Mobility is the way of the future. In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Jason Prater, VP of Development at Plex Systems, will outline the hybrid approach behind the development of a groundbreaking application that combines mobility and cloud technology for manufacturers. He will outline how his product and platform development teams were able to bring SMBs the flexibility of using any mobile platform and location to access cloud functions.
Because an enhancement is useless until it is in the users’ hands, Prater coupled agile development with an agile, continuous deployment process to launch this mobile cloud computing capability within an accelerated timeframe. Hear, in this “Hot Topics” track session, how this was accomplished.

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Ohio-based LLT Barcode & Label, has found powerful new ways to develop sales and leads inexpensively using Ariba Discovery to better connect with qualified new customers.
Social tools, big data and business networks are reshaping e-commerce in such a way that buyers and sellers are linking up in ways not possible even a few years ago.
In one example, Ohio-based LLT Barcode & Label, has found powerful new ways to develop sales and leads inexpensively using Ariba Discovery to better connect with qualified new customers.

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Why has cloud computing failed to deliver on the promise of true high availability? Have we reached the limits of operational performance? Or are there emerging technologies that may make terms, like ‘downtime,’ ‘scheduled outage,’ or ‘unreachable’ obsolete?
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Dr. Jay Smith, CTO of Lagrange Systems will review weaknesses inherent in today’s approach to cloud computing and showcase how the next generation of technological advances will enable 99.999% or better.

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TwinStrata on Monday unveiled the latest release of its CloudArray software, which gives customers the ability to access production snapshots of their data remotely. Coupled with new accelerated cache reload capabilities, the new release drastically simplifies disaster recovery and testing. TwinStrata CloudArray 4.7 also provides improved encryption key protection, fully integrated support for Cleversafe’s dsNet® dispersed storage technology and support for Keystone authentication for OpenStack platforms.
In May, TwinStrata introduced CloudArray Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), which provides on-demand disaster recovery for VMware environments. CloudArray 4.7 further extends that capability, enabling organizations to more easily test their disaster recovery plans by providing access to in-cloud, production snapshots of their data from a secondary CloudArray. As a result, customers can conduct fire drills without shutting down their primary site, streamlining the process and reducing the impact of such tests on day-to-day operations.

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Users need to focus upon cost, security, and availability to reap full cloud benefits. This article, part 3 in a series, present key aspects of availability monitoring.
While cost brings people to the cloud, agility and availability keep them using. For sophisticated users, AWS (and other public clouds) offers tremendous advantages in terms of availability – need another 100 servers? We can spin those up instantly. Unexpected CDN demand? No problem. Want to test something out? We’ll get the resources right away.
The public cloud offers nearly unlimited capacity in a nearly instantaneous manner.
However, using a public cloud is far more complex than it first appears. There are numerous opportunities for missteps. Unfortunately, the errors are rarely obvious and always sacrifice functionality (see a detailed survey of actual user errors).

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Enterprises are eager to implement virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to address BYOD, disaster recovery, mobility, security, EOL for Windows XP and more. But the high cost and complexity of building their own on-premises solution have been huge barriers to VDI adoption.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Danny Allan, CTO at Desktone, will discuss how enterprises are using cloud-hosted desktops and apps to quickly get all the promised benefits of VDI, without VDI’s upfront investment and ongoing infrastructure requirements. Businesses routinely reduce VDI costs by 30%-40%, while eliminating vendor lock-in and delivering much better user experience over on-site VDI.

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Organizations building out private Infrastructure as a Service clouds and utilizing public cloud infrastructure facing the challenging task of using several interface consoles to manage their infrastructure.
One unified console would be ideal to accomplish tasks such as:
Capacity management and planning
Virtual Machine life-cycle and management
Policies to govern access and usage
Quota enforcement and usage
Chargeback and cost allocation

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AppZero, the fastest and most flexible way to move server applications from the datacenter to the cloud, will be exhibiting at VMworld 2013, booth #647, August 25-29 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. Now in its 10th year, VMworld highlights how virtualization and cloud computing can help you spend less time and money supporting underlying IT.
AppZero will showcase its “Up-level” OS migration, new technology that provides one step migration of applications running on Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012. With Windows Server 2003 end of life approaching, companies will be faced with moving large numbers of enterprise applications. AppZero provides the only way to upgrade existing server applications from WS2003 to WS2008 or WS2012 in a cost effective and time saving way.

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IDC has determined that Red Hat’s approach to scale-out storage can present a significant value. In a recently published IDC white paper, sponsored by Red Hat, on the Economics of Software-based Storage, IDC reports:
“Procuring server hardware with internal disks and deploying a software-based storage solution such as Red Hat Storage Server can be nearly 29% cheaper than deploying an average capacity-optimized NAS solution and nearly 49% cheaper than deploying an average capacity-optimized midrange disk storage system. Over a five-year period, these costs shift to 33% and 52%, respectively. While these costs do not include people resource costs, IDC estimates that on average, businesses can save at least 20% on people resource costs.”

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