Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Andi Mann returns to ‘DevOps at Cloud Expo 2016’ as Conference Chair
The @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo will take place on November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
«DevOps is set to be one of the most profound disruptions to hit IT in decades,» said Andi Mann. «It is a natural extension of cloud computing, and I have seen both firsthand and in independent research the fantastic results DevOps delivers. So I am excited to help the great team at @DevOpsSummit and Cloud Expo tell the world how they can leverage this emerging disruptive trend.»
Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate at Splunk, is an accomplished digital business executive with extensive global expertise as a strategist, technologist, innovator, and communicator. For over 30 years across five continents, Andi has built success with Fortune 500 corporations, vendors, governments, and as a leading research analyst and consultant.
Andi is a sought-after commentator on business technology – published in USA Today, New York Times, Forbes, CIO, and Wall Street Journal; presented at Gartner ITxpo, VMworld, CA World, Interop, Cloud Expo, and DevOps Summit; participated and hosted interviews for radio, television, webcasts, podcasts, and live events; and more.
The Evolution of Storage | @CloudExpo #BigData #IoT #DataCenter #Storage
One of the greatest challenges facing business and government organizations is how to store and move sensitive data around the world while maintaining security. Storing and securing critical data held within data centers (whether physical or virtual) is top of mind from the boardroom to the remote data center. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, spending on private cloud IT infrastructure in 2015 will grow by 15.8 percent year over year to $12.1 billion, while spending on public cloud IT infrastructure will increase by 29.6 percent to $20.5 billion.
[slides] Best Practices in Operating Hybrid Infrastructure | @CloudExpo @RackNgo #Cloud
The pace of innovation, vendor lock-in, production sustainability, cost-effectiveness, and managing risk… In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Dan Choquette, Founder of RackN, discussed how CIOs are challenged finding the balance of finding the right tools, technology and operational model that serves the business the best.
He also discussed how clouds, open source software and infrastructure solutions have benefits but also drawbacks and how workload and operational portability between vendors and platforms give control back to the users and drives innovation.
[video] Cloud Is Now Mainstream ‘Power Panel’ | @CloudExpo #Cloud
The initial debate is over: Any enterprise with a serious commitment to IT is migrating to the cloud. But things are not so simple. There is a complex mix of on-premises, colocated, and public-cloud deployments.
In this power panel at 18th Cloud Expo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist – Windows Products and Microsoft Partnerships at Commvault; Dave Landa, Chief Operating Officer at kintone; William Morrish, General Manager Product Sales at Interoute; and Nara Rajagopalan, CEO at Accelerite; looked at the present state of cloud from the C-level view, and how great companies and rock star executives can use cloud computing to meet their most ambitious and disruptive business goals.
Securing Privileged Accounts | @CloudExpo #Cloud #BigData #Security
Insider threats are on the rise more than ever. It’s a malicious activity that originates from users within an organization, as opposed to attacks like DDoS that come from the outside. Cyber hackers of this kind get inside the system to steal intellectual property from the company via user credentials. They can use a variety of techniques like phishing links, password brute force, password scanning, keyloggers and many others to get their foot in the door of the enterprise network.
[slides] Modernizing Existing Infrastructure | @CloudExpo @FalconStor #Cloud #BigData #Storage
Let’s face it, embracing new storage technologies, capabilities and upgrading to new hardware often adds complexity and increases costs.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Seth Oxenhorn, Vice President of Business Development & Alliances at FalconStor, discussed how a truly heterogeneous software-defined storage approach can add value to legacy platforms and heterogeneous environments. The result reduces complexity, significantly lowers cost, and provides IT organizations with improved efficiencies, all while delivering real freedom and flexibility. Come learn how to #BeFree.
[session] Driving Value into the Cloud | @CloudExpo @EdgeWebHosting #API #Cloud #Security
Most organizations prioritize data security only after their data has already been compromised. Proactive prevention is important, but how can you accomplish that on a small budget? Learn how the cloud, combined with a defense and in-depth approach, creates efficiencies by transferring and assigning risk. Security requires a multi-defense approach, and an in-house team may only be able to cherry pick from the essential components.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Vlad Friedman, CEO/Founder of Edge Hosting, will discuss what questions to ask and the technologies to look for from your cloud service provider to ensure your applications stay online and secure.
Why enterprise cloud transformation is all a matter of transition
(c)iStock.com/Ivan Bliznetsov
The move for enterprises to the cloud is not a question of if but when – and neither is it a question of pace.
That’s the view of Matthew Finnie, chief technical officer at virtual data centre (VDC) provider Interoute. He argues that the industries traditionally less than keen on changing – finance and manufacturing, and a trend which this publication has covered extensively – have all come to the same realisation. “The issue for us is not so much the speed at which stuff will move to the cloud, which is going at a good old pace, but it’s actually more the implicit understanding that most people have now – stuff is going to leave their premises,” he tells CloudTech.
“No-one, really, should be in the business of running their own infrastructure, unless of course that is your business, or you’re very, very large,” he adds. “They’ve all got to get out – it makes no sense any more for anyone to build their own.”
Nor does the outspoken Finnie believe cloud transformation is going to make things unnecessarily complicated and lead to headaches for IT departments. “It’s less about the absolute scale of the data centre, [but] more about the scale of the ability to take on some of those data centre assets in whatever form they come at you,” he says. “If you’ve got an AS/400, you ain’t sticking that in the cloud, or worse, an application written in COBOL. That’s certainly not going in the cloud. We use the network as a method of binding it together.”
Regarding the complexity, Finnie continues on the theme. “There’s no technology precedent that says it goes all from one place, your data centre, to multiple locations, platform as a service, software as a service, infrastructure as a service and your own data centre, and therefore it’s going to be really complicated. It’s all transitionary. From our experience, the speed of transformation has got nothing to do with technology… [but] many times the fear and loathing of the IT department.”
One important piece of news from Interoute’s perspective was the acquisition of cloud networks provider Easynet. The £402 million deal was announced in September and given full sign-off in November from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). As Finnie explains, the similarities between both companies, as well as a big European footprint, was vital. “What they were predominantly was manage WAN,” he says, “and in any digital transformation, the hard yards are connecting everyone up.
“For us, it was about acquiring a set of customers that we could upsell to, and practically speaking, by acquiring Easynet we acquired our next largest competitor. We gave ourselves a year to do the integration, and we’re already in a place now, six months in, where we’re actively upselling to those existing customers,” Finnie adds.
But with that in mind, Interoute has been busy expanding its empire, with new VDC zones in Singapore and Istanbul mooted. For the company, the latter is about as far south and east as you can go in Europe, and represents a good base to potentially target the Middle East. “We’ve got lots of bigger customers who are European based, but global – a lot of them will have an Asian presence,” Finnie says.
“They’ll want to run services natively in a region, and so [the move] is to support that, but also we’ve now got a model on this digital platform approach that will combine network and cloud, and those are very portable. It’s much lighter in terms of putting a full service set into a region.”
Contract dispute with HPE costs Oracle $3bn
Oracle has released a statement declaring it will appeal a jury decision to side with HPE in a long-running contract dispute worth $3 billion.
The dispute dates back to 2011 when Oracle decided to stop creating new versions of its database and other software for systems running Intel’s Itanium chip. The HP Enterprise claimed the decision violated the contractual terms between the organizations, a claim which the jury also believed. Oracle also claimed Intel had decided to stop supporting Itanium shifting focus to the x86 microprocessor, which the chip-maker has denied.
“Five years ago, Oracle made a software development announcement which accurately reflected the future of the Itanium microprocessor,” said Dorian Daley, General Counsel of Oracle. “Two trials have now demonstrated clearly that the Itanium chip was nearing end of life, HP knew it, and was actively hiding that fact from its customers.
“Oracle never believed it had a contract to continue to port our software to Itanium indefinitely and we do not believe so today; nevertheless, Oracle has been providing all its latest software for the Itanium systems since the original ruling while HP and Intel stopped developing systems years ago.”
Back in 2012, Santa Clara court’s Judge James Kleinberg confirmed to Oracle it would have to maintain its end of the contract for as long as HPE remained in the Itanium game. This decision was appealed by Oracle, which delayed the damages trial.
HPE has been seeking damages of $3 billion – $1.7 billion in lost sales before the case started, plus $1.3 billion in post-trial sales – which was awarded in full by the jury. Daley has unsurprisingly stated Oracle will appeal the decision, which could mean the sage will continue for some time.
Oracle has been having a tough time in the court room as of late, as it was seeking $8.8 billion in damages from Google over the unlicensed use of Java in a case which has dated back to 2010. The recent ruling was a victory for Google as the jury found Android does not infringe Oracle-owned copyrights because its re-implementation of 37 Java APIs is protected by ‘fair use’. Oracle again stated it would appeal the decision, though it has been a tough couple of months for Oracle’s legal team.
Machine Vision 5G use case demonstrated by Ericsson and Vodafone
Ericsson and Vodafone have successfully demonstrated another 5G Proof of Concept, this time focusing on Machine Vision (MV) application, reports Telecoms.com.
The team created a 5G Smart Network Edge prototype including a 5G ready core and demonstrated the benefits of network slicing and distributed cloud technology for MV. Making the announcement at the Innovation Days at Ericsson’s R&D Center in Aachen, the team demonstrated how the 5G Smart Network Edge enables much greater efficiency for industry. Due to reduced network latencies the recognition rate of a cloud-based face detection application was increased. The PoC also confirmed data could be stored locally, decreasing the risk of breaches, loss or unauthorized access.
“Within only 3 months we created a 5G Smart Network Edge prototype by connecting our labs,” Sonja Graf, Head of Vodafone Innovation Park at Vodafone Germany. “The Face Recognition use case is just one example demonstrating how 5G will meet the diverse needs of a wide range of industries.”
While MV is not a new concept for the industry, it is becoming increasing commonplace for quality assurance, inspection and industrial robot guidance processes in the manufacturing industry. Examples of MV include wood quality inspection, robot guidance and checking orientation of components and reading of serial numbers. Actions of the back of the inspection can be automated, opening up the door for artificial intelligence in the manufacturing industry.
“We are delighted that the Ericsson and Vodafone labs have come together to innovate and this first use case shows an excellent example of how 5G can enable industries to become more efficient as well as more secure and cost effective,” said Valter D’Avino, Head of Ericsson Western & Central Europe.