SYS-CON Events announced today that Datera 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. Datera offers a radically new approach to data management, where innovative software makes data infrastructure invisible, elastic and able to perform at the highest level. It eliminates hardware lock-in and gives IT organizations the choice to source x86 server nodes, with business model options that best align to their goals.

read more

As the true definition of hybrid cloud continues to blur, eight out of 10 enterprises in a survey from Stratoscale say they avoid running sensitive data in the public cloud.

The results appear in the company’s Hybrid Cloud Survey, which was conducted in June and features more than 600 responses from organisations at varying sizes.

According to the research, almost four in five (77%) respondents define the value of the hybrid cloud in one of two ways, depending on how far advanced their adoption is. In enterprises with hybrid cloud adoption level below 20%, hybrid is most frequently defined as ‘the ability to move workloads between private and public cloud’, but as it exceeds 20%, the concept moves to one of ‘different workloads belonging in different public and private environments’.

More than 80% of enterprises polled said they had either moderate or high levels of concern around public cloud lock-in, with the smallest companies – those with less than 100 employees – the most concerned. More than half of enterprises have also moved less than one fifth of their workloads to the public cloud, with smaller firms the furthest into their journey, with large companies having more users who start but a much slower pace of progress.

“The transformation to a ‘digital business’ by implementing cloud services and platforms is no longer much of an option – it’s an imperative for the continued survival of any enterprise,” said Ariel Maislos, Stratoscale CEO in a statement. “The findings from our survey confirm what we’re hearing from our customers – although many have started their journey to the public cloud, the vast majority of companies are still running mission critical workloads and sensitive data in private solutions, primarily for security reasons.

“It’s clear the hybrid cloud model represents the near and long-term future for most enterprises, regardless of size,” Maislos added.

The lack of consensus around the definition of hybrid cloud is reminiscent of a study conducted by Clutch at the start of this year regarding DevOps, where not even a quarter of respondents could agree on a definitive meaning for the term.

Read more: What is the point of hybrid cloud – or, is it time to re-evaluate hybrid?

Dasher Technologies is committed to being the best technology solution company in the United States by operating with the highest integrity and building lasting relationships with its customers and partners. Since 1982, Dasher Technologies helped public, private and nonprofit organizations implement technology solutions that speed and simplify their operations. As one of the fastest growing system integrators in the country, Dasher have gained a reputation for effortless implementations with relentless follow-through and enduring support. Dasher’s strong technical expertise and vendor independence allows the company to integrate best-of-breed software, hardware and services into a custom solution that directly impacts the business. Dasher was recently named the HP 2012 ESSN Partner of the Year and is the #1 provider of HP High Performance Computing solutions and HP Open Source/Linux solutions in the US. The company has grown to five offices nationwide with locations in California, Oregon, Washington, Alabama, and Florida. Dasher is listed as a certified Women Owned Business.

read more

The winning trinity in competitive decision-making includes people, ideas and things according to the renowned military strategist John Boyd. Although competitive decision-making is not yet an Olympic sport, it affects us all. Leaders (people) must become trained experts at using digital technologies to make fast decisions. Leaders must use the right strategies and methodologies (ideas) to make wise decisions fast, and they must collect the needed data and analyze it fast enough using the best solutions (things). If any component of this trinity is weak, it will be hard to compete.

read more

Open networking is a hot topic these days. When we read about open networking products and initiatives, the emphasis is on network switches more often than not. But server-based networking has also proceeded along an increasingly open path, and in many ways it set the stage for the opening of switch technology.

Network switches like top of rack (TOR) switches have traditionally been closed – they come from specific vendors with proprietary software. Networking in commercial off the shelf (COTS) servers has been open for several years, thanks to the proliferation of Linux server operating systems (OSs), and networking technologies like Open vSwitch (OVS).  The networking industry wants the switch world to follow servers’ successful path; hence the birth and popularity of the term “open networking.”

Open switch evolution

Switches have traditionally been closed – the network operating systems and protocols that run on the switches have been proprietary, could not be disaggregated from the hardware and were not open source. At first, switches were really closed because the switch ASIC, the software and the switch box were all from a single vendor and were proprietary. Then, switches got disaggregated a bit when the switch vendors adopted switch ASICs from merchant silicon vendors like Broadcom. Next came OpenFlow and OpenFlow-based SDN controllers like Floodlight, which proposed that the switch control plane protocols be removed from the switch and placed in an open source controller. This in some ways disaggregated the OS from the switch box.

Subsequently, switch operating systems like Cumulus Linux came into the market. These are disaggregated because they can install and run on merchant switch ASIC-based switch boxes from multiple vendors like Quanta and Dell. But such disaggregated switch OSes are not necessarily open source.

More recently, open source switch operating systems like SONiC and Open Network Linux have been in the news. The open source controller ecosystem has further evolved as well, focusing on feature completeness and carrier grade reliability (i.e. OpenDaylight and ONOS).

All in all, significant action and news in the realm of open networking have been related to switches, geared toward helping the industry manage the switch supply chain more effectively and deploy efficiently, similar to the COTS server model.

Figure 1: Switch disaggregation follows server model

Open networking on servers

What seems to get overlooked in these discussions about open networking is the all-important precursor to this movement – open networking on servers. Most importantly, how open networking on servers (or server-based open networking) has evolved and enabled open networking on switches.

Over the last several years, TOR switches have become simpler because data centre traffic patterns have changed and networking infrastructure efficiency requirements have increased. When using leaf (TOR) and spine switches, the imperative has shifted to moving east-west traffic most efficiently, which requires more bandwidth, more ports and lower latency. As a result, the feature requirements in hardware and software in leaf and spine switches have been reduced to a simpler set. This has made open networking in switches easier to implement and deploy.

However, the smarts of networking did not disappear – they just moved to the server, where such smarts are implemented using the virtual switch – preferably an open one such as OVS – and other Linux networking features like IP tables. Many new networking features related to network security and load balancing have been added to OVS.

OpenStack, as an open source and centralized cloud orchestration tool, has rapidly come to prominence, with more than 60% of OpenStack networking deployed today using OVS (with OpenStack Neutron). Server-based open networking has evolved relatively quietly compared to open networking in switches, but it has made major contributions toward bringing deployment efficiencies and flexibility.

Today, in many high growth cloud, SDN and NFV applications, server-based open networking is running into server sprawl and related TCO challenges. As the networking bandwidths increase and the number of VMs proliferates on servers, OVS processing is taking up an increasingly large number of CPU cycles, which is limiting the number of CPU cycles available for processing applications and VMs.

Data centre operators cannot economically scale their server-based networking using traditional software-based virtual switches. So implementing server-based networking in x86 architectures and software is a double whammy: it increases costs as too many CPU cores are consumed, and it lowers performance as applications are starved for resources. 

Offloading network processing to networking hardware is an option that has worked well in the past.  However, software-defined and open source networking is evolving at a rapid pace; such innovation stops the moment data centre operators look to inflexible networking hardware for performance and scale.

Figure 2: Networking smarts moving to servers

SmartNICs: The programmable option

The solution to this challenge is to offload OVS processing to an SmartNIC. A SmartNIC handles I/O functions and incorporates a programmable network processor that can run OVS and other software. With a SmartNIC handling OVS processing, performance is boosted by up to 5X, and the data centre operator frees as many as 11 CPU cores from network-related processing, enabling greater VM scalability and lower costs. Because it is programmable, a SmartNIC can evolve rapidly with few features, preserving the pace of innovation. 

Although server-based networking by itself can cause server sprawl, SmartNICs are making the case for efficient and flexible open networking from the COTS server side.

Figure 3: A SmartNIC offloads networking from servers

The AWS Marketplace is growing at breakneck speed, with 40% more listings than last year! This and more insights were revealed when CloudEndure used their custom tool to quickly scan the over 6,000 products available on AWS Marketplace. The top offerings are highlighted in the image below but additional detail is available on their blog.

read more

Technology integration is complex and an evergreen business challenge for IT teams. Enterprises setup manual & point to point connections to exchange data from business partners. However, data disruptions emerge when the business IT systems expand and prevents organizations from sharing data with partners. Information exchange with this approach requires more resources and manpower is required. For such scenarios, information solution experts recommend to use the B2B data exchange tool to support the Electronic Data Interchange. However, enterprises are struck in a dilemma to go for an in house or a b2b solution. This blog will help you in deciding whether to develop an in-house solution or a dedicated information solution

read more

Who is accountable for SSH-related, key-based access in your organization? In many enterprises, this is not clear, leading to assumptions that leave you vulnerable to attack and compliance violations as well. This article will address the challenge of SSH user key-based access from the perspective of compliance.
It’s all about access control. All the regulations, laws and frameworks exist to ensure, at a minimum, that protected data (PII, ePHI, credit card data, etc.) has authorized access. It doesn’t matter whether that access is being requested by a machine, admin or business user.

read more

Rackspace and OVH have announced the openings of new data centres in Frankfurt and London respectively.

The former cited EU and Swiss data protection regulations as part of the reason for its move, while the latter said that ‘in spite of Brexit’ it was still committed to the UK market.

“This marks a significant step forward for OVH in supporting UK customers with a local dedicated gateway into our worldwide network,” said Hiren Parekh, director cloud EMEA at OVH. “We are offering low latency, guaranteed bandwidth and enhanced DDoS protection for all of our customers.” Jeff Cotton, president of Rackspace, said: “Rackspace’s first data centre in Germany marks another key milestone for our DACH portfolio and reflects our investment in the German market.”

The new German data centre means Rackspace will operate 12 worldwide, while OVH is opening its fifth data centre in 12 months, after Australia, Singapore, Poland and Germany.

The two companies have been busy outside of their data centre remits in recent months. In May, Rackspace announced the acquisition of TriCore Solutions, an enterprise app management provider, as well as unveiling their new CEO, former EarthLink boss Joe Eazor. Last month, OVH announced a €400 million (£358.6m) funding round in order to help expand its global strategy.

Also among Rackspace’s recent highlights was announcing a deal with Google Cloud for managed services support, while OVH was named as the top cloud computing vendor in Europe in May in terms of price and performance.