News, analysis and context on enterprise technology for the CTO
We have previously provided a Quickstart guide to standing up Rackspace cloud servers (and have one for Amazon servers as well). These are very low cost ways of building reliable, production ready capabilities for enterprise use (commercial and government). And Bryan Halfpap has provided a Quickstart guide which shows you how to build a Hadoop Cluster (leveraging Cloudera's CDH3). Using Bryan's guide you can have a Hadoop Cluster up and running in … [Read more...]
While virtualization offers many benefits to enterprise such as lower costs and greater flexibility, it also creates new challenges. One of the greatest concerns with switching over to virtualized infrastructure, espeically in government, is security and compliance in a complex and dynamic environment which legacy software can no longer handle. Catbird offers automated security solutions tailored to virtualized data centers and has recently unveilled the … [Read more...]
Here are a few recent links of note on cybersecurity and disruptive technology: The Cyber Power Index by Booze Allen Hamilton. The G20 are ranked by their potency in cyber, determined by their legal and regulatory framework, economic and social context, technology infrastructure, and industry application. The United States is ranked second with the United Kingdom surprisingly first and China in 13th place. This tool is interactive and, if you … [Read more...]
Two years ago, the Department of Energy's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research launched the Magellan project, a research and development effort aimed at harnessing cloud computing for the most demanding information processing of the national labs. A distributed testbed infrastructure was deployed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and the National Energy Research Scienti c Computing Center, then benchmarked for some of the most … [Read more...]
The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a government-wide program established in December 2011 to speed the adoption of cloud computing. FedRAMP includes a set of requirements for federal cloud computing and universal procedures for approving services and providers to work with the government. When contractors feel that they have met FedRAMP requirements, they must have their security control implementations independently … [Read more...]
Big Data solutions company Splunk has just filed to go public and is looking to raise $125 million in IPO. Splunk, which will list under the symbol SPLK, collects, indexes and harnesses all the fast moving machine data generated by enterprise applications and devices. It makes this data, which can be hundreds of terabytes a day for large enterprises, easy to break down and query so that even non-technical users can solve Big Data problems, reducing … [Read more...]
Editor's note: The tips Bryan Halfpap provides below really work. I stood up a working Hadoop Cluster in under 20 minutes, from cold iron to production ready, using just his guidance and a Rackspace account. bg I've been working with Apache Hadoop in my lab, spending much of that with CDH3 (the Cloudera Distribution including Apache Hadoop). As part of my examination of the best way to move from test/evaluation/prototyping to production systems I've … [Read more...]
Rackspace is a growing cloud computing capability provider that differentiates themselves by what they call "Fanatical Support." We try not to dwell too long on the marketing slogans of firms but have first-hand experience with Rackspace and can tell you their support is really really different. It must be the culture, but every support experience has left me convinced they are a great company to do business with. We host several sites at … [Read more...]
Editor’s note: We have asked each of our researchers to pull together considerations meant to help in your planning for 2012. We solicit your feedback on all these predictive posts. bg Come explore the future with me, but be warned, the future is a big place, and 2012 is a small slice of time. It's hard to be sure what the future holds, or how quickly the tech world will change. While I see all of the bellow predictions coming to pass sooner rather … [Read more...]
Amazon didn't invent cloud computing, but they deserve lots of credit for transforming the business model for providing cloud services through elastic computing (for some history see Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet from Businessweek Nov 2006). They have pushed the economics of cloud computing to be so efficient they are able to offer a 12 months worth of initial compute for free. This is a great opportunity to learn their interface and to test how their computing … [Read more...]