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Infrastructure 2.0

If the leadership in your organization is mature and has a good track record – rest assured that a risk-mitigated decision to dabble in the public cloud is a vote of confidence in your direction. It's little more than innate human nature to strive to control the environment around us....
The IT industry is nothing if not a breeding ground for an infinite variety of acronyms and neologisms. Alongside cloud computing today sits the term Big Data, which of course we understand to mean “that amount” of data which a traditional database would find hard to compute and proces...
New breakthroughs in cloud-based data management empower databases with the necessary elasticity they need to be truly responsive to the ebbs and tides of supply and demand. Cloud computing allows all capital assets – computing power, memory and storage for example – to be exchanged a...
We'll learn why a cloud-of-clouds approach is providing new types of IT services to Thomas Duryea’s many Asia-Pacific region customers. We've been talking about cloud computing for years now, and I think it's pretty well established that we can do cloud computing quite well technicall...
We have all been getting used to the term Big Data by now. Despite varying definitions of what it is supposed to mean across a variety of computing platforms and use cases, we typically understand Big Data to refer to anything from “hundreds” of gigabytes for smaller organizations thro...
Cloud Computing is not really a market or set of markets at all. It’s part of a paradigm-shifting trend that is reinventing how organizations large and small purchase, provision, utilize, pay for, and think about IT resources. Eventually, everything will be the Cloud, which from the ma...
BigData (and Hadoop) are buzzword and growth areas of computing; this article will distill the concepts into easy-to-understand terms. As the name implies, BigData is literally "big data" or "lots of data" that needs to be processed. Lets take a simple example: the city council of San...
I wrote a blog for Cloud Ecosystem last month that talks about the disruption potential of hybrid clouds for disaster recovery. You can read it here: Hybrid Cloud will Transform Disaster Recovery. Within a few days CloudVelocity CTO Anand Iyengar weighed in shortly after with: The Hy...
As the cloud market explodes, a distinct chasm has become apparent between the operation of infrastructure and applications. Sharing, isolation and load balancing issues in the network, combined with high density virtualization in compute and storage resources, can adversely impact the...
In a recent blog post, we discussed the emergence of Cloud Protection Gateways as a solution for enterprises looking to protect sensitive cloud data by keeping that data under their complete control. We started looking at the vetting process enterprises undertake when they are selectin...
Through a great deal of research on enterprise cloud adoption and security, I’ve learned something telling. As you would expect, CISOs’ opinions about cloud strategy are quite varied. While many folks recognize their company’s use of SaaS for HR, sales, communication, and other applica...
The demand for distributed data and services is increasing as big companies are more and more spread across the world. Cloud services are raging from simple storage and up to complex computing processes. Depending on the needs there are products that run completely into the cloud whil...
When I was writing about the cloud and disaster recovery I was only considering the tip of the iceberg, the obvious over-provisioning of expensive, specialized infrastructures needed in case the production environment failed. A duplicate data center is necessary today but perhaps less...
Outsourcing commodity capabilities to the low-cost provider while focusing your strategic value-add on customized offerings is an oft-repeated pattern in the world of business, but it hasn’t really taken hold in the world of IT until the rise of Cloud Computing. The reason it’s taken s...
The most essential element in optimizing performance is detecting issues before they impact your systems. However, you need to implement constant monitoring on your operating environment to gain this early insight. There are tools to help, but finding one that provides all the right in...
TTNET, the largest internet service provider in Turkey, with six million subscribers, significantly improved applications deployment while cutting costs and time to delivery. What was the situation there before you became more automated, before you started to use more software tools?...
In mobile app development, we're seeing a major philosophical split between the "nativists" (running directly on the device hardware) and the "virtualizers" (with their scripting and interpretive layers and containers). Both enterprises and independent software vendors (ISVs) know the...
Testing tools and frameworks are infinitely useful when planning cloud architecture for many reasons. “The confidence of a well-tested codebase brings the ability to deploy quickly, and often. Testing infrastructure assures that incremental changes to the codebase do not affect the ov...
Last night CloudVelocity CEO Rajeev Chawla was able to talk to Brian Gracely at The Cloudcast on CloudVelocity and the hybrid cloud. The 33 minute interview (Accelerating the Hybrid Cloud (#83) is now available for download. A special thanks to Brian, who asked some of the most probin...
In recent years, IT departments have been confronted with the convergence of several highly disruptive trends that have fundamentally altered the enterprise IT landscape, particularly when it comes to how data and applications are managed. Mobility and the rise of BYOD (bring your own ...
As the proliferation of the cloud continues, Cloud Protection Gateways are increasingly being discussed as a way to address security issues surrounding cloud adoption. Whatever stage of cloud adoption your organization is in, a thorough vetting of the different gateways available will ...
The "Force Majeure" provision, a Latin term roughly meaning an "Act of God" is commonly found in most services agreements. But should it be included in your cloud services contract? This nugget is a common clause in contracts that essentially frees both parties from liability or obli...
Cloud has arrived. Everyone in the business, from the CEO to the customer relations manager, wants in on a computing model that promises to lower costs while delivering better service and greater efficiency. The business finally sees the potential of IT to add value, yet such high expe...
Forrester analyst James Staten says that “the whole value of cloud computing is tied to areas of IT that can be standardized, automated, and shared among multiple constituents.[1]” Automation through the cloud is the next step for cloud-based innovation to reduce costs and increase pro...
The lack of emphasis on self-service Private Clouds is a telling indicator of the state of Cloud Computing (in particular, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS) in the enterprise. If an enterprise IT shop were to truly implement a self-service Private Cloud, and actually got it to work...
The success or failure of public cloud services can be measured by whether they deliver high levels of performance, security and reliability that are on par with, or better than, those available within enterprise-owned data centers. Gartner predicts that the global public cloud comput...
CIOs understand the importance of analytics and BI. According to a 2012 survey of 2300 CIO by Gartner, analytics and BI are their number one technology priority. Analytics and BI can make bigger business impact when they can access more data. With data in the cloud and Big Data silos, ...
Six months ago my boss sent me an interactive calculator that the New York Times created to help people decide whether it’s a better financial decision to buy a home or simply rent one. He shared the calculator with me because, at the time, we were looking for interesting ways to visua...
The Open Group’s first conference in Australia will focus on enterprise transformation. Speakers and a variety of sessions will place the transformation in the context of such vertical industries as finance, defense, exploration, mining, and minerals. As a prelude to the event, Briefi...
Despite the recent flood of high profile network breaches, hacking attempts are hardly new. In 1995, I was attending school in Helsinki when I discovered a password “sniffer” attack in our university network. In response, I wrote a program called the “secure shell” to safeguard informa...
If you were to ask EMC or VMware whom they consider their major threat and competition you’d be easily forgiven for being mistaken to think it was NetApp, HP or offerings such as Hyper-V. The current cloud era has undoubtedly been spearheaded by the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook...
Today’s IT infrastructure is in the midst of a major transformation. In many ways, the data center is a victim of its own success. The growing number of technologies and applications residing in the data center has spawned increasing complexity, which makes IT as a whole less responsiv...
When VMware announced its hybrid cloud initiative it made perfect sense. The hybrid cloud market could provide substantial growth opportunities for VMware, as discussed in VMware Crosses the Rubicon and Hybrid is a Whole New Cloud. Yet one respected tech analyst has recently suggested ...
The ability to guarantee performance to thousands of applications at once has garnered praise from analysts and enterprises alike. Without this guarantee, cloud providers will not be able to meet the rising performance requirements of enterprise customers. Given the compelling advantag...
Organizations today understand that better access to information assets can improve their bottom-line. But they struggle with the variety of enterprise, cloud and big data sources, and all their associated access mechanisms, syntax, security, etc. Data abstraction overcomes data sourc...
The responsibility for proper consumption of Cloud resources doesn’t fall to a single role in our organization. Rather, developers, operations personnel, as well as the managers responsible for the Cloud provider business relationship must work together to ensure the code is correct, t...
More and more of our lives are lived online. Our music collections, bookshelves, vacation memories and more are increasingly digitized and uploaded into the cloud, the vast network of server farms that provide the bulk of online storage today. Research firm Gartner projects that by 201...
OpenStack is an OpenSource offering of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). For a review, here is a quick overview of IaaS and OpenStack. OpenStack is admittedly not trivial to manually install. I have started a manual install beginning with the Identity Service (keystone) here, other ...
Everyone has an argument for the ideal technological approach to cloud computing: public vs. private (vs. hybrid), open vs. closed, vertical vs. horizontal, etc. Larry Ellison’s thoughts on the proprietary cloud aside, an open cloud environment is inevitable. Companies will have a vari...
A move to the cloud brings serious benefits, particularly for startups who often need to ramp up their IT capacity quickly without the burden of investing in new hardware or training staff. If your company is ready to offload its applications to the cloud, how do you decide which provi...