Spend less time running the network and more time enabling your business. Learn how Cisco is leading the way to a new fully unified wired-wireless network solution in this live webcast on January 29, 2013, 16:30 p.m. GMT / 08:30 a.m. PST.
Cisco and NetApp Expand Partnership to Unify Data Center and Public Cloud
Cisco and NetApp on Thursday announced an expanded partnership to deliver new converged infrastructure innovation to unify branch office, data center and public cloud infrastructures under the FlexPod architecture. The partnership expansion includes efforts in technology integration, solution development, and continued go-to-market collaboration — all designed to make it easier for customers to deploy and access next-generation cloud infrastructure solutions.
Current IT architectures comprise a fragmented combination of infrastructure along with public, private and hybrid clouds offered by different organizations and addressing distinct customer needs. Through a shared vision of a unified data center, Cisco and NetApp offer the ability to simplify deployment, management and orchestration — connecting enterprise clouds to service providers, enterprises to branch offices, consumers to enterprises, and clouds to clouds.
Security and the Cloud
Is now the time to make the move to cloud services with all the current IT security concerns? Security and the cloud seems to be the topic of conversation for many businesses and IT groups today. As you prepare for that decision making process around your IT infrastructure security, remember to take a risk based approach to help ensure a sound decision from an information security perspective.
Rather than spend months learning, digesting, and attempting to implement a structured formal risk management framework, regard your strategic security planning with these four pillars of risk management.
Apple Disappoints; Punters Flee Stock; Google Smirks
As soon as Apple’s fiscal first-quarter numbers hit Wall Street Wednesday,
its stock dropped.
Thirty minutes into the after-hours conference call it was down 8% to
under $475 after losing 30% of its value since it hit a $705 all-time high in
September and was roundly cheered as the most valuable company on earth.
Fifteen minutes later it was down 10% to $462 and change. By the end of
the call it was grazing the other side of $460, down 11%.
Cloud cited as key driver for redefining CIO role [infographic]
A new survey from Brocade has revealed the extent of the changing CIO role in enterprise – and put cloud adoption as a major driver of it.
The research, which asked 100 CIOs from the EMEA sector (Europe, Middle East, Africa) found the following top-line takeaways:
- 50% of the CIOs polled expect that cloud adoption will result in their jobs involving less time fretting over the company IT infrastructure
- One third of CIOs confirmed that cloud services had been deployed by their business without involving the IT department
- Two in three envisage that by 2020, this trend will continue with business units procuring cloud services much more frequently
There were other interesting results, with 75% of respondents unsure whether their company’s SLAs (service level agreements) will meet minimum requirements, which may come as a surprise.
Of course, a downwardly revised SLA will mean downtime and greater IT costs, but Forrester …
On the up: Changing lives in Brazil
Just over ten years ago I went backpacking in Brazil for a month with some friends. We arrived in Rio de Janeiro, one of the world’s great party towns, at nightfall and found, to our dismay, that we couldn’t get a caipirinha for love nor money. It turned out that we’d landed on the day of the presidential elections and there was a blanket ban on sales of alcohol because the authorities were concerned that violence might erupt if politics mixed with booze.
Eventually we managed to persuade a man running one of the street food outlets on the Copacabana beach to sell us a beer. He told us that the winner of the election would be a man known as Lula. Lula, leader of PT, the worker’s party, went on to become perhaps the most popular president in the history of Brazil, introducing sweeping social reforms designed to lift millions of Brazilians out of poverty.
Cloud Computing: Red Hat to Merge ManageIQ with Its CloudForms IaaS
Red Hat closed its acquisition of ManageIQ in December shortly after it agreed to buy the joint for $104 million and on Tuesday morning it said in a webcast that it’s going to integrate ManageIQ’s cloud management and automation widgetry with its CloudForms Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform to expand its all-important open hybrid cloud portfolio.
When this will happen is unclear.
ManageIQ lets users deploy, manage and optimize across private clouds, public clouds and virtualized infrastructures.
Red Hat’s Cloud Business Unit general manager Bryan Che said, “We’ve worked with ManageIQ as a partner to our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform with successful joint customers and saw an opportunity to expand our hybrid cloud management capabilities with an even closer relationship with ManageIQ’s compelling portfolio. With the closing of the acquisition, we now begin work to integrate ManageIQ’s enterprise cloud management and automation technologies with our complementary Red Hat CloudForms hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution and our open Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management solution. With this combination, we can offer our customers an unparalleled open hybrid cloud management portfolio.”
Hybrid Cloud and Its Future Role in Market Leadership
Hybrid cloud is early, yet promises to accelerate the enterprise adoption of cloud computing. The question is: who will lead and what impact will they have on how enterprises buy technology solutions?
There are a handful of publicly-traded companies vying for leadership in cloud computing, among them Amazon, VMware, Microsoft, and Rackspace. There is even a cloud ETF (SKYY). That is why the current debate regarding the future of public, private and hybrid cloud operating models is significant to the futures of these companies, as well as many others in hardware, software and even data center co-location.
If the public cloud becomes the cloud of choice for enterprise IT pros, Amazon will have a commanding position in the evolution of the multi-trillion enterprise IT market. Likewise, if private cloud establishes market leadership then VMware could transform its leadership in server virtualization into cloud leadership and have even greater access to IT budgets. On the other hand, hybrid cloud promises the opportunity for VMware and others (including Microsoft and Rackspace) to establish leadership by delivering even greater levels of IT power and efficiency by integrating public and private cloud functionality into more powerful hybrid clouds.
Go Daddy Getting Into Web Payments
First Data Corporation and web host Go Daddy today announced Go Daddy Payment Solutions. The application is designed to serve the electronic payment needs of the small business community.
Go Daddy customers will be able to leverage Go Daddy Payment Solutions to process eCommerce transactions online. Go Daddy gives customers the ability to go from an idea to a full-blown Web presence – including a website, shopping cart and online payment acceptance – in a few simple steps.
“Go Daddy’s main focus is to help small businesses get bigger without investing a lot of time, money or energy,” said Neil Proctor, senior director of Development, Go Daddy. “First Data’s payment processing gives Go Daddy customers the chance to quickly enable credit card payments online, expanding their revenue growth opportunities exponentially. The best part is, if customers have any questions, they can reach out to Go Daddy’s world-class customer service to get them answered quickly.”
To find out more about Go Daddy Payment Solutions, please visit http://www.godaddy.com/ecommerce/merchant-services.aspx.
Anomaly Detective Adds Predictive Analytics to Splunk
Prelert today announced Anomaly Detective, an advanced machine intelligence solution for Splunk Enterprise environments. The introduction of Anomaly Detective expands Prelert’s line of diagnostic predictive analytics products that integrate with a customer’s existing IT management tools and quickly provide value by finding problematic behavior changes hidden in huge volumes of operations data.
Anomaly Detective’s self-learning predictive analytics with machine intelligence assistance recognize both normal and abnormal machine behavior. Using highly advanced pattern recognition algorithms, Anomaly Detective identifies developing issues and provides detailed diagnostic data, enabling IT experts to avoid problems or diagnose them as much as 90 percent faster than previously possible. IT personnel who utilize Splunk Enterprise software in infrastructure, applications performance and security can now additionally benefit from machine learning to automatically spot anomalies and isolate their root causes in minutes, saving time and resolving problems before the business is impacted.
Anomaly Detective is downloadable software that installs as a tightly integrated application for Splunk Enterprise. Because it leverages recent advances in machine intelligence, Anomaly Detective is 100 percent self-learning and requires minimal configuration. Anomaly Detective augments existing IT expertise, empowering IT staff to spend less time mining data, reduce troubleshooting costs and improve compliance with service-level agreements — all of which contribute to a rapid return on investment.
“Prelert Anomaly Detective is like a machine intelligence assistant, using advanced machine learning analytics to analyze the massive amounts of IT operations management data produced by today’s online applications and services,” said Mark Jaffe, CEO of Prelert. “We’ve packaged the power of big data analytics, normally focused on solving business problems, in easy-to-use machine intelligence solutions that are greatly needed in the real world of IT operations.”
Prelert Anomaly Detective is now available and easily downloadable from the Prelert website and from Prelert resellers. Pricing is based on the amount of data analyzed per day, starting at $1,200 for environments indexing more than 500MB of data per day. For information on pricing for Splunk Enterprise, go to http://www.splunk.com/view/how-to-get-splunk/SP-CAAADFV.
