Intel, Rackspace, OpenStack, and a Cloud for All
I didn’t really get it, back in January 2014, when Intel, Amazon and others made a big noise about slapping the equivalent of an ‘Intel Inside’ sticker on your favourite cloud. Now they’re at it again, with the birth of a new ‘Cloud for All’ initiative, a nudge for OpenStack, and the promise that Intel and Rackspace […]
Amazon iterates, Google partners
Positive cloudy news from two of the big three, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) making some significant improvements to their DynamoDB service and Google signing on as a sponsor of the OpenStack cloud platform. AWS has got this incremental improvement thing down to a fine art, to the extent that too many competitors have stopped […]
Basho extends
Basho, the company behind NoSQL database Riak, announced the Basho Data Platform yesterday. Riak, like so many other NoSQL/ NewSQL/ xSQL tools, was designed to be excellent… at addressing a relatively small problem. Basho (and others in the space) recognise the issue, and know that substantial enterprise adoption requires either a tool that can address […]
State of the Stack v4 – OpenStack In All It’s Glory
I gave the seminal State of the Stack presentation at the OpenStack Summit. This is the 4th major iteration of the deck. This particular version took a very different direction for several reasons: Most of the audience is well steeped in OpenStack and providing the normal “speeds and feeds” seemed pedantic There were critical unaddressed […]
Introducing CoprHD (“copperhead”), the Cornerstone of a Software-Defined Future
You’ve probably been wondering what I’ve been working on post-acquisition and yesterday you saw some of the fruits of my (and many others) labor in the CoprHD announcement. CoprHD, pronounced “copperhead” like the snake, is EMC’s first ever open source product. That EMC would announce open sourcing a product is probably as big a surprise […]
Interview With an AWS Cloud Champion
Allow me to introduce a good friend, Peter Sankauskas, who I met through the AWS cloud community. Our level of cloud experience evolved with the expansion of the cloud, Amazon in particular, and we have both become prominent members of the AWS community. Having learned more about open source and development, I’d like to focus on the […]
Twitter, DataSift, platforms
Twitter, DataSift, platforms: Many of you will know that Twitter unexpectedly cancelled it’s [sic] contract to allow DataSift to resell Twitter data to 3rd parties. I read the declarations by industry analysts on Twitter that this was “proof that you can’t build a business on somebody else’s platform” and perhaps DataSift should have known better. […]
Amazon binds itself more tightly to the enterprise
Amazon Web Services (AWS) spent years being dismissive of anything that didn’t run in an AWS data centre. Private and hybrid clouds were, we were repeatedly and vehemently told, ‘false clouds.’ There was no value in doing anything cloudy any way but the Amazon way. Non-cloudy workloads were, simply, anachronistic. Left alone, they’d get on with the […]
OpenStack doesn’t scale. Allegedly.
OpenStack doesn’t scale. Allegedly.: Shock news, from a company that wants paid to help you handle complex OpenStack deployments. Scaling is hard. Scaling anything is harder than running it on a server or two. This is not surprising. Most OpenStack deployments tend to be relatively small. This isn’t surprising either. Most comparable public/hybrid cloud deployments tend […]
Hyper-Converged Confusion
I have had my doubts about converged and hyper-converged infrastructure since the Vblock launched, but I eventually came around to understanding why enterprises love the VCE Vblock. I am now starting to think of converged infrastructure (CI) as really “enterprise computing 2.0”. CI dramatically reduces operational costs and allows for the creation of relatively homologous […]
The EMC Federation Joins the OpenStack Foundation
Recently a major set of milestones was reached for the EMC Federation’s involvement with OpenStack. First, EMC and it’s affiliated companies and brands (VMware, VCE, Pivotal, RSA, Cloudscaling) determined a cohesive strategy for engagement with the OpenStack Foundation Board. Second, EMC appointed a VMware employee, Sean Roberts (@sarob), as the official representative of EMC and […]
The 6 Requirements of Enterprise-grade OpenStack, Part 3
In part 1 and part 2 of this series I introduced the core ideas around defining the requirements and then discussed the first four. Today we’ll discuss the final two requirements and tie it all together. Onwards and upwards! Requirement #5 – Scalable, Elastic, and Performant Enterprise-grade has to mean something. In the past, enterprise-grade […]
The 6 Requirements of Enterprise-grade OpenStack, Part 2
In part 1 of this series earlier this week, I introduced The 6 Requirements of Enterprise-grade OpenStack. Today, I’m going to dig into the next two major requirements: Open Architectures and Hybrid Cloud Interoperability. Let’s get started. Requirement #3: Open Architectures & Reducing Vendor Lock-in We already covered building a robust control plane and cloud […]
The 6 Requirements of Enterprise-grade OpenStack, Part 1
Introduction OpenStack is an amazing foundation for building an enterprise-grade private cloud. The great OpenStack promise is to be the cloud operating system kernel of a new generation. Unfortunately, OpenStack is not a complete cloud operating system, and while it might become one over time, it’s probably best to look at OpenStack as a kernel, […]
Is Your Mobile Strategy A Coconut Or Banana?
Don’t climb the coconut tree, when a banana will do just fine. My team and I spend a lot of time talking to customers about their mobile strategy. Generally, we hear the same two things: Either,customers don’t know where to start with mobile, or their strategy involves solving too many things (security, integration, etc) to […]
