Garantia at AWS re:Invent 2013

Garantia Data: Scalalbe and Reliable Redis on Steroids The main challenge of Redis is scalability, assuring reliability for large data sets and overall performance. Over a thousand paying customers make…

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The Cloud in HP’s Cloud (Part 2): HP Discover, the Enterprise and AWS Cloud

imageLast month I attended HP Discover (disclosure: my participation was funded by Ivy World). The IT war already started however HP stands still not taking initiatives and real risks as true leaders should take. At the three-day conference I learned why some companies don’t last and why this IT giant is at a great risk of losing in this new era IT battle. This is a story of a lasting company that might have already lost.
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My 5 Enterprise Cloud Predictions for 2013

imageI believe that this is the year when the enterprise will find its way to the cloud.
The mega Internet sites and applications are the new era enterprises. These will become the role models for the traditional enterprise. IT needs remain the same with regards to scale, security, SLA, etc. However, the traditional enterprise CIO has already set the goal for next year: 100% efficiency.
The traditional CIO understands that in order to achieve that goal, IT will need to start and do cloud, make sure that IT resources are utilized right, and that his teams move fast.

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Cloud Capacity Part 2: Plan Your Consumption

Cloud CapacityIn the first part I presented some basic concepts and an overview of cloud capacity management. cloud capacity discussion has two main aspects:

  1. Infrastructure capacity management by the IaaS vendor to plan capacity of the cloud data-center to optimize utilization and decrease operations costs.
  2. Cloud resources consumption by the cloud consumers  (any IT organization such as a SaaS vendor) including planning capacity demand in order to achieve efficient consumption of the purchased cloud resources. In this part I will discuss this aspect.

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The Basics of Cloud Capacity

Cloud CapacityThe IT capacity plan is derived from the current and future resources utilization for holding, storing and accommodating the software services. It is a given fact that servers’ average utilization in the traditional data center is between 5% and 20%. By contract, when planning capacity in the cloud, the basic working assumption is that, utilization should match the demand at all times and support temporary demand peaks and future trends.
Capacity planning is described by Wikipedia as the

“process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands for its products.” It is also given by the following formula:
(number of machines or workers) × (number of shifts) × (utilization) × (efficiency)

In his CIO’s article about cloud computing capacity, Bernard Golden wrote,
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Who Stole my CPU? A Few Basics on CPU Steal Time

One of the most important features of the cloud is the sharing of resources by multi-tenants.

Without sharing and being able to optimize utilization of resources, the cloud operator can’t provide scalability and support “economies of scale” for its business.

The IaaS public contains its “cloud magic” as well as real hardware such as computing, storage, and network devices. The utilization of these resources should be optimized by meeting demand (by time), hence they must be shared between the cloud consumers.

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ClickSoftware – Great Case of an AWS Cloud Adoption: Part 1, Operations

imageOver the last year I had endless conversations with companies that strive to adopt the cloud – specifically the Amazon cloud. Of those I met, I can say that ClickSoftware is one of the leading traditional ISVs that managed to adopt the cloud. The Amazon cloud is with no doubt the most advanced cloud computing facility, leading the market. In my previous job I was involved in the ClickSoftware cloud initiative, from decision making with regards to Amazon cloud all the way to taking the initial steps to educate and support the company’s different parties in providing an On-Demand SaaS offering.
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IGT: Story of a Leading Cloud Computing Institute

imageNext week, on Oct 23rd in Tel Aviv we welcome the annual conference of IGT – The Israeli Association of Cloud Computing. Started in 2008, this is the 5th year that this international conference takes place in the vibrant city of Tel Aviv located alongside the Jaffa coastline. This year the conference will no longer discuss what is the cloud and how it disrupting the IT world. This year the conference holds two themes: Big Data and SaaS business.

In a discussion I had with Mr. Avner Algom, Founder and CEO of IGT, he noted:

““Every year we strive to bring the international industry leaders and, as our community grows, it just becomes more appealing and it’s easier to get them to come. Without a doubt, the question “What is Cloud?” is behind us. This year’s conference focus is on Big Data and SaaS. These are important issues for cloud companies and cloud business as these are strongly tied together in the cloud”” said Avner Algom, IGT CEO.
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Cloud Security Management – Overview and Challenges

What’s your first priority cloud security concern ?
From an attacker’s perspective, cloud providers aggregate access to many victims’ data into a single point of entry. As the cloud environments become more and more popular, they will increasingly become the focus of attacks. Some organizations think that liability can be outsourced, but no, it cannot! This presentation will answer questions such as what are the key security challenges for new cloud comers. What are the options and how you can start with a safe cloud deployment?
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