In today’s business environment, enterprises of all sizes are looking for new ways to leverage large amounts of accumulated data. In order to manage this data, many have turned to the cost-effective Hadoop framework. However, Hadoop poses a key challenge: security.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Brian Christian is Co-founder and CTO at Zettaset, will explain how Zettaset’s secure Hadoop initiative called SHadoop is challenging currently held data analytics assumptions by providing a secure, affordable and user-friendly Big Data Hadoop platform.
What Will 9/11 Ultimately Mean?
On this very solemn day in the US, the small aggravations of daily work and life recede as we ponder the toll exacted by hatred and violence throughout the world. The events of 9/11 in the US were global in their implications – not only did people from 60 countries die in the attacks on US soil, but untold thousands more people have died, and continue to die, in the wars that followed.
Violence begets violence, and the words of wisdom from Isaiah 2 (“…they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks…”) are heeded no better today than when written more than 2,700 years ago.
I’ve written extensively and recently about my fear and loathing of the nascent police states and unending wars spawned by 9/11, and the use of much of the great technology that our industry produces to maintain it. In the US, UK, and elsewhere, blanket use of the word “terrorism” to justify all manner of suppressive vigilance transcends political parties. This disease has permeated media coverage as well; every violent act by a crazed loner these days is first reported through the lens of possible terrorism.
As I was traveling through the US recently, I lost track of my laptop bag for a few seconds. Prior to 9/11, the fear would be that someone might steal it. Now, the fear is someone might report it, and it might be confiscated and destroyed. Be sure to analyze that contents in that bottle of Tums while you’re at it, folks. The truly sad thing is, if I ever space out and leave that bag in a mall somewhere, or on a city bench, or in a parking lot, the response will likely be the same.
September 11, 2001 will never be forgotten in the US as long as there is a US. It’s an iconic date, along with July 4 and December 7. My hope is some day its lesson will be a more positive one.
July 4 proved that the US can be a nation of one out of many. The post WWII aftermath of December 7 has proven that even the most horrific of wars can be reconciled among nations. When can September 11 come to symbolize a resolute strength in the face of terror, one that does not cower in fear and make suspected criminals of everyone, but dispenses justice to those deserving of it then carries on as before?
The Cloud: Floor Wax or Dessert Topping?
The end result of this ongoing specialization trend is that selecting the right product won’t get much easier. It used to be that when you needed a software product, you could consider the big suites or the smaller specialists, rank them according to quality and price, and make your selection based on those criteria—essentially comparing apples to apples. But with the Cloud, you have a number of specialty players who each solve different problems well, and you need to figure out the right tool—or combination of tools—for the problems you’re trying to solve.
Certainly part of this move toward specialization is a result of the emerging nature of the Cloud and NoSQL marketplaces, but the CAP Theorem won’t go away once the products mature. As a result, ZapThink expects the maturation of these markets to take a dramatically different tack than the SOA Suite market from the last decade. If you’re waiting for some big vendor suite to solve all your Cloud problems, dream on.
ProfitBricks: Live Virtual Scaling by the Minute
A two-and-a-half-year-old Berlin-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) start-up you never heard of called ProfitBricks thinks it can take on Amazon Web Services and win.
By its lights the likes of Amazon, Rackspace, Savvis and GoGrid are all first-generation and it’s not.
It claims to have completely re-engineered cloud computing and went GA with its widgetry in the US on Monday. The stuff’s reportedly been running in Europe for six months and has amassed 70,000 servers.
It says it’s first to offer live vertical scaling of CPU cores and RAM without forcing the user to reboot the server.
Nobody has been able to add resources to an instance (a virtual machine) without taking the server down before, it says.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: This Is Your Career on OpenStack
In a little over two years, OpenStack has shattered adoption benchmarks set by previous open source projects and gained acceptance as the future of the data center, but has your career kept up with its blistering pace?
In her session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Niki Acosta, Product Evangelist for Rackspace Private Cloud, will explain how they have already made a career out of the OpenStack movement and how you can make the transition into making OpenStack your full-time job, from becoming more familiar with the code to selling on the opportunity to the C-suite and startups alike.
Mind the Gap – Quality of Experience: Beyond the Green light/Red light Datacenter.
By Geoff Smith, Senior Solutions Architect
If you have read my last three blogs on the changing landscape of IT management, you can probably guess by now where I’m leaning in terms of what should be a key metric in determining success: the experience of the user.
As any industry progresses from its infancy to mainstream acceptance, the focus for success invariably transitions from being the “wizard-behind-the-curtain” towards transparency and accountability. Think of the automobile industry. Do you really buy a car anymore, or do you buy a driving experience? Auto manufacturers have had to add a slew of gizmos (some which have absolutely nothing to do with driving) and services (no-cost maintenance plans, loaners, roadside assistance) that were always the responsibility of the consumer before.
It is the same with IT today. We can no longer just deliver a service to our consumers; we must endeavor to ensure the quality of the consumer’s experience using that service. This pushes the boundaries for what we need to see, measure, and respond to beyond the obvious green light/red light blinking in the datacenter. As IT professionals, we need to validate that the services we deliver are being consumed in a manner that enables the user to be productive for the business.
In other words, knowing you have 5 9s of availability for your ERP system is great, but does it really explain the whole story? If a system is up and available, but the user experience is poor enough to affect productivity, and results in a lower than expected output from that population, what is the net result?
Moving our visibility out to this level is not easy. We have always relied upon the user to initiate the process and have responded reactively. With the right framework, we can expand our proactive capabilities, alerting us to potential efficiency issues before the user experience degrades to the point of visibility. In this way, we move our “cheese” from systems availability to service usability. The business can then see a direct correlation between what we provided and the actual business value what we provided has delivered.
Some of the management concepts here are not entirely new, but the way they are leveraged may be. Synthetic transactions, round-trip analytics, and bandwidth analysis are a few of the vectors to consider. But as important is how we react to events in these streams, and how quickly we can return usability to “Normal State.” Auto discovery and re-direction play key roles and parallel process troubleshooting tools can minimize experience impact.
As we move forward, we need to jettison the old concepts of inside-out monitoring and management and a datacenter focus, and move toward service-oriented metrics and measurement across infrastructure layers from delivery engine to consumption point.
Porticor for Best Cloud Computing Security
Q&A with Gilad Parann-Nissany, founder and CEO, Porticor, September 05, 2012 When did you first hear about the SC Awards and what prompted you to be a part of the big event? I have known about the SC Awards for years and years, and have watched all the high-quality companies and products it has recognized. Each year it […]
The post Porticor for Best Cloud Computing Security appeared first on Porticor Cloud Security.
Does new study show cloud computing is viable for SMEs?
Advantage of cloud for smaller businesses “loud and clear”, according to Australia-based research
A survey by Australian cloud software provider MYOB has shown that many SMEs are not taking advantage of the cloud – but those that do experience tangible benefits.
The research, conducted by market researchers Colmar Brunton and commissioned by MYOB, polled over 1000 SMEs and found some intriguing trends:
- Accessing data from any location proved the biggest draw for SMEs migrating (42%)
- Working remotely (28%); reducing IT usage issues (26%) and data protection (23%) also popular
- But 27% of respondents said they didn’t know enough about the cloud to make a decision
Nearly four-fifths of the companies surveyed (79%) said they didn’t use the cloud for business. 14% said they did, while 8% weren’t sure.
The highlights from the research included various quick wins for enterprises. For example, 44% of SMEs in the cloud expected …
Autodesk Liberates Designers with Cloud-Based Pay-As-You-Go Simulation
Autodesk, Inc. today unveiled Autodesk Simulation 360—a comprehensive set of tools delivered securely in the cloud with a pay-as-you-go pricing model that enables any company to make simulation part of their everyday design and engineering processes.
With Autodesk Simulation 360, designers, engineers and analysts can more easily predict, optimize and validate the performance of things in the world around us. The virtually infinite power of the cloud allows complex engineering tests that were once limited to simulation specialists to be performed by mainstream designers. For example:
- Product designers can test how various ergonomic designs of furniture,
such as chairs, will accommodate and adapt to differing body types and
levels of use well before the piece is ever manufactured. - Manufacturers can understand the heat generated by electronics devices
enabling them to design-in proper cooling, avoid overheating and help
prevent costly consumer recalls. - Architects and engineers can gain deeper insight into how buildings,
including plants, will perform by simulating air flow to help ensure
thermal comfort; analyze environmental effects on bridges and
buildings; and test the behavior of structural materials including
concrete — all before anything is ever built.
Autodesk Simulation 360 is the latest offering to build upon the Autodesk 360 cloud-based platform. By performing computationally intensive simulation tasks in the cloud, designers, engineers and analysts can test multiple “what if?” design scenarios in parallel. The computational power of the cloud also eliminates the need for specialized hardware, thereby removing previous limitations and helping to increase productivity.
“The ability to run multiple simulation studies in the cloud, in the same time as a typical singular simulation study with single variables, really opens up the game for us by helping us understand much more of the system in a shorter amount of time,” said Matt Nowicki, senior product engineer at BioLite, Inc. “It’s impressive how easy, valuable and seamless simulating in the cloud can be for a company such as ours.”
“Our customers can now visualize building comfort before the project is constructed. This enables them to make more informed decisions pertaining to project costs and lets them evaluate system and energy trade-offs as well. Providing this type of service helps distinguish us from our competition,” said Darryl McClelland, BIM and Virtual Design manager at Heapy Engineering, which provides Mechanical-Electrical-Technology Systems Design Services, LEED and Energy Consulting Services, Building Commissioning Services, and Planning Services.
The Autodesk Simulation 360 software portfolio includes a wide range of cloud-based mechanical, fluid flow, thermal and plastic injection molding tools at an affordable price. Additional benefits include direct geometry exchange; robust meshing tools; extensive material libraries; and proven solver technology to improve simulation accuracy in the areas of greatest concern.
“Businesses simply can’t afford not to understand how their designs will perform before anything gets built,” said Robert “Buzz” Kross, senior vice president, Design, Lifecycle and Simulation at Autodesk. “Autodesk Simulation 360 puts powerful simulation capabilities within reach for designers and engineers at virtually every company, giving them the tools they need to better predict, optimize and validate their designs early in the design process.”
In contrast to traditional perpetual licensing, Autodesk Simulation 360’s easy and affordable, pay-as-you-go model simplifies access and offers unparalleled flexibility. Autodesk Simulation 360 is now available in English, and is planned to be available in other languages in the near future. For additional information on how to access Autodesk Simulation 360 and take part in the Simulation Liberation event, visit www.autodesk.com/simulationliberation. Additional resources such as simulation experts, on-demand videos and tutorials are available at www.autodesk.com/simulation-360.
Filling in Big Data’s Missing Link: Making Big Data Pay for Itself
Say hello to Bashes — the first cloud-apps that enable companies to turn Big Data into new sources of revenue
I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but today’s the day GoodData makes it possible for companies to finally monetize Big Data. That’s because today we unveil our first Bashes — cloud-based business mashups — on our platform that enable anyone, in any size business, to turn mountains of disparate data into insight that finds new sources of revenue, boosts profit and builds a competitive edge.
We call these new solutions Bashes because they combine the best elements of consumer apps with modern, enterprise-class technologies. That means consumer apps’ clean and intuitive user interface, ease of use and device independence, with cloud-based business technologies that collect and manage structured and unstructured data from hundreds of sources. With Bashes, businesses can discern meaning from all the data flooding in from emails, social media, enterprise software and cloud apps.