In the past few weeks I visited several Cloud and Big Data conferences that provided me with a lot of insight. Some people only consider the technology side of Big Data technologies like Hadoop or Cassandra. The real driver however is a different one. Business analysts have discovered Big Data technologies as a way to leverage tons of existing data and ask questions about customer behavior and all sorts relationships to drive business strategy. By doing that they are pushing their IT departments to run ever bigger Hadoop environments and ever faster real-time systems.
What’s interesting from a technical side is that ad-hoc analytics on existing data is allowed to take some time. However ad-hoc implies people waiting for an answer, meaning we are talking about minutes and not hours. Another interesting insight is that Hadoop environments are never static or standalone. Most companies take in new data on a continuous basis via technologies like flume. This means Hadoop may reduce jobs needed to be able to keep up with the data flow, either by adding more hardware or by optimizing them.
There are multiple drivers to Big Data (actually there are a lot) but the two most important ones are these: Analytics and Technical Need for Speed. Let’s look at some of those and the resulting takeaways.
Zadara Storage to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that Zadara Storage, a provider of enterprise-class storage for the cloud, 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.
Zadara Storage offers enterprise-class storage for the cloud. With Zadara Storage, cloud storage leapfrogs ahead to provide cloud servers with high-performance, fully configurable, highly available, fully private, tiered storage. By combining the best of enterprise storage with the best of cloud storage, Zadara Storage takes the cloud to the next level enabling enterprises to migrate mission-critical applications to the cloud.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: High Performance Computing in the Cloud
The rapid advancements in cloud computing technology enable unlimited access to computing power for anyone with an Internet connection. Leveraging this utility enables high-performance computing workloads to maximize the processing potential of a cloud. Nevertheless, the costs can be prohibitive.
In their session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Scott Houston, CEO and founder of GreenButton, joins Dell cloud evangelist Stephen Spector to discuss how companies of all sizes and budgets can best leverage cloud-based high performance computing without breaking the bank. They will also demonstrate the simplicity and cost-efficient methodology for running a rendering workload in the cloud in a matter of minutes instead of hours.
The Building Is the Computer: The Big Data Era Has Arrived
In the past, we ran small data on expensive big boxes, and it worked fine. For example, most database applications were sized in gigabytes or a few terabytes. Today, we’re moving to a world of Big Data measured in petabytes, running on lots of inexpensive small boxes. Data volumes are growing at 50 percent per year worldwide and at more than 100 percent compounded annually in many companies. This growth presents a fundamentally different computer science problem, and it requires a redesign of the way we build and operate data centers.
Simply put, rapid data growth is outstripping legacy IT designs, and the new world is all about distributed systems: commodity hardware, scale-out design, open standards, Ethernet, programmability, automation and self-service. The problem: your favorite large IT vendors don’t have products that look like this, and their pace of innovation is too slow to catch up to the need.
Here Comes Rackspace & Amazon’s Latest Rival
LeaseWeb, a privately held Dutch-based hosting provider, is setting up in the US with the idea of competing against Rackspace, Amazon and Softlayer. It says it’ll be cheaper.
The company is one of the largest hosting providers in Europe. OCOM, its parent company, is one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the Netherlands. It offers dedicated servers, colocation, cloud hosting, content delivery (CDN) and hybrid solutions.
LeaseWeb has hired William Schrader as CEO of its USA unit. Schrader was co-founder of the world’s first commercial ISP, PSINet, which dominated the market in the 1990s and was good for $16 billion at its peak, serving a reported 60% of the Fortune 500 in 30 countries. He previously had an advisory role at AIS Network, the managed, cloud and applications hosting provider.
Cloud Computing: A New Wave of Innovation in Infrastructure Software
“People will still be predicting the end of middleware ten years from now!” stated Cedric Thomas, CEO of OW2, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “The Internet has fostered the use of simple, robust protocols,” Thomas continued. “That middleware we used to know, when information systems were organized in silos is no longer center stage.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Why in your view is open source so important to the future of infrastructure?
Cedric Thomas: The infrastructure is typically what is shared by different users, different applications, different information systems, different companies. People want an infrastructure that is generic, standard, robust and scalable; an infrastructure that they can trust and that they can share. From that perspective, open source is the right model: users, and the economy in general, are much more efficient with shared open source software than with many proprietary vendors. Open source maximizes the network effects in the writing, the testing, the debugging and the support of code and delivers infrastructure software that is generally more reliable.
Study: Big Data, Cloud will Transform City Government
Around the world, city leaders face the challenge of delivering economic growth while meeting sustainability targets and rising expectations about the quality of municipal services, often in the face of drastic budget reductions. This is forcing many city leaders to improve efficiency and drive further innovation in the creation and delivery of services. According to a recent report from Pike Research, a part of Navigant’s Energy Practice, new platforms for communication, data sharing, and application development – particularly cloud computing and data analytics – will play a key role in this transformation.
Cumulative investment in smart government technology between 2011 and 2017 will be almost $4.8 billion, the report finds. Annual investment in smart government technologies in North America alone will surpass $1 billion in 2017, and annual investment in cloud services for smart cities will reach nearly $1.4 billion worldwide by 2017.
“Cloud-based computing, in particular, offers new options for cities that reduces capital expenditure, provides access to new skills, and reduces time-to-deployment of new solutions,” says research director Eric Woods. “Cloud-based systems also enable cities to take advantage of the huge amounts of operational data they collect to improve efficiency and develop new services.”
City leaders are also looking at investment in technology as a means of spurring economic growth. This includes a range of strategies: making the city a center of cleantech development and innovation (e.g., Denver, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam); creating new types of digital commerce and development (e.g., New York and Manchester); being at the leading edge of technology adoption (e.g., Barcelona and Friedrichshafen); becoming an exporter of technology (e.g., Seoul); or retaining or establishing a position as a regional trading hub (e.g., Singapore and Songdo). Each of these approaches, the study concludes, requires a vision of where the city is heading, an investment in infrastructure, and a commitment to innovation.
Pike Research’s report, “Smart Government Technologies”, analyzes the global market opportunity for smart government technologies. It assesses the business drivers, market forces, and technology trends that are transforming the use of information and communication technology and related technologies in smart cities and communities. The study forecasts the size and growth of the market for smart government technologies through 2017, and it also forecasts the growth in smart government data analytics and cloud-based services between 2011 and 2017. The report includes profiles of major smart government initiatives around the world and also examines the strategies of key players in the smart government market including government agencies, IT companies, telcos, and infrastructure providers. An Executive Summary of the report is available for free download on the firm’s website.
The Trick with Big Data Is Context, Context, Context
OpTier, which has a handsome collection of customers with some very impressive names, quotes a Gartner guesstimate that 85% of the Fortune 500 won’t be able to exploit Big Data for competitive advantage until the other side of 2015. Hmmm, and this is 2012. “Houston, we’ve got a problem.”
OpTier says the way to make sense of it all is to track and analyze it in context and not leave a factoid here and a factoid there in separate silos so you don’t know what the heck you’re looking at unless you invest the time and energy running down all the missing pieces of the puzzle.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Safe Cloud Applications: Why’s Nirvana So Hard?
Cloud-delivered applications are often perceived as riskier than applications delivered on premises. Why is this still the perception, and how will the industry overcome these concerns?
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Jon Matsuo, VP Emerging Products & Technologies at Symantec, will describe what is needed to realize a truly safe cloud service and illustrate how an all-new cloud service from Symantec is delivering a safe experience for consumers and businesses. Hear the CIO from a major business bank discuss safe cloud applications.
Oracle Revenues Light on Dim Sun; Firm Going IaaS
Oracle turned in its fiscal Q1 scorecard Thursday when the market closed and said earnings were up 11% to $2 billion (41 cents a share) on revenues down 2% to $8.2 billion. Wall Street expected $8.4 billion
New software licenses and cloud software subscriptions revenues were up 5% to $1.6 billion, none of it due to a large deal. The cloud portion, which it broke out for the first time, amounted to $222 million mostly in the US and Asia-Pac. Software license updates and product support revenues were up 3% to $4.1 billion.
Hardware, however, plummeted 24% to $779 million.