365 Command for managing Office 365 subscriptions replaces command line and and scripting with an HTML5 GUI. Watch the video for a walkthrough:
Top Eight Application Performance Landmines
We have been blogging about the same problems and problem patterns we see while working with our customers over the past few of years. There have always been the classic application performance landmines in the areas of inefficient database access, misconfigured frameworks, excessive memory usage, bloated web pages and not following common web performance best practices among others.
More than two years ago we posted summary blogs of the Top Server-Side Performance Problems and the Top 10 Client-Side Performance Problems to give operations, architects, testers and developers easy-to-consume best practices. We feel that it is time to provide an update to these best practices as new problem patterns have since come into play. We also want to cover more than just problems that happen within your application by broadening the scope across the entire Application Delivery Chain. This includes all components between your end user and your back-end systems, databases and third-party services. The following illustrates which components are involved and what the typical errors are along the delivery chain.
Why ParElastic Could Raise $5.7 Million
ParElastic Corporation has raised $5.7M in a Series A round financing led by General Catalyst Partners. The company’s existing investors including Point Judith Capital, CommonAngels and LaunchCapital also participated in the round. The Series A brings ParElastic’s total financing to $8.7M. The ParElastic Database Virtualization Engine “dramatically increases the flexibility of your current relational database, improving performance and reliability while reducing storage and processing costs.”
Read more, watch a video, download a white paper here.
Space Monkey May Be Nearing Public Beta
Space Monkey, the Google-backed P2P start-up that intends to compete against Box and Dropbox not to mention the likes of Google Drive and SkyDrive, seems to be slowly pumping up publicity for its widget so maybe it’s getting close to its promised public beta if it can get the Kickstarter money to bring the thing to market.
Space Monkey aims to put a cloud in every house and says it’s “building a storage network the likes of which have never been seen.”
It involves a local storage device and a $10-a-month subscription for a terabyte of online storage, which is 10 times the storage you’d get from Dropbox for the same money.
Cloud Expo New York: Secret Sauce for a Scalable Enterprise Cloud Model
AMAG Pharmaceuticals’ five-person IT team should bottle its secret sauce for a scalable enterprise cloud model. The public company eliminated its data center in 2008 and has since encouraged employees to adopt cloud applications as they see fit and ramped up security to make this possible – resulting in a reduction of over 60% in IT costs and much more productive (and happy) staffers.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Nathan McBride, Vice President of IT and Chief Cloud Architect at AMAG Pharmaceuticals, will explain how enterprises can not only move to the cloud, but create a more productive workforce, sharing the security and infrastructure strategies necessary to do so successfully.
Five Private Cloud Pitfalls
Private cloud may be the right choice for you, though it is not without its potential pitfalls.
There are many reasons to trust the private cloud – from reliability, to security and compliance, to predictability, private cloud can often be the best choice for a business.
But just because it’s private doesn’t mean it’s not susceptible to its own range of pitfalls. While the shortcomings of public cloud have been widely discussed, it’s important to note that private clouds, too, are associated with a range of potential pitfalls you ought to be aware of.
Shadow IT – The Reality Is Here
A recent survey has shown that security policies and rules set down by IT departments are not just being ignored but having a bus driven through them by staff and senior executives, who wish to bring their own device to work so that they can do more, work smarter and be in touch all of the time.
The survey shows that almost three-quarters of respondents would not bet against their own organization having a data breach within the next 12 months.
This along with other responses shows that the IT Department of 2013 is a long way from the IT Department of just five years ago, where what they said may not have been liked but was generally adhered to and, if it was not, sanctions could come into effect.
Cloud Expo New York: Getting the Most from Hadoop Development
The Hadoop framework and SSD technology augment cloud data systems ranging from analytics to on-line transaction processing (OLTP) to data warehousing. The resulting balance of processing, networking, SSD storage, and Hadoop optimization results in improving Big Data sort responsiveness from hours to minutes.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Chris Black, a Data Center Solutions Architect at Intel, will review the background of Apache Hadoop, its application, and methods to accelerate data system clusters with Intel SSD technology. He will provide an overview of the genius of Hadoop and an overview of the ecosystem landscape, and discuss the best-known applications of SSD technology to development, real-time query, and main Hadoop clusters.
NEC builds cloud presence in China
Japanese equipment vendor NEC this week signed a memorandum of understanding with Chongqing City, one of China’s four national central cities, with a view to forming a strategic partnership in the smart city and cloud service areas.
Chongqing is a major city in Southwest China with a population of 28.8 million and aims to shift its status from an industrial-oriented economy to a communications industry hub.
Cloud Computing Performance
“The cloud (whether public or private) is a strong driver of Big Data,” noted Michael Kopp, a technology strategist at Compuware, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “A Cisco survey said that 4 out of 5 IT professionals stated that ‘all or some Big Data projects will require cloud computing capabilities.’”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?
Michael Kopp: Agree – The move to cloud is about faster go-to-market, more flexibility, more agility and faster deployments. That being said Cloud costs can easily explode if not monitored and if applications are not specifically tuned toward cloud-based cost structures