It’s easy to lose your head in the clouds. While virtualization has provided a way to satiate the need for on-demand solutions, it is easy to lose sight of the appropriate architecture when being allured to the sky.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, will go back to the basics and take a practical approach to solution building: how to structure your application to take advantage of hybrid environments and provide the basis for a truly scalable solution.
As Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, Phil Jackson is the lead customer contact for SoftLayer’s robust API. He also develops and maintains a portion of the company’s software platform and content. Mr. Jackson joined SoftLayer from The Planet, where he was a Sales Engineer building test environments, architecting complex technical solutions, and serving as a technical consultant for customers pre-and-post sale. Prior to The Planet, he served on the top tier of the Customer Care and Response team for Ev1Servers, where he also led the training department and created numerous training initiatives. Mr. Jackson is proficient in a wide variety of software languages and has a diverse background in the technology industry.
Dell Cloud Introduces Cloud-enabled Solutions for Running SAP Apps
Dell Services on Tuesday announced the first offers in its new Dell Cloud suite for SAP solutions, further enriching Dell’s portfolio in support of SAP solutions. For customers looking to move their SAP solutions, Dell’s easy-order offers blend a set of SAP-certified enterprise-class cloud services in a secure hybrid, public or private cloud.
Dell Cloud for SAP Solutions provide the agility to easily integrate legacy applications and enables customers to expand beyond physical resources for “just in time” resource allocation and incremental on-demand capacity.
Dependencies Gone Wild: Testing Cloud Applications at Cloud Expo New York
The move to cloud-based applications has undeniably delivered tremendous benefits. However, the associated distribution creates various challenges from the quality perspective:
End-to-end tests need to pass through multiple dependent systems, which are commonly unavailable, evolving, or difficult-to-access for testing.
Accessing such systems often involves transaction and bandwidth fees.
Teams need to test and tune the system under test against a realistic and broad range of performance and behavior conditions – yet such conditions are often difficult to achieve in a test environment.
6fusion Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere Now in Public Beta
6fusion, a provider of utility metered public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructure management solutions, today announced that Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere has achieved public beta and is now available for sign up. Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere allows users to meter resource consumption in any VMware vSphere 4.1 or 5.0 environment providing unparalleled insight into resource consumption – all for free and all right from the VMware Console. Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere product joins the existing family of Cloud Resource Meter for Windows, and Cloud Resource Meter for Linux already available from 6fusion.
“Utility metering with the Cloud Resource Meter gives us the ability to profile our environment in a way we never have before,” said Graham Brown, Director, Business Technology Consulting, Gyrocom, “which gives us accurate data to make informed decisions on workload allocation and deployment.”
Using 6fusion’s unique Workload Allocation Cube technology with a connection to the UC6 Cloud Management Platform, Cloud Resource Meter provides an industry standard unit of measurement allowing you to meter resource consumption across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. This standardized approach to metering allows IT departments to improve ROI analysis, optimize resource consumption, build the business case to migrate to cloud, or simply improve IT distribution processes.
“Universal metering is foundational to any utility,” said John Cowan, 6fusion Co-founder and CEO. “Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere allows any VMware user in the world to quantify their cloud requirements and determine the best location to run those workloads going forward – maximizing efficiency of IT spend and ROI.“
Cloud Resource Meter is available in two models – Free and Pro. Cloud Resource Meter Free provides the ability to meter and view the last 28 days of data directly in the vSphere interface or in the 6fusion UC6 Console. The Pro version provides the full capabilities of the tool, including unlimited metering, expanded reporting capabilities, technical support as well as the ability to access 6fusion’s enhanced analytics tools.
To learn more about Cloud Resource Meter or to sign up for access to the beta product, visit www.6fusion.com/products/cloudresourcemeter, or stop by booth 618 at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco or booth 311 at Interop Las Vegas.
ShoreTel Introduces Collaboration Solution
ShoreTel, a provider of premise and cloud-based business phone system and unified communications (UC), today announced the availability of collaboration applications to meet the demands of large enterprise customers deploying ShoreTel solutions around the world.
ShoreTel 12.3 supports 10,000 concurrent instant messaging clients, 1,000 audio conferencing ports and 500 Web conferencing ports. ShoreTel’s Linux based Service Appliance 400 enables tightly integrated collaboration services that are administrated by IT in ShoreTel Director and managed by the end user in ShoreTel Communicator.
ShoreTel is increasingly being selected by large global enterprises in more than 48 countries, which need to collaborate internally and externally on a massive scale – between departments or with customers, in any location.
“The SA-400 from a feature standpoint is simply amazing. Beyond the added capacity that comes with the new hardware the new feature set is so rich that it enables users to work in ways that were not possible before,” said Bakari Taylor, Systems Administrator at Current TV. “When we first received the new conference bridge we thought it was a standard upgrade, but to our surprise it was so much more. To put it simply the SA-400 is a game changer.”
Faster and more casual than email, IM is the new dial tone. And collaboration helps coworkers easily share ideas – avoiding lengthy games of phone and email tag, which create latency in productivity. With the new levels of concurrent client capabilities, employees can chat one-on-one or in groups. When instant messaging is not enough, users can easily turn an instant message into a video-enabled phone call at the touch of a button, and easily share their desktop with a single click.
ShoreTel Collaboration integrates with enterprise applications such as Microsoft Outlook, where appointments automatically configure voice and Web collaboration resources for both internal and external participants.
“We’re pleased to be selected by large enterprises that wish to provide applications for their employees, but without the cost of complexity of traditional premise or hosted services. By offering a single scalable platform that serves both midsize and large enterprises, we’re able to concentrate all efforts on making solutions brilliantly simple for users and administrators,” said Kevin Gavin, chief marketing officer at ShoreTel. “Like most UC vendors, we include collaboration tools with our UC platform. But it’s not an add-on or after thought; it’s functionally integrated into our system and end-users applications, with no more IT burden for deploying collaboration at the lowest cost for the organization.”
Crypto in the Cloud Secures Data in Spite of Providers
With companies increasingly worried about their data in the cloud, a number of providers have cropped up to offer various types of encryption Many studies have shown a chasm between cloud service providers and their customers regarding who is responsible for the security of the customer’s data: The providers put the responsibility in the hands […]
Proper Security and Protection Measures Enable Rapid Cloud Adoption
Cloud computing has clearly sparked the imagination of business leaders, who see it as a powerful new way to be innovative and gain first-mover advantages.
It now falls to CIOs to not only rapidly adapt to cloud computing, but to find the ways to protect their employees and customers as they adopt cloud models – even as security threats grow.
This is a serious — but not insurmountable challenge.
Cloud computing has clearly sparked the imagination of business leaders, who see it as a powerful new way to be innovative and gain first-mover advantages — with or without traditional IT’s consent.
Cloud-Based Collaboration Services in Asia-Pacific Gov
Government agencies are reportedly one of the primary benefactors of managed cloud services. According to the results from a recent market study by IDC, IT decision-makers across the Asia-Pacific region (excluding Japan) found that 59 percent of public sector respondents are confident in the ability of their internal IT departments to deploy private cloud environments.
However, IDC Government Insights cautions that high levels of private cloud adoption may not bode well for a collaborative and citizen-engaging government and preemptive measures should be taken for collaboration to take place across organizational boundaries. More insights can be found in the IDC report entitled, “Cloud Computing for Government: a View from Asia-Pacific.”
Frank Levering, Research Manager for IDC said, “An efficient and productive internal IT department is definitely a good to have in any organization, private or public. However, a department that is highly confident in running its own private cloud environment may run the risk of not reaching out to other internal departments to collaborate on cloud opportunities.”
To counter this possibility, IDC recommends that whenever possible, governments should consider cloud-based collaboration services rather than independent private cloud solutions.
Although governments will initially be seeking cloud-based solutions to deliver cost advantages and better manage resources, eventually, cloud implementations need to be about inter-department collaborations and citizen relationship management in order to reap the full benefits of its capabilities to deliver optimal citizen services.
This is particularly important for key initiatives like data classification for security purposes; if agencies do not align their security levels, it would prove to be a massive obstacle for future joint efforts.
A positive sign is that governments across the region are growing to recognize the need for collaboration within the cloud space. There is already a significant installed base of collaborative applications in the cloud and the numbers will grow significantly in the next 12 months.
To optimize the benefits of cloud services, IDC offers recommendations to governments:
- Evaluate all aspects of cloud computing. Read everything you can get your hands on. Most suppliers will have recognized that the key to their long-term success is their short-term role as an educator. Since security is a big concern, develop security profiles for all suppliers being considered.
- Service-oriented architecture (SOA) first, then cloud. The right SOA needs to be in place to facilitate a smooth connection to external cloud services. Government agencies needing to build a robust SOA require a plan that tackles the transition in bite-size pieces while solidifying long-term migration to the shared services architecture. Remove the key barriers to cloud computing.
- Challenges like security concerns and decentralized data storage will be blocking issues until they are acknowledged and appropriately addressed. Many of the more complex scenarios, like customer/citizen relationship management and inter-department collaboration will depend on a government’s ability to get the basics right.
- Know your current environment. An inventory of the current environment should provide a good indication of whether systems contain sensitive data, including taxpayers’ personally identifiable information and/or mission-critical data and (legacy) applications. This will provide an excellent start to planning for cloud services adoption.
Cloud Expo New York: The Dark Side of Virtualization
Virtualization and private cloud are good for server consolidation, creating flexible environments, and saving IT budget dollars. A recent survey of 1200 companies with 500+ employees showed that 59% had server virtualization in production or pilot. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dave Asprey, VP of Cloud Security at Trend Micro, will explain the types of situations when you should consider not virtualizing some of your applications. Reasons range from technical to legal to IT ops to politics to finances. Attend this session, and hear a true IT insider’s guide to the truth about virtualization.
Does Cloud Storage Make Sense for Businesses?
For the past several years, companies have been making use of cloud computing solutions. Cloud solutions offer agility and scalability that are often hard to duplicate in-house, and they offer a way for companies to meet specific business functions without large capital investments. Cloud-based storage is one of the areas that has seen relatively little activity in the business world, while it’s taken serious hold in the consumer marketplace.
The success of companies like Dropbox in providing cloud-based storage solutions, however, has more and more businesses asking whether such solutions make sense for them.