New scale-out, solid-state, and cloud-integrated storage products provide a more flexible alternative to traditional monolithic storage systems. These new products are better suited for many companies' needs. The article discusses how storage innovation through new technologies can provide benefits over traditional storage approaches. It highlights some key new product categories and technologies that offer more flexible and scalable options for companies' storage needs.
My Article - Demystifying Enterprise Content Management (pages 12-14)Jill Eckhart
Organice, a SharePoint-based solution, has been acquired by CSC Australia to expand its document management and collaboration capabilities for several industries. Centrelink has begun digitizing paper forms submitted by customers using scanning and workflow software integrated with its multi-function devices, processing over 370,000 pages in the initial phase. APS Commercial has been appointed by Distributor Alloys to resell large format printers to the geographical information systems market.
The document discusses how extreme weather can negatively impact businesses by preventing workers from commuting to the office. It notes that 97% of businesses were affected by extreme weather last year, but most do not have adequate contingency plans. During winter storms, over 20% of UK workers, or 6.4 million people, were unable to get to work in 2020 compared to 14% the prior year. Cloud computing allows workers to access work tools remotely, which could help businesses avoid losses when weather prevents on-site work.
This white paper discusses best practices for securing web 2.0 technologies in organizations. It finds that 95% of organizations allow access to web 2.0 sites and 62% see them as necessary for business. However, only 64% permit access to social networks for business use, while 49% allow personal social networks. The paper provides an overview of web 2.0 technologies and the unique security challenges they pose. It argues that organizations should embrace web 2.0 to increase collaboration and productivity while securing these technologies to avoid security and compliance issues.
The document summarizes the findings of a survey on global information security trends. It finds that while social media and cloud computing present new security risks, companies are taking steps to manage these risks such as monitoring employee social media use and ensuring virtualized environments are properly configured. It also notes that while outsourcing of security functions had been expected to grow, the economic downturn has led more companies to keep these functions in-house. Overall security budgets are holding steady despite cost-cutting in other areas.
This document discusses the opportunities and challenges of intelligent workload management. Virtualization is increasing datacenter complexity by rapidly proliferating the number of workloads that must be managed. At the same time, composite applications and cloud computing further complicate operations. To effectively manage this dynamic environment, organizations need policy-based workload automation, identity and access management, and monitoring of workloads across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. Intelligent workload management aims to address these needs through technologies like software appliances, workload packaging, and automated, policy-driven management of workloads regardless of their location.
Developing a Cutting Edge Social Enterprise Software Strategy that Leverages ...Enterprise 2.0 Conference
This document provides an overview of developing a social enterprise software strategy that leverages an existing SharePoint investment. It discusses sources of lessons learned from over 200 large firms practicing social business and enterprise 2.0. Key drivers for next-generation business include global connectivity, new interaction platforms, and information abundance. The elements of a social business are outlined, and examples of significant social software are provided. Strategies are presented for driving business value with social software, including defining problems first, understanding what makes social software work best, investing in community management, and treating social intranets as a platform rather than just an app.
This document discusses the shift from traditional "Enterprise 1.0" email and document-centric collaboration to newer "Enterprise 2.0" people-centric collaboration using social networking and real-time communication. Enterprise 2.0 aims to increase productivity by allowing seamless collaboration between employees, suppliers, customers and stakeholders. It emphasizes the user experience over rigid legacy tools. While technology plays a role, Enterprise 2.0 represents a philosophical shift focusing on extracting value from social interactions and user experiences within an organization. The challenges for organizations include embracing open information sharing over top-down control and accommodating newer technologies and work styles.
My Article - Demystifying Enterprise Content Management (pages 12-14)Jill Eckhart
Organice, a SharePoint-based solution, has been acquired by CSC Australia to expand its document management and collaboration capabilities for several industries. Centrelink has begun digitizing paper forms submitted by customers using scanning and workflow software integrated with its multi-function devices, processing over 370,000 pages in the initial phase. APS Commercial has been appointed by Distributor Alloys to resell large format printers to the geographical information systems market.
The document discusses how extreme weather can negatively impact businesses by preventing workers from commuting to the office. It notes that 97% of businesses were affected by extreme weather last year, but most do not have adequate contingency plans. During winter storms, over 20% of UK workers, or 6.4 million people, were unable to get to work in 2020 compared to 14% the prior year. Cloud computing allows workers to access work tools remotely, which could help businesses avoid losses when weather prevents on-site work.
This white paper discusses best practices for securing web 2.0 technologies in organizations. It finds that 95% of organizations allow access to web 2.0 sites and 62% see them as necessary for business. However, only 64% permit access to social networks for business use, while 49% allow personal social networks. The paper provides an overview of web 2.0 technologies and the unique security challenges they pose. It argues that organizations should embrace web 2.0 to increase collaboration and productivity while securing these technologies to avoid security and compliance issues.
The document summarizes the findings of a survey on global information security trends. It finds that while social media and cloud computing present new security risks, companies are taking steps to manage these risks such as monitoring employee social media use and ensuring virtualized environments are properly configured. It also notes that while outsourcing of security functions had been expected to grow, the economic downturn has led more companies to keep these functions in-house. Overall security budgets are holding steady despite cost-cutting in other areas.
This document discusses the opportunities and challenges of intelligent workload management. Virtualization is increasing datacenter complexity by rapidly proliferating the number of workloads that must be managed. At the same time, composite applications and cloud computing further complicate operations. To effectively manage this dynamic environment, organizations need policy-based workload automation, identity and access management, and monitoring of workloads across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. Intelligent workload management aims to address these needs through technologies like software appliances, workload packaging, and automated, policy-driven management of workloads regardless of their location.
Developing a Cutting Edge Social Enterprise Software Strategy that Leverages ...Enterprise 2.0 Conference
This document provides an overview of developing a social enterprise software strategy that leverages an existing SharePoint investment. It discusses sources of lessons learned from over 200 large firms practicing social business and enterprise 2.0. Key drivers for next-generation business include global connectivity, new interaction platforms, and information abundance. The elements of a social business are outlined, and examples of significant social software are provided. Strategies are presented for driving business value with social software, including defining problems first, understanding what makes social software work best, investing in community management, and treating social intranets as a platform rather than just an app.
This document discusses the shift from traditional "Enterprise 1.0" email and document-centric collaboration to newer "Enterprise 2.0" people-centric collaboration using social networking and real-time communication. Enterprise 2.0 aims to increase productivity by allowing seamless collaboration between employees, suppliers, customers and stakeholders. It emphasizes the user experience over rigid legacy tools. While technology plays a role, Enterprise 2.0 represents a philosophical shift focusing on extracting value from social interactions and user experiences within an organization. The challenges for organizations include embracing open information sharing over top-down control and accommodating newer technologies and work styles.
1) The document discusses IBM's cloud computing strategy and offerings called SmartCloud.
2) SmartCloud aims to help organizations transform IT from cost centers to strategic innovation centers by enabling faster deployment, improved access to resources, and variable costs through public, private and hybrid cloud models.
3) IBM focuses on capturing the cloud market across infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and business process/software as a service through its SmartCloud foundation technologies, managed cloud services, and cloud business solutions.
Major vendors are starting to integrate their application life-cycle management and systems management tools to close the loop between development and operations. The vision of a fully integrated, automated end-to-end IT life-cycle management solution could address the needs of large businesses. However, there are still many gaps today in vendors' approaches. In the short term, vendors will focus on extending existing offerings through integration. In the medium term, vendors will compete on partner ecosystems and developer networks. Longer term, an integrated solution could become the platform for closed-loop change management and provide governance and auditing capabilities.
Get a detailed comparison and analysis of available solutions
Social Messaging is the exchange of information in real time by staff and executives. It makes status updates by staff available to the whole network (except if it has been limited to partial networks), which helps colleagues learn from each other, share what they are working on, important events, or relevant information.
Download this summary as a prelude to purchasing the full report at www.aiim.org/reports
Mvine is a social business software company founded to enhance collaboration between companies. It offers secure corporate communication and collaboration tools, as well as business communities and portals. Mvine's platform provides features like directories, groups, events, and dashboards to help businesses connect and share information. The presentation highlights Mvine's solutions for document management, communications, and unified messaging to build relationships and streamline business processes.
Australian cio summit 2012 bill frangeskakis news releaseTurning Business D...IT Network marcus evans
Turning Business Data into Dollars: Interview with: Bill Frangeskakis, General Manager, Frontline, a sponsor company at the marcus evans Australian CIO Summit 2012, on using data to produce stronger results.
This document summarizes a live webinar about emerging trends in enterprise content management (ECM), social computing, and networking. It discusses how the model for finding information has changed from needing prior knowledge to being able to find information from anywhere. It also outlines key topics covered, including trends in ECM and collaboration technologies, the growth of the ECM market and leading vendors, and new features in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 that enable enterprise social networking.
Chapter 2
IT Supports Organizational Performance in Turbulent Business Environments Information Technology for Management Improving Performance in the Digital Economy 7th edition
20111031 KMWorld 2011 Applying the Social Business Roadmap to Your OrganizationJesse Wilkins
This workshop delivered at KMWorld 2011 outlined the essential steps in the AIIM social business roadmap, presented a high-level assessment to conduct in order to develop an organization-specific roadmap, and outlined key strategies for the governance portion of the roadmap.
Chapter 1 IT Supports Organizational Performancein Turbulent Business EnvironmentsInformation Technology for ManagementImproving Performance in the Digital Economy7th
Social ERP [English version] - Luis CarrascoLuis Carrasco
Social ERP aims to incorporate social networking functionality into enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to: 1) Boost collaboration between business peers, 2) Capture real-time information from business processes, and 3) Provide employees with the best information. An example is described where a manufacturing company leverages a Social ERP system to manage an important sales order more efficiently.
The document discusses six factors for successfully implementing Web 2.0 technologies in companies based on McKinsey's research of over 50 early adopters. The six factors are:
1) Senior leadership needs to champion Web 2.0 initiatives while allowing for bottom-up participation.
2) Companies should scale up successful unintended uses identified by users rather than dictating preferred uses.
3) Web 2.0 technologies need to be incorporated into daily workflows to sustain participation.
4) Incentives should appeal to participants' ego and needs rather than just financial incentives.
5) Efforts require engaging the right influential participants who can drive critical mass and add value.
6) Companies
The document discusses how companies can effectively utilize Web 2.0 technologies. It identifies six key factors for success: 1) having a range of technologies that facilitate collaboration, communication, collective estimation, metadata creation, and social networking; 2) requiring high user participation to generate new content and edit others' work; 3) being relatively lightweight to implement compared to earlier technologies; 4) tapping into employees' "cognitive surplus" through participation; 5) unlocking new management capabilities like mass internal content creation, broadcast solution sourcing, and external collaborative contributions. The document provides examples of how Web 2.0 differs from and can build upon the gains of earlier technologies like ERP and CRM.
Focus is on understanding Information Professionals and how they connect with solution providers.
This was presented at the Document Management Solution Providers Executive Forum (http://www.aiim.org/dmspef).
Thinking about Technology, Risk, and Change Management Through a Social LensJohn Mancini
The document discusses implementing social technology responsibly and strategically. It provides information about AIIM strategy briefings on using social business to reinvent customer relationships and improve business flexibility. The briefings cost $8,000 and cover topics like aligning organizations, improving collaboration, and knowledge sharing. The document also discusses balancing knowledge and risk when adopting new technologies like social media and cloud computing.
Lessons Learned: Business agility through open standards & cloudAngel Diaz
Dr. Angel Luis Diaz is the Vice President of Software Standards and Cloud for IBM Software Group. The document discusses how open standards and cloud computing can help businesses achieve agility through flexibility, innovation, and cost reduction. It also notes that while cloud projects promise benefits, they can fail without proper planning around communication, collaboration, and standardization. IBM recommends their approach of leveraging best practices and standards to help ensure cloud project success.
In the social, mobile and cloud era, what does it take to be an Information P...John Mancini
Summary of massive changes underway in the enterprise IT marketplace being driven by social, mobile, and cloud, and the implications of these changes on what it means to be an information professional.
http://www.aiim.org/certification
The document discusses Dell's adoption and use of social media over time. It notes that Dell was an early adopter of online sales and support. It then summarizes Dell's experiments with social media from 2005 to 2011, including launching blogs, communities, and social media profiles. The document discusses how Dell aligned its organization for social media success and leveraged social media across different business functions. It also addresses key learnings about how social media can be a tool rather than just a channel and how customer-connected employees are important.
Este documento trata sobre estilos de vestimenta. Menciona dos estilos, "elegancia" y "casual", insinuando que ofrece una opción elegante y otra más casual o informal.
OBD (On Board Diagnostics) systems have evolved over time to standardize vehicle emissions monitoring and diagnostics. OBD1 was initially developed by vehicle manufacturers in the 1980s but each used their own interface. In the 1990s, CARB mandated OBD2 which established universal codes, connectors and protocols. All US vehicles are now required to implement OBD2's expanded monitoring of emissions systems and standardized diagnostics to make repairs easier across all manufacturers.
1) The document discusses IBM's cloud computing strategy and offerings called SmartCloud.
2) SmartCloud aims to help organizations transform IT from cost centers to strategic innovation centers by enabling faster deployment, improved access to resources, and variable costs through public, private and hybrid cloud models.
3) IBM focuses on capturing the cloud market across infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and business process/software as a service through its SmartCloud foundation technologies, managed cloud services, and cloud business solutions.
Major vendors are starting to integrate their application life-cycle management and systems management tools to close the loop between development and operations. The vision of a fully integrated, automated end-to-end IT life-cycle management solution could address the needs of large businesses. However, there are still many gaps today in vendors' approaches. In the short term, vendors will focus on extending existing offerings through integration. In the medium term, vendors will compete on partner ecosystems and developer networks. Longer term, an integrated solution could become the platform for closed-loop change management and provide governance and auditing capabilities.
Get a detailed comparison and analysis of available solutions
Social Messaging is the exchange of information in real time by staff and executives. It makes status updates by staff available to the whole network (except if it has been limited to partial networks), which helps colleagues learn from each other, share what they are working on, important events, or relevant information.
Download this summary as a prelude to purchasing the full report at www.aiim.org/reports
Mvine is a social business software company founded to enhance collaboration between companies. It offers secure corporate communication and collaboration tools, as well as business communities and portals. Mvine's platform provides features like directories, groups, events, and dashboards to help businesses connect and share information. The presentation highlights Mvine's solutions for document management, communications, and unified messaging to build relationships and streamline business processes.
Australian cio summit 2012 bill frangeskakis news releaseTurning Business D...IT Network marcus evans
Turning Business Data into Dollars: Interview with: Bill Frangeskakis, General Manager, Frontline, a sponsor company at the marcus evans Australian CIO Summit 2012, on using data to produce stronger results.
This document summarizes a live webinar about emerging trends in enterprise content management (ECM), social computing, and networking. It discusses how the model for finding information has changed from needing prior knowledge to being able to find information from anywhere. It also outlines key topics covered, including trends in ECM and collaboration technologies, the growth of the ECM market and leading vendors, and new features in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 that enable enterprise social networking.
Chapter 2
IT Supports Organizational Performance in Turbulent Business Environments Information Technology for Management Improving Performance in the Digital Economy 7th edition
20111031 KMWorld 2011 Applying the Social Business Roadmap to Your OrganizationJesse Wilkins
This workshop delivered at KMWorld 2011 outlined the essential steps in the AIIM social business roadmap, presented a high-level assessment to conduct in order to develop an organization-specific roadmap, and outlined key strategies for the governance portion of the roadmap.
Chapter 1 IT Supports Organizational Performancein Turbulent Business EnvironmentsInformation Technology for ManagementImproving Performance in the Digital Economy7th
Social ERP [English version] - Luis CarrascoLuis Carrasco
Social ERP aims to incorporate social networking functionality into enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to: 1) Boost collaboration between business peers, 2) Capture real-time information from business processes, and 3) Provide employees with the best information. An example is described where a manufacturing company leverages a Social ERP system to manage an important sales order more efficiently.
The document discusses six factors for successfully implementing Web 2.0 technologies in companies based on McKinsey's research of over 50 early adopters. The six factors are:
1) Senior leadership needs to champion Web 2.0 initiatives while allowing for bottom-up participation.
2) Companies should scale up successful unintended uses identified by users rather than dictating preferred uses.
3) Web 2.0 technologies need to be incorporated into daily workflows to sustain participation.
4) Incentives should appeal to participants' ego and needs rather than just financial incentives.
5) Efforts require engaging the right influential participants who can drive critical mass and add value.
6) Companies
The document discusses how companies can effectively utilize Web 2.0 technologies. It identifies six key factors for success: 1) having a range of technologies that facilitate collaboration, communication, collective estimation, metadata creation, and social networking; 2) requiring high user participation to generate new content and edit others' work; 3) being relatively lightweight to implement compared to earlier technologies; 4) tapping into employees' "cognitive surplus" through participation; 5) unlocking new management capabilities like mass internal content creation, broadcast solution sourcing, and external collaborative contributions. The document provides examples of how Web 2.0 differs from and can build upon the gains of earlier technologies like ERP and CRM.
Focus is on understanding Information Professionals and how they connect with solution providers.
This was presented at the Document Management Solution Providers Executive Forum (http://www.aiim.org/dmspef).
Thinking about Technology, Risk, and Change Management Through a Social LensJohn Mancini
The document discusses implementing social technology responsibly and strategically. It provides information about AIIM strategy briefings on using social business to reinvent customer relationships and improve business flexibility. The briefings cost $8,000 and cover topics like aligning organizations, improving collaboration, and knowledge sharing. The document also discusses balancing knowledge and risk when adopting new technologies like social media and cloud computing.
Lessons Learned: Business agility through open standards & cloudAngel Diaz
Dr. Angel Luis Diaz is the Vice President of Software Standards and Cloud for IBM Software Group. The document discusses how open standards and cloud computing can help businesses achieve agility through flexibility, innovation, and cost reduction. It also notes that while cloud projects promise benefits, they can fail without proper planning around communication, collaboration, and standardization. IBM recommends their approach of leveraging best practices and standards to help ensure cloud project success.
In the social, mobile and cloud era, what does it take to be an Information P...John Mancini
Summary of massive changes underway in the enterprise IT marketplace being driven by social, mobile, and cloud, and the implications of these changes on what it means to be an information professional.
http://www.aiim.org/certification
The document discusses Dell's adoption and use of social media over time. It notes that Dell was an early adopter of online sales and support. It then summarizes Dell's experiments with social media from 2005 to 2011, including launching blogs, communities, and social media profiles. The document discusses how Dell aligned its organization for social media success and leveraged social media across different business functions. It also addresses key learnings about how social media can be a tool rather than just a channel and how customer-connected employees are important.
Este documento trata sobre estilos de vestimenta. Menciona dos estilos, "elegancia" y "casual", insinuando que ofrece una opción elegante y otra más casual o informal.
OBD (On Board Diagnostics) systems have evolved over time to standardize vehicle emissions monitoring and diagnostics. OBD1 was initially developed by vehicle manufacturers in the 1980s but each used their own interface. In the 1990s, CARB mandated OBD2 which established universal codes, connectors and protocols. All US vehicles are now required to implement OBD2's expanded monitoring of emissions systems and standardized diagnostics to make repairs easier across all manufacturers.
This document provides an overview of computer systems and electronic control modules used in vehicle engines, including the CPU, ECM, PCM, TCM, and BCM. It discusses the basic functions of input, processing, storage, and output that computers perform. Inputs can be switches that are on/off or sensors that provide feedback. Reference voltage sensors use a constant 5 volt reference point to measure values, while voltage generating sensors produce their own voltage signal. The document begins to discuss output devices like solenoids, switches, relays, and motors that are controlled by computer output signals.
http://inarocket.com
Learn BEM fundamentals as fast as possible. What is BEM (Block, element, modifier), BEM syntax, how it works with a real example, etc.
How to Build a Dynamic Social Media PlanPost Planner
Stop guessing and wasting your time on networks and strategies that don’t work!
Join Rebekah Radice and Katie Lance to learn how to optimize your social networks, the best kept secrets for hot content, top time management tools, and much more!
Watch the replay here: bit.ly/socialmedia-plan
The document discusses how personalization and dynamic content are becoming increasingly important on websites. It notes that 52% of marketers see content personalization as critical and 75% of consumers like it when brands personalize their content. However, personalization can create issues for search engine optimization as dynamic URLs and content are more difficult for search engines to index than static pages. The document provides tips for SEOs to help address these personalization and SEO challenges, such as using static URLs when possible and submitting accurate sitemaps.
Lightning Talk #9: How UX and Data Storytelling Can Shape Policy by Mika Aldabaux singapore
How can we take UX and Data Storytelling out of the tech context and use them to change the way government behaves?
Showcasing the truth is the highest goal of data storytelling. Because the design of a chart can affect the interpretation of data in a major way, one must wield visual tools with care and deliberation. Using quantitative facts to evoke an emotional response is best achieved with the combination of UX and data storytelling.
This document summarizes a study of CEO succession events among the largest 100 U.S. corporations between 2005-2015. The study analyzed executives who were passed over for the CEO role ("succession losers") and their subsequent careers. It found that 74% of passed over executives left their companies, with 30% eventually becoming CEOs elsewhere. However, companies led by succession losers saw average stock price declines of 13% over 3 years, compared to gains for companies whose CEO selections remained unchanged. The findings suggest that boards generally identify the most qualified CEO candidates, though differences between internal and external hires complicate comparisons.
Demystifying cloud computing with IBM POWER Systems and IBM i COMMON Europe
This document discusses IBM Power Systems cloud computing solutions. It begins by explaining how cloud computing can help businesses by improving efficiency and reducing costs. It then provides an overview of IBM's cloud offerings including Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service, and hybrid cloud solutions. The document focuses on IBM SmartCloud Entry, a basic private cloud solution for Power Systems. It describes the key capabilities of SmartCloud Entry such as projects, appliances, workloads, metering, and four-click deployment. Finally, it discusses advanced cloud solutions like CloudBurst that provide a fully integrated platform for private clouds.
This document discusses how cloud computing requires a cloud-intelligent network to address its needs. It begins by providing background on the shift to cloud computing and how the role of networks has evolved with each new era of computing. It then discusses how current network strategies are insufficient for cloud computing due to issues like inefficient bandwidth usage, lack of security and control, poor visibility, and inconsistent user experiences. The document proposes that a cloud-intelligent network is needed to deliver security, visibility, optimization and control for cloud services. It outlines the components and benefits of a cloud-intelligent network for enabling IT agility, time to market advantages, and assured user experiences.
The National Registration Department of
Malaysia (Jabatan Pendaftaran Negara
Malaysia, or JPN) is the government agency
responsible for registering important demographic
events. To expedite statistical queries
and requests for data extraction from governmental
entities, JPN custom-built an application
referred to as the Statistics and Data Extraction
Request Management System (SAL). Although
the application was designed to automatically
manage, calculate and distribute responses to
data requests, the underlying hardware platform
was woefully inadequate for the task and
frequently bogged down.
Cloud computing and Innovation in ManufacturingInfosys
The document discusses how cloud computing can enable innovation and growth in manufacturing. It argues that the cloud has the power to accelerate product development by enabling seamless collaboration. The cloud lowers barriers to innovation by reducing costs, shortening timelines, and allowing collaboration across locations and organizations. The document provides examples of how manufacturers can leverage the cloud for collaboration, mobility, and analytics to further innovation.
Faced with depressing predictions of looming budget cuts cloud computing has come to the fore of discussions to uncover relatively short-term economies in IT functions within the public sector. But how much of the cloud story is hype? How different are cloud architectures to the web-server farms that organizations have had the means to access for well over a decade? And how realistic is it that core business systems will move out of the data centre to the cloud?
1) The document discusses cloud computing trends, with Salesforce.com identified as the current leader in cloud according to search trends.
2) Cloud skills are in high demand, with developers experienced in cloud environments and project managers to implement cloud solutions being most sought after.
3) Salaries for cloud professionals are expected to rise sharply as cloud implementations increase in 2022.
Salesforce.com is currently leading in cloud computing according to search trends, followed by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Cloud computing is in high demand and impacting the job market, with a shortage of developers experienced in cloud environments and rising salaries expected. The document discusses the growing momentum of cloud computing and predictions that organizations will continue innovating and integrating more systems and services through the cloud in 2012.
Technology Forecast - Driving Growth With Cloud ComputingPier Paolo Mucelli
This article discusses how cloud computing can enable companies to become an "extensible enterprise" and unlock new business growth opportunities by making internal capabilities available to external partners and customers. It provides the following examples:
- Automatic Data Processing (ADP) leveraged cloud computing to integrate more deeply with ecosystem partners and offer their payroll services to a wider range of customers, allowing them to maintain revenue stability during an economic downturn.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) used modular cloud services to build a business model where they offer internal infrastructure capabilities to external customers, creating a large new revenue stream.
- Cloud computing allows companies to encode internal business services into software and provision them in the cloud, opening them up to third
This document provides an overview of managing security and delivering performance in the cloud. It discusses how businesses are increasingly moving applications and commercial apps to the cloud to enable innovation and cut costs. However, IT departments must manage services across private, public and hybrid cloud environments while ensuring security, performance and compliance. The document outlines CA Technologies' approach to planning, building, running, securing and assuring cloud services across the lifecycle to help customers enable innovation while managing complexity.
Andreas Pöschl, Senior Solutions Architect, BMW
Agenda
BMW Group IT
Organization
Environment
BMW Group and its private cloud
Expectations
Challenges
How ODCA usages will help
Key decisions
Implementation
Next Steps
Cloud Computing for Banking
What does the future of cloud computing for banking look like—both in the near and long terms? Accenture sees cloud computing as an important step in the continuing industrialization of IT and thus capable of ultimately playing a key role in enabling high performance.
1) The document discusses simplifying IT by changing the game through engineered together solutions like Oracle Fusion Middleware, Exalogic, and Exadata.
2) These solutions aim to reduce complexity, increase performance and manageability, and allow 70% of IT spending to be focused on transforming the business rather than just keeping the lights on.
3) Oracle Fusion Applications were designed from the ground up over 6 years to run in the cloud or on-premise, be integrated, have built-in security, analytics and a modern user interface.
Cloud Computing IT Lexicon's Latest Hot SpotTech Mahindra
Oracle aims to support both public and private clouds with a complete portfolio of products. Their strategy includes providing enterprise-grade technology through their PaaS platform and IaaS offerings. Oracle's platform allows customers to build, deploy, and manage applications and services in cloud environments. They are developing their portfolio of applications, middleware, databases, servers, and management tools to enable rich SaaS and cloud solutions.
Cloud Computing in the Midmarket: Assessing the Optionsarms8586
The document discusses cloud computing options for mid-sized companies with 100-999 employees. It explains that public cloud approaches are beginning to gain more traction than private clouds among mid-sized firms. The document provides an overview of cloud computing models including cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure, with software as a service accounting for the largest share of cloud spending. It aims to help companies understand cloud technology and determine if cloud solutions are appropriate for their needs.
The document discusses Kimind Consulting and the services it provides around Enterprise 2.0 strategic consulting and Web 2.0 development, including helping companies adopt new collaborative technologies and strategies to improve productivity, innovation, and business growth. It outlines Kimind's approach to Enterprise 2.0 adoption, benefits for different stakeholders, and features of Google Apps that can facilitate adoption.
Oracle Fusion Middleware is Oracle's middleware product line that provides a complete, integrated, and open platform. Benny Soemadi from Oracle gave a presentation on Oracle Fusion Middleware and how it can help financial services and banking industries. The presentation covered an overview of Oracle and Oracle Fusion Middleware, how Oracle Fusion Middleware has become a market leader, and the specific capabilities it provides for the financial and banking sectors, such as helping businesses innovate through capabilities like cloud, mobile, and social technologies.
The document discusses several megatrends shaping the IT world including growth in emerging markets, increasing amounts of data ("big data"), security threats, analytics, cloud computing, mobility, and social business. It outlines IBM's transformation to a "smarter" approach focused on instrumented, interconnected and intelligent systems. Key technologies discussed include Watson, predictive analytics, expert integrated systems, storage class memory, and mobile/cloud platforms. The trends point to a more data-centric architecture and analytics approaches needed to make sense of unprecedented data volumes and varieties.
Removing Uninteresting Bytes in Software FuzzingAftab Hussain
Imagine a world where software fuzzing, the process of mutating bytes in test seeds to uncover hidden and erroneous program behaviors, becomes faster and more effective. A lot depends on the initial seeds, which can significantly dictate the trajectory of a fuzzing campaign, particularly in terms of how long it takes to uncover interesting behaviour in your code. We introduce DIAR, a technique designed to speedup fuzzing campaigns by pinpointing and eliminating those uninteresting bytes in the seeds. Picture this: instead of wasting valuable resources on meaningless mutations in large, bloated seeds, DIAR removes the unnecessary bytes, streamlining the entire process.
In this work, we equipped AFL, a popular fuzzer, with DIAR and examined two critical Linux libraries -- Libxml's xmllint, a tool for parsing xml documents, and Binutil's readelf, an essential debugging and security analysis command-line tool used to display detailed information about ELF (Executable and Linkable Format). Our preliminary results show that AFL+DIAR does not only discover new paths more quickly but also achieves higher coverage overall. This work thus showcases how starting with lean and optimized seeds can lead to faster, more comprehensive fuzzing campaigns -- and DIAR helps you find such seeds.
- These are slides of the talk given at IEEE International Conference on Software Testing Verification and Validation Workshop, ICSTW 2022.
Communications Mining Series - Zero to Hero - Session 1DianaGray10
This session provides introduction to UiPath Communication Mining, importance and platform overview. You will acquire a good understand of the phases in Communication Mining as we go over the platform with you. Topics covered:
• Communication Mining Overview
• Why is it important?
• How can it help today’s business and the benefits
• Phases in Communication Mining
• Demo on Platform overview
• Q/A
TrustArc Webinar - 2024 Global Privacy SurveyTrustArc
How does your privacy program stack up against your peers? What challenges are privacy teams tackling and prioritizing in 2024?
In the fifth annual Global Privacy Benchmarks Survey, we asked over 1,800 global privacy professionals and business executives to share their perspectives on the current state of privacy inside and outside of their organizations. This year’s report focused on emerging areas of importance for privacy and compliance professionals, including considerations and implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, building brand trust, and different approaches for achieving higher privacy competence scores.
See how organizational priorities and strategic approaches to data security and privacy are evolving around the globe.
This webinar will review:
- The top 10 privacy insights from the fifth annual Global Privacy Benchmarks Survey
- The top challenges for privacy leaders, practitioners, and organizations in 2024
- Key themes to consider in developing and maintaining your privacy program
Cosa hanno in comune un mattoncino Lego e la backdoor XZ?Speck&Tech
ABSTRACT: A prima vista, un mattoncino Lego e la backdoor XZ potrebbero avere in comune il fatto di essere entrambi blocchi di costruzione, o dipendenze di progetti creativi e software. La realtà è che un mattoncino Lego e il caso della backdoor XZ hanno molto di più di tutto ciò in comune.
Partecipate alla presentazione per immergervi in una storia di interoperabilità, standard e formati aperti, per poi discutere del ruolo importante che i contributori hanno in una comunità open source sostenibile.
BIO: Sostenitrice del software libero e dei formati standard e aperti. È stata un membro attivo dei progetti Fedora e openSUSE e ha co-fondato l'Associazione LibreItalia dove è stata coinvolta in diversi eventi, migrazioni e formazione relativi a LibreOffice. In precedenza ha lavorato a migrazioni e corsi di formazione su LibreOffice per diverse amministrazioni pubbliche e privati. Da gennaio 2020 lavora in SUSE come Software Release Engineer per Uyuni e SUSE Manager e quando non segue la sua passione per i computer e per Geeko coltiva la sua curiosità per l'astronomia (da cui deriva il suo nickname deneb_alpha).
AI 101: An Introduction to the Basics and Impact of Artificial IntelligenceIndexBug
Imagine a world where machines not only perform tasks but also learn, adapt, and make decisions. This is the promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a technology that's not just enhancing our lives but revolutionizing entire industries.
For the full video of this presentation, please visit: https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2024/06/building-and-scaling-ai-applications-with-the-nx-ai-manager-a-presentation-from-network-optix/
Robin van Emden, Senior Director of Data Science at Network Optix, presents the “Building and Scaling AI Applications with the Nx AI Manager,” tutorial at the May 2024 Embedded Vision Summit.
In this presentation, van Emden covers the basics of scaling edge AI solutions using the Nx tool kit. He emphasizes the process of developing AI models and deploying them globally. He also showcases the conversion of AI models and the creation of effective edge AI pipelines, with a focus on pre-processing, model conversion, selecting the appropriate inference engine for the target hardware and post-processing.
van Emden shows how Nx can simplify the developer’s life and facilitate a rapid transition from concept to production-ready applications.He provides valuable insights into developing scalable and efficient edge AI solutions, with a strong focus on practical implementation.
HCL Notes und Domino Lizenzkostenreduzierung in der Welt von DLAUpanagenda
Webinar Recording: https://www.panagenda.com/webinars/hcl-notes-und-domino-lizenzkostenreduzierung-in-der-welt-von-dlau/
DLAU und die Lizenzen nach dem CCB- und CCX-Modell sind für viele in der HCL-Community seit letztem Jahr ein heißes Thema. Als Notes- oder Domino-Kunde haben Sie vielleicht mit unerwartet hohen Benutzerzahlen und Lizenzgebühren zu kämpfen. Sie fragen sich vielleicht, wie diese neue Art der Lizenzierung funktioniert und welchen Nutzen sie Ihnen bringt. Vor allem wollen Sie sicherlich Ihr Budget einhalten und Kosten sparen, wo immer möglich. Das verstehen wir und wir möchten Ihnen dabei helfen!
Wir erklären Ihnen, wie Sie häufige Konfigurationsprobleme lösen können, die dazu führen können, dass mehr Benutzer gezählt werden als nötig, und wie Sie überflüssige oder ungenutzte Konten identifizieren und entfernen können, um Geld zu sparen. Es gibt auch einige Ansätze, die zu unnötigen Ausgaben führen können, z. B. wenn ein Personendokument anstelle eines Mail-Ins für geteilte Mailboxen verwendet wird. Wir zeigen Ihnen solche Fälle und deren Lösungen. Und natürlich erklären wir Ihnen das neue Lizenzmodell.
Nehmen Sie an diesem Webinar teil, bei dem HCL-Ambassador Marc Thomas und Gastredner Franz Walder Ihnen diese neue Welt näherbringen. Es vermittelt Ihnen die Tools und das Know-how, um den Überblick zu bewahren. Sie werden in der Lage sein, Ihre Kosten durch eine optimierte Domino-Konfiguration zu reduzieren und auch in Zukunft gering zu halten.
Diese Themen werden behandelt
- Reduzierung der Lizenzkosten durch Auffinden und Beheben von Fehlkonfigurationen und überflüssigen Konten
- Wie funktionieren CCB- und CCX-Lizenzen wirklich?
- Verstehen des DLAU-Tools und wie man es am besten nutzt
- Tipps für häufige Problembereiche, wie z. B. Team-Postfächer, Funktions-/Testbenutzer usw.
- Praxisbeispiele und Best Practices zum sofortigen Umsetzen
GraphRAG for Life Science to increase LLM accuracyTomaz Bratanic
GraphRAG for life science domain, where you retriever information from biomedical knowledge graphs using LLMs to increase the accuracy and performance of generated answers
Unlocking Productivity: Leveraging the Potential of Copilot in Microsoft 365, a presentation by Christoforos Vlachos, Senior Solutions Manager – Modern Workplace, Uni Systems
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 6DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 6. In this session, we will cover Test Automation with generative AI and Open AI.
UiPath Test Automation with generative AI and Open AI webinar offers an in-depth exploration of leveraging cutting-edge technologies for test automation within the UiPath platform. Attendees will delve into the integration of generative AI, a test automation solution, with Open AI advanced natural language processing capabilities.
Throughout the session, participants will discover how this synergy empowers testers to automate repetitive tasks, enhance testing accuracy, and expedite the software testing life cycle. Topics covered include the seamless integration process, practical use cases, and the benefits of harnessing AI-driven automation for UiPath testing initiatives. By attending this webinar, testers, and automation professionals can gain valuable insights into harnessing the power of AI to optimize their test automation workflows within the UiPath ecosystem, ultimately driving efficiency and quality in software development processes.
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into integrating generative AI.
2. Understanding how this integration enhances test automation within the UiPath platform
3. Practical demonstrations
4. Exploration of real-world use cases illustrating the benefits of AI-driven test automation for UiPath
Topics covered:
What is generative AI
Test Automation with generative AI and Open AI.
UiPath integration with generative AI
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Unlock the Future of Search with MongoDB Atlas_ Vector Search Unleashed.pdfMalak Abu Hammad
Discover how MongoDB Atlas and vector search technology can revolutionize your application's search capabilities. This comprehensive presentation covers:
* What is Vector Search?
* Importance and benefits of vector search
* Practical use cases across various industries
* Step-by-step implementation guide
* Live demos with code snippets
* Enhancing LLM capabilities with vector search
* Best practices and optimization strategies
Perfect for developers, AI enthusiasts, and tech leaders. Learn how to leverage MongoDB Atlas to deliver highly relevant, context-aware search results, transforming your data retrieval process. Stay ahead in tech innovation and maximize the potential of your applications.
#MongoDB #VectorSearch #AI #SemanticSearch #TechInnovation #DataScience #LLM #MachineLearning #SearchTechnology
Best 20 SEO Techniques To Improve Website Visibility In SERPPixlogix Infotech
Boost your website's visibility with proven SEO techniques! Our latest blog dives into essential strategies to enhance your online presence, increase traffic, and rank higher on search engines. From keyword optimization to quality content creation, learn how to make your site stand out in the crowded digital landscape. Discover actionable tips and expert insights to elevate your SEO game.
GraphSummit Singapore | The Art of the Possible with Graph - Q2 2024Neo4j
Neha Bajwa, Vice President of Product Marketing, Neo4j
Join us as we explore breakthrough innovations enabled by interconnected data and AI. Discover firsthand how organizations use relationships in data to uncover contextual insights and solve our most pressing challenges – from optimizing supply chains, detecting fraud, and improving customer experiences to accelerating drug discoveries.
Driving Business Innovation: Latest Generative AI Advancements & Success StorySafe Software
Are you ready to revolutionize how you handle data? Join us for a webinar where we’ll bring you up to speed with the latest advancements in Generative AI technology and discover how leveraging FME with tools from giants like Google Gemini, Amazon, and Microsoft OpenAI can supercharge your workflow efficiency.
During the hour, we’ll take you through:
Guest Speaker Segment with Hannah Barrington: Dive into the world of dynamic real estate marketing with Hannah, the Marketing Manager at Workspace Group. Hear firsthand how their team generates engaging descriptions for thousands of office units by integrating diverse data sources—from PDF floorplans to web pages—using FME transformers, like OpenAIVisionConnector and AnthropicVisionConnector. This use case will show you how GenAI can streamline content creation for marketing across the board.
Ollama Use Case: Learn how Scenario Specialist Dmitri Bagh has utilized Ollama within FME to input data, create custom models, and enhance security protocols. This segment will include demos to illustrate the full capabilities of FME in AI-driven processes.
Custom AI Models: Discover how to leverage FME to build personalized AI models using your data. Whether it’s populating a model with local data for added security or integrating public AI tools, find out how FME facilitates a versatile and secure approach to AI.
We’ll wrap up with a live Q&A session where you can engage with our experts on your specific use cases, and learn more about optimizing your data workflows with AI.
This webinar is ideal for professionals seeking to harness the power of AI within their data management systems while ensuring high levels of customization and security. Whether you're a novice or an expert, gain actionable insights and strategies to elevate your data processes. Join us to see how FME and AI can revolutionize how you work with data!
Observability Concepts EVERY Developer Should Know -- DeveloperWeek Europe.pdfPaige Cruz
Monitoring and observability aren’t traditionally found in software curriculums and many of us cobble this knowledge together from whatever vendor or ecosystem we were first introduced to and whatever is a part of your current company’s observability stack.
While the dev and ops silo continues to crumble….many organizations still relegate monitoring & observability as the purview of ops, infra and SRE teams. This is a mistake - achieving a highly observable system requires collaboration up and down the stack.
I, a former op, would like to extend an invitation to all application developers to join the observability party will share these foundational concepts to build on:
Why You Should Replace Windows 11 with Nitrux Linux 3.5.0 for enhanced perfor...SOFTTECHHUB
The choice of an operating system plays a pivotal role in shaping our computing experience. For decades, Microsoft's Windows has dominated the market, offering a familiar and widely adopted platform for personal and professional use. However, as technological advancements continue to push the boundaries of innovation, alternative operating systems have emerged, challenging the status quo and offering users a fresh perspective on computing.
One such alternative that has garnered significant attention and acclaim is Nitrux Linux 3.5.0, a sleek, powerful, and user-friendly Linux distribution that promises to redefine the way we interact with our devices. With its focus on performance, security, and customization, Nitrux Linux presents a compelling case for those seeking to break free from the constraints of proprietary software and embrace the freedom and flexibility of open-source computing.
Maruthi Prithivirajan, Head of ASEAN & IN Solution Architecture, Neo4j
Get an inside look at the latest Neo4j innovations that enable relationship-driven intelligence at scale. Learn more about the newest cloud integrations and product enhancements that make Neo4j an essential choice for developers building apps with interconnected data and generative AI.
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Office 2013 built for sharing >>
Compliance in the cloud era >>
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VMware’s executive shuffle >>
Why IT outsourcing fails >>
Oracle vs. Salesforce in social >>
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New scale-out, solid-state, and cloud-integrated products may be
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By Kurt Marko
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CONTENTS THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY July 23, 2012 Issue 1,339
This all-digital issue of InformationWeek is part of our 10-year strategy to reduce the publication’s carbon footprint
COVER STORY
22 Compliance In The Cloud Era
Fundamental changes in the way companies use IT
services are changing the dynamics of compliance
12 Storage Innovation
New scale-out, solid-state,
and cloud-enabled products 3 Research And Connect
provide a flexible alternative InformationWeek’s in-depth reports, events, and more
to monolithic systems
4 CIO Profiles
Iron Mountain’s Tasos Tsolakis learned not to rely on big budgets
12 5 Global CIO
QUICKTAKES 10 VMware’s Exec Shuffle An IT exec takes a practical look at why IT outsourcing often fails
7 Office Gets Social EMC brings VMware closer,
Microsoft makes it easier pushes ahead with vision of
to store and share software-defined data center
documents on the Web 4
9 Buying Spree
Oracle and Salesforce.com
face off over social and
collaboration software
CONTACTS
28 Editorial Contacts 29 Business Contacts
informationweek.com 7 July 23, 2012 2
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Resources to Research, Connect, Comment
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CIOprofiles TASOS TSOLAKIS Iron Mountain
Title: Executive VP and mann, my first mentor at Bell Labs. He helped VISION
Chief Information and me focus on practical results and simplify plans One thing I’m looking to do better this
Global Services Officer and design. year: In the past year, we made significant in-
vestment in talent acquisition. This year will
Degrees: Virginia Tech, ON THE JOB stabilize the team by focusing on key deliver-
MS and Ph.D.; Wharton IT budget: $102 million ables and delivering on schedule for our key
Business School, MBA projects and initiatives.
Size of IT team: 480 employees
Leisure activity: Lesson learned from the recession: You can
Motorcycling Top initiatives: be more effective with less of a budget, still
>> Enterprise-wide implementation of Oracle, meeting your goals and delivering results.
Tech vendor CEO I using one system to streamline internal pro-
admire most: Sam CAREER TRACK cesses like travel, expenses, and employee What the federal government’s top
Palmisano of IBM How long at Iron Mountain: Almost two learning. technology priority should be: Make the
years at this provider of records management government more open—use technology to
Pet peeve: Reliance on and data backup services. >> Implementation of a human resource portal, make more information more accessible to
big budgets; it’s possi- allowing greater levels of employee self-service. more people.
ble to do more with less Career accomplishment I’m most proud of:
I was part of the team that launched AT&T Inter- >> Improving the technology aspects of cus- Kids and technology careers: Although I
If I weren’t CIO, I’d be ... net Services. During our first week of operation, tomer service. don’t have children, I would definitely steer
the CEO of a startup we got 10 times the demand that the business them toward technology. It’s pervasive in our
technology firm anticipated for the first six months of the service. How I measure IT effectiveness: Some of the society, and you need to be proficient in it to
Scaling the service while supporting customers key metrics we use are measurements of busi- be successful.
was a big challenge and a key accomplishment. ness team and customer satisfaction, expense
to revenue, and on-time delivery and defects Ranked No. 47 in the 2011
Most important career influencer: Hank Berg- in the first month of production.
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 4
5. globalCIO
Previous Next
Table of Contents
Why IT Outsourcing Often Fails JIM DITMORE
While the general trend of more IT outsourc- However, IT is critical to all three areas. And companies don’t have the scale to achieve
ing (via smaller, more focused deals) contin- because of this intrinsic linkage, IT isn’t like a cost parity with a large outsourcer, nearly all
ues, these engagements remain difficult to security guard force or a legal staff, two areas large companies and many midsize ones do.
navigate. Every large IT shop that I have companies commonly outsource successfully. Nearly every outsourcing deal that I have re-
turned around had significant problems By outsourcing intrinsic capabilities, compa- versed in the past 20 years yielded savings of
caused or made worse by the outsourcing nies put their core competency at risk. at least 30% and often much more. Cost savings
arrangement, particularly large deals. While My IT best practice: Companies must control can be accomplished by an IT outsourcer for a
those shops performed poorly for other rea- their critical intellectual property. If your com- large company for a broad set of services only
sons (ineffectual leadership, process failures, pany uses outsourcing vendors to develop if the current shop is mediocre. If your shop is
talent issues), improving performance re- and deliver key features or services that differ- well run, your all-in costs will be similar to the
quired a substantial revamp or reversal of the entiate its products and define its success, best outsourcing vendors. If you’re world class,
outsourcing arrangements. then those vendors can typically turn around you can beat the outsourcer by 20% to 40%.
Failed outsourcing deals involving reputable and sell those advances to your competitors. Realize as well that any cost difference an IT
vendors and customers litter various industries. Or you are putting your success in the hands outsourcer can deliver typically degrades over
Why? Much depends on what you choose to of someone with very different goals. Be wary time. The outsourcer’s goals are to increase
outsource and how you manage the vendor of those who say IT isn’t a core competency. revenue and profit margin, so it invariably will
and service. A common misconception is that With every year that passes, there’s more IT find ways to charge you more, usually for
any activity that’s not “core” to a company can content in products in nearly every industry. changes to services, while minimizing its work.
and should be outsourced. In The Discipline Of Choose instead to outsource those activities One dysfunctional, $55 million-a-year out-
Market Leaders, authors Michael Treacy and Fred where you don’t have scale or cost advantages, sourcing contract I reversed a few years back
Wiersema argued that market leaders must rec- or capacity or competence. But ensure that you was for desktop provisioning and field support
ognize their competency in one of three areas: either retain or build the key design, integra- for a major bank. During a surprise review of
product and innovation leadership, customer tion, and management capabilities in-house. the relationship, we found warehouses full of
service and intimacy, or operational excellence. Cutting costs is another frequent reason for obsolete equipment that should have been dis-
They shouldn’t try to excel at all three. outsourcing. While most small and midsize posed of and new equipment that should have
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 5
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globalCIO
been deployed. Why? Because the outsourcer range of services, organizations, and locales. and in the right circumstances. An executive
was paid to maintain all equipment, whether in When I was at Bank One more than a decade leader can’t focus on all company priorities at
use in our offices or in a warehouse, and it had ago, working under CEO Jamie Dimon and once, nor would you have the staff. In some ar-
full control of the logistics function. COO Austin Adams, they supported our un- eas, such as field support, outsourcing provides
The solution? We insourced the logistics func- winding of the largest IT outsourcing deal ever natural economies of scale for many companies.
tion and established quality goals. Then we split consummated at the time. Three years into the When outsourcing, ensure that your com-
the field support geography and conducted a contract, it had become a millstone around pany retains critical IP and control. Use out-
Bank One’s neck. Costs were going up every sourcing to augment your capacity or to lever-
My then-CEO Jamie Dimon at year, and quality eroded to the point where age best-in-class specialized services.
Bank One said it best: “Who do system availability and customer complaints Since effective management of large out-
were the worst in the industry. sourcing deals is nearly impossible, do small
you want doing your key work?
In 2001, we cut the deal short; it was sched- deals. Handle the management like any signifi-
Patriots or mercenaries?” uled to run another four years. During the next cant in-house function—establish service-level
18 months, after hiring 2,200 infrastructure agreements, gather operational metrics, review
competitive bid to select two vendors for that staff and revamping the processes and infra- performance with management every three to
work. Every six months, we evaluated each ven- structure, we reduced defects (and downtime) six months, and address problems. Stipulate
dor’s quality, timeliness, and cost. We gave more to one-twentieth the levels in 2001 while re- consequences for bad performance and re-
territory to the higher-performing vendor and ducing our ongoing expenses by more than wards for good performance. Use contractors,
took away territory from the lower-performing $220 million per year. This effort aided the including cloud providers, for peak workloads.
one, which was on notice for possible replace- bank’s turnaround and allowed for the merger With these best practices and a selective hand,
ment. We kept a small team of field support ex- with JPMorgan a few years later. your IT shop and company can benefit from
perts to keep training and capabilities up to par, As for having in-house staff do critical work, outsourcing and avoid the failures.
update service routines, and resolve problems. Dimon said it best: “Who do you want doing
The result was far better quality and ser - your key work? Patriots or mercenaries?” Jim Ditmore is senior VP of technology, operations, infrastruc-
vice—at a 40% lower cost. These results are Like any tool or management approach, out- ture, architecture, and innovation at Allstate. Write to us at
typical with similar actions across a wide sourcing is quite valuable when used properly iwletters@techweb.com.
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 6
7. Quicktakes
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CLOUD FIRST
Office 2013 Built For Social Sharing
Install the preview of Microsoft Office 15, and business network, they’re easier to share.
you’ll know something radical has changed the At some point, Microsoft’s $1.2 billion acqui-
first time you click “save” on a new document.
In the upcoming version of Office aimed at
home users, the default location for saving a
document is the cloud—Microsoft’s SkyDrive
sition of Yammer collaboration software will
also factor into Office and SharePoint, but with
the deal not yet closed, Microsoft offered no
specifics.
Ballmer
wants Office
“touchable”
Meanwhile, after years of lagging in social
[
service. In the next version for business, the de- Cloud and social collaboration features are software functionality, a new version of Share-
fault will be to save to SharePoint, or maybe Sky- central themes with the new Office, which is Point is delivering what appears to be a com-
Drive Pro, a version of the cloud storage service now in an open beta test phase expected to petitive enterprise social networking experi-
featuring more enterprise controls. You can still last several months. Microsoft is also touting ence. The new SharePoint news feed handles
store files to your local machine and change the touch screen functionality and a con- threaded discussions and more of the social
the settings to make that the default, but Mi- sumerized user interface, which it hopes will features you’d expect, such as the ability to
crosoft wants to make that the last choice on align with the Metro user interface of Windows “like” a post, mention another user by typing
the list. SkyDrive, SharePoint, and other Web lo- 8 to make Microsoft relevant on tablets. Mi- the @ symbol, and type # for suggested hash
cations for storing documents come first be- crosoft CEO Steve Ballmer described this ver- mark tags. You develop feeds by following peo-
cause, when they’re stored on the Web or your sion of Office as “fast and fluid and touchable.” ple, topics, tags, documents, or groups. Share-
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 7
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Table of Contents
Point is gaining group collaboration functionality,
which it never really had before.
Since some of the main things people share on
SharePoint are Office documents, the news feed lets
you preview documents by paging through a pres-
entation without the need to open it in PowerPoint,
for example.
Office 15 will eventually come to market as Office
2013, for those who install it as traditional software,
or as an update to the Office 365 subscription service.
Microsoft isn’t saying when the software will be avail-
able or at what price.
Microsoft Office is being challenged in business and
consumer markets by Google Apps, which includes a
suite of Web-based office productivity apps, so Mi-
crosoft is working to show the value of combining
cloud services with its traditional desktop software.
Office 365 includes Web-based document viewers
and editors that work much like the document edi-
tors in Google Apps, but they’re positioned as alter-
natives for quick access rather than the primary mode
of interaction.
Office is taking another cue from the online world
by creating an apps market for each of its products.
These apps are based on Web standards—HTML5,
JavaScript, OAuth, and REST—together with Office-
specific APIs, so they’ll work in Web and desktop
modes. —David F. Carr, TheBrainYard.com (dcarr@techweb.com)
informationweek.com
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Table of Contents
SOCIAL MARKUP LANGUAGE
Oracle To Acquire Involver As Next Step In Broader Plan
The duel between Oracle and Salesforce.com that provide a consistent experience across applications, which its customers can modify,
to acquire social and collaboration software multiple touch points,” Involver CEO Don Beck and a Visual SML tool for developers.
continues, with Oracle’s planned purchase of said in a blog post on the Oracle acquisition. Oracle and Salesforce have fallen into a pat-
Involver and Salesforce’s pending acquisition While there may be some overlap between tern of making news in this area, one after the
of GoInstant. Vitrue and Involver, Oracle is particularly inter- other. They compete in customer relationship
Oracle announced an agreement to pur- ested in the latter’s Social Markup Language management, with the emphasis shifting to
chase Involver on July 10, and the deal is ex- development platform, which gives Web de- online and social sales and customer service.
pected to close this summer. Oracle declined signers and developers greater freedom over GoInstant disclosed July 9 that it has agreed to
to discuss its plans for the company beyond the content they create to be embedded in so- be acquired by Salesforce. Details on the deal
what was published on its website. cial sites. Involver provides a library of social haven’t been announced, but some reports
Oracle bought Vitrue, another social market- put the purchase price at more than $70 mil-
ing tools purveyor, in May for a reported $300 lion. GoInstant’s co-browsing software makes
million. Oracle also recently purchased Collec- What Oracle Gets it possible for a customer service representa-
tive Intellect, a maker of social media monitor- >> INVOLVER’S Social Markup Language tive to browse a website with a customer—not
ing software geared to tracking customer com- integrates APIs and services through screen sharing, but as a shared session
ments and complaints, as part of a broader >> VISUAL SML can be used to quickly create where the representative can help.
“customer experience” strategy. social media pages This pattern has been intensifying in the last
Like Buddy Media, which Salesforce agreed to >> CONVERSATION SUITE makes it possible two years, as Salesforce stepped up its focus on
to listen and reply to comments at scale
buy in June for $689 million, and Vitrue, Involver social business with the introduction of Chat-
helps marketers create landing pages and ap- >> CUSTOMERS include Facebook, Mogo ter and the acquisition of Radian6. Oracle
Finance, and the White House
plications that can be embedded on Facebook countered with the acquisition of RightNow, in
and other social media websites. “Social-savvy >> TECHNOLOGY supports multiple part for its ability to connect and service cus-
languages, mobile devices
customers expect brands to build social cam- tomers through social media interaction.
paigns that are engaging, easy to navigate, and —David F. Carr, TheBrainYard.com (dcarr@techweb.com)
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 9
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VIRTUALIZATION
Exec Shake-Up Hints At Data Center’s Future
When I interviewed EMC president Pat Gel- increasingly focused on selling software used
singer in May, he laughed when I pointed out to manage virtualized data centers.
that the way he described automated data The shuffle occurs as VMware’s growth, while
center management sounded a lot like what still impressive, may be cooling. VMware’s pre-
VMware CTO Steve Herrod was calling the liminary results for its second quarter show rev-
“software-defined data center.” enue of $1.12 billion for the first quarter of 2012,
“You’re right,” Gelsinger said. “Maybe I should
sit down with Steve and talk about aligning
up 22% over the same quarter last year. Its an-
nual revenue growth last year was 32%, while
[ Gelsinger:
Studied at Intel
our strategies.” the first quarter of 2012 showed growth of 25%. coined to describe a data center that can be
Guess it’s time to have that chat. EMC CEO and chairman Joe Tucci, who will organized more flexibly, with resources com-
Gelsinger has been named CEO of VMware, continue in his roles, said he is changing missioned, reconfigured, or decommissioned
replacing Paul Maritz, who will move into a VMware’s leadership from “a position of through a software management layer. Admin-
chief strategist position at EMC after four years strength.” Changes are needed as “we see a istrators are able to make such changes con-
leading VMware. EMC owns 79% of VMware. transformation in the IT industry unlike any- tinuously without disrupting users. But many
My exchange with Gelsinger spotlights the thing we’ve seen before,” Tucci said during an challenges remain before a data center can be
blurring line between the missions of EMC and analyst conference call. “Organizations are run from the management console of just one
VMware. EMC is a data storage company trying moving to adopt cloud computing that can in- software layer. Data on hundreds or thousands
to play a bigger role in today’s more automated voke the efficiency and agility that comes from of devices will need to be plugged into analyt-
data centers. Companies increasingly want to running IT as a service.” ics software that can draw a picture of how the
manage their data center hardware—storage, Maritz and team positioned VMware as a facility is running as a whole and help make
networking, and servers—as one resource, and leader of that transformation. Now EMC and decisions on how to keep it in trim.
EMC doesn’t want to be stuck providing just VMware need “to become the leader in building When Tucci says “running IT as a service,” he
the storage hardware. VMware is the dominant out the complete, software-defined data center.” is referring primarily to a private, on-premises
server virtualization software provider, but it’s The software-defined data center is a phrase cloud—an environment that lets companies
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Quicktakes
Table of Contents
mimic some of the advantages of speed and data center as virtual appliances, providing stor- ership of 21% to give VMware some inde-
flexibility that public cloud computing ven- age management wherever it’s needed instead pendence—to give VMware room to lead in
dors such as Amazon Web Services offer. Pri- of centralized on EMC-only equipment. EMC is the emerging field of server virtualization.
vate clouds let CIOs get some advantages of still working on executing on the idea. Wells Fargo equity analyst Jason Maynard
cloud computing without the risk of relying Another innovation is to have more auto- thinks the exec shuffle is a step toward unify-
on an outside provider. mated security and network management ing EMC and VMware, a move he calls “in-
built into the management layer, allowing evitable” in a note to investors. One reason:
Conservative Approach greater ease of administration of virtual ma- EMC’s software-defined data center strategy
The EMC-VMware vision for a software-de- chines, Gelsinger said. centers on VMware’s virtualization.
fined data center, in comparison, is a safer, more But for the software-defined data center to Enterprise customers may one day want inte-
conservative approach. Think of it as pulling come about, VMware is going to have to work grated units of hardware and software shipped
legacy systems into a single management con- with other software vendors, including other vir- to them, something like Oracle’s Exadata and
sole without worrying about the organizational tualization software vendors. Elevating Maritz to Exalogic machines, ready to be plugged in.
changes a cloud environment demands, like the parent company may reflect a desire to get Gelsinger’s Intel experience—he led x86 archi-
letting employees self-provision their comput- VMware one step removed from his known spirit tecture development—might give him the right
ing capacity or imposing a strict environment of relentless competitiveness. By putting VMware perspective to take VMware beyond virtualizing
limited to x86 servers. The software-defined under the tutelage of the cool-headed Gelsinger, existing data center hardware and into a new
data center message lets EMC-VMware cater to Tucci may be encouraging VMware staffers to field of integrated virtualization appliances. ”The
both legacy and newly built, cloud-oriented ap- reach out to other vendors. After all, before join- next generation of software-defined data cen-
plications without VMware or EMC needing to ing EMC in 2009, Gelsinger spent 30 years at Intel, ters will be built by combining software with
tell customers which camp they should be in. the ultimate industry partner. He’ll need those standardized hardware building blocks,”
So how might EMC and VMware work more skills to diminish other tech vendors’ fears that a Gelsinger said. ”VMware is uniquely positioned
More On Private Clouds closely together to establish such a data center? software-defined data center is something de- to be the leader in this endeavor.”
Our digital issue explores what’s Look at EMC’s storage applications. Earlier this signed to entrap them. Tucci referred to Maritz will continue on EMC’s board of direc-
needed to implement private
clouds: expertise, automation,
year, EMC said it plans to make its storage man- Gelsinger’s ability to successfully build out an tors, Gelsinger will join the board, and Tucci will
and a willingness to bust silos. agement software “virtualize-able,” meaning ecosystem around a proprietary vendor’s set of keep his roles at least through 2013. ”As long
able to run functions in virtual machines. That technologies as “something he did at Intel.” as I’m in good health, and I am, I’ll be around,”
Download
would let IT move storage functions around the After EMC bought VMware, it yielded own- Tucci said. —Charles Babcock (cbabcock@techweb.com)
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[COVER STORY]
Table of Contents
Storage
Innovation
New scale-out, solid-state,
and cloud-integrated products
may be a better fit for companies
than monolithic systems
By Kurt Marko
F or years, the trend in storage architectures has
been consolidation—bigger, more complex, and
more expensive systems. But the maturation of
flash memory into a cost-competitive storage technology
along with creative approaches that have turned banks of
cheap, commodity disk drives into parallelized, consoli-
dated pools of centrally managed storage are reshaping
the landscape.
Designing enterprise storage architectures is no longer a
matter of choosing the biggest, baddest storage system
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Table of Contents
and bulking up as needed to create complex, Which Applications Are Driving Big Data Needs At Your Company?
monolithic, and hence expensive disk arrays Financial transactions
that try to meet every requirement. Today 58%
storage architects are designing more special- Email
ized systems that make it easier to strike the 58%
right balance between price and performance Imaging data
38%
based on a company’s needs.
Web logs
Storage innovation isn’t just happening in the 35%
usual, predictable areas. Sure, engineers con- Internet text and documents
tinue to find ways to pack more bits on a square 28%
inch of magnetic film. But the real innovation is Call detail records
coming from the long-predicted migration 28%
from magnetic to solid-state electronic storage, Science or research data
accompanied by scale-out architectures. These 26%
new architectures have self-contained arrays, E-commerce
25%
with their own I/O controllers and network in-
Video
terfaces that can be aggregated, adding I/O 24%
processing power and network bandwidth as
Data: InformationWeek 2012 Big Data Survey of 231 business technology professionals, December 2011
you add capacity. They’re often paired with dis-
What’s New In Storage tributed file systems and cloud storage services. performance is the need to manage and pro- shops should develop a strategy for replacing
Our full report on storage In the latest sign of storage innovation, Dell tect big data such as Web clickstreams and cus- high-performance hard disk drives with solid-
innovation is free with
registration. It includes: just last week announced a $60 million fund tomer interactions. But those aren’t the only state storage, and for adding scale-out prod-
> A look at how distributed, to invest in five to 10 early-stage storage start- drivers. Storage needs continue to increase ucts to their storage technology arsenal, par-
parallel, fault-tolerant file ups. The fund is part of the company’s Dell across the board, driven by expanding email ticularly for applications with rapidly growing
systems are moving into
the enterprise
Ventures venture capital arm. and collaboration systems as well as the in- or extreme capacity requirements.
> More storage-related data
The surge in storage innovation is driven by creased use of rich content, particularly video.
from InformationWeek surveys demand as companies struggle to store and Don’t let our use of “innovative” mislead Storage Vendors Answer The Call
manage increasing quantities of data. One de- you: This isn’t bleeding-edge stuff that you To meet this demand, storage vendors are
Download mand driver for more storage space and better should take a wait-and-see attitude toward. IT improving both storage performance and ca-
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 13
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Table of Contents
move toward distributed, scale-out designs for How Are You Using Or Planning To Use Solid-State Drives?
bulk data storage front-ended by solid-state General databases
arrays for an application’s working data set. 61%
Big vendors like EMC, Hewlett-Packard, and Improve overall server performance
Dell have responded to the demand for more 57%
and better storage by buying innovative start- Automated tiered storage
ups: EMC snagged scale-out specialist Isilon, HP 34%
acquired IBRIX and LeftHand, and Dell grabbed Technical applications (financial, scientific)
29%
EqualLogic (another scale-out firm) and Com-
Reduce power consumption
pellent. They’ve also integrated solid-state 27%
technology, largely for caching and auto-tier-
Video or multimedia editing
ing, into their established scale-up products. 21%
Other transaction-heavy software (e-commerce, CRM, ERP)
Performance Vs. Capacity 26%
The classic trade-off when designing stor- Data: InformationWeek 2012 State of Storage Survey of 166 business technology professionals using or evaluating SSDs, January 2012
age systems is performance and speed versus
cost and capacity. Traditional scale-up arrays of products do blend high-capacity architec- All-silicon designs are the leading edge of
like the big iron that EMC has perfected try to tures with high-performance devices in an at- solid-state storage innovation, but the overall
Big Data’s Challenge
accommodate performance and speed as tempt to get the best of both. market has stratified into several performance
Our full report on big data
management is free with well as cost and capacity needs in the same >> Architectures for performance: When tiers. There are the blazingly fast, pure solid-state
registration. It’s packed with box. This approach has led to layering feature it comes to storage performance, it’s all about systems from GridIron, Kaminario, Texas Mem-
useful information, including:
upon feature in systems that are costly and solid-state memory. But the days of just shoe- ory, and Violin. These systems have been built
> The first steps you should take
complex. They’ve become the storage version horning flash memory into legacy disk sub- from scratch without mechanical disks and disk
to manage big data
of sporks, good at both speed and capacity systems are over. Storage innovators have de- controllers. They look nothing like a typical disk
> A rundown of the major players
in the field but not perfect for either. veloped memory systems with controllers, array. Instead, they resemble a server stuffed to
> A look at the economics of big New storage architectures generally try to packaging, and firmware optimized around the gills with flash memory, controlled by soft-
data and the cloud meet one goal or the other, not both. There’s the integrated circuit’s speed, size, and power ware, and married to network interfaces that ex-
still a strong impulse toward the Swiss army efficiency. These systems work around non- pose standard storage protocols to the outside.
Download knife design, though, and a growing number flash memory’s major flaw—poor durability. Then there are the evolutionary, but still fast,
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solid-state drive-based arrays from GreenBytes, Do You Use Cloud Storage Services?
Pure Storage, and SolidFire where the SSDs are
2012 2011
coupled to conventional array controllers.
Yes, for email
These systems stick with disk controllers and 13%
hard disk drive form factors but replace spin- 8%
ning disks with much faster flash-based SSDs. Yes, for archiving
>> Architectures for capacity: Storage sys- 11%
8%
tems designed to provide the most cost-effec-
Yes, for backup and recovery
tive capacity typically use commodity SATA 8%
drives. Storage innovators don’t scale capacity 6%
by adding shelves to a big, monolithic disk No, but we’re considering it
controller like HP’s quintessential MSA arrays. 34%
34%
Instead, new scale-out designs are built
No
around self-contained storage blocks or 43%
nodes, each with its own controller, that can 51%
be deployed independently and incremen- Data: InformationWeek State of Storage Survey of 313 business technology professionals in January 2012 and 377 in November 2010
tally. Capacity is increased by adding more
nodes to a networked cluster. Beyond Solid-State Drives cache from a big, consolidated storage array
The secret sauce for scale-out storage is the The most innovative solid-state designs to the application server. Two other product
use of storage clustering or virtualization have ditched the disk drive entirely, and archi- segments are all-SSD arrays, and hybrid sys-
software. Such software can spread data tecturally look much more like very large tems that use a mix of SSDs, flash modules or
among storage nodes yet still treat a group computer memory systems than a bank of mSATA cards, and conventional hard drives.
of nodes as a unified storage pool through a disks. The solid-state market has evolved into SolidFire offers a scale-out system built com-
common set of metadata. Conceptually, it’s several subcategories. pletely from SSDs. Each storage node is a 1U
similar to RAID, but the atomic storage units The most familiar is the PCIe adapters pop- device sporting 10 SSDs for up to 6 TB of raw
are complete storage nodes. These are what ularized by Fusion-io that serve as embedded capacity. Nodes can be clustered in groups of
Coraid CEO Kevin Brown calls RAIN, redun- flash storage devices. These are often used as five to 100, which when coupled with the sys-
dant array of independent nodes, each of caching devices for conventional storage—a tem’s real-time data compression, deduplica-
which uses RAID on the inside. form of tiered storage that moves the flash tion, and thin provisioning software, yields up
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to 2.4 PB of effective capacity in a single storage pool.
SSDs are showing up in primarily disk-based sys-
tems, too. Nexsan has augmented its scale-out arrays
with a hybrid product that uses DRAM and SSDs to
transparently cache reads and writes, promising per-
formance up to 10 times better than its hard disk
drive-based products. On the low end, Drobo’s re-
cently announced 5D product uses a single mSATA
SSD card as a fast cache while keeping all five drive
bays open for high-capacity drives.
SSDs will continue to have their place, as they build
upon established SATA and SAS storage interface
standards, and are easily integrated into existing
standalone servers and storage arrays. SSD-based sys-
tems, which often use multilevel cell devices and less
sophisticated controllers, also are cheaper per byte
than pure solid-state arrays.
Which brings us to the most basic point of solid-
state storage product differentiation: the type of
memory device employed. Flash memory comes in
two flavors: single-level cell that stores 1 bit per cell,
and multilevel cell that (despite the ambiguous
name) only stores 2 bits per cell, doubling the mem-
ory density of single-level cell chips.
The trade-off here is that multilevel cell has lower
performance, particularly for writes, and is less durable
and reliable. Since each multilevel cell has four elec-
tronic states (corresponding to “0” and “1” for each of
the 2 bits), its bit error rates are higher than the single-
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level design. A subclass of multilevel cell prod- Are You Utilizing Public Cloud Infrastructure Or Storage For Big Data?
ucts, known as eMLC, includes features such as
more memory cell redundancy and better er-
No plans to use or consider for use
ror correction circuitry to reduce error rates.
38%
Turning flash memory chips into a storage sys- Utilizing in production
tem involves several layers of additional circuitry 13%
and software. Every solid-state storage prod-
uct—whether a flash PCIe card, pure solid-state
array, or SSD—uses a controller to manage read- 17%
ing and writing data to the memory chips. Con- Testing some applications
trollers perform a number of important func- 32%
tions, including: error correction; wear leveling Planning to use, but not currently in use
that spreads data out so that all cells are used
equally; memory scrubbing and bad block map- Data: InformationWeek 2012 Big Data Survey of 231 business technology professionals, December 2011
ping to proactively look for bad memory cells
or blocks and eliminate them from the available age can be used either independently by formance, scale-out designs are the way to go.
memory pool; and read and write caching. manually setting up separate LUNs consisting These products can turn a batch of commod-
Some controllers also perform inline data com- of only solid-state devices, or in tandem with ity SATA drives and standard chassis into
pression to reduce the amount of data actually hard disk drives in which the solid-state de- large, redundant, easily expanded and cen-
written to flash and automatically encrypt data. vices act as caches for “hot” data. EMC’s Fast trally managed pools of shared storage.
Solid-state systems sport the features found Cache and Nexsan’s FASTier do this using an Coraid's scale-out products combine a pure
in any storage array. These include RAID for array controller. Other vendors integrate a file Ethernet-based storage protocol and Lego-
SSD or memory module redundancy and sup- system that incorporates automatic caching; like storage blocks and epitomize the new
port of common block and file storage proto- Coraid does this with ZFS in its new ZX series. generation of scale-out design. This approach
cols, and standard Ethernet and Fibre Channel Alternatively, arrays can incorporate a caching is ideal for the big data needs of Coraid’s cus-
network interfaces. software add-on like VeloBit’s HyperCache. tomers, many of which operate multipetabyte
Increasingly, systems allow mixing and systems for everything from video hosting to
matching of solid-state and conventional Scale-Out Is In genome sequencing, Coraid CEO Brown says.
hard drives in the same array. Solid-state stor- When capacity is more important than per- While scale-out systems are often less ex-
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pensive per byte than legacy SAN arrays, their big ad-
vantage is incrementalism: You can start small and
grow big by adding storage blocks. Unlike big iron
scale-up systems, increasing capacity doesn’t require
adding controller cards, network interfaces, and ex-
pansion chassis to existing storage frames. The new
capacity you get by adding storage blocks automati-
cally shows up in the available storage pool on a cen-
tral management console and can be seamlessly
added to existing LUNs and file shares.
A valuable byproduct of scale-out designs is that
their innate I/O performance scales with added capac-
ity. With a consolidated, scale-up approach, you add
capacity by adding drive shelves to an existing con-
troller module, which is responsible for all drive and
network interfaces. But added capacity usually means
added workload and greater network I/O. You can’t
just add expansion units; you need to add processing
capacity (CPU) and throughput (network interfaces).
This means adding modules to the controller itself.
With scale-out designs, there’s no central controller,
and each storage block includes its own CPU and net-
work interface. Adding capacity means automatically
adding I/O throughput since larger scale-out designs
spread I/O across more controller horsepower and
network capacity.
Such scalability across all critical storage perform-
ance parameters—capacity, controller performance,
and I/O throughput—is a big reason scale-out de-
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signs are especially popular in IT organiza- consider public cloud infrastructure or storage port data deduplication to reduce the amount
tions dealing with rapidly growing data sets. for big data applications (see chart, p. 18). of information stored in the cloud and data
Most of Coraid’s customers, which range from Backup services usually provide client soft- encryption to protect data in transit and
cloud service providers to government agen- ware for controlling backup jobs and copying stored on public cloud systems, Marks says.
cies, are doubling their data every year. files to their servers. But for general-purpose
Although initially focused on providing the storage, a big hurdle to use of online services What To Do
best capacity bang for the buck, scale-out prod- is the difficulty of moving data between inter- With new storage products being released
ucts are also being used in hybrid configura- nal systems and the cloud. Cloud storage serv- every month, what’s an IT pro—particularly
tions. For example, Brown says a virtual desktop ices don’t typically support SAN protocols like one in a large company saddled with a sizable
infrastructure implementation might use all iSCSI, and certainly not FCoE. The big infra- investment in big storage systems—to do?
SSD LUNs for boot drives and SATA for home di- structure-as-a-service providers, namely Ama- While that gold-plated storage system seemed
rectories. “You can reserve the high capacity zon Web Services and Rackspace, don’t even like the only reasonable option just a few years
spindles for the long tail of data,” he says. support NAS protocols like NFS or CIFS, al- ago, consider these four steps before you cut a
though many cloud backup services do. purchase order on yet another expansion rack:
Cloud Storage Gateways Cloud storage gateways, which come as ei- 1. Inventory your storage requirements.
Cloud services are rapidly gaining acceptance ther hardware or software appliances, tackle Take stock of your critical applications and
as an alternative to on-site storage for every- this problem, serving as bridges between identify those with high I/O requirements
thing from backup and disaster recovery to SANs and the cloud. They act as storage prox- (typically transaction-based databases) and
email archiving and application development ies sitting inside your data center that look like rapidly growing capacity needs. This informa-
repositories. More than half of respondents to a conventional iSCSI target or NAS device but tion is critical to making best use of your pre-
our 2012 State of Storage Survey are using or can redirect read and write requests to a cloud cious storage dollars and figuring out where
considering cloud storage services (see chart, p. service. Storage gateways like Panzura’s Quick- you might use new storage technologies.
16), with 25% having online storage in their silver give users access to all data, whether 2. Introduce solid-state storage for appli-
project plans for the next year, as reported in cached on the appliance or in the cloud, cations with high I/O requirements. Exactly
the InformationWeek Buyer’s Guide to Cloud through a single name space, says Information- what product you use depends on your
Storage, Backup, and Synchronization. And big Week contributor Howard Marks in naming throughput requirements, size of your data
data could propel another wave of cloud stor- Quicksilver winner of a Best of Interop 2012 set, and your budget. Pure solid-state systems,
age adoption. Our Big Data Survey finds only award. Gateways can incorporate flash or disk such as those from GridIron, Kaminario, Texas
38% of respondents have no plans to use or storage for local caching. They can also sup- Memory, and Violin, offer the best perform-
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 20
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ance but are also the most expensive. For many, an
SSD or hybrid HDD/SSD system, such as SolidFire and
Nexsan, is a reasonable option.
3. Consider introducing SSD adapters as fast caches
into servers hosting I/O-sensitive applications if a new
solid-state system seems like too much. These aren’t ex-
actly plug-and-play products since they require soft-
ware or file system support, but several of them, like
Fusion-io’s ioTurbine, SanDisk’s FlashSoft, STEC’s En-
hanceIO, and VeloBit’s HyperCache, can transparently
cache the most active or I/O-intensive data without
modifying applications and existing disk configurations.
4. Consider moving applications with rapacious
capacity needs off of existing (and expensive) SAN ar-
rays onto scale-out storage nodes. Start small and
grow; that is, after all, a key benefit of the scale-out
philosophy. For example, a 10-TB stack of Gridstore
boxes goes for less than $4,000. Alternatively, Coraid
nodes average about $575 per terabyte, meaning a
nice 100+ TB starter set of three 36-TB storage blocks
sets you back around $60,000. Also consider using
cloud services for data archive, disaster recovery, or
new (but not necessarily long-term) applications.
These steps will get you well on your way to trying
out the new innovative storage products on the mar-
ket and rethinking your long-term approach to storage.
Kurt Marko is an IT pro with broad experience, from chip design to IT
systems. Write to us at iwletters@techweb.com.
informationweek.com
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Table of Contents
Compliance
In The Cloud Era
The 422 respondents to our 2012 Regulatory Compliance Survey
see storm clouds gathering. Here’s how to cope.
By Diana Kelley and Ed Moyle
I
T pros charged with keeping their companies in compliance face challenges that weren’t
even on our radar a few years ago. That’s because fundamental changes in the way companies
consume IT services—led by public cloud computing and expanded outsourcing
relationships—mean we’re on the hook for the security and compliance of more external entities
in the information supply chain. And that brings a whole new set of problems.
To find out how we’re coping, we surveyed 422 business technology professionals, all of whom
qualified for our InformationWeek 2012 Regulatory Compliance Survey by being on the hook for
at least one regulation. We asked about the scope and nature of their compliance strategies, with
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 22
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Table of Contents
a focus on how the new reality impacts over- What Are Your Top Drivers For Compliance Initiatives?
sight and governance of vendors, partners, Fear of legal repercussions or fines
customers, outsourcers, and service providers. 58%
The good news is that the regulatory bur- Strong internal desire to manage risk
den isn’t growing. Thirty-five percent of com- 41%
panies must comply with four or more man- Fear of negative publicity
41%
dates—which is a lot, but the median number
Proactive push to satisfy customer needs or expectations
of regulations IT must address in 2012 is down 33%
slightly from our June 2009 survey. IT teams
Fear of negative audit results from a third-party reviewer
tend to feel less resource-constrained, with al- 31%
most eight in 10 fairly comfortable with their Proactive push to satisfy business partner needs or expectations
resources for compliance. More companies 18%
have successfully aligned their security and We need to fix findings from a previous audit
compliance programs, to the benefit of both. 7%
The bad news is that we can’t get too com- Data: InformationWeek 2012 Regulatory Compliance Survey of 422 business technology professionals, May 2012
fortable. The dynamics of compliance are question is whether we’re doing the challeng- tory requirement under PCI, HIPAA, and mul-
changing as we grant third parties more ac- ing work of actually implementing support- tiple other mandates) scored highest, fol-
Get This And
All Our Reports cess to sensitive and critical data, and IT must ing controls. lowed by application firewalling (a PCI re-
Our full report on regulatory
consider the damage if there is a major secu- And, in fact, the data shows that respon- quirement), identity management (supports
compliance is free with registration. rity breach at one of your key external part- dents are. We listed 13 security technologies numerous access-control requirements across
This report includes 34 pages of ners. Fortunately, there are steps you can take and asked: If you could choose to fund only a broad swath of regulations), and patch man-
action-oriented analysis, packed
with 25 charts. to find and address potential problems. three security controls, which would you se- agement (supports system maintenance
What you’ll find: lect? The majority favor controls that are man- requirements).
> Regulations demanding the
Requirements, Barriers, And Drivers dated by widely adopted regulatory require- In terms of drivers for compliance, fear
most resources and attention We found that policies supporting compli- ments—at the expense of technologies, like looms large—predominantly of legal or reg-
> Desirability ratings for 13 ance are well adopted among respondents— data loss prevention and mobile device man- ulatory action (58%) and negative publicity
security tools think acceptable use and password guide- agement, that are probably on the radar for (41%). This is understandable. From a publicity
lines and pre-employment screening. the larger security team. standpoint, no one wants to make headlines
Download But it’s easy to write a policy. The bigger For example, endpoint protection (a regula- for losing data, and the recent successful
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 23