Our headline professional service engagement is Cloud Migration Management (CMM). The issues that the service needs to address were recently identified through an auditors analysis of the progress of the US Government’s Cloud First program. In the GAO report Progress Made but Future Cloud Computing Efforts Should be Better Planned they reported that despite the hype about […]
Big Money for Big Data
Big Data is the data too large, complex, and fast-moving for conventional information infrastructure to handle. There’s been a lot of buzz about investment in cutting edge Big Data solutions and start ups, and for good reason. Venture capital for Big Data is sizable and growing.
Data Analytics in the Cloud: Two Cool NoSQL ‘Big Data’ Options for the SMB
Some estimates suggest that by 2015 the digital universe will grow to 8 zettabytes of data (1 Zettabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). Much has been written in recent years about “Big Data” and the implications for Information management and data analytics.
The 50 Best Federal Technology Blogs
Fed Tech Magazine recently released their list of “50 Must-Read Federal Technology Blogs,” which included CTOvision.com. The list is a great resource, featuring the blogs of numerous government CIOs, CTOs, cybersecurity experts, and departments, as well as top federal news sources. I noticed that most of these blogs and experts also had a Twitter presence […]
This post by AlexOlesker was first published at CTOvision.com.
The Future of Cloud Computing: Part 1 – VDI is DOA
Innovations in streaming application code… rather than streaming pixels… will kill VDI before it even fully arrives.
From the start, the concept of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is flawed for most real-world applications and use-cases. The future application delivery method will instead use the server-side to deliver application functionality, data, and licensing on-demand to devices directly rather than just screen shots of the monitor output; enabling previously unattainable accomplishments like «Cloud-bursting» to become a reality.
Buttoned-Down IBM Gets Flashy
IBM is going to buy privately held high-performance flash memory house Texas Memory Systems (TMS).
It did not disclose the terms of the definitive agreement. The deal is expected to close later this year.
The Houston company has been around since 1978. It sells its solid-state solutions as the RamSan family of shared rack-mount systems and Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) cards. They’re supposed to improve performance and reduce server sprawl, power consumption, cooling and floor space requirements.
The purchase is a shift from IBM’s usual concentration on software.
Google’s Dremel is the Holy Grail of Big Data: Really Big, Really Fast, Really Simple
First Google created, and wrote papers on, Hadoop and MapReduce, which got reverse-engineered into the current state of the art for Big Data.
But Google has moved on to Dremel, and the rest of the world is slow in catching up.
With BigQuery Google offers a simple-to-user service that doesn’t sacrifice Big Data scale OR speed.
As Armando Fox, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in these sorts of data-center-sized software platforms. put it in a Wired article:
“This is unprecedented. Hadoop is the centerpiece of the “Big Data” movement, a widespread effort to build tools that can analyze extremely large amounts of information. But with today’s Big Data tools, there’s often a drawback. You can’t quite analyze the data with the speed and precision you expect from traditional data analysis or “business intelligence” tools. But with Dremel, Fox says, you can.
“They managed to combine large-scale analytics with the ability to really drill down into the data, and they’ve done it in a way that I wouldn’t have thought was possible,” he says. “The size of the data and the speed with which you can comfortably explore the data is really impressive. People have done Big Data systems before, but before Dremel, no one had really done a system that was that big and that fast.
“Usually, you have to do one or the other. The more you do one, the more you have to give up on the other. But with Dremel, they did both.”
Bull Services Facilitate Adoption of Open Source PostgreSQL
Bull HN Information Systems is rolling out IT support services with the launch of its MOVE IT (Modernize, Optimize, Virtualize and Economize Information Technology) campaign to showcase products and services that it recently announced and plans to announce in the future. These products and services help customers derive maximum value from their legacy IT investments and get the most out of their IT operations while opening enterprise data to the cloud and mobile devices.
Bull’s newest MOVE IT service offerings are PostgreSQL support subscriptions; database design and build assessments; database performance and tuning services; and forms and reports migration services. These service offerings support migration to PostgreSQL—recognized as the world’s most advanced open source database—enabling organizations to reduce costs and open enterprise data to the cloud and virtualized environments.
According to Bull’s Data Migration Business Unit Director Jim Ulrey, “MOVE IT services and software help free companies from high licensing and maintenance costs, and offer both dramatic operational efficiencies and the agility required to flourish in competitive business environments.
“We developed MOVE IT enterprise solutions including database migration services, software and our newest support services to meet the needs of IT departments that prefer to manage work internally, as well as those that prefer to outsource—whether due to skill sets, resources or project objectives,” concluded Ulrey.
Bull’s MOVE IT products and services work effectively standalone by providing solutions to specific challenges, and they’re also engineered to work together to provide enterprise IT clients with multiple benefits. From cost-saving database migrations from Oracle to flexible open source PostgreSQL, to LiberTP™ software to migrate transaction-processing applications, Bull’s solutions open enterprise data to modern environments that support the cloud, virtualized environments and mobile devices. Most importantly, Bull can help free companies from high licensing and maintenance costs, offer dramatic operational efficiencies and the agility required to flourish in competitive business environments.
Gamma announces partnership with City Lifeline to offer London colocation services
City Lifeline, the central London colocation data centre, has announced a strategic partnership with Gamma, a network communications provider. This new partnership will provide Gamma with first rate colocation services, which will in turn boost its reliability and recommendations among potential channel partners.
Working with City Lifeline, Gamma will deliver a broad range of voice, mobile and data services designed specifically to take to market through its channel partners. Gamma is the UK’s market leader in the provision and supply of SIP Trunking services to mid-market enterprises and hosted voice and application service providers. SIP Trunking and the centralisation of telephone numbers is enabling the hosting of voice and data services previously handled by PBXs in colocation centres.
Adding Gamma SIP Trunking services to a colocation infrastructure will add cost effective, easy to deploy voice services that will enable the support of its customers that work across more than one location. Further, this will allow the company to drive more colocation space sales.
Alan Mackie, Head of SIP Services at Gamma, said: “Thanks to the help of City Lifeline, we can take our market leading services to the next level.The trend for SIP Trunking is accelerating at a rapid rate, so a service that allows us to save money and improve service really is invaluable. As a company we are dedicated to innovation and efficiency, which is why we chose to partner with a company like City Lifeline, which shares these values so openly.”
Roger Keenan, managing director at City Lifeline, explains: “We are thrilled to partner with Gamma, as we can both benefit from one another’s expertise, locations and connectivity. This new relationship enhances both our company’s portfolio of product offerings and will lead to further business opportunities for us both. Most importantly, this new relationship is helping to boost the productivity of two ambitious UK businesses – which shows our economy is really getting back on track.”
Cloud Storage: Looking Beyond The Bottom Line
Cost reduction is often perceived as the most compelling adoption driver for new technologies. However, in many cases, looking beyond bottom line benefits often uncovers additional intrinsic value.
Such is the case for cloud storage. While frequently touted benefits of cloud storage include cost savings, maintenance reduction and better utilization of IT resources, there is actually more to the value equation than meets the eye.