As a follow up to my article on Infrastructure as a Service, here is a four minute video:
Cloud Computing Is the One True Path
Walking around Cloud Expo in Santa Clara yesterday, sitting in on various sessions, grabbing conversations with old friends and new acquaintances, I learned a few things:
The technologists are still ahead of the customers. Although AWS has been around since 2006, the impression here is that most enterprises are still migrating to the cloud very slowly. I take this as a good sign, as the best is yet to come. I wrote last year that it was still only Year One for the cloud; this may still be true.
I love PaaS and its potential, but this seems be a mystery still to many companies. I think it’s because decades of legacy, stovepiped architecture, applications, and data have resulted in 80-90% of IT budgets and time to be spent on routine operations rather than innovation. This habit is hard to change, especially so since most people, to be honest, would rather focus on the routine rather than the innovative, because the innovative is hard.
Green continues to emerge. At Cloud Expo and what I’ve seen in the industry in general, it’s taking a sensible, efficiency-oriented approach, rather than cast in apocalyptic global warming or nanny-state terms.
There’s been a lot of consolidation in the industry lately. I’m seeing dozens more companies who seem to be staking their claim to a single area of superior core competence, and are waiting for someone to buy them out.
Great to see the Holland pavilion in full swing. Lots of fresh ideas in the areas of collaboration, cloud management, and real-time monitoring.
Cloud’s inevitability is as strong as ever, even if most people’s day-to-day routine may not pick up on this. But one speaker said the amount of data on the Internet continues to double every five years or so, and I’m starting to hear the word “yottabyte” thrown around. The disconnect is that grand, abstract visions don’t help anyone get the milk delivered today. But we need to know that, even with a perpetual Moore’s Law, data storage and transmission does have a price (eg, 18 cents a gigabyte for bandwidth delivered by Rackspace), and as we start to think in terms of billions and trillions of gigabytes we simply must have the means to deal with this amount of data. Cloud computing is the one, true path.
Swivel Secure launches in North America
Swivel Secure, a provider of tokenless authentication technology that is capable of securing Microsoft Office 365 as well as other cloud and virtual private network (VPN) remote access solutions, announced its expansion into North America and the opening of its first office in Seattle, Washington.
Swivel Secure is a UK network security solutions provider that has pioneered the development of tokenless, multi-factor authentication technology. The Swivel authentication platform, first launched in 2003, is now used in over 35 countries by governments and global enterprises in a range of sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals and logistics as well as in hundreds of smaller businesses around the world.
Swivel’s strategic entry into North America marks the launch of an aggressive channel expansion programme targeting value added resellers (VARs) in the Washington State area and beyond.
“The market for tokenless authentication is growing rapidly as US businesses start to take cloud solutions seriously,” comments Fraser Thomas, VP International, Swivel Secure, who is spearheading the US expansion and VAR recruitment programme. “Given that Swivel is an approved tokenless provider for Microsoft Office 365, a Swivel partnership will enable VARs to offer a compelling remote access proposition for businesses that are migrating to the cloud, together with those that are employing more traditional VPN solutions.”
The unauthorised access of sensitive corporate data is one of the biggest fear factors holding businesses back from migrating to the cloud. Securing a corporate infrastructure with multi-factor authentication means that business owners can be assured that only permitted individuals will be able to gain access to their corporate systems.
B & L, Progress Software Partner to Deliver Cloud-Based ERP for Metalcasters
Progress Software Corporation announced that B&L Information Systems, developers of metalcasting-specific ERP software, has successfully transformed its Odyssey ERP offering to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model with the help of the Progress® OpenEdge® product.
B&L’s Odyssey software provides foundries and die casters with precise and timely information to balance customer satisfaction, operational efficiencies and profitability. With the help of Progress Software, B&L transformed its traditional ERP software to a SaaS model and doubled its close rate for the application. The Odyssey SaaS application offering outsold the traditional model by 300% in the first year and has seen a revenue increase of 880% since 2009. The SaaS model has enabled B&L to spend more time on site with customers instead of keeping up backend systems.
The Progress OpenEdge platform helps Progress’ Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) Partners build dynamic, business process-enabled applications for secure deployment across any platform, any mobile device and any Cloud. The OpenEdge platform has evolved over the last 30 years incorporating new technologies such as multi-tenancy, data encryption and auditing, security and compliance and user-interface flexibility.
“Progress has given B&L the resources and support needed to grow our business beyond expectations,” said Matthew Gacek, vice president of Business Development for B&L Information Systems. “A major benefit for us was the Progress SaaS Empowerment Program, which helped B&L develop a business plan, determine costs, and market our applications. Progress’ tools, market intelligence and expertise are unmatched by any other provider we’ve looked into.”
Gacek continues: “Progress has allowed us to do two things very well. First, they have given us a rock solid platform to work with which means no crashes or downtime – that’s critical in our industry. Generally, our customers are smaller, privately held firms. They don’t have resources for a formal IT department. The Progress OpenEdge product has empowered us to give them a product that does not require a vast amount of maintenance resources, which, in turn, allows us to help them improve their bottom line.”
“Progress has always strived to provide our partners with the information and services needed for market success,” said Kimberly King, vice president, Global Partners and Channels for Progress Software. “It’s great to see that our Empowerment Program played a key role in growing B&L’s business, and our OpenEdge platform continues to provide loyal partners, like B&L, with new opportunities to drive their business forward.”
Which Asia Pacific country knows the most about the cloud?
The third annual VMware Cloud Index survey has shone light on trends in Asia Pacific cloud computing, including which was the most knowledgeable nation.
The research surveyed 6,500 senior IT workers across the Asia Pacific region in 11 countries, including Australia, China, India, Japan and Korea.
Yet it appeared Singapore and Hong Kong were top of the class. 82% of respondents in Singapore claimed they had a strong knowledge of the cloud, with nine out of ten people in Hong Kong having a strong knowledge of virtualisation.
The key takeaways from the research included:
- Three quarters of those surveyed were either in the cloud or planning to go there
- Data privacy was the biggest barrier to cloud computing, ahead of security
- Most companies see cloud as having multiple benefits, with optimising existing IT management the most important
- 71% of respondents believe cloud computing has made their job less complex …
Facebook backs project to develop ARM servers
Telefonica makes cloud more accessible
Telefónica Digital is bolstering its global public cloud service with a toolkit that offers users greater control and provisioning of virtual servers.
Dubbed ‘Instant Servers’, which sounds like something created by adding a spoonful of granules to a mug of hot water, the service is based on technology from Joyent, which allows customers to configure the size of their virtual server in terms of RAM memory, CPU and hard drive as well as choose the Operating System (SmartOS, Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows Server, Fedora and Debian) the virtual server runs on.
Optimizing Controller-Based Wireless LANs with Good Old-Fashioned Autonomous Concepts. Well – Kinda.
Get your attention yet? This isn’t fresh news by any stretch, but there are some good concepts to observe when deploying today’s controller-based WLANs. We have known for years the benefits of the typical controller-based wireless networks. The intelligence that the controller has of the access points (APs) and the ability to dynamically change channels and power outputs is obviously fantastic. Depends on the manufacturer as to what they call it – Radio Resource Management or Adaptive Radio Management etc. Either way, it’s one of the main reasons to go to a controller-based solution.
On top of this we also can get Layer 3 roaming capabilities. A typical controller-based solution has each individual access point create a tunnel back to the controller. In a lot of cases this gives you the ability to roam between L3 subnets. Consider a scenario where you have a corporate campus – there very well could be a voice and a data VLAN per closet. If the access point didn’t tunnel back to a controller we would potentially drop sessions (unless you extended a wireless VLAN across campus which has its own implications) when you went from one AP on one subnet to another AP on a disparate one. Often, this may not be an issue with some standard TCP applications – but if we are talking about time-sensitive applications such as voice this could be disastrous. If we have a tunnel from each AP to the controller, we can now set up Layer 3 roaming capabilities without having to create a sprawling wireless VLAN. Voice connections stay up and all is good – right?
So what happens if we have a situation – let’s call it a remote office without a controller – where you want to keep local traffic local, but tunnel the rest of the traffic back to a controller at the Data Center. If we stick to the newer model, all traffic gets directed to the controller via the tunnel. Kind of seems pointless for me at a remote branch sending a print job back to the Data Center and then back to the remote office to the printer next to me right? Many companies now are allowing their controller-based solutions to “hairpin” local traffic to keep it local rather than waste valuable bandwidth. This hybrid or HREAP type approach does in fact give us the ability to glean the benefits of both the centralized intelligence of the controller, but also can minimize the bandwidth burden that these tunnels take up. If it’s meant for the Data Center so be it; if it’s meant to remain local we can do that too. If the remote office is large enough to warrant its own local controller then that is a different conversation – until next time.
We’ll be holding educational events in Boston, NYC, and Atlanta over the month of November. Should be a lot of good info and a great networking opportunity. Click for registration details.
NCR Introduces Cloud-based Managed IT Domain Service for Telecom Carriers
NCR Corporation today launched Managed IT Domain Services, a managed service for telecommunications carriers and technology manufacturers (OEMs), which enables support for remote monitoring and management of enterprise customers’ IT domains, through cloud-based IT infrastructures.
The total service supports applications, cloud, network/WAN, security, server, storage and virtualization. More than 3,000 products from many leading networking and IT vendors can be managed. Components include a network operations center, which will monitor, identify and resolve IT infrastructure irregularities, a service desk for end-to-end incident management and a self-service portal for customers to track the real-time status of their managed environment and view key performance indicators and other metrics.
“Many CIOs today are transitioning business functions into the cloud to realize cost-savings, increase productivity and reinvent business agility,” said Nadine Routhier, vice president, NCR Telecommunications and Technology. “We’re creating exceptional value for telecom and OEM’s companies by enabling them to quickly and cost-effectively scale to meet growing demand for cloud-based services, without making extensive capital investments.”
Sophisticated configuration management and analytics tools are also included in the service to maximize network availability and reduce on-site support costs, including remote restoration and updates to managed devices. NCR research shows that 98 percent of availability issues identified through the service can be resolved remotely, and resolution time can be reduced by up to 60 percent versus traditional on-site support. Network operational data is also continuously analyzed in order to provide proactive recommendations to further enhance availability and up-time, which is critical to the success of enterprise cloud computing initiatives.
Moab Cloud Suite 7.2 Speeds Cloud Deployment
Adaptive Computing today announced the release of Moab Cloud Suite 7.2. Now Moab Cloud Suite provides improved time to cloud deployment offering out-of-the-box integration with existing infrastructure, minimizing system upgrades by leveraging existing investments. It also enables IT departments to more easily meet the needs of different organizational groups by streamlining tasks with a new dashboard portal and automating budget allocation.
Moab facilitates the deployment of private clouds by optimizing existing infrastructure components to make the most of current investments. It integrates easily with virtualization, management and other cloud platforms, such as the new VMware Center connector (Moab Cloud Suite vCenter Connector), HP Cloud Services Automation Connector (HP CSA) and more (to be released soon).
Moab Cloud Suite vCenter Connector enables the metrics of virtualized resources to be utilized to drive Moab automation and optimization policies for the cloud environment. This extends the value of the customer’s existing VMware investments. Vendor lock-in is also avoided as other hypervisor and management tool metrics can also be leveraged for cloud management and policies through extensible Moab Web Services.
Moab Cloud Suite HP CSA Connector allows Moab’s patented intelligence engine policies to optimize service placement and performance while maximizing utilization as part of the HP CSA cloud solution. This connector is currently available through HP and HP partners.
The streamlined dashboard portal enables users and admins to be more productive by grouping the needed data views and management actions together for common tasks so they can be accomplished quicker and easier. Key subjects are listed with every relevant action in easy-to-navigate panes, and dashboard filters allowing multiple filtering options to speed common cloud requests and status tasks. In addition, dashboards now show more actionable data, summarized in a comprehensible at-a-glance format with improved data list views and one-click drill downs on almost any data item. These new dashboard features give admins aggregate and summarized data to provide a better overall picture of their current cloud conditions.
