Need to scale your data tier? The foundation of every application is the database layer, and today application architects have more choices than ever. With these choices come new questions: Which database technology is best for your application? How can your application take advantage of Big Data technology? Can you run your relational database at Big Data scale? What does it take to implement a comprehensive data infrastructure, including your core database, incorporating SQL, No SQL and Big Data platforms?
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Cory Isaacson, CEO/CTO of CodeFutures Corporation, will answer these questions and more. You will learn exactly what it takes to scale your data tier, and how to keep it reliable – despite the challenges presented in Cloud environments. He will also provide a quick review of the primary types of database platforms, enabling you to choose the best technology for your application challenges. He will close with a high volume social application/gaming case study, showing you exactly what it takes to run a high-volume, multi-terabyte database infrastructure in the cloud.
Monitis and M3 at Velocity 2012
Velocity 2012 Last week I was honored to be invited to the infamous Velocity 2012 conference in Santa Clara California, hosted by O’Reilly. Monitis was one of the silver sponsors. It was a great opportunity for me to meet the wonderful team I’ve been working with for the last year.
SpringBoard V5.5 Makes the Cloud More Efficient for Project Managers
LoadSpring Solutions, a provider of Project Management (PM) hosting and software, is introducing a new version of their SpringBoard cloud portal.
SpringBoard is a user-friendly control console that enables easy access to PM software and information that is hosted within LoadSpring’s cloud infrastructure. It connects project teams through any computer or mobile device worldwide.
The new SpringBoard 5.5 retains the same familiar look and feel as previous versions, but with improved tools and features that afford more functionality, speed and efficiency.
Launched on July 9th, these improvements will deliver broader enterprise access and greater data control, while helping users get more done in less time and with less effort.
According to Eric Leighton, LoadSpring’s founder and CEO, “Our enhanced control console will serve as a gateway to software resources and core LoadSpring services,” adding that, “The new features will further allow our enterprise-level customers to be more productive and efficient. SpringBoard 5.5 will even link users to our new LoadSpring Academy, transforming the way people are trained to maximize their use of new software.”
The upgraded portal is part of LoadSpring’s continuing pursuit of refinements that improve the customer experience and help them realize a quicker return on investment faster.
SpringBoard 5.5 is based on strengths that users value most in previous versions, such as:
- Easy application and data access, anywhere, on any device
- Software deployment in days, not weeks or months
- Simple user scaling, both up and down
- Fast global application upgrades and version changes
- Safe, effortless migration of large amounts of data
- Trouble-free, corporate-wide ID management
- Disaster recovery with more Data Rescue options than ever
- Enterprise-level security, support and service
Total Defense Acquires iSheriff
Total Defense, Inc., provider of solutions to combat the growing threat of cybercrime, today announced the company has acquired iSheriff. Together, the companies will offer “one of the most robust cloud security solutions on the market.”
“The days of employees safely accessing the internet from behind a corporate firewall are increasingly history for modern businesses. Today’s workforce is increasingly mobile, connecting through a broad array of devices and adopting cloud services at an accelerating pace. This reality requires a new approach to security,” said Paul Lipman, CEO at Total Defense. “A truly effective security solution requires a multi-layered approach. The cloud enables companies to very easily scale and deploy a powerful additional layer of security that is specifically tailored to today’s ‘de-perimeterized’ environments. As the security industry transitions, our acquisition of iSheriff puts us at the forefront of Internet security firms, by providing customers solid, best of breed, integrated security that’s managed through the cloud. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to truly make an impact and change the dynamic of the security market,” added Lipman.
Recently, Total Defense announced its first cloud product, Total Defense Cloud Security, an integrated cloud based SaaS (Security as a Service) solution for Web and email protection. The new offering provides a powerful and versatile Web and email security platform that protects users anytime and anywhere. This game changing solution provides a comprehensive additional layer of security that enhances the company’s existing endpoint solutions, giving Total Defense the advantage of a global cloud for real time malware protection across multiple platforms.
Oscar Marquez, CEO & Director of the Board of iSheriff, commented, “I have shared a vision for transforming the way businesses consume internet security with Paul Lipman for some time. Becoming part of Total Defense creates an ideal synergy. Total Defense’s large base of customers and extensive network of global partners will quickly accelerate the growth of our cloud offerings giving Total Defense a multi-tenant solution to provision and manage their customers, partners and OEM providers. This coupled with our global cloud infrastructure and cloud security expertise and Total Defense’s complete line of internet security solutions make a formidable company even stronger.”
For more information about Total Defense and its products, please visit: www.totaldefense.com.
Peer 1 Hosting to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that PEER 1 Hosting, a leading provider of IT infrastructure, 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.
PEER 1 Hosting is one of the world’s leading IT hosting providers. The company is built on two obsessions: Ping & People. Ping represents its commitment to best-in-breed technology, founded on a high performance 10Gbps FastFiber Network™ connected by 18 state-of-the-art datacenters, 22 points-of-presence and 10 colocation facilities throughout North America and Europe. People represents its commitment to delivering outstanding customer service to its more than 12,000 customers worldwide, backed by a 100 percent uptime guarantee and 24x7x365 FirstCall Support™. Info-Tech Research Group recently named PEER 1 Hosting as a «Champion» in its Canadian colocation and managed services Vendor Landscape report, recognizing the company’s strength in product offerings and enterprise strategy in the global IT marketplace. PEER 1 Hosting’s portfolio includes Managed Hosting, Dedicated Servers, Colocation and Cloud Services. Founded in 1999, the company is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with European operations headquartered in Southampton, UK. PEER 1 Hosting shares are traded on the TSX under the symbol PIX.
Why Use a Cloud-Based Distributed File System?
Distributed File System (DFS) in the context of Microsoft Windows is a very familiar feature for Windows Server administrators. As a summary, it can organize many distributed SMB file shares into a single DFS namespace (DFS root), providing location
An Introduction to Terracotta’s Enterprise IT Optimization Capabilities
Terracotta offers data optimization technologies that take current IT capabilities and enable scalability, availability and performance. They offer services, support software and solutions such as BigMemory, which stores “big data” in machine memory for ultra-fast access, Enterprise Ehcache, which plugs into enterprise applications and expedites integration and high-performance scalability, and Quartz Scheduler provides simple and flexible job execution from within execution code.
While Big Data is clearly more than a just a buzzword, our data is exploding at an exponential pace, there is a need for solutions that manage big data in all forms. Terracotta offers the ability to store big data in memory (even Terabytes), providing faster access for applications. By keeping big data close, and local, applications can run more smoothly and incur tenfold performance gains.
Top Five Pitfalls to Avoid When Selling the Cloud
As the organizations involved in traditional sales of shrink-wrapped software enter the Cloud business, they face a challenge dealing with the new paradigm. While the best practices of selling do not change much, they need to get comfortable pitching, positioning and selling the new ‘anything as a service’ model. Based on my experience, I am […]
Are Hadoop’s Days Numbered?
Interesting article at GigaOm: http://bit.ly/OINpfr I won’t repeat the main points – but basically it says that since Hadoop is disk/ETL/batch based it won’t fit for real time processing of frequently changing data. Author correctly…
Amazon Web Services and the NetFlix Fix?
I received the following note from Amazon Web Services (AWS) about an enhancement to their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service that can be seen by some as an enhancement to service or perhaps by others after last weeks outages, a fix or addressing a gap in their services. Note for those not aware, you can view current AWS service status portal here.
The following is the note I received from AWS.
Announcing Multiple IP Addresses for Amazon EC2 Instances in Amazon VPC
Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,
We are excited to introduce multiple IP addresses for Amazon EC2 instances in Amazon VPC. Instances in a VPC can be assigned one or more private IP addresses, each of which can be associated with its own Elastic IP address. With this feature you can host multiple websites, including SSL websites and certificates, on a single instance where each site has its own IP address. Private IP addresses and their associated Elastic IP addresses can be moved to other network interfaces or instances, assisting with application portability across instances.
The number of IP addresses that you can assign varies by instance type. Small instances can accommodate up to 8 IP addresses (across 2 elastic network interfaces) whereas High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large and Cluster Computer Eight Extra Large instances can be assigned up to 240 IP addresses (across 8 elastic network interfaces). For more information about IP address and elastic network interface limits, go to Instance Families and Types in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.
You can have one Elastic IP (EIP) address associated with a running instance at no charge. If you associate additional EIPs with that instance, you will be charged $0.005/hour for each additional EIP associated with that instance per hour on a pro rata basis.
With this release we are also lowering the charge for EIP addresses not associated with running instances, from $0.01 per hour to $0.005 per hour on a pro rata basis. This price reduction is applicable to EIP addresses in both Amazon EC2 and Amazon VPC and will be applied to EIP charges incurred since July 1, 2012.
To learn more about multiple IP addresses, visit the Amazon VPC User Guide. For more information about pricing for additional Elastic IP addresses on an instance, please see Amazon EC2 Pricing.
Sincerely,
The Amazon EC2 Team
We hope you enjoyed receiving this message. If you wish to remove yourself from receiving future product announcements and the monthly AWS Newsletter, please update your communication preferences.
Amazon Web Services LLC is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon.com is a registered trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. This message produced and distributed by Amazon Web Services, LLC, 410 Terry Ave. North, Seattle, WA 98109-5210.
End of AWS message
Either way you look at it, AWS (disclosure I’m a paying EC2 and S3 customer) is taking responsibility on their part to do what is needed to enable a resilient, flexible, scalable data infrastructure. What I mean by that is that protecting data and access to it in cloud environments is a shared responsibility including discussing what went wrong, how to fix and prevent it, as well as communicating best practices. That is both the provider or service along with those who are using those capabilities have to take some ownership and responsibility on how they get used.
For example, last week a major thunderstorms rolled across the U.S. causing large-scale power outages along the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and in particular in the Virginia area where one of Amazons availability zones (US East-1) has data centers located. Keep in mind that Amazon availability zones are made up of a collection of different physical data centers to cut or decrease chances of a single point of failure. However on June 30, 2012 during the major storms on the East coast of the U.S. something did go wrong, and as is usually the case, a chain of events resulted in or near a disaster (you can read the AWS post-mortem here).
The result is that AWS based out of the Virginia availability zone were knocked off line for a period which impacted EC2, Elastic Block Storage (EBS), Relational Database Service (RDS) and Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) capabilities for that zone. This is not the first time that the Virginia availability zone has been affected having met a disruption about a year ago. What was different about this most recent outage is that a year ago one of the marquee AWS customers NetFlix was not affected during that outage due to how they use multiple availability zones for HA. In last weeks AWS outage NetFlix customers or services were affected however not due to loss of data or systems, rather, loss of access (which to a user or consumer is the same thing). The loss of access was due to failure of elastic load balancing not being able to allow users access to other availability zones.
Consequently, if you choose to read between the lines on the above email note I received from AWS, you can either look at the new service capabilities as an enhancement, or AWS learning and improving their capabilities. Also reading between the lines you can see how some environments such as NetFlix take responsibility in how they use cloud services designing for availability, resiliency and scale with stability as opposed to simply using as a cost cutting tool.
Thus when both the provider and consumer take some responsibility for ensuring data protection and accessibility to services, there is less of a chance of service disruptions. Likewise when both parties learn from incidents or mistakes or leverage experiences, it makes for a more robust solution on a go forward basis. For those who have been around the block (or file) a few times thinking that clouds are not reliable or still immature you may have a point however think back to when your favorite or preferred platform (e.g. Mainframe, Mini, PC, client-server, iProduct, Web or other) initially appeared and teething problems or associated headaches.
IMHO AWS along with other vendors or service providers who take responsibility to publish post-mortem’s of incidents, find and fix issues, address and enhance capabilities is part of the solution for laying the groundwork for the future vs. simply playing to a near term trend theme. Likewise vendors and service providers who are reaching out and helping to educate and get their customers to take some responsibility in how they can use services for removing complexity (and cost) to enhance services as opposed to simply cutting cost and introducing risk will do better over the long run.
As I discuss in my book Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), do not be scared of clouds, however be ready, do your homework, learn and understand what needs to be done or done differently. This means taking a shared responsibility one that the service provider should also be taking with you not to mention identifying new best practices, tools to be used along with conducting proof of concepts (POCs) to learn what to do and what not to do.
Some related information:
Only you can prevent cloud data loss
The blame game: Does cloud storage result in data loss?
Cloud conversations: Loss of data access vs. data loss
Clouds are like Electricity: Dont be Scared
AWS (Amazon) storage gateway, first, second and third impressions
Poll: What Do You Think of IT Clouds? (Cast your vote and see results)
Ok, nuff said for now.
Cheers Gs
Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)
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