Friday, March 28th, 2014

Time	Event
11:30a	Intel Goes All-in with Cloudera, Making Large Investment Intel (INTC) and Cloudera announced a broad strategic technology and business collaboration, as well as a significant equity investment from Intel, making it Cloudera’s largest strategic shareholder. Intel says the investment in Cloudera is the single largest data center technology investment in its history. A little over a year ago Intel entered the Hadoop market with its own Hadoop distribution, and recently expanded its portfolio with the Intel Data Platform. Last week Cloudera raised $160 million from T. Rowe Price, along with Google Ventures and an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P., the private investment firm for Michael S. Dell and his family. The deal will join Cloudera’s leading enterprise analytic data management software powered by Apache Hadoop with the leading data center architecture based on Intel Xeon technology. Cloudera will develop and optimize Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) for Intel architecture as its preferred platform and support a range of next-generation technologies including Intel fabrics, flash memory and security. In turn, Intel will market and promote CDH and Cloudera Enterprise to its customers as its preferred Hadoop platform. Intel will focus its engineering and marketing resources on the joint roadmap. “By aligning the Cloudera and Intel roadmaps, we are creating the platform of choice for big data analytics,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group. “We expect to accelerate industry adoption of the Hadoop data platform and enable companies to mine their data for insights that inform the business. This collaboration spans our data center technology from compute to network, security and storage, and extends to our initiatives for the Internet of Things.” “Hadoop has changed the entire conversation around data,” said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer, Cloudera. “Based on our ability to store, process and analyze all kinds of data, increasingly in new ways, the potential for advances in business, social and economic environments are vast. Teaming with Intel, the industry leader in data center technology innovation, presents an opportunity for us to layer Hadoop into a platform’s core framework. The result is rapid performance improvements on workloads such as those extracting intelligent insight. Intel’s vision for delivering open, performance optimized solutions for big data is synergistic to our vision to help companies accelerate time to achieving success.” Intel’s Diane Bryant and Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly discussed the importance of the technology and business collaboration between companies on this Bloomberg TV segment. Both the strategic collaboration and the equity investment are subject to standard closing conditions, including customary regulatory approvals. (Comment on this)
12:25p	Leveraging NoSQL In-Memory with Minimum Pain Points Nikita Ivanov founded GridGain Systems in 2007, which is funded by RTP Ventures and Almaz Capital. Nikita has led GridGain to develop advanced and distributed in-memory data processing technologies, including a Java in-memory computing platform. As a data storage and retrieval option, NoSQL, with its less-restrained consistency models (vs. relational databases) has long been viewed as a way to achieve design simplicity, horizontal scaling and more granular control over availability. With high potential for optimization, NoSQL databases can potentially perform quite well in terms of latency and throughput, making them key components of many big data and real-time applications. With that said, the data demands of most organizations today, in terms of sheer volume and speed, may yet overwhelm NoSQL-based infrastructure. Coming Up Short in the Face of a Data Avalanche Consider, for example, fraud detection and market risk within the financial services industry: organizations may only have a fraction of a second to analyze a wide range of data sets and make a decision. Or, think about the logistics demands of today’s global organization, which needs to calculate pickup and delivery routes in real time, based on package location, traffic/weather conditions and countless other factors. Similarly, often need to track every single item in each of their retail locations around the world and analyze sales patterns and trends in real-time to stay ahead of the market. All of these examples involve processing and deriving live action from streaming data — which will soon become the lifeblood of business decisions. However, this is an area that is giving most organizations quite a bit of trouble, largely due to the fact that traditional computing has basically reached its limit in this regard. It’s unlikely that companies will be able to gain the real-time insights that they need from the massive amounts of data they’re taking in using traditional computing methods — it’s too slow and inflexible. Therefore, it’s not entirely surprising that the majority of NoSQL usage has traditionally come from non-critical websites. In short, NoSQL has been somewhat limited in its potential. But it doesn’t have to be. Taking NoSQL further with In-Memory There’s no logical reason for NoSQL to remain primarily in the non-critical realm, and certainly many of the partnerships and advances that MongoDB is putting forth demonstrate that NoSQL will play a major role in the emerging data-driven economy. The financial services industry, which I previously mentioned, is among the first industries to employ In-Memory technology in order to analyze massive quantities of data in real-time in order to solve problems that they otherwise couldn’t address through traditional computing methods. Kirill Sheynkman of RTP Ventures defines In-Memory computing: “In-Memory Computing is based on a memory-first principle utilizing high-performance, integrated, distributed main memory systems to compute and transact on large-scale data sets in real-time – orders of magnitude faster than traditional disk-based systems.” To put it simply, traditionally, you take the data to the computation. This is a time-consuming, resource-intensive process. With In-Memory, the idea is to bring the computation to your data. This is orders of magnitude faster and frees resources. It’s kind of like family visits over the holidays — do you pack all your kids, cousins and siblings in a bus and drive them across the country to visit your great uncle, or do you simply purchase a plane ticket for him and bring him to where everyone else already is to celebrate? Taking the data to the computation — particularly now that there is such an incredible amount of data to be processed — is like taking the bus across country. With In-Memory, we have the opportunity to purchase a plane ticket, so to speak. Putting NoSQL on Steroids While In-Memory data grids are generally more sophisticated than NoSQL, it is possible to “accelerate” NoSQL to work with In-Memory technology to achieve superior performance. With natively distributed in-memory architecture, organizations can achieve scale-out partitioning, increased performance and improved scalability. As it is by far the most popular NoSQL database currently on the market, let’s talk about how a natively distributed In-memory database with support for MongoDB driver protocol can be pushed into overdrive to meet your NoSQL performance needs. In order to leverage NoSQL In-Memory with minimum pain points, look to achieve certain things in your implementation: Configuration on the database or collection level. This requires no code change to user applications enabling much easier integration. Deployment between user applications and optional MongoDB database. With this approach user applications require no changes and continue to use their native MongoDB drivers for target languages. Configuration to work with specific MongoDB databases or individual collections. Collections not processed are simply passed through to underlying MongoDB database, freeing computing power to focus on what you really need it for, rather than needlessly redundant and unnecessary processing. Native support for MongoDB driver. This eliminates the need to change any application code. Native distribution and data partitioning. By leveraging an In-Memory database and allowing it to employ native distribution and data partitioning you can scale up to several thousands of nodes in production settings and avoid many of the shortcoming associated with sharding. Rely on a distributed memory-first architecture. Keeping all data in RAM with a secondary on-demand disk persistence allows you to completely eliminate memory-mapped file paging. Implement a field compaction algorithm. Though NoSQL works with unstructured data, field names will frequently repeat between documents and create excessive storage overhead. You can potentially save up to 40 percent of memory space by implementing a field compaction algorithm which internally indexes every field. Keep index and data in-memory. You can significantly increase performance and scalability for most MongoDB operations, including the ability to run on large commodity-based clusters. As the business landscape becomes more competitive, organizations will need to begin gaining real-time insight from their data in order to meet a host of challenge, which may be mission critical. In an era in which customers can switch banks in a matter of minutes, financial services firms, for example, only have a small window of time in which to approve a loan before a competitor swoops in. Additionally, with the advent of social media, a minor snafu can turn into a major revenue-draining disaster within hours. Companies need to stream insight from multiple sources and analyze it immediately. Essentially the aforementioned steps will enable you to skip over a number of processes, allowing you to instantly see increased performance, improved scalability and scale-out partitioning and get straight to the business of drawing conclusions from NoSQL data. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. (Comment on this)
12:34p	How to Design a Cloud-Ready Disaster Recovery Infrastructure Emergencies happen, entire platforms go down, but the business process must go on! Right? This recent DCK story says it best: “The Year in Downtime: The Top 10 Outages of 2013.” We’ve seen all sorts of issues happen with both cloud and private environments. It’s important to create an environment capable of supporting business continuity needs. This means understanding the fact that the cloud can and will potentially go down. For example, in a recent major cloud outage, a simple SSL certificate was allowed to expire. This then created a global, cascading failure taking down numerous vital public cloud components. Who was the provider? Microsoft Azure. Over the past few years, organizations found it challenging to enter the DR and even business continuity conversation. First thing’s first: it’s important to understand that disaster recovery and business continuity are two different business objectives. However, they can certainly overlap. Even today there is still some confusion about what the cloud can really deliver. It’s not so much how the cloud works, but more so around DR capabilities. Whether you’re a small shop or a large enterprise, if you have haven’t look at the cloud as a DR or business continuity option, it’s time that you do. Already, organizations of all sizes are looking at ways to expand their platform – intelligently – into the cloud. The idea is to create a powerful, pay-as-you-go, recovery solution. For example, Bluelock already has some pretty powerful recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) options. Bluelock’s Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) solutions enable organizations to recover their IT resources efficiently and effectively when an adverse situation strikes, protecting you from loss of revenue, data, or reputation. The idea is to create a solution by combining the benefits of a multi-tenant cloud with the latest recovery technology to get a highly reliable, testable and enterprise-grade recovery solution at a compelling price point. That said, there are specific cloud technologies which have become driving factors for better business IT redundancy. Before we get into the execution part of a DRBC strategy, it’s important to look at the solutions that help make it all happen. Cloud-based traffic management. This is all about global traffic management (GTM) and global server load balancing (GSLB). Our ability to logically control traffic over vast distances has allowed the cloud to become a true hub for many different kinds of DR strategies.   Software-defined everything! We now have hardware abstraction at its greatest. Let’s face it, working with today’s modern networking controllers is pretty nice. We can now create thousands of virtual connection points from one physical switch port. Plus, we’re able to control layer 4-7 traffic at a much more granular level. Furthermore, solutions around storage, compute and security can further create powerful cloud resiliency models. Virtualization and automation. Working with agile technologies like virtualization allows the sharing, replication, and backup of various kinds of images and workloads. These images can then span global data centers depending on the needs of the organization. Couple that with automation technologies and you can now span your platform from one infrastructure to another very seamlessly. Plus, you can better control resources which span numerous nodes. New types of storage and hardware intelligence. Cloud-based storage solutions have come a long way. Whether we’re working with an open-source cloud storage platform or something more traditional like an EMC or NetApp, our ability to control storage is pretty advanced. Data deduplication, controller multi-tenancy, and fast site-to-site replication make cloud storage systems a powerful part of the DR process. Hardware solutions aside, the logical layer of storage is pretty powerful as well. Software-defined storage completely abstracts physical components and allows for VMs, data points and other infrastructure resources to scale very dynamically. Now, let’s look at some ways that DRBC can really happen in the modern enterprise. (Comment on this)
1:00p	Tech Titans Form Industrial Internet Consortium AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel today announced the formation of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), an open membership group focused on breaking down technology silos to support better access to big data with improved integration of the physical and digital worlds. The IIC will be managed by the non-profit trade association Object Management Group (OMG). The IIC will identify requirements for open interoperability standards and define common architectures to connect smart devices, machines, people, processes and data. The new group will take the lead in establishing interoperability across various industrial environments for a more connected world. The IIC charter calls for utilizing existing and creating new industry use cases and test beds for real-world applications, delivering best practices, reference architectures, case studies, and standards requirements, influencing the global standards development process, facilitating open forums to share and exchange real-world ideas, and building confidence around new and innovative approaches to security. “We are at the precipice of a major technological shift at the intersection of the cyber and physical worlds, one with broad implications that will lead to substantial benefits, not just for any one organization, but for humanity,” said Janos Sztipanovits, E. Bronson Ingram Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Director of the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS), Vanderbilt University. “Academia and industry understand the need to identify and establish new foundations, common frameworks and standards for the Industrial Internet, and are looking to the IIC to ensure that these efforts come together into a cohesive whole.” The IIC is open to any business, organization or entity with an interest in accelerating the Industrial Internet. In addition to gaining an immediate, visible platform for their opinions, consortium members will join in developing critical relationships with leaders in technology, manufacturing, academia and the government on working committees. “As leaders we have come together to drive the ecosystem and market development of Industrial Internet applications and ensure organizations around the world can more easily create better services, access better data, and most importantly, seamlessly connect all the pieces together,” said Bill Ruh, vice president, GE Global Software. “The IIC has been established to achieve this goal through the creation of common architectures and use cases that will enable businesses in aviation, transportation, healthcare or energy to ‘plug-and-play’ Industrial Internet technologies anywhere, anytime.” “The IIC aligns well with Intel’s vision for the Internet of Things which centers around accelerating business transformation through a robust end to end IoT solution, connecting both existing systems and new systems into a secure infrastructure,” said Ton Steenman, vice president, IoT Solutions Group, Intel. “Enabling IoT scale requires an open solutions architecture facilitated by standards and a strong ecosystem. The IIC will help accelerate the momentum and make the Internet of Things a reality more quickly.” (Comment on this)
2:30p	Cloudera Launches Data Scientist Certification Concurrent’s application platform for big data is certified with the Intel Data Platform, Datameer 4.0 introduces “flip side” view for big data analytics workflow, and Cloudera addresses the industry need for big data skills with a certification program and big data challenge for data scientists. Cloudera launches certified data scientist program. Cloudera announced the industry’s first hands-on data science certification, called Cloudera Certified Professional: Data Scientist (CCP:DS). Consisting of an essentials exam and data science challenge, the new program helps developers, analysts, statisticians, and engineers get experience with relevant big data tools and techniques and validate their abilities while helping prospective employers identify elite, highly skilled data scientists. The demand for data scientists is at an all-time high, and they possess a rare combination of engineering capabilities, statistical skills, and subject matter expertise that is difficult to find. Once candidates have passed the Data Science Essentials exam, they must then successfully complete a Cloudera Data Science Challenge, offered twice annually. Cloudera’s second Data Science Challenge opens on March 31 and is about detecting anomalies in Medicare claims. Concurrent Cascading certified for Intel Big Data platform. Enterprise big data application platform company Concurrent announced the compatibility of its Cascading application platform for big data applications using Hadoop with the Intel Data Platform. As Hadoop applications leverage an enterprise’s most valuable asset – its data, a secure infrastructure is crucial. Enter the Intel Data Platform, which incorporates and builds on an open source software platform to provide distributed processing and data management for enterprise applications analyzing massive amounts of diverse data. This certification offers the right fit for businesses seeking to make the most of their Big Data by combining the productivity benefits of Cascading with the security, performance and manageability advantages of Intel Data Platform. “Today’s announcement demonstrates Concurrent’s continued mission of making enterprise data application development easy for the masses and enabling businesses to operationalize their data,” said Gary Nakamura, CEO at Concurrent. “Now our users can rely on the Intel Data Platform’s next-generation analytics and secure infrastructure combined with all the power and benefits of Cascading to drive business differentiation.” Datameer introduces ‘Flip Side’ view for big data analytics. Big data analytics company Datameer introduced Datameer 4.0 and the first end-to-end big data analytics workflow that allows for visual insights at every step of analysis. With Datameer’s new “flip side” view to its spreadsheet interface, users can get instant visual feedback at any point in the big data analytics process. This allows them to check initial results and adjust appropriately as they go, further shortening the time to insight and freeing up time for teams to tackle bigger challenges. The new product consists of a visual profile of the data after every step of the process, including integration, enrichment, transformation and advanced analytics. “We are consistently pushing the envelope to make big data analysts as productive as possible, and studies show the fastest way to digest information is visually,” said Stefan Groschupf, CEO of Datameer. “With Datameer 4.0, analysts no longer need to wait until the final visualization to gain insights from their data. This new paradigm means companies will realize meaningful ROI on their big data analytics projects faster than ever before.” (Comment on this)
3:19p	Friday Funny: Pick the Best Caption for “Warning Signs” The close of the work week approaches! For Friday, it’s fine to have frivolous fun and festivities. That includes our weekly caption contest, with cartoons drawn by Diane Alber, our favorite data center cartoonist! Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor. Here’s how it works. We provide the cartoon and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion. The winner receives a hard copy print, with his or her caption included in the cartoon. This week, we are voting on the last cartoon.  Please vote below, and have a good weekend! Take Our Poll Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor. For the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. (Comment on this)
4:14p	Cisco Releases New Nexus 9000 Switches Cisco celebrates five years of unprecedented growth in its UCS portfolio and launches new switches to the Nexus 9000 portfolio, China Mobile selects Alcatel-Lucent to transform to an all-IP ultra-broadband network, and Aeorhive Networks files for an initial public stock offering. New Cisco Nexus switches for ACI and Cloud. Cisco (CSCO) introduced new Nexus 9504 and Nexus 9516 switches to the Nexus 9000 portfolio. The 9516 features 576 wire-speed 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 60 Tbps throughput, and was selected as a finalist in the data center category for a 2014 Best of Interop award. The new Nexus 9504 provides a cost effective option to solve migration from core-aggregation-access to spine leaf architectures. With the Nexus 9504 partners now have new engagement options for customers seeking lower density aggregation and access designs. A new Nexus 3164Q switch was introduced, designed for the most demanding workloads.  It is an ultra-dense, high performance switch that delivers flexible connectivity for either 40 Gigabit or 10 Gigabits ports (up to 256 10Gigabit ports) in a 2 RU and a rich NX-OS feature set. The Nexus 3164Q offers seamless mobility with workload isolation, wire rate layer 2/layer 3 switching, and enhanced programmability options. ”We selected Cisco’s Nexus 9000 series switches and Application Centric Infrastructure as the foundation for our new data centers because the solution will streamline our operational processes and reduce operating expenses for power, cooling and cabling,” said Saleem Al Balooshi, Executive Vice President – Network Development & Operations, du.  “We particularly like the Cisco bi-directional optics which gives us four times the 40GE density as well as upgrades to 100Gb using the same cabling infrastructure, thereby removing the necessity for costly fibre upgrades.” China Mobile selects Alcatel-Lucent for transformation. Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) and China Mobile (CMCC)  announced a one-year comprehensive frame agreement valued at up to Euro 750 million to provide technology that will move the world’s largest mobile service provider to an all-IP ultra-broadband network paving the way for future network functions virtualization (NFV) and cloud-based services. In 2013, China Mobile selected Alcatel-Lucent to provide its innovative lightRadio 4G TD-LTE overlay, Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and small cells technology to support the new 4G network. Using Alcatel-Lucent’s virtualized proof of concept LTE radio access network (RAN) Baseband Unit (BBU) and its virtualized evolved packet core (vEPC) in a multi-vendor environment, the two companies demonstrated at Mobile World Congress how an open mobile cloud network enhances agility, efficiency and scale. “This is a significant achievement of Alcatel-Lucent and essentially makes us a key technology provider in virtually every aspect of China Mobile’s growing mobile ultra-broadband network,” said Michel Combes, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent. “We have worked side-by-side with China Mobile throughout many developments in mobile technology, including the development of 4G TD-LTE.  We are continuing that close collaboration as China Mobile moves to the next level of ultra-broadband through NFV supporting future cloud applications and services.” Aerohive Networks files IPO.  Aeorhive Networks announced the pricing of its initial public offering of 7,500,000 shares of its common stock at a price to the public of $10 per share. In addition, Aerohive has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 1,125,000 additional shares of common stock from Aerohive at the initial public offering price. The shares begin trading March 28th under the symbol “HIVE”. (Comment on this)
5:13p	Dean Nelson Teams With Mom to Build Schools in India Dean Nelson has built some of the world’s most advanced data centers. His newest project presents a very different type of challenge: building new schools for impoverished children in the mountain villages of India. It’s a labor of love Nelson has undertaken with his mother, Sandy, who accompanied him on a 2007 trip to India, when he was working on the data center team at Sun Microsystems. “What happened on that trip really changed our lives,” said Nelson. “We met some incredibly selfless people who were helping kids in poverty by getting them access to education. We met the children, played with them, listened to their needs, and heard their parents beg us to help educate their children.” Together the Nelsons formed the Just Let Me Learn Foundation, which has just launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to support the construction of a new school in Sesawng, India. They are seeking to raise a total of $149,000 to fund a school campus where up to educate up to 750 children in this remote village, which had never had any organized education. The foundation has already purchased two school buses for children in Patna, created a tutoring center in Chandouli in Utter Pradesh, and is nearing completion of its first school project in Saiphai. The group’s latest project addresses a dire need in Sesawng, a mountain village where many of the families migrated from remote villages in other countries (including Nepal and Bangladesh) and don’t even have birth certificates. The Sesawng school project is also the focus of the first fundraising effort for GEEKS Giving Back, a new organization focused on connecting the data center community with philanthropic causes. GEEKS Giving Back is headed by Maricel Cerruti, the Director of Marketing at data center firm Teledata and founder of the Technology Convergence Conference held each year in Silicon Valley. The group will kick off its efforts Thursday, April 3 with a Casino Night Fundraising event from 5:30 to 9 pm at the SanDisk Facility in Milpitas, Calif. The event will feature one-on-one speed networking with data center industry executives, followed by casino games like Black Jack, roulette and poker. All of the proceeds will go to support the construction of the school in Sesawng. “There’s a lot of really giving people in this industry who are doing things very much like this,” said Nelson. “I see a bright future in what she’s putting together.” Nelson, the Vice President for Global Foundation Services at eBay, is passionate about efficiency and sustainability. The trip to India energized his mom, Sandy, “It fundamentally changed her,” said Dean Nelson. “She saw their need. Next thing you know, she said ‘I want to build a school.’” Unbeknownst to her son, Sandy Nelson donated a substantial portion of her business income to the first school project. Check out the Indiegogo campaign for details. Here’s a video in which Dean Nelson provides an overview of the project: (Comment on this)

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