Compuware Corporation on Tuesday launched SpeedoftheWeb.org, a new free online cloud service that helps web application and site owners increase the speed of their most important web properties. This cloud service enables organizations to compare the speed of their website’s performance against leading competitor sites.
SpeedoftheWeb is available here.
As modern application delivery continues to add complexity at the edge of the Internet, speed is one of the most important factors for improving end-user experience on the web. Studies have shown that improving website performance can lead to increased revenues and reduced operating costs.
Subscribe to Enterprise Storage via the Cloud
About a dozen years ago, the storage utility model was a novel concept. The idea was that businesses could literally plug applications into enterprise storage, enabling them to outsource administration and begin paying on a monthly usage basis. While the concept was attractive, unfortunately, many of the storage service providers (SSPs) who sprouted back then couldn’t quite perfect the model. Fast forward to today. Over the past 5 years, cloud storage providers (CSPs) have successfully made the delivery of on-demand data storage to the premises a reality, with a pay-as-go model backed by huge economies of scale.
2012 Future of Cloud Computing Survey Exposes Hottest Trends in Cloud
North Bridge Venture Partners has announced the results of its second annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey. Supported by 39 industry collaborators spanning established leaders, emerging, fast-growth companies, and startups – the 2012 survey captures current industry perceptions, sentiments and emerging trends in cloud computing. This year’s collaborators include companies such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, and Glasshouse. A total of 785 respondents spanning industry experts, users and vendors participated in the survey. Respondents were asked about a wide range of key issues impacting cloud computing, including drivers for cloud computing, inhibitors, best practices, sourcing, total cost of ownership (TCO), cloud’s impact on multiple business sectors, and emerging cloud technologies. The survey provides many insights into the adoption of cloud computing, including the cloud configurations and applications that are forming around specific business needs including Big Data, business continuity, collaboration and storage.
CDH: The Standard for Hadoop in the Enterprise Just Got Better
In June Cloudera announced the general availability of CDH4 and Cloudera Manager 4. These releases are significant milestones for the Big Data community, and are also important to any organization which has yet to being their Big Data journey. CDH4 and Cloudera Manager 4 make it far easier to begin projects the right way.
Both CDH4 and Cloudera Manager 4 are full of new features. CDH4 has more security features. Cloudera Manager makes it easy to manage and audit clusters of systems doing Big Data work.
Here is a more technical restatement of that: CDH4 includes high availability for the filesystem, an ability to support multiple namespaces, HBase table and column level security, improved performance, HBase replication, and greatly improved usability and browser support for the web interface (Hue). Cloudera Manager 4 includes new abilities to manage multiple clusters and multiple versions, automation for high availability and MapReduce2, multi-namespace support, cluster-wide heatmaps, host monitoring and automated client configurations. There are many other features which will enhance capabilities for those seeking to built applications on top of CDH, which is important for the large and growing community of applications developers leveraging Hadoop for solutions.
Quest’s Mystery Bidder Plops Down $2.32 Billion
The money in play for Quest Software jumped from $2.17 billion to $2.32 billion Monday morning.
The mystery bidder, believed to be Dell, that looked trumped a few days ago is back in the game after topping the $25.75-a-share offer made by Insight Venture Partners and Vector Capital, two private equity outfits, with a bid of $27.50 a share cash, a sharp increase.
The sum approaches the $28 a share or $2.36 billion JPMorgan claimed the company was worth weeks ago. Insight on its own started with $23 a share in March and had to call in reinforcements last week to go to $25.75.
The unnamed strategic bidder is going to have to pay a $25 million termination fee to make the Insight-Vector alliance go away. Insight-Vector could also re-up but they’re already working on borrowed capital. There’s no financing in the mystery bid. The Insight-Vector combine has three business days to decide whether to match or improve on the “Dell” bid. Wall Street seems to think the deal could get a mite sweeter. Quest’s stock opened at $27.74 then lost a little ground.
Quest’s Mystery Bidder Plops Down $2.32 Billion
The money in play for Quest Software jumped from $2.17 billion to $2.32 billion Monday morning.
The mystery bidder, believed to be Dell, that looked trumped a few days ago is back in the game after topping the $25.75-a-share offer made by Insight Venture Partners and Vector Capital, two private equity outfits, with a bid of $27.50 a share cash, a sharp increase.
The sum approaches the $28 a share or $2.36 billion JPMorgan claimed the company was worth weeks ago. Insight on its own started with $23 a share in March and had to call in reinforcements last week to go to $25.75.
The unnamed strategic bidder is going to have to pay a $25 million termination fee to make the Insight-Vector alliance go away. Insight-Vector could also re-up but they’re already working on borrowed capital. There’s no financing in the mystery bid. The Insight-Vector combine has three business days to decide whether to match or improve on the “Dell” bid. Wall Street seems to think the deal could get a mite sweeter. Quest’s stock opened at $27.74 then lost a little ground.
RECAP: HP Discover 2012 Event
If you are going to do something, make it matter. That was the key phrase that was posted throughout the conference at HP Discover 2012 in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago. With some of the new announcements, HP did just that.
One of the biggest announcements in my opinion is the HP Virtual Connect Direct-Attached Fibre Channel Storage for 3PAR. In a nutshell, it helps to reduce your SAN infrastructure by eliminating switches and HBAs. You connect your Blade System Servers directly to the 3PAR array. This allows you to have a single layer FC storage network. Since you won’t have a fabric to manage, you can increase your provisioning process by as much as 2.5X. Also, by removing the fabric layer, you can eliminate up to 55% latency.
This will allow organizations to reduce costs by eliminating the SAN fabric. It will save on operating costs by cutting down on capital expenditure. It also scales with the “pay as you grow” methodology allowing you to purchase only what you need.
Complexity is greatly decreased with the wire-once strategy. If new servers are added to the Blade Chassis, they simply access the storage through the already connected cabling.
Virtual Connect Manager allows for a single pane of glass approach. It can be used through a web interface or CLI, for those UNIX lovers.
The new trend in IT is Big Data. Some of the biggest customer challenges are the velocity and volume of data, the large variety and disparate sources of data, and the complex analytics that are required for maximizing the value of information. HP introduced Vertica 6, which does all of
these.
Vertica 6 FlexStore has been expanded to allow access to any data, stored at any location, through any interface. You can connect to Hadoop File Systems, existing databases, and data warehouses. You can also access unstructured analysis platforms such as HP/Autonomy IDOL.
It also includes high performance data analytics for the R Statistical Tool natively and in parallel without the in-memory and single-threaded limitations of R. Vertica 6 has expanded their C++ SDK to add secure sandboxing of user-defined code.
Workload Management simplifies the user experience by enabling more diverse workloads. Some users experienced up to a 40X speed increase on their queries. Regardless of size, Workload Management balances all system resources to meet SLAs.
Vertica 6 software will run on the HP public cloud. Web and mobile applications generate a ton of data. This will allow business intelligence to quickly spot any trends that are developing and act accordingly.
Not to be overlooked are the enhancements made to the core components that are already part of the system.
Over the past few years, there has been a big interest in disk to disk backup and deduplication. HP’s latest solution in this space is the B6200 with StoreOnce Catalyst software. It has over 50 patents that deliver world record performance of 100TB/hr backups and 40TB/hr restores. This claims to be 3X and 5X faster, respectively, than the next leading competitor.
The hardware is scalable. It starts at 48TB (32TB usable) and can grow to 768TB (512TB usable). With a typical deduplication rate of 20X, the system can provide extended data protection for up to 10PBs.
This is a federated backup solution that allows you to move data from remote sites to multiple datacenters without having to reduplicate it. It integrates with HP Data Protector, Symantec NetBackup, and Symantec BackupExec giving the administrator one console to manage all deduplication, backup, and disaster recovery operations.
The portfolio also includes smaller units for SMB customers. They take advantage of the same type of technologies allowing companies to meet those pesky backup windows.
As a leading HP Partner, GreenPages can assist you with these or any of the products in the HP portfolio.
By Mark Mychalczuk
Over a third of consumer content in cloud by 2016, says Gartner
There’s no such thing as too little cloud research from Gartner, and this is more interesting news for cloud users: Gartner forecasts that more than a third of consumers’ digital content will be stored in the cloud by 2016.
Gartner’s research is of course widely accepted as one of the most authoritative in the business, so this will come as another welcome trend, especially given that consumers only store seven percent of their content in the cloud now.
“With the emergence of the personal cloud, fast-growing consumer digital content will quickly get disaggregated from connected devices,” said Shalini Verma, principal analyst at Gartner.
Cloud storage, in the ‘post PC’ era, is one of the most alluring aspects of consumers’ cloud adoption, and especially with user content growing at an inordinate rate, the cloud appears to be the obvious place to meet those needs.
Gartner therefore predicts that the …
Folder and File Sharing with IBM SmartCloud Storage
The previous two articles discussed different access methods to your IBM SmartCloud Object Storage and Team Folder collaboration features. This article introduces the Folder and File Sharing feature with your IBM SmartCloud Storage.
Functionality wise, Folder and file sharing is similar to team folder collaboration. There are 3 major differences.
(1) Team folder is managed by administrator for the team; while Folder sharing is managed by each team member.
(2) Team folder can only be published to known team users; while folder sharing can be shared to external user on a read-only basis, in addition to sharing with internal team users.
(3) Team folder is always collaboration on a folder level; while folder and file sharing can share on a single file level.
It’s Official: Microsoft to Acquire Yammer
Microsoft has, as leaked a couple of weeks ago, gone ahead and cut a deal to buy the Twitter-y enterprise social network Yammer for $1.2 billion cash to extend its cloud services and protect its revenue flank.
The four-year-old start-up and its 400 people will be sent to the Office Division when the acquisition closes in Q3. Yammer CEO David Sachs, the former COO of PayPal, will report to Office president Kurt DelBene.
Yammer’s five million-odd verified corporate users reportedly include 85% of the Fortune 500.
Yammer offers a free secure private network hoping to trigger a viral “grassroots movement” that it can convert into a company-wide initiative competing with Microsoft for $5 a head every month. Customers pay to upgrade their network with administrative and security controls, integrations with enterprise applications, priority customer service and a so-called designated customer success manager.
Microsoft plans to accelerate Yammer’s adoption by integrating it with SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics, Outlook and Skype. It says the service will develop new capabilities and scale bigger. It will also continue to be offered as a standalone product.
Yammer already integrates with SharePoint.
Yammer raised an $85 million fifth round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson in February. All Things Digital says the “implied valuation” then was around $600 million so Microsoft is paying double. Yammer has raised $140 million altogether.
The blog also said Yammer’s free users are notoriously hard to convert into paid users and suggested it’s hard to integrate.
Yammer may have a million paid subscribers.
Rival Jive Software, which IPO’d late last year, forces users to pay after a 30-day trial. It reportedly has 676 companies paying. Cisco’s got WebEx Social, Salesforce has Chatter and IBM a thing called Connections.
Yammer has iPhone and Android apps.
It was reportedly advised by Midas-like Qatalyst Partners.
Microsoft, which owns a slice of Facebook, closed down 2.7% at $29.86. Yammer has added Facebook-like features since it started on Peter Thiel’s nickel. He was Facebook’s first major investor and worked with Sacks at PayPal.