The ability to guarantee performance to thousands of applications at once has garnered praise from analysts and enterprises alike. Without this guarantee, cloud providers will not be able to meet the rising performance requirements of enterprise customers. Given the compelling advantages for performance isolation and guaranteed storage QoS, it's no wonder that storage vendors are adding QoS features to their products. We recently discussed some of the simplistic approaches to QoS offered by storage systems, however the ability to guarantee performance to applications is not as simple as adding a new bullet point to a lengthy feature list. Being able to guarantee application performance in all situations - including failure scenarios, system overload, variable workloads, and elastic demand - requires an architecture built from the ground up specifically to guarantee ... (more)

Cloud Applications: Some Assembly Required

Cloud Expo New York $500 Savings here! Emerging applications will not just be cloud-enabled, but also mobile, connected to social media networks and able to consume and respond in real-time to patterns in Big Data. Most important, application building must become more productive with a reduced time-to-market. In his Day 3 keynote at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley Progress Software CTO John Bates presented ten imperatives for constructing next-generation applications that have been defined based on research findings from a community of 1,500 application building companies. Click Here... (more)

Shehzad Merchant Joins Gigamon as Chief Strategy Officer

MILPITAS, Calif., April 1, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Gigamon®, a leader in traffic visibility solutions with the innovative Visibility Fabric™ architecture, announced today that enterprise networking veteran Shehzad Merchant has joined the company as Chief Strategy Officer. Merchant will be focused on developing a strategic path for the continued evolution of the company's Visibility Fabric architecture in this exciting and fast-paced market. Merchant joins Gigamon from Extreme Networks. "Shehzad will play a critical role in driving and evangelizing the strategic vision of our innova... (more)

Federating Application Network Services

We (as in the industry) talk a lot about federating cloud. Usually solutions for federating cloud (aka hybrid cloud) are presented from the perspective of the end-user. We want to make it easier to transition between applications in the cloud and focus on identity management, single-sign on, and transparent integration that seamlessly directs users to the best resource, regardless of its deployment location. But what about federation of the actual infrastructure? The architectures that support such ease of use features and functions for end-users should also be transparent and s... (more)

VMware Sets Up New Hybrid Cloud Unit

VMware has started a new Hybrid Cloud Services Business Unit and hired Bill Fathers, the former president of Savvis, the cloud computing and managed hosting outfit, to run it. VMware, whose stock is at its lowest ebb in three years, made the announcement at a Strategic Forum for Institutional Investors Wednesday. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said the new unit was meant to extend the software-defined data center. VMware is supposed to launch a vCloud Hybrid Service later this year and push it through existing channels. It's supposed to let customers "reap the benefits of the public cl... (more)