SYS-CON Events announced today that Gridstore™, the leader in software-defined storage (SDS) purpose-built for Windows Servers and Hyper-V, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Gridstore™ is the leader in software-defined storage purpose built for virtualization that is designed to accelerate applications in virtualized environments. Using its patented Server-Side Virtual Controller™ Technology (SVCT) to eliminate the I/O blender effect and accelerate applications Gridstore delivers vmOptimized™ Storage that self-optimizes to each application or VM across both virtual and physical environments. Leveraging a grid architecture, Gridstore delivers the first end-to-end storage QoS to ensure the most important App or VM performance is never compromised. The storage grid, that uses Gridstore’s performance optimized nodes or capacity optimized nodes, starts with as few a...| By Yeshim Deniz | Article Rating: |
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| August 25, 2014 01:00 PM EDT | Reads: |
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Fundamentally, SDN is still mostly about network plumbing. While plumbing may be useful to tinker with, what you can do with your plumbing is far more intriguing. A rigid interpretation of SDN confines it to Layers 2 and 3, and that's reasonable. But SDN opens opportunities for novel constructions in Layers 4 to 7 that solve real operational problems in data centers. "Data center," in fact, might become anachronistic - data is everywhere, constantly on the move, seemingly always overflowing. Networks move data, but not all networks are suitable for all data.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Steve Riley, Technical Leader in the Office of the CTO at Riverbed Technology, will discuss how finding (or building) the right network, with the right applications, is still a labor-intensive task. Must it always be this way? No: for networks will soon be expressed as code. Finally, the data, the applications that process it, the networks that move it and the objects that store it can all be described by software constructs - let's call this collection a super-blob - in the hands of skilled developers. Freed from their dependence on any given location, super-blobs can move around as necessary, resting on any physical fabric that can satisfy their requirements. As requirements change, locations may change - while preserving all application states. Location-independent computing is within our grasp.
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Speaker Bio:
Steve Riley is Technical Leader in the Office of the CTO at Riverbed Technology. His role is to research cutting-edge developments that help customers maximize their infrastructure investments. This includes working with customers to develop and improve technical architectures, incorporating feedback into the product planning and development processes. His specialties include information security, compliance, reliability, privacy, and policy.
A popular speaker at conferences worldwide, Riley meets regularly with user groups of all sizes, and seeks opportunities to engage with customers as often as possible. Born with an Ethernet cable attached to his belly button, he grew up in networking and telecommunications. Besides lurking in the Internet's dark alleys and secret passages, he enjoys freely sharing his opinions about the intersection of technology and culture. He writes at http://stvrly.wordpress.com, tweets as @steveriley, and emails from [email protected]. Prior to joining Riverded, he was Sr. Technical Evangelist and strategist for cloud computing at Amazon Web Services.
A Rock Star Faculty, Top Keynotes, Sessions, and Top Delegates!
Cloud Expo® 2014 Silicon Valley, November 4-6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The growth and success of Cloud Computing will be on display at the upcoming Cloud Expo® conference and exhibition in Santa Clara, CA, November 4-6, 2014.
All main layers of the Cloud ecosystem will be represented at the 14th International Cloud Expo® - the infrastructure players, the platform providers, and those offering applications, and they'll all be here to speak, sponsor, exhibit and network.

Sponsorship Opportunities
for Cloud Expo® 2014 Silicon Valley
Cloud Expo® 2014 Silicon Valley "show prospectus" has shipped. Sponsorship, exhibit, and keynote opportunities can be obtained from Carmen Gonzalez by email at events (at) sys-con.com, or by phone 201 802-3021.
Early Bird Registration Options
for Cloud Expo® 2014 Silicon Valley
Cloud Expo® delegates can pre-register for Cloud Expo® Silicon Valley with Early Bird Savings here.
About SYS-CON Media & Events
SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com) has since 1994 been connecting technology companies and customers through a comprehensive content stream at www.sys-con.com - featuring over forty focused subject areas, from Cloud Computing to Web Security - interwoven with market-leading full-scale conferences produced by SYS-CON Events. The company's internationally recognized brands include among others Cloud Expo® (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), Big Data Expo (http://BigDataExpo.net), Virtualization Conference & Expo (www.VirtualizationConference.com), DevOps Summit (http://DevOpsSummit.sys-con.com), Internet of @ThingsExpo (http://www.ThingsExpo.com), SDDC Expo (http://SDDCExpo.sys-con.com), WebRTC Summit (http://WebRTCSummit.net), Government IT Conference & Expo (www.GovITExpo.com), Cloud Computing Bootcamp (www.CloudComputingBootcamp.com), and UlitzerLive! New Media Conference & Expo (http://events.sys-con.com).
Cloud Expo® is a registered trademark of Cloud Expo, Inc.
Published August 25, 2014 Reads 2,450
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More Stories By Yeshim Deniz
News Desk compiles and publishes breaking news stories, press releases and latest news articles as they happen.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Gridstore™, the leader in software-defined storage (SDS) purpose-built for Windows Servers and Hyper-V, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Gridstore™ is the leader in software-defined storage purpose built for virtualization that is designed to accelerate applications in virtualized environments. Using its patented Server-Side Virtual Controller™ Technology (SVCT) to eliminate the I/O blender effect and accelerate applications Gridstore delivers vmOptimized™ Storage that self-optimizes to each application or VM across both virtual and physical environments. Leveraging a grid architecture, Gridstore delivers the first end-to-end storage QoS to ensure the most important App or VM performance is never compromised. The storage grid, that uses Gridstore’s performance optimized nodes or capacity optimized nodes, starts with as few a...Sep. 3, 2014 08:45 PM EDT Reads: 1,892 |
By Pat Romanski SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloudian, Inc., the leading provider of hybrid cloud storage solutions, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloudian is a Foster City, Calif.-based software company specializing in cloud storage. Cloudian HyperStore® is an S3-compatible cloud object storage platform that enables service providers and enterprises to build reliable, affordable and scalable hybrid cloud storage solutions. Cloudian actively partners with leading cloud computing environments including Amazon Web Services, Citrix Cloud Platform, Apache CloudStack, OpenStack and the vast ecosystem of S3 compatible tools and applications. Cloudian's customers include Vodafone, Nextel, NTT, Nifty, and LunaCloud. The company has additional offices in China and Japan.Sep. 3, 2014 07:00 PM EDT Reads: 2,604 |
By Elizabeth White SYS-CON Events announced today that TechXtend (formerly Programmer’s Paradise), a leading value-added provider of server and storage virtualization, and r-evolution will exhibit at SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. TechXtend (formerly Programmer’s Paradise) is a leading value-added provider of software, systems and solutions for corporations, government organizations, and academic institutions across the United States and Canada. TechXtend is the Exclusive Reseller in the United States for r-evolutionSep. 3, 2014 01:00 PM EDT Reads: 2,125 |
By Liz McMillan The cloud provides an easy onramp to building and deploying Big Data solutions. Transitioning from initial deployment to large-scale, highly performant operations may not be as easy.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, will discuss the benefits, weaknesses, and performance characteristics of public and bare metal cloud deployments that can help you make the right decisions. Sep. 3, 2014 11:30 AM EDT Reads: 711 |
By Elizabeth White Planning scalable environments isn't terribly difficult, but it does require a change of perspective.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, will broaden your views to think on an Internet scale by dissecting a video publishing application built with The SoftLayer Platform, Message Queuing, Object Storage, and Drupal. By examining a scalable modular application build that can handle unpredictable traffic, attendees will able to grow your development arsenal and pick up a few strategies to apply to your own projects. Sep. 3, 2014 10:30 AM EDT Reads: 715 |
By Liz McMillan Every healthy ecosystem is diverse. This is especially true in cloud ecosystems, where portability and interoperability are more important than old enterprise models of proprietary ownership. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mark Baker, Server Product Manager at Canonical/Ubuntu, will discuss how single vendors used to take the lead in creating and delivering technology, but in a cloud economy, where users want tools of their preference, when and where they need them, it makes no sense.Sep. 3, 2014 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,069 |
By Liz McMillan The consumption economy is here and so are cloud applications and solutions that offer more than subscription and flat fee models and at the same time are available on a pure consumption model, which not only reduces IT spend but also lowers infrastructure costs, and offers ease of use and availability.
In their session at 15th Cloud Expo, Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia, and Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia, will discuss this shifting dynamic with an example of a top European Telco provider. Find out how they are leveraging the power of acloud-based consumption model services to offer more value to the mass market and enable a new revenue model that embraces the true meaning of the Third Industrial Revolution.Sep. 2, 2014 11:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,123 |
By Elizabeth White The emergence of cloud computing and Big Data warrants a greater role for the PMO to successfully manage enterprise transformation driven by these powerful trends. As the adoption of cloud-based services continues to grow, a governance model is needed to orchestrate enterprise cloud implementations and harness the power of Big Data analytics. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mahesh Singh, President of BigData, Inc., to discuss how the Enterprise PMO takes center stage not only in developing the appropriate governance model but also in collaborating with key stakeholders to ensure a successful transformation. Sep. 2, 2014 11:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,213 |
By Pat Romanski In today's application economy, enterprise organizations realize that it's their applications that are the heart and soul of their business. If their application users have a bad experience, their revenue and reputation are at stake.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Application Performance Management at CA Technologies, will discuss how a user-centric Application Performance Management solution can help inspire your users with every application transaction. Sep. 2, 2014 04:30 PM EDT Reads: 1,147 |
By Liz McMillan Come learn about what you need to consider when moving your data to the cloud. In her session at 15th Cloud Expo, Skyla Loomis, a Program Director of Cloudant Development at Cloudant, will discuss the security, performance, and operational implications of keeping your data on premise, moving it to the cloud, or taking a hybrid approach. She will use real customer examples to illustrate the tradeoffs, key decision points, and how to be successful with a cloud or hybrid cloud solution.Sep. 2, 2014 04:00 PM EDT Reads: 997 |
By Elizabeth White Cloud computing started a technology revolution; now DevOps is driving that revolution forward. By enabling new approaches to service delivery, cloud and DevOps together are delivering even greater speed, agility, and efficiency. No wonder leading innovators are adopting DevOps and cloud together!
In his session at DevOps Summit, Andi Mann, Vice President of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies, will explore the synergies in these two approaches, with practical tips, techniques, research data, war stories, case studies, and recommendations.Sep. 2, 2014 02:30 PM EDT Reads: 2,884 |
By Elizabeth White The 16th International Cloud Expo announces that its Call for Papers is now open. 16th International Cloud Expo, to be held June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City brings together Cloud Computing, APM, APIs, Security, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps and WebRTC to one location.
With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!Sep. 1, 2014 05:45 PM EDT Reads: 1,683 |
By Liz McMillan Aug. 29, 2014 11:00 PM EDT Reads: 2,285 |
By Pat Romanski Hardware will never be more valuable than on the day it hits your loading dock. Each day new servers are not deployed to production the business is losing money. While Moore’s Law is typically cited to explain the exponential density growth of chips, a critical consequence of this is rapid depreciation of servers. The hardware for clustered systems (e.g., Hadoop, OpenStack) tends to be significant capital expenses.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mason Katz, CTO and co-founder of StackIQ, to discuss how infrastructure teams should be aware of the capitalization and depreciation model of these expenses to fully understand when and where automation is critical.Aug. 27, 2014 02:30 PM EDT Reads: 2,093 |
By Liz McMillan Over the last few years the healthcare ecosystem has revolved around innovations in Electronic Health Record (HER) based systems. This evolution has helped us achieve much desired interoperability. Now the focus is shifting to other equally important aspects – scalability and performance. While applying cloud computing environments to the EHR systems, a special consideration needs to be given to the cloud enablement of Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), i.e., the largest single medical system in the United States. Aug. 26, 2014 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 2,483 |
- My Journey to #DevOps Enlightenment
- Red Hat Announces General Availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5
- Emulex 10Gb Ethernet and Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters Selected by Lenovo to Enhance ThinkServer Family
- Rackspace Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting in Both North America and Europe
- Rackspace Announces OnMetal Cloud Servers General Availability and Pricing
- Citrix To Present Crash Course in "Open Source Cloud" At Cloud Expo
- Steve Riley Of Riverbed Joins Cloud Expo Silicon Valley Faculty
- Oracle Solaris 11.2 Now Generally Available
- Couchbase Partners with ElasticBox, Cloudsoft and CumuLogic
- Gordon Haff (@ghaff) Joins @DevOpsSummit Faculty [#DevOps]
- Chad Jones' Internet of Things Presentation Slides At @ThingsExpo
- Blue Box Named "Bronze Sponsor" of DevOps Summit Silicon Valley
- My Journey to #DevOps Enlightenment
- Red Hat Announces General Availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5
- OpenStack and the Industry Shift with Open Cloud
- Getting Started with OpenStack
- WSO2 Announces Full Agenda for WSO2Con Europe 2014 Conference
- Why Legacy Approaches to Availability for OpenStack Doesn’t Make Sense
- Red Hat to Acquire eNovance
- Emulex 10Gb Ethernet and Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters Selected by Lenovo to Enhance ThinkServer Family
- Red Hat Offers Cloud Management Certification for Linux OpenStack Platform
- Rackspace Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting in Both North America and Europe
- The Linux Foundation Announces Early Keynote Speaker Line Up for LinuxCon + CloudOpen Europe
- ASG Software Solutions Aligns Business and IT with Launch of CloudFactory 8.0
- WebRTC Summit at Cloud Expo Agenda Announced
- Rackspace Hosting Named “Platinum Plus Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York
- Session Topics: 12th Cloud Expo / Cloud Expo New York
- Overview of the OpenStack Cloud
- Cloud Expo Names Industry Thought Leader Vanessa Alvarez Conference Chair
- Cloud Solutions and Technology
- Financial Results, New Appointments, and General Meetings - Research Report on Red Hat, Yelp, Sierra Wireless, Infinera, and Bitauto
- Storage Made Easy Announce the General Availability of Their On-Premise Enterprise File Share and Sync Product
- Cloud Enables a Win-Win on Both Sides of the Business
- Which Open Source Software License Should I Use?
- The Accessibility of the Cloud
- Cloud Expo New York: Developing the World’s First IaaS Marketplace

SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloudian, Inc., the leading provider of hybrid cloud storage solutions, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloudian is a Foster City, Calif.-based software company specializing in cloud storage. Cloudian HyperStore® is an S3-compatible cloud object storage platform that enables service providers and enterprises to build reliable, affordable and scalable hybrid cloud storage solutions. Cloudian actively partners with leading cloud computing environments including Amazon Web Services, Citrix Cloud Platform, Apache CloudStack, OpenStack and the vast ecosystem of S3 compatible tools and applications. Cloudian's customers include Vodafone, Nextel, NTT, Nifty, and LunaCloud. The company has additional offices in China and Japan.
SYS-CON Events announced today that TechXtend (formerly Programmer’s Paradise), a leading value-added provider of server and storage virtualization, and r-evolution will exhibit at SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. TechXtend (formerly Programmer’s Paradise) is a leading value-added provider of software, systems and solutions for corporations, government organizations, and academic institutions across the United States and Canada. TechXtend is the Exclusive Reseller in the United States for r-evolution
The cloud provides an easy onramp to building and deploying Big Data solutions. Transitioning from initial deployment to large-scale, highly performant operations may not be as easy.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, will discuss the benefits, weaknesses, and performance characteristics of public and bare metal cloud deployments that can help you make the right decisions.
Planning scalable environments isn't terribly difficult, but it does require a change of perspective.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, will broaden your views to think on an Internet scale by dissecting a video publishing application built with The SoftLayer Platform, Message Queuing, Object Storage, and Drupal. By examining a scalable modular application build that can handle unpredictable traffic, attendees will able to grow your development arsenal and pick up a few strategies to apply to your own projects.
Every healthy ecosystem is diverse. This is especially true in cloud ecosystems, where portability and interoperability are more important than old enterprise models of proprietary ownership. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mark Baker, Server Product Manager at Canonical/Ubuntu, will discuss how single vendors used to take the lead in creating and delivering technology, but in a cloud economy, where users want tools of their preference, when and where they need them, it makes no sense.
The consumption economy is here and so are cloud applications and solutions that offer more than subscription and flat fee models and at the same time are available on a pure consumption model, which not only reduces IT spend but also lowers infrastructure costs, and offers ease of use and availability.
In their session at 15th Cloud Expo, Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia, and Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia, will discuss this shifting dynamic with an example of a top European Telco provider. Find out how they are leveraging the power of acloud-based consumption model services to offer more value to the mass market and enable a new revenue model that embraces the true meaning of the Third Industrial Revolution.
The emergence of cloud computing and Big Data warrants a greater role for the PMO to successfully manage enterprise transformation driven by these powerful trends. As the adoption of cloud-based services continues to grow, a governance model is needed to orchestrate enterprise cloud implementations and harness the power of Big Data analytics. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mahesh Singh, President of BigData, Inc., to discuss how the Enterprise PMO takes center stage not only in developing the appropriate governance model but also in collaborating with key stakeholders to ensure a successful transformation.
In today's application economy, enterprise organizations realize that it's their applications that are the heart and soul of their business. If their application users have a bad experience, their revenue and reputation are at stake.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Application Performance Management at CA Technologies, will discuss how a user-centric Application Performance Management solution can help inspire your users with every application transaction.
Come learn about what you need to consider when moving your data to the cloud. In her session at 15th Cloud Expo, Skyla Loomis, a Program Director of Cloudant Development at Cloudant, will discuss the security, performance, and operational implications of keeping your data on premise, moving it to the cloud, or taking a hybrid approach. She will use real customer examples to illustrate the tradeoffs, key decision points, and how to be successful with a cloud or hybrid cloud solution.
Cloud computing started a technology revolution; now DevOps is driving that revolution forward. By enabling new approaches to service delivery, cloud and DevOps together are delivering even greater speed, agility, and efficiency. No wonder leading innovators are adopting DevOps and cloud together!
In his session at DevOps Summit, Andi Mann, Vice President of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies, will explore the synergies in these two approaches, with practical tips, techniques, research data, war stories, case studies, and recommendations.
The 16th International Cloud Expo announces that its Call for Papers is now open. 16th International Cloud Expo, to be held June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City brings together Cloud Computing, APM, APIs, Security, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps and WebRTC to one location.
With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!
Hardware will never be more valuable than on the day it hits your loading dock. Each day new servers are not deployed to production the business is losing money. While Moore’s Law is typically cited to explain the exponential density growth of chips, a critical consequence of this is rapid depreciation of servers. The hardware for clustered systems (e.g., Hadoop, OpenStack) tends to be significant capital expenses.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mason Katz, CTO and co-founder of StackIQ, to discuss how infrastructure teams should be aware of the capitalization and depreciation model of these expenses to fully understand when and where automation is critical.
Over the last few years the healthcare ecosystem has revolved around innovations in Electronic Health Record (HER) based systems. This evolution has helped us achieve much desired interoperability. Now the focus is shifting to other equally important aspects – scalability and performance. While applying cloud computing environments to the EHR systems, a special consideration needs to be given to the cloud enablement of Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), i.e., the largest single medical system in the United States.
Some don’t know but “yes” there is a past for the Internet of Things. What’s really interesting is what the future looks like. Just imagine the Internet of Things in the year 2025. Can you?
Regardless if you’ve migrated multiple applications or this is your first migration to a public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) you will want to run a small proof-of-concept to make sure that the basic elements of data flow operate as expected and your components will run in the IaaS environment. This week I spent some time experimenting with the three top IaaS offerings: Amazon AWS, Google Compute Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The architecture was relatively simple: 3 docker containers, one hosting a LAMP—Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP—stack running WordPress, one hosting Postfix mail server forwarding all mail, and one hosting CVS. The results of the testing were informative.
On August 28th, Samsung and LG announced their latest generation of smartwatches in separate press releases. The Samsung report flaunts its Gear S, a smartwatch with a curved screen that measures a full two-inches long. Capabilities of the watch include providing notifications from social networking websites, GPS, improved S Health features, turn-by-turn directions, a touch keyboard, and 3G connectivity. Samsung estimates battery life at two days for normal usage. Details regarding pricing and when the product goes to market were not released.
In August, GovCloud Network and Tech Equity Ltd promised to deliver cloud education and training on a global basis. Today the companies are making good on that promise by announcing a Cloud Certification Best Practices Program for the European and North American markets.
Building upon the Cloud Clinique database of over 7,500 cloud best practice concepts across 18 separate domains, certified cloud practitioners and trainers will now be delivering high quality cloud computing education in a affordable, pay-as-you-go, modular format. IT practitioners can attend any or all of these 16 topical webinar modules for only $25/€20 each. Attendees will also get Free Access to our database of best practice concepts on cloudclinique.com for 3 months!
In today’s software-defined business era, uptime and availability are key to the business survival. The application is the business. However, ensuring proper application performance remains a daunting task for their production environments, where do you start?
Enter Business Transactions.
By starting to focus on the end-user experience and measuring application performance based on their interactions, we can correctly gauge how the entire environment is performing. We follow each individual user request as it flows through the application architecture, comparing the response time to its optimal performance. This inside-out strategy allows AppDynamics to instantly identify performance bottlenecks and allows application owners to get to the root-cause of issues that much faster.
Last week I was both learning and speaking at the The Internet of @ThingsExpo in New York City. I taught a session on the subject of IoT, Code Halos and Digital Transformation Strategies. Then I had the privilege of interviewing Microsoft's mobile and IoT guru Nick Landry (Twitter @ActiveNick). In this interview he shares Microsoft's solutions and strategies around the Internet of Things. Enjoy!
In June I was presenting at the ThingsExpo conference at the Javits Center in New York City. During my talk I was demonstrating how to integrate consumer devices into a business workflow. In particular, I was doing live measuring of my own blood pressure to show how to integrate consumer devices into a business workflow. Internet […]
I came across a very interesting story posted at the Reviewed.com. Website in the section covering home oven reviews. The headline read “The Smart Home Dominates the Internet of Things.” The story, based on a recent report published by Appinions, a market research firm, stated that while home automation “is used interchangeably” with the Internet of Things, the fact is that the IoT is far bigger than that. “It promises to unify a vast array of industrial and commercial devices and activities, not just your phone and dishwasher.”
To be sure, home automation is leading the way right now, what with Apple, Google, Microsoft and other companies jumping on the bandwagon. What is missing in the piece is the real challenge (and opportunity) of the IoT: monetization.
The evolution of JavaScript and HTML 5 to support a genuine component based framework (Web Components) with the necessary tools to deliver something close to a native experience including genuine realtime networking (UDP using WebRTC). HTML5 is evolving to offer built in templating support, the ability to watch objects (which will speed up Angular) and Web Components (which offer Angular Directives). The native level support will offer a massive performance boost to frameworks having to fake all these features like Polymer and Angular. It will also encourage people who are not familiar with these next generational frameworks to get in on the action. As I am from a gaming background then I always complain that TCP (Web Sockets) is not genuinely real-time, so I look forward to seeing UDP (WebRTC) solutions being delivered like Desktop Sharing in Chrome 34.
So exactly how do you kick start a DevOps strategy? For example, say your organization is tied down to a very sequential, but cumbersome Waterfall approach to software development that is wasting precious dollars and hindering productivity? In the following we’ve outlined some strategy tips that every business leader will need to consider as they start down the path of DevOps adoption.
Whatever steps your organization takes on the DevOps path of rolling out software faster and more effectively and deployment will require the support of your senior level management team. Explain the advantages of DevOps to the executive team in terms that they can easily understand. Provide an outline of how DevOps and cloud computing can save on ROI and get your new mobile application into the hands of the customer faster and more effectively with higher quality.
The IoT has the potential to transform the world, bringing new functions and efficiency to big problems such as disease, poverty, traffic, and government transparence. It also makes for a nice Christmas gift for “kids in science fair projects.” This latter point was made by Broadcom and Brian Bedrosian, the company's senior director for wireless connectivity. Specifically, the company has introduced its Wiced Sense Kit at a price of US$20. The kit—suitable for adult use, of course, as well--allows IoT developers and the millions of “makers” in the thriving Maker Movement to build sensors that communicate with iPhones, home communication hubs, and other devices. Suggested uses include baby monitors, door locks, and personal healthcare monitors.
Broadcom's kit presumably competes with a US$25 kit from Texas Instruments, which also has Android and Bluetooth functionality.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is getting personal. Wearables, ingestables, even implantables – devices that not only help us with our fitness, but can monitor and manage disease and its treatment – are right around the corner. And where the IoT goes, money follows. In this case, Big Pharma smells opportunity. But while these new consumer doodads get all the press, health-related IoT technologies are only the tip of the iceberg for the Digital Transformation hitting the pharmaceutical industry, as it struggles with a turbulent business landscape. “There are very few blockbuster drugs,” explains Eric Pilkington, EVP Digital Strategy at McCann Health North America. “The pharma companies are trying to figure out what to do. The competitors are the generics: identical and cheaper. The pharmas have to provide value beyond the drug itself.”
Such devices and connected technologies exist today, and the sector is driving the leading edge of the Internet of Things under the label of the “Connected Home” or “Smart Home”. Fact is, some pretty traditional low-tech concepts are becoming technology-enabled, such as/including locking doors, turning on the lights, heating the home, etc. What this means is that technology companies are broadening into areas that have historically been outside of their business plans. Apple is in the fitness business. Google is in the heating business. Samsung is in the appliance business. Others include cable TV and Internet provider Comcast, and the Schlage-brand lock maker Ingersoll Rand.
When we talk about the impact of BYOD and BYOA and the Internet of Things, we often focus on the impact on data center architectures. That's because there will be an increasing need for authentication, for access control, for security, for application delivery as the number of potential endpoints (clients, devices, things) increases. That means scale in the data center.
What we gloss over, what we skip, is that before any of these "things" ever makes a request to access an application it had to execute a DNS query. Every. Single. Thing.
Elasticity is hailed as one of the biggest benefits of cloud and software-defined architectures. It's more efficient than traditional scalability models that only went one direction: up. It's based on the premise that wasting money and resources all the time just to ensure capacity on a seasonal or periodic basis is not only unappealing, but unnecessary in the age of software-defined everything.
The problem is that scaling down is much, much harder than scaling up. Oh, not from the perspective of automation and orchestration. That is, as the kids say these days, easy peasy lemon squeezy. APIs have made the ability to add and remove resources simplicity itself. There isn't a load balancing service available today without this capability - at least not one that's worth having.


















