Oracle puts applications in the Fast Data lane

Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, IT – Enterprise Solutions

With the X3 generation of the Oracle Exadata and Exalogic engineered-systems platforms significantly upping the amount of Flash (SSD) and memory (DRAM), Oracle is now cranking up the speed on its applications portfolio. With Flash and DRAM prices plummeting, it is now cost-effective to persist, rather than temporarily cache, data. Oracle claims that much of its existing application portfolio can run up to 16x faster, unmodified, on the X3-2 Oracle Exadata and Exalogic models.

Oracle is now taking the next step in optimizing portions of its application portfolio to take full advantage of the new X3-2 line. Oracle’s Fast Data approach to enterprise applications follows SAP’s release of SAP Business Suite and CRM on the in-memory HANA platform. Ovum believes that Oracle’s approach is a logical first step, and would like to see this eventually yield a new generation of …

The Top Five SaaS Risks and How to Mitigate Them

You may have heard that cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models can turn software technology into a pay-as-you-go utility that businesses can “plug in to” and use like electricity?

Perhaps — however, software technology is far more varied, nuanced and diverse than electricity. You don’t win customers by having better electricity than your competition. Software, by contrast,…

 

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Business Transformation with Cloud – Is Your Organization ‘Cloud-Ready’?

Organizations across the world are increasingly starting to see the benefits of moving more and more services to the cloud. The focus on the cost-saving potential of cloud is rapidly shifting to completely transforming the business with cloud. As organizations are investing enormous sums on technology they are starting to realize that in order to maximize the return on investment and accelerate the business transformation process the first area of focus should be people. By ensuring the organization is ‘cloud-ready’ the organizational adoption will be much faster and much better. A workforce ready and eager to maximize the potential value and benefit will more readily embrace a cloud strategy.

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OK, Google, What Do I Need To Know About I/O Cloud Announcements?

With all the focus on Google Glass, new Maps features and Star Trek-ish conversations coming to Google Search everywhere (“OK Google…”) let’s not forget Google’s cloud computing moves:

Google Compute Engine – now available for everyone

New Compute Engine features:

  • Sub-hour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a ten-minute minimum, so you don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use
  • Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads
  • Advanced Routing features help you create gateways and VPN servers, and enable you to build applications that span your local network and Google’s cloud
  • Large persistent disks support up to 10 terabytes per volume, which translates to 10X the industry standard

ISO 27001:2005 international security certification for Compute Engine, Google App Engine, and Google Cloud Storage.

Google App Engine adds PHP runtime

Google Cloud Datastore (AKA NoSQL)

Google Cloud Datastore is a fully managed and schemaless solution for storing non-relational data. Based on the popular App Engine High Replication Datastore, Cloud Datastore is a standalone service that features automatic scalability and high availability while still providing powerful capabilities such as ACID transactions, SQL-like queries, indexes and more.

You can catch today’s live streams for two Google Cloud talks, or watch recordings of yesterdays, here.

This time next  year we’ll probably just open up the Google home page, tap the mike, and ask, “OK, Google, what do I need to know about Google Cloud?”

The Buzz Around Software Defined Networking

By Nick Phelps, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p51KAxPOrt4

 

One of the emerging trends in our industry that is stirring up some buzz right now is software defined networking. In this short video I answer the following questions about SDN:

 

  1. What is Software Defined Networking or SDN?
  2. Who has this technology deployed and how are they using it?
  3. What does SDN mean to the small to mid-market?
  4. When will the mid-market realize the benefits from SDN based offerings?
  5. When will we hear more? When should we expect the next update?

 

What are your thoughts on SDN? I’d love to hear you’re comments on the video and my take on the topic!

 

 

Supporting CIO Strategies and Priorities from the Cloud

A recent Gartner study states that the function of the modern CIO is in flux and that his or her future focus must incorporate digital assets (aka cloud-based data and applications) to remain relevant. Towards the goal of riding the sea change a compiler of stacks to a broker of business needs, security from the cloud is used as the example of this new prioritization and strategic thinking.

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Don’t Believe the Hype: Getting to the Promise of Big Data

Companies around the world are collecting massive amounts of data everyday that’s sitting around and not being utilized. Take for example the fact that companies collect demographic and location-based data via mobile devices all the time, but have to figure out how to monetize that data. In this session, Joyent CTO and founder Jason Hoffman will examine the state of Big Data, taking a look at what we’re doing now to discussing what’s on the horizon, as companies prepare and realign their business strategies for new streams of revenue.

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NoSQL: Another big data acronym or a strategic differentiator?

Cloud, SaaS, Big Data, Fast Data, NoSQL, PaaS…while this economy cannot produce jobs, it can definitely produce jargon at the speed of light.

As a tech-savvy business person who is not an engineer, I’m always trying to figure out how these new technologies and trends help my customers.

So when I had the opportunity to work on a press release announcing ServiceSource as a MongoDB customer, I wanted to understand the value for my market. Even though MongoDB sounds like something you’d see in the X Games, I knew it must be a differentiator for our business.

I went to the MongoDB website and found “MongoDB in a Nutshell.” When I clicked on it, this is what I saw

"name" : "mongo",
"type" : "db",
"doc_links" : {
        "installation" : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/installation/",
        "tutorial"     : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/getting-started/",
        "reference"    : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/"
},
versions ...