One of the primary reasons folks use a Load balancer is scalability with a secondary driver of maintaining performance. We all know the data exists to prove that “seconds matter” and current users of the web have itchy fingers, ready to head for the competition the microsecond they experience any kind of delay.
Similarly, we know that productivity is inherently tied to performance. With more and more critical business functions “webified”, the longer it takes to load a page the longer the delay a customer or help desk service representative experiences, reducing the number of calls or customers that can be serviced in any given measurable period.
So performance is paramount, I see no reason to persuade you further to come to that conclusion.
Inventory levels. Sales results. Negative comments on Facebook. Positive comments on Twitter. Shopping on Amazon. Listening to Pandora. Online search habits. No matter what you call it or what the information describes, it’s all data being collected about you.
Thanks to new technologies like Hadoop, once-unquantifiable data (like Facebook conversations and Tweets) can now be quantified. Now, because nearly everything is measurable, everything is measured. The result: companies are spending big dollars to collect, store and measure astronomical amounts of data.
Show me the data!
There’s a name for this movement: Big Data. Not only is it a name, it has been the “it, it” of 2012, possibly trumping “the cloud.”
Cloud computing has reduced deployment times and the ability to try out new ideas without significant investments in hardware and software. Cloud supports business agility and Cloud projects may have a quicker turnaround time for releases. Many programs have declared victory as being Agile since they are using the rapid deployment capabilities of Cloud and Big Data. The myth is “I use Cloud” hence I’m Agile”. However this is only the business agility aspect in terms of using the “pay as you go” model of Cloud to have quicker provisioning and deployments. Agile management and development is a focus on Agile techniques throughout the development lifecycle. On some projects, in an attempt to get products out using Cloud, Big Data Business Intelligence tools quickly, the magnificent capabilities of Agile management and development have been forgotten. Agile processes do put forth specific methods to manage the rapid development cycles and changing requirements in application development.
Over the last decade, Business Process Outsourcing has become an enterprise standard way of delegating the non-core processes to third-party service providers, which resulted in cost controls and business efficiency. This BPO industry has further matured by providing innovation to the outsourcing enterprise because specialized BPO providers with subject matter expertise on clients’ business vertical and business processes have ultimately enabled the enterprises to achieve their business goals beyond cost-cutting.
Cloud-based BPM is the provision of Business Process Management tools as a SaaS/PaaS over the network. These services provide the ability to orchestrate many low level of business services (again available as SaaS Services or by other On premise applications) coupled with human processes into a realization of complete Business Process As A Service (BpaaS).
Rackspace says it’s gussied up its free Private Cloud Software, a k a Alamo, boosting remote support capabilities for on premise OpenStack-powered clouds, helping companies to monitor their private clouds, and providing more storage capabilities.
It claims that since Alamo launched in April thousands of organizations in 125 countries – from Fortune 100s to colleges and research centers – have downloaded the product.
Some of the new features of the Private Cloud Software include highly scalable block storage, which turns external storage into an additional storage volume for a private cloud environment based on OpenStack Cinder; object storage powered by OpenStack Swift, which lets users create massively scalable storage resource pools that can be used by a Rackspace Private Cloud environment for storing files as well as server images, taking advantage of commodity hardware to reduce costs; and monitoring apps, Graphite and Collectd, to extend the monitoring and alerting capabilities available to private cloud environments.
Companies of every size and kind are making the transition to an integrated infrastructure as a way to implement cloud computing, streamline their business and keep costs down. It’s also a way to increase the performance of important applications and keep the IT service efficient. Integrated infrastructures also help with stability as many companies simply don’t have the capacity to power such applications.
Although many of my fellow business owners and leaders understand the importance of resource consolidation, virtulaization and simplification of their infrastructure management, we’re not all adopting them at the same rate or for the same uses. Some are just starting out on the path towards virtualization and some are using them for the vast majority of their operational applications. For those just delving into the world of virtualization, time, available manpower and budgetary concerns may be what’s holding them back. One way in which they can get past this hurdle is to use a ready-to-deploy, pre-wired, and pre-integrated virtualized infrastructure.
Dell on Friday announced the acquisition of Gale Technologies, a provider of infrastructure automation software that allows organizations to streamline the deployment of on-premise and hybrid clouds for self-service access to infrastructure. Dell also announced the formation of its Enterprise Systems & Solutions organization focused on the delivery of converged and enterprise workload topologies and solutions in alignment with Dell’s Enterprise vision.
Gale Technologies helps customers turn discrete compute, network and storage components into integrated and highly-optimized application, virtual desktop infrastructure, and private cloud solutions featuring self-service and advanced automation. Gale Technologies’ solution provides a comprehensive management, automation and orchestration platform for simplifying end-to-end provisioning across heterogeneous infrastructures. Gale Technologies delivers automated physical and virtual resource allocation, preserves best practice enterprise infrastructure deployment through reusable templates, and masks that complexity from the end user to provide a valuable enterprise asset.
Dell on Friday announced the acquisition of Gale Technologies, a provider of infrastructure automation software that allows organizations to streamline the deployment of on-premise and hybrid clouds for self-service access to infrastructure. Dell also announced the formation of its Enterprise Systems & Solutions organization focused on the delivery of converged and enterprise workload topologies and solutions in alignment with Dell’s Enterprise vision.
Gale Technologies helps customers turn discrete compute, network and storage components into integrated and highly-optimized application, virtual desktop infrastructure, and private cloud solutions featuring self-service and advanced automation. Gale Technologies’ solution provides a comprehensive management, automation and orchestration platform for simplifying end-to-end provisioning across heterogeneous infrastructures. Gale Technologies delivers automated physical and virtual resource allocation, preserves best practice enterprise infrastructure deployment through reusable templates, and masks that complexity from the end user to provide a valuable enterprise asset.
How are all those existing Rackspace cloud customers going to transition to the new Rackspace open cloud? Here is one answer.
Racemi, the moving company for the cloud, announced its cloud migration software now supports physical and virtual server migrations to Rackspace open cloud giving customers more flexibility and choices when it comes to migrating existing workloads to public cloud computing resources. This means it is no longer necessary to rebuild servers from scratch in the cloud, which translates to significant time and cost savings.
Both its Cloud Path software as a service and DynaCenter on-premises software can now migrate servers running supported operating systems to Rackspace open cloud server instances, based on OpenStack Compute.
LeaseWeb, the Dutch-based infrastructure provider, is expanding its public cloud infrastructure to the US, figuring to be cheaper than Rackspace and Amazon.
The multi-tenant widgetry is designed for maximum redundancy and uses the open source CloudStack platform Citrix turned over to the Apache Foundation at its core. It likes KVM for virtualization and its fast network-attached storage is based on a Nexenta platform.
The hungry newcomer is offering four CPU and memory packages ranging from $16 a month to $99 a month.
Sixteen bucks will buy a single core machine with a half a gig of memory, 40 gigs of storage and 500 gigs free bandwidth. Ninety-nine bucks buys quad-core VMs, four gigs of memory, 160 gigs of storage and the same free bandwidth. All instances are automatically firewalled and it just takes a credit card.