A number of analysts are beginning to suggest 2013 will likely signal the awakening of a long night in the IT industry that started with the beginning of the third millennium with the Internet crash. And just as recovery was around the corner, the financial crisis of 2008 dried the IT well once more. Both crises can be characterized as crises of demand. Just past 2000, the Y2K pipeline ran dry. Some argue that the problem was overstated, whereas others argue that the problem was solved just in time. In either case this event triggered a significant pullback in IT spending.
Faced with an existential threat after Y2K, the IT industry did not sit still. The main outcome from these lean years has been a significant increase in efficiency where the role of IT in companies with most advanced practices shifted from being a cost center to an active participant in the execution of corporate business strategy. Capabilities evolved from no accountability on resource utilization to efficient use of capital to nimble participant in a broad range of organizations and initiatives. The second crisis reaffirmed the continuing need to do more in the face of shrinking budgets and very likely provided the impetus for the widespread adoption of cloud technology.
From ESBs to API Portals, an Evolutionary Journey | Part 1
A number of analysts are beginning to suggest 2013 will likely signal the awakening of a long night in the IT industry that started with the beginning of the third millennium with the Internet crash. And just as recovery was around the corner, the financial crisis of 2008 dried the IT well once more. Both crises can be characterized as crises of demand. Just past 2000, the Y2K pipeline ran dry. Some argue that the problem was overstated, whereas others argue that the problem was solved just in time. In either case this event triggered a significant pullback in IT spending.
Faced with an existential threat after Y2K, the IT industry did not sit still. The main outcome from these lean years has been a significant increase in efficiency where the role of IT in companies with most advanced practices shifted from being a cost center to an active participant in the execution of corporate business strategy. Capabilities evolved from no accountability on resource utilization to efficient use of capital to nimble participant in a broad range of organizations and initiatives. The second crisis reaffirmed the continuing need to do more in the face of shrinking budgets and very likely provided the impetus for the widespread adoption of cloud technology.
Baidu Commercializes First ARM Servers for Cloud
Baidu, which is often called the Google of China, has apparently won the race to become the first company to deploy servers based on ARM smartphone chips in a “large-scale” production environment in its data center.
It’s using a custom version of Marvell’s low-power 32-bit quad-core Armada XP CPU Server-on-a-Chip (SOC) in a personal cloud storage system called Baidu Cloud or Baidu Pan.
It’s unclear whether any other kind of server is being used to deliver the service.
The boxes themselves, called “easy-to-integrate,” were run up by an unidentified Asian ODM.
Marvell, like the other dozen or so ARM fabricators, is hoping to eventually challenge industry-standard x86 servers, a situation Intel would rather avoid. ARM has forced Intel to try to cut its inefficient power consumption.
Alcatel-Lucent, GigaSpaces Partner for Delivery of Carrier Cloud PaaS
Guest post by Adi Paz, Executive VP, Marketing and Business Development, GigaSpaces
GigaSpaces Cloudify solution enables the on-boarding of applications onto any cloud. For several months now, GigaSpaces has been working with Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) on the use of Cloudify in a carrier cloud service environment. Together with Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand™ solution, Cloudify is a fundamental building block in the technological backbone of ALU’s carrier-grade Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS).
Dor Skuler, Vice President & General Manager of the CloudBand Business Unit at Alcatel-Lucent, has said that, “Offering CPaaS as part of the CloudBand solution enables service providers to make a smooth migration to the carrier cloud and quickly deploy value-added services with improved quality and scalability, without the need for dedicated equipment.”
This new class of carrier cloud services brings the benefits of the cloud to the carrier environment without sacrificing security, reliability and/or quality of applications. The CPaaS enables the on-boarding of mission-critical applications on a massive scale, including both legacy and new carrier cloud services. This is a factor in meeting the requirements of many customers’ Service Level Agreements (SLAs) by integrating carrier networks.
Unlike regular cloud environments, where an application needs to explicitly handle multi-zone deployments, CPaaS enables the application workload and availability to be handled through a policy driven approach. The policy describes the desired application SLA, while the carrier CPaaS maps the deployment of the application resources to the cloud and reflects the best latency, load, or availability requirements.
Additionally, the integration will enable the creation of network-aware CPaaS services, simplified on-boarding to ALU’s CloudBand platform, multi-site app deployment and simplification of management of a number of latency and location-sensitive applications. The ability to comply with five-nine reliability, security, and disaster recovery requirements ensures peace-of-mind for enterprises choosing to on-board mission-critical applications to the carrier network.
The Cloudify Approach
Cloudify manages applications at the process level, and as such uses the same underlying architecture for any application regardless of the language or the technology stack that comprises the application. That said, working at the process level is often not enough, because not all processes are made the same. For example, databases behave quite differently from web containers and load-balancers. In order for us to still get in-depth knowledge about the managed application’s processes, Cloudify uses a recipe-based approach. The recipe-based approach enables us to describe the elements that are specific to that individual process, such as the configuration element, the dependency on other processes, the specific key performance indicators that tell if that process’ behavior is aligned with its SLA, and so on.
Working on the process level makes it possible to plug into a large variety of infrastructures, whether they happen to be public, private, or bare-metal environments. Cloudify uses an abstraction layer known as the Cloud Driver that interfaces with the cloud infrastructure to provide on-demand compute resources for running applications.
The Cloudify process can be implemented be done on individual clouds from HP, Microsoft, IBM, CloudStack, etc., or in the carrier network infrastructure of a company like Alcatel-Lucent.
Adi Paz is responsible for developing and communicating GigaSpaces’ strategy, and managing the company’s go-to-market activities and strategic alliances.
Evaluating Cloud Computing Uptime SLAs
Last week’s Windows Azure Storage outage made me thinking how many of us evaluate the vendor’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) before they decide to deploy workloads in the cloud. I bet many think about it only when it is too late.
Evaluating Cloud Computing Uptime SLAs
Last week’s Windows Azure Storage outage made me thinking how many of us evaluate the vendor’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) before they decide to deploy workloads in the cloud. I bet many think about it only when it is too late.
Retail: The next industry to be disrupted by the cloud?
I watched with interest recently an interview with NetSuite CEO, Zach Nelson on Bloomberg TV. During the interview Nelson stated his belief that retail wasn’t dead and that Apple had shown the way to all retailers with regards customer experience. Nelson also stated that in his mind, retail would be the next industry to be “disrupted by the cloud”.
In this blog I will examine some of the reasons why retailers might look to the cloud for business management systems that help to grow their business.
Customer Experience
Retailers are faced with a battle on two fronts, being squeezed by the need to cut costs at the same time as customers are demanding an increasingly better experience. They expect an ‘omnichannel’ shopping experience where they can interact with a brand through any channel and receive a consistent experience across the board. They want to be able to shop anywhere …
It’s Money That Matters in the Cloud… Well, At Least ROI
Before you add another decimal place to security budgets, maybe it’s time you consider the how cloud-deployed security options can not only address the complexities of enterprise security ably, but do so at considerable savings.
With all the talk of fiscal cliffs sequestrations, financial binds and “next year’s budget,” I started thinking about cloud security in more tangible ways. Specifically returns on investment, economic impact and total costs of ownership. Just like death and taxes, businesses can add intrusion and attack to the list of sureties. I can hear CFOs all over the world sigh in exasperation as they feel pressured to add another expense line item to minimize the building security threats to their enterprises.
It’s Money That Matters in the Cloud… Well, At Least ROI
Before you add another decimal place to security budgets, maybe it’s time you consider the how cloud-deployed security options can not only address the complexities of enterprise security ably, but do so at considerable savings.
With all the talk of fiscal cliffs sequestrations, financial binds and “next year’s budget,” I started thinking about cloud security in more tangible ways. Specifically returns on investment, economic impact and total costs of ownership. Just like death and taxes, businesses can add intrusion and attack to the list of sureties. I can hear CFOs all over the world sigh in exasperation as they feel pressured to add another expense line item to minimize the building security threats to their enterprises.
Cloud Expo New York: Launching Hadoop into the Cloud in Three Clicks
Big Data applications such as Hadoop and Hive are becoming more widely adopted and mainstream. There is an increasing number of users who will select the cloud – whether private or public – as an efficient and scalable deployment vehicle for these large-scale distributed apps. Hadoop implementations can involve deployment of dozens to thousands of application nodes – a scale that can become very time-consuming to manage. Embracing Big Data applications is one thing, but users will struggle to manage them due to a lack of tools designed for such complex applications in the cloud. New solutions are required to enable a far simpler setup, configuration and provisioning of complex Hadoop and Hive deployments on a large scale – and also to manage them over their continuing life cycle.