Cloudscaling, the cloud infrastructure software shop, has released Open Cloud System (OCS) 2.0 for general availability in production deployments.
CTO Randy Bias says, “General availability of OCS version 2.0 is a major milestone. As far as we are aware, we’re the only company to ship an elastic cloud infrastructure software solution built on OpenStack technology for public or private deployments.”
The new version adds OpenStack Folsom support and a new scale-out elastic block storage option.
The Consumer Electronics Show: All about enterprise
Mike Sapien, Principal Analyst, Enterprise, Ovum
The 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was the usual media frenzy, with as many new technology announcements as ever. Although CES focuses on mass-market, consumer products, entertainment, and services, it does provide a preview of technologies and products that will most likely enter the enterprise market eventually. It also gives IT departments some idea of what the corporate end user is going to expect in terms of corporate IT services, user interfaces, and service flexibility.
Mobility, cloud-based services, and end-user empowerment
Mobility, cloud-based services, and end-user empowerment were the major themes of many of the new products and services on display at CES. Another prominent topic was the “Internet of Things” or the “Internet of Everything.” Manufacturers introduced devices of all kinds with wireless capabilities, and unveiled enhanced versions of existing devices that had been upgraded with flexible applications such as location-based services, text …
HP Forms New Cloud Unit
HP has hired Margaret Dawson out of Symform to be VP of product
marketing and cloud evangelist for HP Cloud Services, a new start-up unit
inside HP.
She claims that “much of the negative hype reported around HP does not
match reality. HP has a strong foundation to compete and win in the cloud
and is building out the right leadership team, ecosystem, cloud platform and
solutions to escalate that process.”
It’s unclear how many people will believe her.
Data Optimization in Cloud Storage
The promise of “the cloud” is that cloud storage delivers users seamless “just in time” storage scalability to handle growth and quickly respond to peak loads. The economics and business impact of cloud storage also delivers a compelling financial proposition in today’s budget constrained IT environments. To the IT consumer shifting what was a capital expense and a fixed cost to a variable cost operating expense is financially compelling. Additionally, the ability to function in a “just in time” mode versus a “predictive” model for consumable storage also changes the CAPEX impact further assisting in justifying an already strong value proposition for adopting cloud storage.
IDC forecasts that cloud-based storage will represent a $15.6B market by 2015 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32%. They also predict 10,000 service providers will focus on cloud storage with a data protection emphasis. The economics of this market transition will continue to evolve and accelerate as costs of delivering cloud services are optimized by service providers that become more efficient – ever mindful of the cost of their plant/facility, operating expenses and business margins.
Skyera Inc. Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that Skyera Inc., an emerging provider of enterprise solid-state storage systems, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of 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.
Skyera Inc. is an emerging provider of enterprise solid-state storage systems designed to enable a large class of applications with extraordinarily high performance, exceptionally lower power consumption and cost effectiveness relative to existing enterprise storage systems. Founded by the executives who previously developed the world’s most-advanced flash memory controller, Skyera is backed by key technology and financial partnerships designed to position it at the forefront of the hyper growth in the solid-state storage sector. The company was featured in the Gartner report “Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies, 2012,” was chosen by Flash Memory Summit as a Best of Show award winner for 2012 in the category of Most Innovative Flash Memory Enterprise Business Application, and won the Visionary Product Award at Storage Visions, 2013.
Private Cloud Without Internet Connectivity
Back in 2007, the title of this article probably didn’t make any sense. The cloud was a diagram to represent the Internet. Cloud Services == Services from the Internet.
Now, when someone told you they need a private cloud solution without
Private Cloud Without Internet Connectivity
Back in 2007, the title of this article probably didn’t make any sense. The cloud was a diagram to represent the Internet. Cloud Services == Services from the Internet.
Now, when someone told you they need a private cloud solution without
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 realisation 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?)
Today the term Business Process …
Software Development, the Cloud, & SYOD
As I continue to meander through the early stages of our software-development project, I’ve encountered a large measure of scope creep. Scope jog or scope sprint might be a more accurate term. What started as a modest, internal workflow project has been intertwined with a more ambitious, external content delivery system.
One company, one vision, two seemingly unrelated projects. As I’ve written before, we’re hosting and streaming content for the content system from the cloud, with one of the big public vendors. Separately, our internal data workflows are also being considered for the cloud, but we’ve been stopped dead in our tracks by concerns about Vendor Lock-in 2.0 in this case.
We don’t mind being locked into a vendor to handle what may be terabytes of data from the external project’s customers, but we fear lock-in of our modest amount of internal data.
However we proceed, we’re also not concerned about performance per se. Content is flowing freely without noticeable delay on the external project, and the internal project won’t be in anything nearing real-time.
However, we proceed with some trepidation about delivering content from the external system in venue-level performances. That is, we are building what may be a next-generation social-media company, with content flowing through our website but also in specific live performances in venues ranging from 20 people to 1,000.
It is in this area where we are losing sleep. We are delivering sound, pictures, and video in the external project, and are now looking at any number of alternatives in doing it in the venues. We started by building a rather massive, rack-mounted PC and AV system. It’s powerful, but heavy and expensive, and includes lots of hardwiring to projectors, HDTVs, and cameras. We’re now looking at what can be achieved on a laptop, but also on a tablet or phone, perhaps using Bluetooth 4.0 to send data throughout the venues.
These are not cloud-related issues, but they are certainly mobile and BYOD issues – and we are in any case relying on transmitting our data from our massive, cloud-based resource.
So here we are, with what is verifiably a small business with a small staff and budget, yet tackling complex issues that on the one hand scream for a unified approach but on the other will require several hardware and services vendors.
Oh, and in our rollout later this year, we’ll be serving our own devices (SYOD) to our customers as well. Our massive system comes in any color you want as long as it’s black, and we may have to settle on a single vendor for the OS and tablet as well.
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Software Development, the Cloud, & SYOD
As I continue to meander through the early stages of our software-development project, I’ve encountered a large measure of scope creep. Scope jog or scope sprint might be a more accurate term. What started as a modest, internal workflow project has been intertwined with a more ambitious, external content delivery system.
One company, one vision, two seemingly unrelated projects. As I’ve written before, we’re hosting and streaming content for the content system from the cloud, with one of the big public vendors. Separately, our internal data workflows are also being considered for the cloud, but we’ve been stopped dead in our tracks by concerns about Vendor Lock-in 2.0 in this case.
We don’t mind being locked into a vendor to handle what may be terabytes of data from the external project’s customers, but we fear lock-in of our modest amount of internal data.
However we proceed, we’re also not concerned about performance per se. Content is flowing freely without noticeable delay on the external project, and the internal project won’t be in anything nearing real-time.
However, we proceed with some trepidation about delivering content from the external system in venue-level performances. That is, we are building what may be a next-generation social-media company, with content flowing through our website but also in specific live performances in venues ranging from 20 people to 1,000.
It is in this area where we are losing sleep. We are delivering sound, pictures, and video in the external project, and are now looking at any number of alternatives in doing it in the venues. We started by building a rather massive, rack-mounted PC and AV system. It’s powerful, but heavy and expensive, and includes lots of hardwiring to projectors, HDTVs, and cameras. We’re now looking at what can be achieved on a laptop, but also on a tablet or phone, perhaps using Bluetooth 4.0 to send data throughout the venues.
These are not cloud-related issues, but they are certainly mobile and BYOD issues – and we are in any case relying on transmitting our data from our massive, cloud-based resource.
So here we are, with what is verifiably a small business with a small staff and budget, yet tackling complex issues that on the one hand scream for a unified approach but on the other will require several hardware and services vendors.
Oh, and in our rollout later this year, we’ll be serving our own devices (SYOD) to our customers as well. Our massive system comes in any color you want as long as it’s black, and we may have to settle on a single vendor for the OS and tablet as well.
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