December 22, 2014

Hybrid cloud adoption set for a big boost in 2015
What's helping to bridge that gap is the hybrid cloud -- a combination of using a private cloud and a public cloud, giving the user the security of a private offering and the low cost of public. While the cloud market is still immature, enterprises are starting to get their feet wet with the hybrid cloud. While they may not make a huge shift to put critical workloads or even production workloads into the hybrid cloud this year, companies are looking to experiment with it and try it out with basic apps and information. "Hybrid is at the early stages of the maturity cycle," said Krans. "Hybrid is growing, but it will take a lot of experience to really grow it for more critical applications."


10 Ways Data Center Industry Will Change in 2015
As we approach the end of 2014, those in IT who like to ponder industry trends send us their predictions for next year. Here are some of the more interesting predictions we have received from folks so far. Stay tuned for more 2015 predictions on Data Center Knowledge in the coming weeks. Here it is, our list of data center industry trends that will dominate the conversation in 2015:


Five Rules for Strategic Partnerships in a Digital World
Partnerships have also always been notoriously tricky to make work. Too bad, because in today’s hypercompetitive, hyper-connected marketplace, partnerships have taken on even greater strategic importance and complexity. Both business-to-consumer and business-to-business companies are in an arms race to develop innovative user experiences, expand distribution, and capture new sources of monetization. Digital leaders are discovering that their future depends not just on what their own companies can do, but on the capabilities, functions, channels, and insights they can tap by partnering with others.


Fog Computing and the 'Internet of Things' Analytics Hardware
Fog Computing is a paradigm that extends Cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. Similar to Cloud, Fog provides data, compute, storage, and application services to end-users. With the concept of Fog Computing, where by the network locally analyze the IoT data and take a decision on what data to be passed on to cloud. It's a concept called fog computing. And Cisco® makes it possible today with the Cisco IOx platform. Cisco IOx takes the best of Cisco IOS® Software capabilities, combines them with compute, storage, and memory at the network edge.


5 lessons to help security pros craft a New Year’s resolution
People often find themselves stressed and overwhelmed during this time of year. Looking back, they realize all the goals that are still unmet. The cyber security holiday season is no different. While some organizations might be happy they did not get breached this year, behind closed doors everyone, including the CEO, is likely wondering at what point a breach will happen; will it be in 2015? The answer, which no one wants to hear, is that a breach will happen. However, if handled correctly, the damage can be very minimal. Consider these lessons from 2014:


Obama Vows U.S. Response to North Korean Hacking Attack on Sony
There is no evidence of direct Chinese participation but the country does keep a close eye on data moving through its networks, suggesting it may have been aware of the North Korean attack and did nothing to alert officials in the U.S., the person said. When asked if China assisted in the Sony attack, Obama said the U.S. has “no indication that North Korea was acting in conjunction with another country.” ... “We will respond,” Obama said, without specifying any actions. “We will respond proportionally and we will respond in a place and time and manner that we choose.”


Exploring Microsoft Licensing, Part 2: Don’t Get SAM’d
Microsoft isn’t auditing everyone equally. They’re cherry-picking areas that are in decline or showing signs of slowed growth. I’ve seen another area that attracts audits. Generally, customers have some sort of non-compliance that are met with steep fines. However, Microsoft will almost always offer the customer a “true up” of the non-compliance licenses as long as the customer agrees to sign a new, three year, Enterprise Agreement. This process locks you in for another three years with Microsoft with no assurances that at the end of that time they won’t audit you again. One of our recent customers was audited by Microsoft during the evaluation process and faced a steep penalty.


Version 3 of FoundationDB's Key-Value Store database announced
Let's get around all of the hype in FoundationDB's release and get to the point. Relational databases have been pressed into service in many applications because it has become a tradition, not because it is the best or most cost effective tool in the shed. I suspect this is because many developers were trained to use relational databases and now see the world though that lens. I'm reminded of something Abraham Maslow once said "If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." Other approaches to database management can be more cost effective, offer better performance in some applications, be more reliable and also use system resources much better.


Decisions, decisions: Choices abound as data center architecture options expand
More companies are opting to move away from traditional data centers with rows and racks of servers because there are a number of issues to contend with in a conventional data center model, including buying your own equipment, figuring out a floor plan, installing it, testing it and maintaining it, experts say. The number of data centers worldwide will peak at 8.6 million in 2017 and then begin to decline slowly, IDC predicts, although the amount of total data center space will continue to grow as mega-data centers replace smaller ones.


Inject Novelty into Your Innovations
We look at game participation using the information about in-game achievements, which are now common practice across video-games: measures of how accomplished players are, so that they can have bragging rights with their friends. The evolution of participation in the expansion “The Wrath of the Lich King” is displayed in the graph and shows clear insights about how players respond to product updates. Before each product update, users are forward-looking, anticipating new content that is very likely more exciting than what was launched before, which leads to waiting for the new content and drops in participation (red circles in the graph).



Quote for the day:

"You got to be careful if you don't know where you are going, because you might not get there." -- Yogi Berra

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