SYS-CON Events announced today that VentureBeat has been named “Association Sponsor” of 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.
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Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, Nov. 4-7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: The Rise of the Software Defined Infrastructure
Disaggregation of the fundamental server elements of processing/memory/storage/networking means that these individual elements can be cycled/upgraded at their natural replacement frequency providing large CapEx savings.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Bob Quinn, VP and chief technologist in the Corporate Strategy Office of LSI Corporation, will show how pooling of these disaggregated resources in a rack can enable Software Defined Infrastructures to optimally allocate the resources dynamically as workloads change across various applications and services providing significant OpEx savings.
Steering Safely into the Open Enterprise
I recently wrote an article for Wired, which discussed the importance of thinking about security at every stage of your application lifecycle. This is especially important as we enter the new era of open enterprise IT. The explosive growth of mobile computing has shifted the enterprise perimeter and traditional access control mechanisms are no longer sufficient. This is even more relevant when thinking about the Internet of Things (IoT) and its rapidly evolving ecosystem.
George Reese of Dell recently published an article that discusses the Tesla Model S REST API. This API enables some remote control features on the car and is primarily used by Tesla’s available smartphone apps. Great stuff, showing how mobile meets IOT meets API. The problem is that the focus of the article is all on its potential security vulnerabilities. Where the Tesla developers should be lauded for driving this type of innovation, they are instead scolded for addressing security poorly.
The telco cloud dilemma: How to succeed in the IaaS marketplace
One of the notable presenters at this week’s Cloud World Forum in Brazil was from telco giant Telefónica.
This Spain-based powerhouse has extensive interests across Latin America as well as North America and Europe, and owns everything from undersea cables up to managed services. And as with every other telco on this planet, they’re heavily into Cloud Computing.
Nothing unusual so far. But toward the end of this fellow’s talk, someone asked whether Telefónica was going to either partner with Amazon Web Services (AWS) or compete with them. Seeing as the larger company was all-in with their Cloud bet, I expected the answer would be to compete with the IaaS leader.
After all, telcos from Verizon to Alcatel are in the trenches battling Bezos and Company. But to my surprise, he answered that they would prefer to run their SaaS apps on Amazon, while at …
CITC Saves $75,000 by Deploying Zetta.net’s Cloud-Based NetApp Backup
Zetta.net has announced that the tribal nonprofit organization Cook Inlet Tribal Council (CITC) is using Zetta DataProtect for NetApp to provide 3-in-1 offsite backup cloud backup and disaster recovery (DR) for critical data housed in its NetApp Filers. CITC selected Zetta.net’s 3-in-1 backup, disaster recovery and archiving solution to avoid the costly investment of an additional NetApp Filer, third party software, and WAN traffic accelerator – saving $75,000 as a result.
With a largely Microsoft Windows-based environment that uses VMware for its 50 virtual machine infrastructure and NetApp storage, CITC had increasing concerns about the possible damage a natural disaster might present. A recent storm that caused a three-day power outage in the area was a serious reminder that its valuable data may be at risk.
The Telco Cloud Dilemma
The bottom line for the telcos is that Cloud-based offerings are value-added services, where the value they add is added to the plumbing. In other words, their fundamental cultural perspective is to make more money with the telecommunications infrastructure. The problem with this perspective, however, is that it’s not the best way for a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to think.
Those of us whose careers have centered on moving bits around can easily forget that telephone companies have been in existence since Alexander Graham Bell and his partners founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. For most of this century and a half of history, telecommunications has delivered plain old switched voice networks. The rise of mobile telephony, the Internet, and now the Cloud have each in turn shaken the telco world to its core. And yet, its history, and hence its culture, rest in the world of the Public Switched Telephone Network. In other words, once a phone company, always a phone company.
Force 3 Case Study: VMware vCloud Hybrid Service
VMware vCloud Hybrid Service can greatly reduce IT capital expenditure by removing the need for a remote offsite location for DR/CO-OP operations. IT departments can simply scale up the capacity during disaster operations, greatly reducing the operational cost for maintaining a DR site.
Was Trump University the Catalyst for Cloud Computing?
When cloud computing started to materialize we learned the benefits of matching workloads to the IT resources but what customer problem prompted the need for cloud computing? This one…
In 2005, I was working at Hewlett Packard in the storage group. We were three years past the Compaq-HP merger in Houston. My product line consisted of an entry-level SAN storage product and some accompanying data protection software. One of the many product management duties was customer interface. I always enjoyed tradeshows, telephone calls and face-to-face customer briefings.
Rapid Fire Summary of Carl Eschenbach’s General Session at VMworld 2013
By Chris Ward, CTO, LogicsOne
I wrote a blog on Monday summarizing the opening keynote at VMworld 2013. Checking in again quickly to summarize Tuesday’s General Session. VMware’s COO Carl Eschenbach took the stage and informed the audience that there are 22,500 people in attendance, which is a new record for VMware. This makes it the single largest IT infrastructure event of the year. 33 of these attendees have been to all 10 VMworlds, and Carl is one of them.
Carl started the session by providing a recap of Monday’s announcements around vSphere/vCloud Suite 5.5, NSX, vSAN, vCHS, Cloud Foundry, and vCHS. The overall mantra of the session revolved around IT as a Service. The following points were key:
- Virtualization extends to ALL of IT
- IT management gives way to automation
- Compatible hybrid cloud will be ubiquitous
- Foundation is SDDC
After this, came a plethora of product demos. If you would like to watch the presentation to be able to check out the demos you can watch them here: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/us/learn/generalsessions
vCAC Demo
- Started with showing the service catalogue & showing options to deploy an app to a private or public cloud. Also showed costs of each option as well
- I’m assuming this is showing integration between vCAC & ITBM, although that was not directly mentioned
- Next they displayed the database options as part of the app – assuming this is vFabric Data Director (DB as a Service)
- Showed the auto-scale option
- Showed the health of the application after deployment…this appears to be integration with vCOPS (again, not mentioned)
- The demo showed how the product provided self-service, transparent pricing, governance, and automation
NSX Demo
- Started with a networking conversation around why there are challenges with networking being the ball and chain of the VM. After that, Carl discussed the features and functions that NSX can provide. Some key ones were:
- Route, switch, load balance, VPN, firewall, etc.
- Displayed the vSphere web client & looked at the automated actions that happened via vCAC and NSX during the app provisioning
- What was needed to deploy this demo you may ask? L2 switch, L3 router, firewall, & load balancer. All of this was automated and deployed with no human intervention
- Carl then went through the difference in physical provisioning vs. logical provisioning with NSX & abstracting the network off the physical devices.
- West Jet has deployed NSX, got to hear a little about their experiences
- There was also a demo to show you how you can take an existing VMware infrastructure and convert/migrate to an NSX virtual network. In addition, it showed how vMotion can make the network switch with zero downtime
The conversation then turned to storage. They covered the following:
- Requirements of SLAs, policies, management, etc. for mission critical apps in the storage realm
- vSAN discussion and demo
- Storage policy can be attached at the VM layer so it is mobile with the VM
- Showcased adding another host to the cluster and the local storage is auto-added to the vSAN instance
- Resiliency – can choose how many copies of the data are required
IT Operations:
- Traditional management silos have to change
- Workloads are going to scale to massive numbers and be spread across numerous environments (public and private)
- Conventional approach is scripting and rules which tend to be rigid and complex –> Answer is policy based automation via vCAC
- Showed example in vCOPS of a performance issue and drilled into the problem…then showed performance improve automatically due to automated proactive response to detected issues. (autoscaling in this case)
- Discussing hybrid and seamless movement of workloads to/from private/public cloud
- Displayed vCHS plugin to the vSphere web client
- Showed template synchronization between private on prem vSphere environment up to vCHS
- Provisioned an app from vCAC to public cloud (vCHS) (it shows up inside of vSphere Web client)
Let me know if there are questions on any of these demos.
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