Archivo de la categoría: Enterprise IT

Big Data, cloud migration, Enterprise IT, Hadoop, News & Analysis, wandisco

WANdisco’s new Fusion system aims to take the fear out of cloud migration

CloudSoftware vendor WANdisco has announced six new products to make cloud migration easier and less dangerous as companies plan to move away from DIY computing.

The vendor claims its latest Fusion system aims to create a safety net of continuous availability and streaming back-up. Building on that, the platform offers uninterrupted migration and gives hybrid cloud systems the capacity to expand across both private public clouds if necessary. These four fundamental conditions are built on seven new software plug-ins designed to make the transition from production systems into live cloud systems smoother, says DevOps specialist WANdisco.

The backbone of Fusion is WANdisco’s replication technology, which ensures that all servers and clusters are fully readable and writeable, always in sync and can recover automatically from each other after planned or unplanned downtime.

The plug-ins that address continuous availability, data consistency and disaster recovery are named as Active-Active Disaster Recovery, Active-Active Hive and Active-Active Hbase. The first guarantees data consistency with failover and automated recovery over any network. It also prevents Hadoop cluster downtime and data loss. The second regulates consistent query results across all clusters and locations. The third, Hbase, aims to create continuously availability and consistency across all locations.

Three further plug ins address the threat of heightened exposure that is created when companies move their system from behind a company firewall and onto a public cloud. These plug-ins are named as Active Back-up, Active Migration and Hybrid Cloud. To supplement these offerings WANdisco has also introduced the Fusion Software Development Kit (SDK) so that enterprise IT departments can programme their own modifications.

“Ease of use isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about Big Data, so WANdisco Fusion sets out to simplify the Hadoop crossing,” said WANdisco CEO David Richards.

Citrix, Enterprise IT, Goto, News & Analysis, redundancies, shareholder

Citrix to axe 1000 staff and spin off GoTo amid shareholder pressure

CitrixCitrix is to decimate its workforce and spin off its GoTo product into a separate listed company as it seeks $200m savings and a return to its most profitable basics.

The loss of 1000 jobs, thought to be sanctioned under pressure from the activist hedge fund manager Elliott Management, represents 10% of the company’s workforce.

In July BCN reported that Citrix was considering its options for the future of its GoTo range of networking systems, which includes videoconferencing and the popular desktop sharing service GoToMeeting. At the time, Elliott Management, a 7% stakeholder in Citrix, made no secret of its wish to see the company spin off any non-core assets, slim down the product portfolio and cut costs dramatically to yield higher rates of growth.

In an operational review released on November 17th, the company said it would stop investing in certain programmes and products and shut down non-core products. The company said it expects about $200 million in annualized pre-tax cost savings, 75% of which is likely to be in 2016. The job cuts do not include the impact of the spinoff, according to Citrix. The job cuts will cost between $65 million and $85 million in the fourth quarter of 2015 and fiscal 2016 with most of the restructuring would be done in November and in January, Citrix disclosed.

The Go To business, which is valued at $3.5 billion to $4 billion (according to FBR Capital Markets analysis) could be sold as a separate business unit.

In a statement, Citrix said it plans to ‘increase emphasis and resources’ to its core enterprise products, including XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile, ShareFile and NetScaler. It has previously been reported that Elliott suggested that Citrix to explore the sale of NetScaler, a system that speeds up cloud based applications.

“We are simplifying our product, marketing, sales, operations and development,” said interim Citrix CEO Bob Calderoni, “Focusing on core strengths and simplifying how we work will improve execution, drive higher profit and begin growth in areas in which we provide the greatest value.”

Analyst Clive Longbottom at Quocirca said Citrix has become becalmed and can’t propel itself to the next level it needs to reach.

“It has a decent position as the main virtual desktop vendor, but with a new CEO and pressure from investors, Citrix has to do something,” said Longbottom.

However GoTo in combination with other technology such as ShareFile could have created the means for a massively scalable information platform, said Longbottom.

“There is one possibility around all this – a possible acquisition by another organisation. If Microsoft acquired a company that it has supported for so long, it would gain a platform for full desktop computing in Azure,” said Longbottom.

Avere, Azure, Enterprise IT, hybrid cloud, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Avere-Microsoft joint effort enables Azure hybrids

server rackEnterprise storage vendor Avere Systems is to work with Microsoft so that its Virtual FXT Edge filers can be used with Microsoft Azure.

The hardware maker, which specialises in creating storage devices that caters for hybrid cloud set ups, says the two vendors are collaborating to make it easier and cheaper to get the qualities of the cloud from IT infrastructure that is situated ‘on premise’.

The system aims to simplify the task of creating a system for providing computing power, memory and storage on demand for enterprise IT staff who are not specialists in running cloud services. The Avere technology is designed to make data that is held on network attached storage (NAS) more readily accessible to Azure, so that users don’t experience any latency.

The rationale is that many companies want the liquidity of cloud computing but are not allowed to move their data off the company premises, according to Avere. Its solution was to invent a ‘virtual NAS’ system that is easy for an enterprise IT department employee to install and manage. Meanwhile the system is sophisticated enough to provide multi-protocol file access (including NFS and SMB) and clusters, making it powerful enough to deliver high availability, scalable performance and capacity.

As hybrid cloud systems become the de facto standard for enterprises, it’s important that they are easy enough for IT department employees to manage, according to Nicole Herskowitz, Microsoft Azure’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Microsoft Azure.

By adapting the system to work smoothly with Azure, enterprise IT department managers can deploy thousands of Azure HPC instances on-demand to crunch data with low latency and no data migration. This means businesses can tap into hyper-converged infrastructure of Azure with ease, without breaking the bank, Avere claims.

“At Avere, we’ve been dedicated to shattering the myth that organizations can’t have enterprise NAS performance in the public cloud,” said Rebecca Thompson, VP Marketing of Avere Systems, “with Microsoft we’re helping enterprises harness the computing power of Microsoft Azure, which is used by 57% of Fortune 500 companies for big data applications.”

Enterprise IT, IT, News & Analysis, procurement, UK

Our cloud ambitious are frustrated by barriers, enterprises tell Hitachi

Network servers

An overwhelming majority of enterprise decision makers want cloud services, but practically all of them are blocked from adopting it, according to new figures released by Hitachi Data System (HDS).

HDS recently announced the results of a study the IT growth issues in UK enterprises. In the research it surveyed 200 UK IT decision makers at companies with over 1000 employees in a bid to discover the issues that cause “innovation inertia”.

HDS reported that a large majority (81%) of IT leaders say their companies aren’t set up for the digital age. It also established two other pieces of evidence for a growing clamour for cloud services, with 75% of IT leaders complaining that they can’t make informed investment decisions and 90% of the study group confession that their organisation is at risk of being outpaced by digitally-born brands.

However, HDS has released statistics to BusinessCloudNews that reveal that even more of the study group are prevented from applying cloud solutions to these problems, with 86% of respondents saying they experience barriers to cloud adoption. The main blockages, according to Hitachi, are security concerns (reported by 50% of the study group), data protection concerns (39%), budget constraints (28%) and legacy technology restrictions (20%).

“It’s not surprising that IT leaders feel concerned,” said Bob Plumridge, EMEA CTO at HDS, “the digital evolution feels scary because they are having to throw out every theory and intuition they have.”

In response HDS has a launched additions to its flash portfolio in order to improve the performance of cloud infrastructure and remove any performance doubts from nervous cloud buyers. The new offerings include an all-flash Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) F Series, enhanced models of the Hitachi VSP G series offerings, next-generation Hitachi flash modules with inline data compression (FMD DC2) and enhanced Hitachi Automation Director and Data Centre Analytics tools for improved response times and greater effective capacity.

Enterprise IT, fintech, News & Analysis

FCA aims to clarify fin-tech cloud legality issues

Money cloudA new guide from The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has helped clarify some of the legal issues surrounding financial technology and could lead to a boom for cloud service providers catering for the money markets.

The draft guidance briefs readers on the key areas regulated firms must consider when researching into outsourcing to the cloud and covers regulatory issues, data protection and security and business continuity. It also includes a section on how to manage risk and how to ensure regulators have effective access to data.

In the guide the FCA concludes there is “no fundamental reason why cloud services (including public cloud services) cannot be implemented, with appropriate consideration, in a manner that complies with our rules”.

Cloud outsourcing can help improve competition in the financial services sector, the regulator said, because it can “increase the ability” of financial services providers to renew their IT systems more efficiently. Greater choice and innovation in outsourcing should deliver “commensurate benefits for firms and consumers,” says the guide.

The FCA warns about the risks of outsourcing to cloud providers, however, and it briefs financial technology buyers to be vigilant on where data is stored and to check hidden sub-contracting arrangements which may obscure data residence arrangements.

The regulator advises that financial services companies must establish if and how their cloud contracts are governed by UK law and subject to UK court jurisdiction. Even when UK courts do not have jurisdiction financial service companies will have to ensure that their auditor and the FCA have “effective access” to their data, to the cloud provider’s business premises and even to the company’s Human Resource vetting procedures and audit trails. Although the definition of business premises includes head offices, operations and data centres, regulated firms do not have to ensure they have access to all of their cloud provider’s premises.

Writing on the Out-Law blog of law firm Pinsent Masons, fin-tech legal expert John Salmon said the FCA guidance is a “positive recognition that the financial services sector can move ahead with plans to use cloud services as long as appropriate safeguards are put in place.”

The FCA’s guidance is open to consultation until 12 February 2016.

“The consultation period over the next few months will provide a good opportunity for businesses affected to set out clear views about how existing regulation can be addressed in a way that enables cloud products,” said Salmon.

Big Data, Enterprise IT, Huawei, News & Analysis, Open Source, SAP HANA, Telco Cloud

Huawei shows how FusionSphere runs SAP HANA

SAP HANA VoraSAP partner and telecoms equipment maker Huawei used the SAP TechEd conference in Barcelona to demonstrate how its FusionSphere operating system handles SAP’s HANA big data processing platform on Huawei hardware.

Huawei’s FusionSphere is an open, enterprise-level cloud operating system based on OpenStack architecture. The telecoms equipment maker says it integrates software-defined computing, storage, networking and cloud management components into one system that can support private, public, and hybrid clouds. Delegates at the SAP conference were invited to see demonstrations of how the ‘open and agile’ operating system could handle running enterprise software.

Huawei argued that since FusionSphere can run business applications that have traditionally been run ‘on premise’, it will create new opportunities for mass processing of big data on the cloud. With the economies of scale and greater choice over resources that cloud gives the managers of IT operations, purchasers of IT services will have much greater buying power, according to Huawei.

Consequently, it argued, cloud based HANA projects could be run at much lower capital and operating costs, with more efficiency and service quality.

Huawei became a SAP global technology partner in 2012. Since then it has supported the SAP HANA platform and associated applications via a series of other products alongside FusionServer, with one, the Huawei Appliance for SAP HANA, currently being used in China, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Huawei used the Linux-oriented OPNFV Summit to unveil its new inventions for OPNFV Mobile Networking.

Huawei Chief Technology Officer Pang Kang told the conference the next generation of mobile architecture will be built on an open source version of NFV (network functions virtualisation).

“The OPNFV platform will be a significant step in the move to a new mobile architecture that scales, is elastic, resilient and agile,” said Pang Kang. “A carrier grade virtual infrastructure will help Huawei deliver the next-generation in mobile networking to our customers.”

Among the projects that Huawei is contributing to, within the OPNFV organisation, is Pinpoint – a big data system for failure prediction and Multi-site Virtualized Infrastructure, a distributed architecture for OPNFV.

During the OPNFV Summit, Huawei will demonstrate three OPNFV-based solutions that are targeted for commercial deployment, VNFs over OPNFV, VTN of ONOS (a carrier grade open source SDN controller) for OPNFV and Compass for OPNFV, a DevOps tool.

Azure, Datacentre, Enterprise IT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Red Hat, Virtualisation

Red Hat launches Cloud Access on Microsoft Azure

redhat office logoRed Hat has followed its recent declaration of a partnership with Microsoft by announcing the availability of Red Hat Cloud Access on Microsoft Azure.

The Access service will make it easier for subscribers to move any eligible, unused Red Hat subscriptions from their data centre to the Azure cloud. Red Hat Cloud Access will give them the support relationship they enjoy with Red Hat with the cloud computing powers of Azure, the software vendor said on its official blog. Cloud Access extends to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Middleware, Red Hat Gluster Storage and OpenShift Enterprise. The blog hints that more collaborations with Microsoft are to come.

Meanwhile, in his company blog Azure CTO Mark Russinovich gave a public preview of the coming Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets offering. VM Scale Sets are an Azure Compute resource that allow users to create and manage a collection of virtual machines as a set. These scale sets are designed for building large-scale services targeting big computing, big data and containerized workloads, all of which are increasing in significance as cloud computing evolves, said Russinovich.

By integrating with Azure Insights Autoscale, they provide the capacity to expand and contract to fit requirements with no need to pre-provision virtual machines. This allows users to match their consumption of computing resources to their application needs more accurately.

VM Scale Sets can be controlled within Azure Resource Manager templates and they will support Windows and Linux platform images, as well as custom images and extensions. “When you define a VM Scale Set, you only define the resources you need, so besides making it easier to define your Azure infrastructure, this also allows Azure to optimize calls to the underlying fabric, providing greater efficiency,” said Russinovich. “To deploy a scale set, all you need is an Azure subscription.”

Example Virtual Machine Scale Set templates are available on the GitHub repository.

Enterprise Cloud, Enterprise IT, HANA, News & Analysis, SAP

SAP claims to have simplified its Business Suite for all enterprise cloud users

SAP HANA VoraSAP has updated its suite of on-premise and cloud editions included in its Business Suite 4 SAP HANA range, which it promised will simplify processes in a range of functions and lines of business.

The announcement of improvements to its SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management system was made at SAP TechEd in Barcelona.

SAP claimed it has invented new, simpler and faster ways of using its systems in eight major areas that affect users working in finance, sales, service, marketing, commerce, procurement and sourcing, manufacturing, supply chain, asset management, research and development and human resources.

Finance, sales and purchasing staff will benefit from a new method of optimized working capital with new accounts payable and receivable cockpits. In the supply chain, workers can benefit from a new system with fewer stock buffers and a simplified data model for inventory management. This, says SAP, will speed things up by catering for more real-time, high-volume processing. In other departments, procurement, sourcing and supply chain management professionals will benefit from new levels of instant insight into stock and material flow.

Meanwhile, in other part of the enterprise, cloud users in Production Departments will benefit from shorter manufacturing cycles, as a result of streamlined material flow for internal requirements and for material requirements planning. Project managers and supervisors will become more productive, claims SAP, thanks to its new augmented reactivity with real-time monitoring of production orders for flow and critical issues.

Operations managers, on the other hand, will make better operational decisions with easier simulation of supply alternatives. Buyers will be able to lower their procurement costs as a result of the advances on standard integration to the Ariba Network. Meanwhile, at the shop floor, enterprises will be able to offer better customer service thanks to a new sales order fulfilment cockpit that could identify and clear bottlenecks instantly.

These line of business improvements will be found across the SAP portfolio in applications such as SAP Cash Management, SAP SuccessFactor, the Ariba Network in procurement and SAP hybris systems for marketing and commerce.

“We worked together closely to identify where digitized operations can provide the most value,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Products & Innovation.

Datacentre, Enterprise IT, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Microsoft to invest $2bn in Euro cloud infrastructure

datacentre cloudMicrosoft has announced plans to invest $2bn on building the infrastructure across Europe to support nationally-based data centres supporting national cloud services. It means that commercial cloud services can be run from the UK and other major European countries, allaying some data sovereignty and Safe Harbour fears.

From late 2016 Microsoft Azure and Office 365 will be generally available from local UK-based data centres, CEO Satya Nadella said at an event in London. A locally supported service for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will follow in 2017. Microsoft will also offer Azure ExpressRoute to provide customers with the option of a private connection to the cloud.

The new local Microsoft cloud regions are designed to ally fears over data residency for customers in the UK. Once the infrastructure is in place Microsoft will be able to replicate data within the UK for backup and recovery.

Services delivered from these UK data centres will not only improve sovereignty and cut latency but create new opportunities for Microsoft UK’s 25,000 channel partners, said Michel Van der Bel, the general manager of Microsoft UK. The UK is a global leader in using cloud-based systems with an adoption rate of 84% claimed Van der Bel.

“Our commitment to run our cloud services from local data centres will help meet demand from those who want their cloud systems based in the UK,” said Van der Bel. Customers and partners who can innovate will grow with the power of the cloud, he said, and now they can meet the strict regulations of the banking, financial services and public sectors.

Microsoft also announced completion of the latest phase of data centre facility expansion in Ireland and the Netherlands, which serve as cloud computing hubs for European customers.

One channel partner said the local data centres for local people plan is an overdue step in the right direction.

“This is great news for the UK and the technology sector as a whole,” said Avanade UK’s General Manager Julian Tomison, “questions around data residency aren’t new, but at least now we have a new solution.”

It’s good for the channel and the cloud industry said Tomison. “The investment validates the sector and will have a positive impact on the cloud industry as collectively customers will feel they have more control. Having data centres in the UK helps us stay competitive when prices and services are becoming uniform. I predict more investments like this as legislation like last month’s Safe Harbour ruling shape the legal situation here.”

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Verizon

Enterprise no longer fears cloud as adoption hits tipping point – Verizon report

VerizonCloud computing is on the verge of becoming the de facto method of buying business systems, according to a new study into adoption and attitudes towards the new generation of technology.

The number of enterprises that are not adopting cloud computing are a small minority, according to Verizon Enterprise Solutions’ 2016 State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud report. As the majority have run mission critical applications over the cloud, and there is near universal recognition of better performance, usability and lower cost of ownership, the fear of adopting cloud and abandon old expensive computing models has disappeared, according to the report.

The lean toward the cloud has reached the tipping point, according to Ryan Shuttleworth, cloud CTO for Verizon Enterprise Solutions and he predicts that companies will push on to look for ‘new opportunities to grow’.

The enterprise user feedback came from a mixture of Verizon’s own cloud customers, anonymised cloud customer usage data and data supplied by analysts such as Forrester and Gartner. This year the highest ever number of enterprises (69%) said they had re-engineered at least one business process using cloud computing, almost double the numbers from the previous year. An overwhelming majority (88%) said it was an improvement on their old computing model and improved responsiveness to the business, while 65% said it improved overall operations.

Having proved the concept of cloud computing, cloud phobia has disappeared, according to Verizon, as 87% of businesses think the cloud at least matches on-premise computing and 80% say they feel as secure or more secure than they do with an internally run IT service. As a result, 87% of businesses are now using the cloud for mission-critical workloads, up from 71% last year and 60% in 2013. By 2016, according to Verizon’s figures, the mission critical penetration of cloud computing could reach 98%.

Last year, it was news when a cloud was used for mission-critical workloads, according to Shuttleworth, but now it’s the de facto standard. “Companies are now using cloud technologies to create new customer experiences, business processes and new opportunities to grow,” said Shuttleworth.

There was some positive news for enterprise IT departments, however, with the revelation that private cloud on the rise with 44% of enterprises using, or planning to use, a private cloud system.