Two types of cloud infrastructure have emerged to clearly differentiate the choices enterprises face in their cloud migration strategies: enterprise virtualization clouds versus elastic cloud infrastructure. The former defines infrastructure built to support legacy enterprise applications like those built on SAP and Oracle. The canonical example is a vSphere stack. The second cloud category – elastic cloud – defines infrastructure built to support new, dynamic applications like mobile, gaming, Big Data, and PaaS. The canonical example is public cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Troy Angrignon, Vice President of Sales & Partnering at Cloudscaling, will explain how enterprise CIOs are increasingly faced with the need to build and support new, dynamic apps built on REST-ful APIs under the devops model. Unfortunately, new apps are ill-suited to their enterprise virtualization stacks. Running them on public clouds like AWS works technically, but this presents regulatory, availability and proprietary issues. CIOs are asking for an elastic cloud infrastructure that’s architecturally and behaviorally consistent with AWS, but they want it in their data center.
Is Your Security Initiative “One Inch into a Mile”?
IT spends untold millions of dollars, thousands of man hours for technology designed to solve solutions, but because of complexity, budget shortfalls, lack of expertise or a myriad of other gremlins, too many initiatives never realize their potential. That was before cloud computing and more specifically, cloud based security provided a flexible option that eliminates Cap Ex and promotes ROI (through immediate realization of functionality) from Day One.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Keys to Service Provider Success
Cordys helps Cloud Service Provider customers deliver differentiated products, services and experiences in an agile and flexible framework.
In their session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Tom Katayama, Sr. Solutions Architect at Cordys, and Glenn Donovan, Regional Director at Cordys, will describe via case study examples, how various Cloud Service Provider business models can be facilitated via this approach. Topics to be discussed include:
Vendor agnostic and unified XaaS provisioning and cloud orchestration
Service aggregation & value add business applications
Cloud broker enablement
Business friendly self-service interaction
Strategy Analytics: SMBs Run on Business Clouds
Keep it simple, scalable and secure is the approach of small and medium businesses in adopting business clouds according to the Strategy Analytics Business Cloud Strategies (BCS) service report, “SMBs Run on Business Clouds According to 2012 Global Survey.” It describes the extent to which SMBs have embraced public clouds for applications more than any other cloud option.
Unlike larger organizations that have invested in both public and private clouds for applications and infrastructure, SMBs prefer public Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings that are easy to use, manage and integrate with other infrastructure and applications. Security remains a concern shared with larger firms.
“Many SMBs have moved nearly all of the applications that they can to public SaaS clouds,” commented Mark Levitt, Director of Business Cloud Strategies research at Strategy Analytics. “In the next 12-24 months, SMBs will explore how to move their remaining applications to run on public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds.”
“To compete with larger competitors, SMBs recognize that they must tap the vast resources available in business clouds to act nimbly and quickly in response to business and market needs,” said Andrew Brown, Director of Enterprise Research at Strategy Analytics.
Global Cloud Index: Traffic to Grow Sixfold by 2016
In the second annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2011-2016), Cisco forecasts global data center traffic to grow fourfold and reach a total of 6.6 zettabytes annually by 2016. The company also predicts global cloud traffic, the fastest-growing component of data center traffic, to grow sixfold – a 44 percent combined annual growth rate (CAGR) – from 683 exabytes of annual traffic in 2011 to 4.3 zettabytes by 2016.
For the period 2011-2016, Cisco forecasts that roughly 76 percent of data center traffic will stay within the data center and will be largely generated by storage, production and development data. An additional 7 percent of data center traffic will be generated between data centers, primarily driven by data replication and software/system updates.
The remaining 17 percent of data center traffic will be fueled by end users accessing clouds for Web surfing, emailing and video streaming.
From a regional perspective, the Cisco Global Cloud Index predicts that through 2016, the Middle East and Africa will have the highest cloud traffic growth rate, while the Asia Pacific region will process the most cloud workloads, followed by North America.
Beyond Cloud Computing: ERP Helps to Land Curiosity Rover on Mars
SYSPRO, a devoper of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for on-premise and cloud-based utilization, announced today that Windings, a manufacturer of custom electric motor and generator components and a user of SYSPRO ERP since 1998, is the producer of a key component of the sky crane’s braking system that safely lowered Curiosity to the Red Planet for the rover’s explanatory journey of the Mars landscape.
While smaller rovers of past Mars mission have utilized airbag landing systems, the size of Curiosity necessitated the utilization of a special landing system to provide a soft landing for the huge vehicle.
According to Windings President and CEO Jerry Kauffman, this was not the first time that a Windings-built component has been instrumental in assisting in the exploration of planets, as well as the earth’s nearest neighbor, the moon. However, he did indicate that the Curiosity mission is the first time a Windings component has been utilized in the braking system of a device to safely land a large, mobile instrument package on the surface of a planet.
Windings, which is based in New Ulm, MN, has utilized SYSPRO Enterprise Resource Planning software since 1998. Prior to that time, Windings had been utilizing an IBM System 36, which lacked the flexibility to deal with the mixed-mode manufacturing operations utilized by Windings to produce both standard and custom electromagnetic motors, generators and sub-assemblies for numerous industrial uses, including factory automation, renewable energy, automotive, medical, defense and aerospace.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Open Cloud at PayPal
PayPal is the faster, safer way to pay and get paid online, via mobile devices and in store. The service allows people to send money without sharing financial information, with the flexibility to pay using their account balances, bank accounts, credit cards or promotional financing. With more than 113 million active accounts in 190 markets and 25 currencies around the world, PayPal enables global commerce. PayPal is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. and its international headquarters is located in Singapore.
As a technology leader, PayPal leverages open standards including the rapid pace of cloud innovation evolving from the OpenStack ecosystem. Innovations developed by PayPal’s technologists are given back to the community for the betterment of open clouds everywhere.
ComputeNext to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that ComputeNext will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
ComputeNext is building the next generation of compute power through the launch and operation of a federated cloud marketplace, leveraging true multi-cloud connectors, to enable consumers and providers of cloud services to effectively participate in the search, purchase, and utilization of the most efficient cloud resources available.
Big Data Security for Apache Hadoop
Big Data takes center stage today at the Strata Conference & Hadoop World in New York, the world’s largest gathering of the Apache Hadoop™ community. A key conversation topic will be how organizations can improve data security for Hadoop and the applications that run on the platform. As you know, Hadoop and similar data stores hold a lot of promise for organizations to finally gain some value out of the immense amount of data they’re capturing. But HDFS, Hive and other nascent NoSQL technologies were not necessarily designed with comprehensive security in mind. Often what happens as big data projects grow is sensitive data like HIPAA data, PII and financial records get captured and stored. It’s important this data remains secure at rest.
I polled my fellow co-workers at Gazzang last week, and asked them to come up with a top ten list for securing Apache Hadoop. Here’s what they delivered. Enjoy:
Cloud Computing: MapR Takes a Run at Taming HBase
MapR Technologies worked for months to make the elephantine curmudgeon known as Hadoop less snappy and irascible.
It dragged it out of the elephant house, scrubbed its hands and face, gave it some manners, told it which fork to use, slicked down its hair, polished its shoes and sent it out to live in civil society.
Then, beguiled by the fact that 45% of Hadoop shops also use HBase, it turned its hand to taming the equally irritable and hard-to-manage database that lets people run NoSQL queries against Hadoop data. This week it put its civilizing influence into public beta. It calls the widgetry M7.
MapR says it’s given HBase enterprise-grade reliability and performance and put Hadoop and NoSQL capabilities together on the same platform capable of Big Data operations ranging from batch analytics to real-time analytics.