Rackspace Hosting has partnered with Alamo Colleges to provide job training using a $2.5 million Skills Development Fund grant from the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC).
Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier stated that “Rackspace fully understands the importance of a highly engaged, cloud savvy workforce. We are thrilled to be partnering with Alamo Colleges and see this as an exciting step forward in our journey to bridging the IT skills gap.”
“This grant will provide training for skills that companies would have previously had to search for globally,” said state Sen. Carlos Uresti. “We are pleased that this partnership will result in good-paying jobs here in Texas.”
“This partnership is good for our families, good for our businesses, and good for San Antonio,” said state Sen. Donna Campbell. “Together, the State of Texas, Alamo Colleges, and Rackspace are creating 1,000 new jobs and providing workers with opportunities to develop the skills that will ensure Texas remains a leader in 21st Century technology.”
Google Cloud Ventures – Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
To best capture the primary value of Cloud Computing I always recommend looking at the scenario of a new entrepreneur launching their online business.
The Cloud has made entrepreneurism itself more accessible to more people, lowering the barrier to entry by lowering the costs it takes to launch a new online venture by a magnitude, while simultaneously improving the quality of the apps you can produce, and how quickly you can produce them.
Combined with the continuing explosion of online users and how much they grow their daily use of social media, e-commerce etc., this is a massively potent combination.
The Joys of Cloud Storage demoed at Parallels Summit
by, Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Parallels
If you missed all the fun at Parallels Summit in Vegas last week here is a quick recap. It was all about cloud storage. Pure software magic at its very best.
Just imagine a rack of servers converted with a software RAID device into a single storage cloud; with storage on all the nodes now available across the rack, available for any of the VMs or containers running on that rack, ready for any container of VM connected to that rack, or available as a pure store for any application or backup system connected to that rack.
Since my affinity is for virtualization, my personal favorite is the fact that software storage abstraction not only frees up all the dormant storage in the datacenter but that it enables High Availability as a simple outcome of that abstraction.
On the main stage at Caesars Palace, we demoed it using a server rack with 5 nodes. We ran a container streaming a video on node 2. Then we connected the video stream to the main projector and showed heart beats for all the nodes and the container right below.
All it took then to show High Availability was to parade unannounced in front of the audience on the main stage during the keynote and pull out both power cords from the node running a virtual container. At that point the management node, aka virtual RAID, rechecked availability of data on server and confirmed that it was down and found the container with the video stream missing. It than used distributed data from remaining nodes to restart a container on a new node and 12th seconds later re-started video streaming on the projector.
I know I should stop writing right here because it does not get much better than that, but here is a quick calc for all of you appreciating datacenter operations. If you are running mirror RAID on a single server you are probably averaging at least 4 service impacting incidents a year. If it takes you 2 hours per incident to recover the service, your customers are experiencing 8 hours of downtime a year, or about 2 “9’s” of availability on your service, leaving you with a bunch of unhappy customers, and you are a hoster who has lost business.
Now if you run High Availability cloud storage on that same rack. You will still get same number of incidents, that is just life and stuff happens, but now you are going to recover service in 10-30sec. dropping your total yearly downtime to less than 5 minutes. Now you tell me how many 9s that is.
Cloudscaling Productizes OpenStack Folsom
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.
Optimizing Your Private Cloud for the Collaboration Era
Collaboration in the cloud is a genius idea. Massively scalable and low-cost infrastructure is just what businesses need to bring seamless communication back to a mobile, global workforce. But the way that cloud has taken hold in most enterprises, via software-as-a-service (SaaS), may be too fast and loose for some of today’s enterprise data, which is highly regulated and thus must be highly secured.
Private clouds are growing in popularity as a result. A private cloud provides scalability while slashing IT costs and complexity, all without compromising security. For many organizations, it offers the best blend of public and private network.
As organizations plan their private cloud deployment, they should be aware of the typical issues that they may face. According to a June 2012 Forrester survey of US IT decision-makers that had deployed private clouds at their enterprise, 62 percent encountered problems with security and compliance, while 52 percent faced trouble integrating the cloud with existing tools and apps. Meeting service level agreements with customers and end users was a problem for nearly four out of 10 users, while nearly a third of IT buyers faced problems with software licensing or creating self-service access for users. The likelihood of these issues arising increases if your organization is running high-bandwidth applications such as video collaboration.
An Introduction to Windows Azure Features
With IaaS combined with the many features Windows Azure offers, the opportunities for enterprise IT as well as small and medium businesses are real and exciting to employ cloud as a delivery platform for LOB services including media and phone apps.
Top Three Best Practices for Migrating to the Cloud
As an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider, Bluelock sees a lot of migration of applications. Migration is occurring from physical servers to cloud, from private cloud to public cloud and back to private cloud from public cloud.
Migration can be tricky and a poor migration strategy can be responsible for costly time delays, data loss and other roadblocks on your way to successfully modernizing your infrastructure.
While each scenario is different, I’d like to identify three key best practices that will help your team create a solid, successful plan for migrating your application.
Even before you begin to move your application, there’s a lot of best practice that goes into choosing which application to migrate to the cloud. Regardless of whether you are migrating that app to a public cloud or a private cloud, you should assess the app for data gravity and connectivity of the application.
KPMG: Cloud Computing Is Harder, More Expensive Than We Thought
KPMG International’s Cloud Survey reports businesses saying cloud computing challenges are harder and more costly than they originally thought.
Why? Failure to address changes that were needed in:
- Business-process redesign
- IT management capabilities
- Systems integration
- Infrastructure management
- IT “configurations”
GigaOM does a good overview.
Rackspace Receives $2.5 Million Job-Training Grant
Rackspace Hosting has partnered with Alamo Colleges to provide job training using a $2.5 million Skills Development Fund grant from the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC).
Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier stated that “Rackspace fully understands the importance of a highly engaged, cloud savvy workforce. We are thrilled to be partnering with Alamo Colleges and see this as an exciting step forward in our journey to bridging the IT skills gap.”
“This grant will provide training for skills that companies would have previously had to search for globally,” said state Sen. Carlos Uresti. “We are pleased that this partnership will result in good-paying jobs here in Texas.”
“This partnership is good for our families, good for our businesses, and good for San Antonio,” said state Sen. Donna Campbell. “Together, the State of Texas, Alamo Colleges, and Rackspace are creating 1,000 new jobs and providing workers with opportunities to develop the skills that will ensure Texas remains a leader in 21st Century technology.”
Zimory to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that Zimory, the cloud management software company, 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.
Zimory provides heterogeneous, independent IaaS cloud management software for private, public, hybrid and database clouds. Zimory is working with leading service providers, enterprises and governments due to its proven security and carrier-grade quality.