Equinix Achieves Microsoft Gold Cloud Platform Status

Equinix, Inc. has announced that it has achieved Microsoft Gold Cloud Platform status via its Equinix Professional Services (EPS) organization. This designation reinforces Equinix’s ongoing commitment to delivering Microsoft hybrid cloud to its customers inside a global footprint of International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers. Since Equinix began offering direct access to Microsoft Azure in 2014, it has seen significant growth in the amount of enterprise customers developing hybrid and multi-cloud deployments across five continents including North America, South America, Asia, Europe and Australia. Equinix currently offers direct connections to Microsoft Azure via the Equinix Cloud Exchange™ in 20 metros around the world.

Equinix’s Gold Competency status was awarded in recognition of its expertise in the areas hybrid cloud enablement through EPS. Hybrid cloud continues to be a top priority for enterprise CIOs. In fact, based on results from IDC’s 2017 CloudView Survey, nearly 70% of cloud users expect that within two years the majority of their IT capabilities will be delivered through some form of cloud service — public, private, or hybrid. Yet the path to the hybrid cloud can be technically challenging. Through EPS and Equinix’s ability to provide direct access to Microsoft Azure via the Equinix Cloud Exchange, Equinix helps its enterprise customers advance their cloud strategies and capitalize on these cloud benefits by seamlessly incorporating cloud services into their existing architectures.

“Hybrid cloud is revolutionizing the way enterprises do business, and Equinix is committed to empowering our customers to deploy high-performance, scalable and secure hybrid cloud solutions on a global scale. A critical component of this is interconnectivity to Microsoft Azure and Office 365 platforms inside our vast platform of data centers. We are honored to have reached Gold partner status with Microsoft, and look forward to providing additional ways for our global customers to achieve improved performance of their cloud-based applications,” said Bob Breynaert, global managing director, Microsoft strategic alliance, Equinix.

Microsoft Gold certification, provided to a select group of partners who demonstrate that they meet strict criteria, is the highest level of certification for companies that are part of the Microsoft partnership program. Companies, such as Equinix, that attain this status must provide successful client references and demonstrate that they have developed innovative products and solutions based on Microsoft technologies. Equinix has been aligned with Microsoft for many years to provide high-level interconnection and global access to Microsoft Azure. Equinix will also be expanding its role as a critical partner in Microsoft hybrid cloud solutions by integrating Microsoft Azure Stack into its interconnection offerings.

“We are incredibly proud to have achieved Gold Cloud Platform status. The recipe for our accomplishment ultimately stems from the right mix of a number of symbiotic ingredients: Equinix’s hybrid cloud enabling interconnection platform with unprecedented global reach, Microsoft’s reputable cloud service offerings, the exceptional quality of work delivered by our Professional Services organization, and last but not least, our extremely innovative customers. Teaming with a pioneering organization like Microsoft is instrumental in being able to deliver end-to-end solutions that quickly deliver business results and satisfy the evolving needs of our customers,” said Ryan Mallory, vice president, global solutions enablement, Equinix.

With Equinix, applications and workloads operating in a hybrid cloud are optimized for business value. By directly and securely connecting to Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Azure Stack inside Equinix, customers can take advantage of:

• Superior application performance and user experience
• Enhanced compliance by connecting privately to Microsoft Azure and keeping data within region, without going over the public internet
• Increased cloud security, by bypassing the public internet

EPS offers practical guidance and proven solutions to help enterprise customers optimize and future-proof their data center architecture and cloud journey. EPS provides hands-on experience in assessing, enabling, migrating, optimizing, planning, designing, testing and deploying IT infrastructure, networks and cloud architectures.

*Source: IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2017 Predictions; Doc # US41863916, Nov. 2016

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Rackspace Named A Leader In Hosted Private Cloud Services

Rackspace has announced that it was named a leader in the Forrester Research, Inc. June 2017 report, The Forrester Wave™: Hosted Private Cloud Services, North America, Q2 2017. The report evaluated nine vendors based on 33 criteria, including current offering, strategy and market presence. Rackspace was ranked above all vendors in strategy and automation capabilities for its Rackspace OpenStack Private Cloud offering.

According to the report, “Rackspace enjoys a highly visible market position by virtue of its lengthy history in the managed hosting segment, OpenStack contributions and close partnerships with the leading hyperscale public cloud providers … Although its current offering is strong, Rackspace stands out by virtue of its customer-centric, ‘Fanatical Support’ strategy as well as its coexistence with hyperscale providers through management and migration services.” Additionally, customer references contacted during the evaluation called out Rackspace for “its superior self-service control options relative to other evaluated solutions, describing it as best-in-class.”

Rackspace scored highest among vendors in the strategy category for its Rackspace® OpenStack® Private Cloud, which Rackspace believes indicates the strength of its go-to-market strategy and future vision for hosted private cloud services. The independent research firm evaluates strategy using eight criteria, and Rackspace received the highest score possible in three of these criteria including: business technology vision, market approach and partner ecosystem.

In addition, Rackspace received the highest score in the automation capabilities criterion within the current offering category, and was among the vendors that scored the highest for self-service portal and user interface, integration strength, service level agreements (SLAs), storage and contract agreements.

“I believe that Rackspace’s position in this report further validates that it is the clear market leader in the OpenStack private cloud space,” said Scott Crenshaw, SVP and GM of OpenStack and Microsoft clouds at Rackspace. “In my view, our positioning is a testament to our strategy to deliver OpenStack private clouds as a service, providing self-service tools and an industry-leading 99.99% API uptime SLA. As a co-founder of OpenStack, Rackspace is well positioned to enable customers of all sizes to succeed through operational expertise gained from more than one billion server hours managing OpenStack clouds at scale. We are proud to be named a leader in this report and will continue to innovate and lead by providing industry-leading SLAs, world-class economics and a revolutionary, utility-based private cloud consumption model.”

Rackspace delivers a broad portfolio of managed private cloud solutions that support multiple platforms including OpenStack, VMware® Private Cloud, and Microsoft® Private Cloud. These private cloud solutions give customers the agility, scalability and efficiency of the public cloud, with the greater levels of control and security of a single-tenant, dedicated environment.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

DataCore Chooses JULABO For Software-Defined Storage

DataCore Software has announced that SANsymphony™ was chosen by JULABO GmbH as the software-defined storage platform best suited to support its flexible virtual infrastructure. JULABO, a Germany-based worldwide provider of high-quality temperature control solutions, chose SANsymphony to ensure business continuity and high performance of VMware vSphere virtual machines synchronized across German and U.S. data centers. The VMs support Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft SQL Server and Matrix42 software and workspace management applications. A JULABO data center in Allentown, Pennsylvania mirrors the German headquarters systems located in the Black Forest using DataCore replication software and Riverbed WAN technology.

“The complete infrastructure project was implemented and supports the network, servers and storage using DataCore SANsymphony cost-effectively. The entire project was carried out at the same cost as what would we would have paid for storage alone if we had chosen a major storage hardware provider,” said Jürgen Jonescheit, CIO JULABO GmbH.

JULABO GmbH is one of the foremost providers of high-quality, reliable and high-performance “Made in Germany” temperature control solutions for high-tech industries. With 10 branch offices on three continents and more than 400 employees, the central IT team provides support for Microsoft Dynamics ERP and other business-critical applications.

JULABO was faced with the need to move data between its remote sites and to headquarters, while also supporting rapid growth and new business requirements in its local markets. Growing workloads caused increased demands for high availability and greater flexibility, prompting it to implement a comprehensive virtual infrastructure across the entire organization. Today JULABO maintains mirrored computer centers in two different sites, protected with various fire compartments, as well as a third computer center located to support off-site storage of backups. All of the sites are connected via a high-performance fibre channel network.

Parallel I/O, Fusion-io and High-Speed Caching Drive 5x Performance Increase

DataCore partner and system integrator Leitwerk AG was commissioned to implement VMware vSphere and DataCore SANsymphony on the main site. Today all systems are virtualized, with workloads running across 170 virtual machines on redundantly designed VMware ESX servers on HP Proliant hardware, each with 768 GB RAM and 16 cores.

SANsymphony also runs on an HP Proliant and virtualizes 50TB of storage capacity (SAS, SATA, SSD/flash) while providing synchronized highly available data to applications. DataCore provides auto failover protection and high availability to ensure accessibility to the two HP D2700 disk shelves. In addition to DataCore’s high-speed caching, Fusion-io PCIe flash memory cards were integrated within the DataCore software-defined storage nodes, providing cost-effective performance by using DataCore auto-tiering to manage and optimize performance and resource utilization.

DataCore’s Parallel I/O technology leverages multi-cores to improve I/O performance and response times needed by demanding applications by processing I/O requests in parallel. JULABO estimates that, in comparison with hardware-bound architecture, DataCore has resulted in a five-fold increase in performance. Up to 40,000 IOPS with 64K blocks were achieved during tests under realistic real-world conditions.

“Hardware solutions were not able to achieve the DataCore performance results and value, even with twice the number of spindles,” Jonescheit added.

“We chose DataCore because of its excellent price/performance ratio and its outstanding technical design. Good examples are the automatic failover for high availability and auto-tiering for performance. We have put this functionality into practice successfully. However, the flexibility resulting from hardware independence does not only have technical and functional advantages. It also allows us to flexibly extend our infrastructure cost-effectively to maximize our economic efficiency, as we are now vendor-independent,” Jonescheit concluded.

Benefits at a glance:

• DataCore reduces storage-related costs by 50%.

• Performance has improved 5-fold.

• Storage-related failures were reduced by 90%.

• Time spent on routine administrative tasks was reduced by 90%.

• Planned downtime (data migrations, upgrades, updates) was reduced by over 95%.

• DataCore managed to convert 50% of unused storage space into available free storage capacity.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Cloud Business Communications Growing By 23% Per Year

New Q1 data from Synergy Research Group shows that the cloud business communications market is growing at an annualized rate of 23%, as strong UCaaS adoption continues to drive the market. Retail UCaaS services account for well over 70% of the total market, though the smaller wholesale UCaaS segment is growing considerably more strongly. The balance of the market comprises cloud communications (virtualized call control and UC applications), which are growing at a similar rate to retail UCaaS. The total cloud communication market is now generating revenues in excess of $2 billion per year. RingCentral is the market leader based on quarterly revenues and has been consistently growing its market share, thanks to leadership of retail UCaaS and a strong position in wholesale UCaaS. It is followed by 8×8, Mitel and ShoreTel.

Retail and wholesale UCaaS business suite services now generate revenue of well over $1.7 billion on an annualized basis. These include private, public and hybrid cloud service offerings. Public UCaaS is the largest of the three sub-segments and is also growing the most rapidly. Overall the cloud business communications market continues to be heavily concentrated in the United States, which accounted for 80% of total revenues in the first quarter of the year.

“UCaaS continues to be a force for change within the business communications market,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and chief analyst. “Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past and consequently we are seeing continued erosion of on-premises PBX-based systems. Clearly these trends will continue over the next few years.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

IBM Launches New Service For Hybrid Cloud Networks

IBM has launched a new offering designed to help companies more efficiently manage applications and services across a hybrid cloud environment by gaining real-time visual insights on the performance of supporting infrastructure.

Agile Service Manager for IBM Netcool Operations Insight will help companies in industries rapidly moving applications to the cloud — such as telecommunications and financial services — better monitor changes in their underlying systems so they can avoid customer service disruption. It’s among the only offerings in the IT industry to provide a detailed topology of infrastructure across a broad set of domains, including different public clouds and on-premises systems, with both real-time updates and historical views.

By having this view of virtual and physical resources, companies can now better manage applications and services deployed across highly distributed and increasingly complex hybrid cloud networks. Agile Service Manager also can help companies prevent and more quickly resolve problems by providing context about the resources that underpin a hybrid cloud network. This is especially important for companies where applications put significant demands on network resources while requiring continuous uptime to meet customer expectations.

For example, a communications service provider could use IBM Netcool Operations Insight with Agile Service Manager to support launching and scaling a new, cloud-based video conferencing service. As the company expands use of the conferencing service, Agile Service Manager could provide real-time insights about the infrastructure supporting the new service, such as response time of specific servers and capacity of storage, letting the company know if these assets are meeting customer needs.

“In today’s fast-changing marketplace, companies are under increasing pressure to roll out new and enhanced applications for customers,” said Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Hybrid Cloud. “Agile Service Manager gives valuable new insights about what is going on in the network and how it is impacting service quality and customers in real time.”

Companies can use Agile Service Manager to present a configurable topology view that shows the relationships and states of resources both in real time and within a defined time window. Agile Service Manager extends the capabilities of IBM Netcool Operations Insight, an analytics driven software that helps organizations gain actionable insights from the massive amounts of operational data generated from their hybrid cloud environments.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Equinix Partners With Alibaba Cloud

Equinix, Inc. has announced a collaboration with Alibaba Cloud to provide enterprises with direct, scalable access to Alibaba Cloud via the Equinix Cloud Exchange™ in the company’s Hong Kong, Silicon Valley, Sydney, and Washington, D.C., International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers, with the addition of Frankfurt and London available soon.

The cloud computing market continues to grow rapidly in Asia, and specifically China. According to the U.S. International Trade Administration, the Chinese cloud market is expected to grow at 40% per year through 2020, reaching $20 billion. Access to Alibaba Cloud is critical for multinational customers looking to expand their cloud-based applications into this growing region in a secure and high-performing manner. By providing multi-national enterprise customers with secure and direct access to Alibaba Cloud, Equinix delivers connectivity to the full suite of Alibaba cloud services to enterprises. Furthermore, Alibaba Cloud Express Connect enables companies to leverage the extensive Alibaba Cloud network in mainland China. 

“As one of the world’s leading and fastest growing cloud computing companies, Alibaba Cloud represents a significant partnership for Equinix as we continue to empower businesses around the globe to build secure, private clouds, without compromising network and application performance. We are thrilled to offer direct access in markets across the U.S., Asia and Europe, and look forward to bringing additional markets online in the near future,” said Greg Adgate, vice president of global technology partners and alliances, Equinix.

With the addition of direct access to Alibaba Cloud on Cloud Exchange in these new markets across Asia Pacific, EMEA and the Americas, Equinix now offers private access to Alibaba Cloud in five markets. The company previously offered access in its Singapore IBX. Alibaba Cloud is also a colocation customer in Dubai with Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company PJSC (“du”).

“The global reach of Equinix Cloud Exchange makes it simple for Alibaba Cloud to access new markets. We are pleased to provide greater value and bring our services closer to enterprises by leveraging Equinix’s powerful, on-demand cloud connectivity, and in particular to provide greater connectivity to the Chinese market,” said Yeming Wang, deputy general manager of Alibaba Cloud Global.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Talend Unveils Multi-Cloud Big Data Integration Solution

Talend has unveiled a new version of its Talend Data Fabric platform that is optimized to manage cloud and multi-cloud enterprise IT environments. Talend Summer ’17 helps seamlessly manage information across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudera Altus, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Snowflake platforms, enabling customers to rapidly integrate, cleanse, and analyze data to fuel innovation and gain a competitive edge.

As businesses continue to evolve their cloud strategies, many find that it’s imperative to use services from several different cloud providers to deliver value across their business units. In fact, according to IDC, more than 50% of IT organizations already utilize a multi-cloud approach and another 20% have plans to implement [a multi-cloud strategy] within 12 months.¹

“Companies are adopting cloud platforms at an unprecedented pace and as they do so, they are selecting different platforms to address varying business needs,” said Ashley Stirrup, CMO, Talend. “In this environment, CIOs must design their IT infrastructure with agility to deliver in a hybrid, multi-cloud world. Using Talend Data Fabric, companies can develop data pipelines on any of the leading cloud platforms with peace of mind in knowing whatever they develop will be able to run on the latest cloud and open source innovations.”

The Summer ’17 release of Talend Data Fabric allows customers to access a rich and growing library of Talend native cloud components, using intuitive drag-and-drop visual tools to build big data workflows that run in nearly any cloud, almost anywhere. Adding to its already robust support for AWS, the new version of Talend Data Fabric includes new capabilities for Cloudera Altus, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Snowflake that allow customers to:

• Speed Multi-Cloud Pipeline Development: Talend Summer ‘17 delivers a range of new connectors for Azure, Cloudera and Google Cloud that span Big Data, cloud data warehousing, NoSQL, and messaging platforms. Additionally, the newest version of Talend Data Fabric includes the industry’s first support for Cloudera Altus, a platform-as-a-service offering that simplifies customers’ construction and deployment of intelligent data pipelines on Cloudera — minimizing the need for operational support.
• Accelerate Migration to the Cloud: Talend Summer ’17 helps rapidly migrate on-premises data to the cloud, so customers can simply and intuitively build cloud data warehouses, power richer analytics, and speed time-to-insight. With this release Talend delivers the fastest bulk loader connector for Snowflake that accelerates data migration by up to 20X. Using data quality and visual extract, transform and load tools, Talend reduces the time needed to migrate on-premises and cloud data to Snowflake.
• Build Once, Use Everywhere: Talend Summer ’17 provides the flexibility and portability to take development work designed for one cloud platform and reuse it with other cloud platforms. This is designed to help customers rapidly adopt new innovations in cloud services and future-proof current development work. Consequently, businesses can rapidly combine and analyze data in new ways to innovate faster, while reducing their maintenance and development costs.
• Delivering Data Quality with Machine Learning at Big Data Scale: As data stores grow, customers must find new ways to clean and combine data at scale with even less human intervention. Talend Summer ’17 utilizes Apache Spark-powered machine learning algorithms to automate and accelerate data matching and cleansing, improving scale, performance and accuracy. Over time, these algorithms monitor decisions made by data curators to become more intelligent and accurate. These new algorithms and machine learning capabilities are designed to work seamlessly with Talend’s intuitive, role-base Data Stewardship app, to enable continuous improvement within each data quality model.

Enterprises worldwide, across all industries use Talend together with our partners’ products to create truly data-driven solutions.

“Talend and Snowflake have a solid partnership that continues to benefit our joint customers,” said Walter Aldana, Snowflake’s vice president of Alliances. “With Talend’s newest Snowflake connector, enterprises will see even more efficiencies when moving data into Snowflake. Talend’s architecture capitalizes on Snowflakes’ parallel loading capabilities, which enables our joint customers to easily load a diverse set of data types so they can jumpstart their cloud data warehousing projects much faster.”

1 “Multi-cloud Infrastructure as a Service as a Public Cloud Adoption Pattern,” IDC, August 2016, Doc # WC20160825.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Altair And Daffron Partner

Altair has signed an agreement with Daffron & Associates to expand the reach of Envision; its cloud-based business intelligence solution, in the utilities market. Envision will be integrated with Daffron utility software solution and power its data analytics and visualization capabilities to enable utility companies to gain insight from their data.

“Daffron & Associates is very excited to collaborate with Altair. We appreciate Altair’s commitment to the utility industry, their deep experience in this field, and their willingness to help achieve the goals of Daffron and its customers,” said Paul Kluba, chief operating officer, Daffron. “Data analytics is integral to Daffron’s customers, who interact with large amounts of data and need to evaluate data quickly and derive strategic insight to gain a holistic view of their organization.”

Daffron provides tightly integrated utility software solutions, including CIS/billing, customer self-service–web and mobile, financial management, materials and workflow management, prepaid metering, meter data management, and field solutions. In addition to software, Daffron provides application and data hosting as well as information technology services.

Envision provides secure and free-form data visualization in real time. The cloud based solution is scalable throughout the enterprise in real time thanks to its innovative licensing system. Integrated with Daffron, Envision will enable Utilities with easy customer billing analysis, meter data aggregation, rate schedule simulation & optimization, assets and outage management, and more.

“It is my pleasure to welcome Daffron to our collaborative ecosystem,” said Joe Sorovetz, senior vice president for enterprise business, Altair. “Daffron is known for their strength in process-driven user interfaces and highly integrated functional systems, and this association adds strong support for our business, offering our Utility community broader data analytics capabilities that will help reduce manual processes and overall costs.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Q&A: Hortonworks and IBM double down on Hadoop

Hortonworks and IBM recently announced an expanded partnership. The deal pairs IBM’s Data Science Experience (DSX) analytics toolkit and the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), with the goal of extending machine learning and data science tools to developers across the Hadoop ecosystem. IBM’s Big SQL, a SQL engine for Hadoop, will be leveraged as well.

InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently met with Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden and IBM Analytics general manager Rob Thomas at the DataWorks Summit conference in Silicon Valley, to talk about the state of big data analytics, machine learning, and Hadoop’s standing among the expanding array of technologies available for large-scale data processing.

InfoWorld: What does IBM Data Science Experience bring to the Hadoop Data Platform?

Thomas: We launched Data Science Experience last year and the idea was we saw a change coming in the data science market. Traditionally, organizations were either SPSS users or SAS users but the whole market was moving toward open languages. We built Data Science Experience on Jupyter. It’s focused on Python data scientists, R, Spark, Scala programmers. You can use whatever language you want.

And you can use whatever framework you want for the machine learning underneath. You can use TensorFlow or Caffé or Theano … It’s really an open platform for data science. We focus on the collaboration, how you get data scientists working as a team as part of doing that. Think about Hadoop. Hadoop has had an enormous run in the last five to six years in enterprises. There is a lot of data in Hadoop now. There is not super value for the client by just having data there. Sometimes, there is some cost savings. Where there is super value for the client is they actually start to change how they’re interacting with that data, how they’re building models, discovering what’s happening in there.  

InfoWorld: IBM has a well-known experience with machine learning with Watson. Hortonworks has positioned Apache Spark and Hadoop as its entrance into the machine learning space. Can you discuss the company’s future plans for machine learning, AI, and data science?

Bearden:  It’s going to be through the DSX framework and the IBM platforms that come through that. Hadoop and HDP will continue to be the platform. We’ll leverage some of the other processing platforms collectively like Spark and there’s a tremendous amount of work that IBM’s done to advance Spark. We’ll continue to embody that inside of HDP through YARN but then on top of all of these large data sets, we’ll leverage DSX and the rest of the IBM tool suite. We expressed that DSX and the rest of the tool suite from IBM for machine learning, deep learning, and AI will be our strategic platforms going forward and we’re going to co-invest very deeply to make sure all the integration is done properly. That goes back to being able to bring all resources into a focused distribution so that we can not only innovate horizontally but integrate vertically.

InfoWorld: InfoWorld ran a story late last year claiming that Hadoop had peaked, that other big data infrastructure including Spark, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Kafka were marching past it. InfoWorld asked Hortonworks CTO Scott Gnau a similar question last year. What can you say about the continued vitality of Hadoop?

Bearden: We’re a public company and we’re continuing to grow at 24 to 30 percent a year. The way we get paid is by bringing data under management. That’s one vector and it’s just a quantitative data point. I think what you have to then revert backwards to is, is the volume of data growing in the enterprise? According to just about any CIO you’ll speak with or any of the traditional industry analysts, and I think Rob will back this up, about every 18 months the volume of data doubles across the enterprise. About 70 to 80 percent of that data is not going to go into the traditional data platforms, the traditional SQL transactional EDW, etc., and they’re looking for that new area to come to rest, if you will. Hadoop is the right platform and architecture for that to happen. That’s why this partnership is so important. We’re great at landing that data, bringing it under management, securing it, providing the governance, etc., and being able to drive mission-critical marks on some pretty good economics. But what the enterprise really wants is the ability to gain insight from it, to get access to it, to have visibility, to be able to act on a decision and create an action that drives value for an application.

Thomas: Maybe the hype peaked but the hype always peaks when the hard work starts. I think Hadoop is still in its early days. We’ll look back at some point and it will be like sitting here in 1992 saying relational warehouses have peaked. It was just the start. We’re in the same place but the hard work has begun, which is—all right, now we’ve got the data there, how do I actually integrate this across my whole data landscape, which is why Scott talked a lot about Big SQL and what we’re doing there. That’s a really hard problem and if people don’t solve that then there’s probably a natural limitation to how much they could do with Hadoop. But together we solve that problem to the point of the whole discussion on data science, data governance. When you bring those things to Hadoop and you do it at scale, it again changes the opportunity for how fast and how widely Hadoop can be deployed.

InfoWorld: What’s going to happen with the evolution of YARN? What’s next on the roadmap for it?

Bearden: The notion of containers and having the ability to then take a container-based approach to applications and being able to do that as an extension through YARN is actually part of the roadmap today. We published that and we think that opens up new use cases and applications that can leverage Hadoop.

You go back to the ability to get to existing applications, whether it be fraud detection, money laundering, two of the typical ones that you look at in financial services. Rapid diagnostics in the healthcare world, being able to get to better processing for genomics… analyzing the genome for certain kinds of diseases and being able to take those existing algorithms or applications and moving them over to the data via a container approach. You can do that much cleaner with YARN.

InfoWorld: Is there anything else you want to mention?

Thomas: I’d mention just one more point around data governance. We started working with Hortonworks over the last, oh, 18 months around a project called Atlas. I’d say it’s just coming into form as we’ve both been working with a lot of clients and we view it as a key part of our joint strategy around how we’re going to approach data governance. You use data governance for compliance. You use data governance for insights. There’s a big compliance mandate with things like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) that’s happening right now in Europe. I think you’ll see more and more on this topic in the future from us.

Source: InfoWorld Big Data

Report: Hybrid Cloud Becomes A Strategic Imperative

Cloud computing is no longer a decision made solely for tactical reasons like cost savings or ease of implementation. Key strategic business demands — the need for greater business agility, data capabilities, and better customer and user experiences — are compelling companies to embrace cloud systems, according to the Insight-sponsored report by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services.

Respondents are nearly split when it comes to hybrid and private cloud adoption, while total public cloud usage captures only a fraction of the market:

• Hybrid approach with systems hosted in both the public and private clouds (42%)
• Host most of their systems in a private cloud (40%)
• Host most in the public cloud (13%)
• The types of systems most likely to reside in the cloud, include:
• Email and communication tools (54%)
• Billing and invoicing (29%)
• Business intelligence (29%)
• Payroll (26%)
• Customer service (24%)
• Project management (24%)
• Cloud improves company performance

“A company’s IT environment should work for them by enabling them to both run and innovate. Large and small to mid-sized companies need to focus on managing and modernizing their IT infrastructure, so that it becomes a transformative part of their business that can directly improve results,” said David Lewerke, director, Hybrid Cloud Consulting Practice at Insight. “While we knew there were a number of benefits, we wanted to better understand from respondents exactly how cloud systems were impacting their business outcomes.”

The benefits of cloud adoption are even more pronounced among small to mid-sized companies:

For all respondents, nearly half (49%) say cloud or hybrid cloud systems have significantly improved collaboration, followed by business agility and flexibility (45%), their ability to manage, analyze, act on and share data (43%) and their ability to empower employees and create a better user experience (42%).

Methodology

A total of 347 respondents were drawn from the Harvard Business Review audience of readers (magazine/ enewsletter readers, customers, HBR.org users). Twenty-nine percent of respondents were executive management or board members, 28% were senior management; 31% were middle management; 12% came from other grades.

Source: CloudStrategyMag