Archivo de la categoría: News & Analysis

Big Data, David Stokes, Europe, IBM, Jo Johnson, News & Analysis, Public Sector, STFC, uk government

IBM, UK gov ink $313m deal to promote big data, cognitive compute research

IBM and the UK government are pouring £313m into big data and cognitive computing R&D

IBM and the UK government are pouring £313m into big data and cognitive computing R&D

The UK government has signed a deal with IBM that will see the two parties fund a series of initiatives aimed at expanding cognitive computing and big data research.

The £313m partnership will see the UK government commit £113m to expand the Hartree Centre at Daresbury, a publicly funded facility geared towards reducing the cost and improving the efficiency and user-friendliness of high performance computing and big data for research and development purposes.

IBM said it will further support the project with technology and onsite expertise worth up to £200m, including access to the company’s cognitive computing platform Watson. The company will also place 24 IBM researchers at the Centre, who will help the researchers commercialise any promising innovations developed there.

The organisations will also explore how to leverage OpenPower-based systems for high performance computing.

“We live in an information economy – from the smart devices we use every day to the super-computers that helped find the Higgs Boson, the power of advanced computing means we now have access to vast amounts of data,” said UK Minister for Universities and Science Jo Johnson.

“This partnership with IBM, which builds on our £113 million investment to expand the Hartree Centre, will help businesses make the best use of big data to develop better products and services that will boost productivity, drive growth and create jobs.”

David Stokes, chief executive for IBM in the UK and Ireland said: “We’re at the dawn of a new era of cognitive computing, during which advanced data-centric computing models and open innovation approaches will allow technology to greatly augment decision-making capabilities for business and government.”

“The expansion of our collaboration with STFC builds upon Hartree’s successful engagement with industry and its record in commercialising technological developments, and provides a world-class environment using Watson and OpenPower technologies to extend the boundaries of Big Data and cognitive computing,” he added.

Alibaba, Aliyun, Chris Sharp, Equinix, Infrastructure as a Service, Networks, News & Analysis, Sicheng Yu

Equinix to offer direct access to Alibaba’s cloud service

Equinix will offer direct links to Alibaba's cloud

Equinix will offer direct links to Alibaba’s cloud

Equinix has signed an agreement with Alibaba that will see the American datacentre incumbent provide direct access to Chinese ecommerce firm’s cloud computing service.

The deal will see Equinix add Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud computing division, to its growing roster of cloud services integrated with its cloud interconnection service, and offer direct access to Aliyun’s IaaS and SaaSs in both Asia and North America.

Equinix said it’s aiming this primarily at large multinationals looking to expand their infrastructure into Asia.

“Our multi-national enterprise customers are increasingly asking for access to the Aliyun cloud platform, as they deploy cloud-based applications across Asia,” said Chris Sharp, vice president of cloud innovation, Equinix.

“By providing this access in two strategic markets, we’re empowering businesses to build secure, private clouds, without compromising network and application performance,” Sharp said.

Sicheng Yu, vice president of Aliyun said: “Aliyun is very excited about our global partnership with Equinix, who not only has a global footprint of cutting-edge datacentres, but has also brought together the most abundant cloud players and tenants in the cloud computing ecosystem on its Equinix Cloud Exchange platform. Connecting the Equinix ecosystem with our Aliyun cloud services on Cloud Exchange will provide customers with the best-of-breed choices and flexibility.”

The move will see Equinix expand its reach in Asia, a fast-growing market for cloud services, and comes just one week after Equinix announced it would bolster its European footprint with the TelecityGroup merger.

Ad Dijkhoff, Enterprise IT, Healthcare, Internet of Things, News & Analysis, Philips

Philips health cloud lead: ‘Privacy, compliance, upgradability shaping IoT architecture’

Ad Dijkhoff says the company's healthcare cloud ingests petabytes of data, experiencing 140 million device calls on its servers each data

Ad Dijkhoff says the company’s healthcare cloud ingests petabytes of data, experiencing 140 million device calls on its servers each day

Data privacy, compliance and upgradeability are having a deep impact on the architectures being developed for the Internet of Things, according to Ad Dijkhoff, platform manager HealthSuite Device Cloud, Philips.

Dijkhoff, who formerly helped manage the electronics giant’s infrastructure as the company’s datacentre programme manager, helped develop and now manages the company’s HealthSuite device cloud, which links over 7 million healthcare devices and sensors in conjunction with social media and electronic medical health record data to a range of backend data stores and front-end applications for disease prevention and social healthcare provision.

It collects all of the data for analysis and to help generate algorithms to improve the quality of the medical advice that can be generated from it; it also opens those datastores to developers, which can tap into the cloud service using purpose-built APIs.

“People transform from being consumers to being patients, and then back to being consumers. This is a tricky problem – because how do you deal with privacy? How do you deal with identity? How do you manage all of the service providers?” Dijkhoff said.

On the infrastructure side for its healthcare cloud service Philips is working with Rackspace and Alibaba’s cloud computing unit; it started in London and the company also has small instances deployed in Chicago, Houston and Hong Kong. It started with a private cloud, in part because the technologies used meant the most straightforward transition from its hosting provider at the time, and because it was the most feasible way to adapt the company’s existing security and data privacy policies.

“These devices are all different but they all share similar challenges. They all need to be identified and authenticated, first of all. Another issue is firmware downloadability – what we saw with consumer devices and what we’re seeing in professional spaces is that these devices with be updated a number of times during a lifetime, so you need that process to be cheap and easy.”

“Data collection is the most important service of them all. It’s around getting the behaviour of the device, or sensor behavior, or the blood pressure reading or heart rate reading into a back end, but doing it in a safe and secure way.”

Dijkhoff told BCN that these issues had a deep influence architecturally, and explained that it had to adopt a more modular approach to how it deployed each component so that it could drop in cloud services where feasible – or use on-premise alternatives where necessary.

“Having to deal with legislation in different countries on data collection, how it can be handled, stored and processed, had to be built into the architecture from the very beginning, which created some pretty big challenges, and it’s probably going to be a big challenge for others moving forward with their own IoT plans,” he said. “How do you create something architecturally modular enough for that? We effectively treat data like a post office treats letters, but sometimes the addresses change and we have to account for that quickly.”

Cloud Security Alliance, CSA, Daniele Catteddu, data protection, News & Analysis, Paolo Balboni

CSA tool helps cloud users evaluate data protection posture of providers

The CSA says the tool can help customers and providers improve their cloud data protection practices

The CSA says the tool can help customers and providers improve their cloud data protection practices

The Cloud Security Alliance this week unveiled the next generation of a tool designed to enable cloud customers to evaluate the level of data protection precautions implemented by cloud service providers.

The Privacy Level Agreement (PLA) v2 tool aims to give customers a better sense of the extent to which their providers have practices, procedures and technologies in place to ensure data protection vis-à-vis European data privacy regulations.

It also provides a guidance for cloud service providers to achieve compliance with privacy legislation in EU, and on how these providers can disclose the level of personal data protection they offer to customers.

“The continued reliance and adoption of the PLA by cloud service providers worldwide has been an important building block for developing a modern and ethical privacy-rich framework to address the security challenges facing enterprises worldwide,” said Daniele Catteddu, EMEA managing director of CSA.

“This next version that addresses personal data protection compliance will be of significant importance in building the confidence of cloud consumers,” Catteddu said.

The tool, originally created in 2013, was developed by the PLA working group, which was organised to help transpose the Art. 29 Working Party and EU National Data Protection Regulator’s recommendations on cloud computing into an outline CSPs can use to disclose personal data handling practices.

“PLA v2 is a valuable tool to guide CSPs of any size to address EU personal data protection compliance,” said Paolo Balboni, co-chair of the PLA Working Group and founding partner of ICT Legal Consulting. “In a market where customers still struggle to assess CSP data protection compliance, PLA v2 aims to fill this gap and facilitate customer understanding.”

Docker, Infrastructure as a Service, Kubernetes, Linux containers, Mesos, News & Analysis, Open Source

Containers ready for the primetime, Rackspace CTO says

John Engates was in London for the Rackspace Solve conference

John Engates was in London for the Rackspace Solve conference

Linux containers have been around for some time but only now is the technology reaching a level of maturity enterprise cloud developers are comfortable with, explained John Engates, Rackspace’s chief technology officer.

Linux containers have been all the rage the past year, and Engates told BCN the volume of the discussion is only likely to increase as the technology matures. But the technology is still young.

“We tried to bring support for containers to OpenStack around three or four years back,” Engates said. “But I think that containers are finally ready for cloud.”

One of the projects Engates cited to illustrate this is Project Magnum, a young sub-project within OpenStack building on Heat to produce Nova instances on which to run application containers, and it basically creates native capabilities (like support for different scheduling techniques); it effectively enables users and service providers to offer containers-as-a-service, and improves portability of containers between different cloud platforms.

“While containers have been around for a while they’ve only recently become the darling of the enterprise cloud developers, and part of that is because there’s a growing ecosystem out there working to build the tools needed to support them,” he said.

A range of use cases around Linux containers have emerged over the years – as a transport method, as a way of quickly deploying and porting apps between different sets of infrastructure, as a way of standing up a cloud service that offers greater billing granularity (more accurate / efficient usage) – the technology is still maturing and has suffered from a lack of tooling. Doing anything like complex service chaining is still challenging with existing tools, but that’s improving.

Beyond LXC, one of the earliest Linux container projects, there’s now CoreOS, Docker, Mesos, Kubernetes, and a whole host of container-like technologies that bring the microservices / OS ‘light’ architecture as well as deployment scheduling and cluster management tools to market.

“We’re certainly hearing more about how we can help support containers, so we see it as a pretty important from a service perspective moving forward,” he added.

Blue Box, Cisco, Hilton Romansky, IBM, Jim Comfort, News & Analysis, Open Source, Piston

Cisco, IBM spend big in OpenStack-focused land grab

Cisco and IBM have both acquired OpenStack vendors this week

Cisco and IBM have both acquired OpenStack vendors this week

Cisco and IBM have both signed deals to acquire OpenStack vendors this week, with Cisco acquiring Piston Cloud Computing, a firm specialising in OpenStack-based private cloud software and IBM buying up managed private cloud provider Blue Box.

Piston offers what it calls Piston CloudOS, a supped up version of OpenStack for private clouds alongside custom cluster management and monitoring software and APIs. Underneath that sits a custom Linux micro-OS that contains all of the necessary code to run CloudOS; the company said it can be characterized as a “bare-metal operating system that is tailor-made for pools of hyper-converged, commodity resources.”

Cisco said Piston will help it deliver on its Intercloud vision, which sees a Cisco-based set of cloud services that can federate with one another; OpenStack seems increasingly to be at the heart of that effort.

“Paired with our recent acquisition of Metacloud, Piston’s distributed systems engineering and OpenStack talent will further enhance our capabilities around cloud automation, availability, and scale. The acquisition of Piston will complement our Intercloud strategy by bringing additional operational experience on the underlying infrastructure that powers Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud,” said Hilton Romanski, corporate development lead at Cisco.

“Additionally, Piston’s deep knowledge of distributed systems and automated deployment will help further enhance our delivery capabilities for customers and partners,” he added.

The move will also give Cisco some strong in-house OpenStack expertise. One of Piston’s co-founders, Chris MacGown, was among the originating members of OpenStack’s Nova-core (compute) development team.

This is the second big OpenStack-focused acquisition Cisco has made in recent months. In September last year Cisco acquired Metacloud, a provider of commercially supported OpenStack. Metacloud also had IP in the networking technology it has integrated into its OpenStack distribution, which gave Cisco’s OpenStack play an SDN boost.

IBM, meanwhile has acquired managed private cloud provider Blue Box, which the company said would help bolster its hybrid cloud and OpenStack strategy.

The company said the move would enable it to provide a public cloud-like experience within its customers’ datacentres by allowing it to offer a remotely managed OpenStack offering, which it hadn’t previously.

“IBM is dedicated to helping our clients migrate to the cloud in an open, secure, data rich environment that meet their current and future business needs,” said IBM general manager of cloud services Jim Comfort. “The acquisition of Blue Box accelerates IBM’s open cloud strategy making it easier for our clients to move to data and applications across clouds and adopt hybrid cloud environments.”

IBM said it will continue to support Blue Box customers and use the company as a channel to sell its own cloud services.

Both acquisitions are a sign the old-hat vendors are putting their money where their mouths are when it comes to OpenStack – particularly when some of them, like HP and Red Hat, are digging their heels in and aggressively pushing their OpenStack wares.

DeepSecure, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Simon Hansford, Skyscape

Skyscape, DeepSecure strike cloud data compliance deal

Skyscape is partnering with DeepSecure to bolster its security cred

Skyscape is partnering with DeepSecure to bolster its security cred

Cloud service provider Skyscape is partnering with DeepSecure in a move the companies said would help public sector cloud users meet their compliance needs.

DeepSecure traditionally sells to the police, defence and intelligence sectors and provides secure data sharing and data management services as well as cybersecurity systems, and the partnership will see Skyscape offer its customers DeepSecure’s suite of data sharing and security services.

The move could give Skyscape, which already heavily targets the public sector, a way in with some of the more heavily regulated clients (security-wise) there.

“We’re delighted to announce our partnership with DeepSecure, a likeminded company with a significant track record when it comes to helping organisations share data securely,” said Simon Hansford, chief executive of Skyscape Cloud Services.

“DeepSecure is certainly a good cultural fit for us as a fellow UK sovereign SME that specialises in delivering secure digital services to the UK public sector.  The firm also shares our commitment to offering a consumption-based pricing model for its security services, which aligns with our own pay-as-you-go model for our full catalogue of assured cloud services,” Hansford said.

Datacentre, HP, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Orlando Bayter, Ormuco, Steve Dietch

Ormuco taps HP Helion for mid-market hybrid cloud offering

Ormuco is partnering with HP on hybrid cloud

Ormuco is partnering with HP on hybrid cloud

Ormuco is partnering with HP to launch a Helion OpenStack-based hybrid cloud solution the company said is designed specifically with workload portability in mind.

Hybrid cloud is still high on the agenda for many CIOs but challenges abound – security and compliance management, service automation and orchestration and of course, workload portability. The company is relying on HP’s implementation of OpenStack to solve some of those challenges, and said its ConnectedCloud offering will help enterprises move their workloads across OpenStack-based private and public clouds.

“Ormuco is entering the cloud services market since there is a vital need for a hybrid cloud solution with streamlined functionality for enterprise customers,” said Ormuco chief executive Orlando Bayter. “HP Helion OpenStack and Ormuco’s new data centres enable us to create environments that focus on service delivery regardless of the underlying infrastructure.”

Ormuco has datacentres in Dallas, Texas; Sunnyvale, California and Montreal, Quebec, and said it has others planned for New York and Seattle as well as an expansion into Europe with datacentres in Frankfurt and London.

The company is a member of HP’s Helion Partner Network, a federation of HP-certified OpenStack cloud incumbents globally that private cloud users can burst into, which is for the time being primarily how the company delivers scale.

“Ormuco requires extensive geographic reach and the ability to meet customers’ in-country or cross-border cloud requirements,” said Steve Dietch, vice president, HP Helion, HP. “With HP Helion OpenStack and the HP Helion Network, Ormuco’s Connected Cloud customers will have access to hybrid cloud services from a global, open ecosystem of service providers.”

Azure, Datacentre, Kevin Turner, Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics, News & Analysis, Office 365

Microsoft to open two cloud datacentres in Canada

Microsoft is adding two cloud datacentres in Canada

Microsoft is adding two cloud datacentres in Canada

Microsoft is opening two cloud datacentres in Canada, the company said this week. The facilities, one in Toronto, Ontario and one in Montreal, Quebec, will deliver Azure, Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics to local customers.

The company said the datacentres would help companies and organisation in highly regulated sectors like healthcare, the public sector, higher education and financial services overcome data storage and compliance regulations.

“Companies and organisations that have to adhere to data storage requirements and compliance standards can now take advantage of the advantages offered by Microsoft services here in Canada,” said Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner.

Turner said the announcement speaks to Microsoft’s “deep and growing commitment” to Canada and its public and private sector organisations.

“Now customers will be able to enjoy the benefits of all commercial cloud services on their terms across Canada.”

This is Microsoft’s first big cloud datacentre push since the company announced the launch of Azure in Australia last year. Lately, however, Microsoft has seemed more focused on bolstering its position through hybrid cloud, announcing Azure Stack – a series of updates and architectural changes (more microservices) to its server and cloud technologies aimed at blending the divide between Azure and Windows Server.

Converged Infrastructure, Datacentre, HP, News & Analysis, Paul Morgan, Vendor

HP targets hybrid cloud users with CloudSystem, Helion updates

HP has updated its CloudSystem converged infrastructure offerings

HP has updated its CloudSystem converged infrastructure offerings

HP has updated its CloudSystem platform to include its distribution of OpenStack in a converged private cloud offering. Paul Morgan, HP’s cloud head in EMEA told BCN the company is looking to broaden its support for hybrid cloud deployments.

The HP Helion CloudSystem includes all of HP’s Helion software including CloudSystem (its own private cloud software), Helion OpenStack, Helion Development Platform (it’s Cloud Foundry distribution) and HP Helion Eucalyptus (for AWS workload portability).

The offering comes in two flavours: the CS200-HC, which is being pitched as an entry-level hyper converged system aimed at SMBs and enterprises and can scale up to 32 nodes (pricing will be announced later this year but Morgan suggested the cost would float around the $2,000 mark for three years with support and maintenance); and the CS700x/700, which is cabinet-sized, aimed at larger enterprises and can scale up to 100 blade servers.

The software loaded on top comes in two versions: Foundation, which includes the Development Pack and OpenStack; and Enterprise, which ships with everything the Foundation package offers as well as OneView, Matrix, and Eucalyptus service templates, and includes more robust architecting and publishing capabilities.

The company said it has expanded support for HyperV, enhanced VMware networking, and added a number of OpenStack ancillary services under the hood including Heat (for orchestration) and Horizon (for dashboarding). It’s also added OneView – its converged infrastructure operations management software – to the mix.

“We definitely think that down the road many of the applications and workloads we see today will be hosted in the public cloud,” Morgan explained. “But in reality many of those applications don’t move over so easily. The cloud journey really does start with hybrid, which is where we think we can add value.”

Morgan said that converged offerings can help IT departments save big because they improve automation and deliver orchestration and automation without needing to radically change applications. He added that some of its customers have saved upwards of 30 to 40 per cent using its CloudSystem offerings.

“That’s where these converged offerings can play a role – in delivering all of the agility and cost savings cloud brings and which enterprises are looking for when they refresh their hardware, but not necessarily forcing them to rush off and overhaul the application landscape at the same time.”