SiliconANGLE » Enterprise 2.0

Peter Chang CEO of Oxygen Cloud Talks Infrastructure at EMC World 2012

Kit Dotson — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:47:55 +0000

EMC has always been about storage and, as a result, how storage effects the use of data in computing architectures. Products such as Oxygen Cloud seeks to be part of this decoupling of data from computation, enabling data to float free from applications and allow it to be available anywhere.

Peter Chang, CEO of Oxygen Cloud, met with John Furrier and Dave Vellante in the Cube at EMC World 2012 to speak about how his company is looking into the market to furrow out their niche. He expects that people can move their processing into the cloud, but you still have to move that data—and currently processing is virtualized, but it’s also important to virtualize data so that it follows behind computing.

“The infrastructure makes things possible,” Chang says, “so Big Data architecture might make it possible for you to store and crunch a lot of data; but what you do with it, that’s what’s next, that’s where the value actually comes from. How can you build on this infrastructure to create things that change people’s lives?”

When asked about use cases and the best traction, Chang explains that he sees people seeing access to enterprise content in the cloud. Employees want access to data via iPad and Android and mobile devices with security and control—such as enterprises really need. At NodeSummit he spoke about a similar expectation from the market, especially with the bring-your-own-device trend creeping into enterprise.

Oxygen Cloud, Furrier believes, is navigating some very choppy and dark waters and the company is just a start up between huge groups such as EMC, VMware, IBM, and HP. Chang sees it as a challenge, but that the market has a need but the big companies don’t have the technology or mobility to deliver what the market needs at the level that smaller startups can nimbly approach. So Chang says that he hopes to provide technology—such as anywhere access to EMC storage, Isilon, etc.—through partnerships with EMC.

Chang sees the end-user as the important linchpin for much storage delivery. While the big companies move and make huge waves through the cloud environment, the enterprise venue involves taking data out of the vast expanse of the cloud and bringing it down to the service level. Such as IT departments look to provide data and storage to end users.

“We’re going to be eventually managing storage as a service, I think that’s a forgone conclusion,” Chang says. “The question is what are the qualities of that service, where does that data live, and how do we drive lower costs?”

His vision is to build out a complete platform that not only provides access to all content across the enterprise—but also take advantage of that data set and provide value added services on top of that. Oxygen Cloud doesn’t provide just cloud storage, Chang explains, as in they’re not just there to provide access to files.

“We don’t think of ourselves as an application,” he says, “we think of ourselves as part of the infrastructure.”

We’re looking at an interesting niche with Oxygen Cloud, especially in comparison to traditional cloud-services such as Amazon Web Services. SiliconANGLE’s Alex Williams recently made a comparison between AWS and Oxygen Cloud looking at just these expectations.

The middle-man making the cloud-storage better. With Oxygen Cloud, certainly there is cloud-storage entailed; but to distribute data means to build out a platform, APIs for accessing that platform, and delivering all the necessary elements that make a solution for a storage-as-a-service. As a result, Chang sees that Oxygen Cloud will be able to compete by providing a superior service for cloud-storage providers to connect with IT departments and the enterprise sector.

Peter Chang CEO of Oxygen Cloud Talks Infrastructure at EMC World 2012 is a post from: SiliconANGLE
We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

EMC World 2012: Storage Launches, More Data News

Maria Deutscher — Mon, 21 May 2012 18:08:03 +0000

An official statement from EMC World 2012 revealed that the storage giant will be making a total of 42 product announcements during the event. That’s just enough for this year’s Megalaunch to raise the bar beyond the previous record set back in 2011, with 41 product-related updates.

It’s Day 1 of the conference, and a few of the most significant announcements already hit the press. Coming out of Las Vegas is word on new and improved storage systems, scattered across the company’s entire portfolio.

The entry level category now features the VNXe 3150, which supposedly delivers 50 percent more performance and capacity than the previous generation of the solution. And in turn, the higher end family of storage arrays based on the VMAX operating system has also been extended with the addition of the 40K model.

The existing configurations, a low end system with a capacity of 1.5 petabytes and a more advanced one with 2PBs, have been renamed to VMAX 10K and VMAX 20K, respectively. The new 40K packs twice as much capacity than the latter, its predecessor, and doubled performance with up to 32 2.8GHz Intel Xeons under the hood. Each chip features six cores.

In addition, the 40K ships with one terabyte of ECC-protected DDR3 DRAM, improved networking and a number of other enhancements.

The VNXe 3150 and VMAX 40K storage systems are far from being the only new kids on the block. EMC will be showcasing the latest version of the Isilon OneFS scale-out NAS operating system, and the company is aggressively branching out to other industries as well.

One such area is networking. This year a more diverse lineup of companies is attending, including Juniper Networks and Arista, while big data once again made it to the flyers and is in fact the big slogan behind Megalaunch part 2.

EMC World 2012: Storage Launches, More Data News is a post from: SiliconANGLE
We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

SAP Technology Adoption in the “7th Inning Stretch” says NetApp VP

Guest Author — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:45:40 +0000

As part of their continuing SAP SAPphire 2012 coverage at #theCube, John Furrier and Dave Vellante spoke with Thomas Stanley, former baseball player turned tech Global Alliance VP for NetApp (see full interview below). Vellante noted that SAP SAPphire messaging had changed since last year, now focusing more on “speed, simplicity, personalization [and] mobility.”

Using the baseball analogy, Stanley explained in terms of new technology adoption and SAP, “we are definitely in the 7th inning stretch.” Now the products are on the marketplace and the important questions according to Stanley are: “How does the ecosystem come together?…What are [the] workloads [and] customer requirements?…Are we able to fulfill them?”

SAP provides major workloads to NetApp and Stanley explained the company’s go-to-market for SAP meant maintaining their status as leaders in innovation and data solutions.

Stanley also discussed what Vellante considered the “land grab for FlexPod.” Net App has had significant growth in FlexPod architecture and clients appreciate the enhanced innovation and R&D. For NetApp, Flex Pod helps provide the architecture that allows its clients to realize their main goals of reducing time to market, cost and risk. The value Net App brings suggests there should be no premium attached to FlexPod architecture. Vellante predicts that, in the future, most of the market will converge and open architecture will be the largest segment.

NetApp plans to continue integration with SAP, a big drive of workload, to bring significant value to the marketplace. Stanley suggests: “It’s not just what our people do with our software…it’s what do we do with our software connected to the applications that SAP is bringing to the market…our job is to be number 1 in that.”

Watch live video from SiliconANGLE.com on Justin.tv

SAP Technology Adoption in the “7th Inning Stretch” says NetApp VP is a post from: SiliconANGLE
We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

Bernhard Schulzki from EMC and Satinder Sethi from Cisco Talk HANA at SAPphire 2012

Kit Dotson — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:52:06 +0000

Bernhard Schulzki, Vice President of EMC Solutions Group, and Satinder Sethi, VP of Service Access & Virtualization Technology at Cisco, spoke with Dave Vellante at SAPphire 2012 about the cloud and HANA infrastructure. (See the video at the end of the article for the full interview.)

Schulzki says that the specific emphasis on solutions with SAP in partnership with Cisco involves HANA and the journey into the cloud. Especially because Cisco is one of the leading providers helping to deliver people into the cloud via broader networking and datacenters.

He also spoke about how EMC intends to use Cisco led certification for HANA in order to move forward with development. “We’re responding to customer needs,” Schulzki said. “Everybody loves HANA,” and this appears to be the direction that the customers want to move in and therefore that’s where EMC and Cisco choose to attend.

Sethi said that Cisco sees a huge need in the market for a differentiated computing architecture and that this will lead modern day infrastructure.

“It doesn’t really matter what application I’m running or what point in time,” Sethi said speaking about abstraction and architecture under the tutelage of Cisco and their technology. “Look at some of the capabilities that HANA is trying to drive such as faster response time, information available instantly…agile infrastructure that can be scaled out, repurpose at any given point of time, and being able to deliver the performance that customers are looking for.”

Dave expanded that SAP becomes part of the mission critical horizontal app infrastructures, enabling the capability of running any app at any time they want and providing the agility to shift between different applications when they need it. With the advent of cloud-technology, applications are no longer tied directly to hardware, but are abstracted across clouds being upheld by a lot of networking infrastructure coupled with storage.

Schulzki went on to speak about how EMC Solutions has brought resilience to HANA architectures through an SAP context by providing fully automated storage tiering and being able to integrate with legacy systems or migrate from older systems. He expects that working with SAP’s infrastructure agnostic systems will help with virtualization and abstraction and as a result may simplify the toolset needed to make datacenters run.

“SAP has a roadmap that we want to attach to,” he said speaking about the cloud-to-cloud, “…and it’s good stuff coming out.”

In-memory computing is a very big deal in this industry because often software decisions are made based on the hardware available at the time. Hardware is a long-term decision that needs to be maintained and upgrade for future projects and an early decision can cripple future agility and growth—however, with SAP HANA solutions and layers of abstraction the hardware underneath doesn’t matter as much to the software on top, thus enabling customers to look to companies like EMC and Cisco to resolve their on-the-ground problems and use the abstraction software layer to provide them agility.

As a result, such products will be very fruitful for companies like Cisco and EMC as they allow them to collaborate with customers to give them the best possible infrastructure without locking them into something that may restrict their ability to remain customers in the future.

Bernhard Schulzki from EMC and Satinder Sethi from Cisco Talk HANA at SAPphire 2012 is a post from: SiliconANGLE
We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

Nvidia Prepares Graphics Card Lineup for the Cloud Gaming Era

Kit Dotson — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:31:02 +0000

The cloud has penetrated everything, even gaming, and Nvidia wants to craft the sails that will lead the gaming world into those cloudy waters with their upcoming Kepler-based graphics chips—these graphics cards will include features designed to enable cloud-gaming across the Internet and facilitate lower-lag with shinier graphics for the next generation of consoles.

Essentially, the way Nvidia and others see it: home consoles can only go so far in power and strength requirements for graphics and this means a cost-barrier to customers. So gaming-as-a-service breaks in by allowing data centers to house extremely powerful graphics cards on servers that run the games, render the graphics, and then stream them to the consoles. Lowering the power and cost needs at the client end and defraying costs for the enterprise.

Dean Takahashi from GamesBeat interviewed Nvidia senior vice president Dan Vivoli about Nvidia’s announcement of the Kepler-based cloud-gaming chipsets and how they might impact the industry as a whole,

But with improved multitasking on Nvidia’s Kepler-based graphics chips, each data center server can handle multiple users at a lower cost. That makes cloud gaming more economical, Vivoli said.

The Kepler-based chips have also been designed to reduce the latency, or time it takes for an interaction between computers, for cloud gaming. That means that there won’t be a perceptible delay in playing cloud games.

Nvidia is partnering with Gaikai, which has 24 data centers in the U.S., to help reduce network latency. Nvidia is building a grid-based computing platform, dubbed Nvidia GeForce Grid, for Kepler-based machines to access. Together with cloud graphics software, the Nvidia GeForce Grid will be enable cloud-gaming companies to operate with lower operating costs, said Phil Eisler, general manager of cloud graphics at Nvidia.

Companies such as OnLive, Gaikai, and Otoy have been seeking solutions to enable gaming services across the cloud for some time now and Nvidia has even sought a partnerships with them. Southern California-based Gaikai, Inc. was in the news last year for their endeavor to provide cloud-streaming and cloud-delivery assets to MMO games such as Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online. We’ve also seen OnLive pushing into mobile with support for Xperia PLAY and appear on Internet-enabled TVs through being preloaded onto Google TV.

“The beauty of this approach is that GPUs will continue to improve all of the time,” Vivoli told GamesBeat. “Your hardware stays the same, but the data center hardware can be upgraded to handle better games.”

By using a datacenter packed with the Nvidia Kepler-based graphics cards, each of these different cloud-gaming outfits would be able to render the games in their servers and then pipe them to devices that would traditionally not be able to play triple-A titles such as Crysis 3—a set of devices that include thin-client consoles, Internet-enabled TVs, low-end PCs, and mobile devices.

With the production of this type of equipment we will probably seen the next generation of consoles have two modes: one that uses the internal graphics to allow the play of games the traditional way (possibly the primary selling point) and the second will be much like Xbox LIVE and other Intenet-enabled services that also allow for cloud-based gaming via OnLive, Gaikai and others using gaming-as-a-service datacenters.

Nvidia Prepares Graphics Card Lineup for the Cloud Gaming Era is a post from: SiliconANGLE
We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

More Big Data Access with Kapow-Informatica Team Up

Guest Author — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:20:40 +0000

Kapow Software, an innovator in big data solutions, partnered with Informatica Corporation, a leader in data integration software, to introduce Informatica PowerExchange for Kapow Katalyst. This new product offers enhanced big data solutions and will be made available as part of Informatica 9.5.

Informatica PowerExchange for Kapow Katalyst solves important data problems to potentially add value to customers. While internal data is limited, external data is massive, difficult to access and unwieldy. Utilizing IT, Informatica PowerExchange for Kapow Katalyst allows users to extract large amounts of external data, easily structuring and tailoring it to their needs. With the new ability to tap into web, cloud applications and social media Informatica customers can gain novel insight on market trends, forecasts, competition and customer preferences. This enhanced access can add major value as it can be leveraged to innovate and increase profit.

Stefan Andreasen, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Kapow Software suggests: “Enterprises are quickly realizing the value of external data sources and the meaningful impact this type of information can have on their decision-making process and overall market position.”

Companies are now making stronger efforts to ensure that Big Data software is not a costly liability, but actually drives value to maximize competitive advantage, productivity and revenue. Kapow Software’s partnership with Informatica is a new milestone in the company’s push to offer critical and strategic data solutions from external web apps. For Informatica, this partnership and the introduction of Informatic 9.5 reinforces its commitment to optimize return on data. Informatica 9.5 aims to provide actionable, authoritative data that minimizes expense.

More Big Data Access with Kapow-Informatica Team Up is a post from: SiliconANGLE
We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

Citrix Synergy 2012 Stars: Mobility, Virtualization and Cloud

Cherr Aira — Fri, 11 May 2012 20:20:47 +0000

Citrix Synergy 2012 kicked off on a high note this past Wednesday. At the center of it all was the ongoing discussion of how the cloud era is changing the course of mobility, virtualization and cloud computing, with an emphasis on mobility.

Mobility

Mobility is a sector Citrix intends to attack aggressively as demand mounts on both the consumer and enterprise sides. Early this year Citrix Systems announced a Google-sponsored project called Mobilize the Cloud – A Reality. Pundits gathered to evaluate the many cloud requirements for industry verticals with a mobile workforce, including field sales, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and transportation. At the event, Citrix Systems finally debuted Citrix Podio, a team-based collaboration platform for mobile workstyles and cloud spaces. It’s also integrated with popular platforms such as GoToMeeting, Citrix ShareFile, Evernote, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive and SugarSync.

In a recent report Bernardo de Albergaria, VP and GM of Collaboration at Citrix gave his insights on the developments within the mobile collaboration space, saying, “This is one more way we’re enabling people to simply and effectively get real work done. Through the social power of the Podio collaboration platform, we’re the first to provide this type of integrated cloud-based support for team-based collaboration.

“We’re delivering easy and seamless access to today’s leading productivity services and we’ve done this with simplicity, affordability and customer experience in mind, continuing our support for the evolution of how work gets done.”

Virtualization and Cloud Computing

The second day of the Citrix Synergy marked a few new things for Citrix, as they revealed technology partners for Citrix HDX-Ready System-on-Chip. The joint ventures will support the said product to deliver and boost high-definition desktop applications to thin client displays using PoE, or Power-over-Ethernet, often used to send data and electricity over the same set of wires. Some of the partners include HP, NComputing, LG and Fujitsu.

The attendees were also fortunate to have witnessed the unveiling of ten new initiatives in cloud computing and virtualization. Included in the pack are the new HDX Universal Printer Server, GoToMeeting HDFaces for the iPad, ShareFile Storage Zones, New Cloud Platform, NetScaler 10 for AWS, previously mentioned Podio, acquisition of Virtual Computer, lower pricing for VDI, acquisition of Viral Computer, launch of RemotePC and Project Avalon.

Apart from these announcements, Citrix showed its support to newcomers as they awarded and added two new companies to its Startup Appcelerator roster. ScriptRock and AppEnsure were given $100K each. Also present at the event to showcase their partnership with Citrix and Wyse is Dell, with a stalwart booth highlighting Citrix VDI in a Box software coupled with a Wyse zero client in action, or testing out DVS Simplified Desktop as a Service (DaaS and Dell Virtual Labs solution is purpose- built to solve the specific IT problems in the education field.

Citrix Synergy 2012 Stars: Mobility, Virtualization and Cloud is a post from: SiliconANGLE
We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

Oracle VDI Update Means Less Vendor Lock-In?

Maria Deutscher — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:00:08 +0000

Database behemoth Oracle upgraded three applications in its desktop virtualization portfolio with the addition of new features spread across a number of different areas, from storage and security to video playback quality.

Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3.4 now offers a bit less vendor lock-in with support for not only Sun ZFS appliances but also storage solutions from third party vendors. In addition, the Global VDI Centers included with the latest version enable admins to create several deployments which automatically redirect users to the designated server group.

In turn, Sun Ray v5.3 features a few improvements as well. Sun Ray now ‘accelerates‘ Adobe Flash and Windows Media Player, and video can be streamed at 720p if Virtual Desktop Client 3.1 is installed.

On top of that, ‘location tracking’ has been introduced to increase overall convenience – for example, the app automatically adjusts screen sized depending on the monitor the user happens to be logging in from. This is also designed to push security up a notch in some regards, and comes alongside the addition of 802.1X network authentication.

Lastly, Oracle says that its software supports a broader range of USB device and that actual storage performance is increased fivefold.

“With our continued product enhancements, Oracle’s desktop virtualization solution is making it easier and more cost-effective for IT to deliver centrally managed, secure services for end user desktops and provide access to enterprise applications from a wider variety of locations and devices,” Wim Coekaerts, SVP of Linux and Virtualization Engineering.

This latest Oracle update comes just two days after a major development in its case against Google. The judge decided that Android does indeed infringe several Java patents, but the litigation is not over and the plaintiff has only been awarded with a mere $160,000 in damages.

Oracle VDI Update Means Less Vendor Lock-In? is a post from: SiliconANGLE
We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

ActiveState Adds Control, Debugging with Stackato 1.2

Maria Deutscher — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:00:17 +0000

ActiveState, a software development solutions maker, launched the latest version of its so-called private, development-centric PaaS. The multi-stack, platform-agnostic moto persists, only with a few extra touches that aim to make Stackato a bit better than what it used to be.

Version 1.2 features several new additions. One of the major updates is support for file-system services, which means that an application like Drupal can more easily share data across multiple instances within the cloud environment.

ActiveState also added ‘app store features’ for admins to better manage applications’ lifecycle. That includes a simplified deployment console and a configurable Stackato App Store that can support multiple online storefronts and comes with a built in search function.

On top of all that a permissions system has been installed so that developers accessing the code on a company’s Stackato deployment can only modify the portion they’re working on. And debugging their code should be easier thanks to integration with Komodo, ActiveState’s rather popular IDE.

“Stackato 1.2 is all about control,” said Jeff Hobbs, VP of Engineering and CTO at ActiveState. “It’s the only Cloud Foundry-based PaaS solution to offer group and user-specific controls, a powerful tool for enterprises looking to maintain transparent oversight of cloud application development and deployment processes. With Stackato 1.2, IT administrators can set memory, service and application quotas for individual users, or even groups.”

The latest release is available in the commercial edition and a single freely downloadable VM that customers can play around with before signing up to the former.

Stackato is based on VMware’s Cloud Foundry, and the open-source PaaS’s original developer is looking to make the most out of it as well. Earlier this week we learned that BOSH, a tool originally made for Foundry, is going to be usable in OpenStack deployments as well.

ActiveState Adds Control, Debugging with Stackato 1.2 is a post from: SiliconANGLE
We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

LulzSec Leaked VMware Code Raises Concerns and Implications

John Casaretto — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:01:28 +0000

In an already busy week for cybersecurity news, it was revealed this week that source code for VMware ESX Hypervisor was leaked onto Pastebin. A member of the notoriously familiar group LulzSec was identified as the source of the leak.

A LulzSec hacker known as “Hardcore Charlie” was tied recently to an attack on China’s CEIEC, a defense contractor. In that attack, Hardcore Charlie obtained and subsequently released thousands of internal documents, ostensibly looking for secret military information regarding US war efforts in Afghanistan. The Guardian reports that the leaked code, up to 300MB worth was a part of that CEIEC breach where as much as 1TB of data was copied.

VMware has played this down in a company blog post that reads:

“Yesterday, April 23, 2012, our security team became aware of the public posting of a single file from the VMware ESX source code and the possibility that more files may be posted in the future. The posted code and associated commentary dates to the 2003 to 2004 timeframe.

The fact that the source code may have been publicly shared does not necessarily mean that there is any increased risk to VMware customers. VMware proactively shares its source code and interfaces with other industry participants to enable the broad virtualization ecosystem today. We take customer security seriously and have engaged internal and external resources, including our VMware Security Response Center, to thoroughly investigate. We will continue to provide updates to the VMware community if and when additional information is available.”

The Bottom Line

While the amount and age of the source code may seem to indicate a lesser value in terms of implications, considering that there is an unconfirmed 300MB of code that is out in the wild is an area of concern. An overwhelming amount of organizations rely on VMware solution for their infrastructure. This extends to the cloud, internally, and externally, to high-availability scenarios, to virtual desktop implementations, and all services that run on it. A vector of compromise that starts with such a code leak on this ubiquitous architectural component will be a point of significant concern for not only the security community, but any community that is responsible in mitigating risk and availability of services to an enterprise.

The biggest questions many should be asking right now are: how much the rest of the reportedly compromised source code is actually still out in the wild, how much of the genetics of that code still exists in the product today, and what if anything is its true value? In the weeks and months to come, it may very well be answers to these questions will be revealed, in a good way or not. It is a safe bet to assume VMware is actively looking to answer these questions, but not making it public.

LulzSec Leaked VMware Code Raises Concerns and Implications is a post from: SiliconANGLE
We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.