Yesterday I thoroughly enjoyed an opportunity to participate in the DorobekINSIDER LIVE edition on cloud computing. The conversation was both lively and informative. Joining me on the show were:
Jim Sweeney, author of the book Get Your Head in the Cloud: Unlocking the Mystery for Public Sector and President and CTO of V3 Systems.
Patrick Fiorenza, Senior Research Analyst, GovLoop. He is writing the GovLoop Guide on cloud computing.
WebRTC Summit | Robust Carrier Grade WebRTC Service
Consumers have higher expectations of their telephony experience than they do of a web browsing experience. They expect the phone to connect instantly with minimal disruptions. The phone is already secure and phone numbers are used to make connections. Subscribers expect their phone service to work seamless across any network, anywhere, at any time. Subscribers will expect WebRTC into the enterprise to behave in the same manner.
In his session at WebRTC Summit, Douglas Tait, Global Director of Marketing for Telecommunications at Oracle, will look at the user experience and expectations of a WebRTC service and cover how a WebRTC service handles security, reliability, and interoperability within browsers and networks.
Inocybe Technologies to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that Inocybe Technologies Inc., the company that aims to keep IT simple, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Inocybe Technologies Inc. makes networking infrastructure simple to launch and monetize by alleviating the complexities of today’s Information Communication Technology (ICT) management of shared infrastructures. The company delivers a one-stop-shop for businesses that want to quickly find all the providers and products they need to deploy, operate, and manage a virtualized network infrastructure. Inocybe Technologies combines network element virtualization, cloud computing, Software-Defined Networking (SDN), and DevOps technologies into their single, flexible Inocybe Virtualization Platform (IVP) turnkey solution that any organization can use to create virtual infrastructures in just seconds. Inocybe Technologies is privately held and has been a pioneer in user empowered networking research since 2005.
Collaborating Through Crisis and Change for Successful Outcomes
By Brian Shaw, Program Manager, Managed Services Solutions
Crisis management and change management begins long before an incident occurs with the creation of a collaboration and decision making framework prior to project implementation.
A collaboration strategy needs to address the types of change to be communicated (perhaps based on thresholds for schedule and cost impact), who change needs to be communicated to, and what actions may result from that change. Actions resulting from change collaboration may be as simple as accepting the impact to the project schedule or as complex as allocating additional budgets and personnel. Follow the below steps prior to project implementation and your project team will be ready for change when it occurs. [Note: the method of applying these concepts should scale to the complexity and duration of the project.]
Preparation
Could it be coincidental that “preparation” and “Project Manager” both begin with a “p?” I think not. It is the responsibility of the Project Manager and the project team to create an environment for project success. A communication plan is a key component of project preparation. The plan should take into consideration the multiple audiences for project related information. All too often a single communication method is selected (such as emailing weekly status updates); however, this strategy doesn’t take into consideration that each audience has its’ own needs. A project engineer will require information regarding architecture and device level access that would be extraneous noise to an executive audience.
Additionally, most projects have a threshold for which change can be quickly accepted versus change or crisis that requires escalation. Define these thresholds as early as possible. If the duration of the work effort changes by less that x% or the cost changes by less than $x, can the project team quickly move forward without engaging an executive for approval? Prior to project initiation determine what types of change need to be escalated and who those changes need to be escalated to.
Control Sheet/Project Dashboard
Believe it or not, some audiences of project information don’t like reading MS Project plans and Ghantt charts…go figure. Both executive and client audiences often prefer a succinct format which quickly identifies task families that are on track, those at risk and those that have failed. This type of shorthand project metrics update is often referred to as a project dashboard or control sheet.
A project dashboard should quickly communicate project budget to actuals, project timeline and the status of milestones and/or important tasks. A popular method of sharing the status is the red, yellow, green light methodology. The critical benefit of this communication strategy is that audiences of this information can move quickly to problem areas and work towards resolution actions. If you are using a risk register then the yellow and red lights may kick out to the risk management work stream.
Collaboration Tools
Knowing what you are going to communicate and when you are going to communicate is only part of the collaboration strategy. It is critical that the project team determine how to collaborate and share types of information. Collaboration tools such as SharePoint, Drop Box and Huddle are commonplace, and I highly recommend your project team adopt a collaboration tool if you haven’t already done so.
The collaboration tool you use should allow the storage of multiple types of information along with selective access to information. The best tools allow access control at both the folder and file level. This level of information control allows sensitive information such as access credentials to be locked down to those that need access only.
The control sheet should be maintained within your collaboration tool so appropriate consumers can pull up a live project status at any time. Additionally, the collaboration tool should not replace individual action. If an important change or crisis occurs an update to the control sheet should not suffice as engaging decision makers. Those changes should be escalated in an active way to decision makers.
Execution:
Creating a communications plan around change is only the beginning. Once you’ve determined how you are going to communicate change, what changes will be communicated and how crises will be handled, it is then the responsibility of the Project Manager to ensure that consumers of this plan are informed and clearly understand the expectations. The plan is actionable and when change occurs the project team should be familiar enough with the plan to easily put it in motion.
Four Strategies to Simplify Cloud-to-Cloud Migration
In the storage industry, we hear the term «migration» all the time – almost every day. One of the first visuals that comes to my mind whenever I hear that word is a neatly formed «V»-formation of geese or ducks flying south for the winter. The «V» formation is a very efficient way to fly long distances. One bird’s wing-flapping causing a vortex, giving the bird directly behind effortless lift. The group works together in this way to migrate vast distances in a short amount of time while expending as little effort as possible.
Just as bird migration is inevitable, so to is data migration – no matter what form it’s in. In the storage world, this might mean you need to migrate older tape formats to a more current one to support the new tape drive you’ve just bought, or migrate data from an older storage array to a new one.
Too often, storage strategies are developed without migration in mind. The reality is that regardless of the storage solution you’ve deployed, migration is a normal part of the lifecycle, and you need to design and incorporate a migration strategy into your storage environment.
Responding to a New Breed of Services
Cloud computing is enabling services transforming many industries and every CIO needs to be ready to respond to new competitive threats.
Benefits from cloud computing are often focused on infrastructure optimization, but one disruptive change occurring across a variety of industries are a new breed of commercial services delivered through the public Internet. The common themes these services share include ease of use, accessibility through a wide range of devices and always targeting inefficient business processes. I will focus on two examples of such services that I believe show promise of future success and growth.
How cloud services usage is rising in the Middle East and Africa
In the third annual Global Cloud Index, Cisco forecasts that global cloud traffic, the fastest growing component of data center traffic, is expected to grow 4.5-fold — that’s a 35 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) — from 1.2 zettabytes of annual traffic in 2012 to 5.3 zettabytes by 2017.
The Cisco Global Cloud Index (2012–2017) was developed to estimate data center and cloud-based Internet Protocol (IP) traffic growth and trends. The Index serves as a complementary resource to existing network traffic studies, providing new insights and visibility into emerging trends affecting data centers and cloud architectures.
The forecast becomes increasingly important as the network and data center become more intrinsically linked in offering cloud services. Overall global data center traffic will grow threefold and reach a total of 7.7 zettabytes annually by 2017.
Approximately 17 percent of data center traffic will be fueled by end …
The DevOps Way to Solve JVM Memory Issues
The killer in any IT operation is unplanned work. Unplanned work may go by many names: firefighting, war rooms, Sev 1 incidents. The bottom line is that Operations must stop whatever planned work it was doing to manage this drill. This means little or no normal work is being accomplished. It is a scenario most of you will be familiar with: your application servers are humming along happily until suddenly, without an obvious reason, memory usage starts to increase, soon followed by longer garbage collection suspensions that finally force you to restart the application. The operations team is typically unaware of the actual impact on end users (other than a service being down), and it additionally lacks data and time to further investigate the issue. As communication between the traditional silos of operations, testing and development teams is often less than ideal, a scheduled restart in a “low impact” timeframe is often the easiest solution and turns into something resembling a “Production Best Practice” over time. This adds to the workload of an operations team because unplanned work becomes unnecessary preventative work. It also becomes a suspect every time there is a problem with the application. Wouldn’t it be better to actually fix the issues instead of just working around them? Shouldn’t there be a general understanding across all teams responsible for an application to fix the problem as fast as possible and make sure that it’s prevented in the future?
OpenStack Fundamentals: Replacing Nova-Network with Neutron
If you’ve had an OpenStack deployment for any length of time the chances are very good that you are still using nova-network. With the planned deprecation of nova-network right around the corner with Icehouse it’s time to start planning your transition from nova-network to Neutron.
Nova-network is a single monolithic process, that while complicated, handled all your networking needs. Neutron is very different system from nova-network with numerous components. It can be hard to understand how all the different components fit together to replicate the functionality you’ve come to rely on from nova-network.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Chet Burgess, Senior Director, Engineering at Metacloud, will take a look at some of the core functionality in nova-network and show you how it maps to Neutron. He will start by describing a multi-project nova-network setup that utilizes fixed IPs, security groups, floating IPs, and VLANs for project isolation. Over the course of the session he will describe the Neutron components that provide this functionality. By the end he will have a complete Neutron-based architecture that replicates your existing nova-network deployment. Finally he will cover the gaps between nova-network and Neutron today as well as what pitfalls you might encounter during your transition.
Interoute CTO Matthew Finnie: Legacy data vendors should learn from history
With Oracle, SAP and IBM fighting for precious market share on the in-memory relational database market, and the likes of MongoDB, Couchbase and DataStax putting together momentum in the NoSQL space, it almost feels like whoever wins the battle will win the war of database customer buy-in.
Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold told CloudTech his company’s position was that the market was going to move to the “disruptive” NoSQL technologies that “ultimately are going to dominate.”
This, of course, may not be a hugely surprising admission – although the tone of it raised eyebrows – yet according to Matthew Finnie, CTO of cloud service provider Interoute, the incumbent legacy vendors should definitely be looking over their shoulders.
“For the incumbents of this world, they have a recognised revenue stream that they have to maintain and retain,” Finnie, who is speaking at Apps World Europe next week, explained in a call. “And they …