Navigating The Shifts In Computing Infrastructure Markets Cloud Services, New Technologies, And The Rise Of Informal Computing Buyers
The New Capacity Planning Process Requires Three New Steps Reboot Your Capacity Planning Process With Cost-Value Analysis, Governance, And Global Planning
The New Capacity Planning Process Requires Three New Steps Reboot Your Capacity Planning Process With Cost-Value Analysis, Governance, And Global Planning
IBM Unveils Next Generation Smart Cloud Platform for Business
Clients get the economics of IBM's existing cloud services with an extended choice of delivery models and enterprise features
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, - 07 Apr 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled its next generation IBM SmartCloud, an enterprise-class, secure cloud specifically created to meet the demands of businesses.
To accelerate the shift from experimentation, development and assessment to full scale enterprise deployment of cloud, IBM is building out its existing cloud portfolio with IBM SmartCloud, enterprise cloud technologies and services offerings for private, public and hybrid clouds based on IBM hardware, software, services and best practices.
As part of this announcement, IBM is demonstrating a next-generation, enterprise cloud service delivery platform currently piloting with key clients and available later this year. For the first time, enterprise clients will be able to select key characteristics of a public, private and hybrid cloud to match workload requirements from simple Web infrastructure to complex business processes, along five dimensions, including:
· Security and isolation
· Availability and performance
· Technology platforms
· Management Support and Deployment
· Payment and Billing
The IBM SmartCloud includes a broad spectrum of secure managed services, to run diverse workloads across multiple delivery methods both public and private. It includes customer choice with the potential for end-to-end management of service delivery from the server and operating system to the application and process layer.
“The new IBM SmartCloud allows for the best of both worlds – the cost savings and scalability of a shared cloud environment plus the security, enterprise capabilities and support services of a private environment,” said Erich Clementi, senior vice president, IBM Global Technology Services. “In thousands of cloud engagements, we have discovered that enterprise client wants a choice of cloud deployment models that meet the requirements of their workloads and the demands of their business.”
This level of choice and control translates into capabilities customized to your needs and priorities, whether you’re deploying a simple web application, an ordering logistics system or a complete ERP system.
The new IBM cloud can enable organizations, their employees and partners, to get what they need, as they need it – from advanced analytics and business applications to IT infrastructure like virtual servers and storage or access to tools for testing software code - all deployed securely across IBM’s global network of cloud data centers.
The IBM SmartCloud has two implementation options: Enterprise and Enterprise +.
- Enterprise – Available today and expanding on our existing Development and Test Cloud allowing customers to expand on internal development and test efforts with reduction of application development tasks from days to minutes via automation and rapid provisioning with over 30% reduction in costs versus traditional application environments. This offering is available immediately.
- Enterprise + -- To be made available later this year, Enterprise + will complement and expand on the value of Enterprise, offering brand new capabilities provide a core set of multi-tenant services to manage virtual server, storage, network and security infrastructure components including managed operational production services.
Toyota to use Microsoft Windows Azure ‘cloud computing’
Toyota president, Akio Toyoda, and Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, have just announced a partnership deal which will introduce Microsoft’s Windows Azure ‘cloud computing’ platform into Toyota plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles of the future.
In a video media conference meeting last night, the two company executives discussed plans involving a one billion yen (around $12 million) plan for Toyota’s subsidiary media brand, Toyota Media Service, which will see telematics applications using Microsoft’s Windows Azure ‘cloud computing’ program being launched in plug-in and electric Toyota’s by 2012.
The systems will work in much the same way as Ford Motor Co.’s MyFord Touch and Holden’s Enhanced Driver Interface in that it will bring together many telecommunication and infotainment systems into one platform. It will also display GPS information and power and energy information in regards to the car’s electric motors and batteries.
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, recently said about the deal,
“Today’s announcement of our partnership with TMC is a great example of how we continue to invest in the automotive industry and of our commitment to power the services that are important to consumers.”
Toyota is aiming to have the complete cloud interface and service up and running by 2015. The company has also expressed that it will introduce the technology in markets all over the world.
Cloud storage will fail without WAN Acceleration
FedEx to the rescue?
WAN Acceleration needed for external Clouds, internal cloud gaining movement.
By Larry Chaffin 
Amazon is working with customers to help with terabits of data that need to go to storage in their cloud by offering a service which makes no sense to me. Let’s you have terabytes of data you need to upload to Amazon’s cloud storage service. Your company does not feel like waiting the transfer to complete over hours or days, maybe weeks, you now have another option, FedEx. Amazon is allowing customers to FedEx mass storage devices to its Seattle, Virginia or Dublin locations for direct and internal upload. Amazon will charge your company $80 per physical storage device sent, plus $2.49 for each hour it takes for the data to upload.
From Amazon “AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity. AWS is not responsible for damages associated with loss or inadvertent disclosure of data; or the loss, damage, or destruction of the physical hardware. You should always retain a back-up copy of your data.”
Why would you have cloud storage if you need to use FedEx to get data to Amazon? This is one of the main reasons cloud storage needs to allow customers to put their own WAN Acceleration appliance in to help with the movement of data. Now most cloud providers are not allowing this and causing issues with sales for customers. Now customers are looking at more of an internal cloud. I have been working with more than a few worldwide customers who are looking at the internal cloud for this reason and the security of an internal cloud. They would only look at Amazon or others if they could put a WAN Acceleration appliance in their data center of which Amazon tells customer no. Plus if you already have invested in storage it makes no sense to go external at the moment.
So who is going to win and lose in the cloud?
The winner of cloud storage won’t be Amazon or other big companies but the smaller or regional company who will work with customers, allow them to use WAN Acceleration. If I had my own data center I would offer it to customers, it would be hardware based at the customer site. They could accelerate all traffic back to the cloud or the data center for storage and cloud applications. Cloud Storage vendors selling customer more bandwidth will not work and does not work, that’s why they are using FedEx now.
The losers are the customers right now, it is not good to say that but it is the truth. Customers have been sold an idea that by moving to the cloud things are so much faster and better, well they are not. Most of the time they are slower and now FedEx is coming to the rescue of Amazon. I say build your own internal cloud and use an external cloud only if you can get the same speed, storage and application performance. You will need WAN Acceleration for your external cloud, so look for help. Feel free to drop me a comment if you need ideas.
Riverbed Expands Breadth and Depth of Cloud Storage and Backup Solutions Ecosystem
Whitewater Provides Customers Choice and Flexibility with Added Support of Enterprise Cloud Storage Provider Nirvanix, EMC NetWorker, CA ARCserve, and Quest vRanger Backup Tools
San Francisco—April 5, 2011—
Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT performance company, today announced an expansion of its ecosystem for the Riverbed® Whitewater™ family of cloud storage accelerator products. Working with cloud storage and backup solution providers, Riverbed is helping customers speed backup and select archive workloads into public cloud environments, and reduce costs without changes to their existing backup infrastructure. Whitewater supports a broad and growing array of cloud storage and backup solution providers, offering customers unprecedented choice and flexibility. Nirvanix, a leading provider of enterprise-class cloud storage services, joins an already robust list of cloud storage solutions supported by Whitewater. Also, with the addition of EMC NetWorker, Quest® vRanger®, and CA ARCserve® Backup, Whitewater now supports additional major backup tool solutions.
With Whitewater, organizations have a fast, secure and cost-efficient solution to seamlessly offsite data to cloud storage environments. Whitewaterconnects directly to existing backup tools and cloud service provider application programming interfaces (APIs). It securely accelerates backup and recovery operations, deduplicates and compresses data to reduce storage costs in the cloud and installs quickly without requiring changes to the existing backup infrastructure. The broad ecosystem for Whitewater enables organizations to flexibly transition between major cloud storage providers, should requirements change.
“Regardless of the cloud storage provider or backup tool used by an organization, Whitewater integrates seamlessly to augment the existing infrastructure with cloud storage. With the added support of Nirvanix for cloud storage services, and backup software solutions EMC Networker, Quest vRanger and CA ARCserve Backup, we continue to provide our customers with maximum choice and flexibility to choose interoperable cloud storage solutions that best meet their requirements for faster and more reliable DR operations,” said Apurva Davé, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed. “Riverbed works closely with each cloud storage and backup solution providers to ensure customers can confidently move to cloud storage to enhance their data protection strategies without changes to their existing backup software or processes.”
Freedom to Choose From Multiple Cloud Vendors in More Regions
By providing support for various cloud storage providers in more regions, Whitewater offers enterprises the flexibility to choose the cloud storage solution that best meets their requirements for DR, data storage location, service level agreements and cost. Nirvanix adds its enterprise-class storage services to a broad list of cloud storage solutions that support Whitewater, including EMC® Atmos® and Amazon S3. With the addition of the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network™ (SDN), Whitewater customers can now connect to Nirvanix SDN and use their locally accessible cloud storage in the United States, Germany, Ireland, Japan and Switzerland.
The SDN, Nirvanix’s enterprise-class public cloud storage solution, enables unlimited uploads and downloads of massive content files for one flat monthly rate. It is comprised of a cluster of 7 carrier-class data centers—a global grid of interconnected nodes that cross-communicate with each other at all times. Customers can use Nirvanix policy-based geo-replication to specify exactly where data should be stored or replicated, placing data closest to the user for optimal performance and creating multiple copies for enhanced availability. The combination of the Nirvanix SDN and Whitewater delivers a secure and reliable backup target, providing customers replication with high availability and fast global access. Backup targets can be sized up or down on demand, capacity-optimized and accelerated, and customers pay for only what they use—significantly reducing costs and eliminating the need for expensive remote disaster recovery hardware.
“Working closely with Riverbed enables Nirvanix to further simplify storage management for organizations and securely enable faster access to data in the cloud in a cost-efficient manner,” said Scott Genereux, President and CEO at Nirvanix. “When Whitewater and the Nirvanix SDN are deployed together, customers can strengthen and advance their data protection solutions while complying with the most stringent data retention policies. Customers no longer need to be concerned about the performance, complexity, manageability or costs associated with off-site tape storage.”
Ease and Flexibility When Addressing Cloud Storage
Whitewater now supports major backup tool solutions including IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, Symantec’s NetBackup and Backup Exec and now, with the added support for EMC NetWorker, Quest vRanger, and CA ARCserve Backup, Whitewater supports nearly three quarters of the worldwide backup market based on 2010 market share[1]. With Whitewater, backup applications integrate seamlessly with public cloud storage, ensuring that enterprises can utilize public cloud storage without having to make any changes to their fine-tuned backup software and processes. Whitewater simply acts as a target for an organization’s current backup software, requiring no expensive integration or complex configuration. Organizations get the flexibility to use multiple backup software tools, or switch between tools at any point in the future for secure and accelerated DR in the cloud. Customers can set up Whitewater and move data to the cloud in less than an hour, providing a fast return on their investment.
“CA Technologies is constantly looking for ways to make data protection easier, faster, more economical and more reliable for our customers,” said Steve Fairbanks, vice president of product management for Data Management at CA Technologies. “That is why CA ARCserve has been an industry leader in backup for years – and why we are working with Riverbed to help customers and MSP partners capitalize on the agility of the cloud for backup storage and archiving.”
“VRanger Pro provides customers with an integrated backup and replication solution for data protection in VMware environments,” said John Maxwell, vice president for data protection products at Quest Software. “The combination of VRanger Pro with Whitewater provides our customers with a secure, flexible and easy-to-use cloud storage platform with seamless integration, enabling them to more quickly and easily back up and recover virtual data and files, so they can save time, money and ultimately get greater value from their investment.”
[1] Gartner, Inc., Market Share: Storage Management Software Market, Worldwide, 2010" by Alan Dayley and Matthew Cheung, March 2011
Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, statements regarding performance results of Riverbed solutions and customer cost savings following implementation of Riverbed solutions that may suggest likely or certain outcomes, and statements relating to Riverbed’s ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed’s business are set forth in our Form 10-K filed with the SEC on February 8, 2011. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.
Webinar-Cloud Best Practices: Implementing for IaaS Tools, Components, & How to Put Them Together
Dr. Malcolm Herbert
Director, Strategy & Solutions, Red Hat
Lee Denison
Senior Architect, Red Hat
In this session, Malcolm Herbert and Lee Denison, senior architect at Red Hat, will discuss key Red Hat technologies, methodologies, and ideas for implementing an open standards, open source IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) environment.
The Red Hat Virtual Experience is a global online forum of Red Hat experts, partners, customers, and the open source community.
The event on January 26, 2010 will feature over 40 unique sessions, with access to Red Hat experts and partners, networking opportunities with other Red Hat users, and keynotes from and QnAs with Red Hat visionaries.
From cloud computing and virtualization, to platform, middleware and management technologies, the Virtual Experience will cover the latest and greatest in software innovation.
Once you've completed this registration, you will receive an email with further details regarding this webinar.
Register Here
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