I’ve been on a good number of roller coasters in my day and generally love riding on them. So when Network World Cool Tools Editor Keith Shaw and I were researching the story of Six Flags New England introducing virtual reality headsets on their star Superman ride, I knew I wanted to experience it for myself.The ride is incredible, even without the VR headset: It’s got a 220-foot drop, 5,000+ feet of track and it goes 77 miles per hour. It’s a trill-lovers paradise.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Virtual Flying with Superman: How Six Flags added even more thrills to its top roller coaster | Superman the Virtual Reality Ride, in pictures | First-person reaciton to Superman VR Ride +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s earnings season, which for publicly-traded technology vendors in the cloud market means it’s time to update investors on the momentum of emerging products helping to displace eroding revenue from legacy offerings.For two technology vendor stalwarts – Microsoft and IBM - cloud computing has played a significant role in their earnings this quarter.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 4 Numbers that stood out in VMware’s earnings| Who’s right behind Amazon in IaaS revenue? Not Microsoft +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s earnings season, which for publicly-traded technology vendors in the cloud market means it’s time to update investors on the momentum of emerging products helping to displace eroding revenue from legacy offerings.For two technology vendor stalwarts – Microsoft and IBM - cloud computing has played a significant role in their earnings this quarter.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 4 Numbers that stood out in VMware’s earnings| Who’s right behind Amazon in IaaS revenue? Not Microsoft +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
VMware this week updated investors on the progress of emerging technologies playing an increasingly significant role in the company’s earnings.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: EMC targets strategic markets as Dell acquisition looms | Microsoft will miss its 1 billion Windows 10 device target +VMware’s product mix includes not just compute virtualization, but network virtualization, cloud management and end user computing. Below are four numbers that provide a snapshot of VMware’s earnings and a preview of future offerings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s summertime, which means you may not be keeping up with all the news in the busy cloud computing industry.Last week there were a handful of announcements that flew somewhat under the radar, but have important implications for this market.Congress considers moving Federal IT to the cloud There’s a movement afoot in Congress to encourage more government workloads to migrate to cloud computing platforms, according to GovInfoSecurity.com. A bill named Move IT Act aims to sure up cybersecurity defenses and upgrade legacy infrastructure systems while making it easier for federal agencies to use cloud computing services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Digital Ocean, an intriguing cloud infrastructure vendor that many may not have heard of, is taking a big step forward today with the introduction of block storage to its platform.Block storage allows users to add extra disk space to virtual machines that can be scaled up and down independently from the state of the VM. DO’s SSD-based Block Storage is priced at $.10 per GB per month, the same price as Amazon EBS, the Elastic Block Storage Service from Amazon Web Services. Digital Ocean
Digital Ocean unveiled a new logo, new CTO and new Block Storage service today To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For some applications, the public cloud is only as good as the slowest connection to it.
Latency of cloud providers – the amount of time it takes for a cloud-based service to respond to a user’s request – is one of many critical factors that customers consider when choosing a cloud provider and monitoring their workloads. So which cloud provider has the best latency?
+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Who’s right behind Amazon in IaaS cloud revenue? Not Microsoft | 4 Tips for buying cloud management software +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Research firm IDC is out with its latest semi-annual tracking of IaaS public cloud vendors and while the top provider in this market – Amazon Web Services – will not surprise you, numbers two and three just might.
IDC estimates that IBM’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud revenues are larger than those of Microsoft in this still-emerging market.
+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Gartner says cloud will be “default” software deployment option by 2020 | Top 5 Storage vendors shows massive shift to cloud +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As Pokemon Go continues to be a viral craze, the makers of the game have dealt with the service going down – presumably from peak loads on the game.Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has offered a solution: The cloud.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Armed crooks use Pokemon Go to lure and rob victims +In a post on Twitter from over the weekend, Vogels implied that the game’s makers could use Amazon Web Services' public IaaS cloud to help alleviate intermittent service issues. "Dear cool folks at @NianticLabs please let us know if there is anything we can do to help!" Vogels Tweeted. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Managing clouds can be a challenge given that virtual machines and storage are running in two different environments simultaneously. A crowded industry of cloud management platforms (CMP) has emerged to help.Gartner Research Director Mindy Cancila says the CMP market is young and maturing; customers should understand the limitations of various options.Here are four tips from Cancila for organizations considering cloud management products.IaaS needs its own tools Many organizations began their cloud journey by using SaaS tools like Office 365, Salesforce or some other business planning software. These SaaS platforms may require some new skills, but customers don’t usually need to purchase a whole new management platform to use them. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is different. Consuming cloud-based virtual machines, storage, databases and other services is such a complex issue that Cancila says users can benefit greatly from using a dedicated management platform for IaaS, especially if they’re managing a hybrid cloud computing environment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In what could be foreshadowing a momentous shift in the IaaS public cloud computing market, investment bank Morgan Stanley’s survey of CIOs found they’re more likely to use Microsoft Azure compared to Amazon Web Services in the coming years.The results of the survey are noteworthy because since the dawn of the IaaS cloud computing market Amazon Web Services has been seen as the top vendor. Morgan Stanley’s 2016 State of the CIO report shows that could be changing though. Morgan Stanley
More CIOs are using Amazon Web Services over Microsoft for IaaS cloud now, but in three years more expect to use Azure over AWS. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft Monday announced that customers can now purchase a joint licensing agreement for its cloud-based Operations Management Suite and its on-premises Systems Center infrastructure manager.Packaging these separate but related management platforms will encourage customers to use public cloud resources and make it easier to manage hybrid clouds.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Why Brexit could be a data management headache for US companies | Microsoft appears to be building a business app marketplace +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Avaya today released the 1.0 version of its Open Networking Adapter (ONA), a device the size of a deck of cards that plugs into any Ethernet-enabled machine and automatically connects it to a broader network while enforcing strict security policies on network traffic.Avaya’s ONA is a network edge device meant to usher in an era of connected devices to create an internet of things environment. The first use case Avaya is targeting with ONA is the health care industry with a custom software GUI for controlling the ONAs.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Top 5 Storage vendors shows a massive shift to the cloud | Why Brexit could cause major data privacy headaches for US companies + ONA is a small proxy device with two Ethernet inputs on each end. The aluminum casing holds a dual core CPU running Open vSwitch. It’s equipped with two-factor authentication so that when the device is on boarded for the first time there’s a key that’s shared between the ONA and a software defined networking (SDN) controller to verify it. The device doesn't store any data, so if it were stolen, it would be a brick without the 2FA connection. “It Continue reading
There’s a changing of the guard afoot in the storage industry, and it’s getting cloudy.Each quarter 451 Research Group surveys it members in its Voice of the Enterprise series. Late last year, the company’s research revealed a dramatic reshaping of the storage market both in terms of which vendors enterprises consider strategic storage partners and where their future storage will be housed.+ MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Gartner says cloud will be the “default” application deployment option by 2020 | Deutsche Bank says one-third of finance apps will be in the cloud within 3 years +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The impact of the United Kingdom vote to withdraw from the European Union could have far-reaching consequences for international companies, which may need to rethink their data management policies.“As a part of the European Union, there is a general directive that all nations abide by a guide,” says Geeman Yip, CEO of cloud consultancy BitTitan. “Now that the UK is not a part of the EU, the previous baseline directives that were adopted will change.”Said another way: When the UK is part of the EU it has the same data sovereignty laws as other countries in the EU. When the UK breaks away, those laws could change. Companies operating in Europe may have to manage one set of data privacy laws for the UK and another for EU-member countries. The issue will impact both cloud and managed service providers who may need to offer additional options for customers to host data across Europe, and enterprise end users who may need to reconsider where their data is stored in Europe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Panzura is a company that’s been around for eight years but two months ago brought in the first new CEO after founder Randy Chou left the business. LinkedIn
Panzura CEO Patrick Harr
The new head honcho is Patrick Harr, an executive who formerly worked at VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprise on its Helion Cloud Platform and Nirvanix – the now defunct public cloud storage company. He’s been brought in to scale the company’s growth, he says. And he’s got a clear plan of how to do it: He wants to bring enterprises to the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
By the year 2020, it will be a cloudy world.Researchers at Gartner are out this week with new predictions on what the infrastructure computing market will look like in the coming years. And they’re very bullish on the cloud. The combination of end users gaining comfort with using cloud services combined with vendors shifting to primarily offering software from the cloud means that cloud will be the dominate software deployment model within three and a half years.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 20 Highest paid tech CEOs | Cloud or on-prem? This data company says they do both +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At Dockercon this week many vendors are singing the praises of their platforms being ideally suited to run application containers. One company with a particularly strong showing at the conference has been Microsoft though, which announced today it is further integrating Docker’s container management products into its Azure cloud portfolio.Microsoft’s container-related announcements at Dockercon include:-Docker Datacenter, the container management platform product is now available as a service in the Azure public cloud marketplace. This is a big deal because it allows customers to run Docker Datacenter on their own premises, and in the public cloud. This is not an exclusive agreement however; Docker Datacenter is also available in Amazon Web Service’s cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco’s entrance into the data center analytics market with the introduction of Tetration is the culmination of two years worth of wrangling various open source projects and developing proprietary algorithms in the areas of big data, streaming analytics and machine learning.Tetration is an analytics platform that provides deep visibility into data center and cloud infrastructure operational information. Here’s a description from Network World’s story on Tetration:The platform, Cisco Tetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics and machine learning to offer IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources. The system will dramatically simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security monitoring.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco’s entrance into the data center analytics market with the introduction of Tetration is the culmination of two years worth of wrangling various open source projects and developing proprietary algorithms in the areas of big data, streaming analytics and machine learning.Tetration is an analytics platform that provides deep visibility into data center and cloud infrastructure operational information. Here’s a description from Network World’s story on Tetration:The platform, Cisco Tetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics and machine learning to offer IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources. The system will dramatically simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security monitoring.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brandon Butler