The new open source cloud orchestration platform called OpenStack is the promise of flexible network virtualization, and network overlays are looking closer than ever. The vision of this platform is to enable the on-demand creation of many distinct networks on top of one underlying physical infrastructure in the cloud environment. The platform will support automated provisioning and management of large groups of virtual machines or compute resources, including extensive monitoring in the cloud.
There is still a lot of work to be done, as there are many concerns around the efficiency and simplicity of the management solution for the compute and storage resources. A mature solution will need to incorporate different approaches to interact within the intra-server provisioning, QoS and vNIC management. For example, by leaning on local network adapters that are capable of managing the requests by utilizing OpenFlow protocol, or by using a more standard approach which is managed by the switch. Using only one method might create performance and efficiency penalties.
Code 42 Software to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that Code 42 Software, the creator of CrashPlan, CrashPlan PRO, and CrashPlan PROe award-winning onsite, offsite and cloud backup 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.
Starting out as a software development company in 2001, Code 42 Software is the creator of CrashPlan, CrashPlan PRO, and CrashPlan PROe award-winning onsite, offsite and cloud backup solutions for home, businesses, and enterprise.
Yet Another Analyst Insists on AWS Spinoff, Others Disagree
Not for the first time an investment analyst, this time Oppenheimer analyst Tim Horan in a report published on Monday, insists in a report that AWS will inevitably be spun off to avoid “channel conflict”, etc.
“In our view, we believe an ultimate spin-off of AWS is inevitable due to its channel conflicts and the need to gain scale. We see the business as extremely valuable on a standalone basis…”
The Register has a useful take on Horan’s opinion, with a well-thought-out contrary view.
The crack in this bout of crystal-ball gazing is that Oppenheimer is an investment firm that by nature likes predictable cash above everything else, and Amazon’s leader Jeff Bezos is a mercurial, ambitious figure who has demonstrated time and time again a love for risky, long-term projects*.
This Reg hack believes the Oppenheimer spin-off analysis misses the temple for the gold fixtures: keeping Amazon Web Services yoked to Amazon holds a slew of major advantages, many of which could be critical in the battle for dominance of the cloud, but they will all take time to play out and are not a sure thing.
Dimension Data Introduces Wan Optimization Across Its Global Cloud
Dimension Data announced on Tuesday that it has introduced WAN optimization capabilities to its cloud globally. By deploying WAN optimization technology in Dimension Data’s Managed Cloud Platform™ (MCP) cloud data centers, Dimension Data clients are reporting a significant increase in application performance across the entire cloud. Organizations using the cloud for database replication, file synchronization, and backup and disaster recovery between data centers have realized the greatest improvement in performance. An enhanced capability, WAN optimization is provided as part of the company’s standard public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering at no additional charge.
According to Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data’s Cloud Solutions Business Unit, “we are helping our clients overcome the latency and bandwidth constraints often associated with public cloud services.”
Semantic Interoperability: The Pot of Gold Under the Rainbow
The way humans understand the world, the way we think, and the way we put our thoughts into language require both vagueness and ambiguity. Without them, we lose important aspects of meaning. Furthermore, how we structure our language is culturally and linguistically relative. As a result, current semantic interoperability efforts will be able to address a certain class of problems, but in the grand scheme of things, that class of problems is a relatively small subset of the types of communication we would prefer to automate between systems.
Will CPR Significantly Increase Cloud Survival Rates?
IT is an acronym crazed world. So crazy that sometimes – when running out of three letter ones – we simply recycle them or add sequence numbers. Remember MRP, which used to mean Material Requirements Planning, but then became Manufacturing Resource Planning (called MRP II to avoid confusion), to only a couple of years – and a few trillion of investments – later, resurface as ERP.
In that era the term BPR also became popular. BPR stood for Business Process Re-engineering (see for example Hammer, M. and Champy, J. A.: (1993) Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution), a movement that in my perspective*really gained steam from the realization that throwing new technology (ERP) at existing processes, only offered limited improvement potential. As Business Process Re-engineering often resulted in massive redundancies and layoffs, BPR got kind of a bad rap, especially among employees and unions (remember those?).
When Is a Stack Not a Stack? When It’s Unified in the Cloud
You’ve got SIEM, you employ log management. You even have access and or identity management. Each performs a specific security function for your enterprise, but unless they are working across all your information silos and collaborating their collective capabilities, you still might have vulnerability gaps…like a thoroughbred running with blinders.
While trawling the blogs, feeds and news I came across an analyst’s article about best security practices in which he kept referring to “the stack.” And by this, he meant a multitude of various solutions that address certain security needs and capabilities; everything from email filtering, firewalling, authenticating, credentialing, logging and intrusion detection, etc…
And, if you read my blogs often enough, you know I am a big proponent of unified security. However, unified security is not a stack. It is easy to be confused as both look to utilize best of breed tools to prevent negative impact on IP assets. A stack references a number of technologies where each operates independently from one another. Single sign on by itself is a sufficient tool, but when operating alone in its own silo, important contextual information is lost.
Weekly Roundup: SAP Business Suite Is Certified for AWS
Over the last week, the cloud world has witnessed a few important announcements from a couple of major cloud players. There were some new feature releases from Amazon and Microsoft. In addition, Amazon has announced the SAP Business Suite certification on AWS. Also, there was a ‘must read’ post published by Microsoft. Plus, ActiveState has announced about its significant revenue growth from the past year.
Here’s a quick summary of cloud happenings over the last week.
Beginning with the IaaS leader, Amazon has introduced the integration of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). This service allows a user to set up notifications for any RDS instances by creating an Event subscription. Next, Amazon has announced that AWS has been certified to host the SAP Business Suite environment in full production mode. Thus, increases the agility of the business, shorten deployment times, reduces deployment cost and scales up and down as needed.
Another Regulator Wants a Look at Autonomy’s Books
The Financial Reporting Council (FRC), a British accounting regulator, said on its web site Monday that it’s launched an investigation into the financial reports Autonomy put out between January 1, 2009 and June 30, 2011 right before it was acquired for $11.1 billion by Hewlett-Packard.
HP charged the British company with cooking its books and duping it into overpaying when it wrote off $8.8 billion of its investment in November. It referred the case to the SEC, which called in the Justice Department, and the Serious Fraud Office in Britain.
Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, has roundly denied HP’s allegations. Lynch, who made a reported $800 million off the deal, claimed to welcome the FRC’s investigation and said in a statement that “As a member of the FTSE 100 the accounts of Autonomy have previously been reviewed by the FRC, including during the period in question, and no actions or changes were recommended or required.”
Another Regulator Wants a Look at Autonomy’s Books
The Financial Reporting Council (FRC), a British accounting regulator, said on its web site Monday that it’s launched an investigation into the financial reports Autonomy put out between January 1, 2009 and June 30, 2011 right before it was acquired for $11.1 billion by Hewlett-Packard.
HP charged the British company with cooking its books and duping it into overpaying when it wrote off $8.8 billion of its investment in November. It referred the case to the SEC, which called in the Justice Department, and the Serious Fraud Office in Britain.
Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, has roundly denied HP’s allegations. Lynch, who made a reported $800 million off the deal, claimed to welcome the FRC’s investigation and said in a statement that “As a member of the FTSE 100 the accounts of Autonomy have previously been reviewed by the FRC, including during the period in question, and no actions or changes were recommended or required.”