SiliconANGLE » Enterprise 2.0

Arista Networks’ Jayshree Ullal Talks Node.js, Networking in the Cloud

Maria Deutscher — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:55:48 +0000

Jayshree Ullal arrived at the recent Node Summit representing Arista Networks and stopped by theCube during one of the openings in her busy schedule. The networking exec discussed Node.js, and how it fits in with the overall scheme of networking in the cloud and enterprise IT.

JavaScript-based programming language Node.js puts the emphasis on I/O and real-time web, enabling developers to offer their users more functionality, for more work to be done in the backend – the networking layer. This is the point when Ullal took over, and laid out how her company plays into the market.

She said that in the past couple of decades, networking was about “connecting the dots.” Now it’s about optimizing apps for the network and all the devices attached to it, a task that requires a better understanding of app behavior and more application-aware infrastructure. Other pundits discussed this topic as well during the conference, and one of the big highlights was the need for enterprises to minimize the gaps between frontend and DevOps – or NetworkOps in this case.

Continuing her argument, Ullal said that this smarter network has extended itself to the cloud (if not the other way around), and that Arista has made itself a name in this area, thanks to a number of qualities. The gear the company provides is not cheap – only ‘cost-effective,’ as she put it – but offers a lot of value in terms of more performance and capacity, low latency and small footprints. The crown jewel, however, is the software that powers Arista’s boxes, including the open APIs and other aspects that enable clients to avoid vendor lock-in and setup a more agile environment.

There’s also abstraction in the network. According to Ullal, building software that can deal with all the necessary usage parameters is what the Node.js developers that attended the conference should be thinking of.

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Cisco’s Craig Huitema Has High Expectations of the Cloud being a Networking Driver

Maria Deutscher — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:00:52 +0000

Craig Huitema, director of data center solutions at networking giant Cisco, discussed his take on the cloud and how it’s driving the evolution of the networking market, both in the datacenter and the average household, during an interview. The outline of his vision is that the consumer space is pushing the enterprise forward towards this direction, and this is the area where Cisco usually comes in.

Huitema described how organizations are upgrading their networks to address a growing demand for bandwidth, driven by three main factors.

“Organizations are facing a dramatic increase in demand for network bandwidth

This can be attributed to a number of things including:

“New tools to access applications and data (access from smartphones, tablets and other non-traditional access tools)
Data that formerly was stored close to the user on a local PC is increasingly being stored back in the data center
The data people are creating, accessing and updating is both far larger than before and far more complex. This trend includes the increasing use of both structured data and non-structured data such as audio and video.”

The last two bulletins extend to include the enterprise as well. Consumers and organizations both leverage services such as Box and other cloud storage platforms. And at the same time, the big data industry is growing thanks to overwhelming demand for new ways to identify everything ranging between consumer behavior and infrastructure utilization trends.

Huitema also covered the impact of it all. Companies are forced to boost their networking backend with virtualization and other upgrades – preferably ones provided by Cisco – to be able to address the data explosion. And Cisco itself is trying to address the market by modifying its switches to support higher speeds of 40Gbps-100Gbps.

Vendors are trying to tap the rise of big data from several angles. Huitema and his colleagues are going after hardware, while the newly launched Sumo Logic provides an analytics-as-a-service from the cloud. Most recently Cisco faces disruption from newcomer Nicira, which launched an industry first with its network-as-a-service product.

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CommVault Stays Stag as HP, Others Build Storage Strategy

Maria Deutscher — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:14:03 +0000

Enterprise storage software maker CommVault won’t follow the same track its competitors did, and will continue to run solo for the time being, according to a statement by Bob Hammer, the chief executive, chairman and president of the company.

“Whatever happens on the M&A side, our mission is clear — create shareholder value on our own as an independent company,” Hammer said.

CommVault’s head is keen on generating that value, and said he plans on boosting his company’s annual sales to $1 billion within five years, a formidable distance from today’s $400 million. Those plans may include additional partnerships with the large enterprises that may be interested in more extensive access to CommVault’s IP.

“Michael Turits, a technology analyst at Raymond James, said that for a large technology company, CommVault would make a “great acquisition.”

Turits said CommVault would be able to better compete within a larger organization with the likes of Symantec, EMC and IBM, which have far more resources.

Isilon, 3PAR and Compellent were the software maker’s prime competitors in the storage space, up until they were acquired by the titans of this industry: EMC, HP and Dell. So far these investments have proved rather fruitful in all three cases.

EMC, for one, recently integrated a part of the Isilon portfolio into its big data strategy, which is no longer dependant on MapR’s third party software. The company introduced an appliance that features a new Hadoop distribution developed internally by EMC running on Isilon hardware.

In a different area of the storage industry, Permabit has already started with its own plan to make partnerships in order to facilitate growth. The company offers an OEM-embedded dedupe solution named Albireo, and StoneFly is the newest reseller.

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Symantec Launches New Versions of Backup Solutions

Maria Deutscher — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:20:27 +0000

Symantec has released the latest versions of two of its enterprises backup and recovery offerings, which the company said took two years of 1,600 developers’ time to upgrade.

Backup Exec 2012 and NetBackup v7.5 will ship with several major improvements, first and foremost separate editions of the two referred to as V-Ray. The new branding comes with support for VMware and HyperV-powered virtual machines, on top of the ability to manage physical boxes and all the other enhancements made available with the regular versions.

Backup Exec 2012 offers more automation in the form of ready-to-use backup configurations that are made available via a new UI, as well as more choice. Users can recover datasets or individual objects to physical servers and not just VMs with the 2012 edition, all while taking advantage of what Symantec claims are major performance and utilization boosts.

“We’re taking what was formerly a four- or five-hour backup down to a one minute or two minute backup,” Regan said. “This is not something you can compare to on the market today.”

Moving on to NetBackup 7.5, the platform puts more emphasis on the newly added virtualization support. The Virtual Machine Intelligent Policy, conceived with some help from Symantec’s marketing team to form the acronym VIP, automatically detects, back up and dedupe the data stored on new VMs. It also comes with a consolidated interface designed to enable easier management of multiple – up to hundreds – of snapshots in NetApp environments.

Both Backup Exec and NetBackup are offered up with a whole lineup of other new additions, all designed to compete in a market where innovating has to catch up with competition. For one, Coraid and Veeam launched their own joint backup and recovery solution just last month.

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Piston Cloud Teams up with Three DevOps Titans

Maria Deutscher — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:38:02 +0000

Piston Cloud is one of the biggest supports of OpenStack out there. This is mainly because the company, which was founded by some of the people who’ve contributed the most to the project, based its flagship offering on the cloud OS. Piston has added proprietary components of its own to OpenStack and now offers it as a commercial distribution for private cloud deployments.

Today the company made a push to increase the appeal of its offering by announcing partnership with three of the biggest names in DevOps and automation: Opscode, the maker of Chef, Puppet Labs and RightScale. Each offers customers different advantages, and now Piston’s clients are also included in that roster.

“Today’s private cloud solutions are poised to transform IT economics for the enterprise,” said Joshua McKenty, CEO and co-founder of Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. “Automation and orchestration are key to realizing the operational efficiencies of private cloud. By supporting solutions like Opscode Chef, Puppet Enterprise and RightScale myCloud, Piston Cloud’s customers have the ability to rapidly deploy and automate their applications within an OpenStack-powered environment.”

Piston is still a relatively new player, and it’s making some early progress to try and capture a head start in a small but growing market that will hopefully expand. This sort of approach ended up working out for Cloudera, among others.

PentOS, Piston Cloud’s product, rolled out into general availability just last month. Our news editor Kristen Nicole wrote up a feature about the company back when it first unveiled its plans in September last year, and dug a little deeper into the roots f the venture kicked off by NASA and Rackspace veterans.

Since then, more and more companies have made their commitments to OpenStack. One of them is Dell, which, just like competitor HP, is starting to pay more attention to the enterprise cloud space in light of a shaky PC consumer sector.

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ScaleXtreme Launches New Partner Program for CSPs

Maria Deutscher — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:40:45 +0000

ScaleXtreme, a provider of cloud management and automation tools for the enterprise, announced the latest boost to its ecosystem. The company hopes to increase the number of paid licenses it’s selling via its partners, which is why it launched the Cloud Service Provider Program.

Providers that are developing cloud-based or on-premise offerings for either vCloud, Citrix CloudStack or OpenStack can integrate with ScaleXtreme. When signing up, they receive an API for account management, in addition to software and training on their end.

“ScaleXtreme provides the fastest way for customers to provision and manage their cloud servers,” said ScaleXtreme CEO Nand Mulchandani. “This helps cloud service providers to offer new, differentiated products to their customers and increase customer satisfaction through self-service server management.”

The emphasis is on simplicity, or “plug and play.” Customers of providers that are participating in the program automatically have access to ScaleXtreme Xpress, the free edition of ScaleXtreme’s platform, and can use it to manage their deployments. There’s also a built-in tool for server templates.

Cloud companies are growing their respective ecosystems through the many different channels of the industry. In the open-source universe, Rackspace stepped up its investment in OpenStack a few months ago, even though it will be spun off as an independent foundation this year. It announced that the Rackspace Cloud Builders will be offering a course entitled Fundamentals Training for OpenStack to developers that are interested in getting familiar with the open cloud platform.

Hadoop distro maker Cloudera has also made several commitments to its partners and community. In August last year it announced a big donation to big data with the release of a free knowledge base as well as tools and other resources that encompassed a lot of what one of the biggest players in this industry picked up over the years.

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This Week in Cloud: From SoundCloud to VMware’s Datacenter App Store

Maria Deutscher — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:05:03 +0000

There have been a few major updates this week, a sizable portion of which emerged from the Node Summit gathering in San Francisco. SiliconANGLE has been attending and covering the gathering extensively across our different channels, including the newly launched DevOpsAngle. We’ve also been reviewing other news from the cloud ecosystem, and the following rundown sums up some of the most interesting developments that popped up throughout the week.

SoundCloud 10 million strong

The first highlight comes from SoundCloud, a German music streaming startup that recently announced it now has over 10 million users worldwide. The update is notable from several angles: it’s yet another indicator of the growing chunk of web traffic media content is accounting for, and, provides a new point of view on the SOPA/PIPA buzz, which will soon be reaching its climax. It’s also very good news for the company.

AWS opens the cloud gates

Over in the PaaS space, Amazon has come up with yet another way to take over the cloud market. Cloud Gateway is the newest AWS offering, and hooks up on-premise apps with Amazon storage, providing it a very good way of tapping companies running legacy IT environments. For now however, the traditional storage market is doing just fine.

EMC, VMware are killing it

EMC’s latest earnings call revealed a lot of growth for the storage behemoth, indicating among other things that its cloud strategy has been living up to expectations. It’s also a sign that IT spending is not on the decline just yet, something that both Oracle and Juniper Networks suggested.

VMware in turn has also seen quite a bit of growth. The virtualization provider plans on fastening its pace, and the first step in this quarter was the launch of the VMware Solution Exchange. The online catalog has the potential of giving the company’s ecosystem – both partners and customers – a big boost.

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Embracing Change to Become the IT Champion

Brian Curry — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:02:48 +0000

“No one ever got fired for buying IBM,” was the adage of enterprise IT decision-makers in the 1990s. Banking on the IT giant was the safest bet you could make, and if a new IT product came to market that was outside of IBM’s portfolio, administrators would simply wait for IBM to develop it…in IBM we trust. Then the “four horsemen” of IT emerged in the form of Microsoft, Intel, Dell and Cisco, which roamed from company to company, dominating everything IT.

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.

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Joyent’s Jason Hoffman Talks Recent Funding, Node.js at theCube

Maria Deutscher — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:32:55 +0000

We’ve been broadcasting live from Joyent’s first 2012 NodeSummit in San Francisco, and our own John Furrier and Alex Williams caught up with company founder and CTO Jason Hoffman to discuss everything Node.js.

The interview went into second gear after Hoffman provided a quick run-down of his company’s eight-year history. They started out as what he referred to as an infrastructure system software firm, and today they’re among the oldest and biggest players in this market, trailing just behind Amazon. The competition is still intense, and Hoffman thinks Joyent got the lead thanks to the support it gives to its community and the visibility that’s built into the language.

The most recent milestone for the Joyent is the massive $85 million round of funding announced just this week, which was naturally brought up several times throughout the 20-minute chat on theCube.

Later, Hoffman summarized where he thinks Node.js stands in the industry, and where it fits in with all the cloud buzzing going on today. Web-based apps are seeing more adoption in both the consumer and enterprise segments, and server-client apps are turning into real-time “small data” sync peers. Mobile is becoming an even bigger driver, Joyent’s founder added, and demand from mobile workers will drive demand for easily accessible cloud applications.

All these new end points have transformed many networks into a back point/abstraction layer, and this is where Node.js comes in the picture. Hoffman described the open-source programming language his firm is sponsoring as the new platform that runs on top of that layer and helps developers address the market’s demands.

The discussion was then extended to the Node.js ecosystem. It’s constantly expanding thanks to new startups that offer products and service designed for and/or based on the language. Among them is The Node Firm, and, as one Twitter user highlighted, a whole lineup of DevOps tools providers.

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The Impact of Megaupload’s “Mega-Downfall” on Sharing in the Cloud

Kit Dotson — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:30:04 +0000

With the fall of Megaupload.com to the United States government in an action that has taken them entirely offline—in a move yet unprecedented by the US against a foreign site—it brings to mind what sort of effect this might have on other file sharing sites such as Box.net, Dropbox, YouSendIt, and others.

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.]

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