In a crowded world of popular computer languages, platforms and ecosystems, Node.js is one of the hottest. According to w3techs.com, Node.js usage has gone up 241 percent in the last year alone. Retailers have taken notice and are implementing it on many levels. I am going to share the basics of Node.js, and discuss why retailers are using it to reduce page load times and improve server efficiency. I’ll talk about similar developments such as Docker and microservices, and look at several companies implementing these technologies. I’ll also discuss how mobile computing is changing buyer behavior and expectations.
Microsoft adds more software capabilities to Azure IoT suite
Microsoft has announced the acquisition of Solair, an Italian IoT software company which currently operates in the manufacturing, retail, food & beverage and transportation industries.
Solair software, which runs on the Microsoft Azure platform, focuses on helping customers improve efficiently and profitably of their IoT initiatives. The acquisition continues Microsoft’s ambitions in the IoT market segment, delivering a more complete solution, as opposed to simply the Azure IoT platform.
“The integration of Solair’s technology into the Microsoft Azure IoT Suite will continue to enhance our complete IoT offering for the enterprise,” Sam George, Partner Director, Azure IoT at Microsoft. “We’ll have more specifics to share about how Solair is helping us build the intelligent cloud in the future. In the meantime, I’d like to reiterate my welcome to the Solair team.”
Solair has been in operation for five years now, and boasts a healthy number of customers including Rancilio Group, where it enabled a connected coffee machine maintenance strategy, and Minerva Omega where it created a remote maintenance and service strategy for the food processing group. Financial details of the acquisition were not released, and Microsoft did not release any specific details of how the business will be integrated into the overall Azure IoT suite.
“From the very start, our mission has been to help customers quickly and easily gain access to the huge benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT),” Tom Davis CEO at Solair. “By building our solutions based on real customer requirements that allow them to gain real value, I’m confident that Solair’s technology and talent will be able to make an important contribution to Microsoft’s Azure IoT Suite and Microsoft’s broader IoT ambitions.”
Microsoft has seemingly been on a mission to bolster its position in the IoT market, both organically and through industry acquisitions. At Build 2016, the team launched Azure Service Fabric and new IoT starter kits, as well as previews of new services to serverless compute for event-driven solutions, Azure Functions, and Power BI Embedded which allows developers to embed reports and visualizations in any application.
EMC outlines ‘Technical Debt’ challenges for data greedy enterprises
President of Core Technologies Division Guy Churchward (Left) and Jeremy Burton, President of Products and Marketing (Right) at EMC World 2016
Speaking at EMC World, President of Core Technologies Division at EMC Guy Churchward joined Jeremy Burton, President of Products and Marketing, to outline one of the industry’s primary challenges, technical debt.
The idea of technical debt is being felt by the new waves of IT professionals. This new generation is currently feeling the pressure from most areas of the business to innovate, to create an agile, digitally enabled business, but still have commitments to traditional IT systems on which the business currently operates on. The commitment to legacy technologies, which could represent a significant proportion of a company’s IT budget and prevents future innovation, is what Churchward describes as the technical debt.
“They know their business is transforming fast,” said Churchward. “Business has to use IT to make their organization a force to be reckoned with and remain competitive in the market, but all the money is taken up by the current IT systems. This is what we call technical debt. A lot of people have to do more with what they have and create innovation with a very limited budget. This is the first challenge for every organization.”
This technical debt is described by Churchward as the first challenge which every IT department will face when driving towards the modern data centre. It makes business clunky and ineffective, but is a necessity to ensure the organization continues to operate, until the infrastructure can be upgraded to a modern proposition. Finding the budget without compromising current operations can be a tricky proposition.
“When you live in an older house, where the layout doesn’t really work for the way you live your life and there aren’t enough closets to satiate your wife’s shoe fetish, maybe it’s time to modernize,” said Churchward on his blog. “But do you knock the whole house down and start again? Maybe it’s tempting but, what about the investment that you’ve already made in your home? It’s similar when you want to modernize your IT infrastructure. You have money sunk into your existing technology and you don’t want to face the disruption of completely starting again
“For many companies, this debt includes a strategy for data storage that takes advantage of a shrinking per-gig cost of storage that enables them to keep everything. And that data is probably stored primarily on spinning disk with some high-availability workloads on flash in their primary data centre. The old way of doing things was to see volumes of data growing and address that on a point basis with more spinning disk. Data centres are bursting at the seams and it’s now time to modernize – but how?”
Churchward highlighted the first-step is to remove duplicate data sets – EMC launched its Enterprise Copy Data Management tool at EMC World this week – to reduce unnecessary spend within the data centres. While there are a number of reasons to duplicate and keep old data sets for a defined period of time, Churchward commented this data can often be forgotten and thus becomes an expense which can be unnecessary. Although the identification and removal of this data might be considered a simple solution to removing a portion of the technical debt, Churchward believes it could be a $50 billion business problem by 2018.
The Enterprise Copy Data Management software helps customers discover, automate and optimize copy data to reduce costs and streamline operations. The tool automatically identifies duplicate data sets within various data centres, and using data-driven decision making software, optimizes the storage plans, and in the necessary cases, deletes duplicate data sets.
This is just one example of how the challenge of technical debt can be managed, though the team at EMC believe this challenge, the first in a series when transforming to a modern business, can be one of the largest. Whether this is one of the reasons cloud adoption within the mainstream market cloud be slower than anticipated remains to be seen, though the removal of redundant and/or duplicated data could provide some breathing room for innovation and budget for the journey towards the modern data centre.
Artifficial Intelligence and IoT | @ThingsExpo #AI #IoT #DigitalTransformation
Artificial Intelligence has the potential to massively disrupt IoT.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, AJ Abdallat, CEO of Beyond AI, will discuss what the five main drivers are in Artificial Intelligence that could shape the future of the Internet of Things.
AJ Abdallat is CEO of Beyond AI. He has over 20 years of management experience in the fields of artificial intelligence, sensors, instruments, devices and software for telecommunications, life sciences, environmental monitoring, process control, homeland security, energy and finance.
IoT and Fog Computing | @ThingsExpo @Metavine #IoT #InternetOfThings
The IoTs will challenge the status quo of how IT and development organizations operate. Or will it? Certainly the fog layer of IoT requires special insights about data ontology, security and transactional integrity. But the developmental challenges are the same: People, Process and Platform.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Craig Sproule, CEO of Metavine, will demonstrate how to move beyond today’s coding paradigm and share the must-have mindsets for removing complexity from the development process, accelerating application delivery times, and ensuring that developers will become heroes (not bottlenecks) in the IoT revolution.
Data-Driven #DevOps | @DevOpsSummit @AndiMann #APM #Microservices
Much of the value of DevOps comes from a (renewed) focus on measurement, sharing, and continuous feedback loops. In increasingly complex DevOps workflows and environments, and especially in larger, regulated, or more crystallized organizations, these core concepts become even more critical.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate at Splunk, will show how, by focusing on ‘metrics that matter,’ you can provide objective, transparent, and meaningful feedback on DevOps processes to all stakeholders. Learn from real-life examples how to use the data generated throughout application delivery to continuously identify, measure, and improve deployment speed, code quality, process efficiency, outsourcing value, security coverage, audit success, customer satisfaction, and business alignment.
Microsoft announces general availability of SQL Server 2016
Microsoft has announced the SQL Server 2016 will hit general availability to all customers worldwide as of June 1.
The SQL Server, which is recognized in Gartner Magic Quadrants for Operational Database, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse, and Advanced Analytics, will be available through four editions, Enterprise, Standard, Express and Developer. The team also announced it would move customer’s Oracle databases to SQL Server free with software assurance.
“SQL Server 2016 is the foundation of Microsoft’s data strategy, encompassing innovations that transform data into intelligent action,” said Tiffany Wissner, Senior Director of Data Platform Marketing at Microsoft. “With this new release, Microsoft is delivering an end-to-end data management and business analytics solution with mission critical intelligence for your most demanding applications as well as insights on your data on any device.”
Features for the SQL include mission critical intelligent applications delivering real-time operational intelligence, enterprise scale data warehousing, new Always Encrypted technology, business intelligence solutions on mobile devices, new big data solutions that require combining relational data and new Stretch Database technology for hybrid cloud environments.
“With this new innovation, SQL Server 2016 is the first born-in-the-cloud database, where features such as Always Encrypted and Role Level Security were first validated in Azure SQL Database by hundreds of thousands of customers and billions of queries,” said Wissner.
Last month, the team announced the team also announced it was bringing the SQL Server to Linux, enabling SQL Server to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows and Linux, as well as on-premises and cloud. This move seemingly surprised some corners of the industry by moving away from its tradition of creating business software that runs only on the Windows operating system. The news continues Chief Executive Satya Nadella’s strategy of making Microsoft a more open and collaborative organization.
IoT Data and HTML5 | @ThingsExpo #HTML5 #IoT #M2M #InternetOfThings
Increasing IoT connectivity is forcing enterprises to find elegant solutions to organize and visualize all incoming data from these connected devices with re-configurable dashboard widgets to effectively allow rapid decision-making for everything from immediate actions in tactical situations to strategic analysis and reporting.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Shikhir Singh, Senior Developer Relations Manager at Sencha, will discuss how to create HTML5 dashboards that interact with IoT devices via Ext JS constructed components like Grids, Charts, and Widgets.
Century launches automation offering for hybrid and multi-cloud
CenturyLink has launched Runner, it’s new configuration management and orchestration service designed for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
The new offering is built with openness in mind, ensuring automation in any cloud or data centre, including its own cloud platform, other third-party cloud providers and on premise infrastructures and devices. Runner focuses on open source automation and orchestration engine as a service.
“Runner is a new product from CenturyLink Cloud that enables fast, easy automation and orchestration on the CenturyLink Cloud Platform, as well as third-party cloud providers and on-premises infrastructure and devices,” said Chris Kent, Runner Product Owner at Century Link. “Runner provides the ability to quickly provision and modifies resources on any environment, and gives users a true Hybrid IT solution, regardless of where their resources are.
“Runner, at its core, is an Ansible engine. On top of that engine exists several other custom services and APIs we’ve created, many of which were created in tandem with the Runner job service to enhance the job execution capabilities.”
The new offering is built on the assumption that customers do not have the time or resource to effectively manage a hybrid or multi-cloud environment, and also cases where customers need better distribution in case of failures. The team seem to be focusing on the concepts of execution speed and a reduction in human error as some of the prominent features to differentiate themselves in an already competitive market. CenturyLink has also differentiated itself by focusing the technology on managing and automating the infrastructure itself, as opposed to focusing on the connections themselves, as with other competitors.
EMC rolls out Virtustream global hyper-scale storage cloud
(Image Credit: iStockPhoto/Sami Sert)
Entering a large emerging market, EMC has rolled out a global, hyper-scale storage cloud known as Virtustream Storage Cloud as the company takes on the likes of IBM Softlayer, Oracle Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services among others. EMC, which will be known as Dell EMC in the near future, considers the offering to be its vanguard webscale storage, backup and archiving instrument.
Virtustream offers a tier of cloud-management abstraction that is placed above the virtual machine management tier and provides more accurate controls for administrators. This feature makes it stand out from rival offerings. The product’s services will hit the market on May 10, 2016, as both on-premises and cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) deployments for large enterprises.
The platform has gone through wide-ranging tests with underlying elements running successfully in production for several years as the primary object storage platform for a select set of customers managing multiple exabytes of data, with hundreds of billions of objects under management and an event monitoring system that processes more than 35 billion events per day.
The new Virtustream Storage Cloud provides cloud extensibility for on-premises EMC storage, providing simple and efficient tiering, long-term backup retention, and cold storage in the cloud with single-source EMC support. EMC offerings that will support the platform in the future include Data Domain, EMC Data Protection Suite, EMC Isilon, VMAX, XtremIO and Unity Systems.
What do you think about EMC’s new Virtustream solution? Let us know in the comments.