SHI
Opening Keynote | Mission-Critical Applications in the Cloud – Myth or Reality?
From the Blogosphere
 Did you know 72% of data breaches worldwide the previous year occurred at companies with 100 or fewer employees — a 63 percent increase. However, with unified security solutions, small businesses can gain enterprise-class safeguards at an affordable price.
I just got off the phone wit...Nov. 20, 2012 08:00 AM EST Reads: 596 |
 Inventory levels. Sales results. Negative comments on Facebook. Positive comments on Twitter. Shopping on Amazon. Listening to Pandora. Online search habits. No matter what you call it or what the information describes, it’s all data being collected about you.
Thanks to new technologi...Nov. 19, 2012 07:00 AM EST Reads: 1,399 |
 One of the primary reasons folks use a Load balancer is scalability with a secondary driver of maintaining performance. We all know the data exists to prove that "seconds matter" and current users of the web have itchy fingers, ready to head for the competition the microsecond they exp...Nov. 16, 2012 10:00 AM EST Reads: 1,361 |
 The English language is well known for its subtlety. Sometimes it’s a delight, but on other occasions it can be very frustrating. If I use the term Gothic Architecture you will immediately understand I am describing a style of architecture that flourished in medieval times. And if like...Nov. 16, 2012 08:45 AM EST Reads: 1,207 |
 From time to time WebRenderer is deployed within an Applet. Applets provide a convenient mechanism for launching client applications within the browser. WebRenderer however requires different libraries based on the target platform (Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris) and architecture (32/64...Nov. 15, 2012 10:00 AM EST Reads: 564 |
 Welcome to Part 4 of my series Deploying APM in the Enterprise. In the last installment we covered how you find, test, and justify purchasing an APM solution. This blog will focus on what to do after you’ve made a purchase and started down the path of deploying your coveted APM tool (a...Nov. 15, 2012 08:15 AM EST Reads: 1,013 |
 After spending time at VMware and Cloud Expo last week, I believe that VMware’s lack of full backing for Cloud Foundry software is holding back the entire PaaS market in the enterprise.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of momentum in PaaS despite how very immature the market is. But ...Nov. 15, 2012 07:45 AM EST Reads: 1,351 |
 Could you imagine NASA sending a rocket into space without testing it first? What about a racing team putting a brand new car on the track without taking it for a few laps to test the handling and stability? It seems to me that testing is inherent in every technical field — except for ...Nov. 14, 2012 03:45 PM EST Reads: 602 |
 PCI (Payment Card Industry) enforces Data Security Standards that looks to ensure that ALL companies that process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. This can be a burdensome task unless retailer can leverage the cloud. This article takes a look at...Nov. 14, 2012 08:30 AM EST Reads: 1,201 |
 In the first wave of solid-state storage arrays, we saw commodity style SSDs (solid state drives) being added to traditional storage arrays. This solution provided an incremental benefit in performance over spinning hard drives, however the back-end technology in these arrays was deve...Nov. 14, 2012 08:30 AM EST Reads: 917 |
 I hear people talking about how Solid State Devices (SSDs) have not been successful with or for vendors of storage arrays, particular legacy storage systems. Some people have also asserted that large storage arrays are dead at the hands of new purpose-built SSD appliances or storage sy...Nov. 14, 2012 08:00 AM EST Reads: 1,180 |
 This morning, Chaucer, our relatively new Sheltie puppy, took off with my slippers. I found one lying in his favorite spot almost immediately, but the other had gone missing. I wandered about the house with one slipper in hand while he hid in his kennel, knowing I was angry but not qui...Nov. 13, 2012 10:00 AM EST Reads: 1,834 |
 When load balancing, "fastest" response time is relative. Nov. 13, 2012 09:15 AM EST Reads: 725 |
 User expectations with respect to performance are always a concern for IT. Whether it's monitoring performance or responding to a fire drill because an application is "slow", IT is ultimately responsible for maintaining the consistent levels of performance expected by end-users – wheth...Nov. 12, 2012 07:00 AM EST Reads: 2,247 |
 Do you ever feel like your Windows server is not performing well in the VMware environment, as if it were a sponsor-less contestant in the arena of the annual hunger games? As a VMware admin and consultant I witnessed first hand the fine art of deception for presenting restricted reso...Nov. 9, 2012 01:00 PM EST Reads: 713 |
 Sears plus its acquired entity Kmart belong to Sears Holdings whose goal is to get closer to its customers. That requires big time analytic capabilities. While revenue at Sears has declined from $50B in 2008 to $42B in 2011, rivals like Wal-Mart. Target and Amazon have grown steadily w...Nov. 8, 2012 10:00 AM EST Reads: 2,082 |
 When you’re a kid at the beach, you spend a lot of time and effort building a sand castle. It’s cool, a lot of fun, and doomed to destruction. When high tide, or random kids, or hot sun come along, the castle is going to fall apart. It doesn’t matter, kids build them every year by the ...Nov. 4, 2012 01:00 PM EST Reads: 2,155 |
 This is an industry trends and perspective piece about big data and little data, industry adoption and customer deployment.
If you are in any way associated with information technology (IT), business, scientific, media and entertainment computing or related areas, you may have heard b...Nov. 1, 2012 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,791 |
 At the end of last month the EU released its plans for "Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe". But although the document (s) - just like EU commissioner Kroes in this video - do a good job describing in non-technical terms what cloud is and why Europe should care about...Oct. 31, 2012 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,491 |
 IT spends untold millions of dollars, thousands of man hours for technology designed to solve solutions, but because of complexity, budget shortfalls, lack of expertise or a myriad of other gremlins, too many initiatives never realize their potential. That was before cloud computing an...Oct. 27, 2012 02:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,842 |
 Big Data takes center stage today at the Strata Conference & Hadoop World in New York, the world’s largest gathering of the Apache Hadoop™ community. A key conversation topic will be how organizations can improve data security for Hadoop and the applications that run on the platform. A...Oct. 27, 2012 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,995 |
 As mentioned in Part I of this series, cloud technology has introduced a viable alternative to the practice of creating secondary sites for disaster recovery (DR), promising to save IT organizations hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in infrastructure and maintenance. Wh...Oct. 27, 2012 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,498 |
 On Monday, Amazon Web Services — the leading provider of cloud services — suffered an outage, and as a result, a long list of well-known and popular websites went dark. According to Amazon’s Service Health Dashboard, the outage started out as degraded performance of a...Oct. 26, 2012 11:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,864 |
 The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently published a useful and informative report on cloud computing that provides key guidance for companies using or considering cloud services in the UK. The guidelines intend to help organizations comply with the 1998 Data Protection ...Oct. 26, 2012 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,291 |
 In the second annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2011-2016), Cisco forecasts global data center traffic to grow fourfold and reach a total of 6.6 zettabytes annually by 2016. The company also predicts global cloud traffic, the fastest-growing component of data center traffic, to grow six...Oct. 26, 2012 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,352 |
 It’s interesting as a parent watching your kids grow up and learn how to do things for themselves. I have 2 boys ages 6 and 7 and they often amaze me and confound me. There are times when I think they are absolutely brilliant and other times where I think that significant amounts of re...Oct. 26, 2012 07:45 AM EDT Reads: 1,381 |
 Today’s data center infrastructure has to be more agile than ever before. It needs to increase efficiency while increasing agility, and providing more and more services.
Having an agile infrastructure lets you change how IT operates. It lets you adapt to growth – even unexpected growt...Oct. 24, 2012 07:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,326 |
 Open Data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at the most, to the requirement for attributes and sharealikes (Open Software Service Definition – OSSD). As a consequence, Open Data should create value and might have a positive impact in ma...Oct. 23, 2012 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,692 |
 A new report from analyst firm Gartner forecasts that IT organizations will spend $232 billion (US) on hardware, software and services related to Big Data through 2016. Some key findings from the report: $5.5 billion in new software sales will be driven directly by demands for new big ...Oct. 23, 2012 08:15 AM EDT Reads: 1,653 |
 Military science has a simple mechanism utilized at almost every level of both tactical and strategic thinking: Pin the enemy down with a distraction (a feint or an actual attack, either way), and then hit them where they’re not looking. This maxim has worked very well from squad level...Oct. 23, 2012 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,363 |
 Nearly everyone has played musical chairs – as a child if not as an adult with a child. When that music stops there's a desperate scrambling to pair up with a chair lest you end up sitting on the sidelines watching the game while others continue to play until finally, one stands alone....Oct. 20, 2012 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,467 |
 Too many IT departments take the stance of "I'll worry about it when I have to worry about it." Problem with security issues is, by then it's too late. Often times maintaining the status quo is as dangerous as doing nothing at all.
In my experience there are two types of enterprise IT...Oct. 19, 2012 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,310 |
 Gartner offered a list of 10 key trends in infrastructure that will affect IT and data centers over the next several years. While some of those trends might seem a little far-fetched, there are several that catch the eye. Here are some of the top trends Gartner sees in the c... Oct. 19, 2012 08:15 AM EDT Reads: 1,942 |
 It is a topic of fascination for me that the high-tech world just plain will not stand still. The changes in automotive technology over the last century, for example, do not match the changes in high tech over the last decade. In addition to the expected on-upsmanship that market leade...Oct. 19, 2012 08:15 AM EDT Reads: 1,759 |
 Whether bees or Martians, science or science-fiction, the notion of a hive mind is one that pops up frequently within the realm of psychology, philosophy, theology, science and, last but not least, technology. A hive mind is one that has a collective memory, sharing information from th...Oct. 19, 2012 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,644 |
 BYOD or Bring Your Own Device has moved from trend to an permanent fixture in today’s corporate IT infrastructure. It is not strictly an IT issue however. Many groups within an organization need to be involved as they grapple with the risk of mixing personal devices with sensitive info...Oct. 19, 2012 07:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,287 |
 There has been an increasing amount of commentary about the growing shortage of Information Security folks. While the reasons for this shortage are manifold and easily explained, that doesn’t change the fact that it exists. Nor the fact that natural sources may well be causing it to wo...Oct. 18, 2012 07:30 AM EDT Reads: 1,538 |
 In case you are not familiar, degrees of separation refer to how you are connected to other people.
When you know somebody directly then you are a first connection, and you are a second degree of separation from people that they are directly connected to. The theory goes that via a mi...Oct. 17, 2012 08:45 AM EDT Reads: 4,435 |
 Mouse gestures are one of those great "add-ons" that enhance browser usability. For those that are not familiar with mouse gestures, they are a browser navigational aid that works via mouse movements. Mouse gestures have been around for some time now and we thought it would be good to ...Oct. 16, 2012 03:25 PM EDT Reads: 721 |
 When moving to the cloud, the four pillars become much less manageable. The amount “much less” implies depends a lot upon your cloud provider, and how you define “cloud”.
Put in simple terms, if you are suddenly struck blind, that does not change what’s in front of you, only your abil...Oct. 16, 2012 05:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,155 |
