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 ...

On Wednesday, Google held its annual developer-focused conference, Google I/O, in San Francisco, California. As expected, the tech giant made tons of big announcements, highlighting updates to existing products and showcasing new programs and hardware. All of the conference’s biggest announcements have been highlighted on this site already, but if you’re looking for a greatest…

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Email management provider Mimecast has experienced a UK-based outage due to a hardware network failure today, with customers being temporarily unable to send or receive emails.

The first reports of irregularity occurred at approximately 1100GMT, with Mimecast acknowledging the problem at 1215.

Around forty minutes later, the company further tweeted that a fix was on the way purportedly on a tower-by-tower basis, with the majority of servers back up and running at the time of printing.

Yet the outage itself does not explain the full story. Mimecast, for better or worse, promises a 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA) – which now is torn to shreds after today’s unfortunate difficulties.

To rub further salt into the wound, a blog post dated May 8 from Orlando Scott-Cowley concerning Postini Services notes: “Any downtime can be expensive and disruptive.

“That is why Mimecast offers a 100% uptime SLA to our customers, because …

You’ve adopted the cloud, got a high level of storage and moved a lot of apps in – but you’re still not getting as much work done as you thought.

That’s the alarming case with more than half of respondents to an Oracle-conducted survey entitled ‘Cloud for Business Managers: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.

54% of the 1355 executives polled said that they had suffered staff downtime as a result of difficulties with cloud integration. In terms of specific numbers, this amounted to 11 downtime situations per department surveyed in the last six months. Struggling cloud integration also affects departments which don’t even use cloud apps, the research found.

Similarly, 54% of respondents also said that deadlines had been missed during the past six months “due to a lack of cloud data being shared effectively around the organisation”. Whether cloud technology can actually be blamed …

Legos have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest, fondest memories involve Legos – starting from a small car made from a couple of simple bricks to very complex spaceships and wild creatures. I’m always amazed at how nicely and cleanly they snap together to create something solid, functional, and – in the case of the Millennium Falcon – amazing. Let’s be honest, I’m not the only one occasionally sneaking down Target’s Lego aisle to discover what new theme they’ve cooked up from the same core concept: clicking bricks together.
It’s magical what happens to the brain when snapping those colorful, simple blocks into place. Visions of larger, cooler creations are conjured and we find ourselves scrambling for additional blocks to connect to create something that has a whole new purpose or function.

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“Trust is an ongoing journey and sits at the foundation of any vendor relationship – the companies that don’t consistently earn trust won’t be around long,” noted Henrik Rosendahl, Senior VP of Cloud Solutions at Quantum, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “As they do more with cloud, trust will organically grow – maybe it’s just about meeting SLAs or seeing firsthand that data is there when you need it,” Rosendahl continued.
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?
Henrik Rosendahl: I believe it is actually both. Time is money, as they say. I typically think in terms of efficiency, which encompasses economics as well as the positive impact on administrative workflows. This is certainly true when we talk about cloud-based backup as a service (BaaS). Typically with BaaS customers, the first question is “How much is this going to cost?” Monthly costs are primarily capacity-driven – store more, pay more; however, you don’t have to buy future capacity that’s not being used for a while so in that sense you save a lot of money. Cloud-based backup and archive solutions enable companies to reduce or eliminate tape, as well as realize the promise of true business continuity. Another benefit of cloud-based solutions, particularly when it comes to backup, is in paying only for the capacity you immediately need, with the ability to scale up as needed, and convert CAPEX to OPEX, which is an important element of flexibility.

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Apptio, which knows how to gauge the total cost of IT services, has gotten a mighty $45 million E round that it means to invest in its platform and its international expansion, immediately in Western Europe.
Counting the new money the company has now seen $136 million in funding since late 2007.
The latest round was led by new investments from funds managed by Janus Capital, the Hillman Company, and a secret unnamed global institutional investor.
Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Shasta Ventures and T. Rowe Price also kicked in.
Apptio figures “IT costs are moving from fixed to variable, computing assets are shifting from owned to shared, and business executives increasingly expect the CIO to play a more strategic role, spending less resources ‘keeping the lights on’ and more on innovation that drives the business forward.” It positions its TBM widgetry as a “must have” set of business management applications and analytics for the Global 2000.

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In an ideal developer/systems administrator’s world, most applications would deploy seamlessly to multiple platforms and scale elastically with minimal effort bringing the unprecedented agility of the cloud within immediate reach of developer teams and IT organizations.
OpenStack, a RackSpace and NASA initiative, is now managed by an independent foundation and is supported by multiple vendors. It defines APIs for compute, storage, networking, services, monitoring, and additional infrastructure services.
jclouds is an open source library that helps you get started in the cloud and utilizes your Java or Clojure development skills. The jclouds API gives you the freedom to use portable abstractions for cloud-specific features. It’s a cross-cloud toolkit that works with both public and private clouds, enabling hybrid cloud workloads.

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Following the North American IPv6 Summit, I received some questions on what Parallels take is on the IPv6 market and our implementation of this technology.

At Parallels, we believe that it is important to stay on top of internet technology when delivering hosting solutions to thousands of customers. Leveraging the latest stacks can help improve product security, deliver value to customers and give technology companies time to (with feedback from customers) mature and perfect their technology.

For some technology, urgency of implementation is farther driven by hard market requirements. For example, the need for implementation of IPv6 technology is exacerbated by the fact that in some geographies, IPv4 has simply sold out.

 
Parallels implemented IPv6 starting in Parallels Plesk Panel 10.2 two years ago because of the IPv6 ability to improve security and reliability, the ability to offer IPs to a global market, and built-in functionality for Mobile IP. This implementation now fully matured with all versions of Parallels Plesk 10 and Parallels Plesk 11 and it will now be a battle tested mainstream feature in Parallels Plesk 11.5.

We originally selected and will maintain a hybrid IPv6 implementation. The hybrid or dual stack implementation is important because most countries expect that IPv4 and IPv6 will co-exist for several years, so it will be important for sites to be represented in both versions of IP.  Parallels Plesk Panel also supports “pure IPv6” for when no IPv4 is available.

Parallels implementation of IPv6 is designed to support hosters’ needs regardless of the underlying OS and therefore supports multiple Linux OSs including Debian, Ubuntu, CenOS, RedHat, OpenSUSE, CloudLinux and multiple versions of Windows. We use the same multi-OS strategy for Server Name Indication (SNI), a technology which lets hosters have multiple SSL Certs on a single IPv4 address, stretching the dwindling supply of IPv4 addresses.

IPv6 is an important technology today.  Any company that is only now considering implementation of IPv6 is already behind the innovation game as it is a must have feature of the networked hosting world.

Adam Bogobowicz
Sr. Director of Product Marketing

Cloud service providers store data all over the globe, and are constantly moving that data from one datacenter to the next for reasons as wide-ranging as cost considerations and redundancy requirements. Does this mean that the requirements outlined in varying data residency laws and privacy regulations are directly at odds with how cloud computing works?
The question is an especially delicate one when the cloud service provider stores and processes data in a jurisdiction that is perceived to have far less stringent privacy and data protection requirements – or may allow government agencies far broader data subpoena powers. Since the cloud computing model relies on distributed infrastructure to generate cost and flexibility benefits for customers, building a datacenter in each data residency jurisdiction quickly becomes cost-prohibitive. And, applying a set of constraints to the movement of data introduces an additional layer of complexity that further erodes the value proposition of cloud computing for customers.

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