Business Processes, Data migration, JD Edwards, Tools

Best Practices for Managing Data in the Cloud

Managing Data In the CloudThe importance of data management is increasingly evident as companies find themselves having to respond to change faster than ever to remain competitive. Without best practices, volumes of data cannot be leveraged effectively to give companies a competitive advantage.

The way to mitigate this is to implement efficient business practices that are regularly evaluated and streamlined to generate results in a real-time environment.

What Are Best Practices for Managing Data in the Cloud?

Businesses hire analysts to manage data in real time. Online analytical processing (OLAP), online transaction processing (OLTP) and specialized reporting are all required to help businesses improve processes and increase revenue.

Data warehouse information and OLTP data may be combined in cloud-based solutions to provide organizations with more flexibility. For some enterprises, cloud-based solutions meet the “practical sense” test and for others these solutions do not. Common factors of the “practical sense” test include: Cost effectiveness, scalability, migration capability and return on investment. Once these factors are determined, a set of best practices can be implemented.

Efficient Infrastructure Solutions. Efficient infrastructure solutions allow IT professionals to focus on mission-critical tasks rather than managing infrastructure problems. The infrastructure supports the integration, design and configuration of a database in a cloud-based solution. Consolidation efficiency should be monitored and a set of practices should be developed to achieve optimal performance. With efficient best practices, IT can use the cloud to eliminate some customization issues and deploy solutions in a fraction of the time.

Data Migration. Best practices for data migration require that businesses learn to convert data efficiently at a database level. Efficient migration must occur regardless of the format generated. Databases, which are not required to be combined for security or operational reasons, can be migrated to a virtualized server. All source data must be converted into a standardized format to facilitate consolidation before migration to a shared server. 

Consolidate to Minimize Costs. Consolidation reduces costs associated to hardware, cooling and power. It also reduces operational complexity which reduces the time required by IT management to complete projects. Consolidation can also assist IT managers with developing disaster recovery strategies and adopting best practices for a uniform backup routine. Best practices for an update and patch schedule should also be established. 

Use Cloud-Based Data Center to Meet Demands of Faster Service. A cloud-based data center allows companies to share the capacity and equally divide the workload of applications across numerous servers for more efficient data manipulation and recall. This allows for faster innovation and ability to meet customer demands. Overall performance will not be affected when large amounts of data can be processed in the cloud.

Next Steps…

JD Edwards helps businesses integrate data management best practices into organizations. Consultants help clients understand how to apply best practices and how to maintain competitive advantage in a fast paced work environment. The result is an affordable and high performance cloud-based solution. Cloud-based solutions are easily scalable, easy to deploy and cost effective.

The result: lower operating costs and increased efficiency.

 


Dell, Morphlabs, NexentaStor, OpenStack, Rackspace Cloud, Storage

Morphlabs Announces First OpenStack Converged Infrastructure for Enterprise Private Clouds

OpenStack

Morphlabs today announced the general availability of the all-SSD mCloud Rack Enterprise Edition, an SSD-powered converged infrastructure solution for the enterprise powered by OpenStack. The mCloud Rack E leverages the Dell PowerEdge-C Platform, Arista Networks’ switches and Nexenta’s enterprise-class OpenStorage to deliver the industry’s most price performant private cloud.

“The all-SSD mCloud Rack Enterprise Edition powered by OpenStack offers Morphlabs’ customers the full benefits of the most dynamic and fastest-growing open source project ever,” said Morphlabs CEO Winston Damarillo. “Morphlabs optimizes the best-of-breed cloud building blocks from Nexenta, Dell and Arista to deliver a high-performance, flexible infrastructure that leverages the robust OpenStack community for rapid innovations and increased code stability.”

The mCloud Rack E next generation modular architecture utilizes OpenStack adaptiveness to harness industry-leading cloud computing components. The mCloud Rack E optimizes enterprise cloud deployments by providing exponentially more IOPs per compute while retaining industry-defining power and cost efficiency.

“The strength of our community and contributions of companies like Morphlabs are helping accelerate the adoption of OpenStack by making it easier for enterprises to deploy and manage,” said Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack Project Policy Board and co-founder Rackspace Cloud. “Morphlabs’ mCloud Rack Enterprise Edition is a testament to the readiness of OpenStack for mission critical infrastructure deployments.”

Morphlabs’ mCloud solutions are built and tested on Dell PowerEdge-C servers, which use the latest hyperscale technology to decrease energy use, space and weight. Dell Data Center Services (DCS) provides global support for mCloud Racks, enabling four-hour response times anywhere in the world and affording a world-class supply chain to deliver the latest, most efficient and cost-effective data center technology to customers.

“As early supporters of OpenStack, Dell remains committed to providing open, standards-based solutions that enable customers to integrate new technologies without sacrificing performance or existing IT investments. By employing the power of Dell PowerEdge-C servers, including Dell’s popular Crowbar software framework, in Morphlabs’ mCloud Rack E, we created a purpose-built infrastructure that enables users to be up-and-running on an OpenStack cloud in mere hours,” said John Igoe, executive director of Cloud Solutions at Dell Inc.

The mCloud Rack E is the only converged infrastructure solution that enables scalable and modular enterprise-grade block storage. Leveraging the mCloud Rack E’s revolutionary share-nothing architecture and Nexenta Systems’ highly resilient ZFS-based NexentaStor, SSD-accelerated storage that eliminates the risk of data loss at the foundation of the cloud is finally affordable.

“If you want to accelerate the transformation of your virtualized infrastructure into an internal cloud, these solutions provide all the basic building blocks, already pre-integrated for you. They include the automation solutions for deployment, management, and monitoring; the unified virtual infrastructure; and even the self-service portal for deployment requests,” wrote Forrester Research, Inc. Vice President and Principal Analyst Richard Fichera1.

“Using OpenStack with proprietary storage makes no sense; why use an open approach to the cloud and then hand your data off to a proprietary vendor?” said Nexenta CEO Evan Powell. “Morphlabs has done a great service for their customers and the OpenStack community by launching an end-to-end engineered solution that leverages the best of open infrastructure. We’re proud that Morphlabs selected our ZFS-based and SSD-accelerated NexentaStor as the foundation of their mCloud Rack E and look forward to working closely with them.”

A trial of the mCloud platform is available for a limited time at http://www.morphlabs.com/evaluatessd/.


Business Processes, Kansas Parks Reservations

Kansas State Park Reservation System Deployed Via Cloud

The Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism (KDWPT) has announced that its new online reservation site is open for business. Built by Active Network, Inc., a cloud-based activity and participant management solutions provider, the new system makes it easy to find and reserve campsites and cabins in the state parks as well as cabins at certain state fishing lakes and wildlife areas. It is hosted on ReserveAmerica.com, a media property of Active Network for camping reservations. The online registration system powered by ActiveWorks® cloud technology was launched on schedule just after midnight on Tuesday, April 17. KDWPT had not taken online or phone reservations since April 1 to allow programmers to move reservations made before April 1 into the new reservation system.

The new reservation system allows KDWPT to take its paper- and phone-based camping reservations process online for the first time, creating tremendous efficiencies for both park staff and consumers. The centralized system allows guests to search multiple camping and cabin sites simultaneously and make reservations from the comfort of their homes. In many cases, park users will save money through reduced service fees and will be assured a site if they have made a reservation. Additionally, the system will enable KDWPT park staff to more effectively manage their statewide parks and facilities, and benefit from centralized reporting and auditing.

“We are very pleased to launch this new reservation system to meet the ongoing needs of our guests,” said Linda S. Lanterman, KDWPT assistant state parks director. “By partnering with Active Network and revamping our reservations processes we are providing a valuable service to our constituents while encouraging greater participation in outdoor activities.”

To make campsite and cabin reservations, guests can visit the KDWPT website, ksoutdoors.com, where they’ll be directed to the new reservation site at reserveamerica.com, or they can call a KDWPT state park office or the Pratt Operations Office at 620-672-5911. For the location of the nearest Kansas state park office, go to the KDWPT website and click “State Parks/Locations.” For those without computers or who still prefer using a phone, park staff will be able to use the new system to help callers with reservations.

The number of campsites available for reservation will vary by park – in most parks about half of the sites can be reserved. The rest will be available through the traditional “first-come, first-served” method. Shelter and group campground reservations will continue to be made only through the park office where the facilities are located.

“As the leading provider of campground reservations in North America, our ReserveAmerica media property aims to make it easier for our valued State customers to manage their facilities and for outdoors enthusiasts to find new ways to enjoy the nation’s beautiful natural resources,” said Alex Barnetson, senior vice president of Outdoors at Active Network. “The KDWPT joins more than 20 other wildlife agencies and over 30 States who rely on Active Network to automate their campground, hunting and fishing reservations.”


Caringo, Free, Storage, Virtualization

Caringo Offers VMs of Market Proven Cloud Storage Architecture for Rapid Evaluation

Caringo Inc., a provider of object storage software, today announced virtual machine editions of their CAStor object storage engine, and Content File Server (CFS), instant access to CAStor via standard file protocols (CIFS, NFS, FTP, and WebDAV). The VMs can run on any Windows server via VMware ESX and VMware Player, on Mac via VMware Fusion, and the CFS VM can also run on Oracle VirtualBox (Windows or Mac). The Virtual Editions were designed to enable the quick and easy evaluation of Caringo object storage software, which is ideal for cloud storage architectures. The VMs are available immediately for download with a free 2 TB license, bringing the benefits of object storage and cloud storage architecture to ANY organization within minutes.

“Cloud storage services built upon object storage provide scalability, ease of management, responsiveness and affordability,” said Mark Goros, CEO at Caringo. “With our Virtual Editions we are bringing the same technology to any company or individual to install and try in less than 30 minutes. Now anyone can easily experience the power of object storage and cloud storage architecture quickly and securely.”

Caringo’s object storage software Virtual Editions delivers cloud storage architecture and instant access by providing:

Data access and portability using HTTP 1.1, and customizable metadata that is stored with each object, enabling data mobility based on business value with content moving freely and securely system wide – even across different locations.

Automatic data protection driven by an integrated health monitor that continuously checks and fixes any issues encountered. All servers participate in recovery so as the system grows, recovery times decrease; even petabyte-size stores can be automatically protected without backups or RAID.

Zero provisioning scale-out and zero downtime servicing with automated, system wide optimization and balancing. Combined with rolling software and hardware upgrades results in no-downtime servicing, no single points of failure and no bottlenecks.

Secure multi-tenancy and multi-site storage in a single system with 128-bit unique universal identifier obfuscating all stored data; all account information is stored with an object allowing support for an unlimited number of tenants, employees, or subscribers on the same infrastructure.

Cloud economics using any x86 server hardware, any combination of servers, or even any size drives at up to 98 percent utilization.

Instant access for legacy applications or devices via CIFS, NFS, FTP, and WebDAV.

Both VM Editions are available now at http://www.caringo.com/virtual-editions


Sin categoría

Why don’t employees embrace enterprise mobility projects?

Workforce engagement with enterprise mobility solutions is critical if the projects are to deliver the efficiency and productivity intended, but new research suggests many companies are failing to consider the factors that affect employee buy-in when implementing these systems.

Research firm Vanson Bourne discovered and alarming trend when it polled 1000 IT and business decision makers on their mobilisation strategies. It found that while 42% of businesses claimed to be actively developing a mobile app for employees, only a quarter believed that their mobile systems had been embraced by the majority of employees.

Additionally, and despite firms over 500 employees planning to spend an average of £390,000 on mobility software in the next 12-18 months, 41% of respondents reported that take up of such schemes had been limited to less than a quarter of the workforce.

Ken Parmelee, senior director of product management at Antenna Software, one of the …

Dell, Research

Dell to be the Next Big Cloud Player?

Is Dell getting its ducks in a row to become the next big player to enter the cloud networking space in a big way? That’s the premise of an interesting post at Wired.

Dell has been on an acquisition spree for several years, yet the pieces of these acquisitions have not quite shown a clear vision of their purpose — until recently. Many have speculated as to the long-term vision of what all these acquisitions mean. What they really reveal is a complete end-to-end computing strategy that can handle every aspect of a business’ infrastructure, whether it be on-premise, cloud-based, private cloud-based or a hybrid cloud scenario.

Read the full post.


Cedexis, Network performance, Networking, Research, Tools

Cedexis Launches Internet Performance Reporting Tool

Cedexis has released a new data visualization interface available at www.cedexis.com/country-reports/ which provides statistics on the performance of IT providers (Hosting Companies, CDNs and Clouds) providing valuable information on the SOH (State Of Health) of their Internet services as end-users actually see them.

The performance measurements of each of the cloud/CDN providers is generated by the users themselves. This is achieved through the integration of a probe (JavaScript tag) on a Cedexis customers’ web, mobile or business application, which only becomes active only after a page has been fully loaded so that an end-users experience is not impacted.

Cedexis combines these quality and performance measurements with an additional service called OpenMix, which enables real-time traffic routing changes to maximize the end-user’s experience.  Thanks to this realtime decision making service, end-users are always sent to the best provider for them at that point in time, with content owners comfortable in the knowledge that 100% availability and optimal performance for each and every end-user is a reality.