Want to gain an edge in your technical career? Industry insiders suggest that over 70% of businesses now run at least two virtualization platforms in their IT environment. That’s why IT pros who understand multiple platforms are invaluable to their companies and clients. With all the talk about the wonderful technologies in the public cloud space, what about all the great work you are doing in your private cloud? The modern datacenter is already virtualizing, and likely virtualizing using VMware vSphere, vCenter, and so on.
In his Lunchtime Focus Keynote at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Matt Hester, Senior Information Technology Professional Evangelist for Microsoft, will help you get familiar with all that Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 can do; and in terms that you’ll understand.
Big Data and Analytics as Part of the Political Process
The Democratic National Committee leveraged big data analytics to better understand and predict voter behavior and alliances in the 2012 U.S. national elections.
To learn more about how the DNC pulled vast amounts of data together to predict and understand voter preferences and positions on the issues, join Chris Wegrzyn, Director of Data Architecture at the DNC, based in Washington, DC.
The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Cloud Expo | Big Data Is a Big Deal: Running Hadoop in the Cloud
Get a solid understanding of the underpinnings and principles of Hadoop, perhaps the most sought after high-paying skill for a developer today.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Bruno Terkaly, an evangelist for Microsoft, will begin by illustrating how you build your own single node cluster of Hadoop on the Linux virtual machine (CentOS) for free so you can start learning immediately. It will begin with a raw Linux VM and all the needed components will be downloaded and installed. You can be up and running quickly in the cloud within 30 minutes. This session will contain code and will show no more than a few slides. We will learn about writing the low-level map/reduce code in Java, which is really the low-level assembly language of Hadoop code. From there we will introduce more efficient approaches to analyzing big data with Hadoop, running high level queries and analyzing crime information from San Francisco as the example.
Cloud Expo Platinum Plus Sponsor HGST and Gold Sponsor Verizon Team Up
As 13th Cloud Expo / Cloud Expo Silicon Valley draws near, two of its major sponsors are working together in a high-profile way. Hitachi GST (HGST), a Western Digital company, and Verizon Enterprise Solutions today announced that HGST is providing solid-state storage solutions for Verizon’s recently introduced Verizon Cloud. HGST’s s800 Series Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) enterprise-class solid-state drives (SSDs) are being deployed in Verizon’s cloud servers, providing large enterprises, mid-size companies and small businesses with high-performing, highly reliable solid-state storage on a scalable platform.
Why SoftLayer believes in a “really good” future with IBM #AppsWorld
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider SoftLayer has been making all the right noises since its acquisition by IBM back in July.
Earlier this month CloudTech reported on the health of the IBM-SoftLayer relationship, with many IBM divisions reputed to be actively collaborating with the SoftLayer team to migrate existing apps and develop new ones.
And for Jonathan Wisler, EMEA general manager, speaking at Apps World Europe earlier today, things couldn’t be any smoother.
“It’s been really good,” Wisler tells CloudTech. “In the short term, it’s opened up a lot of opportunities with customers, and the customers are asking for cloud, which is a great place to be.
“And then also IBM is deploying some of their software as a solution on their stack, which is another validation of their belief in the platform,” he adds.
It’s a straightforward enough value proposition; SoftLayer, as a “purely …
Cloud Expo: How to Accelerate the Need for Cloud-Based Applications
According to IDC Research, cloud-based applications (apps) consumed via software-as-a-service (SaaS) will grow nearly five times faster than traditional on-premise application development. SaaS-based apps address a company’s desire to increase business capabilities without the need for additional capital expenditure and/or IT resources. These next-generation apps must be configurable without the need for IT and empower the business to easily adapt to market demand, be accessible through multiple touch points (Web, Mobile, Social), and support bi-directional end-user interaction with existing enterprise systems.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Jesse Shiah, CEO & Co-Founder of AgilePoint, will highlight how AgilePoint enables customers to modernize their IT infrastructure with cloud-based applications and reap the benefits of SaaS. Our business-oriented development platform provides a collaborative environment where the business and IT can create these applications with minimal code. Come and join us to see how companies are doing more with less.
Moving Targets: Developing Cloud Apps on Rapidly Evolving Platforms
Enterprise software developers used to count on a level of stability and control over their environment that no longer exists when migrating to cloud platforms. As much hand-wringing is spent over how and what can be run in the cloud at all, little thought is given to the long-run costs of developing and optimizing applications to run in constantly-evolving cloud platforms.
Twitter Is Not a SaaS Monitoring Solution
A few weeks ago I was trying to update some files I have stored on a cloud storage service (that will remain nameless). I had moved my files there a while back as a way to make it easier to access them from my various devices and to avoid losing them during the next inevitable hard drive failure. For the most part I’ve been happy with the service, but on this day, I was unable to access the site.
Not good, as I was rushing to make some changes and send the files to a colleague.
Frustrated by my situation, I asked a co-worker to see if he was also having problems. He was, so we did the next logical thing you would expect. We went to the service provider’s status page to see what they had to say. According to it, the service was healthy and there were no current service or maintenance notices.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Encryption – Getting Peace of Mind in the Cloud
Security remains a high consideration for adoption of Cloud. Protection of data is at the center of a Cloud security strategy. Where the data is stored, how the data is secured, and who has access to the data? Encryption is one of the key technologies to address these concerns, securing data in the cloud, and to provide peace of mind to cloud adopters.
Like any other technology, no single solution fits all scenarios. Should you use full disk encryption, database encryption technologies or an encryption gateway? Is there a need to encrypt backup data? You have to address these and many other questions while planning for an encryption solution. There are many considerations related to transparency, usability, and ease of management. There are also issues related to who owns, manages and has access to encryption keys. On top of that, a solution that works well in an IaaS cloud may not work well in an SaaS environment.
IT Still Controls Most Cloud Usage: Cisco Survey
Cisco, like everybody else in IT, believes that cloud computing is central to the Internet of Things (the belief that everything with an on/off switch will eventually be wired or wirelessly connected and controlled by someone – or some thing – somewhere in the world). This isn’t a difficult concept to understand.
Naturally, all of this plays directly into the products and services that Cisco makes – all those switches, routers, random connectors, intelligent network software and so on – that link devices to systems to people and back again, according to an article on eWEEK.
Cisco estimated in an extensive research report, «The Impact of Cloud on IT Consumption Models,» that connections among people, processes, data and things will surge from 10 billion today to 50 billion by 2020.