Posts Tagged cloud

Flash Wars Heat Up as EMC and Fusion-io Battle for Top Gun


Quick Take

Flash competitors are aggressively jockeying for position as the market heats up. It’s a tale of two styles. On the one hand, EMC’s entrance into the all-flash array market targets traditional IT segments. It will both pressure competitive offerings and its own high-end block storage business. EMC is positioning to cannibalize its own base before others cut too deep into the EMC muscle; but it must walk a fine line. At the other end of the spectrum, Fusion-io is uniquely positioned to serve the hyperscale market and currently stands alone with a software-led strategy that leverages atomic writes and delivers new value to database workloads.

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Pushing Forward on Backup as a Service


Storage-as-a-Service is something we’ve been covering for years at Wikibon. In a piece we wrote way back in 2006, we said:

“The storage needs of business and application owners are simple: Give me storage when I need it. Provide services appropriate for my application in the most cost-effective manner. Charge me for what I use, don’t charge me for unnecessary waste.

Service-oriented storage has the potential to meet business needs by inherently offering the ability to:

  1. Provision storage capacity and function that meets application requirements based on performance, scalability, availability, cost and security needs of the business.

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With Pivotal Initiative, EMC is Living Up to Its Messaging


EMC has been touting its “Cloud Meets Big Data” messaging for nearly two years now, and today it took a major step in transforming that message into reality.

EMC announced that it is forming a new “virtual organization” focused on Big Data and application development in the cloud. EMC is calling the new organization the Pivotal Initiative and it will include 800 employees from EMC’s Greenplum and Pivotal Labs divisions, and 600 employees from VMware’s vFabric, Cloud Foundry, GemFire, SpringSource and Cetas organizations. EMC owns over 80% of VMware, where former EMC COO Pat Gelsinger joined as CEO earlier this fall.

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DEVOPS answers business needs


Devops – Art? Science? Hype?   Talking about these things can be quite conceptual in many cases.  How we integrate the Devops concept into the architecture of a company can quite literally be a blend of arts, discipline and the science of technology.  Where that line is drawn is really variable and it depends on a number of factors.   At the intersection of Development and Operations is a genetically embedded business agenda that begins with some issue, followed by a root cause analysis, and the production of an answer or solution.  The solutions that have come to meet this have formed into this DevOps movement.  Through this automated and focused approach, process versus technology and the balance of those elements can cover the spectrum and eventually answers to the end state, ideally factoring in an organization’s agility, capabilities, and ongoing goals.  Getting to that state can be by necessity or by design, but in doing so, effectiveness can be accentuated throughout to ensure the best results.

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Google Playing the Big Data Long Game


Update: MapR and Google announced at Google I/O 2012 that MapR’s Hadoop distributions will be available on-demand via the new Google Compute Engine, validating Wikibon’s previous analysis. Pressure remains on Hortonworks, Cloudera, other Big Data vendors to shore up their cloud strategies.

For the company that invented MapReduce, Google didn’t have much of a presence in the commercial Big Data market until just last month (with the public release of BigQuery.) While Yahoo! engineers took Google’s concept and spearheaded the open source Hadoop movement, Google was happy to quietly develop its own Big Data platform for its own internal use.

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7 Green Data Centers Just in Time for Spring


The power of Green, it’s working! That’s right, growth of the world’s electricity consumed by data centers has slowed substantially despite the rapid growth in the number and power of data centers. The electricity conservation is directly linked to the adoption of Green friendly tactics of powering and cooling of many forward-thinking data centers.

A recent study executed by Stanford Professor Jonathan G. Koomey, PhD by request of the New York Times found that approximately 1.3% of the world’s electricity is being consumed by data centers. However, the growth rate from 2000-2005 indicated that by 2010, data centers should have been consuming 2.2% of the world’s electricity. What slowed the growth? Well the recession actually helped (maybe the only time anyone will ever say that) but more significantly, through an industry-wide effort to make data centers more eco-friendly via various energy saving techniques.

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