Databases. Alongside networking, they're arguably one of the less exciting areas of the technology world.But no matter how boring they are, databases are, of course, a critical part of delivering technology. And we live in a changing time for the humble database, with new models challenging incumbent approached. A case in point is graph databases.For a quick primer, per Wikipedia, a graph database is a database that uses graph structures for semantic queries with nodes, edges and properties to represent and store data. A key concept of the system is the graph (or edge or relationship), which directly relates data items in the store. The relationships allow data in the store to be linked together directly and, in most cases, retrieved with a single operation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Databases. Alongside networking, they're arguably one of the less exciting areas of the technology world.But no matter how boring they are, databases are, of course, a critical part of delivering technology. And we live in a changing time for the humble database, with new models challenging incumbent approached. A case in point is graph databases.For a quick primer, per Wikipedia, a graph database is a database that uses graph structures for semantic queries with nodes, edges and properties to represent and store data. A key concept of the system is the graph (or edge or relationship), which directly relates data items in the store. The relationships allow data in the store to be linked together directly and, in most cases, retrieved with a single operation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Pretty much every large enterprise, at least those that realize the world is kind of in a state of change, is thinking about how to make their organization more agile. They’re also quickly reading Marc Andreessen’s famous Wall Street Journal piece from a few years ago, "Why Software Is Eating The World."Hopefully, they’re then putting these two themes, agility and innovation, through software together and deciding that key to remaining competitive is arming their technology teams with the tools, processes, freedoms and cultures to do good stuff.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s an interesting thing happening in the IT monitoring space that is a reflection on broader trends happening in enterprise IT.Whereas in the past there was a fairly distinct line between application monitoring and infrastructure monitoring, that line is rapidly reducing. And the former application monitoring vendors are moving into the infrastructure space, while vendors that were focused on monitoring the status of servers and the like are increasingly giving the application side of the house more attention.+ Also on Network World: New Relic aims to be your dashboard of the future +
The trend is, of course, a direct response to the DevOps movement—the idea that developers and operations teams need to work more closely (or, at the ultimate level, be essentially the same people). DevOps as an approach enables organizations to move faster, reduce their deployment times, innovate and reduce the risks involved in experimentation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An interesting thing is going on in the application and infrastructure monitoring space. A ton of money is being poured into the various vendors in the market, and all of those vendors are rapidly morphing their platforms to provide holistic monitoring functionality. No longer is it just about application monitoring or infrastructure monitoring in isolation. What is de rigueur today is combined monitoring that provides the often-talked about “single pane of glass” across all of an organizations assets.+ Also on Network World: Infrastructure monitoring products: Users pinpoint the best and worst features +
It’s a fairly busy space—New Relic, DataDog, AppDynamics and a host of others compete. And to that list we must add Wavefront, a Silicon Valley company that recently scored an impressive $52 million by way of a Series B funding round. The company advises that their valuation increased four times compared to their Series A round—no down valuations for this player. It also scored top-shelf investors, existing investors Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures were joined by new investor Tenaya Capital and other equity holders.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The fine details are still murky, but news surfaced in the last day or two that Tesco Bank, a U.K.-based bank owned by the Tesco supermarket chain, suffered some sort of widespread fraud.
The bank’s CEO, Benny Higgins, told Radio 4 that around 40,000 of the bank’s 7 million accounts had seen “some sort of suspicious transactions.” Of those, around 20,000 customers have actually lost money from their bank accounts. In the interview, the CEO told the BBC he was “very hopeful” that customers would be refunded the lost funds. What he didn’t say is that I am sure he is also “very hopeful” that once this all washes up he and his IT team will still have jobs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The fine details are still murky, but news surfaced in the last day or two that Tesco Bank, a U.K.-based bank owned by the Tesco supermarket chain, suffered some sort of widespread fraud.
The bank’s CEO, Benny Higgins, told Radio 4 that around 40,000 of the bank’s 7 million accounts had seen “some sort of suspicious transactions.” Of those, around 20,000 customers have actually lost money from their bank accounts. In the interview, the CEO told the BBC he was “very hopeful” that customers would be refunded the lost funds. What he didn’t say is that I am sure he is also “very hopeful” that once this all washes up he and his IT team will still have jobs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Aligned Energy is about to complete construction of its Phoenix data center, a facility that it claims is leading the way in terms of data center efficiency. Aligned Energy's leaders are so sure of the efficiencies they're driving that they're introducing a new model for how data center space is bought and sold.But before we look at that, let's look at some fundamentals around data centers.+ Also on Network World: Google's DeepMind A.I. can slash data center power use 40% +
It is a generally accepted fact that data centers, a massive and growing industry, is highly wasteful of both energy and water. Indeed, Greenpeace recently went out on a limb with a campaign and report questioning the environmental impact of some major data center users and calling for a move to environmentally efficient construction and operation of data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Aligned Energy is about to complete construction of its Phoenix data center, a facility that it claims is leading the way in terms of data center efficiency. Aligned Energy's leaders are so sure of the efficiencies they're driving that they're introducing a new model for how data center space is bought and sold.But before we look at that, let's look at some fundamentals around data centers.+ Also on Network World: Google's DeepMind A.I. can slash data center power use 40% +
It is a generally accepted fact that data centers, a massive and growing industry, is highly wasteful of both energy and water. Indeed, Greenpeace recently went out on a limb with a campaign and report questioning the environmental impact of some major data center users and calling for a move to environmentally efficient construction and operation of data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apcera is an interesting company. Its founder, Derek Collison, was one of the key people behind Cloud Foundry back when it was a small platform project within VMware. Since then Cloud Foundry has gone on to become, arguably, the most important platform as a service (PaaS) organization on earth.+ Also on Network World: PaaS vendors draw battle lines over containers +
Collison has moved on as well and founded Apcera, a company focused on giving large enterprises the certainty that comes from using a platform with security and policy baked in. In a world were organizations are hearing more and more about containers and cloud-native applications, having a platform that allows them to use these technologies within the context of tight policy is an attractive proposition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Back when Salesforce and its ilk invented software as a service (SaaS), there was much wailing and gnashing of the teeth about the security around these new, as-yet-unproven approaches to delivering software. Many people suggested that these vendors were fly-by-nighters—that they would fail and customers’ data would be lost forever.A decade or so later, and apart from some high-profile cases (who remembers Magnol.ia?), that doomsday scenario hasn’t occurred. SaaS vendors are safely doing their job and keeping customers’ data safe.+ Also on Network World: Why it takes a cloud service to manage cloud services +
Given this fact, you could be forgiven for assuming that there would be no opportunity for a vendor whose core mission is to help users backup their SaaS data. For one thing, SaaS vendors hardly ever fail and for another, even if short-term outages and small-scale losses occur, SaaS vendors can be relied upon to do their own backup and recovery. Right?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Back when Salesforce and its ilk invented software as a service (SaaS), there was much wailing and gnashing of the teeth about the security around these new, as-yet-unproven approaches to delivering software. Many people suggested that these vendors were fly-by-nighters—that they would fail and customers’ data would be lost forever.A decade or so later, and apart from some high-profile cases (who remembers Magnol.ia?), that doomsday scenario hasn’t occurred. SaaS vendors are safely doing their job and keeping customers’ data safe.+ Also on Network World: Why it takes a cloud service to manage cloud services +
Given this fact, you could be forgiven for assuming that there would be no opportunity for a vendor whose core mission is to help users backup their SaaS data. For one thing, SaaS vendors hardly ever fail and for another, even if short-term outages and small-scale losses occur, SaaS vendors can be relied upon to do their own backup and recovery. Right?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A few months ago at the OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas, Don Rippert, IBM’s general manager of cloud strategy, challenged the various players involved in the OpenStack initiative to demonstrate that OpenStack distributions are, in fact, interoperable—between each other and across on-premises, public cloud and hybrid cloud deployments.The Interop Challenge had a very good basis, since one of the major criticisms of OpenStack has been that there is very little consistency between distributions, and as a result, users need to chose their “flavor” of OpenStack and stick to it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s fascinating being a close observer of the OpenStack ecosystem. To be honest, the machinations and posturing among the different players feels almost like a John Le Carre novel with friends, enemies and seemingly dozens of shades in between.Two companies that epitomized this are Mirantis and Red Hat. Red Hat, the 800-pound gorilla in the open source world, has had long-term success commercializing various open-source projects, initially Linux, of course, but a host of others since.For its part, Mirantis is a much newer player and was borne after the advent of OpenStack. Mirantis is essentially trying to “out Red Hat Red Hat.” The two were, back in distant memory, close partners, with Red Hat investing in Mirantis and talking of potential acquisition plans. Red Hat went in a different direction, however, acquiring competing OpenStack service provider eNovance and embarking on a war of words with the upstart. In fairness, I have to point out that the war of words between the two has been mutual, with Mirantis doing its part to fuel the flames.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Red Hat is well known as probably the most successful company built entirely on open-source software. Building a business on top of open source is a hard thing, especially so back in the early days of open source when no one had any real idea how the economics of a product that was free would translate into commercial success.But succeed it did, and Red Hat has created a huge business built entirely on offering services on top of open-source products.+ Also on Network World: Red Hat CEO: Open-source innovation is always user-led +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Interesting news today from GoDaddy that it is aggressively moving into the WordPress space and looking to own a far bigger chunk of the market for small businesses hosting WordPress sites.WordPress is, of course, the open-source blogging platform that hosts an incredible number of different sites. Statistics show that over 25 percent of the top 10 million websites worldwide are built on WordPress. Not bad for a formerly small project with no real commercial focus. And for GoDaddy, the hosting platform, WordPress already has a big footprint. Over 50 percent of GoDaddy’s hosting customers use the platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last week Datadog was in the news trying to attack the market share of monitoring vendor New Relic. While that may seem like industry shenanigans, it marked a very interesting point in time when two vendors, who had previously been happy to compete in a friendly manner, announced all-out warfare and a race for each other’s customer base.New Relic moved strongly into the infrastructure monitoring space, one that it didn’t previously cover, while Datadog made a corresponding move into application monitoring.+ Also on Network World: Infrastructure monitoring products: Users pinpoint the best and worst features +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I was at a conference recently and came across Dawie Olivier, CIO of Westpac Bank and Australasian-operating bank. That it took a trip to Texas to discover someone who lives in the same country as me was an ironic reflection on why industry conferences are still useful events.Notwithstanding the weirdness that we’d never met previously, I was interested to hear of Olivier’s experiences within three different banks in different geographies. After the event, I caught up with him (and thanks must go out to Chef’s awesome PR company for arranging the conversation) to get deeper insight into how banks operate and what it means to innovate within their traditionally constrained environments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I spend a lot of time talking to organizations about disruption and the fact that no matter what industry they’re in, there is an equivalent to Uber breathing down their neck just waiting to destroy them. Normally these conversations end up with defensive legacy IT practitioners finding a million reasons why agile and innovative couldn’t happen in their setting—to much compliance, too many core systems, too much of a “slow and steady” business.Don't get me wrong: While I’m a huge fan of webscale approaches to IT, commodity infrastructure, and moving up the value chain, I’m still well aware that many of the world’s most critical systems—from banking to air travel—run on big old traditional mainframes and that forklifting these applications onto new architectures is hard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s always interesting to see what happens when a high-profile CEO sells his company and then finishes up his earn-out period. There are a few different models: some individuals go buy an island, start making films or go on permanent vacation. Others take some time to work out what they’re going to do and maybe take an entrepreneur-in-residence position for a time, while others jump straight back into the shark tank.+ Also on Network World: Application-layer DDoS attacks will increase, Kaspersky Labs predicts +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ben Kepes