Internap Corporation has expanded its OpenStack-based bare-metal Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering, AgileSERVER 2.0, to its data centers in Amsterdam, Dallas and Santa Clara, Calif. Launched in 2015 out of Internap’s New York Metro data center in Secaucus, N.J., AgileSERVER 2.0 is now available in four locations globally, enabling enterprises and devops teams running mission-critical applications and big data workloads to build scale-out infrastructure environments that are higher performing and more cost-effective than commodity public cloud platforms.
[webcast] DevOps and ROI | @DevOpsSummit @IBMDevOps #DevOps
Stakeholders need to monetize the benefits and ROI to make the organization’s change real. Join this IBM webcast, for a discussion on monetizing key DevOps benefits and associated costs. We share a case study where cost benefit analysis frameworks were leveraged to justify DevOps ROI.
ESG Benchmark: Superior Performance on AWS Exhibited by ClustrixDB | @CloudExpo @Clustrix #Cloud
Clustrix unveiled the results of its benchmark test performed by ESG. Tested against two competing database services, the firm found that ClustrixDB delivered the best performance handling high-value transaction volumes. This offers particular benefits to organizations that anticipate high growth and/or have a high financial stake in their database’s ability to process thousands of simultaneous transactions accurately – such as those in ad tech, gaming, e-commerce or IoT.
USDA Forest Service and @Esri Introduce Interactive Trove of Maps | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Esri and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service announce the publication of Engagement Portfolio, a gallery of maps and apps that gives everyone access to US forestry data. The portfolio of maps and analysis tools opens the Forest Service’s rich content to a broad spectrum of users, engaging everyone from forestry professionals to conservation-minded laypeople.
Engagement Portfolio opens up the Forestry Inventory and Analysis (FIA) database, a trove of detailed information on the nation’s forest ecosystems, which the Forest Service has maintained for almost a century.
IBM and SAP update partnership for greater cloud and on-prem capabilities
(c)iStock.com/zoranm
IBM and SAP have announced their latest strategic partnership, building on a deal struck in 2014 between Big Blue and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
Described at the time as “SAP’s biggest news sitting on one of IBM’s biggest investments”, the latest announcement offers cloud-based solutions, with IBM and SAP collaborating on industry-specific cloud operations, as well as on-premise capabilities and improvements to the customer and user experience. The proposals include an expansion of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud services for ongoing application maintenance and support, as well as scaling of the IBM cloud platform.
The two companies will also set up shop together in Germany and California, as well as showcase the fruits of their labour in global innovation centres.
“The future of business strategy and business value will proceed from the foundational elements of this announcement – cognitive, cloud and the design of consumer-quality experiences in every industry,” said Bridget van Kralingen, SVP IBM global business services in a statement. “We’re formalising a complementary set of capabilities to simplify and speed outcomes for clients evolving to become cognitive enterprises.” Rob Enslin, SAP president of global customer operations, said: “Today’s announcement builds on SAP’s commitment to enable strong, growing businesses that can seize the amazing opportunities of the digital economy.”
The news continues a long-standing partnership between the two tech giants, who have outlaid significant resources on pushing its brand into the cloud. IBM officially rebranded as a cloud-first organisation in March 2014, while SAP took to branding itself as ‘the’ cloud company in the same year, Naturally, the turnaround of the two companies’ major on-premise software revenues towards cloud has not been a painless process – IBM’s latest job cuts amount to up to one third of its total workforce according to reports – yet the long term vision is clear. The Armonk firm acquired Microsoft based software as a service (SaaS) provider Optevia last month.
Will containers change the world of cloud?
The rise of containers as a technology has been glorious and confusing in equal measure. While touted by some as the saviour of developers, and by others as the end of VM’s, the majority simply don’t understand containers as a concept or a technology.
In the simplest of terms, containers let you pack more computing workloads onto a single server and in theory, that means you can buy less hardware, build or rent less data centre space, and hire fewer people to manage that equipment.
“In the earlier years of computing, we had dedicated servers which later evolved with virtualisation,” say Giri Fox, Director of Technical Services at Rackspace. “Containers are part of the next evolution of servers, and have gained large media and technologist attention. In essence, containers are the lightest way to define an application and to transport it between servers. They enable an application to be sliced into small elements and distributed on one or more servers, which in turn improves resource usage and can even reduce costs.”
There are some clear differences between containers and virtual machines though. Linux containers give each application, its own isolated environment in which to run, but multiple containers share the host servers’ operating system. Since you don’t have to boot up an operating system, you can create containers in seconds not minutes like virtual machines. They are faster, require less memory space, offer higher-level isolation and are highly portable.
“Containers are more responsive and can run the same task faster,” adds Fox. “They increase the velocity of application development, and can make continuous integration and deployment easier. They often offer reduced costs for IT; testing and production environments can be smaller than without containers. Plus, the density of applications on a server can be increased which leads to better utilisation.
“As a direct result of these two benefits, the scope for innovation is greater than its previous technologies. This can facilitate application modernisation and allow more room to experiment.”
So the benefits are pretty open-ended. Speed of deployment, flexibility to run anywhere, no more expensive licenses, more reliable and more opportunity for innovation.
Which all sounds great, doesn’t it?
That said, a recent survey from the Cloud & DevOps World team brought out some very interesting statistics, first and foremost the understanding of the technology. 76% of respondents agreed with the statement “Everyone has heard of containers, but no-one really understands what containers are”.
While containers have the potential to be
the next big thing in the cloud industry, unless those in the ecosystem understand the concept and perceived benefits, it is unlikely to take off.
“Containers are evolving rapidly and present an interesting runtime option for application development,” says Joe Pynadath, GM of EMEA for Chef. “We know that with today’s distributed and lightweight apps, businesses, whether they are a new start-up’s to traditional enterprise, must accelerate their capabilities for building, testing, and delivering modern applications that drive revenue.
“One result of the ever-greater focus on software development is the use of new tools to build applications more rapidly and it is here that containers have emerged as an interesting route for developers. This is because they allow you to quickly build applications in a portable and lightweight manner. This provides a huge benefit for developers in speeding up the application building process. However, despite this, containers are not able to solve the complexities of taking an application from build through test to production, which presents a range of management challenges for developers and operations engineers looking to use them.”
There is certainly potential for containers within the enterprise environment, but as with all emerging technologies there is a certain level of confusion as to how they will integrate within the current business model, and how the introduction will impact the IT department on a day-to-day basis.
“Some of the questions we’re regularly asked by businesses looking to use containers are “How do you configure and tune the OS that will host them? How do you adapt your containers at run time to the needs of the dev, test and production environments they’re in?” comments Pynadath.
While containers allow you to use discovery services or roll your own solutions, the need to monitor and manage them in an automated way remains a challenge for IT teams. At Chef, we understand the benefits containers can bring to developers and are excited to help them automate many of the complex elements that are necessary to support containerized workflows in production”
Vendors are confident that the introduction of containers will drive further efficiencies and speed within the industry, though we’re yet to see a firm commitment from the mass market to demonstrate the technology will take off. The early adopter uptake is promising, and there are case studies to demonstrate the much lauded potential, but it’s still early days.
In short, containers are good, but most people just need to learn what they are.
IBM Security targets incident response marketplace with Resilient acquisition
IBM Security has completed the acquisition of Resilient, as part of the company’s expansion in the incident response marketplace. Financial terms of the agreement have not been released.
The company had announced its plans to acquire Resilient in February, alongside the launch of its X-Force Incident Response Services. Resilient’s incident response system allows customers to automate and orchestrate the many processes needed when dealing with cyber incidents. The new services include a remote incident response capability to help clients map how a breach occurred and take action to shut it down.
“The combination of Resilient’s people – top thought leaders in the incident response marketplace – and their technology is a differentiating addition to our security business,” said Marc van Zadelhoff, General Manager at IBM Security. “Our investments in threat detection and prevention have helped us move into a leadership position in the security market. With Resilient, we’re expanding the capabilities we bring to customers, helping them manage the complexities in resolving security incidents, including the coordination of teams, best practices, and reporting.”
The company have claimed by combining Resilient Systems’ Incident Response Platform with IBM’s QRadar Security Intelligence Incident Forensics, BigFix, X-Force Exchange and other Incident Response Services, it will be able to offer increased speed in dealing with threats.
IBM has been quietly building its security business over recent years through various acquisitions and company hires. In the last three years, the company has bought a number of security specific vendors including CrossIdeas, Lighthouse Security Group and Trusteer, the latter was rumoured to be around the $1 billion mark. The company now claims to be the largest cloud and cyber security vendor in the market, exceeding $2 billion in revenue and hiring more than 1000 security professionals in 2015, as well as holding than 3,000 security patents.
“The Resilient team is delighted to be joining IBM Security,” said John Bruce, Resilient’s CEO, “Together, we will be a powerful force helping organizations to manage the evolving security challenges that they face. With the scale of IBM research, development and investment behind us, we’re excited about the possibilities for innovation and to engage with new clients around the world.”
AI battle ground intensifies with AWS rumoured to be making moves
Amazon has apparently acquired deep learning start-up Orbeus in what would appear to be the company’s latest move on the artificial intelligence market, according to reports at Bloomberg. Sources close to Bloomberg have said the acquisition took place in the latter stages of 2015, though the deal has not been announced by Amazon as of yet.
Over recent months, artificial intelligence would appear to be the latest battle grounds for the cloud industry as numerous tech giants bolster their capabilities in the space. While the move has not been confirmed by either Orbeus or Amazon, the play builds on AWS’ previous acquisitions in the segment including high-performance computing company Nice and video processing company Elemental Technologies.
The Orbeus site is relatively bare for the moment, simply displaying the message “ReKognition API is no longer taking new customers. Thank you very much for your interest and support. But we’re up to new/exciting things and to stay tuned.” The Orbeus technology utilizes deep learning techniques to provide scalable image and face recognition solutions for businesses and consumers. The company has won numerous awards and also received healthy media attention for its application PhotoTime, which brings the advances of deep learning to the consumer market.
While the move has not been confirmed by any parties to date it does appear to demonstrate the importance of AI for the tech giants, most of whom are making notable efforts to improve product offerings in the face of increasingly demanding customers. AWS continues to remain as the leader in the public cloud space, though recent moves from Microsoft and Google appear to be closing the gap. Industry insiders have told BCN that AWS’ industry leading position may be coming under threat as competitors would appear to be making more significant moves to improve their own platforms.
The new expertise could counter moves made by Google and Microsoft in recent months, as the companies pursue AI competencies for improved customer experience and decision making capabilities. Google’s recent Go PR stunt demonstrated the efforts which the team have made in deep learning, whereas Microsoft announced a number of Microsoft additions to its Cognitive Services offering, formerly known as Project Oxford, at Build 2016.
Volkswagen moves to OpenStack platform with start-up Mirantis
Car manufacturer Volkswagen Group has chosen OpenStack as its global standard for its next generation private cloud platform, as part of a worldwide standardization project to reduce IT costs and increase automation.
The company signed the deal with start-up Mirantis over the major players in the industry. While the move represents one of the biggest wins to date for the start-up, it would appear that Red Hat have lost out on a healthy deal in the process. Volkswagen is currently a customer of Red Hat, though it is not clear to what degree the relationship will continue.
“As the automotive industry shifts to the service economy, Volkswagen is poised for agile software innovation,” said Mario Müller, VP IT Infrastructure at Volkswagen. “The team at Mirantis gives us a robust, hardened distribution, deep technical expertise, a commitment to the OpenStack community, and the ability to drive cloud transformation at Volkswagen. Mirantis OpenStack is the engine that lets Volkswagen’s developers build and deliver software faster.”
Volkswagen highlighted the move to a private cloud platform will enable the business to better compete in an ever-more digitally enabled world. Müller said that four trends drove the company towards a more agile cloud computing platform, as the new platform enables greater levels of automation as well as a less consuming procurement process.
“Ubiquitous connectivity means we’ll have 50 billion smart sensors in end devices by 2030,” said Müller. “Cloud computing means data access everywhere. That means the amount of stored data doubles every two years. Third, social media. We have 1.3 billion Facebook users today, heading towards 7 billion. And big data. We can do real-time analysis of mass amounts of data.”
Initially Volkswagen will move its infrastructure to Infrastructure-as-a-Service, ending with Platform-as-a-Service for the infrastructure model. On IaaS, Volkswagen will manage the middleware, runtime, data and applications, whereas Mirantis will manage the operating system, virtualization layer, servers, storage and networking, while on PaaS the company will only manage data and applications. The company aim to have PaaS up and running by July of this year. The transition to the IaaS model was completed at the end of 2015.
“First, it’s a service (the current IaaS platform) and not simply dedicated hardware,” said Müller. “The target VW internal audience is administrators and technical competence centres. It’s not designed for end users. The IaaS services provide virtualized hardware computer, networking and storage running on Linux with root access. Connectivity is via VW’s intranet. It’s not yet connected to the Internet. It doesn’t support legacy applications and we don’t yet offer central backups. It’s available to our teams in America, Europe and Asia.”
The deal represents a major win for Mirantis, which previously counted Red Hat as one of its investors. In two rounds of fund-raising in January and June 2013, Mirantis raised $10 million in growth capital funding from various venture capitalists, as well as a further $10 million from Red Hat, Ericsson and SAP. The company then launched its own OpenStack distribution in October 2013, putting it in direct competition with Red Hat, though the technology still worked with Red Hat operating systems.
In recent years, the relationship between the two companies would appear to have soured as Red Hat announced in May 2014 that it would no longer provide support to Linux customers using non-Red Hat versions of OpenStack, contradicting the spirit of the open source community. Later that year in November the company also ordered all employees to stop working with Mirantis. The saga would not have appeared to have effected Mirantis’ perception in the market.
“OpenStack is the open source cloud standard offering companies a fast path to cloud innovation,” said Marque Teegardin, SVP at Mirantis. “It is our privilege to partner with Europe’s largest automaker and we are thrilled to support them as they use the software to out-innovate competitors and expand their business on a global scale.”
NHK World Featured @ThingsExpo | #IoT #M2M #BigData #InternetOfThings
NHK, Japan Broadcasting, will feature the upcoming @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley in a special ‘Internet of Things’ and smart technology documentary that will be filmed on the expo floor between November 3 to 5, 2015, in Santa Clara. NHK is the sole public TV network in Japan equivalent to the BBC in the UK and the largest in Asia with many award-winning science and technology programs. Japanese TV is producing a documentary about IoT and Smart technology and will be covering @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley. The program, to be aired during the peak viewership season of the year, will have a major impact on the industry in Japan. The film’s director is writing a scenario to fit in the story in the next few days will be turned in to the network.