A thorough piece on CNET by Gordon Haff looks at the interconnectivity of cloud computing, mobility and Big Data, and sees these three forces as instrumental in shaping the future of IT.
“Through the lens of next-generation IT, think of cloud computing as being about trends in computer architectures, how applications are loaded onto those systems and made to do useful work, how servers communicate with each other and with the outside world, and how administrators manage and provide access,” Haff writes.
He says the trend also covers the infrastructure and plumbing that make it possible to effectively coordinate data centers full of systems increasingly working as a unified compute resource as opposed to islands of specialized capacity.
Computing is constantly evolving. What makes today particularly interesting is that “we seem to be in the midst of convergent trends of a certain momentum and maturity to reinforce each other in significant ways. That’s what is happening with cloud computing, mobility and Big Data,” Heff writes.
Informatica Upgrades Its iPaaS
Informatica, which already counts its Cloud processing upwards of a billion cloud integration transactions a day, has upgraded the stuff. It reckons its new Cloud Spring 2012 release will deliver the industry’s most comprehensive cloud integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS).
The biggest addition is a new Cloud Developer Edition that consists of a cloud connector toolkit and dynamic cloud integration templates for rapid connectivity to applications. Developers can embed end-user customizable integration logic and connectivity into cloud applications and platforms.
System integrators and ISVs should be able to build, customize and deliver native connectivity to any cloud or on-premise business and social applications that have published Web Services APIs.
Cloud Expo NY: Enterprise Transformation Using Cloud and Cloud Platforms
Cloud is a shift from the focus on underlying technology implementation to leveraging existing implementations and further building upon them. Cloud orchestration or a network of clouds is the wave of the future where these clouds can operate with elasticity, scalability, and efficiency. Effective service management is an important aspect of managing such networks. The transition to the cloud will enable the further aggregation of composite web services and enhanced business-to-business capabilities for integrating processes and applications.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Ajay Budhraja, CTO at the Department of Justice, will discuss how for example the requirement to access multiple clouds will cause a shift toward utilizing identity management services and single sign-on capabilities. With cloud services, a traditional project that just obtained survey information from customers and provided reports was transitioned to leverage an authentication service, cloud customer information service, cloud reporting service and other cloud services to provide a scalable, highly integrated solution quickly.
LogicMonitor Takes SaaS-based Approach
It’s 11pm – do you know where your data are?
This venerable public-service announcement could serve as a slogan for LogicMonitor, which partners with the likes of NetApp, VMware, Dell, HP, and Citrix to deliver SaaS-based monitoring software.
Case in point: company CEO Kevin McGibben points out that during a big Amazon reboot earlier this year,“if you didn’t have notification tools in place for that reboot and if (Amazon’s) monitoring was in that cloud, then you weren’t notified at the time.” Furthermore, he points out that “interdependencies in the entire stack were affected” by the reboot.
Santa Barbara, CA-based LogicMonitor monitors “physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT environments,” McGibben says. “numerous data sources with literally hundreds of device types and technologies are monitored.”
McGibben says the company’s customers are using cloud-computing initiatives because “they have to stay nimble, so are constantly adding data sources to their stacks. Well more than half of our customers have at least some multi-tenant or some presence in the cloud.”
“Most of our customers are going from legacy (infrastructre) to embracing virtualization hosted-services and using private cloud, while figuring out public cloud. We also work with companies who are building their own private clouds.”
The company works on month-to-month contracts, and allows business-side people to “bring business metrics into the system and plot them. (There are) multiple dashboards, so you can wake up in the morning, drink your coffee, look at overall metrics, and get a big overview. You can see how much money you’re making – or not, if you have an interruption.”
This doesn’t imply that you must have someone sitting there with coffee in hand around the clock, McGibben points out. “There is automated alerting, so you don’t just have to star at the glass,” he says. “You can drop a lightweight Java collector in (for the data folks), which watches anytning to be monitored – apps, servers, networking, storage, virtualzation, etc. It will use whatever protocol is appropriate for polling.”
You Can Kiss That Old 19-Inch Rack Good-Bye
A growing throng of Open Compute Project (OCP) disciples converged on Rackspace headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, this week to overturn the established sixty-year-old EIA 310-D rack standard inherited from railroad signaling relays and telephone switching and in its place substitute Open Rack, the very first standard for data centers, especially big hyper-scale data centers like Facebook’s.
Facebook set Open Compute in train a year ago to solve problems it was having trying to shoehorn the compute, storage and networking density it needed into the traditional server rack, a form factor its hardware master calls “blades gone bad.”
Blades supposedly go bad because of what OCP founding board member Andy Bechtolsheim calls “gratuitous differentiation” on the part of vendors and their lock-in-seeking proprietary designs that sacrifice interoperability.
Crash Course in Open Source Cloud Computing at Cloud Expo New York
Very few trends in IT have generated as much buzz as cloud computing. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Director, Cloud Computing Community at Citrix, will cut through the hype and quickly clarify the ontology for cloud computing. The bulk of the conversation will focus on the open source software that can be used to build compute clouds (infrastructure-as-a-service) and the complementary open source management tools that can be combined to automate the management of cloud computing environments.
The session will appeal to anyone who has a good grasp of traditional data center infrastructure but is struggling with the benefits and migration path to a cloud computing environment. Systems administrators and IT generalists will leave the discussion with a general overview of the options at their disposal to effectively build and manage their own cloud computing environments using free and open source software.
Cloud Expo New York: Infrastructure Planning in Next-Gen Data Centers
Capacity management may not be dead yet, but with the adoption of private clouds it’s barely recognizable. IT organizations are radically changing how they plan and manage infrastructure to cope with the complexity of these large-scale shared environments and prevent the over-provisioning that results from old school planning approaches.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO at CiRBA, will outline best practices for gaining control over dynamic capacity supply and workload demand in large-scale virtual and cloud infrastructure. He will also discuss how leading Fortune 500 organizations brought together infrastructure teams, capacity teams and application owners to increase agility, reduce risk and costs by optimizing infrastructure planning and management processes.
Cloud Expo New York: Mobilizing Enterprise Applications for the Cloud
2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for application integration and dependency management technologies to take center stage and accelerate enterprise application workloads into the cloud with single pane-of-glass view and control.
Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Architectures Require Scale-Out Storage
Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid, will discuss how Ethernet SAN architectures leverage off-the-shelf hardware, standard Ethernet, and distributed storage processing to enable a building block approach to scalability – no forklift upgrades required. With Ethernet SAN, capacity and performance both scale linearly with user demand without forcing users into a complex tiered storage environment to deal with price-performance tradeoffs. Now the same storage building blocks can be configured for backup or production, virtualization or database, enabling a flexible one-tier-for-all architecture. Learn how organizations today are already leveraging Ethernet SAN as the storage backbone of their dynamic public and private cloud architectures.
Running Big Data Applications on Eucalyptus IaaS Cloud at Cloud Expo NY
Infrastructure as a Service cloud platforms enable enterprise to experience agility. Infrastructure agility is key to deploying Big Data platforms and applications. As datasets grow in size and numbers in the enterprise, there needs to be a place to store, secure and analyze the datasets. IaaS clouds like Eucalyptus, with the industry’s de facto standard IaaS API implementation, can be “the place” to enable enterprises to deploy Big Data analytics and applications.
Because all data is now in a centralized secure system, it becomes easier to enforce precise and well-documented security policies on sensitive data. The combination of flexibility, rapid automation, speed with which you can dynamically programmatically control infrastructure using Eucalyptus IaaS API, enable enterprises to develop, test and deploy new Big Data applications at a fraction of the cost that’s never been possible before.