Bob Gourley, editor of CTOvision as well as founder and CTO of Crucial Point, LLC, was recently interviewed by WashingtonExec, where he shared his views on emerging information technology, government needs, and Big Data. The interview is reproduced below: How does Bob Gourley, founder and CTO of Crucial Point, LLCand […]
This post by AlexOlesker was first published at CTOvision.com.
Here is an interesting article from over at wired about proposed privacy law and court warrants for cloud data, along with this one over at information week. Both got me thinking about some things that I hear when out and about talking with IT professionals and their concerns around clouds.
Common themes at the recent modernizing data protection and new realities of cloud and virtualization event series that I was involved with pertained to cloud concerns. Some organizations are already using clouds to some degree while others are taking a cautious approach. Some are all in, while others will take longer for various reasons. Likewise some are using a mix of public, private and hybrid to compliment their environments for collaboration, shared storage, compute, content distribution, backup, archive or BC and DR among other things. These environments range from SOHO or small SMB to ROBO to workgroup to enterprise, education and government of various size.
Often the conversations would evolve around gaining confidence with clouds as well as virtualization. In the case of clouds, given that some of the services as well as products, solutions or technologies are still young, there is still a learning and maturing curve. There are also other factors including the amount of hype and FUD around clouds has some people more skeptical or cautious to move forward. Granted there are also the true cynics which tend to be offset by the cloud crowd cheerleaders thus canceling each other out.
For the non cheerleaders and non cynics, hurdles to cloud adoption (in whole or in part, public, private or hybrid) tend to start with the letter C.
My message has and continues to be that of do not be scared of clouds and virtualization, however be ready, informed and decide what your concerns are. By determining your concerns, you can then work on figuring out what to do about those.
Here is a list of common cloud concerns and comments that I hear:
Cloud cheerleader hype
Cloud critics and cynics FUD
Confidence in cloud products or services
Certainty in cloud data protection or security
Cloud certifications and standards
Compatibility and interoperability
Classes and continuing education
Confidentially, privacy and security
Costs of cloud services or products
Country where cloud data is stored
There are many other items that can be added to the list that start with the letter C, however there are also some that start with P. For example, People, Products, Process, Procedures, Practices, Paradigm, Public or Private and Protocols among others.
Its one thing to be scared of something and not know what or why you are scared. It’s another thing to know or figure out what or why you are scared or concerned and then be able to do something about it. For example learn what standards such as SNIA CDMI among others exist and how those could be of help along with other tools or best practices from others.
Thus dont be scared of clouds or virtualization, however do your homework, decide your concerns and then find what can be done about those. If you need help, drop me a note.
In the meantime, here is some more material:
Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking
More modernizing data protection, virtualization and clouds with certainty
Cloud conversations: AWS Government Cloud (GovCloud)
Amazon cloud storage options enhanced with Glacier
Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) publishes two new cloud usage models
Data protection modernization, more than swapping out media
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the NetFlix Fix?
What do VARs and Clouds as well as MSPs have in common?
Only you can prevent cloud data loss
The blame game: Does cloud storage result in data loss?
Cloud conversations: Loss of data access vs. data loss
Clouds are like Electricity: Dont be Scared
Poll: What Do You Think of IT Clouds?
Ok, nuff said.
Cheers Gs
Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)
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What Role Does Open-source Play in Cloud Computing Innovation? is a guest post that I have written on GigaOM to show how open-source is playing an important role in driving and supporting the transition to cloud computing. According to our experience, the availability of open-source cloud management tools like OpenNebula is accelerating the pace of innovation on the datacenter side.
Since we started the OpenNebula project in 2005, we have helped many organizations develop value by building innovative cloud services and solutions to meet their user and customer needs in new ways or to meet new market needs. The guest post looks at cloud innovation from different perspectives, including some specific examples.
Funny thing about the hype cycle in high tech, things rarely turn out the way cheerleaders proclaim it will. Mainframes did not magically disappear in any of the waves that predicted their demise. The reason is simple – there is a lot of code running on mainframes that works, and has worked well for a long time, rewriting all of that code would be a monumental undertaking that, even today, twenty years after the first predictions of its demise, many organizations – particularly in financials – are not undertaking.
Don’t get me wrong: There are a variety of reasons why mainframes in their current incarnation are doomed to a small vertical market at best in the very very long run, but the cost of recreating systems just to remove mainframes is going to continue to hold them in a lot of datacenters in the near future.
But they do need to be able to communicate with newer systems if they’re going to hang around, and the last five years or so have seen a whole lot of projects to make them play more friendly with the distributed datacenter.
In the past few weeks I visited several Cloud and Big Data conferences that provided me with a lot of insight. Some people only consider the technology side of Big Data technologies like Hadoop or Cassandra. The real driver however is a different one. Business analysts have discovered Big Data technologies as a way to leverage tons of existing data and ask questions about customer behavior and all sorts relationships to drive business strategy. By doing that they are pushing their IT departments to run ever bigger Hadoop environments and ever faster real-time systems.
What’s interesting from a technical side is that ad-hoc analytics on existing data is allowed to take some time. However ad-hoc implies people waiting for an answer, meaning we are talking about minutes and not hours. Another interesting insight is that Hadoop environments are never static or standalone. Most companies take in new data on a continuous basis via technologies like flume. This means Hadoop may reduce jobs needed to be able to keep up with the data flow, either by adding more hardware or by optimizing them.
There are multiple drivers to Big Data (actually there are a lot) but the two most important ones are these: Analytics and Technical Need for Speed. Let’s look at some of those and the resulting takeaways.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Zadara Storage, a provider of enterprise-class storage for the cloud, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Zadara Storage offers enterprise-class storage for the cloud. With Zadara Storage, cloud storage leapfrogs ahead to provide cloud servers with high-performance, fully configurable, highly available, fully private, tiered storage. By combining the best of enterprise storage with the best of cloud storage, Zadara Storage takes the cloud to the next level enabling enterprises to migrate mission-critical applications to the cloud.
The rapid advancements in cloud computing technology enable unlimited access to computing power for anyone with an Internet connection. Leveraging this utility enables high-performance computing workloads to maximize the processing potential of a cloud. Nevertheless, the costs can be prohibitive.
In their session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Scott Houston, CEO and founder of GreenButton, joins Dell cloud evangelist Stephen Spector to discuss how companies of all sizes and budgets can best leverage cloud-based high performance computing without breaking the bank. They will also demonstrate the simplicity and cost-efficient methodology for running a rendering workload in the cloud in a matter of minutes instead of hours.
In the past, we ran small data on expensive big boxes, and it worked fine. For example, most database applications were sized in gigabytes or a few terabytes. Today, we’re moving to a world of Big Data measured in petabytes, running on lots of inexpensive small boxes. Data volumes are growing at 50 percent per year worldwide and at more than 100 percent compounded annually in many companies. This growth presents a fundamentally different computer science problem, and it requires a redesign of the way we build and operate data centers.
Simply put, rapid data growth is outstripping legacy IT designs, and the new world is all about distributed systems: commodity hardware, scale-out design, open standards, Ethernet, programmability, automation and self-service. The problem: your favorite large IT vendors don’t have products that look like this, and their pace of innovation is too slow to catch up to the need.
LeaseWeb, a privately held Dutch-based hosting provider, is setting up in the US with the idea of competing against Rackspace, Amazon and Softlayer. It says it’ll be cheaper.
The company is one of the largest hosting providers in Europe. OCOM, its parent company, is one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the Netherlands. It offers dedicated servers, colocation, cloud hosting, content delivery (CDN) and hybrid solutions.
LeaseWeb has hired William Schrader as CEO of its USA unit. Schrader was co-founder of the world’s first commercial ISP, PSINet, which dominated the market in the 1990s and was good for $16 billion at its peak, serving a reported 60% of the Fortune 500 in 30 countries. He previously had an advisory role at AIS Network, the managed, cloud and applications hosting provider.
“People will still be predicting the end of middleware ten years from now!” stated Cedric Thomas, CEO of OW2, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “The Internet has fostered the use of simple, robust protocols,” Thomas continued. “That middleware we used to know, when information systems were organized in silos is no longer center stage.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Why in your view is open source so important to the future of infrastructure?
Cedric Thomas: The infrastructure is typically what is shared by different users, different applications, different information systems, different companies. People want an infrastructure that is generic, standard, robust and scalable; an infrastructure that they can trust and that they can share. From that perspective, open source is the right model: users, and the economy in general, are much more efficient with shared open source software than with many proprietary vendors. Open source maximizes the network effects in the writing, the testing, the debugging and the support of code and delivers infrastructure software that is generally more reliable.