It’s Friday the 13th and it’s October. Halloween is coming and things are getting spooky. We have a Friday 13th Easter egg for you because we just love number 13 at Parallels. Hint: the about screen. Some of you have already noticed and commented on it. If you’re a @ParallelsMac 13 user, there’s an amusing […]
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SYS-CON Events announced today that TidalScale will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
TidalScale is the leading provider of Software-Defined Servers that bring flexibility to modern data centers by right-sizing servers on the fly to fit any data set or workload. TidalScale’s award-winning inverse hypervisor technology combines multiple commodity servers (including their associated CPUs, memory storage and network) into one or more large servers capable of handling the biggest Big Data problems and most unpredictable workloads.
If you had a busy week and need to catch up, here’s a tech news recap of articles you may have missed for the week of 10/09/2017!
Achieving hyper-flexibility by migrating your network to AWS & Azure. Networking trends of 2017. Building a modern help desk. How Azure Stack helps deliver intelligent cloud and edge computing. and more top news this week you may have missed! Remember, to stay up-to-date on the latest tech news throughout the week, follow @GreenPagesIT on Twitter.
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[Interested in learning more about SD-WAN? Download, What to Look For When Considering an SD-WAN Solution.]
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By Jake Cryan, Digital Marketing Specialist
Companies are harnessing data in ways we once associated with science fiction. Analysts have access to a plethora of visualization and reporting tools, but considering the vast amount of data businesses collect and limitations of CPUs, end users are forced to design their structures and systems with limitations.
Until now. As the cloud toolkit to analyze data has evolved, GPUs have stepped in to massively parallel SQL, visualization and machine learning.
Shiny new toy syndrome. We all see it, we all experience it. Who doesn’t like the shiny new toy? Whenever a new technology hits the high points of hype, everyone starts talking about it like it will solve all their business problems. Sadly, frequently without even looking at what problem they are trying to solve. Blockchain is one of those technologies. According to Gartner’s latest report on the hype cycle of emerging technologies, blockchain has just passed the peak of their hype cycle curve. If you read the news articles about it, one would think it has taken over the technology world. The reality is, as Gartner put it, that ‘most initiatives are still in the alpha or beta stages’ and ‘Enterprises are still deciding how to navigate this technology.’
The cloud industry is booming and almost every day, you hear a new platform or service from a company. The number of cloud-based products and services that are available today is truly mind-boggling. Amidst all this, how do you know which product is right for your company at this given point in time?
One of the biggest decisions you’ll have to make it the type of cloud that’s right for your organization.
Broadly speaking, there are three types of clouds, namely private, public and hybrid. A public cloud is the standard cloud resource where the provider creates the resources or platforms for you, so you don’t have to worry about anything. However, this is a public service that’s available to all Internet users, which means, you’ll be sharing the same infrastructure with other users.
Private cloud offers the same benefits as public cloud, except that you’ll be using a proprietary infrastructure that is not shared by other users. In other words, a private cloud is an infrastructure that’s dedicated to a single organization, but offers the same advantages such as flexibility and scalability.
A hybrid cloud, as you would’ve guessed by now, is a combination of private and public cloud with interoperability.
Choosing which of these is right for you is anything but easy. Here are some questions that can point you in the right direction.
If your organization has only one office or if you’re looking to downsize by moving all your IT operations from in-house, a private or hybrid cloud is your best bet. However, make sure that you meet the IT disaster recovery requirements as laid down by the PCI DSS standards.
What is the IT budget you have in mind? Research shows that there are 12 different IT costs you should keep in mind while framing your budget and while calculating the total cost of ownership with cloud computing costs. In general though, if you want to keep costs to a minimum, a private cloud is a good choice.
An important question is to determine the age of your infrastructure. If you’re using an old one and it’s time to replace, then opt for a public cloud as everything is handled by the provider. You can even consider a hybrid cloud infrastructure, if you ‘re particular about using proprietary hardware.
If yes, then private cloud is your best bet as it greatly reduces the chances of hackers getting into your system. Today’s public cloud security has also improved greatly, but still a private cloud is better from a security standpoint.
We hope your decision has become much easier now. let us know what you think.
The post Which cloud is right for you? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Cloud content management company Box has unveiled Box Skills, a framework for applying machine learning tools such as computer vision, video indexing, and sentiment analysis to stored content. Box Skills will facilitate businesses to re-imagine the business processes considered as impractical to digitise or automate or too expensive.
At BoxWorks 2017, Box previewed three initial Box Skills currently in development, leveraging machine learning tools from IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to solve common business use cases, including:
Audio Intelligence: Uses audio files to create and index a text transcript that can be easily searched and manipulated in a variety of use cases; powered by IBM Watson technology.
Video Intelligence: Provides transcription, topic detection and detects people to allow users to quickly look up the information they need in a video; powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services.
Image Intelligence: Detects individual objects and concepts in image files, captures text through optical character recognition (OCR), and automatically adds keyword labels to images to easily build metadata on image catalogues; powered by Google Cloud Platform.
David Kenny, Senior Vice President, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, said: “Box Skills is an extension of our strategic partnership with Box aimed at helping businesses work more efficiently, solve challenges and seize opportunities for innovation.”
Scott Guthrie, EVP of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise division, said: “Box Skills brings together Box’s cloud content management and Microsoft Azure’s industry-leading AI services to deliver intelligent insights for customers.”
Box also launched Box Skills Kit, a set of developer resources for building custom Box Skills. Box Skills Kit will enable an ecosystem of cloud services providers, independent software vendors, systems integrators, and enterprises themselves to create custom Box Skills implementations.
The company also demonstrated its Box Graph technology at BoxWorks 2017. It is an intelligent network of content, relationships, and activity that Box will leverage to power new experiences and services for both individual Box users and enterprises. Box launched the first new experience powered by Box Graph, called Feed. It is a personalised activity feed that curates and surfaces the most relevant updates, insights and content for each Box user.
Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer for Box, said: “Box Skills and Box Graph represent a truly practical application of intelligence for the enterprise, ensuring our customers can realise incredible value from every piece of content they have in Box.”
What are your thoughts on Box’s new framework? Let us know in the comments.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Avere Systems, a leading provider of hybrid cloud enablement solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Avere Systems was created by file systems experts determined to reinvent storage by changing the way enterprises thought about and bought storage resources. With decades of experience behind the company’s founders, Avere got its start in 2008 with a mission to use fast, flash-based storage in the most efficient, effective manner possible. What the team had discovered was a technology that optimized storage resources and reduced dependencies on sprawling storage installations. Launched as the Avere OS, this advanced file system not only boosted performance within standard, on-premises, network-attached storage systems but also within diverse, hybrid architectures that include cloud provider services and other types of object storage.
IBM has announced a new capability at the Serverless Conference in New York City on October 10th, 2017 to further the development of serverless applications.
The new tool, Composer, comprises a library of patterns that are key for building serverless applications. It also has the inherent serverless features such as auto-scaling and pay-as-you-go built into it.
Currently, the programming model is available for use in only Node.js language, but developers can deploy the model to make it available in other programming languages such as Python, Swift, and Java.
Rodric Rabbah, principal researcher for IBM Cloud Functions, said: «Rather than forcing people to learn new programming languages, we’d rather bring the model into their favourite programming language.»
The library highlights the key features of serverless and Functions-as-a-Service, as Rabbah explains: «To make functions first class and still allow you to orchestrate the execution of all the functions and the data flow between them automatically, freeing the programmer from having to do that.»
IBM researcher Paul Castro explained that working with Composer is unlike the typical process wherein the developers building solutions with serverless either had to roll their own composition in an ad hoc manner or use a separate service, such as AWS Step Functions. Castro said: “Composer is bringing that composition into the development flow you would already use for serverless, and it’s well integrated into what we have in OpenWhisk / IBM Cloud Function.»
IBM is also introducing the functions shell, a new tool to help with developing, deploying, running, and debugging serverless Functions and compositions. For example, a developer can use it to edit code in a text editor instead of a drag-n-drop UI, or to validate compositions with visualizations without switching tools. It also helps developers deploy and invoke compositions using familiar CLI commands.
What are your thoughts on IBM’s new Composer tool? Let us know in the comments.
When it comes to cloud computing, the ability to turn massive amounts of compute cores on and off on demand sounds attractive to IT staff, who need to manage peaks and valleys in user activity. With cloud bursting, the majority of the data can stay on premises while tapping into compute from public cloud providers, reducing risk and minimizing need to move large files. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Scott Jeschonek, Director of Product Management at Avere Systems, discussed the IT and business benefits that cloud bursting provides, including increased compute capacity, lower IT investment, financial agility, and, ultimately, faster time-to-market.