Cloud adoption is not a straight line proposition. It is increasingly the main push for many organizations looking to upgrade their IT strategy. A major reason for the shift includes the cloud’s obvious benefits; another reasoning stems from the fact that older IT models simply cannot deliver the speed and agility necessary to compete in today’s marketplace.
However, just because cloud is new and popular doesn’t mean it doesn’t require as much or more work than existing systems. With an emphasis on management or even relying on an outsourcing partner, many IT organizations can successfully implement cloud for their organization.
Yet, all businesses could run the risk of falling short of maximizing efficiencies within the cloud and running upadded costs that weren’t estimated for at the outset of a project.
So what are some hidden costs you need to know to look out for to …
VMware vSphere 5.x includes automated server workload balancing in the vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise+ premium suites via two feature sets: Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Distributed Power Management (DPM). DRS and DPM together are intended to provide an automated method for balancing compute capacity and reducing energy consumption in a highly virtualized datacenter.
These capabilities are important to ensure that an organization is efficiently leveraging virtualization host capacity in a manner that provides greatest performance benefits while reducing ongoing operating costs. However, research has shown that 65% to 70% of organizations are running more than one hypervisor. As a result, it’s necessary to provide these capabilities universally on every hypervisor platform in use – not on just the most expensive editions of a single hypervisor.
These capabilities are important to ensure that an organization is efficiently leveraging virtualization host capacity in a manner that provides greatest performance benefits while reducing ongoing operating costs. However, research has shown that 65% to 70% of organizations are running more than one hypervisor. As a result, it’s necessary to provide these capabilities universally on every hypervisor platform in use – not on just the most expensive editions of a single hypervisor.
In this article, we’ll briefly describe each of these key technical areas and contrast with how these same capabilities are delivered in Windows Server 2012, our FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 enterprise-grade bare-metal hypervisor, and System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) across multiple hypervisors in a heterogeneous Private Cloud …
Getting the most out of Big Data means unprecedented amounts of processing power and storage, a wide variety of tools and technologies, and plenty of sandbox space for data scientists to play in. Choosing whether to execute on a Big Data strategy in the cloud or on-premise is not cut-and-dry. For many companies, a thoughtful analysis often leads to a hybrid strategy.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Paul Zolfaghari, President of MicroStrategy, will discuss how “hybrid BI” began as a strategy for complete transition into the cloud and has become a viable long-term strategy to reduce risk and deliver Big Data analytics effectively, efficiently and economically.
“Spring IO is a platform that ushers in a new era for Spring,” said Adrian Colyer, CTO of Application Fabric at Pivotal, as the Enterprise PaaS company announced today at the SpringOne 2GX 2013 conference the new Spring IO Platform with a complete set of new enhancements designed to extend the capabilities, and application development performance of the Spring foundation.
“It features significant new capabilities for developers that will increase productivity, decrease time to production through integrated DevOps capabilities, and enable new classes of applications exploiting big data, analytics, and mobile,” Colyer added.
“Spring IO is a platform that ushers in a new era for Spring,” said Adrian Colyer, CTO of Application Fabric at Pivotal, as the Enterprise PaaS company announced today at the SpringOne 2GX 2013 conference the new Spring IO Platform with a complete set of new enhancements designed to extend the capabilities, and application development performance of the Spring foundation.
“It features significant new capabilities for developers that will increase productivity, decrease time to production through integrated DevOps capabilities, and enable new classes of applications exploiting big data, analytics, and mobile,” Colyer added.
Every business is different, and their infrastructure is sure to follow suit. However, just as there are standards within best practices for cloud, so too are there consistencies where cloud platforms are concerned.
When we say cloud platforms, however, we don’t mean open or closed clouds, like Rackspace versus AWS. Instead we are referring to public, private and hybrid clouds.
A recent Business Technology Roundtable blog post delved into an IDC study, finding that companies are increasingly leveraging hosted private clouds. IDC points to the hosted private cloud as the new backbone to the infrastructure services, “…transforming existing provider models for IT outsourcing, hosting infrastructure services, and other key IT industries.”
Maintaining email servers is a full-time job including server maintenance, filtering spam, blocking viruses, and creating backups. A hosted Exchange service frees up IT time by putting all of these tasks in the hands of the email host. Even still, the myths surrounding hosted Exchange persist. Let’s knock them out one at a time to see why Exchange might make sense for you.
Myth #1: Hosted Exchange is Only for Large Businesses
Because of the time it takes to manage an Exchange server, small businesses can take the most advantage of a third-party email system. While large businesses can also use Exchange, small business IT departments have more tasks to keep the company running. Allowing the host to manage the email servers takes much of the busy work away from IT personnel, so they can focus on more internal issues instead of maintaining servers.
Every business is different, and their infrastructure is sure to follow suit. However, just as there are standards within best practices for cloud, so too are there consistencies where cloud platforms are concerned.
When we say cloud platforms, however, we don’t mean open or closed clouds, like Rackspace versus AWS. Instead we are referring to public, private and hybrid clouds.
A recent Business Technology Roundtable blog post delved into an IDC study, finding that companies are increasingly leveraging hosted private clouds. IDC points to the hosted private cloud as the new backbone to the infrastructure services, “…transforming existing provider models for IT outsourcing, hosting infrastructure services, and other key IT industries.”
Enterprise applications are increasing in complexity, with multi-tier and distributed applications being the new standards for dealing with high-volume, high-scale requirements. In many development environments, the ideal scenario is to enable DevOps teams to manage dev/test environments in public clouds, with on-demand, usage based billing model – and to ultimately deploy these complex applications in on-premises clouds. Achieving application portability between heterogeneous cloud environments is critical to achieve the productivity goals of DevOps – yet often requires time-consuming workarounds. This article will present examples of approaches employed today, including newer options for model-driven cloud management platforms with their emphasis on automating application portability and approach to eliminating cloud lock-in.
Cloud scalability and performance should be at the heart of every successful internet venture. The infrastructure needs to be resilient, flexible, and fast – it’s best not to get caught thinking about architecture until the middle of an emergency, when it’s too late.
In his interactive, no-holds-barred session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate at SoftLayer, dives into how to design and build-out the right cloud infrastructure.
Phil Jackson is Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer. He helps customers and partners integrate with the SoftLayer’s API. He also architects the company’s Drupal websites, writes API documentation, and maintains the developer blog. Formerly, he was a Sales Engineer building internal tools and providing technical consultation for potential and existing customers.
Jackson started his career in webhosting at Ev1Servers where he led the training department. With a passion for technology that started at a young age, he has developed skills in a variety of scripting and programming languages and enjoys sharing his knowledge with the tech community.