Category: Cloud Enable

Cloud Enable examines the options available to IT departments considering adopting or managing cloud-based architectures in their business environment.

HPE Sets Out to Master the Edge While Extending Managed, Metered IT Consumption to Hybrid Cloud

by Chris Drake, posted in Cloud Enable, IT Leader
C. Drake

Summary Bullets:

• HPE’s new EdgeLine portfolio enhancements will enable customers to run storage-intensive applications and additional core data center functions within remote edge locations.

• HPE’s new GreenLake Hybrid Cloud offering will appeal to hybrid cloud customers that struggle with things like cost and management complexity but won’t disrupt the wider market.

At its Discover event in Las Vegas a last week, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) unveiled several new solution updates and strategic initiatives which, it believes, will transform the way businesses consume, deploy and operate data center technologies. First, HPE announced plans to invest US$4 billion over the next four years to develop technologies that support enterprise edge computing. Edge computing promises to transform the way data centers are deployed and managed and the type of workloads they support. It enables the operation and allocation of enterprise IT resources – including compute, storage, networking, data management, and analytics – at locations that are closer to the points of data generation, and to the end users of digital content and applications.

HPE already has a number of products that support enterprise edge computing initiatives. These include its EdgeLine hyperconverged infrastructure systems, which are specifically designed for deployment in remote locations, often far from central data centers. In Vegas, HPE revealed that it was increasing the storage allocation available on its EL1000 and EL4000 models, from 4TB to 48TB, thanks to a new hardware add-on. The additional storage will allow EdgeLine to support more storage-intensive use cases at the edge of enterprise networks, including databases, artificial intelligence, and video applications. In addition, HPE announced that it had validated several enterprise software stacks for use with the EL1000 and EL4000 systems, including VMware, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP HANA and Citrix XenDesktop. By validating entire software stacks, rather than lighter, tailored versions, HPE aims to help customers run virtualization and compute functions at the network edge with the same tools they use in their primary data centers.
Continue reading “HPE Sets Out to Master the Edge While Extending Managed, Metered IT Consumption to Hybrid Cloud” →

Microsoft’s $7.5 Billion GitHub Buy Illustrates Dire State of Developer Deficit

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Cloud Enable, IT Leader
C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

  • Vendors ramping up coding campaigns get creative in the battle for programming expertise.
  • Microsoft makes a play to scoop up as much coding talent as possible.

Technology’s greatest deficit today is talent. As the digital era moves into a complex new phase of microservices, serverless computing, blockchain, and artificial intelligence (AI), drawing on the expertise of capable programmers and data scientists to help spur adoption of new technology solutions is more important than ever – and difficult. A recent surge in campaigns to attract developers and grow developer communities among application platforms vendors such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, and others reflects the increased importance of gaining vendor loyalties. Continue reading “Microsoft’s $7.5 Billion GitHub Buy Illustrates Dire State of Developer Deficit” →

Chinese Players Are Disrupting the Cloud Market in Asia-Pacific

by Alfie Amir, posted in Cloud Enable
A. Amir

Summary Bullets:

  • The cloud market in Asia-Pacific is getting more competitive, driven by the Chinese cloud giants: Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent.
  • The growing competition offers businesses wider options beyond the traditional cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft and IBM.

The three Chinese ICT giants – Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent – are originally from different ICT areas. Huawei started with telecommunications equipment, Alibaba with e-commerce and Tencent with instant messaging. However, today, they all actively play in cloud market, challenging the traditional cloud players such as AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM. Continue reading “Chinese Players Are Disrupting the Cloud Market in Asia-Pacific” →

Avaya’s a Laggard in Cloud, But Not Too Late in Asia-Pacific

by Alfie Amir, posted in Cloud Enable
A. Amir

Summary Bullets:

• Avaya finally has a cloud strategy; a late mover compared to the other UCC players

• But cloud adoption in Asia-Pacific especially in emerging markets is still low and demand is growing

While Avaya already has a number of cloud-based deployments for several years for example Avaya IP Office as-a-Service (IPOaaS) offered by Optus in Australia, the cloud delivery model is mainly driven by the partners. Avaya itself is finally moving to cloud-based offerings recently. It is a late move considering the other UC major players have gone to cloud years earlier, for example Cisco with Spark and Webex and Microsoft with Microsoft Office 365 and Skype for Business. Continue reading “Avaya’s a Laggard in Cloud, But Not Too Late in Asia-Pacific” →

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe: Another Milestone Event for Kubernetes, but Don’t Expect a Developer-Led, Infrastructure-Agnostic World Anytime Soon

by Chris Drake, posted in Cloud Enable
C. Drake

Summary Bullets:

  • Last week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference in Denmark demonstrated the extent to which Kubernetes has become the industry standard for orchestrating and managing cloud-native applications.
  • The conference saw Kubernetes announcements from Cisco, Red Hat, and Oracle, illustrating the growing commitment of data center infrastructure vendors to open source and application performance management (APM) technologies.

Last week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference in Denmark saw over 4,000 people descend on Copenhagen’s Bella Center for three days of keynote presentations, technical discussions, and networking with a focus on containers, microservices, serverless computing, and the challenges and options facing cloud-native application development. Continue reading “KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe: Another Milestone Event for Kubernetes, but Don’t Expect a Developer-Led, Infrastructure-Agnostic World Anytime Soon” →

Huawei Analyst Summit 2018: Edge Computing, Hybrid Cloud, and AI are Central to Huawei’s Future Vision of the Data Center

by Chris Drake, posted in Cloud Enable
C. Drake

Summary Bullets:

• Key themes from the 15th Huawei Analyst Summit (HAS) in Shenzhen, China, included edge computing, hybrid cloud enablement, and the application of AI to data center technologies.

• To unlock commercial opportunities and reinforce the competitiveness of its solutions, Huawei would benefit from a stronger articulation of both its hybrid cloud and edge computing capabilities.

Judging by the themes of the 15th HAS in Shenzhen, China, 17-19 April, Huawei expects data center technologies to become increasingly more intelligent, more distributed in the way they are deployed, and more diverse in the use cases they support. Key themes from the Summit, with particular relevance to data centers, included edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), multi-cloud and hybrid cloud enablement, and the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to both data centers and the use cases they support.

The Summit saw a recurring emphasis on the theme of “boundless computing”, reflecting Huawei’s commitment to a single infrastructure platform that blurs the boundaries between CPUs, servers, and data centers and supports the delivery of resources wherever they are required. There was considerable discussion of edge computing, which involves the maintenance and operation of IT resources at locations that are closer to the points of data generation, and to the end users of digital content and applications. Huawei already offers several solutions that support enterprise edge computing initiatives, including its Cloud Fabric SDN solution and a version of its hyperconverged infrastructure offering, FusionCube, which is specifically optimized for remote office and branch office (ROBO) and edge computing deployments. Continue reading “Huawei Analyst Summit 2018: Edge Computing, Hybrid Cloud, and AI are Central to Huawei’s Future Vision of the Data Center” →

Cloud Foundry Summit: CF Goes to Battle Against AWS, Red Hat, DIY Options

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Cloud Enable
C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

  • Cloud Foundry, AWS, and Red Hat OpenShift will duke it out in the OSS PaaS space over the coming year.
  • Cloud Foundry members favor the OSS community’s growing ecosystem in a multi-cloud era.

The phrase ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’ never rang truer as AWS contacted the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) at the eleventh hour asking to be a sponsor at this month’s annual Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston. The open source project’s top rivals are AWS, Red Hat OpenShift, and enterprise DIY projects. Perhaps Amazon wanted to get a peek into the goings-on between the 63 members which make up the Cloud Foundry community, including the newest member, Chinese telco giant Alibaba. Continue reading “Cloud Foundry Summit: CF Goes to Battle Against AWS, Red Hat, DIY Options” →

AWS Summit 2018: Amazon Targets Enterprise Developers for App Cloud Migration via ML, Microservices/Containers, and Serverless Computing

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Cloud Enable, IT Leader
Charlotte Dunlap – Principal Analyst, Application Platforms

Summary Bullets:

• Amazon’s high-value services and cloud status make it a competitive threat against PaaS rivals

• Customers are concerned about the cost and effort involved in migrating applications from data centers to the cloud

Amazon has built a behemoth cloud business through its compute power and rudimentary platform services, bringing the notion of IT as-a-service to the masses early on. It has no intention of losing its popular cloud status to technology companies that are innovating in advanced cloud technologies such as AI/ML, chatbots, microservices/containers, and serverless computing. Continue reading “AWS Summit 2018: Amazon Targets Enterprise Developers for App Cloud Migration via ML, Microservices/Containers, and Serverless Computing” →

Low-Code Platforms Are a Driving Force Behind the Cloud’s Success

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Cloud Enable
C. Dunlap
C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

  • A new wave of innovative low-code tools is being integrated into popular cloud offerings to provide developer access to high-value cognitive and IoT services.
  • New low-code platforms are being integrated with operational tools to automate workflows and other application lifecycles.

Cloud providers are finding new opportunities offering low-code platforms that address the labor-intensive requirements involved in the development of web, mobile, and IoT apps. Modern apps are being developed through visual UI tools and frameworks, which engage customers through access to high-value services including analytics, IoT, and big data. Continue reading “Low-Code Platforms Are a Driving Force Behind the Cloud’s Success” →

SREs Take DevOps to the Next Level

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Cloud Enable, IT Leader
C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

  • SREs will play a key role in determining the shape of the DevOps pipeline.
  • Lack of quality SREs has hindered some containerized apps from moving into production.

The evolution of the DevOps pipeline highlights the importance of the software reliability engineer (SRE), as is increasingly evident amid the growing complexity surrounding the application lifecycle. This topic came up during last week’s Container World conference in Silicon Valley in reference to container management and orchestration. Enterprises need to invest in SREs whose operational expertise will take DevOps to the next level, as these experts strive to support new services to empower the knowledge worker. Continue reading “SREs Take DevOps to the Next Level” →