The age of Big Data is here. Organizations are no longer challenged to find enough data to answer the pertinent questions required for success in today’s dynamic business environment. Rather, companies are struggling to keep pace with the enormous volumes of data invading their organizations – leaving some wondering what can we do to “connect the dots” from the data that is buried in our IT systems.
Cloud Computing offers federal agencies, companies, and communities new solutions for consuming, storing, processing, and analyzing Big Data to find the right answers needed to accomplish the mission, gain competitive advantage, and collaborate in more meaningful ways.
In their session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Jill Tummler Singer, CIO for the National Reconnaissance Office, and Jamie Dos Santos, President & CEO, Terremark Federal Group, will share perspectives on the Big Data challenge and how organizations can look in the clouds to discover the right answers. This session will feature collective results from a recent AFCEA International Cyber Committee white paper.
Infinitely Virtual Announces VMWare vCloud Director Capability, Giving IT Pros Greater Control and Flexibility in Managing Applications
Infinitely Virtual, a provider of virtual server cloud computing services for businesses, today announced it has added VMWare’s vCloud Director to its hosting platform, giving IT managers more “self-service” options when needing to quickly reconfigure networking resources, move data between different clouds, or change virtual applications.
Integrated with Infinitely Virtual’s upgrade to VMWare’s vSphere5, VMware vCloud Director saves IT managers time and money by giving them more autonomy and control over important aspects of their virtual infrastructure.
“We recognize that IT managers want the scalability and relative low investment cost of employing cloud-hosted services,” said Adam Stern, Infinitely Virtual founder and CEO. “At the same time, we know they sometimes want the ability to make quick changes to applications or to migrate workloads between different clouds without having to go to the cloud service provider.
“Adding VMWare’s vCloud Director continues Infinitely Virtual’s mission to deliver the most flexible, cost-effective cloud-hosting services to our customers,” Stern said. “We host and manage the secure, cloud platform while our IT customers have increased autonomy to make application and networking changes as they wish. It’s a smart division of labor that advances our goal of enabling clients to use their virtual infrastructure as a growth engine.”
Customers deploying vCloud Director benefit from an exceptionally user-friendly interface that provides end-users with the tools to foster a self-service networking and creative cloud environment. The product saves IT professionals precious time, which they can then devote to other business-critical tasks.
Infinitely Virtual’s vCloud Director integration offers these advantages:
- Gives IT professionals the ability to self-manage virtual applications
(vApps) without the assistance of the cloud service provider,
facilitating quick changes, or changes on short notice due to current
business needs - Allows IT to upload vApps into a catalog which can be used at a later
date, without involving the cloud service provider - Enables greater control in moving and distributing workloads between
different clouds - Cuts network configuration time down to a matter of minutes, using
automated features - Provides the ability to power up or power down at will – without the
need to contact the cloud service provider every time - Manages the end-user’s own firewalls and allows them to change ports
without requiring any workload from the cloud service provider - Facilitates changes in security due to changing department needs –
changes that can be made on the fly.
“Businesses that move resources and retool network configurations on a regular basis will find vCloud Director to be exceptionally well designed for that purpose,” said Stern.
GraphOn Awarded Patent for “Multi-Homed Websites”
GraphOn Corporation, a developer of cloud application delivery and Web-enabling solutions, announced today that it has been issued a new patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
U.S. Patent 8,117,298, issued February 14, 2012, is directed towards an easily configurable Web server that has the capability to host (or provide a home for) multiple Web sites at the same time. This patent helps small companies or individuals create the same kind of Web presence enjoyed by larger companies that are able to afford the cost of multiple, dedicated Web server machines.
This patent protects GraphOn’s unique technology for “configuring” a Web server that has the capability to host multiple Web sites at the same time – called “multi-homing”. This multi-homing capability of the Web server provides the appearance to users of multiple distinct and independent servers at a lower cost. Functionally, a multi-homed Web server consists of, in effect, multiple virtual Web servers running on the same computer. The patent claims a design in which features can be readily added to one or more of the virtual servers. For example, a new software module having additional features or different capabilities might be substituted for an existing module on one of the virtual servers. The new features or capabilities may be added without affecting any other of the virtual servers and without the need to rebuild the Web server.
“We continue to recognize the vital importance of intellectual property in today’s marketplace,” stated Eldad Eilam, GraphOn’s interim chief executive officer. “We are pleased to add this new patent to our intellectual property portfolio, which helps to protect fundamental technology relating to both the Internet and GraphOn’s own products. Our portfolio now includes twenty-five patents, and more than 30 patent applications are pending. Our objectives include continuing to add significantly to our patent portfolio, maximizing the value of that portfolio, contributing technology to our current GO-Global product line, and providing opportunities for development of new products.”
Ops First Rule
It’s unlikely there’s anyone in IT today that doesn’t understand the role of load balancing to scale. Whether cloud or not, load balancing is the key mechanism through which load is distributed to ensure horizontal scale of applications. It’s also unlikely there’s anyone in IT that doesn’t understand the relationship between load balancing and high-availability (reliability). High-Availability (HA) architectures are almost always implemented using load balancing services to ensure seamless transition from one service instance to another in the event of a failure.
What’s often overlooked is that scalability and HA isn’t important just for applications. Services – whether application or network-focused – must also be reliable. It’s the old “only as strong as the weakest link in the chain” argument. An application is only as reliable as its least reliable component – and that includes services and infrastructure upon which that application relies. It is – or should be – ops first rule; the rule that guides design of data center architectures.
Cloud Spectator Named “Media Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloud Spectator has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Cloud Spectator offers cloud computing education to an enterprise audience; constantly analyzing this dynamic industry to keep information up-to-date, as well as providing custom reports to cloud providers.
Cloud Expo 2012 New York, June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Indian Conglomerate Turns to Microsoft Azure
Essar Group is a large, Mumbai-based company with US$17 billion in revenues, operations in 25 countries, and interests in steel, energy, power, communications, shipping ports, logistics, and construction. It is also migrating toward the cloud with some of its Web-based apps with Microsoft Azure, according to company CTO Jayantha Prabhu.
«With Windows Azure, we don’t have to spend money on hardware and software, and we don’t have to spend time on administrative tasks related to infrastructure,» he says. «A scalable, well-defined platform gives us much fewer problems to solve and more time to focus on the overall experience of the application.»
Prabhu says the company “can obtain the benefits of both public and private cloud computing” with Azure, providing on-demand computing and storage when needed through Microsoft datacenters.
Essar has been working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner MindTree to migrate four of its apps – reporting, visitor-management, and gate-pass systems – and values the flexibility it says it’s gained along with “a lower total cost of ownership compared with an on-premises solution,» according to Prabhu.
Cloud Foundry vs Google App Engine
PaaS is nothing but uploading your small kernel of code with business logic and the PaaS service provider will run that code on allocated computing and storage instances. The aim of PaaS is to let the developers concentrate on developing their code rather than creating and maintaining their ecosystem required for it. When Google launched App Engine in 2008 it had very basic functionalities but gradually it has evolved to support much good functionality like Channel APIs. But when it comes to language support, selection of cloud, selection of database, control over database, Cloud foundry gives great amount of flexibility as compared to App Engine. Also, when it comes to supporting Java packages also, Google App Engine doesn’t allow developers to free their arms as there are quite a few important packages which are still not part of App Engine’s white list.
Cloud Expo New York: The Distributed and Decentralized Cloud
While many companies are leveraging Cloud Computing to limit their infrastructure and footprint, the reality is cloud computing is driving a massive data center build out. In fact, this data center expansion is growing at an unprecedented scale and is not sustainable based on the parallel growth in data and storage requirements. This is ironic given the spirit of the Internet is decentralized, distributed architecture, where global bandwidth, processing power, content and infrastructure are accessible via the largest peer-to-peer network in history.
In their session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Margaret Dawson, Vice President of Marketing for Symform, and Praerit Garg, President and Co-founder of Symform, will challenge the audience to think about their own infrastructure and cloud strategy with a distributed filter. They will review distributed cloud models you can leverage today, as well as discuss the inherent benefits and challenges of a decentralized approach. This is a vendor-agnostic session with no product pitch.
What Is Hadoop? Hadoop 101 with Cloudera CEO Mike Olson
Every technologist I know has been working to learn more about Hadoop. I bet you are already somewhat familiar with some of the neat use-cases of this technological framework. But let me ask, wouldn’t you like to be able to express what Hadoop is in a clear, succinct way?
Google to Drive business users towards Google Plus?
30th April 2012
Google’s new cloud storage product, Drive, could be integrated with its much-maligned social network Google Plus, to help attract more business users, according to a report by PopHerald this morning.