Earlier this month it became widely publicized that Apple maintains complete control over the master encryption key to their marquee cloud offering, iCloud. Now, to anyone familiar with security and encryption this should come as no surprise. In order for nearly all consumer cloud services to provide anywhere access to data the provider must be able to encrypt and decrypt data on the fly. But it brings up the bigger question of, who should I trust with my data?
To even begin to answer that question, we need to first look at what types of data are being stored inside Apple’s iCloud. For our purposes, we’ll break the data into two sets: general media files and personal files. The first group consists of music, movies, books, and mobile apps – not exactly what you’d call sensitive data. If a third-party were to gain access to your music library, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. The second group, however, is made up of much more personal documents, including notes, calendar events, mail, contacts, and user settings. This is personal information, there’s no question about it, but would a hacker or rogue Apple employee really go through the effort to read your email, text messages, and photos? Maybe if you are Scarlett Johansson – but that’s a different story…
Performance Management in ‘Big Data’ Applications at Cloud Expo New York
Do applications using NoSQL still require performance management? Is it always the best option to throw more hardware at a MapReduce job? In both cases, performance management is still about the application, but “Big Data” technologies have added a new wrinkle.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Michael Kopp, Technology Strategist at dynaTrace Software, will explain some of the main application performance problems of “Big Data” applications and how to solve them.
The Dramatic Shift in Cloud Computing Intentions
A new survey suggests that as cloud moves into the mainstream of business, it brings new sources of anxiety as well. This disruption and the dramatic shift in cloud computing intentions over the past few years is revealed in a report by Saugatuck Technology.
“Buying and deployment patterns have shifted rapidly toward a near full embrace of the cloud, from the more tactical and point solution-focused initiatives not long ago,” writes Bill McNee, author of the report.
Saugatuck Technology conducted in-depth interviews with CIOs and CTOs at 12 large organizations. The CIOs and CTOs see themselves as now entering a “crisis of opportunity” and innovation, McNee wrote in the report. The crisis is about more than just a revolution in service delivery, McNee said. The dilemna is also fueled by the drive toward mobility, advanced analytics and social business. What this calls for is “a new mission for IT, with a new set of roles, responsibilities and skills required for success.”
VMware increases dominance in virtualization market
19th April 2012
VMware has announced its financial results for Q1 of 2012, reporting 52% more income and 25% more profit compared with the same period in 2011, and strengthening its position as a leader in the virtualization market.
Cloud-Oriented Architecture and the Internet of Things
Quick quiz for all you Cloud aficionados out there: what’s missing from the NIST definition of Cloud Computing? To make this challenge easy for you, here’s the definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
Give up? What’s missing is any mention of data centers. Sure, today’s Clouds typically consist of resources in data centers, running one way or another on racks full of physical servers. But there’s nothing in the definition of Cloud that specifies anything about the physical location of Cloud resources.
Look at the NIST definition again. If you’ve seen this definition before, you may notice a new word that NIST presumably added after their …
Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Ajay Budhraja – U.S. Dept. of Justice
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now just eight weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference…
Amazon Web Services Launches AWS Marketplace
“AWS Marketplace brings the same simple, trusted, and secure online shopping experience that customers enjoy on Amazon.com’s retail website to software built for the AWS platform, streamlining the process of doing research and purchasing software,” said Terry Hanold, Vice President of New Business Initiatives, Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), as AWS, today launched an online store to make it easy for customers to find, compare, and immediately start using the software and technical services they need to build products and run their businesses.
Best Practices for Managing Data in the Cloud
The importance of data management is increasingly evident as companies find themselves having to respond to change faster than ever to remain competitive. Without best practices, volumes of data cannot be leveraged effectively to give companies a competitive advantage.
The way to mitigate this is to implement efficient business practices that are regularly evaluated and streamlined to generate results in a real-time environment.
What Are Best Practices for Managing Data in the Cloud?
Businesses hire analysts to manage data in real time. Online analytical processing (OLAP), online transaction processing (OLTP) and specialized reporting are all required to help businesses improve processes and increase revenue.
Data warehouse information and OLTP data may be combined in cloud-based solutions to provide organizations with more flexibility. For some enterprises, cloud-based solutions meet the “practical sense” test and for others these solutions do not. Common factors of the “practical sense” test include: Cost effectiveness, scalability, migration capability and return on investment. Once these factors are determined, a set of best practices can be implemented.
Efficient Infrastructure Solutions. Efficient infrastructure solutions allow IT professionals to focus on mission-critical tasks rather than managing infrastructure problems. The infrastructure supports the integration, design and configuration of a database in a cloud-based solution. Consolidation efficiency should be monitored and a set of practices should be developed to achieve optimal performance. With efficient best practices, IT can use the cloud to eliminate some customization issues and deploy solutions in a fraction of the time.
Data Migration. Best practices for data migration require that businesses learn to convert data efficiently at a database level. Efficient migration must occur regardless of the format generated. Databases, which are not required to be combined for security or operational reasons, can be migrated to a virtualized server. All source data must be converted into a standardized format to facilitate consolidation before migration to a shared server.
Consolidate to Minimize Costs. Consolidation reduces costs associated to hardware, cooling and power. It also reduces operational complexity which reduces the time required by IT management to complete projects. Consolidation can also assist IT managers with developing disaster recovery strategies and adopting best practices for a uniform backup routine. Best practices for an update and patch schedule should also be established.
Use Cloud-Based Data Center to Meet Demands of Faster Service. A cloud-based data center allows companies to share the capacity and equally divide the workload of applications across numerous servers for more efficient data manipulation and recall. This allows for faster innovation and ability to meet customer demands. Overall performance will not be affected when large amounts of data can be processed in the cloud.
Next Steps…
JD Edwards helps businesses integrate data management best practices into organizations. Consultants help clients understand how to apply best practices and how to maintain competitive advantage in a fast paced work environment. The result is an affordable and high performance cloud-based solution. Cloud-based solutions are easily scalable, easy to deploy and cost effective.
The result: lower operating costs and increased efficiency.
Guest Post: No Bandwidth – No Cloud!
18th April 2012
Forget security – the biggest issue for the widespread adoption of cloud computing in the UK is broadband speed; or rather, our current lack of – as BT’s former chief technologist and futurist Peter Cochrane explains.
Morphlabs Announces First OpenStack Converged Infrastructure for Enterprise Private Clouds
Morphlabs today announced the general availability of the all-SSD mCloud Rack Enterprise Edition, an SSD-powered converged infrastructure solution for the enterprise powered by OpenStack. The mCloud Rack E leverages the Dell PowerEdge-C Platform, Arista Networks’ switches and Nexenta’s enterprise-class OpenStorage to deliver the industry’s most price performant private cloud.
“The all-SSD mCloud Rack Enterprise Edition powered by OpenStack offers Morphlabs’ customers the full benefits of the most dynamic and fastest-growing open source project ever,” said Morphlabs CEO Winston Damarillo. “Morphlabs optimizes the best-of-breed cloud building blocks from Nexenta, Dell and Arista to deliver a high-performance, flexible infrastructure that leverages the robust OpenStack community for rapid innovations and increased code stability.”
The mCloud Rack E next generation modular architecture utilizes OpenStack adaptiveness to harness industry-leading cloud computing components. The mCloud Rack E optimizes enterprise cloud deployments by providing exponentially more IOPs per compute while retaining industry-defining power and cost efficiency.
“The strength of our community and contributions of companies like Morphlabs are helping accelerate the adoption of OpenStack by making it easier for enterprises to deploy and manage,” said Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack Project Policy Board and co-founder Rackspace Cloud. “Morphlabs’ mCloud Rack Enterprise Edition is a testament to the readiness of OpenStack for mission critical infrastructure deployments.”
Morphlabs’ mCloud solutions are built and tested on Dell PowerEdge-C servers, which use the latest hyperscale technology to decrease energy use, space and weight. Dell Data Center Services (DCS) provides global support for mCloud Racks, enabling four-hour response times anywhere in the world and affording a world-class supply chain to deliver the latest, most efficient and cost-effective data center technology to customers.
“As early supporters of OpenStack, Dell remains committed to providing open, standards-based solutions that enable customers to integrate new technologies without sacrificing performance or existing IT investments. By employing the power of Dell PowerEdge-C servers, including Dell’s popular Crowbar software framework, in Morphlabs’ mCloud Rack E, we created a purpose-built infrastructure that enables users to be up-and-running on an OpenStack cloud in mere hours,” said John Igoe, executive director of Cloud Solutions at Dell Inc.
The mCloud Rack E is the only converged infrastructure solution that enables scalable and modular enterprise-grade block storage. Leveraging the mCloud Rack E’s revolutionary share-nothing architecture and Nexenta Systems’ highly resilient ZFS-based NexentaStor, SSD-accelerated storage that eliminates the risk of data loss at the foundation of the cloud is finally affordable.
“If you want to accelerate the transformation of your virtualized infrastructure into an internal cloud, these solutions provide all the basic building blocks, already pre-integrated for you. They include the automation solutions for deployment, management, and monitoring; the unified virtual infrastructure; and even the self-service portal for deployment requests,” wrote Forrester Research, Inc. Vice President and Principal Analyst Richard Fichera1.
“Using OpenStack with proprietary storage makes no sense; why use an open approach to the cloud and then hand your data off to a proprietary vendor?” said Nexenta CEO Evan Powell. “Morphlabs has done a great service for their customers and the OpenStack community by launching an end-to-end engineered solution that leverages the best of open infrastructure. We’re proud that Morphlabs selected our ZFS-based and SSD-accelerated NexentaStor as the foundation of their mCloud Rack E and look forward to working closely with them.”
A trial of the mCloud platform is available for a limited time at http://www.morphlabs.com/evaluatessd/.
