Cloudmeter’s Big Data Network Analytics Enables Integrated Application Performance Management

Posted on April 16, 2013 by

Cloudmeter today announces the general availability of Cloudmeter Stream, a non-invasive platform that enables customers to transform Big Data streams of network data into actionable business intelligence. Cloudmeter also announces the early access availability of Cloudmeter Insight, a SaaS application that integrates back-end network analytics with front-end marketing analytics to deliver integrated data regarding user experiences of application platforms. Together, Cloudmeter Stream and Cloudmeter Insight expand the purview of Big Data analytics to network data and enable customers to obtain a 360 degree view of user interactions with their products. Both Cloudmeter Stream and Cloudmeter Insight allow access to network data without risks of physical disruption to network infrastructures.

Cloudmeter’s analytics represent an extension of the DevOps movement by allowing operations to more effectively understand the impact of IT infrastructure on end-user experiences. Application owners can use Cloudmeter to effectively configure business rules to determine which network data attributes constitute fields of interest. For example, customers can create business rules that identify session errors, network traffic on specific servers or data regarding the elapsed time between specific interactions with the platform. Users create business rules and manage the application more generally using an intuitive user interface featuring screens such as the following:

Cloudmeter CEO Mike Dickey remarked on the innovation represented by the platform for capturing network data by noting:

Our new data capture technology is a culmination of many years of experience building network-based data capture products. It enables customers to gain real time access into the wealth of business and IT information without the need to connect to physical network infrastructure, and without introducing risk to production systems or application performance.

Dickey underscores how Cloudmeter’s technology brings the Big Data revolution to network data and concomitantly empowers customers to access “business and IT information” in ways that have the potential to transform both their marketing platforms as well as their IT infrastructure design. In an interview with Cloud Computing Today, Cloudmeter’s COO Ronit Belson remarked that, rather than falling into the category of DevOps products, the company’s platform more appropriately represents a disruptive innovation in the MarkOps space defined by the integration of marketing-related front-end application design with the Operations-related design of their platform’s IT infrastructure. Cloudmeter Stream integrates with Big Data platforms such as Splunk and GoodData allowing users to integrate petabytes of machine data with data selectively culled from the business rules specific to Cloudmeter’s user interface.

Cloudmeter Stream is complemented by Cloudmeter Insight, a SaaS application that transforms data captured by Cloudmeter Insight into visual representations that allow application owners to comprehensively understand end-user experiences of an application as represented below:

Cloudmeter Stream leverages widgets to allow users to customize reports and dashboards of their choosing. The result is an integrated view of an application’s backend and front-end user experience in ways that allow application owners to obtain a truly holistic picture of user experiences with their platforms. Today’s announcements point toward two exciting new releases into the application performance management space as Big Data begins to own up to its potential of delivering 360 degree views of user experiences with technology platforms. Cloudmeter’s customer base includes Netflix, SAP and Saks Fifth Avenue and 1-800-Flowers.

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7 Key Features Of OpenStack Grizzly

Posted on April 15, 2013 by

OpenStack Grizzly was launched on April 4, 2013 and contains over 230 new features that enhance the OpenStack platform’s computing power and ability to integrate with other technologies. The release was enabled by the collective work of 517 contributors who merged 7,620 software patches. More than 45 companies employed developers that contributed to the release including Red Hat, Rackspace, IBM, HP, Nebula, Intel, eNovance, Canonical, VMware, Cloudscaling, DreamHost and SINA. Given that OpenStack is used in production environments by the likes of Best Buy, Comcast, CERN, HP, NSA and Samsung, the Grizzly release focused on supporting the day to day operational work required to manage IaaS platforms based on OpenStack distributions.

Key features of Grizzly include the following:

•Support for VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, whereas previously OpenStack had focused on the KVM and Xen hypervisors.
•Support for bare metal provisioning
•Enhanced OpenStack compute scalability by means of “cells” that manage distributed clusters alongside a design that reduces the centrality of a core database via a “NoDB” architecture
•Enhanced ability to automate the management of storage platforms by means of quotas
•Ability to manage diverse storage platforms from a central point of access
•Support for additional third party storage solutions such as Ceph/RBD, Coraid, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat/Gluster, SolidFire and Zadara.
•Advanced support for software defined networking (SDN) that allows users to write rules to configure networking infrastructures from a broad array of virtualized networking platforms that now includes Big Switch, Hyper-V, PlumGrid, Brocade and Midonet. Previously, OpenStack had supported the Open vSwitch, Cisco UCS/Nexus, Linux Bridge, Nicira, Ryu OpenFlow, and NEC OpenFlow SDN platforms.

Jonathon Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation, remarked on the maturity of the OpenStack software development process as follows:

The Grizzly release is a clear indication of the maturity of the OpenStack software development process, as contributors continue to produce a stable, scalable and feature-rich platform for building public, private and hybrid clouds. The community delivered another packed release on schedule, attracting contributions from some of the brightest technologists across virtualisation, storage, networking, security, and systems engineering. They are not only solving the complex problems of cloud, but driving the entire technology industry forward.

Here, Bryce notes how OpenStack Grizzly features important enhancements across a wide range of attributes such as virtualization, storage and networking. Central to these enhancements is a significant increase in OpenStack’s ability to integrate with other virtualization, storage and networking vendors in ways that dramatically enhance the attractiveness of the OpenStack product given the inherent heterogeneity of enterprise IT platforms. Expect subsequent releases to add more orchestration and automation to the OpenStack platform, most likely beginning with the Havana release in October 2013.

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Teambox Announces Availability Of On-Premise Solution Behind Enterprise Firewall

Posted on April 9, 2013 by

Today, Teambox announces the availability of an on-premise version of its popular cloud-based collaboration software. Driven by security and compliance considerations for customers that are not ready to host company data within cloud-based environments, Teambox’s on-premise solution provides all of the functionality of its collaboration platform behind the customer’s firewall. Customers access the on-premise Teambox solution using an internal URL that very closely resembles the access procedure for customers on the cloud-version. The key difference with the on-premise solution is that customers can leverage their own IT security protocols to ensure corporate compliance with the use of Teambox for data governed by regulatory protocols such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. In an interview with Cloud Computing Today, Teambox CEO Dan Schoenbaum remarked that the on-premise solution had met with an overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception from the market such that it claimed several paying customers prior to its official launch. The solution is intended to render Teambox available to customers that are still in the process of migrating to the cloud but have yet to define their IT strategy in ways that accommodate the use of cloud-based applications hosted outside the purview of their firewall and data centers. Schoenbaum elaborated that business owners within enterprises are rapidly adopting Teambox as an alternative to SharePoint to increase collaboration and stakeholder engagement in user friendly, operationally simple and cost-effective ways.

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Piston Cloud Releases Version 2.0 of Piston Enterprise OpenStack With Advanced Management and Orchestration Capability

Posted on April 9, 2013 by

Piston Cloud Computing announces the release of version 2.0 of its enterprise OpenStack platform for managing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) private clouds today. Built on OpenStack Folsom, version 2.0 features an array of new features and functionality that streamlines the process of deploying and managing IaaS clouds by leveraging DevOps-related tools and improved storage and memory functionality. Highlights of the release include the following:

•Automated provisioning and configuration

Piston Cloud’s Moxie HA platform automates the application of system upgrades, the re-balancing of VMs, and the provisioning and configuration of new resources in collaboration with CloudBoot, an advanced system orchestration platform. As a result, system administrators can monitor and manage their infrastructure with such ease that the platform is analogous to “managing your servers like cattle – you number them, and when they get sick and you have to shoot them in the head, the herd can keep moving,” as described by CTO and co-founder Joshua McKenty.

The graphic below illustrates the centrality of the Moxie HA and CloudBoot orchestration platform to the platform’s architecture:

Piston Enterprise OpenStack Version 2.0

•Shared storage that leverages open source storage solution Ceph

Piston’s open source Ceph storage solution allows customers to leverage virtual SAN solutions as well as take advantage of existing hardware such as RAID-based Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or SATA devices.

•Capability To Add Additional Virtual Machines In Less Than A Second

Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS) delivers unique capabilities to clone VMs and thereby launch extra virtual machines in less than a second. VMS is a software extension to the KVM hypervisor that leverages sophisticated hypervisor memory management technologies to enable the creation of new VM instances through cloning.

Overall, Piston Enterprise OpenStack version 2.0 is an unequivocally more robust product that provides an integrated, private cloud deployment and management experience over and beyond a simple OpenStack distribution. The release is compatible with all major software defined networking (SDN) platforms and additionally boasts complete interoperability with other OpenStack distributions and the ability to integrate with commodity hardware from x86 vendors such as IBM, Dell, Cisco, HP and Supermicro. One of the platform’s core differentiators consists of its integrated orchestration and configuration management technology that minimizes the degree of day to day operational oversight of the private cloud, IaaS environment. Piston’s CEO Jim Morrisroe surmises the value of the platform by noting:

Piston Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 is perfect for enterprise DevOps teams and AWS customers that want to reduce operating costs and dependencies with a private cloud solution, while maintaining the agility and scalable performance of a true cloud architecture.

In the wake of the release of OpenStack Grizzly and widespread backing of OpenStack for cloud platforms by the likes of IBM, Red Hat and even Oracle, Piston Enterprise OpenStack version 2.0 points to the emergence of a turnkey OpenStack solution for IaaS private clouds that brings all of the agility and scalability of public clouds to the enterprise’s doorstep. For the first time, the product also claims premium levels of customer support that attempt to allay concerns about the ability of a smaller vendor to nimbly respond to the needs of its customers.

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CloudSigma Transitions Public Cloud To SSD Storage

Posted on April 4, 2013 by

This week, public cloud IaaS vendor CloudSigma announced it decision to transition its storage infrastructure to solid-state drives (SSD) as opposed to hard-disk drive (HDD) storage in an effort to increase the performance and reliability of its storage solutions. CloudSigma’s SSD storage will be powered by SolidFire. CloudSigma CEO Robert Jenkins believes that SSD can remove “storage bottlenecks and inconsistent performance” in ways that revolutionize standards for storage within the public cloud industry. SolidFire CEO and founder Dave Wright elaborated on the innovation of wholesale adoption of SSD by an IaaS provider as follows:

Our SSD storage system is designed specifically for cloud providers like CloudSigma to help bring their customers’ business-critical and performance-sensitive applications to the cloud without concern of disruption. Performance predictability starts with guaranteeing quality of service, which is why we’re the first to deliver it, and challenge the industry to follow suit. This partnership enables CloudSigma to deliver more consistent quality for the thousands of applications within its shared public cloud infrastructure.

CloudSigma’s SSD storage platform will be priced equivalently to its HDD storage infrastructure at $0.14 GB per month. Customers have the option of purchasing its SSD storage solutions separately from the rest of its public cloud infrastructure. According to The Register, Databarracks and ViaWest have SSD storage options but very few IaaS vendors have moved their storage infrastructures entirely to SSD, an option available to Zurich-based CloudSigma by virtue of its relatively small operational scale.

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Midokura Raises $17.3M In Series A Funding For Network Virtualization For IaaS

Posted on April 2, 2013 by

Today, Midokura announced the finalization of $17.3 million in Series A funding in a round led by Innovation Network Corporation of Japan with additional participation from NTT Group’s Venture Fund, DOCOMO Innovations Inc. and NEC Group’s Venture Fund, Innovative Ventures Fund Investment L.P. The funding is intended to expand Midokura’s product development teams and contribute to the refinement of its go-to-market strategy. Coincident with the news of Midokura’s Series A funding is the announcement that Dan Mihai Dumitriu, formerly CTO, replaces Tatsuya Kato as CEO. Co-founder Tatsuya Kato will assume the responsibility of Chairman of the Board. CEO Dan Mihai Dumitriu remarked on the significance of the capital raise and the company’s software defined networking technology as follows:

As enterprises and carriers embrace and build out IaaS clouds, an overlay-based network virtualization platform will soon be a must-have technology. The financial support of Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, and other key backers, validates our strategy as well as the work we’ve done over the past three years developing our industry leading product MidoNet. This funding will enable us to accelerate our product engineering, the establishment of partnerships, and the growth of our customer base. We look forward to delivering the most performant, scalable and fault tolerant network virtualization solution to the IaaS infrastructure market.

Here, Dumitriu neatly summarizes the concept behind Midokura’s Midonet platform, a distributed, software-defined virtual network solution targeted toward IaaS cloud-service providers as well as enterprises. Midokura plays in the space made famous by VMware acquisition Nicira, but is designed differently because of its decentralized, fully distributed architecture as elaborated by Brad Hedlund. The company is already a veteran contributor to the OpenStack community and is in the process of gearing up to announce further partnerships with other cloud platforms in the upcoming months according to Chief Strategy Officer Ben Cherian. Now that the company is flush with a significant infusion of cash, the industry should expect to hear more news about Midokura’s penetration into the U.S. market as its unique software defined networking platform increases its footprint in IaaS infrastructures and delivers simplified network infrastructures and protocols for data transmission in addition to high performance and high availability virtual networking solutions.

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Zenoss Survey Reveals Converged Infrastructure Solutions Are On The Rise

Posted on March 31, 2013 by

A recent survey by Zenoss indicates that converged infrastructures are gradually proliferating as the cloud-driven transformation of enterprise IT continues. Converged infrastructure refers to the pooling of hardware and software resources into an integrated unit in order to deliver optimal IT solutions to organizations. Converged infrastructures typically feature servers, networking infrastructures and IT automation solutions. Facebook, for example, leverages converged infrastructure solutions to enable one technician to manage more than 20,000 servers. IT organizations use converged infrastructures in order to simplify operational management, increase economies of scale and reduce costs as indicated by the following data points:

•30% of survey organizations claim to have operationalized a converged infrastructure solution
•51% of organizations are “considering” converged infrastructure solutions
•VMware, IaaS and Big Data projects have been the principal drivers of converged infrastructure adoption to date
•Technology companies lead converged infrastructure adoption by representing 28% of all adopters as compared to other industry verticals
•Enhanced automation, expedited delivery and increased agility represented the top 3 reasons that organizations chose a converged infrastructure solution

The survey was based on responses provided by 350 IT professionals. The infographic below provides more details of the survey results:

Zenoss Converged Infrastructure Survey

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Puppet Labs Survey Confirms Emerging Popularity Of DevOps

Posted on March 27, 2013 by

Puppet Labs, a leader in the IT automation space, recently released its 2013 results for its annual DevOps survey. The results confirmed the arrival of DevOps as an emerging space within IT circles defined fundamentally by increased collaboration between development and operations resources and technologies. The survey was administered to over 4000 technology leaders in more than 90 countries spanning a wide range of businesses including startups, small companies and Fortune 500 enterprises.

Highlights of the survey include the following:

•Organizations that have implemented DevOps deploy code 30x faster than those which have not
•Code developed within a DevOps environment evinces 50% fewer failures and the ability to recover from failures by a factor of 12
•The rate at which code is successfully deployed increases the longer DevOps has been implemented within an organization

Organizations of all sizes are gradually implementing DevOps and attesting to dramatically improved results. Meanwhile, the HR space is witnessing a corresponding proliferation of DevOps-related career opportunities that are likely to continue to increase in the near future. In an interview with Cloud Computing Today, Puppet Labs CTO Nigel Kersten noted that DevOps technology requires culture change within software development departments in contradistinction to the facile implementation of technology for automating software deployments. As such, DevOps initiates a paradigm shift in software development that depends upon skill-sets that can both understand technical architecture as well as the complexities of operations and application ownership.

The survey and the corresponding detailed report suggest that DevOps has finally arrived. Puppet Labs, the survey’s author, stands at the forefront of the DevOps revolution by way of its IT automation products for streamlining the deployment of software and the provisioning of hardware. Puppet Labs technology allows system administrators to effectively manage increasingly heterogeneous IT environments featuring private clouds, virtual machines and public clouds, all of which collectively serve the needs of multiple and diverse constituencies. Puppet recently entered into a partnership with VMware that stands to position it strongly to rapidly accelerate its traction within the enterprise space.

Puppet Labs released an infographic that summarized the results of its DevOps survey as illustrated below:

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