“Without a doubt, cloud computing is making it more difficult to track data, which further complicates analyzing data,” noted David Reoch, Senior Director of Cloud Solutions at Gigamon, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “The enterprise is at a critical inflection point to settle on pervasive visibility solutions that ensure that data, no matter where it lives, can be analyzed and tracked by their existing and future tools.”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?
David Reoch: Completely AGREE. Cost savings are prevalent when legacy X86 hardware can be shut down in the enterprise data center, but without automation, moving a workload to the cloud just adds complexity to IT management systems. This is especially true when those management systems lack visibility for tools that cannot monitor the workload as it gets migrated to virtual or cloud infrastructure.

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Late last Thursday a Reuters exclusive hit the wires saying IBM and EMC as well as other unidentified folks are talking acquisition with SoftLayer Technologies, the Dallas-based cloud and web hosting company founded in 2005. It said the price could be over $2 billion and that SoftLayer had hired Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse.
Late Friday GigaOm waded in and said EMC isn’t really interested because now it’s got VMware’s newly announced Amazon rival and doesn’t have to buy one. A former IBM executive, however, said that Big Blue was interested – or had been at least a month ago but that it had also been kicking the tires at Rackspace.
Rackspace started OpenStack and IBM jumped into OpenStack big-time the week before last. SoftLayer is a member of OpenStack but not as deeply involved as either Rackspace or IBM.
GigaOm’s source said IBM isn’t very good at development and prefers to buy technology, integrate it and stick its brand on the widgetry.

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No one is going to argue (at least not strongly) in favor of running business applications on an operating system that does not get security updates. Compliance teams will see this as a huge risk and will move heaven and earth to remediate it. In the next 12 months many IT departments around the world will be assembling WS2003 EOL SWAT teams to address this challenge. This will be like a mini Y2K forcing function for most enterprise IT departments.
IT departments hate end of life of products and the resulting headaches. End of life for a product means the support lifeline disappears, security updates stop and IT is left stranded with the compliance team breathing down their neck. Upgrade projects are not a fun sell to the business. “Hey, Ms./Mr. Business, let’s invest a bunch of money and time to get the same place you were before”… Gee, let’s get out the drill bit and do a root canal while we’re at it.

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In the face of explosive data growth and significant pressure on IT budgets, data centers cannot afford the application bottlenecks, stranded capacity, and excessive cost of traditional storage and networking architectures. They are leading the adoption of new flash storage and networking innovations with their unexpected TCO savings.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Jamon Bowen, Technical Marketing Manager in the Accelerated Solutions Division of LSI Corporation, will discuss how an array of crucial technologies from “traditional” PCIeTM flash cards to transparent and intelligent caching, shared flash and storage pools, innovative data analytics acceleration and low-latency networking with in-line processing of data are enabling enterprises to dramatically increase datacenter work and efficiency while reducing overall costs.

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Enterprises can’t close their doors just because integration tools won’t cope with the volume of information that their systems produce. As each day goes by, their information will become larger and more complicated and enterprises must constantly struggle to manage the integration of dozens (or hundreds) of systems.
Apache Hadoop has quickly become the technology of choice for enterprises that need to perform complex analysis of petabytes of data, but few are aware of its potential to handle large-scale integration work. By using effective tools, integrators can process the complex transformation, synchronization, and orchestration tasks required in a high-performance, low cost, infinitely scalable way.

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Amazon continues to add more features to make AWS more appealing to enterprises and developers. Also, Rackspace has announced the launch of Rackspace Cloud Backup and introduced new features on Rackspace Open Cloud Servers.
Here’s a quick summary of cloud happenings over the last week.
IaaS leader Amazon has added some advanced features to Amazon VPC coupled with the simplicity of Amazon EC2. Users are now allowed to use features like assigning multiple IP addresses to an instance, changing security group membership on the fly and adding egress filters to your security groups. New features to VPC include DNS Hostnames, DNS Name Resolution, ElastiCache and RDS IP Addresses. Next, they have announced that AWS Elastic Beanstalk will now support Node.js applications. Users can now build event-driven Node.js applications and can also use Elastic Beanstalk to deploy and manage them on AWS.

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One of the most compelling promises of the cloud is that you can pull out a credit card and be working in minutes. No purchase orders tofill out, no equipment to wait for on the loading dock. Just instant access to the resources you need, when you need them. But accessibility comes at a price, and an unintentional consequence may be that you create yet another orphaned identity silo. Enterprise IT has spent years consolidating its mishmash of directories, only to discover that cloud now threatens to turn back their hard-won victories.

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HP’s cloud solutions continue to expand, and more and more organizations are taking advantage of these opportunities. In the cloud storage arena, HP Cloud Object Storage provides highly durable, readily available access to your data. It’s secure, too; each object is stored in three zones of availability, all separate from one another. HP Cloud Object Storage runs on world-class HP servers, of course, giving you scalability and access on demand.

Here are some things you need to know about HP Cloud Object Storage:

• High performance. This service runs entirely on high-end HP servers. This gives you the highest possible levels of availability and performance.
• Scalability. Creating containers and adding objects in order to adjust to growing storage needs is instantaneous, and you only pay for what you use.
• Security. The three availability zones for HP Cloud Object Storage are physically separate, and have redundant power and redundant Internet connections, all of which are monitored 24/7.
• Public containers. HP Cloud Object Storage allows for the option of creating a public container that can be access externally by any user. By default, the containers are of course private.
• Object size. Natively, HP Cloud Object Storage can hold objects anywhere from a singly byte all the way up to 5 GB. Larger objects can be segmented into pieces of 5 GB or smaller at the time of upload, and they will automatically reassemble into the larger file when you access or download it.
• Security. HP Cloud Object Storage relies on REST-based authentication for clients. You can choose between a private key or a token that’s time based in order to secure your data in HP’s public cloud.
• Management. HP has long been known for its capable and intuitive management consoles, and HP Cloud Object is no different. From the console you have increased visibility into how your storage is being used. You can manage containers easily and remove or add objects as the need arises.

In the world of cloud solutions, there are few who can compete with the robust and agile HP Cloud Object Storage.

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