data centre, Datacentre, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, smart car, Toyota

Toyota to build massive data centre and recruit partners to support smart car fleet

Toyota smart car standCar maker Toyota is to build a massive new IT infrastructure and data centre to support all the intelligence to be broadcast its future range of smart cars. It is also looking for third party partners to develop supporting services for its new fleet of connected vehicles.

The smart car maker unveiled its plans for a connected vehicle framework at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

A new data centre will be constructed and dedicated to collecting information from new Data Communication Modules (DCM), which are to be installed on the frameworks of all new vehicles. The Toyota Big Data Center (TBDC) – to be stationed in Toyota’s Smart Center – will analyse everything sent by the DCMs and ‘deploy services’ in response. As part of the connected car regime, Toyota cars could automatically summon the emergency services in response to all accidents, with calls being triggered by the release of an airbag. The airbag-induced emergency notification system will come as a standard feature, according to Toyota.

The new data comms modules will appear as a feature in 2017 for Toyota models in the US market only, but it will roll out the service into other markets later, as part of a plan to build a global DCM architecture by 2019. A global rollout out is impossible until devices are standardised across the globe, it said.

Toyota said it is to invite third party developers to create services that will use the comms modules. It has already partnered with UIEvolution, which is building apps to provide vehicle data to Toyota-authorised third-party service providers.

Elsewhere at CES, Nvidia unveiled artificial-intelligence technology that will let cars sense the environment and decide their best course. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang promised that the DRIVE PX 2 will have ten times the performance of the first model. The new version will use an automotive supercomputing platform with 8 teraflops of processing power that can process 24 trillion deep learning operations a second.

Volvo said that next year it lease out 100 XC90 luxury sports utility vehicles that will use DRIVE PX 2 technology to drive autonomously around Volvo’s hometown of Gothenburg. “The rear-view mirror is history,” said Huang.

Microsoft, O365

Pitfalls of Microsoft O365 Migrations Part 3: Mobile Devices & Help Desk

Here is the 3rd and final part of my video series around common pitfalls of Microsoft O365 migrations (you can watch part 1 here and part 2 here). In this final installment, I dive into the mobile side of Microsoft O365 as well as how your help desk factors in.

 

Pitfalls of Microsoft Office 365 Migrations Part 3

 

Or watch the video here.

Interested in learning more about Microsoft O365 Migrations? Download David’s recent webinar, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality“

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

Database, genomics research, News & Analysis, Research

Paradigm4 puts oncology in the cloud with Onco-SciDB

Digital illustration DNA structure in abstract colour backgroundBoston-based cloud database specialist Paradigm4 has launched a new system designed to speed up the process of cancer research among biopharmaceutical companies.

The new Onco-SciDB (oncology scientific database) features a graphical user interface designed for exploring data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and other relevant public.

The Onco application runs on top of the Paradigm4’s SciDB database management system devised for analysing multi-dimensional data in the cloud. The management system was built by database pioneer Michael Stonebraker in order to use the cloud for massively parallel processing and offering an elastic supply of computing resources.

A cloud-based database system gives research departments cost control and the capacity to ramp up production when needed, according to Paradigm4 CEO Marilyn Matz. “The result is that research teams spend less time curating and accessing data and more time on interactive exploration,” she said.

Currently, the bioinformatics industry lacks the requisite analytical tools and user interfaces to deal with the growing mass of molecular, image, functional, and clinical data, according to Matz. By simplifying the day-to-day challenge of working with multiple lines of evidence, Paradigm4 claims that SciDB supports clinical guidance for programmes like precision anti-cancer chemotherapy drug treatment. By making massively parallel processing possible in the cloud, it claims, it can provide sufficient affordable computing power for budget-constrained research institutes to trawl through petabytes of information and create hypotheses over the various sources of molecular, clinical and image data.

Database management system SciDB serves as the foundation for the 1000 Human Genomes Project and is used by bio-tech companies such as Novartis, Complete Genomics, Agios and Lincoln Labs. A custom version of Onco-SciDB has been beta tested at cancer research institute Foundation Medicine.

Industry veteran Stonebraker, the original creator of the Ingres and Postgres systems in 1985 that formed the basis of IBM’s Informix and EMC’s Greenplum, won the Association for Computing Machinery’s Turing Award and $1million from Google for his pioneering of database design.

Uncategorized

Why the cloud does not just “work”

(c)iStock.com/4774344sean

Everyone knows that migrating workloads to the cloud is challenging. But many assume that after you get to the cloud, all you have to worry about is maintaining your applications.

After all, you have outsourced infrastructure management to AWS, right? No more racking and stacking servers, no more switches and hypervisors.

While AWS will maintain the physical infrastructure that supports your virtual environment, it is not initially set-up to help you configure those virtual instances and get them ready to run your code. And it remains your responsibility to maintain that architecture so that it evolves when your applications change.

This is a potentially dangerous misconception – and one that we run into often.

If you only do the bare minimum in cloud management, or leave it to your (new) DevOps teams or your systems engineers (who are already busy helping with future projects and migrations) to figure out, it often results in chaotic cloud environments. Every instance has a “custom” configuration, a developer launched an environment and forgot to spin it down, changes are made but not documented, and wasted resources accumulate. Suddenly you are not sure which resources belong to which project, and when your site goes down, your team is left combing through dozens of resources in the AWS console.

AWS is a world-class engine equipped with a robust set of tools, but it is not a car you can just drive off the lot. Even the best cloud systems require ongoing maintenance. And while moving to the cloud means you have “outsourced” racking and stacking servers, your IT team still needs to do things like configure networks, maintain permissions, lock down critical data, set up backups, create and maintain machine images, and dozens of other tasks AWS does not perform.

You may have heard of enterprises that now use a team of engineers to run their clouds. These enterprises realise that beyond the initial cloud migration, significant time and effort needs to be invested in automating configuration, auto scaling, and deployment. Automation allows these teams to spin up environments in seconds and repair failures without human effort. AWS provides the tools that make automation possible, but it is not configured on day one. That team of engineers may never touch the AWS console; they are maintaining automation scripts and modules, not the AWS resources themselves.

Over the last few years, the word “automation” has been used to describe many things. That is likely because every enterprise cloud environment will use different tools for different goals, and the end result will likely be partial automation – not every organisation needs to deploy 200 times a day or wants to become the next Netflix, after all. But the great thing about automation is that it is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Even a little effort yields immediate results.

The cloud does not work out of the box, nor does it maintain itself. But with the right team and the right skill set – in tools like Puppet, Jenkins, AWS CloudFormation – it can change your IT department forever.

The post The Cloud Does Not Just “Work” appeared first on Gathering Clouds.

News

Qingteng Funding

Chinese based enterprise security start-up Qingteng Cloud Security has recently gained its first round funding of 60 million Yen from CBC Capital and Redpoint Ventures, setting a record among cloud security start-ups in China for amount of first round funding. Prior to this round of funding, Qingteng received 6.5 million Yen from investments from ZhenFund, Cloud Angel Fund, and Fenghou Capital.
The founder of Qingteng, Zhang Fu, has commented on the severity of the current Internet enterprise security situation. Security operations occur when problems arise, instead of establishing a system of consistent security maintenance. The most efficient way, according to Zhang, to react to external attacks utilizing internal resources is to give security teams tools that allow security operations staff to divert attention from emergency situations, as the tools will take care of them, and instead focus on regular security management.

The security platform was created to be able to adapt to various infrastructures and situations. It may automatically process security issues, construct a safe model for enterprises, analyze internal and external abnormalities that could lead to security issues, and detect as well as block hacking activities. According to Zhang, this security platform has already reached enterprises in many business sectors, including healthcare and finance.

About Qingteng

Qingteng was founded in August of 2014 and is dedicated to offering an adaptive cloud security program that can protect data on various systems and enterprises.

The post Qingteng Funding appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

encrypt virtual machine, encrypt VM, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Parallels Desktop VM, Support Post, Tips & Tricks, virtual machine encryption

Encrypting Parallels Desktop Virtual Machines

Guest blog by Dhruba Jyoti Das, Parallels Support Team Do you think encryption guarantees effective security to your data? While the word “guarantee” might be a bit strong, encryption is a very effective method to restrict your data from unauthorized access. What’s encryption? Encryption is the process of encoding information in such a way that […]

The post Encrypting Parallels Desktop Virtual Machines appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Uncategorized

Cloud computing in 2015 – and what is on the horizon for 2016

(c)iStock.com/Barcin

As we wave goodbye to 2015 and say hello to 2016, it has again been an interesting, mostly successful year for cloud. According to research from Synergy, public cloud generates over $20 billion (£12.9bn) in quarterly revenues for IT firms. With the usual mix of mergers and acquisitions, security scares, and a few surprises, here are the highlights from 2015.

2015 review

February: Box files for IPO, enjoys initial uplift. The on-again, off-again story of enterprise cloud storage provider Box going public was finally resolved in February, with the company raising $175 million in its IPO and mostly confounding the critics. Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora and a long time advocate of Box’s business model, wrote in this publication that the storage firm’s opportunities were “limitless.”
Read more: Box raises $175m with IPO, but what is next?

July: Microsoft shuts down Windows Server 2003, companies try to cling on. July 14 2015 was a date etched firmly into scores of businesses and IT execs worldwide. The shutdown of WS2003 was supposed to mark a watershed in corporate IT – but naturally, businesses reluctant to change had other ideas. Research from the Cloud Industry Forum showed almost three quarters of firms with more than 200 employees were still on the server despite support having expired.
Read more: Windows Server 2003 end of life upgrade: Why many companies are leaving it “quite late”

August: Wuala announces it is to shut down its service. Wuala, the Switzerland based cloud storage service owned by Seagate, announced in August customers would have until November 15 to transfer their data before the service disappeared. The company offered up Tresorit as a potential new home. Even though Tresorit chief exec Istvan Lam welcomed Wuala customers, he added: “You can’t build your business on storage”.
Read more: Wuala cloud storage to shut down, offers Tresorit as potential new home

October: Dell coughs up $67bn for EMC. In the biggest tech deal in history, Dell parted with an eye-watering $67 billion (£43.7bn) to acquire EMC and create what was described by the companies as “the world’s largest privately-controlled, integrated technology company.” VMware would remain an independent, publicly traded company. Some analysts strongly supported the deal, but others were less convinced.
Read more: Dell agrees $67bn EMC deal: An “enterprise powerhouse” or “the walking dead”?

November: Microsoft turns off the tap on unlimited OneDrive. As it transpired, unlimited doesn’t really mean unlimited, as Microsoft said it was no longer offering limitless OneDrive storage. The reason: a minority of users who were just too greedy for their own good, backing up numerous PCs and storing entire movie collections on the service. Brian Taptich, CEO at developer-focused storage provider Bitcasa, told this publication that while it was “definitely not a failure” on Microsoft’s part, but added that competing against Microsoft, Google, Amazon et al on their own terms was akin to a “suicide mission.”
Read more: Microsoft turns off unlimited OneDrive for Office 365, blames greedy users

2016 predictions

Unified communications will become the “true connective tissue” in organisations: That’s the view of Mike Nessler, executive vice president at InterCall, who argues: “We’ll see organisations identifying new ways to drive UC value and ROI by giving IT managers and end users metrics and data to improve their communications.” The key for UC is also around getting tools in the right hands, says Nessler. “2016 will be a year for reassessment as CIOs not only take a look at what UC software they bought, but how end users are putting it to use.”

Amazon to ride out more competition in storage: Michael Tso, CEO and co-founder of Cloudian, argues co-location and data centre providers could provide stiffer competition to Amazon in 2016 as a best bet for cloud storage. “To differentiate themselves, they will start to offer more high-end targeted solutions for a new part of the market, for example disaster recovery, continuity, and regulatory compliance services,” he explains, adding: “As a result of this Amazon growth, S3 will become the de facto storage interface for all new applications and will replace CIFS/NFS as the access protocol for files and content storage.”

2016 will be the year of cloud security and cloud ROI: This is the view of Yorgen Edholm, CEO and president of Accellion. “Businesses are finally recognising the ROI gains of using a public cloud for non-critical content storage don’t have to be discarded in order to retain the security [and] compliance benefits offered by on-premise and private solutions,” he said. 

hybrid cloud, Opinion, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Simplivity

Deciding between private and public cloud

cloud computing machine learning autonomousInnovation and technological agility is now at the heart of an organization’s ability to compete.  Companies that rapidly onboard new products and delivery models gain competitive advantage, not by eliminating the risk of business unknowns, but by learning quickly, and fine-tuning based on the experience gathered.

Yet traditional IT infrastructure models hamper an organizations’ ability to deliver the innovation and agility they need to compete. Enter the cloud.

Cloud-based infrastructure is an appealing prospect to address the IT business agility gap, characterized by the following:

  1. Self-service provisioning. Aimed at reducing the time to solution delivery, cloud allows users to choose and deploy resources from a defined menu of options.
  2. Elasticity to match demand.  Pay for what you use, when you use it, and with flexible capacity.
  3. Service-driven business model.  Transparent support, billing, provisioning, etc., allows consumers to focus on the workloads rather than service delivery.

There are many benefits to this approach – often times, cloud or “infrastructure as a service” providers allow users to pay for only what they consume, when they consume it, as well as fast, flexible infrastructure deployment, and low risks related to trial and error for new solutions.

Public cloud or private cloud – which is the right option?

A cloud model can exist either on-premises, as a private cloud, or via public cloud providers.

In fact, the most common model is a mix of private and public clouds.  According to a study published in the RightScale 2015 State of the Cloud Report, enterprises are increasingly adopting a portfolio of clouds, with 82 percent reporting a multi-cloud strategy as compared to 74 percent in 2014.

With that in mind, each workload you deploy (e.g. tier-1 apps, test/dev, etc.) needs to be evaluated to see if it should stay on-premises or be moved offsite.

So what are the tradeoffs to consider when deciding between private and public cloud?  First, let’s take a look at the considerations for keeping data on-premises.

  1. Predictable performance.  When consistent performance is needed to support key business applications, on-premises IT can deliver performance and reliability within tight tolerances.
  2. Data privacy.  It’s certainly possible to lose data from a private environment, but for the most part, on-premises IT is seen as a better choice for controlling highly confidential data.
  3. Governance and control.  The private cloud can be built to guarantee compliance – country restrictions, chain of custody support, or security clearance issues.

Despite these tradeoffs, there are instances in which a public cloud model is ideal, particularly cloud bursting, where an organization experiences temporary demand spikes (seasonal influxes).  The public cloud can also offer an affordable alternative to disaster recovery and backup/archiving.

Is your “private cloud” really a cloud at all?

There are many examples of the same old legacy IT dressed up with a thin veneer of cloud paint.  The fact is, traditional IT’s complexity and inefficiency makes it unsuitable to deliver a true private cloud.

Today, hyperconverged infrastructure is one of the fastest growing segments in the $107B IT infrastructure market, in part because of its ability to enable organizations to deliver a cloud-operating model with on-premises infrastructure.

Hyperconvergence surpasses the traditional IT model by incorporating IT infrastructure and services below the hypervisor onto commodity x86 “building blocks”.  For example, SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure is designed to work with any hypervi­sor on any industry-standard x86 server platform. The combined solution provides a single, shared resource pool across the entire IT stack, including built-in data efficiency and data protection, eliminating point products and inefficient siloed IT architectures.

Some of the key characteristics of this approach are:

  • Single vendor for deploying and supporting infrastructure.  Traditional IT requires users to integrate more than a dozen disparate components just to support their virtualized workloads.  This causes slow deployments, finger pointing, performance bottlenecks, and limits how it can be reused for changing workloads. Alternatively, hyperconvergence is architected as a single atomic building block, ready to be deployed when the customer unpacks the solution.
  • The ability to start small and scale out without penalty.  Hyperconvergence eliminates the need for resource allocation guesswork.  Simply start with the resources needed now, then add more, repurpose, or shut down resources with demand—all with minimal effort and cost, and no performance degradation.
  • Designed for self-service provisioning. Hyperconvergence offers the ability to create policies, provision resources, and move workloads, all at the VM-level, without worrying about the underlying physical infrastructure.  Because they are software defined, hyperconverged solutions can also integrate with orchestration and automation tools like VMware vRealize Automation and Cisco UCS Director.
  • Economics of public cloud. By converging all IT infrastructure components below the hypervisor and reducing operating expenses through simplified, VM-centric management, hyperconverged offerings deliver a cost model that closely rivals the public cloud. SimpliVity, for example, is able to deliver a cost-per-VM that is comparable to AWS, including associated operating expenses and labour costs.

It’s clear that the cloud presents a compelling vision of improved IT infrastructure, offering the agility required to support innovation, experimentation and competitive advantage.  For many enterprises, public cloud models are non-starters due to the regulatory, security, performance, and control drawbacks, for others, the public cloud or infrastructure as a service is an ideal way to quickly increase resources.

Hyperconvergence is also helping enterprises increase their business agility by offering all the cloud benefits, without added risks or uncertainty. Today technology underpins competitive advantage and organizations must choose what works best for their business and their applications, making an approach combining public cloud and private cloud built on hyperconverged infrastructure an even more viable solution.

Written by Rich Kucharski, VP Solutions Architecture, SimpliVity.

Content & Applications, Infrastructure as a Service, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Software as a service

Microsoft maps out 2016 BizTalk Server, Azure Stack and cloud integration plans

AzureMicrosoft has unveiled its plans to integrate its cast of cloud services and servers in the coming year. Cloud users can now download a roadmap for the direction of its integration products such as the BizTalk application-integration server, Azure Stack and the Logic Apps included in the Azure App Service offering.

The initiative is the idea of new Azure CTO Mark Russinovich in a bid to keep customers aware of the changes that are being made now that many integration processes are out of their domain. Traditionally, integration has been conducted on the customer’s premises or through a business to business arrangement, but in the cloud era the systems they want integrated are typically outside of their control, Russinovich said in the company blog. “Everything from sales leads to invoicing, email and social media, is going to be well beyond the corporate firewall,” he said.

As modern integration goes from corporate computer systems to an increasingly mobile world, there needs to be a change of approach on both ends. On a technical level, this change is unpinned by application programming interfaces (APIs) within lightweight, modern, HTTP/REST-based protocols using JSON, Russinovich said. On a cultural level, Microsoft is to open more channels of communication with its cloud users through updates such as this.

Before the tenth release of BizTalk Server, in Q4 2016, it will release a Community Technology Preview and a beta of the product in Q3. BizTalk Server 2016 is to align with Windows Server 2016, SQL 2016, Office 2016 and the latest Visual Studio. The latest BizTalk release will straddle both the on-premise and cloud worlds, supporting SQL 2016’s AlwaysOn Availability Groups whether they are hosted on Azure or in house.

BizTalk Server will also have better interfaces with Salesforce.com and Office 365, as Microsoft bids to improve the hybrid experience. New, improved BizTalk adapters for Informix, MQ and DB2 have also been promised, along with better PowerShell integration.

Halfway through 2016 Microsoft will host another integration summit, Integrate 2016, as the vendor signals its intent to take its Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) responsibilities seriously too.

According to the roadmap Microsoft should imminently release a preview of a planned Logic Apps Update with Logic Apps becoming generally available in Q2. Azure Stack will be available in Q4.

Appointment, Colt, Corporate, ETNO, News & Analysis

Colt gears up for cloud with new CTO appointment

Network Function VirtualisationColt has announced that its newly appointed Chief Technology Officer Rajiv Datta is to be given the brief to drive the service provider’s future cloud strategy.

Datta’s duties are described as ‘the creation of next generation of products and services, including SDN-based networks and digital customer experience’.

Datta has joined Colt’s Executive Leadership team to be led by Carl Grivner who took over as CEO on 1 January. Datta was recruited from AboveNet Communications, where he was chief operating officer for the fibre infrastructure provider as its annual revenues grew from $190m to $500m. New Colt CEO Grivner said Datta was recruited for his track record of transforming business.

Competition from cloud-based services such as Skype has affected the revenues for all European telcos, according to Reuters, which reported how Colt exited the wholesale market for voice calls in 2014.

However, according to a recent report from the European Telecoms Network Operators’ Association (ETNO), the year 2016 should see a return to growth in this sector, thanks in part to a thinning out of players, such as Colt, which also took the decision to pull out of the IT services market.

With an estate of 34 carrier-neutral data centres in Europe and seven managed facilities in Asia Pacific, Colt is to concentrate on cloud and data centre services. However, the data centre market is entering its own phase of consolidation and in November BCN reported market leader Equinix had bought its rival TelecityGroup. In this climate the change management skills of Datta will be invaluable, according to Colt CEO Grivner.

“Rajiv’s track record of transforming business performance will be invaluable in creating the levels of focus, speed and innovation that we need,” he said.

The cloud news categorized.