Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Friday, June 15, 2012
Cloudsoft Expands its Advisory Board with the Appointment of Major General David Shaw CBE
Former Director of Army Media and Communications to Drill Cloud Computing Start-up in Institutional and Government Markets
EDINBURGH, June 14, 2012 – Cloudsoft Corporation, a software innovator specialising in multi-cloud application management, today announced they have appointed Major General David Shaw CBE to their strategic advisory board. Shaw joins the board to help shape Cloudsoft‘s approach to government and institutional markets, and to provide guidance in media and communication.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
How Enterprises Can Bend the Programmer Learning Curve
http://sandhill.com/article/how-enterprises-can-bend-the-programmer-learning-curve/
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Clearing the Big Data Hurdle: The Open Source Advantage
By Christopher M. Carter, Cloudsoft Corporation
www.cloudsoftcorp.com
www.cloudsoftcorp.com
In today’s world there is a new understanding, the emergence of a new “reality” that is much, much different than what we had even a decade ago. This new reality of big data that exists within today’s enterprises cannot be underestimated. Big data is becoming more important in all industries, but none more so than in the finance arena, both in enterprises and big finance in Wall Street firms. Most businesses aren't ready to manage this flood of data, much less do anything interesting with it.
Big data will impact every industry, from finance to education and government. In fact, the Federal government just announced a new big data research initiative, with a budget of $200 million.
Data as a whole is a catalyst for business. According to IDC, there will be 2.7 zeta bytes of data created this year alone. Now, if you look into the enterprise, you begin to see that in order to begin analysing and deriving value from these increasingly large data sets, organizations need to embrace the right tools that will allow for these new capabilities. As businesses begin to better understand their existing data, they can gain competitive advantage in the process, however, that competitive advantage can only be realized if data can be processed intelligently, efficiently and results delivered in a timely manner.
How does the enterprise begin to mine its data? Good question. With so much data existing that firms can become overwhelmed, how can the good data be identified? What is “needed” data and what information is not as valuable? The old mantra of “good data in, good data out; bad data in, bad data out” can help to start answering these questions. All firms need to be cognizant, first and foremost, of the quality of the data being entered into their systems and used in daily operations. This is especially important in industries like finance, where data is the lifeblood of the business.
Opportunities abound in big data, and an organisation can get as much potential knowledge out of this stored data as they put energy into analysing it. With applications spanning from Business Objects from SAP and the usage of in-memory data from Hana to newer applications, members of the finance sector are looking to add new positions like a Chief Data Officer specifically to make the key decisions around information that need to be made today. Big data is indeed big, but it's not for all purposes. For example, it’s not for transactional or real-time in-memory processing of small and endless streams of structured data. Think of data like a big truck vs. a small sedan - each has its purpose. However, both Big data and fast in-memory traditional databases have a place in driving business.
Opportunities in harnessing and utilising big data become more feasible when open source frameworks come into play. The open source world has basically created the new age of big data analytics, be it when utilising Hadoop, the most widely used and well-known solution for developers, to products like Greenplum from EMC and others. These tools have created a rush to market to support organisations trying to compute as much data as fast as they can with a solution that will allow them to make decisions in as real time as they can. For example, a major retailer with outlets around the globe, utilising an open source framework, has the ability to harness the data coming in from their social media sites, run it through their enterprise data analytics solution, utilising literally thousands of nodes, to make real time decisions in their stores about products and pricing.
Three to five years ago this was not possible. But, with the large and active open source community working on the framework this computation ability now exists and is being utilised and modified by new companies daily.
Corporations are looking at their data as an asset within their walls no matter where it physically resides, but yet there is still so much to learn and to dig through. The new Chief Data Officer and their team must stay vigilant and be concerned about many factors that will directly impact the business, including how and what data is being provided to regulators. Enterprises need to set standards when it comes to their information, and this is more important than ever in the increasingly regulatory-focused landscape. Firms need to insure their internal processes are in place for current government regulatory requirements, as well as taking into account regulations in many of the new laws that are being created, seemingly on the fly.
There is no doubt that bringing the power of big data and harnessing its performance is important and that it will become more strategic when considering how organisations will use the data to interact with their clients, competitors and the market through faster decision-making. Some companies will start to shrink under the pressure of this new data analysis, while some may indeed fail completely. But regardless of which companies falter, and which ones gain market share, one thing is for certain: database companies should see tremendous gains as the need for more and more database applications increases.
Organisations are looking to the future and deciding how important a role big data will play in the coming years. The truth is, how firms utilize big data as a source of knowledge and power will be the largest influence. These enterprises that find success with adopting open source tools to analyse their information will see improved profitability, provide stronger service throughout the organisation and to their customers and rise above in the land of giants.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Cloudsoft Application Management Platform Supports HP Cloud Services
Open Source Application Management Available in New Public Cloud Environment
NEW YORK and EDINBURGH, May 10, 2012 – Cloudsoft Corporation, a software innovator in multi-cloud application management, today announced their Application Management Platform (AMP) support for HP Cloud Services, HP’s new public cloud service.
As part of an agreement between Cloudsoft and HP, customers can use Cloudsoft’s open source Application Management Platform to add portability and runtime agility to applications running on HP Cloud Services (http://hpcloud.com), either as a standalone provider or as part of a hybrid cloud strategy. Customers can expect their cloud applications to operate in accordance with demanding requirements and service levels – without demanding the skills usually needed for sophisticated applications running in a private or hybrid cloud environment.
“Our Application Management Platform allows enterprises to use cloud, without losing control,” said Duncan Johnston-Watt (CEO & Founder, Cloudsoft), “Hats off to HP for creating an open and transparent, business-grade cloud while maximising the role that projects like OpenStack™, brooklyn and jclouds can play. HP’s open source ethos and the depth and breadth of its ecosystem will help drive adoption of cloud by enterprise users.”
Cloudsoft’s Application Management Platform supplies a control plane that can take full advantage of the HP Cloud Services open architecture and OpenStack API to rapidly compose cloud services by relying on well-defined, easily articulated policies, enterprise-grade cloud, combined with fully autonomic, policy driven, application management.
Unlike alternatives that focus on managing the underlying infrastructure, Cloudsoft’s Application Management Platform operates with an application-centric focus, using policies and an understanding of what the application requires, to drive infrastructure to exactly meet those needs – dynamically and in real-time. This includes enforcing jurisdictional constraints as well as ensuring compliance with business and service policies, for example, SLA’s, cost controls, QoS, application priorities and preferred service providers.
About Cloudsoft Corporation
Managing business in the cloud – Cloudsoft Corporation is a software company specialising in multi-cloud application management, enabling enterprises to better exploit the benefits of cloud computing: using cloud without losing control.
Cloudsoft’s Application Management Platform (AMP) enables enterprises to develop, deploy and manage large-scale distributed applications across multiple clouds, at lower cost, reduced complexity and minimal risk, while avoiding vendor lock-in.
Headquartered in the UK and venture funded, Cloudsoft’s seasoned executive team leverages an active presence in key open source communities and is backed by a world-class advisory board. Cloudsoft provides comprehensive professional open source support and services, and actively sponsors a number of open source projects.
Monday, April 2, 2012
A special Cloud Birthday gift to you
To celebrate our third birthday we are open sourcing our policy-based control plane, Brooklyn, under the Apache 2.0 license.
You can read all about it in our press release -
We already provide extensive professional open source support and services, actively sponsoring open source projects such as Apache Whirr and jclouds, therefore open sourcing Brooklyn is a logical next step for us.
In terms of the community this means we can now offer a comprehensive open source Application Platform Toolkit (APT) comprising Brooklyn, jclouds and Whirr that makes managing applications especially in a multi-cloud environment a breeze.
William Fellows, VP Research, 451 Group captures what we are trying to achieve in a provocative report published over the weekend PaaSification – use Cloudsoft's Brooklyn to create your own Force.com?
You can obtain a copy -
However while this is useful background what we'd really like you to do is join the Brooklyn open source community.
Therefore your call to action is to -
- Sign up to our google groups brooklyn-users and brooklyn-dev -
- https://groups.google.com/group/brooklyn-users/subscribe
- https://groups.google.com/group/brooklyn-dev/subscribe
- Visit Brooklyn's new home -
- Join the party -
- IRC: #brooklyncentral
- Twitter: @brooklyncentral #brooklyncentral
Your support is essential as Brooklyn won't be the same without you :-)
Friday, February 3, 2012
Cloud Myth #5: Clouds Require Virtualization
Everywhere I look, I see clouds and virtualization mentioned together. They seem to be the peanut butter and jelly of the technology world. Certainly, clouds and virtualization taste good together, but surely we can separate them, right? Can you build a cloud without virtualization? Does peanut butter taste good without jelly? The short answer is, “You betcha,” but let’s examine why that’s true.
(I should probably note that I covered some of these ideas last year in my post titled “Internal Cloud vs. Virtualization: What’s the Diff?” You would do well to go back and read that material as well.)
The most important thing to keep in mind is that virtualization is primarily a description of technology. In particular, hypervisors are small software shims that slip between the physical machine hardware and a guest operating system and give the guest the illusion that it is running directly on the hardware. This allows the hypervisor to create this illusion for multiple guests at the same time, allowing multiple virtual machines to share the same physical hardware. Many IaaS clouds use virtualization. Certainly, all the major IaaS public clouds — AWS, Terremark, Rackspace, Fujitsu, Savvis, etc. — as well as most IaaS private clouds.
So, doesn’t that suggest that IaaS clouds and virtualization are inseparable? The answer is no, in the same way that finding a bunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in an elementary school cafeteria at noon doesn’t imply that peanut butter isn’t tasty by itself (Thai chicken satay, anybody?).
The fundamental difference is that while “virtualization” describes a technology used to allow different virtual instances to share a common piece of hardware, “cloud” really describes an operating model for IT. So the next logical question is, “What’s an operating model?”
An operating model describes how an enterprise functions across process, operations, and technology domains in order to business deliver value. How do those things interact to create a desirable outcome? A cloud operating model is one focused on using clouds, as-a-service delivery, and agile IT to enable efficient IT utilization as the foundation for increased business value. At ServiceMesh we sometimes call this an “agile IT operating model” to indicate that it’s really about more than clouds, as well, but that’s another post altogether. Whether we call it a cloud operating model or an agile IT operating model, it’s important to note that an operating model can utilize a lot of different underlying technology for its implementation — it’s a completely generic notion at a top level.
Users of a cloud operating model access resources through self-service interfaces. They request resources with certain characteristics (amount of CPU, RAM, and disk space, for instance), and they receive access some time later (hopefully in less than a minute or two). But when they access those resources they don’t have any expectation of which exact physical machine they are using. From a user point of view, there is no way to tell (not totally true) that a given “server” they have requested is backed by a virtual machine or a physical machine. For all the user knows, the server might be a physical server in a huge server farm or it might be an “equivalent” virtual machine being run alongside others on a larger physical machine. At ServiceMesh, we call a cloud that uses physical systems without hypervisors a “bare metal cloud.”
“But, but…” I hear you cry, “Without a hypervisor don’t you lose a lot of manageability?” The answer is yes. But that’s not an argument for why clouds and virtualization are inseparable. You’re merely observing that some cloud implementations are more manageable than others. Virtualization brings many benefits, such as the ability to transparently shift workloads to different hardware within the cloud in a transparent fashion, for load balancing and disaster recovery (think of the live migration technologies supported by the various hypervisors).
But bare metal clouds also have interesting properties such as increased performance. If you want every CPU cycle your cloud can deliver (think large data analytics workloads), you might want to ditch the hypervisor and run your application directly on the metal. You can still manage your physical servers as a pooled resource within a cloud operating model, offering self-service access with accounting and charge-back of resource usage.
Interestingly, if you use an advanced cloud platform like Agility Platform, you can have multiple clouds of each type, virtualized or non-virtualized, running side-by-side, and you move applications and workloads from one to another. You might want to do this, for instance, to allow software development to occur in a lower-cost cloud using virtualization. That saves cost when you don’t really need performance. Then, when development and testing is completely, you can move the final workloads into production on a bare metal cloud. The only difference in user experience is the performance and cost.
So, while the cloud and virtualization combo is certainly as popular as peanut butter and jelly, don’t mistake popularity for inseparability. “Virtualization” describes one cloud implementation technology choice. “Cloud” describes an overall operating model. For many, bare metal clouds that eschew performance-stealing hypervisors are an interesting choice for some percentage of the cloud landscape.
Are you using or interested in bare metal clouds or do you see no value in them whatsoever? Weigh in with a comment and let us know.
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