If an article, 10 years after its initial publication date, is featured in several look backs, reviews, Q&As and still gathers reactions and emotional analysis, it can be concluded it must have struck a chord – or in this case – more an open nerve.
In May 2003*, the Harvard Business Review published “IT Doesn’t Matter” , an article by then still largely unknown editor “at large” Nicholas Carr.
Stagnant budgets, overwhelming data growth, and new user and application demands, are just a few of the many challenges that are putting IT organizations under more pressure today than ever before. As a result, a new approach is required. The session being given by Hitachi Data Systems’ Jeff Lundberg at next month’s 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13, 2013] will discuss why object storage based private cloud is necessary for evolving into a next-generation of IT that supports a new world of applications and storage service delivery models.
BigData (and Hadoop) are buzzword and growth areas of computing; this article will distill the concepts into easy-to-understand terms.
As the name implies, BigData is literally “big data” or “lots of data” that needs to be processed. Lets take a simple example: the city council of San Francisco is required to take a census of its population – literally how many people live at each address. There are city employees who are employed to count the residents. The city of Los Angeles has a similar requirement.
We’ve all heard and understand big data issues: volume, velocity, and variety. But when breaking it down into simple terms, how much data do you think is generated every minute across common platforms?
The answers may shock you. Just remember when reading through that all of these transactions occur in one minute, every day.
(Thanks to Domo for the infographic!)
Guest Post by Paul Vian of Internap
Organizations are increasingly choosing to outsource business-critical applications and content to third-party providers. But, with it comes a long list of questions in order to determine the right mix of IT infrastructure services to meet specific scalability, control, performance and cost requirements. Although a shared public cloud can offer the convenience of easily scaling infrastructure up and down on-demand, many organizations are still hesitant due to concerns around privacy and security within a shared tenancy arrangement. Another complication is that the virtualization layer typically takes around 10 per cent of the resources. Accordingly, dedicated, physical infrastructure is often ideal just for performance purposes.
Which cloud environments are businesses considering?
If a business has a fluctuating workload that has ever-changing demands and requires more resources in the short term, a cloud environment is often still the preferred choice, but this does tend to become more expensive for applications that are always on, such as databases or other highly resource-intensive applications. The reality is that organizations often require something in between, which is driving demand for flexible, hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions that can easily adapt and scale to meet a wide range of use cases and application needs.
What are the benefits of a hybrid cloud infrastructure?
Taking a tailored approach can enable businesses to scale their infrastructures ‘on demand’. It is also now possible for companies utilising physical servers to gain the flexibility and benefits they have been enjoying within a highly virtualized cloud environment in recent years. We are in an age where physical servers can be instantly spun up or down as global demand dictates, so there is no reason why organizations can’t gain the convenience and agility of the cloud with the reliability and performance of physical servers.
How can companies achieve a hybrid cloud infrastructure tailored to their specific needs?
Ideally, companies should look to work with a third-party provider that can provide access to a broader mix of services to meet these emerging demands around scalability in particular. Through working with a provider that takes a consultative sales approach, businesses can benefit from a tailored service that allows them to seamlessly mix, provision and manage both their virtual cloud and physical IT infrastructure – whether this is legacy hardware or back-up equipment. With this approach, businesses can not only meet their diverse application requirements, but also easily address changing global business needs.
We are now seeing things coming full circle; from physical networks, through to virtualization and the cloud, to today’s move towards a hybrid approach. This is in response to the ever-growing sophistication of automation and self-service capabilities, and is the way forward for any forward-thinking organization with a complex list of requirements.
Paul Vian is Internap’s director of business development for Europe, Middle East, and Africa
For many organizations, cloud computing has become an integral part of their everyday business. Many companies are relying on cloud applications for fundamental operations such as CRM and email and are looking to increase utilization of the cloud for other functions. For others, adoption of the cloud along with internal communication about proper protocols for usage has perhaps been slower to evolve or implement.
As recently highlighted in this article in Forbes, it’s been widely observed that employees are experiencing the benefits of cloud computing at home and are often times transferring this personal use into the workplace. Popular applications employees are using both places include Gmail, Skype and Dropbox.
We’ve all heard it. Security and regulatory compliance are issues in the public cloud. And building a private cloud many say does not pass a cost/benefit analysis. Given these hurdles, what is an enterprise to do? Well, according to Datamation, 47% of enterprises are going to implement some sort of private cloud in 2013 regardless of perceived challenges. And Gartner’s latest report on public cloud computing adoption, finds that global spending on public cloud services is expected to grow from $76.9B in 2010 to $210B in 2016.
It’s become increasingly clear that every enterprise will have at least one internal cloud and at least one external cloud in use. As every enterprise architecture will be hybrid and multi-vendor, the better question is how to properly assess the enterprise portfolio to determine which applications and services are best delivered by public and private clouds.
It’s clear that cloud computing has transformed the enterprise IT landscape, from the computing infrastructure layer up through enterprise software, as companies move to leverage more efficient and cost-effective service-delivery models and bring new cloud-based products and services to the market. Perhaps less known is the innovation taking place at the network level and how leading companies are transforming their Wide Area Networks (WAN) to more quickly and efficiently fuel their move to the cloud.
Moving to the cloud requires network managers and IT shops to implement scalable solutions that ensure the reliability and performance of cloud-based applications across their extended enterprise. Cloud computing drives the need for more reliability across the WAN and ever-increasing amounts of highly available, secure and reliable bandwidth across all users, locations and geographies. However, many enterprises are constrained by their existing network infrastructure, both from a cost and performance perspective. They can’t cost-effectively scale their networks; and latency, jitter and packet loss impact performance and reliability in the cloud.
VMWare is well known for its virtualization products, so it’s not surprising that it is establishing a presence in the cloud computing world. Its hybrid cloud service, VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service, runs off of vSphere and vCloud.
It’s set up as an Infrastructure as a Service offering, with a hybrid cloud approach that seeks to expand the customer’s existing datacenter, instead of replacing it.
Here are five methods by which the vCloud Hybrid Service takes existing data centres to the cloud.
5. The hybrid approach. Instead of using a completely cloud-based solution, the hybrid server uses existing infrastructure and augments it with cloud-based resources. VMWare offers both dedicated and virtual private clouds for this service.
4. Integration with existing VMware deployment. VMware makes it simple to connect the cloud-based data centre with the physical data centre. The infrastructure used in the cloud is the same as …
SYS-CON Events announced today that ITprenuers, the leading content and instructor provider for IT best practices training and workshops, 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.
ITpreneurs offers innovative competence development programs for IT best practices to support the educational needs of IT professionals. With expertise in key domains including Cloud Computing, ITSM, IT Governance, Information Security, Process Improvement, and Project Management, ITpreneurs provides guidance on disparate frameworks and integrated solutions.