It is so easy to start a fight. Ask your friends whose legacy is more timeless: the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. If you’re watching a soccer game, declare that Cristiano Ronaldo is highly overrated. Or, if you’re at a database conference, tell those relational database types that Web apps don’t all need to conform to ACID principles (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability).

Yes, the fur will fly. But you’ll have broached a topic that urgently needs more attention. The fact is, the evolution of application design has not kept pace with the explosion of data. In today’s “connected era,” in which billions of devices are now generating, collecting, analyzing, and sharing massive volumes of data with each other, a company’s ability to innovate is largely dependent on its ability to process all this data in a timely fashion. And one frequent obstacle to innovation is the long-standing notion that only ACID-compliant databases will satisfy the stringent requirements of data-driven Web apps. The time has come to investigate other options.

The Limitations of ACID

ACID means that database changes are “all or none” (atomic), that any change or read doesn’t interfere with others (isolated), that the result of any change is a new database state that remains fixed (durable), and that any transaction performed will take the database from one consistent state to another. These guarantees come with certain performance costs, and applications that don’t require all properties of ACID can afford to trade off some of them for higher throughput. Such applications often include those that index large numbers of documents, serve pages on high-traffic websites, or deliver streaming media. In these cases, maintaining the integrity of a transaction is secondary to completing a request as quickly as possible.

Strict adherence to ACID also leads to an increased amount of development work as the database load grows larger and the volume of data increases. Techniques such as sharding (horizontally partitioning your data using a hashing algorithm) have emerged over time to address the complications of manipulating large amounts of data, but these solutions unnecessarily influence application architecture and don’t solve the underlying problem. For example, if you’re “lucky” enough to have “big data,” and you need to change the schema,  a migration could still take months to run!

Nathan Hurst’s guide to NoSQL Systems

Beyond ACID

The ACID vs. non-ACID debate is not going to be settled here and now, nor does it need to be. The purpose of this article is simply to point out that there are alternatives to ACID, and that the time has come to explore them. Why now? Several methodologies, practices and technologies have gained enough traction to encourage us to look beyond ACID-only data stores. Here are a few of them:

●      Widespread adoption and validation of agile development methodologies, fostering rapid innovation and an iterative approach to feature development.

●      Mature development frameworks that enable developers to connect alternative data stores more easily. This also means that projects are more likely to use different types of data stores depending on technical requirements.

●      Service-oriented application design – data stores and application logic are increasingly decoupled in modern architectures, with applications developed as a collection of functional modules connected via APIs.

●      The vast amounts of data gathered by social platforms – and most applications today have a social component – can often be represented more efficiently using a non-relational schema.

●      Non-relational databases have matured with the guidance of early adopters and companies whose businesses would not be possible without them. Companies have also emerged to provide commercial support and development for these technologies.

The New Breed of Databases

Thanks to the open source movement and the accelerating pace of commercial development, there is no shortage of non-relational, distributed databases. Of course, each database has advantages and disadvantages, as well as specific use cases.

Before we delve into specific examples, let’s be clear about one key point: it’s a mistake to assume that non-ACID datastores make absolutely no guarantees. They simply provide a different set of them. These guarantees are governed by the “CAP Theorem,” which essentially states that you may choose any two of the following three:

●      Consistency: all nodes have the same view of the data.

●      Availability: every request to a non-failing node returns a response.

●      Partition tolerance: system properties (consistency or availability) hold true even when the system is partitioned.

For example, you can choose to have consistency and availability, while sacrificing partition tolerance. Or choose availability and partition tolerance, so processing can continue even in the case of network failure, but decide to forgo a consistent view of your data.

An excellent summary of this concept, along with this very intuitive and useful visual guide to Non-ACID systems, has been developed by Nathan Hurst and others.

An Overview of the Current Players:

The list below summarizes key characteristics and use cases of some of the most popular non-ACID datastores.

●      Riak is a Dynamo-based NoSQL database designed specifically for extreme distribution, fault tolerance and scalability. It shines in applications where even seconds of downtime are unacceptable. It has no single point of failure, scales simply and intelligently, and makes data highly available for use in read and write-intensive Web applications. Commercial support is available from Basho.

●      Redis, sponsored by VMware, is an open source, disk-backed, in-memory data store written in C. It is a datatype server, so it provides highly optimized operations on sets, lists, arrays, etc. Redis is extremely fast and easy to set up; it may not be best for large databases, but it’s a great choice for rapidly changing data with a DB size that fits in RAM.

●      MongoDB is a document-oriented database written in C++. It provides schema-free databases that store JSON documents in binary format. It is extremely popular and remarkably easy to get running. MongoDB offers automatic failover when replicated in a set, and its single-master, low-concurrency read performance benchmarks are impressive. MongoDB is a good choice for read-heavy applications where all data fits in RAM. Commercial support is available from 10gen.

●      CouchDB: Another open source, document-oriented store, CouchDB is written mostly in Erlang and is designed for local replication and horizontal scaling across a wide range of devices. Like MongoDB, CouchDB is easy to use, but it has a more robust replication model and greater data consistency guarantees than MongoDB.

●      Membase/CouchBase: CouchBase Server is the result of a Memcache company and a CouchDB company joining forces. In its Membase mode, it is optimized for storing data for highly interactive Web applications. It provides a high-speed distributed key/value store that is extremely performant and very easy to set up. In its Couchbase mode, it offers the same data persistence, clustering, and flexible replication modes of CouchDB. Commercial support is available from Couchbase.

●      Neo4j is a popular open source database that is optimized to represent graph relationships. Implemented in Java, it is an embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than tables—meaning that operations that traverse a network are fast. Neo4j is developed by Neo Technology, a startup based in Malmo, Sweden and Menlo Park, CA.

●      Cassandra is a column-based DB designed to handle very large amounts of data spread out across many servers with no single point of failure. Cassandra is a NoSQL solution initially developed by Facebook to power its Inbox Search feature.[1] An industrial-strength DB, it is best for write-heavy applications. Cassandra can be a bit cumbersome to set up and manage, but commercial versions make this task easier. Commercial support is available from DataStax and Acunu.

●      Hadoop is an open source software framework with an entire ecosystem of tools, languages and knowledge. Inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers, Hadoop is best for heavy analytics and processing of vast amounts of data. It is extremely mature and battle-tested. Commercial support is available from Cloudera, HortonWorks and MapR, among others.

Simplifying Exploration of New Database Options

Without question, ACID is an essential requirement for certain types of applications and will continue to find usage. But there is an increased understanding of the potential of non-ACID databases and the opportunities they provide in improving performance in Web applications that don’t require transactional guarantees.

As the evidence continues to accumulate regarding the benefits of non-ACID databases, it’s important to ask yourself, as part of your requirements analysis, whether one of these databases might be a better tool for the job at hand. You should also consider whether a combination of tools is the best solution, mixing ACID and non-ACID data stores as appropriate.

Learn More: Suggested Reading and Upcoming Events

For additional discussion of the topics covered in this article, please read the following publications and blogs.

●      Alex Popescu’s myNoSQL: http://nosql.mypopescu.com/

●      NoSQL Tapes: http://nosqltapes.com/

●      Basho’s video resources ( http://basho.com/resources/videos/ ) The basho speakers are fantastic. You’ll always learn something new from them.

●      InfoQ NoSQL presentations. Great collection at /a>

●      10gen’s videos and presentations: http://www.10gen.com/presentations

●      Kristóf Kovács NoSQL comparison http://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis

In addition, the following events and meetups are highly recommended:

●      Boundary tech talks (great place to learn about distributed systems): http://www.meetup.com/Boundary-Tech-Talks/

●      Riak Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Riak-Meetup/

●      MongoDB Meetups: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-MongoDB-User-Group

●      Cassandra Meetups: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Cassandra-User-Group/

●      HBase: http://www.meetup.com/hbaseusergroup/

●      SF Graph DBs: http://www.meetup.com/graphdb/

●      Couchbase: http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Francisco-Couchbase-Meetup-Group/

Guest Post: Unshackling Your Data-driven Web Apps is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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We live in an age during which information has become a key resource. Collectively, we have spent the last two decades digitizing and storing vast volumes of data, the amount of which is now estimated to total 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes) a 9x jump in just the past 5 years. Data is a beast that feeds on itself, growing stronger and multiplying as it does so. The only ingredient it needs is connectivity, and that’s where networks come in.

Networks provide the mobility that makes it possible to organize, share, and transform data into the kinds of information that makes businesses efficient and competitive. Businesses depend on networks to function at optimal levels:

• The financial services sector relies on high-speed networks for timely access to market data to make better financial decisions.
• Manufacturers leverage networks to receive just-in-time orders from customers to optimize inventory management.
• Medical professionals rely on networks to ensure that a given prescription isn’t contra-indicated for a patient.

Business processes have been revamped over the last decade to rely heavily on the seamless access and exchange of information by their employees. Without immediate access to information repositories and to each other, employees wouldn’t be able to make sound decisions for the business, leading to significant competitive disadvantages. If a financial services company is able to access critical information minutes or even seconds before its competition, it can convert that advantage to significant revenue by making buying or selling decisions ahead of the market.

Continued reliance on local and remote information is forcing businesses to invest in fast and reliable networking equipment to deliver connectivity between information silos and employees. Businesses are constantly looking for ways to speed up connectivity, leading to equipment refreshes and bandwidth upgrades.

But this is only the beginning.

The Cloud Connection

The advent of cloud computing over the last few years has enabled many businesses to streamline their application delivery workflows and stretch budget dollars, from outsourcing IT services such as email and document repositories to software-as-a-service (SAAS) providers, to exploring models where computing and storage resources can burst to offsite (Amazon, IBM, Rackspace, etc.) locations during times of high utilization. Such strategies are built around highly available and robust internal and external networks that enable uninterrupted access to all services in the cloud.

Because the cloud can deliver an abstracted view of all available computing, storage and application resources, local and remote networks can start to function as a unified resource, but this requires all connectivity, be it local or off-premise, to scale up so the cloud does not impede application performance.

Big Data needs Big Networks

With data volumes growing year-over-year across multiple silos, businesses are exploring ways to analyze this data to derive information that will improve the bottom line. The need to analyze business and social data has given rise to “Big Data” companies (such as Cloudera, Horton Works and Mu Sigma) that are building tools to store and analyze data and produce actionable information faster and for less cost. Businesses are using Big Data tools to:

• Update inventories and product placement based on nightly analysis of customer behavior.
• Increase the odds of success when prospecting for oil/gas by analyzing more field data, faster.
• Speed up complex computations to cut time-to-market for new life-saving drugs.

Big Data enables the creation of information from data sources that were previously being overlooked. In this regard, Big Data is even more ravenous than the data storage and analysis paradigms of the last 5-10 years. Businesses leveraging Big Data will experience an exponential growth in storage requirements; when all data has potential value, none will be discarded.

Supporting the promise of Big Data requires high-capacity networks to provide reliable, low-latency connectivity between scale-out storage silos and high-performance compute clusters. The speeds at which companies need to move data around to carry out Big Data computations will dwarf the network performance requirements of the last 5-10 years. It is axiomatic that Big Data will drive the need for major network overhauls, both internally and externally.

Why Networks Matter in Big Data and Cloud is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Today, however, as has happened in so many areas of society and business, technology and IT have become democratized. Since the introduction of the Internet browser and then the rapid growth of social media, a new breed of tech-savvy worker has emerged. The end of the 9-5 workday has led to employees working around the clock and on the move. To make their lives easier, end users have blurred the distinction between work tools and personal tools, using personal smartphones and tablets on the job.

The Consumerization of IT

In the age of postconsumerization, individuals are making their own choices as to which business applications to use. A perfect example of this trend is the use of email in business. If email is not fully supported across devices by the internal IT department, then individuals will find ways to access work email on personal devices. The consumerization of IT (CoIT) revolution began when consumer brands such as Apple developed products that were easy to use, making purchasers’ business and personal lives more productive. True, Microsoft still dominates the overall enterprise IT pie and is often the primary option when it comes to email and desktop operating systems. However, Apple has nabbed a dominant share of the tablet market and is increasingly growing its share of the smartphone market. In short, there is no longer one principal technology vendor across the board.

End users today want tools that enhance their experience. If workers are not comfortable with the technology approved by IT, they can easily find many different options online for the devices already available to them. So the time has come for IT to make a decision. Do I fight the battle against personal products? Or do I embrace what people are already using and become their IT champion? Now, where consumerization has raised a number of IT security and compliance issues that are of great concern to IT, new tools that are both easy to use and “enterprise ready” are spreading like wildfire.

Beyond the CoIT Paradigm

At YouSendIt, we go beyond the CoIT paradigm: We develop our business-content collaboration tools with a laser focus on making the end-user experience easy, meeting the demands of where and how people work. Workers are collaborating all the time and they are often away from the office, so in response we developed a user-friendly interface that integrates seamlessly across mobile devices. However, we also give IT administrators the features they need to maintain security and compliance, thus satisfying both parties.

The CoIT trend has started and will continue to grow, giving IT managers a chance to be catalysts for change. The monopoly of enterprise products is dying and now there are a myriad of players in every facet of enterprise IT. A new kind of IT champion is emerging; one who does not force technology on end users, but who listens to them and selects solutions that meet the dual needs of the enterprise and end-user. Technology companies that develop products that allow IT to be the champion for their workforce will grow side by side with their customers.

Editor’s note: this is an initial guest post from Brian Curry.  See bio below:

Brian Curry, Chief Product Officer

Brian Curry is responsible for new market penetration, key partnership development, and product strategy at YouSendIt.

Brian brings 15 years of experience to the position and most recently was vice president of corporate partnerships at Yahoo!, where he oversaw the business unit that operates Tier 1 partnerships. While at Yahoo!, Curry managed partnerships with Comcast, EBay, Walmart, Turner Broadcasting and Adobe among others.

Prior to his tenure at Yahoo!, Brian was a vice president of AOL’s Premium and Subscription Services unit, where he was responsible for AOL businesses involving licensed access to the AOL network, integration of AOL services in third-party products, and development of subscription services.

He holds both Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Design and Technology from the University of Illinois.

Embracing Change to Become the IT Champion is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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How will cloud file sharing sites that fall beneath the umbra of the DMCA and other copyright legislation who also permit users to share large files with one another react the current legislative and executive climate? Only recently, laws that would have given tremendous powers to copyright holders and the government to shut off foreign sites—and especially those that enable file sharing in the cloud—have been permanently shelved; but the philosophy that underpins them still flows in undercurrents with copyright law.

Then only a day after a major protect against SOPA and PROTECT-IP (the two shelved bills) did the US government move against Megaupload, citing piracy and copyright infringement by the file sharing site.

Already, FileSonic, another massive file sharing site, has withdrawn their services in the file sharing ecology. In reaction to the Megaupload takedown they’ve caused an immediate cessation of the sharing and personal revenue generation portion of their services. Users who uploaded files to their service still have access to the files they personally uploaded (i.e. they can download them) but users can no longer access files uploaded by other users.

Brian Curry, Chief Product Officer, YouSendIt, says on the subject, “It’s reasonably easy for a business like ours to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).” He adds, “But the cloud industry as a whole will be impacted if legislators start writing laws that are overly broad in an effort to get the bad actors. Such broad legislation will make it difficult for cloud companies to do business.”

Another fear by file sharing sites is that Megaupload has long claimed that they’ve complied fully with the DMCA and there’s currently little evidence that they haven’t. In fact, we’ve heard repeatedly that they have followed the guidelines of the DMCA right up to accepting takedown notices as per the “safe harbor” portions of the law. Although, an Ars Technica examination of the subject shows that Megaupload may have left their pants flying in the wind with some fly-by-night practices in relation to the DMCA before 2009.

Not all businesses feel that the fall of Megaupload will affect them.

“At Box, we’re primarily focused on powering collaboration and information sharing within businesses, and we infrequently run into copyright infringement issues in those instances,” Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net told SiliconANGLE. “In fact, a large number of organizations, in and beyond Hollywood, use the Box Business and Enterprise editions in the creative process of making and bringing movies, music, and other media to market.”

Right now, the ground upon which sharing in the cloud is founded seems a little shaky. Although many supporters of Megaupload paint them in a golden light, detractors and prosecutors want to assure the rest of the world that they were up to no good. The problem is that to others like FileSonic the sudden insecurity felt over upcoming legislation has put them in fear of legal murk.

Big, brand-name cloud file sharing outfits will probably feel safe in light of Megaupload, especially if all their files are in order; but others who have similar models may be looking at their business and making hard decisions right now.

[Article contributors: Kit Dotson and Kristen Nicole.]

The Impact of Megaupload’s “Mega-Downfall” on Sharing in the Cloud is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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VMware’s been on a tear lately, unveiling the new Solution Exchange, an online virtualization and cloud solutions marketplace.  It’s a hub where customers, partners and developers can converge, simplifying the process around choosing business solutions.

The new Marketplace centralizes efforts around a self-service portal, extending VMware’s resources to a broader audience that may be seeking solutions for the private and public cloud.  Boasting a community of more than 2,000 technology partners that have built some 3,500 applications and 6,000 infrastructure products, this new Marketplace is really a storefront of sorts for VMware’s growing portfolio.

The new marketplace comes days after the company reported its results for the fourth quarter of 2011, showing strong growth and beating Wall Street’s expectations.

Profit rose to 46 cents a share or $200.4 million from 28 cents a year ago, which added up to $119.9 million. Analysts forecasted  the firm will report something closer to 42 cents a share.

Sales have also seen impressive growth in Q4. VMware generated $1.06 billion in revenue, up 27 percent from the same period last year and just ahead of the average amount that’s been expected.

“The stock rose 4.4 percent to $89.80 yesterday after the company released its fourth-quarter earnings and first-quarter sales forecast,” reports Bloomberg. “The shares had fallen 2.4 percent to $86 at the close in New York.”

While VMware is seeing growth, it has just lost a key executive to a Hadoop startup.  Alan Geary, who served as senior director of worldwide partner field operations for the software maker for the past seven years, has received a better offer from MapR – a company that offers a commercial Hadoop distribution competing with Cloudera’s. Geary is assuming a new title, senior director of worldwide business development, though the job description remains just about the same.

MapR has tapped VMware’s HR, while EMC is making use of its virtualization technology to enhance its own portfolio. The storage maker owns a 90% cut of the publicly-traded VMware, and has also seen exceptional growth in Q4. That has been steady throughout the entire year, though this latest quarter stands out in several ways, primarily due to the positive light it reflects on enterprise IT spending. EMC’s revenue rose by 14 percent in the past 12 months, indicating that companies are still very much occupied with upgrading their IT infrastructure, in spite of what Oracle says.

VMware Opens Virtualization Marketplace after Stellar Q4 is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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In an article published on AllThingsD by Peter Kafka, a recently released survey by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) [PDF] has revealed that global music digital sales increased by 8 percent last year. Apparently, this is the first time that statistic has grown since 2004 (when the IFPI started tracking that statistic.)

The current analysis suggests that a notable amount of this increase is from licensed music-subscription services such as Spotify and Deezer. In the report, the IFPI accounts for 32% of the music industry’s global revenues coming from digital music sales and ascribes 13 million paying users to paying users (up from 8 million last year.)

The cloud is also showing some penetration in the thoughts of music industry executives:

Afo Verde, president, Latin Region, Sony Music, says: “Broadband penetration in Latin America continues to grow and the region has become the number two cell phone market in the world, presenting a great opportunity to expand the digital music business.  Subscription services are beginning to take root and we anticipate these will perform well, while download services will benefit from the rollout of cloud technology.”

We’ve seen cloud-technology affect digital segments across the board; in fact cloud-distributed gaming has been seeing a lot of expansion with a 40% increase over the past few years.

However, the IFPI, being a trade organization, has a strong bias involving piracy and wants vey much to make it out to be a much bigger boogeyman than it is. It uses the survey to speak not to the technologies that are enabling a greater number of people greater access to music (and thus makes them more likely to jump on board) but about how well legislation is working to curb music piracy.

If anything, this survey shows that people want to buy digital music, that subscription services are seeing a great deal of increase in subscriptions and people actively seek music there means that they’re not pirating it instead. In fact—add that when Spotify came to Sweden piracy went down 25%—it looks like the industry is managing to find what their audience wants and that’s reducing piracy far more than any legislation will ever be capable of.

In the words of Valve Software’s CEO Gabe Newell: “Piracy is almost always a service problem.”

Until the advent of the cloud and better service-based music platforms opens up devices and people to accessing and receiving music. With these services also comes increased quality and accessibility—things that piracy enables when the music industry fails to deliver—if instead of seeking legislation to buttress region locks, device-centric DRM, and anti-copying paradigms the music industry were to seek their audience instead they would probably find that when they open up to more devices and more people they will find more paying customers waiting there.

At least that seems to be the takeaway this survey has shown.

Digital Sales Continue to Bloom but Big Music is Stuck in the Past is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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PentOS offers a number of advantages to enterprises with private cloud deployments; first and foremost the fact that it’s open. The OS’s agnostic nature enables companies to integrate it with third party offerings, including public OpenStack-powered clouds such as those operated by Rackspace, Dell and other providers.  In addition, it can be deployed on just about any piece legacy hardware or multi-vendor environment.

PentOS is running on a Linux distribution specifically developed by Piston for this purpose, which adds another layer of security, according to the company.  And the cloud OS is making use of Null-Tier Architecture, yet another piece of Piston Cloud-developed technology.

The patented code combines storage, compute and networking in every node, making it easier to scale deployments and simplifying the product even further. Piston claims that PentOS can be installed within just 10 minutes.

“As we continue to see security lag in the public cloud environment, it is clear that private cloud is really the only option for organizations dealing with large volumes of regulated data,” said Joshua McKenty, CEO and co-founder of Piston Cloud. “To date, VMware was the only widely accepted option for private cloud, which brought with it associated cost, complexity and vendor lock-in. Piston Enterprise OS disrupts the market with the easiest, most secure and open approach to private cloud.”

We first learned about Piston Cloud’s commercial distribution of OpenStack in September. Our own Kristen Nicole covered the details, noting the background developments on this up and coming company.

Piston Cloud Launches OpenStack Distro is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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In addition to Reddit, Wikipedia, icanhazcheezburger, and Boing Boing, CloudFlare—a well known cloud-based service designed to speed up websites—has developed a protest-blackout app for websites that use their service to easily join in with the flick of a switch with the “CloudFlare Stop Censorship” app.

Sites who use CloudFlare to protect themselves against DDoS and possible downtime can now simply go into their management interface and instantly have their website censored with a ribbon on the side announcing why. The effect is such that certain words on the page will have black bars blocking them from view like a redacted document—visitors can easily click on the ribbon and have the black bars removed and visit sites educating on how certain Internet companies feel about the bills.

“We thought it was an effective way to reach a mass audience and raise awareness about the dangers of a law like SOPA/PIPA,” CloudFlare founder Matthew Prince told TechCrunch. He said: “We see more than 25 billion page views per month for more than 400 million unique visitors. To give you some sense, that’s more page views than Amazon.com, Twitter, Wikipedia, Zynga, and AOL – combined. 400 million uniques is about 25% of the Internet’s entire population.”

We’ve reported on CloudFare’s attitudes about regulating the Internet before and censorship in general when their service was used to hide the IP address of LulzSec’s servers. Then CloudFlare responded to demands that they withdraw LulzSec as a client with a hardnosed reply that they do not support censoring people because people don’t like what they’re doing and pointed out that if the proper authorities asked for the IP address or information with legal warrants they would comply with the law.

The “blackout” app will not affect a website’s SEO on search engines and will apply only a visual effect for visitors—which can easily be swept away.

They are also offering a code snippet on GitHub for people who do not use CloudFlare to use the app on their own websites.

CloudFlare Develops Anti-SOPA/PROTECT-IP App Just in Time for Blackout is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• SOPA Blackout Aftermath

In their joint statement, Symantec and LiveOffice reveal how useful it is for a business to go with a single vendor for their communication and teamwork solutions. This is also the point where the cloud can be extremely useful for a multitude of business models because it allows them to offload e-mail servers and other infrastructure into the cloud which also removes the need for the overhead of in-house servers.

Another issue discovered by many businesses and e-mail is the need for archives. A multitude of different countries have specific requirements for business communications and regulate how long they’re stored, how they’re stored, and asks that they remain accessible for external agencies to audit the business. For example corporations and businesses may need to comply with regulations from FINRA, SEC and SRO. As a result, businesses are asked to keep expensive systems to archive their e-mail communications in order to remain in business.

LiveOffice keeps this covered with their hybrid cloud-service by not just archiving e-mail and past communications for a company using their service, but they do so in a manner that takes into account the regulatory necessity when archiving.

The other side of archived material isn’t just about staying on the right side of the law, but also keeping track of the evolution of projects inside the company. Many companies archive their e-mail and communications just out of necessity so that they don’t lose a great deal of useful documentation if they cannot find it in their files. A cloud-based outfit like LiveOffice vended through Symantec would essentially make short work of this by archiving-as-you-go during communication.

With cloud-based services, archiving is made easy and backups are literally instantaneous (as well as sorting and etc.) as they can be designed to both save locally and into the cloud as they’re sent out. This means that if the local backups are burned in a catastrophe, they’re still available offsite. This also means that remote and mobile users connected to the same vendor do not have far to go in order to get access to a timeline.

Being able to pull up all of the communication for a particular project, link it to assets of that project, and view them remotely (without having to pull them all across the network) could speed up offsite individuals and remote collaboration.

Plugging Into Pre-Existing Services

Looking at the Symantec solution, one interesting thing is that it hooks up with pre-existing cloud-based services such as Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Dropbox. Since these are all extremely popular services and people have already used them, this means that they won’t need to suddenly shift to a new interface or service just because the company switched to LiveOffice.

By acting as man-in-the-middle, LiveOffice can be used to plug into already existing usage of these services and back up information sent to them. It’s also been mentioned—back to the regulatory archiving—that if enterprise users send documents out to these services, via LiveOffice, that those documents can be retained in the format they’re sent out for later use in legal or regulatory matters.

All of this without disrupting the collaboration and communication capabilities of the users.

It looks like LiveOffice is managing to position themselves well by getting acquired and Symantec is positioning themselves as a cloud-enabled enterprise vendor for communication software that will enable businesses to keep doing what they’re doing but stop worrying as much about being able to access backups and or what they need to do in order to stay complaint with data regulations.

All of these things greatly reduce disruption on the workforce while also enabling the power of storage-as-a-service in the enterprise sector.

Symantec Acquisition of LiveOffice Gives Business a Cloud Booster-Shot is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Symantec Enhances Archiving and eDiscovery Offerings, Acquires LiveOffice
• RSA Chairman Gets Personal about Cybersecurity, Discusses Cooperative Ecosystems
• Why NetApp Must Seek Acquisition
• Symantec Code Leak Happens Where Sidewalk Ends in Law Enforcement Sting Attempt
• Norton’s Latest Android Security App Launches Amidst Market Breach
• Anonymous Leaked Symantec Source Codes, Crippled Law Firm

To start, OnLive will have only a viewer app so users will only be able to watch content and involve themselves in OnLive social features—but the whole shebang is coming soon.

“Download the OnLive Viewer app, fire it up and check out my favorite place, the Arena,” Steve Perlman, Founder and CEO, OnLive wrote in the announcement on the Google TV blog. “What you’ll see are gamers around the world playing top-tier videogames live, some of them approaching the visual realism of live action, and before long, you might even think you are watching a movie. Cheer (click thumbs-up) if you like what you see, and that cheer might appear on the screen of a gamer on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Try friending and striking up some chat. And, definitely watch some Brag Clip® videos, showing the best (and worst!) of OnLive gaming, with the most jaw-dropping and most hilarious moments captured from live gameplay.”

We’ve had our eyes on OnLive for some time now due to their nature of using cloud-centric services to deliver video games to Internet-connected devices and offload processing power onto the cloud. As a result, the mobile device essentially virtualizes high quality games via the Internet allowing players to experience gameplay from any device capable of high fidelity networking (even if it doesn’t have the processor power to drive the game itself.)

In November, OnLive announced a competitive $99 Game System for bringing the service into households, but adding it to Google TV will do exactly that—alongside everything else Google TV does for consumers.

Then in December, OnLive took the jump to mobile by leaping over a major milestone in learning how to stream to mobile devices—with a bevy of over 500 million mobile devices and providing 25 titles they’ve been going hot and heavy into the streaming market. It was just in time for Christmas that OnLive came to the monster-of-a-gaming-phone Xperia PLAY which showed the power that the cloud-gaming service could bring into the Android market.

Cloud-Gaming Service OnLive Will be Preloaded on All Google TVs is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Android-Powered Gaming Console EVO 2 Will Bring Mobile Games to Your Television
• This Week in Cloud: Storage, PaaS and Smart TVs
• Online Video Ready for Prime Time: Personal Media Prevails
• Just in time for Christmas, Cloud Gaming Service OnLive Adds Xperia PLAY Support
• Blast From the Past: 15 Movers of Technology (Infographic)
• OnLive Cloud Gaming Goes Mobile