There’s an inherent sense of almost forced innovation that appears to pervade the information technology industry. As we constantly push forward into perpetual cycles of reinvention, continual enhancement and augmentation after augmentation, one almost has to stop and ask what’s wrong with the software and systems that we have at our disposal today?
If a ‘neophiliac’ (don’t worry, it’s not rude) can be described as a person with a personality type characterized by a strong affinity for new things and an ability to adapt well to extreme change, then perhaps it is the neophiliacs who built the new style of IT model that we appear to be hurtling towards today.
Cloud Expo New York: Enabling the Cloud for Big Data
With the right tools, file storage today can be in the cloud or on-premise, with seamless and secure access and publishing regardless of location. Novel, high-speed transport technologies that alleviate the bottlenecks and limitations of traditional data movement protocols are now intrinsically enabled for cloud object storage, such as Amazon Web Services S3 and Microsoft Windows Azure. Companies of all types and sizes can use the latest technology to ingest and distribute large media files to and from Windows Azure BLOB storage, for example, and integrate the platform into media services running on the Azure cloud.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Jason Warman, Director of Sales Engineering at Aspera, Inc., will explore how infrastructure-agnostic transport technologies are transforming the ways all kinds of organizations access and use Big Data for ever-greater efficiencies and innovation.
Cloud Expo New York | Storage & Archive: Are Existing Offerings Relevant?
Storage and Archive offerings are now exploding on the market. From end-user mobile devices to company tactical level, the cloud has become a black hole for every kind of data. But what are the risks, and what are the real needs?
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Alexandre Morel, Cloud Product Manager & Evangelist at OVH.com, will answer questions such as:
How to develop a strategy to use those offers as a base to develop mid and long-term value?
Should companies trust the cloud (Dedicated or Public) or rely on some other solutions?
How to select the right solution for the right internal need?
Which best of breed approaches can be used?
Cloudant Gets First Real Money
Boston-based Cloudant and its NoSQL distributed Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), which have gone to the VC trough four times since the company was started in 2008, have gotten what appears to be their first real money to grow on: a $12 million B round led by Devonshire Investors, the private equity arm of Fidelity Investments, which was joined by Rackspace, Samsung Ventures and Toba Capital, former Quest Software CEO Vinny Smith’s new venture fund.
The start-up, which says it’s targeting profitability in the first half of next year, recently got a secret amount of money from the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel and Samsung and brought in a reported $4 million before that.
Cloud Data Center Draw is Often Power
Interesting trend reported on by James Glanz of the New York Times. Ample access to electrical power is driving up data center rents across the river in New Jersey — to levels higher than the trophy skyscrapers in Manhattan.
…electrical capacity is often the central element of lease agreements, and space is secondary.
Read “Landlords Double As Energy Brokers”.
Cloud Expo New York: 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 his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Jason Hoffman, CTO & Founder of Joyent, 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.
Cloud Expo NY: Essential Open Source Software for Building the Open Cloud
Cloud computing is more than a buzz-phrase it’s a transformative IT paradigm shift. The emphasis in the cloud is on elasticity, scalability, agility and open. Not just open standards but open APIs and open source. The delivery of software is also going through a paradigm shift. Open source software was often a commoditization of a market leader; Unix to Linux or Oracle to MySQL what’s changing is that the iterative nature, user context and the motto of releasing early and often are driving real innovation in open source.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Senior Director, Open Source Solutions at Citrix, will cover those essential open source technologies for delivering cloud computing in the enterprise.
IT Reaches the Tipping Point
IT is dead. Long live IT! 2013 is turning into a watershed year for CIOs as the traditional CIO is not the CIO of today. Business expectations, IT leadership styles and technology solutions are all driving an evolutionary change for CIOs and the IT organizations they lead. The changes did not happen overnight as business […]
SOASTA Beefs Up CloudTest
SOASTA has beefed up its CloudTest platform with the new Spring
Release.
Production loads of mobile and web apps can now be tested on over 750,000
cloud-based load servers worldwide simulating hundreds of thousands of
users.
It was already supposed to be the largest test cloud of available load
generators around when it was only at a half-a-million servers and SOASTA
preens that it can scale to any level of traffic as global public and private
cloud computing expands. It’s even got a patent protecting the widgetry’s
speed, scalability and affordability.
EMC World 2013 Recap
By Randy Weis, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne
The EMC World Conference held last week in Las Vegas demonstrated how EMC has a strong leadership position in the Virtualization, Storage and Software Defined Datacenter markets.
Seriously, this is not the Kool-Aid talking. Before anyone jumps in to point out how all the competitors are better at this or that, or how being a partner or customer of EMC has its challenges, I’d like to refer you to a previous blog I wrote about EMC: “EMC Leads the Storage Market for a Reason.” I won’t recap everything, but that blog talks about business success, not technical wizardry. Do the other major storage and virtualization vendors have solutions and products in these areas? Absolutely, and I promise to bring my opinions and facts around those topics to this blog soon.
What I found exciting about this conference was how EMC is presenting a more cohesive and integrated approach to the items listed below. The ExtremIO product has been greatly improved, some might say so that it is really usable now. I’d say the same about the EMC DR and BC solutions built on RecoverPoint and VPLEX – VPLEX is affordable and ready to be integrated into the VNX line. The VNX product line is mature now, and you can expect announcements around a major refresh this year. I’d say the same about the BRS line – no great product announcements, but better integration and pricing that helps customers and solution providers alike.
There are a few items I’d like to bullet for you:
- Storage Virtualization – EMC has finally figured out that DataCore is onto something, and spent considerable time promoting ViPR at EMC World. This technology (while 12 years to market behind DataCore) will open the eyes of the entire datacenter virtualization market to the possibilities of a Storage Hypervisor. What VMware did for computing, this technology will do for storage – storage resources deployed automatically, independent of the array manufacturer, with high value software features running on anything/anywhere. There are pluses and minuses to this new EMC product and approach, but this technology area will soon become a hot strategy for IT spending. Everyone needs to start understanding why EMC finally thinks this is a worthwhile investment and is making it a priority. To echo what I said in that prior blog, “Thank goodness for choices and competition!” Take a fresh look at DataCore and compare it to the new EMC offering. What’s better? What’s worse?
- Business Continuity and Highly Available Datacenters: Linking Datacenters to turn DR sites into an active computing resource is within reach of non-enterprise organizations now – midmarket, commercial, healthcare, SMB – however you want to define it.
- VPLEX links datacenters together (with some networking help) so that applications can run on any available compute or storage resource in any location – a significant advance in building private cloud computing. This is now licensed to work with VNX systems, is much cheaper and can be built into any quote. We will start looking for ways to build this into various solutions strategies – DR, BC, array migration, storage refreshes, stretch clusters, you name it. VPLEX is also a very good solution for any datacenter in need of a major storage migration due to storage refresh or datacenter migration, as well as a tool to manage heterogeneous storage.
- RecoverPoint is going virtual – this is the leading replication tool for SRM, is integrated with VPLEX and now will be available as a virtual appliance. RP also has developed multi-site capabilities, with up to five sites, 8 RP “appliances” per site, in fan-in or fan-out configurations.
- Usability of both has improved, by standardizing management of both in Unisphere editions for both products.
- High Performance Storage and Computing – Server-side Flash, Flash Cache Virtualization and workload-crushing all-Flash arrays in the ExtremSF, ExtremSW and ExtremIO product line (formerly known as VFCache). As usual, the second release nails it for EMC. GreenPages was recently recognized as Global leaders in mission critical application virtualization, and this fits right in. Put simply, put an SSD card in a vSphere host and boost SQL/Oracle/EXCH performance over 100% in some cases. The big gap was in HA/DRS/vMotion. The host cache was a local resource, and thus vMotion was broken, along with HA and DRS. The new release virtualizes the cache so that VMs assigned local cache will see that cache even if it moves. This isn’t an all or nothing solution – you can designate the mission critical apps to use the cache and tie them to a subset of the cluster. This make this strategy affordable and granular.
- Isilon – This best in class NAS system keeps getting better. Clearly defined use cases, much better VMware integration and more successful implementations makes this product the one to beat in the scale-out NAS market.
Another whole article can be written about ViPR, EMC’s brand new storage virtualization tool, and that will be coming up soon. As promised, I’ll also take a look at the competitive offerings of HP and Dell, at least, in the Storage Virtualization, DR/BC, Server-side flash and scale-NAS solutions areas, as well as cloud storage integration strategies. Till then, thanks for reading this and please share your thoughts.