Amazon Web Services, Datacentre, News & Analysis, renewable energy

AWS launches new wind farm in green drive

Wind farmAmazon Web Services has contracted green energy specialist EDP Renewables to build and run the 100 megawatt (MW) Amazon Wind Farm US Central in Ohio.

The project is due to complete by May 2017 when it will begin producing enough to power run, 29,000 average US homes for a year, it claims. AWS says the latest addition to its green energy stable would generate 320,000 MWh of electricity a year from a new wind farm in the US.

Amazon also claims the energy generated will feed the electrical grid supplying both current and future AWS cloud data centres.

In November 2014 AWS committed to running its infrastructure entirely on renewable energy – in the long term – and claimed that 25% of the electricity running its cloud services was green. By the end of 2016 it aims to have pushed the proportion to 40%.

Earlier this year it announced a renewable project with the Amazon Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge) in Indiana could generate 500,000 MWh of wind power annually. In April it then began a pilot project using Tesla’s energy storage batteries to power data centres at times when wind power and solar are not available. In the same month AWS joined the American Council on Renewable Energy and the US Partnership for Renewable Energy Finance to work with government policy makers on developing more renewable energy options.

In June 2015 it said its new AWS Solar Farm in Virginia could generate 170,000 MWh of solar power annually and a month later it added another wind farm in North Carolina that could generate 670,000 MWh a year. In total, AWS claims to have the potential to create 1.6 million MWh of power.

“We continue to pursue projects that help to power AWS data centres and bring us closer to achieving total renewable energy,” said Jerry Hunter, VP of Infrastructure at AWS.

containers, Interviews, Open Source, Yelp

Containers aren’t new, but ecosystem growth has driven development

kyle andersonContainers are getting a fair bit of hype at the moment, and February 2016 will see the first ever dedicated container-based conference take place in Silicon Valley in the US. Here, Business Cloud News talks to Kyle Anderson, who is the lead developer for Yelp, to learn about the company’s use of containers, and whether containers will ultimately live up to all the hype.

Business Cloud News: “What special demands does Yelp’s business put on its internal computing?”

Kyle Anderson: “I wouldn’t say they are very special. In some sense our computing demands are boring. We need standard things like capacity, scaling, and speed. But boring doesn’t quite cut it though, and if you can turn your boring compute needs into something that is a cut above the status quo, it can become a business advantage.”

BCN: “And what was the background to building your own container-based PaaS? What was the decision-making process there?”

KA: “Building our own container-based PaaS came from a vision that things could be better if they were in containers and could be scheduled on-demand.

“Ideas started bubbling internally until we decided to “just build it” with manager support. We knew that containers were going to be the future, not VMS. At the same time, we evaluated what was out there and wrote down what it was that we wanted in a PaaS, and saw the gap. The decision-making process there was just internal to the team, as most engineers at Yelp are trusted to make their own technical decisions.”

BCN: “How did you come to make the decision to open-source it?”

KA: “Many engineers have the desire to open-source things, often simply because they are proud of their work and want to share it with their peers.

“At the same time, management likes open-source because it increases brand awareness and serves as a recruiting tool. It was natural progression for us. I tried to emphasise that it needs to work for Yelp first, and after one and a half years in production, we were confident that it was a good time to announce it.”

BCN: “There’s a lot of hype around containers, with some even suggesting this could be the biggest change in computing since client-server architecture. Where do you stand on its wider significance?

KA: “Saying it’s the biggest change in computing since client-server architecture is very exaggerated. I am very anti-hype. Containers are not new, they just have enough ecosystem built up around them now, to the point where they become a viable option for the community at large.”

Container World is taking place on 16 – 18 February 2016 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, USA.

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Reinventing the Handshake | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Security

My father used to tell me that the key to success in life was to look people in the eye and give them a firm handshake. But the art of the handshake seems to have died in my generation. I grew up in the era of high fives, forearm smashes and fist pumps. I played baseball, so there were also a lot of butt pats, (but let’s not go into that). It seems like the importance of handshakes and eye-to-eye contact have diminished even further in my daughter’s generation. Every day I watch her friends look down at their smartphones while texting each other “omg hi bff” as they greet each other at school or at the mall.

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Miscellaneous IT, Tech News Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 11/16/2015

Were you busy this week? Here’s a quick Tech News Recap of articles you may have missed!

Tech News Recap

Hackers could take advantage of inaudible sounds that link your phone, TV, tablet, and PC. Anonymous hackers have declared war. By next year, there will be six billion connected devices. Apple has a new magnetic charging dock for the Apple Watch. Cisco says worldwide cloud traffic will reach 8.6 zettabytes by 2019.

Register for our upcoming webinar – IT Help Desk for the Holidays: The Strategic Gift That Keeps on Giving.

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Uncategorized

SQL Server Index Fragmentation In-Depth

There is no way to avoid index fragmentation in any SQL Server environment. It does not depend on your SQL Server version or I/O subsystem you have, or your hardware. In this article, we will drill down into SQL Server index fragmentation issue. We will figure out why index fragmentation is a problem and how it affect on overall performance, discuss how to detect and avoid it.

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2016 IT trends, Information technology, IT trends, Parallels RAS, Parallels Remote Application Server, RAS, Remote Application Server, trends in IT

2016 IT Trends

2016 IT Trends That are Shaping the Future of Business The rapid transformation of the business world from a product-driven model to a service-oriented approach brings new and innovative changes to the technology segment. Businesses need to proactively monitor these trends to realign their business and technological strategies to accommodate these changes. At the recent […]

The post 2016 IT Trends appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Apple, Apple CEO, Infographic, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop 11, Parallels Desktop for Mac, run windows on mac, Steve Jobs, Windows on mac

The Life of Steve Jobs in One Infographic

Life goes by too quickly, and that truth is never as poignant as when we lose one of our brightest minds. When the world said goodbye to Steve Jobs in 2011, we knew we had lost a visionary—the same visionary who pioneered technology that continues to impact the market and the world every day. But […]

The post The Life of Steve Jobs in One Infographic appeared first on Parallels Blog.

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Containers, Mobile Apps, and IoT | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #InternetOfThings

Container technology is shaping the future of DevOps and it’s also changing the way organizations think about application development. With the rise of mobile applications in the enterprise, businesses are abandoning year-long development cycles and embracing technologies that enable rapid development and continuous deployment of apps.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Kurt Collins, Developer Evangelist at Built.io, examined how Docker has evolved into a highly effective tool for application delivery by allowing increasingly popular Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (mBaaS) platforms to quickly create and scale enterprise apps across mobile, web and IoT.

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Leadership for DevOps Success | @DevOpsSummit @G2G3 #DevOps #IoT

Culture is the most important ingredient of DevOps. The challenge for most organizations is defining and communicating a vision of beneficial DevOps culture for their organizations, and then facilitating the changes needed to achieve that. Often this comes down to an ability to provide true leadership.
As a CIO, are your direct reports IT managers or are they IT leaders? The hard truth is that many IT managers have risen through the ranks based on their technical skills, not their leadership ability. Many are unable to effectively engage and inspire, creating forward momentum in the direction of desired change. Renowned for its approach to leadership and emphasis on their people, organizations increasingly look to our military for insight into these challenges.

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Why small business adoption of cloud storage still has some way to go

(c)iStock.com/4774344sean

Research from B2B research firm Clutch has revealed just over half (52%) of small businesses are using a cloud storage solution, with Dropbox the most popular and Apple the highest rated service.

According to the report, which polled 438 small business across the US and 744 full time employees, Dropbox was used by 53% of respondents, ahead of Google Drive (45%), Apple iCloud (34%) and Microsoft OneDrive (30%). Box, in comparison, was used by only 6% of respondents, indicating a preference towards consumer services. Apple’s cloud storage was given the highest Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 62, ahead of Dropbox (54), Google Drive (50) and OneDrive (45).

Plenty of moves have been made in the storage space in recent weeks. Microsoft announced earlier in November that it was dropping its unlimited OneDrive plan, previously available to Office 365 subscribers, after the company admitted a small percentage of users were putting 75 terabytes of data into their accounts – more than 14,000 times the average. Dropbox continues to push itself towards the enterprise market, announcing enhancements to its Dropbox for Business product to include new account management tools and greater security at a recent event.

Yet these survey results show businesses are not as savvy as one might expect with storage. “Cloud storage has been around for a while, but there are still many people who do not know the full scope of what can be done with it,” said David Amaya, consultant at Cardinal Solutions.

“Security and compliance concerns hold many back from adopting the cloud – as small businesses become more aware of what is possible and how the cloud addresses these concerns, the number using the cloud will continue to increase,” he added.

Elsewhere, research from all-flash storage provider SolidFire has examined the state of storage in next-generation IT deployments and argues storage automation is ‘predominantly’ addressing immediate problems IT teams face – but more work can be done. VMware has the largest contingent of organisations using storage automation, while OpenStack and, increasingly, containerised solutions such as Docker, are ‘poised to be a disruptive force’.

The cloud news categorized.