September 04, 2014

The Rack Endgame: A New Storage Architecture For the Data Center
To many SDDC is the holy glue of datacenters, the primordial soup. I’m referring to the term introduced by Oparin, not Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles although some datacenters do have most characteristics of a mutant. In reality many virtual infrastructures rest on a disparate set of hardware components. This equipment, typically multi-vendor, is expected to provide deterministic performance levels. Now it’s expected that SDDC will be this soup that transforms into a more mature form. And yet I don’t see this happening soon.


Connected car company Zubie signs deal with Progressive
For Progressive, which has been a pioneer in usage-based pricing, it wants to start getting out of the business of sending customers hardware in order to track their driving habits. Currently under a program called Snapshot, Progressive customers opt in to a device that plugs into their cars’ on-board diagnostics(OBD) ports and shares their driving data with the insurer. They use the device for six months and then send it back. In return, Progressive charges them based on how well they drive, presumably giving them a lower rate on their insurance. (I can’t see someone who gets a bad rate sticking with Progressive.)


Machine Learning – The Engine Behind Big Data Processing
Now we find ourselves in wave three, where the challenge is not only to analyze the data, but do it quickly and deliver as much tailored information as possible without additional personnel. Machine learning has finally hit its stride by helping to solve the challenges associated with rapidly obtaining relevant insights. Especially in the world of unstructured machine data, machine learning is making CIOs think again about what – and when – they can gather insights from their own infrastructure. Today, organizations generate more data in 10 minutes than they did during the entire year of 2003.


How to Unlock the Potential in Your Business Analytics
With its anticipatory shipping, Amazon has taken its understanding of data to the next level. The retail company could conceivably ship products before you even place an order. A forecasting model uses data from your prior Amazon activity, including time on site, duration of views, links clicked and hovered over, shopping cart activity, and wish lists. The algorithm also factors in real-world information from customer telephone inquiries and responses to marketing materials to offer Amazon an in-depth view of user needs and behavior and inform new changes.


Data shows Home Depot breach could be largest ever
"The banks I spoke with in reporting this story say the data they're looking at suggests that the breach probably started in late April or early May. To put that in perspective, the Target breach impacted just shy of 1,800 stores, lasted for approximately three weeks, and resulted in the theft of roughly 40 million debit and credit card numbers. "If a breach at Home Depot is confirmed, and if this analysis is correct, this breach could be much, much bigger than Target," Krebs wrote. Home Depot itself has so far not confirmed a data breach and has only said that it is investigating reports of "unusual activity" involving credit and debit cards used at its stores.


For CFOs, Tech Transition Is A Matter Of When, Not If
Another area that’s often overlooked is the ability to model the long-term impact of your current decisions, particularly for technology companies where there’s a maintenance element to what you’re selling. Having the right tools in place – for example, tools you use to procure products and manage long-term contracts – allows you to spend more time with analytics. The use of big data tools allow you to combine your financial or human resource data with unstructured data from other sources, including social media, compensation and economic or market data, to gain new insights for the business. This will change the way finance professionals work over the next decade.


What Kind of CIOs Will Millennials Make?
In order to understand millennial techies' future buying habits and how they view brands, just look at their approach to consumer goods. Millennials have been bombarded with brands in email advertisements, Web-based marketing, social networks and mobile apps, as well as traditional radio and television, whereas Gen Xers learned about brands mostly from a few vendors that could afford television commercials. "This may have caused millennials to be distrustful of larger brands, because they sense those companies have nothing but an ulterior motive," Thibodeaux says.


Setting up a ruby development VM with Vagrant, Chef, and rbenv
In recent years I've had more colleagues and friends write articles on my site using the toolchain. To work with them I set up a stripped down copy of my core website repo and we collaborate using git. Since my collaborators are mostly programmers this workflow is pretty effective. To run all this, it's necessary to install some software. All the software I use for the toolchain is open-source, but recently there have been some installation issues. In particular you find that many basic ruby installations are elderly, so we need to install a newer version of ruby.


Future Of Work: 5 Trends For CIOs
These trends -- which include social business, big data analytics, and the millennial workforce, among others -- have forced an "adapt or disappear" scenario for CIOs. Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, says that technology has reached the second half of the chessboard -- or that the rate of change and growth is now exponential. This analogy, though, can extend beyond technology and into new business practices and ways of working. To keep up with the changes that employees and businesses are experiencing, CIOs need to recognize five trends driving these changes, and plan accordingly to stay ahead of the curve.


Are Cloud Services Safe? iCloud Breach Revives Debate
"The cloud is a mistake. No one's data is safe," banking attorney Timothy Naegele wrote in an online comment posted to American Banker's Tuesday story about the breach. "It is vulnerable to hackers, terrorists and others. Anyone who tells you differently is mistaken." In addition to financially motivated cybercriminals, Naegele, a former counsel to the Senate Banking Committee, points to the threat of hackers from other countries. "China has hacked us and a lot of phishing comes straight out of Russia," he said in a later interview. Russian hacking attempts are believed to be retaliation for U.S. economic sanctions against the country over its military presence in Ukraine.



Quote for the day:

"Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success." -- Napoleon Hill

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