Growth is good, but sometimes it may not feel that way when the business you love has outgrown your ability to manage it. When Post-It notes can’t support your customers, it’s time to change. When you’re apprehensive about winning that big, new account because you don’t have the capacity to manage it, it’s time to change. Change came to Old Mill Kettle Corn, a company that manufactures healthy corn-based snacks, when McKee Foods Corporation a national snack food manufacturer approached it with a distribution offer that the company couldn’t refuse.
Old Mill Kettle Corn had never used an ERP platform or a formal food safety management system (FSMS) but with the imminent expansion and new market opportunities, management realized it was no longer feasible to use paper spreadsheets and manual processes to manage product quality, inventory, supply chain communications and other processing operations aspects.
Calculating Your Cloud Computing Costs
There is so much happening in the Cloud Computing world and everyone seems to want a piece of the cloud. Though more and more users are positive about deploying a cloud solution for their business, they are still unclear as to how much they would need to shell out for it. Many organizations are still reluctant and feel they won’t get the expected returns.
But this is not true and Cloud Computing does deliver organizations measurable benefits. Businesses that have deployed Cloud solutions have been talking about how it has helped them save their IT costs and be profitable in such tough times as well. They have achieved good returns from their investments in the Cloud and also have saved a lot.
If any organization or individual needs to ascertain how much it will cost to implement a Cloud solution they can easily do so. The cost of moving to the cloud can be estimated in two forms: i) Cost of migrating and ii) the ongoing costs.
Parallels Plesk Automation 11.5 Preview
Parallels Plesk Automation is rapidly becoming the hosting solution of choice, giving professional shared hosters a new opportunity for efficiency and growth. Now deployed by more than 500 service providers in over 60 countries, Parallels Plesk Automation has been field tested with thousands of users, websites and mailboxes and is proving to be efficient, secure and scalable beyond anything a single panel can provide.
Secure Cloud Backup and Data Transfer: How It’s Done
The Internet is a dangerous place. There’s a new story on Ars Technica about a corporate or government hack almost everyday. So for those interested in how an enterprise-grade secure cloud backup solution handles data encryption, here is some background on a few of the security protocols used to protect customer data here at Zetta:
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) / Transport Layer Security (TLS)
SSL is an Internet security protocol developed by Netscape in the late ’90s that is incorporated in browsers and web servers. The protocol uses the RSA public-key/private-key encryption system and digital certificates to establish a secure connection between the client and server over which data can be transmitted.
SSL has recently evolved into the TLS protocol, but both protocols are still in use. When you see a website that starts with https instead of http, it requires an SSL/TLS connection. Both protocols are IETF standards. While the SSL Working Group is no longer active, the TLS Working Group is, and has issued a number of documents on the protocol since the start of the year. SSL/TSL differs from a complementary IETF protocol Secure HTTP (S-HTTP) in that S-HTTP is designed for sending single messages, while SSL/TSL creates a secure connection over which any amount of data can be sent.
At-a-Glance: Comparing VMware vSphere 5.5 & Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V
There’s been lots of buzz on the enterprise hypervisor front over the past month … In August, Microsoft announced the RTM version of Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, the latest major releases of the Windows Server and System Center families. In addition, at VMworld this year, VMware announced the latest edition of their vSphere hypervisor platform: VMware vSphere 5.5. In this article, I’ll provide a summarized comparison of the virtualization and Private Cloud feature sets provided by each of these latest releases using the currently available public information from both Microsoft and VMware as of this article’s publication date …
Plexxi on Cisco on Arista
The bad thing about price differentiation is that it is also the most easily countered. What happens if Cisco announces dramatically lower price-per-port when they spin Insieme in? They don’t even have to beat Arista; they just have to be close enough that the price part of the equation is roughly a draw. If Cisco does this, the most newsworthy element of Arista’s big product launch is largely neutered. That is not to say that Cisco will match on TCO but rather that their go-to-market strategy will effectively counter what Arista had previously launched.
Teradata 14.10 ups in-memory and in-database analytics
Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Information Management
The recently released Teradata 14.10 platform adds several features that one-up and surpass some of its newer analytic platform rivals. Highlights include dynamic tiering of hot data into memory, increased support for in-database analytics, better connectivity to Hadoop, and new optimizations for R implementation that fully exploit parallel processing.
Some of the enhancements, such as in-memory tiering, in-database analytic functions, and tighter Hadoop integration, are not necessarily unique to Teradata, but the implementations are. As for R scale-up, Teradata is uniquely applying MapReduce-like enhancements to enable R to better utilize the platform’s massively parallel architecture.
In sum, the enhancements are essential for maintaining Teradata’s premium positioning for scalability and performance for workloads that still require the service levels and data protections offered by the SQL environment.
Taking advantage of memory
This is an ongoing theme for all data platforms, both …
How to consolidate and integrate the public and private cloud
By Lee Fisher, Vice President, Abiquo
Most households have many services to keeping things ticking. No two households are the same; they have different priorities, values and structures, and different services suit different households. Water, gas and electricity all come from separate service providers, so if the electricity goes down in a house, it is not left in the cold.
Like a household, organisations are unique and something that works for one organisation, may not work for its competitors.
Choices, choices, choices
Like household utility services, cloud services are designed to bring agility, simplicity, efficiency and self-service capabilities to a business.
Organisations have freedom of choice in terms of selecting infrastructure and services; but in order to make the right choice it is vital organisations have an understanding of what the business requires and the capabilities of existing infrastructure.
Despite the complexity of business requirements and the variety of choices …
Best Mobile Phones for Online Gaming
Gaming forms a big part of the mobile phone industry, and it seems quite useful to answer the question of ‘what is the best mobile phone 2013’ by looking at which handset is the best for games. This slant brings into question processing power, storage, screen size, and app availability, so then, which is the best mobile phone for games in 2013. If you want to make up your own mind, you can play some of the most popular casino games on sites such as online casino UK and see for yourself.
A few contenders spring immediately to mind: the iPhone5, HTC One, Samsung Galaxy 4, Galaxy Note 2, Lumia 920 and the Sony Xperia Z.
Sony have really launched themselves back to prominence with the Xperia range and the gaming credentials of the Xperia Z are very good indeed. For starters there’s a super crisp 5inch HD screen, so visibility is well catered for. Then there’s the 1.5GHz quadcore processor to make sure the phone loads up apps quickly and doesn’t lag when they’re running.
The HTC One is very much a critic’s choice when it comes to games (and most other things). The 4.7inch screen is nicely placed in a market that tends towards overly big or overly small. It has a 1.7GHz quadcore processor and it can come with 32GB storage capacity. Anyone who loves an array of games, apps and media should err towards larger storage, and 32GB seems like a good marker.
The Galaxy Note 2 is a spectacular multimedia device, primed as much for films and personal organisation as it is games. This means the screen size is particularly generous at 5.5inches. You can also get 64GB of memory with the potential to double it on what is a real tablet/smartphone hybrid.
Then the likes of the Lumia 920, iPhone5 and Samsung Galaxy S4 all need to be considered on their relative merits. The iPhone5 and Galaxy S4 are the two accepted industry giants and they benefit from huge amounts of games from their respective Android and Apple stores, but then Windows 8 phones such as the Lumia 920 are really taking off as well.
WebRTC Summit | WebRTC Tools – Where to Begin
Finding the right tools is essential to any project. The good news is that there is already multitude of companies and products out there for supporting WebRTC developers–more than 70 and growing every week. WebRTC’s is still in its infancy, so this number could easily double in the next couple of years as adjacent industries and the laggards get on board. The bad news with the large number of tools out there means there are a lot of hard choices for developers and application architects to make. Complicating these decisions, WebRTC standards are still in progress with several contentious issues yet to be resolved.
In his session at the WebRTC Fundamentals Summit, Chad Hart, Director of Product Marketing at Oracle and Chief Editor of webrtcHacks, will provide some starting guidelines and observations to help developers get started with WebRTC.