As enterprise adoption of cloud computing accelerates, organizations must have a strategy and roadmap for moving to the cloud. Faced with different options including building a private cloud, subscribing to public clouds, or leveraging a hybrid cloud, organizations need a rational and pragmatic approach. In this Lunchtime Keynote Amir Halfon explores the emerging trends in cloud computing and offers best practices for how organizations can successfully navigate a journey to the cloud.
Amir Halfon is Chief Technologist for Financial Services at Oracle, where he oversees the development of industry-specific solutions and strategy, addressing challenges such as Bid Data analytics, on-demand risk management and deep customer insight.
Vertical Cloud Targets Needs of Wall Street
NYSE Euronext’s innovative cloud and groundbreaking business model targets the needs of Wall Street IT leaders.
We’ll learn about how this innovative cloud and groundbreaking business model targets the needs of Wall Street IT leaders, how the business of the financial services industry has received them, and explore how providing cloud services as a business has evolved.
We’ve been very happy with the progress we’ve made. When we announced at VMworld last year, we had just gone into early access for our first clients in our data center in the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut tri-state area, where we have all of our US-based markets running the New York Stock Exchange Markets, the Arca Electronic Markets, and AMEX
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Best Practices 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 session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Alistair Farquharson, CTO at SOA Software, will address this challenge by exploring some proven best practices for API management.
Cloud Computing: SUSE Cloud Rolls Out
SUSE claims it’s got the first enterprise-supported private Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud solution powered by the Essex version of OpenStack, the open source platform that Red Hat is also supporting.
Red Hat’s widgetry, now in preview, won’t solidify until next year. SUSE’s is ready to roll.
It calls the stuff SUSE Cloud, which is supposed to be easier to deploy and manage than Rackspace’s OpenStack package because it’s integrated Crowbar in the thing.
AppFog Kicks Off Its PaaS Consolidation Play
There are way too many PaaS options around, so AppFog has enveloped one of them and will suck up its technology.
It’s acquired Nodester, the open source PaaS for Node.js, which it says grew 40% in the last 30 days.
AppFog is using Nodester’s intellectual property to collaborate with VMware to deliver WebSocket support in Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open source PaaS.
According to Krishnan Subramanian, founder and principal analyst at Rishidot Research, “It is clear that polyglot and infrastructure agnostic PaaS solutions are the future of PaaS. As enterprise acceptance of PaaS continues to ramp up it is likely that we will see a wave of consolidation.”
AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson means to be that consolidator.
There are something like 200 PaaSs in the world all doing things differently and in the fashion of the times not letting developers know where their apps are deployed or take them and run. Single language PaaSs are, as Nodester founder Chris Matthieu discovered, too limiting.
Carlson says standardization is needed before the enterprise finds the PaaS “too ugly.” They need to run across all vendors and public, private and hybrid clouds, all looking the same.
He figures his crusade will take him three-five years. As AppFog strengthens, the weak sisters will wither. Carlson means to be the last man standing with a couple of “ankle-biters” surviving. Evidently his VCs are backing his play.
Returning to the present, AppFog will keep Nodester running as an independent service until WebSocket support is integrated into AppFog later this year and Matthieu decides whether he wants to stay or go. At that point the applications will move into the AppFog infrastructure, giving Nodester users access to all AppFog features including cross-cloud vendor compatibility. They will be able to deploy apps to a wide range of different IaaS providers.
AppFog’s PaaS supports Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, PHP and Ruby solutions. It did Node.js before Nodester, whose widgetry is deeper and broader than what AppFog had. AppFog also inherits a reported significant community, doubling its own.
Node is tied with PHP as the most popular language on AppFog with the most number of applications running. AppFog claims to have deployed 60,000 mobile and web apps to the cloud.
Citrix survey: Is the cloud confusing?
A survey from Wakefield Research for virtualisation experts Citrix has shown that, for consumers, many Americans are unaware of what ‘the cloud’ entails.
32% of respondents stated that cloud was “a thing of the future”, while 95% of those surveyed who thought they weren’t using the cloud actually were, for such simple tasks as online banking and social networking.
The research, which garnered responses from over 1000 American nationals, found some surprising and eye-opening results. Highlights included:
- 40% of respondents stated an advantage of the cloud was being able to access work information in their “birthday suit”
- A quarter of those surveyed said the cloud was great for keeping embarrassing videos off the hard drive
- A third of interviewees said they faked knowledge of the cloud at work, with 14% pretending to know for a job interview and 17% winging it on a first date
Thankfully, Americans did see …
The Data Era – Moving from Big Data 1.0 to Big Data 2.0
Do you think they truly understood just how fast the data infrastructure marketplace was going to change? That is the question that comes to mind when I think about Donald Feinberg and Mark Beyer at Gartner who, last year, wrote about how the data warehouse market is undergoing a transformation.
VMware’s OpenStack Hook-up: Analysis & Comments
VMware has applied to join the OpenStack Foundation, potentially giving the burgeoning open source cloud stack movement a huge dose of credibility in the enterprise. There are risks to the community in VMware’s involvement, of course, but on the balance this could be a pivotal event. There is an alternative explanation, which I will hit at the end, but it’s a pretty exciting development no matter VMware’s true motivations.
VMworld Recap: Day One
Day 1 at VMworld 2012 has been pretty action packed. The first order of business was the official handing over of the reins from Paul Maritz to Pat Gelsinger as CEO of VMware. Paul will remain involved as he is taking the Chief Strategist role at EMC which owns 80% of VMware so I would not expect his influence to go away anytime soon. From conversations I’ve had with others both inside and outside of VMware, the primary reason for this move seems to be purely operational. Paul is an absolute visionary and has taken VMware to some fantastic heights over his four-year tenure, however there have been some challenges on the operational side in executing on the great visions. This is where Pat comes into the picture as he’s historically been a pure operations guy so I envision the team of Paul and Pat to do some great things for VMware going forward.
Some other key highlights from the Keynote are as follows:
- It is estimated that 60% of all x86 server workloads in the world are now virtualized and 80% of that 60% are virtualized on ESX/vSphere.
- There are now 125,000 VCP certified engineers worldwide, almost a 5-fold increase from 4 years ago
- The dreaded vRAM allocation licensing model for vSphere 5 is now officially dead with the release of vSphere 5.1. VMware is going back to per socket licensing and neither RAM nor cores matter. Personally, I am not sure this was a great move as I think most people were over the headache of vRAM and in reality I never saw a single customer who was adversely affected by it. When Pat announced this, I think he thought the entire auditorium would roar in appreciation but that was not the case. Yes, there was some cheering, but even Pat made mention of the fact that it wasn’t the full on reaction he expected.
- There are a lot of new certifications and certification tracks that were announced to better align with VMware’s definition of the new “stack.” These tracks include the pre-existing datacenter infrastructure certs plus new ones around Cloud (think vCloud Director here), Desktop (View and Wanova/Mirage), and Apps (SpringSource). I’ll be taking the new VCP-IaaS exam tomorrow so wish me luck!
- There was a light touch on both the Dynamic Ops and Nicira acquisitions. Both of these have huge implications for VMware but really not much was announced at the show. Both of these are very recent acquisitions so it will take some time for VMware to get them integrated but I am very excited about the possibilities of each.
- There was an announcement of the vCloud Suite, which essentially is a bundling of existing VMware products under a singular license model. There are the typical Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus editions of the suite which include different pieces and parts, but the Enterprise Plus edition throws in about everything and the kitchen sink including….
- vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus
- vCenter Operations Enterprise
- vCloud Director
- vCloud networking/security (I assume this will eventually include Nicira networking virtualization and the vShield product family)
- Site Recovery Manager
- vFabric Application Director
- Lots of focus on virtualization of business critical applications and not just the usual suspects of SQL, Oracle, Exchange, etc. There was a cool demo of Hadoop via Project Serengeti which automates the spinning up/down of various Hadoop VMs and this is delivered as a single virtual appliance. GreenPages has done a lot in the business critical app virtualization space over the past couple of years and we remain excited about the possibilities that virtualization brings to these beefy apps.
- One of the big geeky announcements is around the concept of shared nothing vMotion. This means that you can now move a live running VM between two host servers but without any requirement for shared storage, basically vMotion without a SAN. This has massive implications in the SMB and branch office spaces where the cost of shared storage was very prohibitive. Now you can get some of the cool benefits of virtualization using only very cheap direct attached storage!
- The final piece of the keynote showed VMware’s vision for virtualization of “everything” including compute, storage, and networking. Look for some very cool stuff coming over the next 6 months or so in relation to new ways of thinking about networking and storage within a virtual environment. These are two elements that really have not fundamentally changed how they work since the advent of x86 virtualization and we are now running into limitations due to this. VMware is leading the charge in changing the way we think about these two critical elements and looking at very interesting ways to attack design and in the end making it much simpler to work with networking and storage technologies within virtualized environments.
Have to jump back over for Day 2 activities now, but be on the lookout for some upcoming GreenPages events where we’ll dive deeper into the announcements from the show!
The 1-2-3 about Parallels PartnerNet
About three months ago, we announced an expanded Partner Program which included a new Member level and all-new Parallels PartnerNet portal. There are now over 1,000 users in PartnerNet, and it is just getting started!
For any existing or potential Parallels Partners that haven’t yet registered, here’s 3 good reasons why you should to take a moment and do so:
- 1) Complete your Company Profile (located in the top navigation) and this will link externally to the Partner Locator found on the Parallels website. (NOTE: this feature is only available for Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum partners, and is not available for Members.)
- 2) Be sure to take advantage of the Parallels Plesk 11 launch resources page – there is some fantastic product collateral, messaging, and guidance available, localized into multiple languages.
- 3) Visit the SMB Headquarters for access to our primary research and SMB-focused materials, as well as our Marketing Best Practices page for whitepapers and checklists that you can use.
-Joshua Beil
SP Marketing
jbeil@parallels.com
@joshbeil