Doug Theis - Leave your comfort zone.

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28
Jan 14

VMware – Top 5 Use Cases for Moving to a Hybrid Cloud Solution

For many organizations, the move to a hybrid cloud has become a question of when, not if. Hybrid clouds provide users the unique benefit of on demand access to IT resources for the development of new applications, and as well as the ability to easily manage existing ones all in one place.

The vCloud Hybrid Service, built on proven VMware technology that many organizations are already familiar with in their existing virtual environments, provides a secure, dedicated infrastructure-as-a-service hybrid cloud that makes moving applications to the cloud easy for even new cloud adopters.

Transitioning to hybrid cloud depends on the specific requirements of your workload. However, to help get your organization into the mindset of hybrid cloud, we wanted to share the top 5 uses cases for moving to the hybrid cloud:

Use Case #1: Packaged Applications

A common source of frustration from IT departments is the inability to quickly add capacity on-demand to meet business changes. This challenge can be solved by moving packaged applications, such as email or collaborative software, to the hybrid cloud. The vCloud Hybrid Service supports thousands of applications and dozens of operating systems certified to run on vSphere, so users can run existing applications in the cloud with no changes required! Furthermore, this enables users to transfer applications without the need for re-coding or reconfiguration, and with no loss in the level of security, availability, or performance users are already familiar with in their internal data center.

CustomerThink – What Really Creates Customer Loyalty?

Most companies that set out to deliver better customer service today fall short of creating a customer experience that creates customer loyalty.

60% of customers today say that companies that set out to deliver better customer service don’t actually improve the customer experience enough to create customer loyalty.

All companies want customer loyalty. Customer retention is part of the strategy of any business. The problem many organizations face today is that even with their emphasis on customer retention and increasing customer loyalty, customers aren’t feeling the love they think they need in order to reward organizations with their continued business.

This infographic comes from the team at Drumbi, a company that provides technology to transform the way we communicate. The Drumby team believes that mobile devices, smartphones, mobile web, social media and location-based interactions have created a new metaphor for communications.

More of the CustomerThink post by Flavio Martins

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24
Jan 14

Daily Nation – What your appetite reveals about you

Last week, we started on a journey that I called “The Wale Rules” – some of the things that I have picked up along the way in my life, a number of them in a very hard way.

I believe that experience is not the best teacher. It is the most painful. It is the best teacher when it is someone else’s experience.

Our primary goal should be to learn by instruction. When that fails, then we have to learn by experience.

The wise man learns from the mistakes of others. The fool insists on making his own.

We are where we are not because we were perfect, but because we learnt from our imperfections. That which we learn, we are able to share.

More of the Daily Nation article by Wale Akinyemi

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23
Jan 14

VMware – 4 Tips to Make Your IT Transformation a Success

Accelerate consultants are fortunate to work with a wide variety of IT organizations. Our clients vary by industry, global footprint, size, and competitive landscape. But one common theme among IT leaders has been that true IT transformation involves much more than just updating the technology. In fact, technology consistently ranks low for the challenges IT executives brace for as they push their organizations to modernize and shift toward ITaaS.

With ITaaS, the expectations and ground rules for IT are rapidly changing from “internal shared service” to “quality services at a competitive price.” As IT, our customers are no longer captive; they can easily work directly with public clouds and SaaS vendors. This conjures up a new meaning to “rogue IT.”

Kurzweil – Discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons corroborates controversial 20-year-old theory of consciousness

A review and update of a controversial 20-year-old theory of consciousness published in Elsevier’s Physics of Life Reviews (open access) claims that consciousness derives from deeper-level, finer-scale activities inside brain neurons.

The recent discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons corroborates this theory, according to review authors Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose. They suggest that EEG rhythms (brain waves) also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations, and that from a practical standpoint, treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions.

Microtubules are major components of the structural skeleton of cells.

The theory, called “orchestrated objective reduction” (“Orch OR”), was first put forward in the mid-1990s by eminent mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose, FRS, Mathematical Institute and Wadham College, University of Oxford, and prominent anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, MD, Anesthesiology, Psychology and Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona, Tucson.

Technet – Announcing the GA of Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager

Over the last several weeks this blog has featured a series of posts about the benefits of the Hybrid Cloud – and today marks a major Hybrid Cloud milestone.

I am excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager service.

Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Service protects your on-prem applications by orchestrating the protection and recovery of Hyper-V Virtual Machines running in a private cloud (i.e. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 or System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1) to a secondary location.

Over the years, as I have spoken with the VMWare community, I have heard things like this: “Well, with Windows Server 2008 you did not have Live Migration; let me know when you have that.” Recently, that one missing scenario has been SRM. Well here it is! And I want to emphasize that this solution is so much easier to use and the way we have architected it is a much more modern, cloud-centric way of doing things.

Hyper-V Recovery Manager assembles some core elements of our Cloud OS strategy (Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Replica, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and Windows Azure) to deliver a cloud integrated Disaster Recovery Solution. Reaching GA means that the service is now backed by support and SLA assurance, and IT administrators can use it in production environments. We have had a number of customers running this in production in preview, and their feedback has been straightforward: The solution is incredible and it is ready for general availability.

More of the Technet post by Brad Anderson

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20
Jan 14

Fast Company – 6 Habits Of Resilient People

On April Fool’s Day 2011, I was unexpectedly diagnosed with early-stage invasive breast cancer. As a freelance writer with a career I love and a family that depends on my income, I spent most of the year juggling surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation with assignments, interviews, and youth soccer schedules. Throughout, friends and colleagues seemed surprised that I remained relatively active and pretty optimistic.

What else was there to do, I wondered. Taking to my bed for the better part of a year wasn’t an option for my personality or my bank account. Why not look at the bright side of early diagnosis and great prognosis and keep going? During that time, I contributed to two books, wrote dozens of articles and ended the year with a clean bill of health.

More of the Fast Company article by Gwen Moran

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19
Jan 14

MitchellH.com – Comparing Filesystem Performance in Virtual Machines

For years, the primary bottleneck for virtual machine based development environments with Vagrant has been filesystem performance. CPU differences are minimal and barely noticeable, and RAM only becomes an issue when many virtual machines are active[1]. I spent the better part of yesterday benchmarking and analyzing common filesystem mechanisms, and now share those results here with you.

I’ll begin with an analysis of the results, because that is what is most interesting to most people. The exact method of testing, the software used, and the raw data from my results can be found below this analysis.

In every chart shown below, we test reading or writing a file in some way. The total size of the file being written is fixed for each graph. The Y axis is the throughput in KB/s. The X axis is “record size” or the size of the chunks of data that are being read/written at one time, in KB.

More of the MitchellH.com post

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17
Jan 14

Computing.co.uk – More than 80 per cent of employees use ‘non-approved’ SaaS apps

More than 80 per cent of employees admit to using non-approved software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in their jobs, a new survey has found.

The survey was carried out by Stratecast, a branch of analysts Frost & Sullivan, and commissioned by McAfee. It asked 300 IT staff and 300 “line-of-business” employees of businesses that employ 1,000 staff or more for their views on “shadow IT” – SaaS applications used by employees for business, which have not been approved by the IT department or obtained according to IT policies. The employees represented different industries, and came from North America, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

Only 19 per cent of line-of-business employees and 17 per cent of IT employees said that they did not use any non-approved SaaS applications. According to respondents, the average company uses about 20 SaaS applications, seven of which are non-approved.

“That means you can expect that upwards of 35 per cent of all SaaS apps in your company are purchased and used without oversight,” CEOs and CIOs were warned by Stratecast.

More of the Computing.co.uk post

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16
Jan 14

The Virtualization Practice – Something Is Wrong: It Must Be the Hypervisor!

If you work in any virtual or cloud environments, how many times have you heard that statement as soon as any kind of problem surfaces? Way back when during the twentieth century, as a problem deflection, the network would immediately be blamed. As we got into the twenty-first century, virtualization quickly became the go-to area for any and all problems. As part of the virtualization and cloud computing teams, we would have to prove that a problem was not caused by virtualization before any other teams would really dig in and troubleshoot the issue. Even after the fourteen years since the turn of the century and the mainstream acceptance of virtualization technology as a whole, I still see that kind of blame mentality today. And just when I thought I’d heard it all when it comes to virtualization blame, a news story comes out that takes this immediate blame game to a whole new level.

It has been reported that on December 29, 2013, the official website for the OpenSSL code library was compromised in an incident that caused great concern among security professionals. Although the actual code repositories were untouched, the breach left defacement on the OpenSSL home page. Upon discovering the defacement, OpenSSL immediately restored the index.html file from backup and then started the forensics, investigation, and recovery process. So far, so good, right? Well, by New Year’s Day, OpenSSL had issued an advisory stating that “the attack was made via hypervisor through the hosting provider and not via any vulnerability in the OS configuration.” This advisory, which lacked any real details, immediately raised the question of whether the attack could be exploited to target other sites that utilize the same service. Without finishing the forensic investigation, OpenSSL had jumped the gun and deflected blame to the hypervisor. Once the advisory placed the blame on the hypervisor, it did not take long before people started to realize that the hypervisor under suspicion appears to have been VMware’s ESXi server.

As a result of the advisory, the VMware Security Response Center started to actively investigate the incident in order to understand if and how any VMware products were involved and whether VMware needed to take any action to ensure customer safety.

More of The Virtualization Practice post from Steve Beaver

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.