SYS-CON Events announced today that Panzura, a leading provider of global cloud storage solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Panzura optimizes enterprise data storage management and distribution in the cloud, making cloud storage simple and secure. Panzura’s revolutionary global cloud storage solution seamlessly combines the flexibility, performance and productivity benefits of distributed storage with the manageability, security and cost benefits of centralized storage, overcoming fundamental “administrator vs. user” and “budget vs. performance” conflicts. With Panzura, data location no longer affects usage.
Cloud Expo New York: Agile IaaS with the OVH Dedicated Cloud
It is common to see providers deploy cloud instances using automation, but what happens when these same principles are applied to the provisioning of the infrastructure?
In his General Session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Jean-Sebastien Bruneau, Cloud Architect at OVH.com, will provide insider information on how OVH, winner of the VMware Global Partner Network Award 2013, can make automation work to provide IaaS that scales within minutes.
Jean-Sebastien Bruneau is Cloud Architect at OVH.com. Based in Canada, he joined the team not long after OVH.com opened its first North American Datacenter and has been working his “Cloud-Fu” since. He divides his time evangelising, facilitating customers’ onboarding and leading the internal cloud training program.
Infographic: Tech Giants & Their Overflowing Cash Coffers
SAP to Buy E-Commerce Firm
SAP is buying hybris, a 16-year-old $85 million-a-year Swiss e-commerce company, expecting to deliver the next-generation e-commerce platform for on-premise and cloud deployment.
It claims the purchase, which many have expected for a long time, puts it at the leading edge of the consumer economy, raising the stakes in customer relationship management (CRM) and defining the next-generation customer experience.
Terms weren’t disclosed, but All Things Digital thinks the deal is costing SAP $1.2 billion-$1.5 billion.
hybris just got $30 million from the VCs in March including Meritech Capital Partners and Greylock Israel. Its majority investor is Huntsman Gay Global Capital (HGGC), a private investment firm based in Palo Alto, California.
Skyera Shows Enterprise Solid-State Cloud Storage Systems at Cloud Expo NY
Dr. Radoslav Danilak, CEO and co-founder of Skyera Inc., will present on next-generation flash memory technologies to attendees of Cloud Expo New York, June 10-13 at the Javits Center in New York City. Skyera will also show its 44-terabyte skyHawk, a complete enterprise solid-state storage solution with the low latency and scalability that cloud services demand – with the highest density, smallest form-factor and lowest power consumption in the industry – in booth 214.
Danilak’s speech on using flash memory as primary storage for the cloud is featured on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 12 as part of the conference’s Cloud Storage, Security & Performance session.
According to Danilak, only a system-level approach to flash memory management can meet the increasing performance demands of the cloud while bringing the price of all solid-state systems to a level that is equal to high performance HDDs. Innovations are necessary to make the latest generation of 19/20 nm MLC flash memory usable in mainstream enterprise cloud storage. In addition, reducing high costs that keep flash memory from serving as primary storage (as compared to caches or tiers) is very important. His session will highlight flash technology trends for the cloud, and offer system level solutions that will advance flash memory in the enterprise cloud storage market.
Centrify for SaaS Supports Office 365
Centrify, which made its bones making Microsoft’s popular Active Directory accessible to Redmond’s enemies list, is spreading its wings and snuggling up closer to Microsoft at the same time by throwing it something of a lifeline.
See, Microsoft expects Office 365 to be one of the fastest-growing businesses in its history. It’s already claimed it’s got a billion-dollar run rate. There’s only one little problem.
The widgetry Microsoft supplies for Active Directory integration – ADFS or Active Directory Federation Services – is a pain in the proverbial tail for both Microsoft’s field personnel and the channel, which is paid to sell Office 365 and hardly needs to spend hours wrestling with the slippery stuff since it actually takes pricey dedicated hardware and specialized knowledge of the operating system to get it up and running.
Cloud Technology Partners to Demo PaaSLane at Cloud Expo New York
Cloud Technology Partners, a provider of transforming businesses with cloud solutions, has announced that it will provide the first public demonstrations of PaaSLane at next week’s 12 International Cloud Expo, June 10-13, at the Javits Center in New York City. Additionally, David Linthicum, senior vice president (SVP), will lead a session uncovering the true value of industry-specific clouds.
PaaSLane is a software tool that substantially reduces the time and effort required to migrate applications to the cloud. Traditionally, cloud migration assessments are a manual process that can take months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. PaaSLane automates the process by evaluating application source code against a customizable rules engine to identify cloud compliance and compatibility issues. To learn more and/or request to join the private beta release, please visit www.paaslane.com.
Quantum to Present on Future of Cloud Data Protection at Cloud Expo NY
Quantum Corp., a proven global expert in data protection and Big Data management, has announced that Senior Vice President of Cloud Solutions Henrik Rosendahl will present a session exploring the future of cloud data protection and the impact of data reduction technologies on cloud storage at the 12th International Cloud Expo. The conference takes place June 10-13 at the Javits Center in New York City.
Rosendahl will explore trends in cloud-based backup and disaster recovery (DR) and how current approaches to cloud data protection often fall short. He will look at in-house versus subscription cloud backup as a service models and how on-premise backup for local recovery has advantages. Rosendahl will also discuss the perception versus reality of cloud-based backup and DR as a service for changing CAPEX to OPEX. Finally, the session will explore how long-term archive and big data management are converging with cloud, providing the potential for seamless backup and archive for all data types.
Is There Such a Thing as Just-In-Time IT?
By Praveen Asthana, Chief Marketing Officer, Gravitant
The concept of “Just-in-Time” was pioneered in the manufacturing supply chain as a critical way to reduce costs by minimizing inventory. Implementing a just-in-time system that can handle unexpected demand is not a trivial undertaking. It requires the confluence of a number of disciplines such as analytics, statistics, sourcing, procurement, production management, brokerage and economics.
An interesting new idea is to take this concept pioneered in manufacturing and apply it to Information Technology resources. Doing this can provide an effective way to meet dynamically changing needs while minimizing the inventory of unused IT resources across a set of cloud services platform and providers.
Case Study: Election Day 2012.
With the growing popularity of e-voting and use of the Internet as an information resource on candidates and issues, the Secretary of State’s office for one of the most populous U.S. states knew that demand for IT resources would go up significantly on election day. But they didn’t know exactly how much, and they didn’t want to buy extra infrastructure for a temporary surge in demand. Even if they could come up with a good guess for the demand, deploying the right amount of resources in a timely manner would be challenging. Given the time it normally took (months) to deploy and provision new servers, the Secretary of State’s office knew they couldn’t use traditional means to procure compute and storage capacity to meet this demand.
As it turned out, demand went up over 1000% to over five million hits on the state voting web site by noon on Election Day.
Fortunately the state had deployed a novel capability based on a cloud brokerage and management platform to seamlessly provision IT resources in real time from multiple public cloud sources to meet the variability in demand. As a result, this demand was fully met without needing to do complicated planning or buy unneeded infrastructure. I’ll actually be speaking on a webinar with Chris Ward, CTO at GreenPages-LogicsOne and Dave Bartoletti, a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research on June 12th to talk about leveraging cloud brokerage and the impact it can have on managing your IT environment.
Minutes, not months—that’s what enterprise users want when it comes to having I.T. resources available to meet changing business needs or develop new applications.
However users find this to be an extraordinary challenge—most IT departments today struggle with rigid processes, a round-robin of tasks and approvals across multiple silos and departments, and manual provisioning steps. All this adds significant time to the deployment of I.T. resources resulting in users waiting for months before the resources they need become available.
How do users respond to such delays? By going around their IT departments and directly accessing cloud services. Often termed ‘rogue IT’ or ‘shadow IT,’ such out of process actions expose the company to financial risk, security risks, and operational risk.
The Solution: Just-in-time IT with Real-Time Governance
Just-in-time IT is not merely about using private or public cloud services. It is about engineering the end-to-end IT supply chain so it can be agile and respond immediately to dynamic business needs. To achieve this in practice, you need:
- Effective assessment and strategy
- Self-service catalog of available IT resources
- Collaborative solution design
- Rapid approval work flow
- Sourcing platform that allows you to select the right supply chain partners for your business need or workload profile.
- Single button provisioning of resources
- Transparency across the IT supply chain
- Sophisticated supply-demand analytics
- Elastic source for resources
- Governance—dynamic control of resources based on goal based optimization of budget, resource usage and SLAs.
The first critical aspect of real time supply chain is identifying, sourcing and procurement of best fit cloud platforms and providers (internal or external) to meet your unique business needs.
The second critical aspect of ensuring just-in-time IT is effective is real-time governance, for this is the mechanism by which you truly manage the elasticity of cloud resources and ensure that IT resource inventory is minimized. This also has the additional benefit of eliminating shadow or rogue I.T.
As I mentioned above, if you’re interested in learning more on this topic I would highly recommend registering for the upcoming webinar “What’s Missing In Today’s Hybrid Cloud Management – Leveraging Cloud Brokerage” being held on June 12th. This should be a great session and there will be time for Q & A at the end.
About the Author:
Praveen Asthana is Chief Marketing Officer of Gravitant (www.gravitant.com), a cloud services brokerage and management company. Prior to joining Gravitant, Praveen was Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for Dell’s $13B Enterprise Solutions Division.
Informatica aims to get its “Vibe” back
Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Enterprise Solutions
Informatica, which pioneered the current data integration tooling market, is seeking to reboot growth by targeting midmarket prospects who have traditionally perceived its solutions as too complex and expensive. The technology linchpin of this strategy is “Vibe,” a service-oriented architecture to deconstruct and make Informatica’s technologies more easily embeddable into third-party tools and/or cloud-based services.
This is not the first time that Informatica has promoted an OEM technology and go-to-market strategy for its products. But Vibe marks the first time that Informatica is enabling OEM partners to embed pieces of its capabilities, rather than entire Informatica products, opening the possibility of competing head-on with low-cost/no-cost rivals who have staked out the entry level of the ETL and data quality markets.
Technology is only the first step; to capitalize on Vibe, Informatica must adapt its sales and go-to-market model so it …