Archivo de la categoría: Google

Analytics, Big Data, Database, Google, News & Analysis, SAP

SAP unveils new powers within Analytics in the Cloud

SAP1SAP has unveiled a new user-friendly analytics service for enterprises which it claims will give better insights by offering an ‘unparalleled user experience’.

The SAP Cloud for Analytics will be delivered through a planned software as a service (SaaS) offering that unifies all SAP’s analytical functions into one convenient dashboard.

Built natively on the SAP HANA Cloud platform, it will be a scalable, multi-tenant environment at a price which SAP says is affordable to companies and individuals. The new offering aims to bring together a variety of existing services including business intelligence, planning, budgeting and predictive capacity.

According to SAP, it has fine tuned workflows so that it’s easier for user to get from insight to action, as one application spirits the uses through this journey more rapidly. It achieves this by giving universal access to all data, digesting it and forwarding the right components to the right organs of the organisation. An intuitive user interface (UI) will help all users, from specialists such as finance professionals to generalists such as line of business analysts, to build connected planning models, analyze data and collaborate. It can extend to unstructured data, helping users to spot market trends within social media and correlate them with company inventories, SAP claims.

It’s all about breaking down the divisions between silos and blending the data to make visualization and forecasting possible, said Steve Lucas, president, Platform Solutions, SAP. “SAP Cloud for Analytics will be a new cloud analytics experience. That to me is more than visualization of data, that’s realization of success,” said Lucas.

SAP said it is also working with partners to provide seamless workflows.

SAP and Google are collaborating to extend the levels of analysis available to customers, according to Prabhakar Raghavan, VP of Engineering at Google Apps. “These innovations are planned to allow Google Apps for Work users to embed, refresh and edit SAP Cloud for Analytics content directly in Google Docs and Google Sheets,” said Raghaven.

Cloudflare, Funding, Google, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Qualcomm, startup

Cloud security start up Cloudflare gets $110 million in venture funding

Secure cloudGoogle, Microsoft and chip maker Qualcomm are among the investors to collectively stake $110 million in networking and cyber security start up CloudFlare, according to a report in Fortune.

Cloudflare offers services that speed up cloud systems and web sites while beefing up security. Its main market proposition is to speed up the functioning of any services used by enterprises at the edge of their networks. By doing so it provides a cheaper alternative to the traditional model of on-premise appliances.

Cloudflare claims enterprises can quickly set up cloud-based firewall, load balancing, WAN optimization, distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, content delivery and domain name services services worldwide without needing any hardware. It claims that in one day it saved Chinese users more than 243 years of time that would have been collectively spent waiting for web content to load.

Last week Cloudflare finalized a joint venture with Chinese Internet giant Baidu that allows both US-based companies and Chinese-based companies to use CloudFlare’s website performance service while adhering to Chinese data laws.

Although CloudFlare maintains no physical operations in China, it has worked with Baidu to set up technology within Baidu’s facilities that mimic CloudFlare’s services elsewhere, Prince said.

The funding round was led by Fidelity Investments with Google Capital, Microsoft, Baidu and Qualcomm Ventures, the investment arm of Qualcomm all contributing funds. CloudFlare now has $182 million in total funding.

Matthew Prince, CEO of the start up, said Cloudflare didn’t need the funding as much as it needed the credibility that comes with top brand association. The confidence that comes with the backing of Google and Microsoft could convince nervous buyers that this is a solid investment when the company prepares itself for an initial public offering, it was reported. However, the IPO is unlikely to happen this year, said Prince, and he hinted that it would come no earlier than 2017.

AWS, Cisco, Dell, Equinix, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Platform as a service, Public Cloud, Salesforce, Software as a service, Synergy Research

Public cloud generating $22 billion a quarter for IT Companies

metalcloud_lowresPublic cloud computing generated over $22 billion in revenues for IT companies in the second financial quarter of 2015, according to a study by Synergy Research Group.

The revenue breaks down into $10 billion earned by companies supplying public cloud operators with hardware, software and data centre facilities and $12 billion being generated from selling infrastructure, platforms and software as a service.

In addition the public cloud supports ‘huge’ revenue streams from a variety of internet services such as search, social networking, email and e-commerce platforms, says the report. It identifies the supply side companies with the biggest share of revenues as Cisco, HP, Dell, IBM and Equinix. On the cloud services side the market leaders are AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and IBM.

As the public cloud makes inroads into the total IT market, the hardware and software used to build public clouds now account for 24 per cent of all data centre infrastructure spending. Public cloud operators and associated digital content companies account for 47 per cent of the data centre colocation market.

While the total IT market grew at less than five per cent per year, the growth of cloud revenues outpaced it. Infrastructure and platform as a service revenues (Iaas/Paas) grew by 49 per cent in the past year and software as a service (SaaS) grew by 29 per cent.

“Public cloud is now a market that is characterized by big numbers, high growth rates and a relatively small number of global IT players,” said Synergy Research Group’s chief analyst Jeremy Duke.

However, the report noted that there is still a place for regional small-medium sized public cloud players.

Alcatel-Lucent, Content & Applications, Content delivery network, Google, News & Analysis

Google and Alcatel announce content delivery network upgrades to cloud services

contentTwo major content delivery network (CDN) technology announcements have highlighted the strategic importance of CDN in delivering content without lag and latency.

Google’s Cloud Platform is to be sped up by the addition of four new content delivery networks, it has announced. The addition of CloudFlare, Fastly, Highwinds Network and Level 3 Communications to Google’s network of 70 points of presence in 33 countries forms part of Google’s new CDN Interconnect programme, which falls within the Google Cloud Interconnect line.

The plan is to cut prices for joint customers of the CDN providers and Google Cloud Platform when the customer’s traffic moves from the Google cloud to the CDN, it said. Google’s Cloud Platform product manager Ofir Roval said the additions are needed to speed delivery of rich media payloads from the Google Cloud Platform to end-user devices. Emerging web and mobile apps ‘carry hefty media assets’ which, he blogged, explains the need for new CDN additions, according to a report in The Light Reading. In time dependent enterprise business systems, users are unlikely to tolerate ‘laggy’ unresponsive applications, said Roval.

In November the cloud vendor launched Google Carrier Interconnect, to help link enterprise customers to the Google cloud. Partners in the initiative included Verizon, Equinix, Level 3 and Tata Communications.

Meanwhile, Alcatel-Lucent has moved to bolster it cloud-based IP video storage and content delivery technologies with a new Cloud DVR platform and a new Elastic content delivery network. The plan allows service providers to manage network capacity more dynamically as they deal with growing customer demand, according to Alcatel-Lucent.

The Cloud DVR platform incorporates a number of advances in storage resulting from Alcatel-Lucent’s collaboration with Intel and uses the Intel Intelligent Storage Acceleration Library.

With functions moved to the cloud, the Elastic CDN allows resources to be allocated more flexibly, said Paul Larbey, head of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Video business. “Our IP Video portfolio helps customers better manage the changes in traffic that they are seeing. We can help providers deliver video content more intelligently and efficiently to dramatically improve the end-user experience, in line with demand but without increasing costs.”

Telco TalkTalk has tested components of the enhanced Cloud DVR in a live network environment.

Elastic CDN will be made commercially available in 2016.

Google, News, Services

Lightning Strikes Disrupt Google Data Center

Recently, Google data centers in Belgium have been hit by a series of lightning strikes, which not only took some of its cloud storage systems offline briefly, but caused errors in some customers cloud infrastructure. It was initially reported that lightning had struck electrical systems in one of its three data centers in a small town about fifty miles southwest of Brussels called St. Ghislain. It was later relayed that lightning had not struck the data center, but had hit the local utility grid. This had caused the data center’s power to be interrupted.

Failover systems may switch to an auxiliary power if the primary source goes offline while servers in the data centers have batteries for extra backup. The servers supporting Persistent Disk, cloud storage that acts independently of compute, were backed up with such batteries. However, some servers stilled failed because extended use of the batteries caused them to drain. The incident report stated “In almost all cases the data was successfully committed to stable storage, although manual intervention was required in order to restore the systems to their normal serving state.”

Google data center campus in St. Ghislain

Over the five days that problems had appeared with the cloud storage systems, Google engineers had estimated that around five percent of the persistent disks in the Belgium zone had at least one I/O read or a write failure. A miniscule fraction of all the persistent disks were permanently deleted from servers, roughly 0.000001 percent according to the Google incident report.

Google’s infrastructure teams are swiftly working to replace storage systems with hardware that is more resilient against power failure in case of another emergency such as this one, so that data may be backed up. According to Google, most of the Persistent Disk Storage has already begun running on this stronger hardware.

Following this outage, Google has reminded customers that it has a multitude of cloud computing regions throughout the globe and within these regions are multiple isolated zones so users may set up resilient infrastructure that may fail over from a different zone in case of a single zone outage, like what occurred in Belgium. Google Compute Engine has three different regions: Central US in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Western Europe in St. Ghislain, and East Asia in Changhua County, Taiwan. In the Central United States region, there are four different zones while in Western Europe and East Asia there are three zones each. Because of the different zones, customers may successfully prepare for situations like the one that occurred in Belgium.

The post Lightning Strikes Disrupt Google Data Center appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Google, News, Services

Googles Cloud Services

In order to compete with Cloud giants such as Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft, Google has created two new cloud services, Cloud Dataflow and Cloud Pub/Sub, to handle Big Data necessities. Cloud Dataflow will perform very complex computations on large amounts of data in either batches or streaming mode. Cloud Pub/Sub may send and receive data from applications in a message form.
google dataflow
Cloud Dataflow product manager Eric Schmidt and Cloud Pub/Sub product manager Rohit Khare have written in a blog post, “These fully-managed services remove the operational burden found in traditional data processing system. They enable you to build applications on a platform that can scale with the growth of your business and drive down data processing latency, all while processing your data efficiently and reliably. Every day, customers use Google Cloud Platform to execute business-critical big data processing workloads, including: financial fraud detection, genomics analysis, inventory management, click-stream analysis, A/B user interaction testing and cloud-scale ETL.”
The authors have described Cloud Dataflow as “specifically designed to remove the complexity of developing separate systems for batch and streaming data sources by providing a unified programming model.” This program was based on previous Google innovations such as MapReduce, FlumeJava, and Millwheel.
Cloud Pub/Sub “addresses a broad range of scenarios with a single API, a managed service that eliminates those tradeoffs, and remains cost-effective as you grow, with pricing as low as 5¢ per million message operations for sustained usage.”

The post Googles Cloud Services appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Azure Data Factory, Big Data, Cloud Dataflow, Database, Google, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Google, Microsoft punt big data integration services into GA

Big cloud incumbents are doubling down on data integration

Big cloud incumbents are doubling down on data integration

Google and Microsoft have both announced the general release of Cloud Dataflow and Azure Data Factory, their respective cloud-based data integration services.

Google’s Cloud Dataflow is designed to integrate separate databases and data systems – both streaming and batch – in one programming model while giving apps full access to, and the ability to customise, that data; it is essentially a way to reduce operational overhead when doing big data analysis in the cloud.

Microsoft’s Azure Data Factory is a slightly different offering. It’s a data integration and automation service that regulates the data pipelines connecting a range of databases and data systems with applications. The pipelines can be scheduled to ingest, prep, transform, analyse and publish that data – with ADF automating and orchestration more complex transactions.

ADF is actually one of the core components of Microsoft’s Cortana analytics offering, and is deployed to automate the movement and transformation of data from disparate sources.

The maturation and commoditisation of data integration and automation is a positive sign for an industry that has for a very long while leaned heavily on expensive bespoke data integration. As more cloud incumbents bring their own integration offerings to the table it will be interesting to see how some of the bigger players in data integration and automation, like Informatica or Teradata, respond.

Alphabet, Google, Larry Page, M&A, News & Analysis, Sergey Brin, Vendor

Google creates Alphabet to address bloat, heterogeneity

Google's holding company is intended to help it more effectively manage a growing and increasingly broad set of businesses

Google’s holding company is intended to help it more effectively manage a growing and increasingly broad set of businesses

Google has taken the decision to form a new holding company, Alphabet, of which its biggest component will be Google with its internet and cloud services. The move is likely to appeal to investors who don’t want expensive experiments and general sprawl bringing down its share price.

The company’s chief executive Larry Page revealed the news in a blog post this week.

“We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.”

“Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet. I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President.”

Alphabet is a holding company that will include Google, the largest of its components, which will retain the internet-centric services it provides (including YouTube, Search, Maps, and its cloud services). But its other projects and divisions including Nest, Google X, Research, Fibre, and it venture capital arms (Ventures and Capital) will be spun out and operate under the broader Alphabet umbrella.

Page will serve as chief executive of Alphabet and Sergey Brin as its president. Sundar Pichai, who has led product development and engineering efforts for its internet businesses, will be bumped up to lead Google as chief executive.

“This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main Internet products contained in Alphabet instead.”

“Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related. Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence. In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed. We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well.”

Alex Polvi, Boris Renski, CoreOS, Docker, Google, Kubernetes, Linux containers, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Vendor

Mirantis, CoreOS deliver Kubernetes on OpenStack

Mirantis and CoreOS are partnering on Kubernetes integration with OpenStack

Mirantis and CoreOS are partnering on Kubernetes integration with OpenStack

Pure-play OpenStack vendor Mirantis has teamed with CoreOS to integrate its distribution of the open source cloud software with Tectonic, CoreOS’ commercial Kubernetes distribution.

Tectonic blends Kubernetes, an open source container deployment management service, and the CoreOS software portfolio in an integrated package, including a management console for workflows and dashboards, an integrated registry to build and share Linux containers, and additional tools to automate deployment and customize rolling updates. It runs on-premises or in public and private clouds.

The two companies said the move would improve support and manageability of containers running on OpenStack and bolster their mutual hybrid cloud capabilities.

“Mirantis and CoreOS share a vision of helping DevOps teams create better software faster. Putting Kubernetes on top of OpenStack gives them flexibility in how they build their applications, letting them innovate quickly,” said Mirantis chief marketing officer and co-founder Boris Renski.

“We are thrilled to be working with Google and CoreOS, and look forward to hearing more from them about how enterprises can leverage containers with OpenStack at OpenStack Silicon Valley.”

The move comes nearly half a year after Mirantis announced it would partner with Google to get vanilla Kubernetes integrated with its OpenStack distribution and double down on support for containers more broadly, efforts that have seemingly accelerated since Google announced the official 1.0 launch of Kubernetes last month.

“Now that Kubernetes is production-ready, companies using Tectonic and Mirantis OpenStack can have a Google-like infrastructure at their fingertips,” said Alex Polvi, chief executive of CoreOS. “Mirantis possesses a deep understanding of open source software and their commitment to the open source ecosystem around OpenStack is second to none. It was natural to work with Mirantis to help customers see the benefits of Kubernetes on OpenStack.”

Alibaba, Aliyun, AWS, Daniel Zhang, Datacentre, Equinix, Google, IBM, Infrastructure as a Service, Intel, Meeras, News & Analysis, PCCW, Singtel

Alibaba takes aim at AWS, Google, Microsoft, pours $1bn into global cloud rollout

Alibaba is pouring $1bn into its cloud division to support global expansion

Alibaba is pouring $1bn into its cloud division to support global expansion

Alibaba announced plans this week to plough $1bn into its cloud computing division, Aliyun, in a bid to expand the company’s presence and establish new datacentres internationally. The move may give it the scale it needs to compete more effectively with the likes of Amazon and Google.

The company currently operates five datacentre in China and Hong Kong, and earlier this year set up a datacentre in Silicon Valley aimed at local startups and Chinese multinational corporations.

The $1bn in additional investment will go towards setting up new cloud datacentres in the Middle East, Singapore, Japan and in various countries across Europe.

“Aliyun has become a world-class cloud computing service platform that is the market leader in China, bearing the fruits of our investment over the past six years. As the physical and digital are becoming increasingly integrated, Aliyun will serve as an essential engine in this new economy,” said Daniel Zhang, chief executive officer of Alibaba Group.

“This additional US$ 1 billion investment is just the beginning; our hope is for Aliyun to continually empower customers and partners with new capabilities, and help companies upgrade their basic infrastructure. We want to enable businesses to connect directly with consumers and drive productivity using data. Ultimately, our goal is to help businesses successfully transition from an era of information technology to data technology,” Zhang said.

The company said it also plans to use the funds to expand its partnerships through its recently announced Marketplace Alliance Program, a move that sees it partnering with large tech and datacentre operators, initially including Intel, Singtel, Meeras, Equinix and PCCW among others to help localise its cloud computing services and grow its ecosystem.

The investment if anything confirms Alibaba’s intent to grow well beyond Asia and displace other large public cloud providers like AWS, IBM and Google, which already boast significant global scale.