The worlds of cloud, mobile, social and cyber will continue expanding, permuting and recombining. Their individual effect on society and commerce will become moot as these technological capabilities merge to deliver products and services straight out of Star Trek!
Traditional system integrators will finally realize that their current product and labor based business model is about to go the way of the dinosaurs. Customers will act on market shifts that makes the purchase and resale of hardware and software no longer viable opting instead for the integration of cloud-based services. They will insist on the use of more agile commodity IT services in the development of their custom systems of record.

read more

Citrix announced on Monday that is has completed its acquisition of Sanbolic, an innovator and leader in workload-oriented storage virtualization technologies. Sanbolic technology enables customers to software-define storage to optimize the delivery of application-specific workloads, from any media type – SSD, Flash and hard drives in NAS, SAN, server-side and cloud deployments – improving storage load balancing, application availability and delivering the highest-performance end-user experience. The acquisition of this robust set of workload-oriented infrastructure technologies, combined with its market-leading XenDesktop, XenApp and XenMobile products, enables Citrix to develop a range of differentiated solutions. These solutions will dramatically improve the economics and reduce the complexity of Windows application delivery and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments.

read more

Innodisk has announced it received the 2015 Taiwan Excellence Award for its ServerDOM flash product, a compact SSD designed to fit directly onto the SATA connector of an enterprise 1U rackmount system or blade servers. With 1,155 products nominated from 448 companies this year, the ServerDOM offering Innodisk’s Pin 7 power technology was judged on five criteria by the Ministry of Economic Affairs to win this prestigious award.

read more

On the server side we always use Java and have no plans to switch to any other technology. After spending many years developing the front end with Adobe Flex framework and ActionScript programming language we got spoiled by this super-productive environment. After the mankind led by Apple killed Flash Player, we started to look for an alternative.

Back in 2005 we’ve abandoned JavaScript, but decided to give it another chance. Things were a little better this time. JavaScript has better IDEs and browser-based tools for developers. The number of JavaScript frameworks and libraries went down from two hundred to a couple of dozens, which is a good thing.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today Sematext Group, Inc., a Brooklyn-based Performance Monitoring and Log Management solution provider, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s DevOps Summit 2015 New York, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Sematext is a globally distributed organization that builds innovative Cloud and On Premise solutions for performance monitoring, alerting and anomaly detection (SPM), log management and analytics (Logsene), search analytics (SSA), and search enhancement. We also provide exceptional Search and Big Data consulting services and offer 24/7 production support for Solr and Elasticsearch to clients worldwide.

read more

Is there a point where business can safely assume they have hit the limit of what traditional IT organizations have to offer? In an Internet and data driven world, does IT simply lack the agility and depth needed to fulfill business requirements and need for innovation?
Parts of cloud computing have chimed a loud and painful wake up call for many IT managers. Even at the most simple level, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), it might be fair to say this is simply a utility to accelerate data center imagedecommissioning, and the process of physically decoupling underlying compute, storage, and network infrastructure from the business.

read more

There has been a lot of discussion recently in the DevOps space over whether there is a unique form of DevOps for large enterprises or is it just vendors looking to sell services and tools.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Chris Riley, a technologist, discussed whether Enterprise DevOps is a unique species or not. What makes DevOps adoption in the enterprise unique or what doesn’t? Unique or not, what does this mean for adopting DevOps in enterprise size organizations? He also explored different vendor approaches and success/failure examples with the idea of preparing you to help instill DevOps in your business

read more

SYS-CON Media announced today the IBM, which offers the world’s deepest portfolio of technologies and expertise that are transforming the future of work, has launched ad campaigns on SYS-CON’s numerous online magazines such as Cloud Computing Journal, DevOps Journal, Virtualization Journal, and IoT Journal.
IBM’s campaigns focus on application testing, improving application development processes, common challenges in testing composite applications, continuous testing as part of the DevOps lifecycle, and deploying higher quality software faster through continuous integration testing.

read more

Software-driven innovation is becoming a primary approach to how businesses create and deliver new value to customers. A survey of 400 business and IT executives by the IBM Institute for Business Value showed businesses that are more effective at software delivery are also more profitable than their peers nearly 70 percent of the time (1). DevOps provides a way for businesses to remain competitive, applying lean and agile principles to software development to speed the delivery of software that meets new market requirements.
IBM’s new DevOps Innovation Services help address the challenge of scaling DevOps, enabling enterprises to transform their software delivery lifecycle. The hybrid cloud services combine IBM’s industry expertise from hundreds of organizational change and application development projects with the industry’s leading application development portfolio, including Bluemix, IBM’s open cloud platform-as-a-service. They also apply the flexibility of IBM’s enterprise-grade, hybrid cloud portfolio, which was recently ranked by Synergy Research Group as the leading hybrid and private cloud for the enterprise (2). These services are based upon SoftLayer, IBM’s premier cloud infrastructure platform.

read more

(c)iStock.com/LindaJoHeilman

Over the weekend, Verizon’s cloud service, Verizon Cloud, was offline as it looked to add ‘seamless upgrade functionality as well as other customer-facing updates.’

The maintenance period was put in to improve the service and to ensure further updates went ahead without any hitches to customers. The telco giant warned the fixes could take up to 48 hours, but was completed after 40, with Verizon taking the bizarre step of issuing a press release to announce the work had been done.

“The seamless upgrade functionality allows Verizon to conduct major system upgrades without interrupting service or limiting infrastructure capacity,” the release states. “Traditionally, updates have been made via rolling maintenance and other methods.

“Many cloud vendors require customers to set up virtual machines in multiple zones or upgrade domains, which can increase the cost and complexity. Additionally, those customers must reboot their virtual machines after maintenance has occurred.

“Verizon eliminates these requirements, since virtually all maintenance and upgrades to Verizon Cloud will now happen in the background with no impact to customers,” it adds.

Verizon customer Kenn White tweeted his way through the outage, some with a rather scathing undertone:

Know which clouds are up & have status pages? AWS GCP Azure Fatcow Know who’s been down worldwide 13 hrs, no updates? pic.twitter.com/6ibM1PNPcU

— Kenn White (@kennwhite) January 10, 2015

Until all was finally resolved:

Yay. (logged in as full admin, btw) pic.twitter.com/0eTMRxkmyQ

— Kenn White (@kennwhite) January 11, 2015

Verizon, like various other telecoms providers, has made a concerted push towards cloud services in recent years, having bought Terremark in 2011 for $1.4bn. The company launched its software store Verizon Cloud Marketplace back in November.

While one particular customer was less than happy, two days of pain in a planned outage seems like a far better idea than aiming for 100% uptime before the inevitable happens, as happened with Mimecast. So long as Verizon keeps up its end of the bargain, that is.