As the Government’s own Digital Advantage paper recommends, the key to addressing Canada’s innovation gap is for CIO’s to adopt more new technologies like Cloud Computing, and the public sector can ignite this trend by leading the way with their own adoption.
Don Drummond makes a similar recommendation in his report. Recommendation 16-10 says: The government should shift its service delivery of information and information technology (I&IT) from in-house to external sources, where feasible.
Amazon has provided their take on how the big derecho storm that hit the Eastern US (and still leaves millions without power during a heat wave) brought down one of their data centers. Basically it was “hardware failure” — in this case a couple of emergency generators.
In the single datacenter that did not successfully transfer to the generator backup, all servers continued to operate normally on Uninterruptable Power Supply (“UPS”) power. As onsite personnel worked to stabilize the primary and backup power generators, the UPS systems were depleting and servers began losing power at 8:04pm PDT.
Read the AWS statement for more detail.
SYS-CON Events announced today that ERP.com has been named “Media Sponsor” of 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.
ERP.com is the authority site for enterprise resource planning (ERP). Members of ERP.com and visitors to the site can streamline their business software selection process by searching the comprehensive database of software solutions and ERP packages.
ERP.com also has in-house software implementation experts that can further help companies streamline their software selection process and if needed can install or update a chosen system. For most companies today, technology is a critical component for delivering the best performance and the mission of ERP.com is to help companies find the optimal software solutions at the lowest possible prices – free of charge.
The discussion examines the full implications of IT virtualization, and how accretive benefits are being realized — from bringing speed to business requests, to enhancing security, to strategic disaster recovery (DR), and to unprecedented agility in creating and exploiting applications and data delivery value.
If you look at SAP, you find literally thousands of development systems. You find a lot of training systems. You find systems that support sales activities for pre-sales. You find systems that support our consulting organization in developing customer solutions.
From a developer’s perspective, the first order of business is to get access to a system fast. Developers, by themselves, don’t care that much about cost. They want the system and they want it now. For development managers and management in general, it’s a different story.
For training, it’s important that the systems are reliable and available. Of course again for management, it’s the cost perspective. For people in custom development, they need the right system quickly to build up the correct environment for the particular project that they’re working on.
NuBlue was established in 2005 and has quickly become a leading e-commerce hosting provider in the UK.
Since our inception we have used the Parallels Plesk control panel as no other product offers our customers the powerful and intuitive interface combination that Plesk allows. Our business has grown massively as Plesk has continued to evolve. With Plesk 11 it feels like the product has reached an evolutionary milestone.
Our team and our clients love the new interface, the speed of it, the slick and well organised feature set it provides. It just feels intuitive. Under the hood we are very excited by the possibilities of Nginx and SNI support as well as the myriad of performance enhancements that have been made, not to mention the out the box IPv6 support which stands us in good stead for our impending IPv6 rollout!
All in all we see this release of Plesk as the most exciting release yet and we can’t wait to introduce it to all our customers.
Tom Ashworth
Technical Director
Cloud security is in a state of flux. Actually it’s not really, but discussion is rife across the industry regarding the general state of cloud data and application welfare. Questions flutter around whether particular services are secure, whether multi-tenant clouds can be locked down and whether “spun down” instances of cloud servers will remain secure so that old customer data is deleted and non-accessible.
Where are we headed with the general consensus on cloud security just now?
Of course we should start out from first principles and look to comments made the big name cloud providers who have pointed out that the cloud is only as secure as the controls you place upon it, i.e., virtualized hosting services do not come with “security included” as some sort of free gift… and so a cloud server is really just a server but delivered as a service.
The proliferation of cloud technologies can be seen through the increasing number of cloud ISVs that are leveraging cloud either by changing the underlying computing model or by completely redoing their product offerings. This number is already bordering on hundreds and quickly headed for thousands as the cloud opens new avenues for businesses and consumers alike. Many business domains are already neatly served through cloud ISVs, sometimes very innovatively. Predominantly, areas like HR, marketing, CRM, collaboration, business intelligence, accounting, financial practices, ecommerce and content management have many options already.
ISVs are using cloud models differently and are at different stages of enablement. Some have reused existing tools and features to re-platform products, some are using cloud services to complement the product while others have built products ground up afresh or are using cloud to host and manage service delivery better. Some are testing the waters by embracing cloud partially and some are neck deep betting on it completely. Different ISVs are in different business situations with respect to fully exploiting the cloud benefits. Based on observations so far, here are nine things ISVs can look at doing next. A few of these may be obvious for some, but these steps could be critical for future business. One size seldom fits all. ISVs need to map their current situation and decide what fits them well and in what order.
Equinix, Inc., a provider of global data center services, today announced it has completed its acquisition of ancotel GmbH, a provider of carrier-neutral colocation and interconnection services in Europe.
The acquisition adds more than 400 network, cloud and content customers to Equinix. This includes 200 new networks and an additional 6,000 cross connects. In addition, Equinix adds one data center to its Frankfurt campus and now operates 21,000 square meters (223,000 square feet) of data center capacity across five data centers in the Frankfurt market. As part of the acquisition, Equinix also gains edge nodes in Hong Kong, London and Miami, providing additional points of presence in these markets. One of the world’s busiest data hubs, Equinix’s Frankfurt campus offers a broad mix of networks from Western and Eastern Europe, and significant growth opportunities for customers looking to expand their data center footprint globally.
“As a leading interconnection hub for networks throughout Europe, ancotel brings highly complementary capabilities to our European business that increases our network density in the region and offers a strong interconnection infrastructure that will provide our customers with a platform for growth in Europe and beyond,” said Eric Schwartz, president, Equinix EMEA.
At AT&T Labs in Florham Park, New Jersey, big data is being used to analyze the traffic and movement patterns of people through data generated by their mobile phones to help improve policymaking and urban and traffic planning. The research team realized they could understand deep patterns of how people moved through urban environments by analyzing the flow of mobile devices from cell tower to cell tower. And they wanted to use those insights to help improve traffic flow and to inform better urban planning, not to improve their marketing.
Recently, we’ve been touting how cloud storage reduces the IT maintenance burden for organizations and, more specifically, how organizations can take advantage of cloud storage while keeping control of their data by using cloud storage gateways.
Erik Linask from TMCNet caught up with us at the TwinStrata booth at Cloud Expo 2012 in June to get the full scoop regarding benefits and considerations of cloud storage and just how easily and securely cloud storage integrates into existing data storage environments through cloud storage gateways.