Is your IT organization being pushed to increase the tempo of your software release cycles? Do you currently automate application builds and the creation of staging environments? Do you always test thoroughly before pushing code out to production? Does your hair catch on fire every time you put out a new release? IT organizations large and small are turning to the set of processes, technologies, and organizational practices called DevOps as a way to deal with the need to release software more often and with less trouble by changing the way the Development and Operations teams cooperate.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Uri Budnik, Director of Business Development at RightScale, will discuss how Ceph, a fully open source distributed object store, network block device, and file system designed for reliability, scalability and performance, is transforming DevOps.
Five Top Trends for 2013 in the SMB Cloud
by Emily Kruger, Sr Manager, Market Research, Parallels
Parallels has just finished our 2013 SMB Cloud Insights™ research and have heard from over 6,000 small and medium businesses from 15 countries around the world about their use of cloud services. Here are five of the most interesting trends we are seeing in the SMB cloud market worldwide:
1. Cloud storage is a hot topic in IaaS for SMBs. The majority of small businesses are willing to pay 25% to 50% more for their VPS if it comes with extra storage.
2. When SMBs buy their web applications varies dramatically by SMB size. Over 40% of micro SMB (< 10 employees) bought their web apps with their web hosting and never returned to buy anything else. Medium SMBs (50 employees +) are much more likely to return to their web hoster for additional purchases.
3. Hosted business email took off this past year and was the fastest growing cloud service category in many countries. Perceived security of business class email and better integration with mobile devices are the leading reasons to switch from free to paid email accounts.
4. Hosted PBX is another cloud service that is growing quickly. Automated attendant and call control are the most popular features for SMBs – and ones not omit from a hosted PBX offering.
5. The most popular SaaS applications remain file sharing, instant collaboration and online backup & storage…but there is growing interest in support / help desk apps, online conferencing (phone and web) and online accounting.
Find out much more about the SMB cloud market in Parallels SMB Cloud Insights™ reports. Look for the 2013 research for Europe and Asia-Pacific to be released this Fall at WHD.local events or download all the research at www.parallels.com/smbreport.
Coraid Appoints Dave Kresse as CEO
Coraid has appointed Dave Kresse as Chief Executive Officer. Kresse will lead the company’s continued expansion into the enterprise and cloud markets, building on the company’s growth and award-winning EtherDrive® and EtherCloud™ platforms.
“Enterprise and cloud datacenters are undergoing a massive shift towards commodity scale-out designs and software-driven automation. Coraid is ideally positioned with top-tier customers and a proven storage platform to help customers deliver enterprise-class storage within an elastic, programmable cloud architecture,” said Kresse. “Coraid has the team and is delivering the right solutions to become the storage platform of choice for the world’s largest private and public cloud infrastructure buildouts.”
Kevin Brown, who has served as the company’s CEO since 2009, has moved to the Coraid board of directors as an independent director, where he will contribute to company strategy and key industry initiatives, including participation in the OpenStack community.
Coraid Appoints Dave Kresse as CEO
Coraid has appointed Dave Kresse as Chief Executive Officer. Kresse will lead the company’s continued expansion into the enterprise and cloud markets, building on the company’s growth and award-winning EtherDrive® and EtherCloud™ platforms.
“Enterprise and cloud datacenters are undergoing a massive shift towards commodity scale-out designs and software-driven automation. Coraid is ideally positioned with top-tier customers and a proven storage platform to help customers deliver enterprise-class storage within an elastic, programmable cloud architecture,” said Kresse. “Coraid has the team and is delivering the right solutions to become the storage platform of choice for the world’s largest private and public cloud infrastructure buildouts.”
Kevin Brown, who has served as the company’s CEO since 2009, has moved to the Coraid board of directors as an independent director, where he will contribute to company strategy and key industry initiatives, including participation in the OpenStack community.
Better Process Control in the Cloud
Employee benefits provider Unum Group has been building a DevOps continuum, and is further exploring the benefits of a better process around cloud-assisted applications development and deployment.
This interview highlights how employee benefits provider Unum Group has been building a DevOps continuum, and is further exploring the benefits of a better process around cloud-assisted applications development and deployment.
To learn more about how they’ve been using certain tools and approaches to improve their applications delivery, we sat down with Tim Durgan, an Enterprise Application Architect at Unum Group, and Petri Maanonen, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Application Performance Management at HP Software.
Cloud Expo: Delivering Guaranteed Performance Through an SDS Framework
For cloud providers, offering predictable storage performance backed by firm SLAs will become a competitive differentiator that drives greater customer affinity and a better application experience. Many providers feel that a Software Defined Storage (SDS) frameworks hold the key to delivering guaranteed performance, yet this “software abstraction layer” is only half of the solution. SDS frameworks are dependent on the virtualized resources presented to it, and without the granular abstraction of physical storage resources, these frameworks will remain limited.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Dave Wright, Founder & CEO of SolidFire, will explore how to deliver guaranteed performance today, through intelligent storage architectures and software defined control planes of CloudStack, OpenStack, and VMware.
Data Everywhere – Distributed Data Security in the Cloud
Securing your data used to be simpler (if not necessarily easy). You had IT infrastructure in your data center. You adopted security controls at all levels – from physical security, controlling who could enter the facility, up through the network and system, and application layers. IT security looked a lot like perimeter security in a building – the valuables are inside, the attackers are outside, so you have good walls and strong locks and monitor what passes through.
The cloud explodes this model. Today, your data is in your own facility, at a managed hosting provider’s data center, and at your cloud provider. And while you’ve got a specific set of servers and network connections at the hosting provider – you can even go see your servers if you want to! – in the cloud you’ve got virtual machines that vary in number and location within the cloud environment. In a dynamic, autoscaling cloud the number of VMs you’re using may change hour to hour. And wait, there’s more – your employees, customers, and partners are accessing that data not just on IT-approved workstations but on iPads, Android phones, and probably Google Glass before long with the rise of BYOD.
Data Everywhere – Distributed Data Security in the Cloud
Securing your data used to be simpler (if not necessarily easy). You had IT infrastructure in your data center. You adopted security controls at all levels – from physical security, controlling who could enter the facility, up through the network and system, and application layers. IT security looked a lot like perimeter security in a building – the valuables are inside, the attackers are outside, so you have good walls and strong locks and monitor what passes through.
The cloud explodes this model. Today, your data is in your own facility, at a managed hosting provider’s data center, and at your cloud provider. And while you’ve got a specific set of servers and network connections at the hosting provider – you can even go see your servers if you want to! – in the cloud you’ve got virtual machines that vary in number and location within the cloud environment. In a dynamic, autoscaling cloud the number of VMs you’re using may change hour to hour. And wait, there’s more – your employees, customers, and partners are accessing that data not just on IT-approved workstations but on iPads, Android phones, and probably Google Glass before long with the rise of BYOD.
Aspera Drive Offers Sharing, Collaboration Platform For Big Data
Aspera, Inc. today announced the beta availability of Aspera Drive, their new unified sharing and collaboration platform for big data, combining complete desktop explorer integration with performance and ease of use, transparent support for on–premise and cloud storage, and with security, management and access control.
The Aspera platform allows for transfer and synchronization of files sets of any size and any number with maximum speed and robustness at any distance, with the full access control, privacy and security of Aspera technology. Its architecture allows the platform to be deployed on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid model.
Aspera Drive brings remote file browsing, transfer, synchronization, and package sending and receiving to the desktop, browser and mobile device. A backend architecture and API allows for fine-grained, centralized control over content access, security and bandwidth, regardless of content storage location – on premise or on cloud.
SYS-CON Launches WebRTC Journal
SYS-CON Media has launched WebRTC Journal on Ulitzer.com featuring over 160 original articles, news stories, features, and blog entries. WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is an open source project supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera that aims to enable browser-to-browser applications for voice calling, video chat, and P2P file sharing without plugins. Its mission is “To enable rich, high quality, RTC applications to be developed in the browser via simple Javascript APIs and HTML5.”
Follow WebRTC Journal on Twitter at @WebRTCSummit.