In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Vlad Seliverstov, Chief of Advertising Services Operation at Yandex.ru, will explain how Yandex uses Nimbula Director to run a private cloud for development and testing. With Nimbula’s APIs for elastic setup and teardown of instances, they were able to parallelize the QA process for a 90% time savings. Using the self-service capabilities of Nimbula Director, they have reduced the time for a developer to get access to a sandbox from a couple of days down to minutes.
Vlad Seliverstov is Chief of Advertising Services Operation at Yandex.ru, which uses Nimbula Director to run a private cloud for development and testing.
Taking Advantage of the Advancements in Cloud Computing
“We’ll continue to see the long tail of legacy technology in use for years,” observed Brian Patrick Donaghy, CEO of Appcore, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. Donaghy continued, “New applications are being written today that are much more efficient, fast and cost-effective that take advantage of advancements in massive processing and scale out infrastructure.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?
Brian Patrick Donaghy: It’s the difference between wisdom and knowledge. Collecting, maintaining, and accessing large datasets is the prerequisite to then running analytical processes – or extracting the wisdom from the knowledge. Asking the right questions is the trick.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Interacting with a Cloud
From the command line to web APIs to dashboards, how you interact with your cloud shapes the potential it holds for you. Current industry trends favor arcane CLI tools, resource-oriented dashboards, and orchestration driven by hand-written recipes. How do average users accomplish anything in this paradigm? They copy-and-paste from Google to get their jobs done. We can all do so much better.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Gabriel Hurley, Senior Developer at Nebula, Inc., will cover the current state of cloud interaction and the potential of new interaction paradigms. Topics will cover cloud-scale workload-centric dashboards, real-time event-driven interactions, intelligent CLIs, and APIs that empower every level of cloud consumer, all in the context of modern distributed (and even federated) architectures. Come see where we are, where we’re going, and what currently stands in the way.
Arrival of Big Data Opens Up a New Range of Analytics
With Strata, IBM IOD, and Teradata Partners conferences all occurring this week, it’s not surprising that this is a big week for Hadoop-related announcements. The common thread of announcements is essentially, “We know that Hadoop is not known for performance, but we’re getting better at it, and we’re going to make it look more like SQL.” In essence, Hadoop and SQL worlds are converging, and you’re going to be able to perform interactive BI analytics on it.
The opportunity and challenge of Big Data from new platforms such as Hadoop is that it opens a new range of analytics. On one hand, Big Data analytics have updated and revived programmatic access to data, which happened to be the norm prior to the advent of SQL. There are plenty of scenarios where taking programmatic approaches are far more efficient, such as dealing with time series data or graph analysis to map many-to-many relationships.
Is the Way to the European Cloud Paved Mainly with Good Intentions?
At the end of last month the EU released its plans for «Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe». But although the document (s) – just like EU commissioner Kroes in this video – do a good job describing in non-technical terms what cloud is and why Europe should care about having a competitive cloud position, it kind of stops there.
Even though it defines three key actions – around Standards, Terms and Public Sector taking a lead role – most described actions consist of softer items such as «promoting trust by coordinating with stakeholders», «identifying best practices,» «promoting partnerships» and «investigating how to make use of other available instruments.» Now of course European cloud computing can benefit from funding reserved for other EU initiatives such as the Connecting Europe Facility and from side initiatives such as the «Opinion on Cloud Computing» published by the Article 29 working party that gives privacy-related contracting guidance, but in general the recent published plan seems to be more about what could and should be, than about what is or will be.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: NoSQL Polyglot Solutions for Big Data
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Brian Clark, Vice President, Field Services, at Objectivity, will review different use-cases and discuss the advantages and benefits of using distributed graph database technologies to more efficiently discover the connections within Big Data to enable real-time searches of multiple types of data across disparate data sources. He will also review the complementary aspect of distributed graph technology with existing and new architectures for improved ROI.
Brian Clark is Vice President, Field Services, at Objectivity, Inc. He has nearly 30 years of software and technology experience, and was one of the early architects of Objectivity/DB. Before joining Objectivity, he worked at Automation Technology Products, providing leading tools in the MCAD market. Prior to that, he was with Project Management Services at International Computers Limited, one of Europe’s leading computer companies at the time.
Mimecast Beefs up Email Archiving, Adds iPad Search App
Mimecast, a supplier of cloud-based email archiving, security and continuity for Microsoft Exchange, Hosted Exchange and Office 365, has revamped its cloud archiving capabilities, with end users now able to access their personal archive from their chosen email client or mobile device. Mimecast has also introduced file archiving and now provides users with the ability to search their archived documents from within Outlook, Mimecast Personal Portal (web), or iPad. The company’s new iPad app, Mimefiles, displays all of a user’s documents stored in email, as well as Box, Dropbox, SharePoint, network shares and home drives (My Documents).
Mimecast has also added tight integration between SharePoint and email, with users able to search their email archive from within SharePoint, or their SharePoint documents from Outlook.
“The archive is now so much more than just a dusty data store,” comments Grant Hodgkinson, Product Director, Unified Email Management, at Mimecast. “We see it as a highly available, highly secure, but most of all incredibly useful source of information for IT professionals and their end users. And not just for occasional eDiscovery cases but for day to day interactions. The Mimecast archive can now store more than just email, but perhaps more importantly we’re providing users with the tools to be able to find what they need, quickly, in ways that suit their personal preferences, whether they are iPad users or Outlook junkies. In short, archiving is not just about what goes in; it’s how useful it is when it comes out.”
The key elements of today’s announcement are:
Mimecast File Archive provides a solution for archiving files from SharePoint, Box, Dropbox, network shares and home drives, with a single point of eDiscovery and management that supports regulatory compliance needs.
Mimecast Services for Outlook Version 4 gives users full access to their entire archive history from within Outlook. Users can browse their historical email folders or use the archive search feature, which enables quicker decision-making and transforms responsiveness. They can also drag and drop emails to their inbox when browsing, or view, reply and forward messages returned by the archive search.
Mimecast Services for SharePoint is designed to allow users to search their email archive from within SharePoint.
Mimecast Personal Portal is a web mail portal that allows users to search emails and files in their personal archive, manage their permit/block lists and continue to send and receive email in the event of a mail server outage.
Mimefiles, which will be available from the Apple AppStore in November, is a custom-built iPad app that provides users with a unified view of all their files from Box, Dropbox, SharePoint, network file shares and email attachments. Users can also view the audit trail associated with each file – who emailed whom and when – and can preview the email that the file was associated with.
What Is Driving Cloud Computing?
“In some segments, the price of cloud computing will go up as providers offer higher-end solutions designed to cater to complex enterprise requirements,” observed John A. De Goes, CEO & Founder of Precog, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “However,” De Goes continued, “in most segments, and for any fixed set of features, the price of computing, bandwidth, storage will go down in inflation-adjusted dollars, concurrent with advances in hardware, software, and efficiency, all driven by competitive pressures.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?
John A. De Goes: Far too many companies pat themselves on the back for having terabytes or petabytes of data. But data has no intrinsic value, and maintaining the infrastructure necessary to capture and warehouse data has very real costs. Data by itself doesn’t give you any competitive advantage. It’s only if you act on that data that you can drive more revenue and secure competitive advantages.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Understanding Cloud Security for Your App
Many articles describe cloud security as a problem. But do you know how security affects you and your application in the cloud?
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Bryan D. Payne, Director of Security Research at Nebula, will open your eyes to the various security concerns in the cloud. Then he’ll go a step further and understand how to translate these concerns into a plan of action for using the cloud to meet your needs, safely. Along the way he’ll explore many of the cloud options that are available today, and how these should fit into your security thinking.
Is the road to the European cloud paved with good intentions?
At the end of last month the EU released its plans for “Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe”.
But although the document(s) – just like EU commissioner Kroes in this video – do a good job describing in non-technical terms what cloud is and why Europe should care about having a competitive cloud position, it kind of stops there.
Even though it defines three key actions – around Standards, Terms and Public Sector taking a lead role – most described actions consist of softer items such as “promoting trust by coordinating with stakeholders”, “identifying best practices”, ”promoting partnerships” and “investigating how to make use of other available instruments”.
Now of course European cloud computing can benefit from funding reserved for other EU initiatives such as the Connecting Europe Facility, and from side initiatives such as the “Opinion on Cloud Computing” published by the Article 29 working party that gives privacy-related contracting …