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Software giant Oracle has reportedly hired former SAP exec Shawn Price in another push towards cloud computing, days after hiring Google App Engine founder Peter Magnusson.

Price was fired by SAP five months after he took on the role of global cloud president, having taken over from Robert Calderoni in January. As CloudTech reported at the time, the surprising move was taken as part of a wider effort to shift the business towards cloud computing.

According to Re/code, Price’s new job title will be senior VP for product strategy and marketing, reporting to CEO Mark Hurd.

Unlike Magnusson, whose LinkedIn profile confirmed he was at Oracle with the vague job description of ‘public cloud’, Price’s LinkedIn offers no clues. This may not be unexpected however, as it still lists him as an employee of SAP.

Oracle’s aggressive move towards cloud services was exemplified by Larry Ellison’s keynote speech at this year’s OpenWorld, where he told delegates: “Our cloud is bigger than people think, and it’s going to get a lot bigger.”

It’s been a particularly busy time for Oracle’s HR department of late, with a litany of new hires as well as the boardroom shuffle which saw founder Ellison move to chief technical officer, with Safra Catz and Mark Hurd taking over as CEOs.

During a recent analyst call, Ellison joked: “You’re going to have to wait a little while longer before you get me off the call”, indicating that while Ellison was no longer the boss on the face of it, he’d still be doing his fair share of backseat driving.

SAP and Oracle have plenty in common. Both companies are moving their business models to cloud from on-premise software sales, both companies have used the co-CEO model, and now the former SAP cloud chief is taking an executive role at Oracle.

Oracle’s last set of financial results saw new software license revenues down 2%, total revenues up 3%, and net income pretty much standing still at $2.184bn.

For all but the most curmudgeonly luddites among us, it’s become totally clear: “The cloud” is here to stay. The power and ubiquity of distributed compute and storage is all around us – at home, at work, and in our social lives.
Recent advances in virtualization have brought us compute efficiency, storage consolidation, and system redundancy that were nearly unimaginable just 10 years ago. As a former IT guy, those benefits were always the promise of virtualization, but they seemed like a futuristic fantasy.
A decade ago, my corporate file store consisted of primary storage with three disk shelves of expensive, fast spinning disks to store backed-up data for 30 days. Then I had a filer to track what data was “fresh” and what was “stale.” Stale data was moved to secondary storage, which consisted of many more shelves of much slower disks. Then, after 90 days, all data was copied via a (totally awesome and very expensive) tape robot that whipped and whizzed tapes around inside a big ol’ refrigerator-sized enclosure in my datacenter.

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Performance is the intersection of power, agility, control, and choice. If you value performance, and more specifically consistent performance, you need to look beyond simple virtualized compute. Many factors need to be considered to create a truly performant environment.
In their General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate at SoftLayer, and Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, to discuss how to take advantage of a multitude of compute options and platform features to make cloud the cornerstone of your online presence.

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Most IT administrators are painfully aware that Windows Server 2003 will reach the end of extended support in July 2015. This is a big deal because Windows Server 2003 has been a monster success since it was released 11 years ago. From 2003 to 2010 this platform was the workhorse for applications deployed at both small businesses and large enterprises. And, even though Microsoft released a major update with Windows 2008, late in 2008, most enterprises stuck with Windows 2003 until Windows Server 2008 R2 launched on October 22, 2009.

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#SSL #webperf #infosec 

Now your services can take advantage of hardware acceleration even when they're deployed on virtual machines

Way back in the day, when SSL offloading was young and relatively new, there were a variety of hardware, software and even architecture that arose to defeat the security penalty imposed by the requisite cryptographic functionality.

Most commonly, we'd slap a PCI-card into a server, muck with the web server configuration (to load some shared objects) and voila! Instant performance boost via hardware acceleration. Later, an architectural approach that leveraged a network-based offload capability was introduced. This meant configuring an SSL offload appliance in a side (or one) arm configuration (common for caches and even load balancers back then) in which SSL traffic was routed to the offload appliance and decrypted before being sent on to the web or app server. You added some latency in the hairpin (or trombone, if you prefer) but that was always more than offset by the improvement of not letting the web server try to decrypt that data in the first place.

We've come a long way since then and most often these days you'll find an application delivery controller (ADC) or an app proxy serving duty as cryptographic master of the application. Most ADCs are still far more efficient at handling SSL/TLS traffic because they've benefitted from Moore's Law in two places: the core system and the SSL acceleration hardware (which takes advantage of CPUs, too, in addition to custom hardware).

Now comes the advent of the next generation of application delivery architectures which, necessarily, rely on a fabric-based approach and incorporate virtual appliances as well as traditional hardware. Services deployed on the hardware of course benefit from the availability of specialized SSL acceleration but the virtual appliances? Not so much.

We (as in the corporate We) didn't like that much at all, especially given trends toward greater key lengths and the forthcoming HTTP 2.0 specification which, yes, requires SSL/TLS. That means a lot more apps are going to need SSL – but they aren't going to want the associated performance penalty that comes with it running on software. They may not be as important, but they aren't expendable. That's true whether the web server natively handles SSL or you move it off to a virtual ADC within the services fabric. All apps are important, of course, but we know that some are more important than others and thus are afforded the benefits of services deployed on faster performing hardware while others are relegated to virtual machines.

We take our commitment with Synthesis to leave no application behind seriously and thus have introduced the industry's first hybrid SSL offload capability.

Hybrid SSL Offload 

Hybrid SSL Offload was made available with the release of BIG-IP 11.6 and enables virtual editions of BIG-IP as well as less capable and legacy BIG-IP appliances and devices to harness the power of hardware to improve app performance through cryptographic acceleration. This has the added benefit of freeing up resources on virtual appliances to improve the overall performance and capacity of app services deployed on that virtual edition.

In a nutshell, user requests are sent to the appropriate virtual ADC instance, which hosts all app services for an app except SSL. SSL is offloaded to a designated service running on a hardware platform that can take advantage of its targeted hardware acceleration.

Using hybrid SSL offload within the Synthesis service fabric allows organizations to:

•Achieve the maximum SSL performance of a virtual license  

•Free up Virtual Edition CPU utilization for other application services

All together this means better app performance and capacity for services deployed on virtual editions.

All applications need services and deserve optimal performance, even those that might otherwise by designated as "red shirt" apps by IT. F5 Synthesis continues to leave no application behind by ensuring every application has access to the services it needs, even when it means collaborating across device types.

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Monetization. Monetize. Great sounding words. Is it just pricing or something more? Merriam-Webster defines monetize as “to coin into legal tender,” or “to purchase debt and thereby free for other uses moneys that would have been devoted to debt service,” or “to utilize (something of value) as a source of Brian James

The post Monetization – As interesting as it sounds? appeared first on Recurring Revenue Blog | Aria Systems.

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Big news last week was about the JPMC data breach that could potentially impact millions of customers. This news brought about the return of “banks that are too big to fail” discussions on a much smaller scale then we saw during the financial crisis a few years back. The fact is, we live in a […]

The post Too Big To Scale – Data Visualizations at Web Scale written by Jim Hirschauer appeared first on Application Performance Monitoring Blog from AppDynamics.

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Editor’s note: This post by Invincea CEO Anup Ghosh first appeared at LinkedIn. We knew this would be of interest to you and posted it here with the author’s permission.-bg I’ll say it up front, your security program does not work because it is based on three common myths we hold as unquestionable truths in […]

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Applications are as integral to F5 technologies as they are to your business.

An old adage holds that an individual can be judged by the company he keeps. If that holds true for organizations, then F5 would do well to be judged by the vast array of individual contributors, partners, and customers in its ecosystem. From its long history of partnering with companies like Microsoft, IBM, HP, Dell, VMware, Oracle, and SAP to its astounding community of over 160, 000 engineers, administrators and developers speaks volumes about its commitment to and ability to develop joint and custom solutions.

F5 is committed to delivering applications no matter where they might reside or what architecture they might be using. Because of its full proxy architecture, F5’s ADC platform is able to intercept, inspect and interact with applications at every layer of the network. That means tuning TCP stacks for mobile apps, protecting web applications from malicious code whether they’re talking JSON or XML, and optimizing delivery via HTTP (or HTTP 2.0 or SPDY) by understanding the myriad types of content that make up a web application: CSS, images, JavaScript and HTML.

But being application-driven goes beyond delivery optimization and must cover the broad spectrum of technologies needed not only to deliver an app to a consumer or employee, but manage its availability, scale and security.

Every application requires a supporting cast of services to meet a specific set of business and user expectations, such as logging, monitoring and failover. Over the 18 years in which F5 has been delivering applications it has developed technologies specifically geared to making sure these supporting services are driven by applications, imbuing each of them with the application awareness and intelligence necessary to efficiently scale, secure and keep them available.

With the increasing adoption of hybrid cloud architectures and the need to operationally scale the data center, it is important to consider the depth and breadth to which ADC automation and orchestration support an application focus. Whether looking at APIs or management capabilities, an ADC should provide the means by which the services applications need can be holistically provisioned and managed from the perspective of the application, not the individual services. Technology that is application-driven, enabling app owners and administrators the ability to programmatically define provisioning and management of all the application services needed to deliver the application is critical moving forward to ensure success. F5 iApps and F5 BIG-IQ Cloud do just that, enabling app owners and operations to rapidly provision services that improve the security, availability and performance of the applications that are the future of the business.

That programmability is important, especially as it relates to applications according to our recent survey (results forthcoming) in which a plurality of respondents indicated application templates are "somewhat or very important" to the provisioning of their applications along with other forms of programmability associated with software-defined architectures including cloud computing.

Applications increasingly represent opportunity, whether it's to improve productivity or increase profit. Capabilities that improve the success rate of those applications are imperative and require a deeper understanding of an application and its unique delivery needs than a protocol and a port.

F5 not only partners with application providers, it encapsulates the expertise and knowledge of how best to deliver those applications in its technologies and offers that same capability to each and every organization to tailor the delivery of their applications to meet and exceed security, reliability and performance goals. 

Because applications aren't just a set of protocols and ports, they're opportunities. And how you respond to opportunity is as important as opening the door in the first place.

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#SDAS #HTTP #webperf #SSL De facto standards can be as difficult to transition off of as official ones

If you haven't heard about HTTP 2.0 it's time to start paying attention. It is anticipated that in November the latest version of the specification will become "the standard" for applications.

It includes enhancements designed to improve the security and performance of web applications, which have become critical strategic components to just about every organization on the planet. Go ahead, name an organization that doesn't rely on at least one web-based application to conduct business today.

Exactly.

Performance and security being imperatives along with the presence of applications means that HTTP 2.0 should be a welcome addition to the family of Internet protocols. But it will likely be met with some amount of trepidation by those tasked with supporting it on the data center side of applications because one of the downsides of updating standard protocols after so many years (HTTP 1.1 was ratified in RFC 2616 in 1999) is that they're rarely compatible. That's because in technology years, that 15 years is more like 75 years.

Consider for a moment IPv6, which was officially standardized way back in 1995 (RFC1883).

Yes, I said 1995. Before the great dot bomb. Before Web 2.0. Before mobile apps.

And how's that been going for us? Well, as of May 2014 more than 96% of all Internet traffic was still carried via IPv4. Go ahead, read that again because you're right – a 4% adoption rate over nearly 20 years is somewhat hard to swallow, isn't it?

But, you might think, IP affects everything. We're only talking about apps, here. And web apps, at that.

Well, let's consider that for a moment. According to our data, 65% of all apps are delivered via HTTP right now. in other words, HTTP is pretty darned important to app delivery and it'd be pretty hard to convince someone to upgrade all the things that need upgrading in order to support HTTP 2.0 (particularly with its requirement for encryption via SSL or TLS).

And yet major browsers (and consumer demand for speed, more speed and even MOAR SPEED) are already pushing adoption by broadly supporting SPDY (the protocol upon which HTTP 2.0 is based and which is the primary cause behind compatibility headaches). According to this site, which tracks SPDY adoption across browsers, all major browsers already have at least partial (if not full) support for SPDY.

They're ready to go. The app side? Not so much.

That's where an app gateway comes into play.

App Gateway: Bridging the Old and the New 

Like IPv6, the answer to the conundrum of transitioning from one protocol to another is a gateway. In the case of HTTP, it's an app gateway because HTTP is an app layer protocol.

In the latest release of the ADC platform on which F5 Synthesis High Performance Services Fabric is built we've included both SPDY 1.3 and HTTP 2.0 support, enabling a gateway architectural approach to supporting the latest (soon to be) standard and the existing, more prominent one. This architectural feat is accomplished by way of BIG-IP's full proxy architecture, which lets our ADC speak one version a protocol on the outside (the client) and another on the inside (to the app).

But what about all that security stuff you might ask. The requirement for SSL and TLS is as disruptive as the changes to the core protocol, after all.

You're right, it is, but again – the nature of being a full proxy means we can support SSL or TSL on the outside and plain old HTTP on the inside, sans encryption. While some organizations require end-to-end encryption of all traffic, those that don't will benefit from the ability to leverage client-side (outside) encryption without doing so on the inside (server-side) where lots of Layer 4-7 services may need visibility into traffic to do their respective jobs.

Using a gateway approach also enables a mix of HTTP 2.0 and HTTP 1.x on the inside (server side). That means organizations can take a transitory approach to adoption of the latest app protocol, moving if and when it seems most prudent based on upgrade and refresh cycles, not standards body meeting schedules.

The performance and security (and let's not forget business) benefits to moving to HTTP 2.0 with its SSL/TLS requirements and improvements in core transport of data between client and server are worth exploring. But it's understandable that a protocol so entrenched like HTTP 1.x is not easily ripped out and replaced with something new. Taking a gateway approach to adoption enables organizations to support the old while exploring the new and making sure that consumers and employees using the latest and greatest browsers will be able to enjoy improved performance and productivity.

Additional Resources:

• F5 Synthesis 
• Demo of F5 HTTP 2.0 Gateway with Sr. Product Manager Dawn Parzych @ Velocity 2014  

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