SOA & Cloud Computing

Cloud-Friendly BPM: The Power of Hypermedia-Oriented Architecture

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:45:00 EDT

We must bring together the worlds of SOA, BPM, Cloud, REST, and HOA. The secret to getting all these architectural trends to work well together centers on how we deal with state information. We must first separate application state from resource state, and then subsequently take the conceptual leap to understanding that the best way to implement our business processes is by combining HOA processes with Composite RESTful Services. Once we make this leap, however, the pieces of this complicated puzzle finally fall into place. What we need is a better way of dealing with state information that both allows our BPM engines to be Cloud friendly, and also frees us from the limitations of our ESBs. Or perhaps we must reinvent our ESBs to work in the Cloud. However you slice the problem, Hypermedia-Oriented Architecture (HOA) has the answer.

Don’t Let Your Hybrid Cloud Collapse into a Black Hole

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:33:00 EDT

A PMTUD black hole can cause a particularly subtle set of issues in hybrid cloud-based environments where the cloud resources are connected to a corporate office or other datacenter via IPSec tunnels. PMTUD black holes basically cause certain (but not all) traffic to not make it through the tunnel. Before we get down and dirty into the problems with PMTUD, let's quickly go over what PMTUD is. PMTUD stands for Path Maximum Transmission Unit Discovery and it is a protocol/algorithm defined in RFC 1191 that determines the best packet size for IPv4 datagrams flowing between any two given hosts. In this way, it attempts to optimize traffic through the Internet by using the largest possible datagram that doesn't require intermediary routers to fragment the traffic (since fragmentation and, more importantly, reassembly are expensive operations for routers to perform).

Achieving Scale and Performance in the Cloud

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:00:00 EDT

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 at the best price, giving everyone the best value for their money. Like any free market, it will only deliver its full benefits to buyers and sellers if the right conditions are available. There can be no barriers to entry, and assets in the cloud must be capable of free movement. Unfortunately, the unsuitability of traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) has created such a blockage. Their lack of elasticity or liquidity demobilizes computing resources. However, new developments in cloud database technology (like database bursting and hibernating functions) show how the database component can have the necessary fluidity to bring cloud-computing closer to ‘perfect market’ conditions and begin to deliver its full benefits.

Are Legos the Building Blocks of the Cloud?

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:45:00 EDT

Legos have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest, fondest memories involve Legos - starting from a small car made from a couple of simple bricks to very complex spaceships and wild creatures. I’m always amazed at how nicely and cleanly they snap together to create something solid, functional, and – in the case of the Millennium Falcon – amazing. Let’s be honest, I’m not the only one occasionally sneaking down Target’s Lego aisle to discover what new theme they’ve cooked up from the same core concept: clicking bricks together. It’s magical what happens to the brain when snapping those colorful, simple blocks into place. Visions of larger, cooler creations are conjured and we find ourselves scrambling for additional blocks to connect to create something that has a whole new purpose or function.

Taking a Cloud-of-Clouds Approach

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:00:00 EDT

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 technically. The question that many organizations keep coming back with is whether they should do cloud computing. If there are certain risks, how do they know what risks are important? How do they get through that? What are you in learning so far at TD about risk and how your customers face that?

Forecasting the Cloud Market: How the Sausage Is Made

Mon, 13 May 2013 09:45:00 EDT

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 market sizing perspective means that nothing will be the Cloud. Group vendors into separate, distinct markets (or do so for individual products, when vendors compete in multiple markets). Assign each of your analysts to interview each vendor once a year in the analyst’s assigned market, in the hopes that the vendor will reveal their true revenues for the year in question. Put the resulting numbers in the spreadsheet, add them all up, and you are able to calculate a reasonable estimate for the size of the given market.

Topics in Hybrid Cloud Worth Following

Sun, 05 May 2013 11:45:00 EDT

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 Hybrid Cloud is Ideal for Disaster Recovery. A highlight from both blogs: the on demand pay as you go cloud model is a far superior operating model for DR, if and only if a true hybrid cloud can be deployed. The issue of how a true hybrid cloud can be deployed was addressed in a great interview at Cloudcast with Brian Gracely and Rajeev Chawla called: Accelerating the Hybrid Cloud. The interview is especially relevant to the demands of deploying traditional multi-tier apps into a hybrid model. It isn’t easy, but it is a powerful game-changer for IT agility, availability and scalability.

Choosing a Cloud Protection Gateway Provider | Part 2

Sat, 04 May 2013 13:00:00 EDT

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 selecting a Cloud Protection Gateway Provider. Since it is a decision with implications across the enterprise, we recognize that there are a variety of teams within the organization that should be included in the selection process. We began last time by looking at the information the Security Team needs to make an informed decision about a provider. Other groups to involve include the Governance & Risk team, Information Technology team and End User team.

Migrating On-Premise Controls to the Cloud

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:00:00 EDT

The scale and automation of cloud computing deliver economies of scale – and price points – that can’t be matched by traditional computing platforms. Managers can minimize capital expenses and align operational costs to business demands with scalable, flexible resource deployments. Those same factors enable innovation through rapid prototyping and testing of complex systems that aren’t feasible – or affordable – with established approaches. It’s little wonder the cloud has emerged as the first choice of infrastructure for many IT managers and practitioners. Security and compliance play just as critical a role in the hybrid cloud as they do in more conventional environments. So it’s unfortunate that as organizations move operations to the cloud they tend to mirror the protection efforts they employ with their physical, on-premise systems. It’s a mistake because in many cases existing controls don’t migrate well to the cloud. As a result, they fail to provide the requisite protection and diminish – or even eliminate – anticipated cost and operational benefits of cloud computing.

CSOs: Are You a Groundhog or a Giraffe?

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:00:00 EDT

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 applications, they are fairly divided about the use of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and how secure these environments are in keeping company data safeguarded. After many talks with these technology leaders, I’ve determined that each fall into three distinct categories. The first group is the server huggers and they make up a very small percentage of the respondents. They simply have no reason to leverage IaaS. Their applications are very resource intensive and expensive, and their businesses are highly predictable, so the need for scalable capacity just doesn’t exist. However, the time may come where they have company needs to bring the cloud into the mix. If so, they should be well informed on how to take advantage of cloud services and realize the ways to protect data during and after that migration.

Hybrid Cloud: The Ultimate Silo-Buster

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 07:00:00 EDT

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 necessary tomorrow. Then it dawned on me that the challenge today isn’t just duplication, it is the extensive lock-in tied to various types of gear and the net effect that has on IT agility, protection and efficiency.

Is the Cloud a CDN Killer?

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 15:00:00 EDT

In our Internet-driven world, both organizations and consumers have come to expect fast, always-on data access from any device. As a result, content providers are tasked with delivering massive files and streaming media to tablets and smartphones while simultaneously ensuring superior website performance. To meet the challenges of this digital data deluge, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are often used to efficiently distribute large amounts of content to online users. The emergence of cloud computing has allowed companies to embrace new, cost-effective approaches to building out their IT infrastructure. The challenge of scaling is no longer prohibitively expensive, and the ability to do so in near-real time allows small and medium-sized businesses to more effectively compete with larger enterprises for market share.

Cloud Computing: Rethinking Control of IT

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 14:00:00 EDT

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 so long for the techies is because we’ve never been able to separate control and responsibility in the past as well as we can today. Before the Cloud, if we wanted to outsource one, then the other went along for the ride. Any enterprise that outsourced their entire IT operation went down this road. Sure, your technology becomes somebody else’s responsibility, but you end up giving up control as well.

Monitoring Infrastructure Is Essential for Optimizing Performance

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 11:00:00 EDT

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 information is often a challenge. Complex interactions between applications, networks, servers and other infrastructure components bury the issues, which make it difficult to find a universally compatible monitoring tool that doesn’t add more complexity to the environment. The issue with the tools available today is that they don’t dig deep into the data, and/or they tend to focus too narrowly on the type of infrastructure they can monitor. The best monitoring tool provides broad insight into multiple systems and correlates data in a single interface – viewing only part of the system doesn’t provide a complete picture of what’s going on. To optimize performance, you need different points of view and you need to know how all of them tie together.

Open Source Cloud Computing Testing Tools

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:00:00 EDT

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 overall application performance,” said Omid Rahmat, president, Burnside Digital. One of the Rahmat’s favorite testing tools is rspec, used for ruby applications. Rahmat said it takes a "behavior-driven" approach to testing. “We follow the best practices of writing tests that explain what our code should do before writing it. This gives us a clear path to follow to implement solutions with great confidence and far fewer defects. Having that test and seeing it pass lets us know that we have written features to specification.”

Accelerating the Hybrid Cloud

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:00:00 EDT

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 probing hybrid cloud questions asked by anyone to date. Here is the outline of the conversation (created by the team at CloudCast) so that you can navigate to the part that you are most interested in (if you don’t have time for the entire interview): Description: Brian talks with Rajeev Chawla (CEO @ CloudVelocity) about the evolution and challenges of Hybrid Cloud, working across multiple clouds, and how start-ups are innovating in a highly competitive cloud market.

Creating Harmony When Cloud and On-Premise Worlds Collide

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:00:00 EDT

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 device), as well as the growth of social media and the electronic information it generates, have each proved transformative. But perhaps no shift has been more seismic than the adoption of cloud and SaaS-based applications led by CIOs who see the value proposition associated with outsourcing many complex IT operations. However, integrating data across diverse SaaS applications with existing on-premise solutions has proved exceptionally challenging. To streamline this integration without slowing adoption, IT stakeholders are turning to cloud-based integration solutions that can curtail complexity and IT oversight while enabling organizations to better leverage their information capital to drive business objectives. Indeed, according to a recent report by analyst firm MarketsandMarkets, the global Cloud Brokerage Services (CSB) market is on track to grow from $1.57 billion in 2013 to $10.5 billion by 2018, a compound annual growth rate of more than 45% over the five year period.

Choosing a Cloud Protection Gateway Provider

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:30:00 EDT

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 be important to address key security issues, including data residency concerns, industry compliance and internal security best practices. Cloud Protection Gateways will be an integral part of your cloud adoption strategy. These gateways are built to intercept sensitive data while it is still physically on the premise of an organization and replace it with a random tokenized or strongly encrypted value. This process renders the data meaningless should anyone attempt to hack the data while it’s in transit, being processed or stored in the cloud. Choosing a provider means trusting that provider’s technological capabilities and soundness.

Ignoring the Harmless Looking “Force Majeure” Clause in a Cloud Agreement?

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 09:15:00 EDT

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 obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the parties, such as a war, strike, riot, crime, or an event described by the legal term “act of God” (such as hurricane, flooding, earthquake, volcanic eruption, etc.), prevents one or both parties from fulfilling their obligations under the contract. Having a landscaper or electrician be excused from performing his services due to a hurricane is reasonable, and not an objectionable use of a force majeure clause in a contract with one of these types of service providers. Many cloud service providers would also want you to believe that it’s reasonable for them too, along with their uptime service level guarantees. Should you?

You Got Your Governance in My DevOps

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:54:00 EDT

Forward-thinking organizations realize that accelerating the speed with which they can deliver new applications and services is critical in making their enterprise more agile – and by extension delivering critical business competitiveness. In order to do so, they must break the cycle that holds many IT organizations captive. In many cases, development bemoans central IT for delays in provisioning development platforms, IT begrudges the Security and Audit teams for the processes and procedures that help create these delays, and these teams are in turn frustrated by the lack of compliance that results in unnecessary audit findings. In the process, Development is often seen as throwing the proverbial pig over the wall – sometimes with more lipstick than other times. When you add to this mix a healthy dose of firefighting and pressure from business units to innovate faster, it’s easy to see how this can become a downward spiral for organizations.

Can Health Care Data Be Secure in the Cloud? (Infographic)

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:06:36 EDT

Health care organizations are moving infrastructure and data to the cloud at a fairly rapid pace. A recent study suggests the cloud computing market in health care is expected to reach $5.4 billion by 2017. Enticing as the cloud is, when dealing with highly sensitive and regulated information, it's important to proceed with caution. The good news for pharma companies, biotech firms and research hospitals - organizations most likely to move heavy big data payloads to the cloud- is that there are some security best practices that can protect data at rest in the cloud.

Necessary Conversations: Five Steps to a Perfect Cloud

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:00:00 EDT

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 expectations don’t come without risks for failure. How can you increase the odds of success? By building a firm foundation based on clear communication with the business about their requirements. These conversations should be specific, detailed and, most important, collaborative. The following five steps outline a requirements-gathering process that brings the business and IT together.

The API Distribution Market Is Due for Disruption

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:00:00 EDT

APIs are the coding interfaces that enable developers to create third-party apps, plug-ins, and add-ons that extend the functionality and potential of existing Software-as-a-Service products. Pedro's comments reframe the entire API industry and, if pursued, would fundamentally alter the existing dynamics between developers and third-party app businesses. "We're now in a phase of market maturity and people are starting to realize that they need to be careful about what the API is exposing and what the end user will see around the SaaS product," said Pedro after presenting at the API Strategy and Practice Conference, hosted by 3Scale and API Evangelist, and held in New York in late February, 2013.

Cost Reduction with Automation in the Cloud

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 13:00:00 EDT

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 productivity. But questions remain. Find out how automation from the cloud can enhance the bottom line by delivering savings on hardware and manual effort. From the telephone to the iPad, with every bit of new modern technology that’s introduced, there are very vocal early adopters who can’t wait to try it. There is also an equally vocal group of people who are skeptical about, if not completely opposed to, its introduction. When a decision whether or not to employ the latest and greatest affects an entire company’s well-being, it’s no wonder that questions of progress are approached with such trepidation. However, being a late adopter of innovation – like automation from the cloud – can cost companies real money.

Cloud, DevOps, and the Enterprise

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:00:00 EDT

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 properly, then the enterprise development teams would be able to manage the entire production environment for themselves. There’d be nothing left for the operational IT folks to do except make sure to replace bad hard drives and the like. No more server or network administration. No more break/fix. No more reason to get that healthy salary – or any salary at all, for that matter.

An Intelligent Network Is Critical to Achieve Optimal Cloud Performance

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:00:00 EDT

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 computing market is set to reach US$131 billion in 2013, up from $111 billion last year. To serve this market with the performance, security and reliability needed, cloud providers are moving quickly to build a virtualized multi-data center service architecture, or a “data center without walls.”

Unify Cloud, Big Data and Enterprise Data with Ease

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:00:00 EDT

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, accessing and integrating these new sources can be a challenge for enterprises used to a traditional enterprise data warehouse centric data integration approach. Data virtualization enables integration of cloud, Big Data and enterprise data warehouse sources with ease and agility.

Calculating the Total Cost of Ownership for On-Premise and SaaS Solutions

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:00:00 EDT

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 visualize data and relate it back to our work at Software Advice where we review enterprise software systems and report on enterprise tech trends. More on that in a bit. Although I wasn’t in the market to do either, I found myself adjusting values and playing around with the calculator just to see how long I’d have to rent at my current rate to make purchasing a home worthwhile. In case you haven’t seen the calculator yet, here’s a screenshot of what it looks like.

The Pivotal Initiative – Aiming for the PaaS Crown

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:45:00 EDT

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. It is here where EMC and VMware face their biggest challenge of remaining relevant and cutting edge in a market that demands automation, simplicity and speed of deployment.

To Cloud or Not to Cloud?

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:15:00 EDT

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 responsive and agile. While businesses are focused on moving faster than ever, large and complex infrastructure is inherently rigid and inefficient. As a result, IT is moving outside the traditional data center into colocation facilities and cloud infrastructures – essentially Infrastructure Anywhere. The move to Infrastructure Anywhere is driven by the core objective of improving responsiveness and agility and reducing costs. For example, you can scale up resources through the cloud in minutes, not months. But for all of its benefits, this new Infrastructure Anywhere model presents critical challenges. To make smart decisions about where to run applications and what kind of resources you need, you first must understand your workload: utilization, capacity, and cost. Gaining unified visibility is difficult when your application workloads are distributed across data centers and colocation facilities in different parts of the country or around the world. With limited visibility, how do you accurately align resources and capacity with workloads for efficient processing, cost control, and — more important — achieve the full business value of your IT investment?

Amazon AWS and the Public Cloud Paradox

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:00:00 EDT

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 that VMware's hybrid cloud may be too late. Amazon (AMZN) could be the clearest benefactor of the hybrid cloud operating model if it accelerates the enterprise adoption of off premise cloud services, especially if it occurs before VMware (or Microsoft) is ready with an equivalent offering.

Quality of Service Is Not a Feature... It’s an Architecture

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:45:00 EDT

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 advantages for performance isolation and guaranteed storage QoS, it's no wonder that storage vendors are adding QoS features to their products. We recently discussed some of the simplistic approaches to QoS offered by storage systems, however the ability to guarantee performance to applications is not as simple as adding a new bullet point to a lengthy feature list. Being able to guarantee application performance in all situations - including failure scenarios, system overload, variable workloads, and elastic demand - requires an architecture built from the ground up specifically to guarantee storage Quality of Service. Trying to bolt Quality of Service onto an architecture that was never designed to deliver performance guarantees is like strapping a jet engine to a VW Beetle. The wheels will come off just when you get up to speed.

Cloud Computing: A Retrospective

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:30:00 EDT

Symantec recently took a stroll down memory lane to revisit the first seeds of cloud computing that took hold more than a half-century ago. Symantec created an interactive timeline that illustrates the history of cloud computing, highlighting just how far the technology has progressed. The interactive map, however, does more than just recall the roots of cloud computing; it provides an opportunity to look ahead as well. Symantec has plans to help usher in an era of safe, agile and efficient cloud computing. It recently outlined a strategy to get there, which includes providing companies with a variety of cloud solutions to address their specific needs and current IT environments, according to an article on CMSWire.com. The future of the cloud holds plenty of challenges. As cloud computing becomes the new normal, many companies are looking to move their businesses to the cloud. To meet these needs, and to continue to evolve alongside changing technologies, businesses should look to cloud computing not as a means to an end, but rather as an enabler of change, according to the article.

Agile Solutions for Cloud, Big Data, Mobility Services

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 09:00:00 EDT

The enhanced adoption of Cloud, Big Data, Mobility is causing more services to be developed and aggregated, hence there is a greater emphasis on Agile for service aggregation. Agile processes have specific methods to manage the rapid development cycles and changing requirements in application development. There are several steps to achieving Agility for the entire lifecycle. The first step is to perform a thorough business analysis and review existing, target business processes. Based on the analysis appropriate services that are reusable can be designed and developed. Services can then be developed at either the Enterprise levels or lower levels. Enterprise services such as email and collaboration have been very popular in organizations and agencies, other services can be developed at the business, application and database levels. The integration and workflow aspects of these services have to be defined and then the services are integrated and assembled with the overall solution.

Overview of the OpenStack Cloud

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 05:45:00 EDT

OpenStack is an Infrastructure as a Service offering. (see my prior post for an explanation of IaaS). OpenStack is an OpenSource project, founded by RackSpace, NASA and others. OpenStack can be deployed as a public or private cloud. Project NOVA, or OpenStack Compute, provisions and manages on-demand virtual machines and associated resources: CPU, Memory, Disk and Network. Virtual machines can be started, stopped, suspended, created and deleted, while network options for a virtual machine are static, DHCP, or IPv6.

Challenges in Data Access for New Age Data Sources

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 11:00:00 EDT

The Big Data and Cloud “movements” have acted as catalysts for tremendous growth in fit-for-purpose databases. Along with this growth, we see a new set of challenges in how we access the data through our business-critical applications. Let’s take a brief look at the evolution of these data access methods (and why we are in the mess we are in today). Back in the ’80s the development of relational databases brought with it a standardized SQL protocol that could be easily implemented within mainframe applications to query and manipulate the data. These relational database systems supported transactions in a very reliable fashion through what was called “ACID” compliance (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability). These databases provided a very structured method of dealing with data and were very reliable. But ACID compliance also brought along lots of overheard process. Hence a downfall – they were not optimized to handle large transaction requests, nor could they handle huge volumes of transactions. To counteract this, we’ve did some significant performance and throughput enhancements within data connectivity drivers that lit a fire under the SQL speeds and connectivity efficiencies.

VMware Crosses the Rubicon Redux

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 10:00:00 EDT

VMware’s (VMW) recent hybrid cloud announcement was both expected and yet provocative. It falls into a pattern of successful moves made in virtualization security and networking as the company to grow its addressable market by virtualizing servers and delivering increased IT agility, efficiency and economy. Yet the bold move is not without risk. In 2009 I talked about how VMware, through acquisitions and engineering, entered the security space despite a robust virtualization security ecosystem (see VMware Crosses the Rubicon - March 2009). VMware was threatened then by the new security challenges being brought into the production data center by virtualization and the inability of its partners to move fast enough to address them.

What to Do About the Data Silo Challenge

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:00:00 EDT

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 source to data consumer incompatibility by transforming data from its native structure and syntax into reusable views and data services that are easy for application developers and business analysts to understand and consume.

The Sound of Water Dripping in the Cloud

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:45:00 EDT

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, the configurations are efficient, and the costs are transparent and carefully monitored. There’s nothing worse than opening your water bill and finding that it’s a hundred dollars more than you expected. You scour your house and find the culprit: a leaky toilet or perhaps a dripping faucet. Hard to believe a simple drip drip drip can run up your water bill so dramatically, but those drips add up, quickly. Replace the water with IT capability, and you have Cloud Computing. The pay-as-you-go utility model for Cloud promises dramatic cost savings, especially when unpredictable demand in a traditional, on-premise environment would require poorly utilized servers, sitting mostly idle on the off chance some spike in demand comes along. But just as with your water bill, there are many ways for your Cloud bill to go through the roof unexpectedly. Recognizing the Cloud equivalents to your problem plumbing fixtures can make the difference between saving money in the Cloud and flushing your savings down the drain.

Future Proofing the Data Center

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 16:00:00 EDT

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 2016, 36 percent of consumer content will be stored on the cloud, up from a mere seven percent in 2011. Service providers, watching these trends with a wary eye, will be required to accommodate ever-increasing demands for storage as consumer appetites for cloud content storage continues to grow. To adapt, many service providers are exploring new options in data center architecture that will permit greater flexibility and control over hardware costs.