Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a shoppers’ delight and many retailers’ busiest time of the year. For Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), which owns and operates Lord & Taylor, Saks 5th Avenue and several other brands, last year’s holiday rush turned out to be the perfect time to try out new web site features.
HBC uses a fairly typical Oracle WebLogic application server and an ecommerce platform named Blue Martini from RedPrairie. Basically the stack has been developed and refined over the years. It worked but it was “hard to deploy to, hard to change and … hard to upgrade,” said Matthew Pick, who manages an infrastructure engineering team at HBC and spoke about the company’s digital transformation at a conference hosted by cloud vendor Joyent earlier this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News of Broadcom buying Brocade for an estimated $5.5 billion comes with some caveats: Most notably, chipmaker Broadcom isn’t planning to keep Brocade’s Ethernet business. So what will happen to it?When announcing the deal, Broadcom made its plans to sell Brocade’s IP networking business clear. “Broadcom, with the support of Brocade, plans to divest Brocade’s IP Networking business, consisting of wireless and campus networking, data center switching and routing, and software networking solutions,” the press release states.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News of Broadcom buying Brocade for an estimated $5.5 billion comes with some caveats: Most notably, chipmaker Broadcom isn’t planning to keep Brocade’s Ethernet business. So what will happen to it?When announcing the deal, Broadcom made its plans to sell Brocade’s IP networking business clear. “Broadcom, with the support of Brocade, plans to divest Brocade’s IP Networking business, consisting of wireless and campus networking, data center switching and routing, and software networking solutions,” the press release states.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A team made of former Cisco and Nuage Networks veterans has developed an open source project it released this week named Trireme that takes an application-centric approach to securing code written in containers.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Peek inside Microsoft Azure's open source rack and server designs + Aporeto
Trireme was developed by a startup named Aporeto, whose co-founders include the former co-founder and CTO of software-defined networking company Nuage Networks Dimitri Stiliadis; former distinguished engineer at Cisco’s Insieme Business Unit Satyam Sinha; and Amir Sharif, who previously worked at VMware. The first launch of the company is the free release of its Trireme open source code.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft this week has open sourced the design specifications of servers and racks that make up its hyperscale Azure cloud data centers, contributing the information to the Open Compute Project (OCP).OCP was founded in 2011 and now includes member companies such as Facebook, Intel, Google, Apple, Dell, Rackspace, Cisco, Juniper Networks, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity and Bank of America, who share design specifications for hardware used in their data centers. OCP is meant to be an open source community where member companies share how they buy and configure components used to make data center equipment.Microsoft joined OCP in 2014 and has contributed server and data center designs for its Azure cloud. This week the company announced that it will contribute Project Olympus, which are a series of hardware design specifications for “next-generation hyperscale hardware design,” the company said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft this week has open sourced the design specifications of servers and racks that make up its hyperscale Azure cloud data centers, contributing the information to the Open Compute Project (OCP).OCP was founded in 2011 and now includes member companies such as Facebook, Intel, Google, Apple, Dell, Rackspace, Cisco, Juniper Networks, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity and Bank of America, who share design specifications for hardware used in their data centers. OCP is meant to be an open source community where member companies share how they buy and configure components used to make data center equipment.Microsoft joined OCP in 2014 and has contributed server and data center designs for its Azure cloud. This week the company announced that it will contribute Project Olympus, which are a series of hardware design specifications for “next-generation hyperscale hardware design,” the company said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Mirantis - two of the most instrumental companies in the open source cloud computing project OpenStack - have each laid off employees in recent weeks, according to the companies.The full extent of the layoffs at HPE is unknown but ComputerWorldUK last week quoted Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth as saying that HPE had laid off their “entire OpenStack team.” An official with HPE confirmed there has been a restructuring but would not say how many OpenStack workers were cut, adding that Shuttleworth’s statement is exaggerated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Amazon announced its earnings last week, Wall Street was disappointed, with the company’s stock tumbling 5%. But if Amazon didn’t have its cloud business, Wall Street may have been even more bearish.
By non-Wall Street standards, the online ecommerce giant had a nice quarter: Revenues of $32. 7 billion were up 29% from the same quarter last year and the company turned a $575 billion profit.
The revenues and earnings were less than consensus estimates and Amazon gave vague guidance on future performance heading into the always-busy holiday shopping season. Amazon
AWS continued its healthy growth across sales, operating income and Trailing Twelve Month (TTM) Net Sales To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A team made up of executives from Aruba Networks and Panzura are out with a new self-funded startup this week that aims to deploy security tools that enterprises use in their campus and extend it to the cloud.The idea of Nubeva is to create a Security as a Service platform that takes existing security tools and controls that organizations use in their data centers and other on premises infrastructure and mirror that same stack of security tools in the public cloud. Nubeva has created a platform that automates the deployment of those security resources in the public cloud.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How the Dyn DDoS attack unfolded +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A team made up of executives from Aruba Networks and Panzura are out with a new self-funded startup this week that aims to deploy security tools that enterprises use in their campus and extend it to the cloud.The idea of Nubeva is to create a Security as a Service platform that takes existing security tools and controls that organizations use in their data centers and other on premises infrastructure and mirror that same stack of security tools in the public cloud. Nubeva has created a platform that automates the deployment of those security resources in the public cloud.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How the Dyn DDoS attack unfolded +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy made some bold claims about the cloud computing market during a Q&A with the Wall Street Journal this week and left open the possibility for Amazon to enter almost any new market, except for one.In response to a question about if there’s anything Amazon would not make, Jassy reportedly responded: “Manufacturing guns.”+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What's behind Amazon, Microsoft and Google's aggressive cloud expansions? Check out our interactive map to find out +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As the OpenStack Foundation kicks off its 2016 international conference in Barcelona this week, 451 Research has new predictions for how fast the open source cloud computing project is growing.The research firm predicts that OpenStack revenues will grow by a compound annual growth rate of 35% in the coming years, ballooning to a $5 billion industry by 2020.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: The enterprise wish list for hybrid cloud | OpenStack Director on why open source should be the foundation of your data center +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you know how to drive one car, you know how to drive pretty much any car. The gas pedal is always on the right and brake on the left. Push the turn signal up to go right and down to go left. Whether it’s a Ford or a Toyota, you don’t need to relearn how to drive each car.Public cloud should be the same way, argues Bob Wysocki, CTO of Digital Infrastructure for General Electric and a member of the Open Networking User Group (ONUG). This week at ONUG’s annual fall meeting in New York a key theme is making it easier for enterprises to use public IaaS cloud services. Earlier this year ONUG created a new Hybrid Cloud Working Group that has created a sort of wish-list of what enterprise customers from GE, Pfizer, Citigroup and Gap would like to see from public cloud vendors to achieve easier usability.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Although they both offer core IaaS features like virtual machines, storage and databases the leading public cloud providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, take very different approaches in offering cloud services, including at the most basic level of how their data centers are constructed and positioned around the world.+MORE FROM NETWORK WORLD: What’s behind the Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s aggressive cloud expansions? (With an interactive map!) +Both companies’ clouds are made up of regions: AWS has 14 and Microsoft has 30. But those numbers aren’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s a debate that’s raged on for years: Which is cheaper, public or private clouds?A new report from 451 Research finds that two of the most critical factors that influence the cost of a public versus a private cloud deployment are an organization’s ability to efficiently manage infrastructure and utilization of hardware resources. Generally speaking, if any organization has the expertise to manage a large number of servers at a high level of utilization then on-premises, customer-managed private clouds can have a total cost of ownership (TCO) advantage compared to public clouds. For smaller environments, or any sort of variable workload demand, public cloud is a more attractive financial option, 451 Research’s Director of Digital Economics Owen Rogers reports in “The Cloud Price Index: The great public vs private cloud debate.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It wasn’t long ago that the big spectator sport in IaaS cloud computing was to watch a leading provider such as Microsoft or Amazon Web Services announce price cuts and then ready for its rivals to follow suit.The new game in town plays out in a similar way, except now the vendors are matching or one-upping each other with new data centers and cloud computing regions.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Winners and losers from the AWS-VMware deal | Mapping the cloud: Where does the public cloud actually live? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It wasn’t long ago that the big spectator sport in IaaS cloud computing was to watch a leading provider such as Microsoft or Amazon Web Services announce price cuts and then ready for its rivals to follow suit.The new game in town plays out in a similar way, except now the vendors are matching or one-upping each other with new data centers and cloud computing regions.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Winners and losers from the AWS-VMware deal | Mapping the cloud: Where does the public cloud actually live? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New versions of VMware’s core management software including vSphere, Virtual SAN and the vRealize Suite expand support for application containers and make it easier for customers to manage workloads in IaaS public clouds from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.The moves announced this week the company’s VMWorld Europe conference in Barcelona are significant because there’s been fodder in the market for years about what trends like increased use of the public cloud will mean for private cloud vendors and how the rise of application containers could kill virtual machines. Instead of fighting these innovations, VMware is embracing these innovations, says Raghu Raghuram, the company’s executive vice president of Software Defined Data Center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There will always be antagonists.In the hours that passed after VMware and Amazon Web Services announced one of the most significant recent partnerships in the cloud market, pundits on social media raised questions about what the arrangement means for enterprise customers.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Winners and losers from the big VMware-AWS Pact | Oops, news of the VMware-AWS deal leaked early on a VMware Blog +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services and VMware on Thursday announced what executives at both companies call a long-term strategic partnership to make it easier to run VMware workloads on AWS’s cloud.At a press conference in San Francisco each company’s CEO boasted about the VMware on AWS offering which will be available as part of an invite-only beta early next year and rolled out to the masses in mid-2017.In a nutshell, AWS has dedicated a portion of its bare metal cloud infrastructure for running VMware’s core management software: vSphere (the ESXi hypervisor and virtualization management platform), vSAN (the virtual storage area network platform) and NSX (the virtual networking software). Customers can spin up three sizes of AWS on VMware and pay for it through a credit card or their existing VMware account. AWS is VMware’s “preferred” public cloud and VMware is AWS’s preferred private cloud, CEOs Andy Jassy of AWS and Pat Gelsinger of VMware said during the press conference.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brandon Butler