Developers are the new kingmakers and it’s a busy job. We want to use your solution but we’re short on time and patience. Reduce the friction of onboarding developers by clearly and succinctly documenting your API, regardless of whether you’re delivering SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Everett Toews, Developer Advocate at Rackspace, will show how developers discover and explore your API. What will make them a permanent user and promoter of your service? What will make them run away screaming, never to return?
Ixia ControlTower Promises Comprehensive Visibility Via Single Interface to Cloud Facilities, Distributed Enterprises
Ixia has introduced its ControlTower architecture to help cloud hosting facilities and large enterprise campuses scale and rapidly deploy multiple segments for centralized, intelligent monitoring. The scalable ControlTower architecture provides a single user interface for comprehensive monitoring of network performance and security tools housed in dispersed racks or geographic locations.
The ControlTower architecture builds on the capabilities of the Ixia Anue Net Tool Optimizer (NTO) network monitoring switches, which aggregate, filter, load balance and de-duplicate network traffic to intelligently connect data center and cloud provider networks with monitoring tools. This enables network operators to meet increasing bandwidth demands while retaining critical, packet-level visibility into application performance and security at line rate, all managed via a simple yet powerful central interface.
The ControlTower architecture extends the boundaries of the visible network beyond a single data center with a highly scalable approach that improves monitoring of distributed environments by providing:
- Maximum efficiency: Powered by the Anue NTO’s custom dynamic data traffic filtering capabilities, network monitoring switches filter traffic upon ingress to reduce traffic on the interconnect links and the potential for dropped packets.
- Simple usability and control: Ixia’s user interface presents the entire distributed visibility environment as a single switch, allowing administrators to add new monitored network segments with no added management complexity or overhead — making management of a large number of network segments just as easy as managing one.
- Flexible deployment options: Using Ixia’s ControlTower architecture, network monitoring switches may be easily deployed in a single high-density stack, distributed across the top of multiple racks in a data center or distributed to multiple buildings in a campus environment.
“As businesses continue to expand both their use of and reliance on secure, high-performing IT infrastructures, they are moving toward modular approaches that can include both internal and external cloud resources,” said Jim Frey, Vice President of Research for Network Management at Enterprise Management Associates. “Servers, storage and networking components are more often virtualized and can be activated as needed, and so monitoring strategies need to be flexible and scalable to keep pace. Distributed packet monitoring architectures such as Ixia’s ControlTower are critical for maintaining visibility in the face of dynamic resource provisioning and agile, hybrid environments.”
Ixia will demonstrate the ControlTower products at Booth No.1951 at Interop Las Vegas, May 7-9.
502 Errors, Latency Accessing Gmail
Google reported a problem with Gmail today and not long after said it was resolved:
3:02 AM: We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly.
3:43 AM: The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.
Users were experiencing 502 errors and latency when accessing email.
Sailing the Seven Cs of Security Monitoring
One of the established best practices in InfoSec is monitoring. People, products and companies get paid a great deal of money and expend a great deal of resources to watch pots. Monitoring simply is the central component to any security initiative. But with all best practices, there are variables. How much to monitor? What priorities matter? Where are my greatest vulnerabilities? To this end, I have boiled down monitoring to 7 best practices…The 7 C’s of security monitoring:
Cloud Expo New York: Predicting the Future of Cloud-Based Data Protection
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Henrik Rosendahl, Senior Vice President, Cloud Solutions, at Quantum Corporation, will explore trends in cloud-based backup and DR, and how current approaches to cloud data protection fall short. He’ll look at in-house vs. subscription cloud backup as a service models, and how on-premise backup for local recovery has advantages. He will also discuss the need for application-specific SLAs for failover and continued operation of applications in the cloud using VMs. He’ll explore how long-term archive and Big Data are converging with cloud providing the potential for seamless backup, repository and archive for all data types and compare cost examples to show the implications of cloud BaaS on CAPEX vs. OPEX.
Dell’s George Newstrom Charts Govt, Enterprise IT Evolution
George Newstrom, head of Dell’s federal government defense and national security business, outlines the evolution of information technology from mainframes and servers to «disruptive» technologies such as cloud computing and mobile devices.
Platform one saw mainframes and terminals hit the market and Newstrom writes this development helped government and other industry end users access thousands of applications, reaching millions of end users.
Many places are in the second platform of client and server offerings, which started nearly 25 years ago according to Newstrom.
Intel Names Krzanich CEO; James President
The company said Thursday morning that the board had unanimously picked Intel COO Brian Krzanich to replace Otellini, who in a surprise move decided to step down early a few months ago apparently with the taste of failure in his mouth given the market’s rejection of the desktop and Intel’s lack of position in mobile.
Intel also did something historic and split Otellini’s CEO and presidential roles apart, naming Renée James its first woman president and CEO heir presumptive.
The pair will take up their new jobs on May 16, the date of company’s annual stockholders’ meeting.
Krzanich, 52, was named COO in January of 2012. Since then, Intel said, he’s been running an organization of more than 50,000 employees consisting of Intel’s Technology and Manufacturing Group, Intel Custom Foundry, NAND Solutions group, HR, IT and Intel’s China strategy.
10gen Backs Up MongoDB
Big Data projects are notoriously difficult to back up because data volumes
change so quickly and unpredictably.
So 10gen, the open source MongoDB commercializer, put out in limited
release Tuesday what it calls a “critical new tool” that’s supposed to let
companies of all sizes protect their data with a turnkey, pay-as-you-go,
cloud-based back-up service engineered for its NoSQL database.
Day 3 Keynote at Cloud Expo New York | Driving Cloud Innovation
IT has more opportunities than ever before with the growth in users, devices, data and secure cloud services. This creates not only a more enriching experience for users, but more opportunities for businesses. The key to capitalizing on these opportunities is to have the right tools in place to help scale operations.
In his Day 4 Keynote at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Robert (Rob) Crooke, corporate vice president and general manager of the Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Solutions Group at Intel Corp, will describe the range of products that Intel provides to support different usage models faced by IT with a specific emphasis on the advancement in SSDs.
Topics in Hybrid Cloud Worth Following
I wrote a blog for Cloud Ecosystem last month that talks about the disruption potential of hybrid clouds for disaster recovery. You can read it here: Hybrid Cloud will Transform Disaster Recovery. Within a few days CloudVelocity CTO Anand Iyengar weighed in shortly after with: The Hybrid Cloud is Ideal for Disaster Recovery.
A highlight from both blogs: the on demand pay as you go cloud model is a far superior operating model for DR, if and only if a true hybrid cloud can be deployed.
The issue of how a true hybrid cloud can be deployed was addressed in a great interview at Cloudcast with Brian Gracely and Rajeev Chawla called: Accelerating the Hybrid Cloud. The interview is especially relevant to the demands of deploying traditional multi-tier apps into a hybrid model. It isn’t easy, but it is a powerful game-changer for IT agility, availability and scalability.