Category Archives: Public Cloud

China Mobile, data centre, NEC, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Submarine Cable

Google’s trans-Pacific submarine cable enters into service today

GoogleA consortium of tech giants including Google and NEC has completed the construction and end-to-end testing of a new trans-Pacific submarine cable system, reports Telecoms.com.

The 9,000km FASTER Cable System enters into service today (30 June), and is claimed to be the first cable system designed from the outset to support digital coherent transmission technology, using optimized fibers throughout the submarine portion. The cable system lands in Oregon in the United States and two landing points in Japan, Chiba and Mie. The team claim the cable will be able to deliver 60 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific.

“From the very beginning of the project, we repeatedly said to each other, ‘faster, Faster and FASTER,’ and at one point it became the project name, and today it becomes a reality,” said Hiromitsu Todokoro, Chairman of the FASTER Management Committee. “This is the outcome of six members’ collaborative contribution and expertise together with NEC’s support.”

The consortium includes China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, Google, KDDI and Singtel, of which Google has been one of the most vocal. On the official blog, Google said the new cable will help the team launch a new Google Cloud Platform East Asia region in Tokyo.

The new data centre in Tokyo is part of Google’s ambitions to dominate cloud computing and other enterprise service offerings. While it is generally considered to be ranked third in the public cloud stakes, with AWS and Microsoft Azure out ahead, it has been making strides in recent months. Alongside the Tokyo data centre launch, another was opened in Oregon, and there are plans for a further ten over the course of 2017.

Google has been investing in submarine cables since 2008, initially with the 7.68Tb trans-Pacific Unity cable, which came online in 2010. The completion of the project now takes the number of Google-owned undersea cables up to four, though there are likely to be more added in the coming years.

“Today, Google’s latest investment in long-haul undersea fibre optic cabling comes online: the FASTER Cable System gives Google access to up to 10Tbps (Terabits per second) of the cable’s total 60Tbps bandwidth between the US and Japan,” said Alan Chin-Lun Cheung, a Google Submarine Networking Infrastructure.

“We’ll use this capacity to support our users, including Google Apps and Cloud Platform customers. This is the highest-capacity undersea cable ever built — about ten million times faster than your average cable modem — and we’re beaming light through it starting today.”

AWS, Google, Hotels.com, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

The rest of the world is catching up with AWS – Hotels.com CIO

Speaking at Cloud and DevOps World, Hotels.com CIO Theirry Bedos outlined some of the cloud industry’s growing trends, including the erosion of AWS’ dominant position, reports Telecoms.com.

The growth of the cloud industry has been well documented over recent months, as numerous studies and surveys dominate web searches claiming adoption rates are accelerating. While it is still debatable if cloud has penetrated the mainstream market, according to Bedos, what is clear is the industry is heading that direction; there’s no turning around now.

“The world is becoming fluffier and fluffier,” said Bedos. “There are countless studies and surveys on the internet which show the cloud is becoming more popular and widely used, which is only good for the industry. AWS is still the number one player in the market, but the rest are starting to catch up now. This is one of the most interesting trends which we are seeing.”

As with the acceptance and adoption of any new technology, there are bound to be a number of underlying trends. For Bedos, one of the more interesting of those trends is the acceptance there is another way aside from AWS.

While AWS is still considered the leader in the industry, controlling notably more market share than other cloud providers, the lead is slimming. Microsoft and Google have both been prominent over the course of the last 18 months in bolstering their cloud capabilities, and this has not gone unnoticed by the industry. Although cloud adoption rates are increasing, AWS is getting a smaller and smaller slice of the pie as customers are taking alternatives into consideration.

This should not be considered a major surprise, as this is a trend which has been witnessed with the growth of other technology sub-sectors. Back in the early 2000s, Netscape’s web browser was once dominant in terms of usage share, but lost most of that share to Internet Explorer during the so-called first ‘Browser War’. Bedos highlighted Netscape was first to market, and enjoyed that position for some time until the proposition became normalized and competition grew. This is the same trend AWS is undertaking currently.

“I’m not saying AWS will disappear in the same way Netscape did, but we’re going to see other players chip away at their market share,” said Bedos. That said, the increased competition and drive to acquire new customers could see the balance of power shift towards the consumer.

On top of the increased competition, Bedos also commented on the USPs of the individual cloud providers themselves. Buyers generally buy for a specific reason and these USPs in the cloud provider’s offerings is starting to fund the trend of multi-cloud environments in the enterprise business. Why choose when you can have the best of multiple cloud worlds? For Bedos, this is driving the trend of interoperability. Before too long moving workloads and data sets between different cloud environments will be a simple task, as vendors appreciate a lock-in situation will negatively impact their own business. Co-operation could potentially be the new battle ground.

AWS will continue; they are continuing to innovate and have the backing of one of the worlds’ most recognizable brands. However, increased competition, as well as the tendency of buyers to prefer a multi-cloud proposition, will see a more even playing field, and the bargaining power of these deals potentially leaning towards the consumer.

acquisition, IoT, Joyent, Mobile, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Samsung

Samsung acquires containers-cloud company Joyent

Money Tree, Currency, Growth.Samsung has agreed to buy San Francisco based cloud provider Joyent in an effort to diversify its product offering in declining markets, reports Telecoms.com.

Financial for the deal have not been disclosed, however the team stated the acquisition will build Samsung’s capabilities in the mobile and Internet of Things arenas, as well cloud-based software and services markets. The company’s traditional means of differentiating its products have been through increased marketing efforts and effective distribution channels, though the new expertise will add a new string to the bow.

“Samsung evaluated a wide range of potential companies in the public and private cloud infrastructure space with a focus on leading-edge scalable technology and talent,” said Injong Rhee, CTO of the Mobile Communications business at Samsung. “In Joyent, we saw an experienced management team with deep domain expertise and a robust cloud technology validated by some of the largest Fortune 500 customers.”

Joyent itself offers a relatively unique proposition in the cloud market as it runs its platform on containers, as opposed to traditional VM’s which the majority of other cloud platforms run on. The team reckons by using containers efficiency it notably improved, a claim which is generally supported by the industry. A recent poll run on Business Cloud News found 89% of readers found container run cloud platforms more attractive than those on VMs.

While smartphones would now be considered the norm in western societies, the industry has been taking a slight dip in recent months. Using data collected from public announcements and analyst firm Strategy Analytics, estimates showed the number of smartphones shipped in Q1 2016 fell to 334.6 million units from 345 million during the same period in 2015. The slowdown has been attributed to lucrative markets such as China becoming increasingly mature, as well as pessimistic outlook from consumers on the global economy.

As a means to differentiate the brand and tackle a challenging market, Samsung has been looking to software and services offerings, as creating a unique offering from hardware or platform perspective has become next to impossible. In terms of the hardware, the latest release of every smartphone contains pretty much the same features (high-performance camera, lighter than ever before etc.), and for the platform, the majority of the smartphone market operates on Android. Software and services has become the new battle ground for product differentiation.

Last month, the team launched its Artik Cloud Platform, an open data exchange platform designed to connect any data set from any connected device or cloud service. IoT is a market which has been targeted by numerous organizations and is seemingly the focus of a healthy proportion of product announcements. The launch of Artik Cloud puts Samsung in direct competition with the likes of Microsoft Azure and IBM Bluemix, as industry giants jostle for lead position in the IoT race, which has yet to be clarified. The inclusion of Joyent’s technology and engineers will give Samsung extra weight in the developing contest.

The purchase also offers Samsung the opportunity to scale its own scale its own cloud infrastructure. The Samsung team says it’s one of the world’s largest consumers of public cloud data and storage, and the inclusion of Joyent could offer the opportunity to move data in-house to decrease the dependency on third party cloud providers such as AWS.

As part of the agreement, CEO Scott Hammond, CTO Bryan Cantrill, and VP of Product Bill Fine, will join Samsung to work on company-wide initiatives. “We are excited to join the Samsung family,” said Hammond. “Samsung brings us the scale we need to grow our cloud and software business, an anchor tenant for our industry leading Triton container-as-a-service platform and Manta object storage technologies, and a partner for innovation in the emerging and fast growing areas of mobile and IoT, including smart homes and connected cars.”

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Orange Business Services, Public Cloud

Orange Business Services beefs up cloud gateway

GatewayOrange Business Services has integrated its Enterprise Application Management (EAM) Riverbed offering into its Business VPN Galerie portfolio, reports Telecoms.com.

The EAM offering is a fully-managed service from Orange Business Services targeted on delivering application acceleration and WAN optimization to boost user experience. The product aims to tackle a number of different challenges for customers including insufficient WAN bandwidth, as well as insufficient transport and application protocols in high-latency environments.

The offering uses Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances to deliver application acceleration and WAN optimization, which uses various optimization techniques including data, transport, application and management streamlining. The data streamlining techniques are claimed to reduce WAN bandwidth utilization by 65% to 98% for TCP-based applications.

“Customers need to boost end-user application experience with faster response times to increase productivity at a global scale, enable business-critical migration projects and improve the corporate image,” said Pierre-Louis Biaggi, VP of the connectivity business at Orange Business Services. “By integrating Riverbed’s best-of-breed technology in our secure and fully-managed solution we can deliver this promise.”

The Business VPN Galerie, which Orange claims was the world’s first cloud-ready network, offers customers a range of cloud-based applications and services from their own private network provided by Orange Business Services or its partners. The portfolio currently has 1,600 customers, as well as more than 20 cloud partners including Orange Cloud for Business, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Express Route, Salesforce and AWS.

Elsewhere in the Orange business, the team have opened a new Eco campus based in Chatillon on the outskirts of Paris, which will be devoted completely to research and innovation.

“Innovation, has always been one of the Group’s fundamentals, and must be the expression of Orange’s mission: transforming technology into progress each day and serving people through innovation,” said Stéphane Richard, CEO of Orange. “To put the human context in the centre of our thinking, it is a choice we accept and that characterises us, this is a philosophy that now has a name: ‘Human Inside’. ‘Human Inside’ is both a slogan and a catchword, that gives meaning and which highlights all our action.”

AWS, News & Analysis, Outage, Public Cloud

AWS release statement to explain Aussie outage

Location Australia. Green pin on the map.AWS has blamed a power shortage caused by adverse weather conditions as the primary cause of the outage Australian customers experienced this weekend.

A statement on the company’s website stated its utility provider suffered a failure at the regional substation, which resulted in the total loss of utility power to multiple AWS facilities. At one of these facilities, the power redundancy didn’t work as designed and the company lost power to a large number of instances in the availability zone.

The storm this weekend was one of the worst experienced by Sydney in recent years, recording 150mm of rain over the period, with 93 mm falling on Sunday 5th alone, and wind speeds reaching as high as 96 km/h. The storm resulted in AWS customers losing services for up to six hours, between 11.30pm and 4.30am (PST) on June 4/5. The company claims over 80% of the impacted customer instances and volumes were back online and operational by 1am, though a latent bug in the instance management software led to a slower than expected recovery for some of the services.

While adverse weather conditions cannot be avoided, the outage is unlikely to ease concerns over public cloud propositions. Although the concept of cloud may now be considered mainstream, there are still numerous decision makers who are hesitant over placing mission critical workloads in such an environment, as it has been considered as handing control of a company’s assets to another organization. Such outages will not bolster confidence in those who are already pessimistic.

“Normally, when utility power fails, electrical load is maintained by multiple layers of power redundancy,” the statement said. “Every instance is served by two independent power delivery line-ups, each providing access to utility power, uninterruptable power supplies (UPSs), and back-up power from generators. If either of these independent power line-ups provides power, the instance will maintain availability. During this weekend’s event, the instances that lost power lost access to both their primary and secondary power as several of our power delivery line-ups failed to transfer load to their generators.”

In efforts to avoid similar episodes in the future, the team have stated additional breakers will be added to assure that we more quickly break connections to degraded utility power to allow generators to activate before uninterruptable power supplies systems are depleted. The team have also prioritized reviewing and redesigning the power configuration process in their facilities to prevent similar power sags from affecting performance in the future.

“We are never satisfied with operational performance that is anything less than perfect, and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services,” the company said.

Cisco, HPE, hybrid cloud, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

Microsoft, HPE and Cisco take top-spot for infrastructure vendors

male and female during the run of the marathon raceMicrosoft, HPE and Cisco have been named as three of the leading names in the cloud industry by Synergy Research as the firm wraps up the winners and losers for the first quarter.

While the cloud infrastructure market has been growing consistently at an average rate of 20% year-on-year, 2016 Q1 was estimated at 13%, though this was to be expected following peak sales during the latter stages of 2015. Microsoft led the way for cloud infrastructure software, whereas HPE led the private cloud hardware market segment, and Cisco led the public cloud hardware segment.

“With spend on cloud services growing by over 50% per year and spend on SaaS growing by over 30%, there is little surprise that cloud operator capex continues to drive strong growth in public cloud infrastructure,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s Chief Analyst. “But on the enterprise data centre side too we continue to see a big swing towards spend on private cloud infrastructure as companies seek to benefit from more flexible and agile IT technology. The transition to cloud still has a long way to go.”

For the last eight quarters total spend on data centre infrastructure has been running at an average of $29 billion, with HPE controlling the largest share of cloud infrastructure hardware and software over the course of 2015. Cloud deployments or shipments of systems that are cloud enabled now account for well over half of the total data centre infrastructure market.

cloud leaders

Consumer IoT, Ericsson, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Wearables

44% of consumers have issues with wearables functionality

Iot isometric flowchart design bannerFindings from Ericsson ConsumerLab claim consumer enthusiasm for wearables technology is still growing but vendors are not meeting price or functionality expectations, reports Telecoms.com.

The research focused on opinions from 5,000 smartphone users from Brazil, China, South Korea, the UK and the US, though it’s worth noting 50% of respondents were current owners of wearables technology, a much higher proportion of the general public. While the statistics demonstrated there is still an appetite for wearable technologies outside of fitness applications, price of entry could be a barrier for entry, as well as customer expectations on functionality generally exceeding what vendors are currently able to offer.

32% of respondents said they would be interested or willing to buy a Panic/SOS button, and 25% said the same for an identity authentication device. Smart Watches were still of interest to the industry as 28% said they would have an interest in purchasing such as a device, but this statistic contradicts recent reports the segment has been declining. Strategy Analytics forecasted a 12% decline in Apple watch sales this year after a strong launch. A third of non-users have stated the cost of keeping digital devices connected is a key reason why they haven’t invested in wearable technology to date.

While the SA report could indicate a slight hiccup in the adoption of wearables, this is also backed up to a degree by the Ericsson report which states 10% of wearable users abandoned the technology. This is mainly due to the capabilities which are on offer. A common cause of dissatisfaction is customers feel tethered to their smartphone, as the wearable device does not have standalone features. This could also be tied into the overall value/price proposition of the devices as could be seen as a product of convenience as opposed to a smartphone replacement.

In terms of the reasoning for abandoning wearables, over half of respondents said the devices did not meet expectations. 21% highlighted limited functionality and uses, 23% stated the fact the device was not standalone or didn’t have inbuilt connectivity was the reason, where as 9% said inaccurate data and information. Despite the concerns over functionality, 83% of respondents said they expect wearables to have some form of standalone connectivity in the near future. Should this be the case, 43% believe wearables will ultimately replace smartphones.

“Although consumers show greatest interest in devices related to safety, we also see openness to wearable technology further away from today’s generation,” said Jasmeet Singh Sethi, Consumer Insight Expert, Ericsson ConsumerLab. “In five years’ time, walking around with an ingestible sensor, which tracks your body temperature and adjusts the thermostat setting automatically once you arrive home, may be a reality.” Other use cases included a smart water purifier, gesture communicator, virtual reality sports attire, emotion sensing tattoos and a wearable camera.

The survey does demonstrate long-term viability for wearable technology, though there would have to be increased functionality before it could be considered mainstream. It would appear standalone connectivity would be the bare minimum required, as the currently offering seemingly does not offer the value to customers should they have to continue to carry a smartphone as well as the wearable device.

Data migration, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

82% of C-suite say public cloud is the way forward

Silhouette Businessman Holding PuzzleResearch from HyTrust claims 82% of C-suite execs are to increase the number of workloads their organization hosts on public cloud, reports Telecoms.com.

The transition to a cloud-based mentality and business model has given rise to arguably one of the most influential brands in the world; AWS. That is not to say Amazon as a brand wasn’t influential before the rise of the cloud; more the concept of the cloud made Amazon a major player in the Enterprise IT world.

In April, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky delivered the quarterly earnings call which outlined the team’s belief the AWS business unit would break through the $10 billion barrier. While this number does only represent roughly 10% of the company’s annual revenues, it demonstrates the progress of the cloud industry on the whole.

But the cloud is still seen as a proposition which is mainly utilized by the technologically advanced organizations, so what’s holding it back? The first answer for most would be security, but this might not be the case.

A recent survey from HyTrust highlighted while there may still be concerns for decision makers in trusting the cloud, this is certainly not holding these organizations back from investing. 42% of C-suite executives (CEO, CFO, CIO etc.) say critical server workloads have already been virtualized in their environments; for IT systems administrators and engineers, that number is 65%.

Data and security breaches are still top of the list of concerns when considering such a move, but the survey also highlighted 74% of respondents are planning to move (new or additional) workloads to a public cloud in 2016. This statistic is also weighted more towards the boardroom, as executives would appear to be more bullish in their cloud ambitions than other levels within the business. 82% of C-suite executives who were surveyed believe they will migrate additional workloads to the public cloud in 2016, compared to 66% at director level and 73% at administrator or engineer level.

For most, the C-suite would generally be perceived as the more risk adverse individuals within the business, having been exposed to the stakeholders and media alike when something does go wrong, however the statistics may demonstrate a more general acceptance of cloud computing throughout the business. Security has always been a concern of organizations since the beginning of the cloud revolution, though it would appear decision makers are now okay with accepting 100% secure is impossible and the new objectives should be to remain as secure as possible, consistently.

In terms of the top players within the industry, there are few surprises as to what brand decision makers are leaning towards during 2016. The only difference from many previous reports is the inclusion of VMware vCloud Air, which made an appearance in second accounting for 24% of the respondents, pushing Google Cloud out of the top three. Microsoft Azure was top of the list representing 32% of the vote, whereas the widely recognized market leader AWS sits in third, bringing in 22%.

AWS, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Service Outage

Aussies lose AWS for six hours

amazon awsAWS’ Australian customers suffered an outage over the course of the weekend for approximately six hours due to a power outage which coincided with adverse weather conditions.

The cause of the outage has not been officially confirmed, though did occur at the same time as a storm system that ran from Brisbane to the NSW South Coast which caused widespread flooding, was limited to the Sydney data centre roughly between 11.30pm 4.30am (PST) on June 4.

On the company’s status page it stated, “We are investigating increased connectivity issues for EC2 instances in the AP-SOUTHEAST-2-Region,” at 10.47pm as well as, “We can confirm that instances have experienced a power event with a single availability zone AP-SOUTHEAST-2-Region. Error rates for the EC2 APIs have improved and launches of new EC2 APIs instances are succeeding within the other Availability Zones in the Region,” at 11.49pm PST. Full connectivity was not reported until 4.43am PST.

Although the company has not since commented on the episode, the status page on the website currently states all services are up and running. The outage impacted a number of core and value add services including EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, ElastiCache, Redshift, Relational Database Service, Route 53 Private DNS, CloudFormation, CloudHSM, Database Migration Service, Elastic Beanstalk and Storage Gateway.

While there have been a number of outages in recent months, AWS has seemingly faired pretty well avoiding headlines for the most part. Google appeared to be taking the route of damage control in April following an 18 minute outage, while Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took to twitter last month to apologize for his company’s 12 hour outage and Apple customers lost numerous iCloud services for seven hours earlier this month.

AWS Outage

Apple, Icloud, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Apple experiences outage in North America

Apple 1Apple has restored services to customers around the world after many of its cloud-based offerings and other services faced outages of up to seven hours.

The outages, which were reported from users mainly in North America, are yet to be explained by the company but impacted numerous products including the App Store, iCloud, Apple TV, photos and iMovies as well as a host of others.

The issues would have appeared to have begun at around 9pm (GMT) June 2, and all services were resumed by 4:55am (GMT). Apple spokespersons have been directing journalists to the company’s support page where it posted insightful comments such as “Users experienced a problem with the service above” and “Users may have experienced slower than usual performance when using iCloud Drive, Backup, iCloud Notes, iWork for iCloud and Photos. Users may have experienced slowness with multiple services at iCloud.com”.

The services aspect of the Apple business has been reporting healthy numbers in recent months, seemingly offsetting the drop in iPhone sales. During its Q2 earnings call the company ended its long run of constant year-over-year revenue growth, as it reported a decline for the first time in 13 years, according to Telecoms.com. iPhone shipments were down 16% and Mac sales also went down from $5.61 billion to $5.1 billion, however its services business increased by 20% to almost $6 billion.

Apple Twitter