In the first quarter of 2012, FEMA reported 12 natural disasters throughout the country, including tornadoes, flooding, mudslides and severe storms from Florida to Alaska. The threats to your data are limitless – natural disasters, fires, water damage, equipment theft and hardware failure to name just a few. In the event of a disaster, if you don’t have access to an offsite copy of your data, or if you are unable to replicate it, the chances are it will be gone forever.
Deciding on the Right Provider Should Be No Different Than Buying a Car
Many businesses are opting to move their data to the cloud, citing benefits in time savings/automation, cost, security and access; however, some SMBs still maintain reservations about keeping their valuable data offsite and beyond their control. A recent Information Week Report indicated that only 23 percent of business technology professionals use cloud services as part of their application and data recovery strategies. Many others are confused by the number of online cloud backup companies and “free storage” offerings that are flooding the market; while others are concerned about those data storage companies who have proven to be “fly-by-night” entities that are here today, gone tomorrow.
Netflix Chaos Monkeys: “If You Love Something Set It Free”
Netflix has released its Chaos Monkey AWS “test-by-failure” tool as open source for all to use. The tool seeks to improve the resilience if the Netflix AWS cloud by forcing failure.
“We have found that the best defense against major unexpected failures is to fail often. By frequently causing failures, we force our services to be built in a way that is more resilient. We are excited to make a long-awaited announcement today that will help others who embrace this approach.
We have written about our Simian Army in the past and we are now proud to announce that the source code for the founding member of the Simian Army, Chaos Monkey, is available to the community. Do you think your applications can handle a troop of mischievous monkeys loose in your infrastructure? Now you can find out.”
Read the announcement post.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: A Checklist for Cloud Service Providers
«We are Europe’s leading operator of carrier-neutral data centers, and it’s a demand-driven dynamic that we are seeing,» stated James Tyler, Director of Marketing & Communications at TelecityGroup, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Cloud Computing: Progress Introduces DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET R4.0
Progress Software Corporation on Monday introduced the new Progress DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET 4.0, the latest version of its suite of ADO.NET (ActiveX Data Objects for .NET) data providers that completely eliminates the need for database client libraries with a 100 percent managed, wire protocol architecture. This new release includes Microsoft Entity Framework support, Visual Studio LightSwitch support and expanded enterprise capabilities that enable developers to rapidly create, deploy and manage high-performance, mission-critical desktop and Cloud applications with ease.
As more .NET applications move to the Cloud, high performance and efficiency become even more important. The Progress DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET 4.0 data providers are a critical component to delivering on that goal, while significantly lowering operating costs for Cloud applications by using less memory and CPU cycles. The DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET 4.0 data providers deliver top performance, as well as significantly higher levels of security and authentication, reliability and failover, connection pool management and multi-database consistency not found in other drivers. This enables developers to create higher performing applications with greater uptime and better security.
Cloud Computing: Prospering in the Identity Economy
«We’re helping store all the wonderful identity and personal data about you for cloud providers,» said Andy Land, VP of Marketing at UnboundID, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Cloud Computing: A Dynamic Enterprise App Store in the Cloud
“UShareSoft has been progressing significantly since last year. We are providing a multi-cloud app store platform,” said Alban Richard, CEO of UShareSoft, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Private Cloud within the Public Cloud Architecture
“We’ve always been focused on Software as a Service. And Dimension Data, which was recently bought by NTT, has always been focused on on-premise cloud,” explained Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, a Dimension Data company, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Oracle Buys Xsigo
A week ago VMware said it was buying Nicira for $1.26 billion for its cloudy software-defined network virtualization.
Monday morning Oracle said it’s buying Xsigo Systems for its cloudy software-defined network virtualization.
Oracle’s not saying what it’s paying and it’s unclear how much funding the eight-year-old company took in from VCs like Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Greylock Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.
Like the Nicira acquisition, Xsigo in Oracle’s hands threatens Cisco and Juniper.
Xsigo, which has worked with Oracle in the past, is more established than the fledging Nicira. Xsigo’s stuff is supposed to simplify cloud infrastructure and operations by letting customers connect any server to any network and storage dynamically and flexibly, resulting in increased asset utilization and application performance while reducing cost.
Distributed Computing (Cloud) Services
“Distributed computing (cloud) services are proving to be more universal, more scalable, and more economical as a pay-per-use model,” observed Jerry Miller, Vice President of Technology at CDNetworks, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. Miller continued, “Many of the functions previously confined to private networks, such as WAN acceleration and high-security transactions, can be increasingly performed in the cloud.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?
Jerry Miller: Definitely agree. Even with cloud services, there is often a wealth of data available. Yet enterprises often don’t possess the resources or experience to analyze and take proper action when needed, often resulting in underserved regions or markets, underperforming sites or services, and/or lost revenue. As a service provider, CDNetworks helps ensure that this information is presented in an understandable, actionable manner and works with its customers to consult on improvements, so the content provider can get the analysis needed to find patterns and problem areas to better focus scarce resources. In addition we accelerate cloud applications and websites that contain the data, so companies can use resources in emerging technology hubs like India, China, and Russia to help extract meaningful information.
Progress Introduces DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET R4.0
Progress Software Corporation today introduced the new Progress DataDirect Connect® for ADO.NET 4.0, the latest version of its suite of ADO.NET (ActiveX Data Objects for .NET) data providers that eliminates the need for database client libraries with a managed, wire protocol architecture. This new release includes Microsoft Entity Framework support, Visual Studio LightSwitch support and expanded enterprise capabilities that enable developers to rapidly create, deploy and manage high-performance, mission-critical desktop and Cloud applications with ease.
Tatsuro Hayashi, Corporate Development Office Manager for MapQuest Corporation in Japan, noted: “Using the DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET 4.0 data provider, we can develop high performing, reliable ADO.NET applications that offer bulk load functionality, application failover, and top of the line security for our customers. Because managed code runs in the Common Language Runtime (CLR) environment, it reduces risks such as memory leaks and closes security holes that unmanaged code leaves exposed. This means our programmers and developers have secure, reliable and versatile deployment options available in either application or client-server environments. Additionally, our software developers and programmers can avoid the versioning headaches associated with other .NET providers as well as multiple versions of client libraries and databases used across our company.”
As more .NET applications move to the Cloud, high performance and efficiency become even more important. The Progress DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET 4.0 data providers are a critical component to delivering on that goal, while significantly lowering operating costs for Cloud applications by using less memory and CPU cycles. The DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET 4.0 data providers deliver top performance, as well as significantly higher levels of security and authentication, reliability and failover, connection pool management and multi-database consistency not found in other drivers. This enables developers to create higher performing applications with greater uptime and better security.
