capitalizing on technology advances and dealing with financial industry business challenges. Founded in 1967, the WSTA is a not-for-profit association with a long history of evolving to meet the needs of its members.

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Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, Public Sector Technology

Salesforce announced a private SuperPod hosting of the Salesforce offering for HP at Dreamforce. This announcement appears to open the door to a more nuanced hybrid delivery model where the distinction between public and private cloud services is becoming a matter of customer choice.

The SuperPod may provide a bridge that enables some customers to access the benefits of SaaS while keeping data in dedicated infrastructure. Enterprises, however, need to be careful about wishing for a “private” cloud.

Unless there are definite and unavoidable regulatory or legal drivers, the better path is probably to learn how to live safely in the public cloud. That, after all, is where the real economies of scale and scope are to be found. It is also increasingly the destination of choice of both customers and employees.

Introducing the SuperPod

Dreamforce 13 was, as usual, an impressive …

As you may know, OpenNebula’s approach to cloud bursting (that is, its hybrid cloud model) is quite unique. The reason behind this uniqueness is the transparency to both end users and cloud administrators to use and maintain the cloud bursting functionality.

The transparency to cloud administrators comes from the fact that a an AWS EC2 region is modelled as any other host (albeit of potentially a much bigger capacity), so the scheduler can place VMs in EC2 as it will do in any other local host. Of course, the scheduler algorithm can be tuned so the EC2 host (or hosts, more on this below) is picked last, so it will be only used only if there is a real need (ie, the local infrastructure cannot cope with the demand). On the other hand, the transparency to end users is offered through the hybrid template functionality: the same VM template in OpenNebula can describe the VM if it is deployed locally and also if it gets deployed in Amazon EC2. So users just have to instantiate the template, and OpenNebula will transparently chose if that is executed locally or remotely. Very convenient, isn’t it?

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Internap Network Services Corporation has announced the beta availability of the next generation of its public cloud, AgileCLOUD, which will fully expose both virtualized and bare-metal compute instances over a native OpenStack API and deliver significant performance, interoperability and flexibility benefits.
Raj Dutt, senior vice president of technology at Internap, stated that, “AgileCLOUD is now 100% OpenStack ‘under the hood,’ which provides an open, interoperable framework that helps us deliver a dramatically more scalable platform.”

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Nine in 10 respondents claim the primary reason their company uses the MySQL database is because of its open source nature, according to a survey from SkySQL.

And there’s bad news attached to that statement: a whopping 94% admitted they would move to MariaDB if MySQL lots its open source power.

The survey opened up some interesting thoughts on the development of MySQL, which has only been on the market since 1995. More than half (57%) of respondents have used MySQL for between three and 10 years, with over a quarter (28%) using MySQL for over 10 years.

This gives an indication of the longevity of the system, and the loyalty of companies using it – but the tide may be turning.

Perhaps the most worrying statistic was that four in five (79%) organisations only use internal resources to support MySQL. 9% used Oracle, with 8% opting for survey creators …

Which tablet will work best for an enterprise BYOD strategy? It turns out that, if you’ve done your back-end homework, any of the top three or four will do just fine.
Now that server hardware decisions are no-brainers (thanks to virtualization and the ubiquity of multi-core 64-bit x86), deciding on the enterprise-wide purchase of a tablet computer types will be the biggest hardware choice many IT leaders will make.
So what guides these tablet decisions? Do the attributes of the mobile device and platform (the nature of the thing) count most? Or is it more important that it conforms to the fast-changing needs of the back-end services and cloud ecosystem? Can the tablet be flexible and adaptive, to act really as many client types in one (the nurture)?

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Start-ups have been formed by leveraging cloud resources but enterprises are taking note and adoption rates are increasing.
While attending the Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference last week, I spoke to enterprise customers who described how they benefited from AWS cloud services. One customer converted a $70K bid from a systems integrator for a hosted website and implemented it on AWS for less than $7K. Another customer estimated the cost of acquiring an on-premises business intelligence solution for $200K plus maintenance compared to under $10K a year on AWS. Savings like this will prompt enterprises to assess and migrate applications to the public cloud while addressing privacy and security concerns.

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SaaS is the cutting-edge technology in the current product landscape. With an increase in the adoption of SaaS products by enterprises, more and more ISVs are trying the SaaS delivery channel. But, delivering a SaaS product cannot be considered as just a rebranding exercise of existing products. Products mostly have been architected, written, refined and customized over years with an underlying assumption that “an isolated runtime environment (i.e., isolated customer data and code execution environment) is available for each customer”. The current trend is to offer SaaS as a multi-tenanted product. This challenges the underlying assumption of the existing products. Architectures need to be re-thought to ensure that running the product in a non-isolated runtime environment for a customer does not introduce conflicts between different customer features. Moreover products have been created to scale for a single enterprise load. In a multi-tenanted environment, the same product needs to scale for a higher loads. In other words, existing products have been written as “Server Applications” and not “Cloud Applications.”

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SaaS is the cutting-edge technology in the current product landscape. With an increase in the adoption of SaaS products by enterprises, more and more ISVs are trying the SaaS delivery channel. But, delivering a SaaS product cannot be considered as just a rebranding exercise of existing products. Products mostly have been architected, written, refined and customized over years with an underlying assumption that “an isolated runtime environment (i.e., isolated customer data and code execution environment) is available for each customer”. The current trend is to offer SaaS as a multi-tenanted product. This challenges the underlying assumption of the existing products. Architectures need to be re-thought to ensure that running the product in a non-isolated runtime environment for a customer does not introduce conflicts between different customer features. Moreover products have been created to scale for a single enterprise load. In a multi-tenanted environment, the same product needs to scale for a higher loads. In other words, existing products have been written as “Server Applications” and not “Cloud Applications.”

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