No discussion of the Red Hat Summit 2014 would be complete without some discussion of Apache Hadoop. The happy elephant has now been pushing data for close to a decade, its distributed file system (HDFS) setting the tone for support of modern-day, highly distributed and very large databases in the cloud.

So I was pleased to have Robert Hodges, CEO of Hadoop-focused Continuent Tungsten, answer a few questions about his company’s world.

Roger: What’s the scope of the challenge you face in addressing big Hadoop deployments?

Robert: Hadoop is really very powerful as the way to concentrate and analyze information, so the key issue is how the information from existing transactional data stores gets added to Hadoop without implying additional load, application changes, or repetitive dump processes.

From our existing customer deployments, we know that the biggest challenge is getting the information into Hadoop as quickly and timely as possible from multiple different hosts simultaneously. Our customers often have many more transactional hosts running MySQL than they have Hadoop hosts, just because the scale-out and sharding required to support their transactional needs is so high.

Roger: What are the key pain points?

Robert: The key pain points are therefore the extraction of data from the transactional stores without implying additional load on these servers which are running their live customer facing website, while simultaneously loading large quantities of data that needs to be merged and analysed on the Hadoop side.

The replication solution based on Tungsten Replicator provides this very simply by placing a very low-level of load required for extraction of data, while continually streaming the changes over into Hadoop. Because this can be done on a server or cluster basis, it is easy to scale up the replication of data into Hadoop by adding more streams of replication data.

Roger: How critical is the real-time aspect of modern IT? How quickly is it growing?

Robert: It’s growing very quickly, and in some cases quicker than some company IT departments and the technology they support are able to cope. Replication has for a long time been the solution for this scale-out process, but the flows of this replication data are changing.

One of the key drivers behind the adoption of Hadoop and Cassandra and similar databases is the ability to parallel process the data to get numbers in real-time. You can see this in a wide range of different markets, from banking, through to social networking and online stores.

As we get access to more information, the services supporting them need to support that an ever faster rate. We all want the lowest rate on my plane ticket purchase, while receiving the absolute best benefits and service, and all those different elements rely on real-time analysis.

Roger: What does IT think of this?

Robert: Of course, this also presents a completely different problem for the IT departments. They must deal with how to get the data into a system so that it can be analyzed quickly. The location for your active transactional dataset is not the same as your analysis tools, and may be based on completely different quantities of raw data.

Transactional databases might be conveniently sharded into 50 or 100 different RDBMS of 100GB each, but analysis needs to process all 10,000GB of data collectively to get meaningful information. That means that the IT infrastructure needs an effective way to combine and transfer this active data.

It’s also clear from recent advancements in querying and processing techniques built on top of Hadoop that Hadoop itself is moving into a more real-time tool. Spark, Storm and other query engines provide very fast query and analysis on very large datasets, taking advantage of the distributed nature of Hadoop, and the increasing RAM and CPU power in evolutions of new hardware. Compatibility with Spark and similar live query mechanisms in Hadoop will form a key part of the next evolution of all Hadoop deployments.

3. How key is the role of Big Data in developing your solutions? How important is the term Big Data to you?

Big Data has been a significant requirement for our customers and their needs for some time, but we have definitely seen a shift recently from the scale-out, sharded nature of the typical RDBMS towards concentrating that information for analysis in Big Data stores. As that movement of data moves into the real-time it will be critical to the tools we develop to help make the transfer and management of data replication as easy as possible for our customers.

To us as the provider of the tools that enable our customers to easily share and transfer data, Big Data is therefore as important to us as it is to our customers. Of course, transactional databases are not going away, and we certainly don’t expect that to change, but Hadoop and other Big Data solutions are being brought to work alongside these active data stores. Continuent will certainly be looking to expand our different solutions and techniques to bridge the gap between RDBMS and Big Data.

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Continuing a series of brief interviews with some of the technology execs at this year’s Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, we turn our attention now to Sandro Mazziotta, Senior Director of Product Management, eNovance.

This company is based in Paris with a North American office in Montreal, is an OpenStack company, and focuses on private and hybrid clouds as well as multi-cloud management.

Roger: How has your business grown in Europe? Who are your key customers? How important will North America now be?

Sandro: We started as a managed services app provider, shifted to becoming an IaaS provider, then moved to becoming a services and solutions provider focussing on OpenStack and open source in general.

We started by doing business in France and then in EMEA. Cloudwatt is a major customer for us, for example, and we continue to focus on EMEA and while expanding to the North American market.

There is a clear trend in adoption of OpenStack happening world wide. We are seeing a lot of traction for large-scale OpenStack deployments. North America remains the birth place of cloud computing, and will continue to be a high-growth market as new technologies like OpenStack continue to mature.

Roger: How critical is the real-time aspect of modern IT? How quickly is it growing?

With the emergence of mobile applications, companies are generating more and more information to store and retrieve in the cloud. This creates a fast-moving and growing market opportunity for more modernized IT infrastructures based on OpenStack. The challenge however is for mobile applications to access the right data in real time.

Roger: How key is the role of Big Data in developing your solutions? How important is the term Big Data to you?

We focus on large scale implementation of OpenStack. For Big Data storage, OpenStack is the only open-source cloud management stack to deploy Big Data applications in the cloud – it’s the preferred way to store data. This is particularly important for us with our focus on large-scale deployments.

Clearly, I just scratched the surface here, so expect to follow up with Sandro to glean some more insight from companies like this that are attacking very large challenges within the realms of the cloud, Big Data, and presumably the IoT.

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Next-Gen Cloud. Whatever you call it, there’s a higher calling for cloud computing that requires providers to change their spots and move from a commodity mindset to a premium one. Businesses can no longer maintain the status quo that today’s service providers offer. Yes, the continuity, speed, mobility, data access and connectivity are staples of the cloud and always will be. But cloud providers that plan to not only exist tomorrow – but to lead – know that security must be the top priority for the cloud and are delivering it now.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Kurt Hagerman, Chief Information Security Officer at FireHost, will detail why and how you can have both infrastructure performance and enterprise-grade security – and what tomorrow’s cloud provider will look like.

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The social media expansion has shown just how people are eager to share their experiences with the rest of the world. Cloud technology is the perfect platform to satisfy this need given its great flexibility and readiness. At Cynny, we aim to revolutionize how people share and organize their digital life through a brand new cloud service, starting from infrastructure to the users’ interface.
A revolution that began from inventing and designing our very own infrastructure: we have created the first server network powered solely by ARM CPU. The microservers have “organism-like” features, differentiating them from any of the current technologies. Benefits include low consumption of energy, making Cynny the ecologically friendly alternative for storage as well as cheaper infrastructure, lower running costs, etc.

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This white paper digs deep into the reasons testing mobile apps is fundamentally harder than traditional web or desktop applications. Experts Tina Zhuo and Dennis Schultz from IBM along with Yoram Mizrachi from Perfecto Mobile and John Montgomery from uTest collaborate to explore the complexities of mobile test environments, the value of the mobile device cloud, the unique role crowd sourcing can play, and how teams can leverage automation to help deliver quality apps.

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The upcoming HIT-PH Conference in Metro Manila on May 22-23 focuses on the rapid advance of Information Technology in this sector.
“The Philippine healthcare industry is entering the digital age,” according to the conference organizers, Exist Healthcare IT and Goldcrest Communications. “The use of IT systems in hospitals holds great potential to improve operational efficiencies, promote better clinical outcomes and enhance patient engagement.”
Mobility will be a key topic at this event, covering the use of mobile devices at bedside, barcode technology employed to minimize data-entry errors, and scanning technology to improve record retrieval. Other topics include the use of portals to engage patients online, and the use of cloud computing to scale health IT infrastructures.
In the ongoing research we do at the Tau institute for Global ICT Studies, the Philippines ranks as an emerging regional leader.
Continued improvements in the area of bandwidth are needed, something that’s recently been highlighted by problems with some of the submarine cables serving the country. In contrast, a local investment of US$65 million in a new cable – the “SJC” – addresses this ongoing issue.
The healthcare sector will no doubt benefit as things improve, although our research does show the country as presenting a significant challenge to its government and industry to achieve the improvement it needs. The HIT-PH Conference should provide a unique opportunity for these issues to be addressed and discussed.

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Enterprises are moving more and more applications to the cloud. Gartner predicts that the bulk of new IT spending by 2016 will be for cloud computing platforms and applications and that nearly half of large enterprises will have cloud deployments by the end of 2017.1
The far-reaching impact of cloud computing is summarized in a recent McKinsey report on disruptive technologies: “Cloud technology has the potential to improve productivity across $3 trillion in global enterprise IT spending, as well as enabling the creation of new online products and services for billions of consumers and millions of businesses alike.”2
For many organizations, moving applications that can tolerate brief periods of downtime to the cloud is a straightforward decision with clear benefits. However, concerns about how to provide high availability and disaster protection in the cloud may make this decision more difficult for business-critical applications such as SQL, SAP, and Exchange. Understanding the facts about HA and DR in the cloud can help you make informed decisions about moving applications to the cloud, while ensuring the important business operations that depend on them are protected from downtime and data loss.

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Web conferencing in a public cloud has the same risks as any other cloud service. If you have ever had concerns over the types of data being shared in your employees’ web conferences, such as IP, financials or customer data, then it’s time to look at web conferencing in a private cloud.
In her session at 14th Cloud Expo, Courtney Behrens, Senior Marketing Manager at Brother International, will discuss how issues that had previously been out of your control, like performance, advanced administration and compliance, can now be put back behind your firewall.

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In my previous blog I contrasted the latest net neutrality developments in the EU with the situation in the U.S. Neither decision will settle the argument and the two camps will continue to debate the topic for the foreseeable future. On both sides of the argument and the ocean, believers state with conviction that their way is the right way, leading to a healthier Internet industry and benefits for all.
One camp takes the view that Internet openness and neutrality means that telecom service providers should not be restricted from managing Internet traffic and, if they feel it is appropriate, to charge more to third-party ISPs and content providers for premium service. Only in this way, it is argued, will bit-carriers be able to earn the revenues they need to invest in network growth and quality improvements that will benefit us all.

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In my latest post at The Virtualization Practice I discuss the impacts of the price wars and how I think it effects the long term play of both IaaS and PaaS.
Public cloud IaaS providers are competing heavily on price. Watching Google, AWS, and Microsoft play the falling prices game is like watching a ping-pong match. It is just a matter of time before IBM’s SoftLayer matches the prices as well. In my latest post at The Virtualization Practice I discuss the impacts of the price wars and how I think it effects the long term play of both IaaS and PaaS.

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