SingleHop on Wednesday announced the launch of Hosted Cloud Apps, a new hosted application solution that gives SingleHop customers a simplified way to discover, deploy and manage applications on virtual machines in the cloud.
According to SingleHop CEO Zak Boca the company was able “to integrate the marketplace seamlessly into our console and infrastructure, and customize it with our own look-and-feel to provide a user experience that is point-click simple.”
Built on technology from Standing Cloud, a provider of cloud marketplace and management solutions for IaaS, cloud and hosting providers, Hosted Cloud Apps is an easy-to-use marketplace of 100+ applications, software, development tools and deployment options,fully pre-configured to run instantly and reliably on the SingleHop infrastructure. Once an application is deployed, automated application lifecycle management features give SingleHop customers an easy way to manage their servers and applications on a continuing basis, including monitoring, scaling, back-ups, upgrades, auto-restore and more.
Adaptive Claims Edge on Private Cloud Patents
Adaptive Computing, which just got a dozen new cloud patents from the US
Patent and Trademark Office, figures it’s got one of the largest private cloud
patent portfolios around.
It also says it’s seeing rapid cloud growth due to its product ınnovation, up
244% last year.
Big data: What’s hot, what’s not according to the Twitter stream
By Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Ovum IT Enterprise Solutions
Because (or in spite) of the hype, sentiment about Big Data vendors was generally bullish in 2012. The attention spilled over from IT to the business media. These were among the findings reported by DataSift, which conducted a retrospective analysis of vendor mentions on Twitter during 2012 for Ovum.
To some extent, the results were surprising: while Hadoop garners much of the spotlight as a Big Data platform, the vendor 10gen, which develops MongoDB, came in second in mentions to Apache, which hosts the Hadoop project. Although only peripherally a Big Data story, HP and Autonomy was the biggest negative story of the year.
The data provided by DataSift provides a good example of how social media mining provides a useful snapshot of popular thinking that supplements – or replaces – the traditional role of marketing focus groups.
Mining Twitter for insights
Traditionally …
EESC questions EU cloud computing initiative figures
The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has published an opinion piece detailing opposition to the well documented European Union (EU) computing initiative.
The EU’s cloud strategy, ‘Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe’, announced in September featured two main takeaways; a yearly 160bn Euro (£127.6bn) boost to the European GDP by 2010, and a net gain of 2.5m jobs.
Sounds good on first glance, but the EESC’s opinion – carried by 158 votes to two in a plenary held on January 16 and 17 – disagrees.
It’s not that the EESC is opposed to cloud computing in general – the committee agrees that it is “an opportunity for European growth and competitiveness” – more it suggests an alternative complementary vision to the European Commission’s original plan.
Nor is it that EESC is at odds with everything EU digital agenda VP Neelie Kroes lined out. The committee …
Offering Cloud Services, practice what you preach
by, Gerrit-Jan van Wieren, Vice President Business Development
As an IT service provider you probably started years ago with the idea you would do a better job than the rest. With a lot of enthusiasm and energy you have built a company of reasonable size and offer all kinds of different services. With the rise of Cloud you have the ideal position to tell your customers not to buy and own things, or have IT staff as a core business. You ask them the question; is this bringing you money? Or can we take it off your back? You used to invest in hardware which looked cheaper long-term, but you end up with IT staff that you don’t want on your payroll.
Did you ask that question to yourself? As an IT service provider providing services is in your DNA. But is investing also in your DNA? Or is it about making money? Owning stuff is not your core business. When you choose a solution, whether it is hosted backup or hosted e-mail the question should always be if you could do a better job. Look at all the aspects which come with hosting it yourself. It might look cheaper; buy some disks, forget to calculate the costs for staff, electricity and bring in the money.
Is it that easy? There is some risk involved. Disks can break, 24×7 availability is actually costing money and your staff can (accidentally) mismanage the platform into serious downtime. When we take a closer look at the business case we also see the calculation is missing reality. You always start with 0 GB and it takes time to reach the 100% coverage for all invested Terabytes. And when you reach 80% you know you’re up for new cash out.
Will you do a better job than the manufacturer? Will it bring you more money?
Always go for pay as you grow, without investments. Add value to the proposition with your knowledge and well educated staff. Start making money from day one. And remember what you tell your end customer about investing in IT. Practice what you preach.
Kids Say the Darndest Things…About the Cloud
“The Cloud, Explained by Kids” is Rackspace’s version of that old Art Linkletter standby:
What’s in Store for Technology in 2013
As we get into the full swing of the new year and put another CES behind us, it’s time to take a look at the current trends in technology and get a feel for some of the developments we can expect in 2013. There are a lot of interesting products just around the corner – some of them will seem revolutionary while others will be a big update to current technology – and many of them are well worth a look.
The release of Windows 8, which was optimized for touchscreens, is encouraging a lot of companies to really innovate with their laptops. Last year we saw the trend toward ultrabook computers – all sleek design and impressive form factor – and now the new operating system is giving them a chance to develop even more. Touchscreen ultrabooks are going to provide the simple convenience of a tablet while offering the power and capabilities of a compete computer.
Best Practices: The Role of API Management
We are in the midst of an API revolution. Countless major enterprises are opening up access to their core information systems, allowing innovative third-party developers to build new business opportunities through collaboration and community. However, this remarkable movement puts pressure on IT to manage APIs. The goal is to ensure optimal business outcomes through APIs without inadvertently creating security and system management problems or running up unsustainable costs.
In his General Session at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Alistair Farquharson, CTO at SOA Software, addresses this challenge by exploring some proven best practices for API management.
As I Work in the Cloud, I Encounter an 80/20 Rule
I’m developing software – yikes. I first came to this industry in the 1980s as a non-geek music major, and was forced to learn how to run a Unix-based box from Callan Data Systems that I fondly called The Antichrist.
All these years later, I’m still a non-geek, albeit one who has learned more than I ever cared to learn about dealing with the vast skunkworks project known as Windows, the Stalinesque Apple operating systems, neo-Byzantine network protocols, and now, the ethereal nebulousness of cloud computing.
So I find myself developing a workflow system – or at minimum, the outlines of one – for a vertical-market client who eventually wants this stuff to run on any number of phones, tablets, and hybrids. Android or Win8? Do we need to write for the Mac and iOS, too?
But this responsibility is just part of my job. The client, like most companies, seems to spend most of its time chasing its tail, bogged in the mud, in the doldrums, etc. However you want to put it. Take the industry cliché that 80% of IT is devoted to routine maintenance and ops, with only 20% for innovation, and you get the picture. It may be more like 90/10.
The Obsolete 47%
This is why I was struck this morning by a tweet from Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) that 47% of the federal IT budget is devoted to what he calls “obsolete/deficient” systems. I like Darrell because of his intransigent stand against SOPA and related nonsense; this stand alone makes me overlook other aspects of his public career.
So I hope he’s not trying to make some cheap political point about liberal inefficiency or some other manner of pandering. I hope he’s merely pointing out that a lot of federal IT spending is COBOL-related, for example, rather than focused on the latest cloud developments. It could be that this 47% is above the average in business.
Meanwhile, I’ve expressed disappointment in the current Federal CIO, who is seemingly doing nothing about the government’s Cloud First vision, and who is not responding to my inquiries about it. (No, my feelings are not hurt by this, but it would be great for the industry if he woke up, in my opinion.)
So here I am, trying to create some snappy workflow in the cloud, while also trying to get some new onsite laptops to communicate with the various printers scattered throughout this office. Experts and gurus talks about reversing this 80/20 ratio – but in the real world, it’s probably not going to happen soon. The face is, if I can squeeze 20% of my time to do the innovative stuff, I’ll be happy.
NetDNA EdgeRules Gives Websites Control over CDN Content
NetDNA today announced EdgeRules, an instantaneous HTTP caching rules service, giving site managers rapid and granular control over their web content for a better user experience, improved security, lower bandwidth costs and the ability to better monetize content by preventing hotlinking.
EdgeRules is an add-on service to NetDNA’s EdgeCaching and EdgeCaching for Platforms. Both of these HTTP caching services place site content in NetDNA’s worldwide network of edge servers and peering partners for superior web performance optimization.
Using the EdgeRules control panel, site managers can make changes to their content rules and see them enacted in less than one minute – with no review needed from the NetDNA engineering team. This makes it possible for the first time to test, tweak and deploy very granular controls over how and when content is served.
“EdgeRules truly gives website manages the ability to manage their CDN services their way and to finely tune their pull zone content in a way that they never could before,” said David Henzel, NetDNA vice president of marketing. “NetDNA is well known for giving site managers unprecedented control over their CDN service through our Control Panel. With EdgeRules, we are at the forefront of CDN self provisioning again.”
A site manager can use EdgeRules to keep certain files from being proxied and thus protecting them from exposure on the Internet. For example, EdgeRules can prevent the exposure of directory indices due to misconfiguration, which is a common problem on cloud services such as Amazon’s S3 service.
The service allows different rules to be set for different files or classes of data so that frequently updated files can be classed differently from more static data. This reduces calls to the origin server, which lowers bandwidth charges.
Site managers can also use the service to blacklist certain IP addresses, for example blocking web robots that are scraping data from the site.
The EdgeRules service can also read the operating system of a device and serve up optimized content for that device. For example a smartphone-optimized image can be served up instead of a large image when the service detects a request from an Android or iOS device.
EdgeRules is now available for all NetDNA EdgeCaching customers. For more information email sales@netdna.com or go to: http://www.netdna.com/
