In this video, Jeff Frick and John Furrier of Silicon Angle, discuss the fact that OpenStack has reached a critical mass in enterprise as evidenced by the “big boys” jumping in, including IBM, NetApp, and EMC.
Adaptive Computing Named “Cool Vendor” in Cloud Management by Gartner
Gartner awards Adaptive Computing, developer of innovative, robust cloud management software with the title of “Cool Vendor”.
We believe to be recognized as a ‘Cool Vendor’ by Gartner for our cloud management technology is confirmation of our pioneering work in policy-based optimization for this space,” said Robert Clyde, CEO of Adaptive Computing. “Our Moab Cloud Suite allows enterprise IT leaders and cloud architects to maximize cloud return on investment through cost savings in capacity and management complexity. Moab’s ability to perform ongoing service optimization ensures organizations achieve both agility and service performance with their private cloud.
Read the Full Story.
Univa Survey: 75% of Enterprises Encounter Problems When Using Open Source Software
This week Univa announced the findings of its 2013 Open Source Software Use survey. Conducted online by uSAMP, the report finds that free and Open Source software (FOSS) is prominent within businesses today with 76% of companies using FOSS, while 75% have experienced a problem with using it. Businesses are relying heavily on unsupported Open Source solutions today; therefore 64% say they would pay for supported software should it solve their problems.
We have always said that users are willing to pay for quality when it comes to Open Source software, and the results of the survey have confirmed as such,” said Gary Tyreman, Univa CEO. “A large number of organizations use Open Source Grid Engine as a key ingredient in product development, but as the company grows they can’t afford to rely on unsupported Open Source Grid Engine. That is when they can turn to us for peace of mind, scalability and reliability provided by our team and proven Univa Grid Engine.”
According to the survey report, a lack of enterprise-grade support is the largest problem FOSS users experience in their company with 27% of respondents raising it as their top concern. Other troublesome issues include usability (24%), maintenance (20%), crashes (19%), bugs (18%), downtime (16%), loss off productivity (16%) and interoperability (16%).
Indeed FOSS’ importance today means that 64% are willing to pay for better quality, with the following listed as reasons to do so:
- Stability (25%)
- Enterprise-grade support (22%)
- Ease of use (20%)
- Extra functionality (18%)
- Bug reports/fixes (15%)
- Integrated solution (13%)
- Product upgrades (13%)
- Predictable lifecycles (13%)
The key product development departments of a business where most mission-critical software resides – engineering and R&D – rely most heavily on FOSS (32%). These trump executive (5%), legal (1%), finance (6%), sales (8%), HR (3%) and marketing (6%) combined. One in ten businesses uses FOSS across the board in every department, indicating how important FOSS is depended upon as the backbone of a company.
Read the Full Story.
HP is Expertly Integrating OpenStack into its Own Cloud Solutions
Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Register writes that HP is utilizing OpenStack to beef up and re-define its own CloudSystem offering.
We see a small set of customers that are purely adopting OpenStack for their private cloud,” Frances Guida, manager of cloud solutions and infrastructure at HP, explained to El Reg. “But we see a larger set of customers who are weaving OpenStack into a broader set of private clouds, and that is where CloudSystem comes in.
Read the Full Story.
OpenStack’s Newest Release, “Grizzly” to be Featured This Week at Annual Summit
Over at Computer Weekly, Adrian Bridgwater writes that at the OpenStack Summit this week in Portland, Oregon, organizers will focus on the latest release of the cloud control software referred to as “Grizzly”.
The Grizzly release is a clear indication of the maturity of the OpenStack software development process, as contributors continue to produce a stable, scalable and feature-rich platform for building public, private and hybrid clouds,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation.
Read the Full Story.
The Things Nobody Told You About ZFS
Over at Nex7′s Blog, Andrew Galloway from Nexenta Systems writes that while ZFS is one of the most powerful, flexible, and robust filesystems, it does have its own share of caveats, gotchya’s, and hidden “features.”
Deduplication Is Not Free. Another common misunderstanding is that ZFS deduplication, since its inclusion, is a nice, free feature you can enable to hopefully gain space savings on your ZFS filesystems/zvols/zpools. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Unlike a number of other deduplication implementations, ZFS deduplication is on-the-fly as data is read and written. This creates a number of architectural challenges that the ZFS team had to conquer, and the methods by which this was achieved lead to a significant and sometimes unexpectedly high RAM requirement. Every block of data in a dedup’ed filesystem can end up having an entry in a database known as the DDT (DeDupe Table). DDT entries need RAM. It is not uncommon for DDT’s to grow to sizes larger than available RAM on zpools that aren’t even that large (couple of TB’s). If the hits against the DDT aren’t being serviced primarily from RAM or fast SSD, performance quickly drops to abysmal levels. Because enabling/disabling deduplication within ZFS doesn’t actually do anything to data already on disk, do not enable deduplication without a full understanding of its requirements and architecture first. You will be hard-pressed to get rid of it later.
Read the Full Story.
Magento Gives Rackspace Even Stronger Presence in E-Commerce
The VAR Guy‘s Christopher Tozzi reports that Cloud giant, Rackspace, has partnered with Magento to provide both companies with greater strategic advantages.
From a broader channel perspective, there are two key points to note from this news. First, it underlines the growing convergence between cloud computing and online retailing, which hasn’t always been at the top of the list of cloud applications. That’s changing as more and more commerce shifts online, and companies seek to operate in larger markets that may involve less consistent traffic patterns.
Read the Full Story.
How to Set Up an MPI Cluster on Amazon EC2
Glenn K. Lockwood from SDSC writes that setting up a working set of EC2 instances that have the necessary configuration to run MPI applications can be quite daunting, so he has posted a guide.
Most guides online are kind of unhelpful in that they try to illustrate some proof of concept in how easy it is to get a fully configured cluster-in-the-cloud setup using some sort of provisioning toolchain. They gloss over the basics of exactly how to start these instances up and what to expect as far as their connectivity. Fortunately it only took me a morning to get MPI up and running, and for the benefit of anyone else who just wants to get MPI applications running on EC2 with as little effort as possible, here are my notes.
Read the Full Story.
Video: Cloud Data for the Everyday Developer
In this video, Scott Klein from Microsoft presents: Cloud Data for the Everyday Developer.
When should you use a database? When will it bite you? When is table storage the solution? In this session, Scott Klein will guide us through the various storage services in the Windows Azure landscape and provide some key insights into performance and scalability of those.
Univa Grid Engine Steps Up with Version 8.1.4
Today Univa released the latest version of Univa Grid Engine. With cross-platform support, Release 8.1.4. of Univa Grid Engine includes a number of customer-driven enhancements:
- Improved Load collection tool for Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors
- Extended memory usage metrics for Multi-Threaded applications
- Scheduler performance enhancements ensuring maximum number of jobs running in the cluster while improving system responsiveness
- Interactive Univa Grid Engine jobs can now set their memory affinity
Our latest Univa Grid Engine version 8.1.4 has been completely customer driven and is the largest update of the last 10 months,” said Fritz Ferstl, CTO Univa Corporation and father of Grid Engine. “We are leading the industry right now in converged infrastructures supporting Big Data and Big Compute, and our customers rely on Univa Grid Engine to manage mission-critical applications – so we make sure to always stay close to them in order to support their needs.”
Read the Full Story or check out our recent podcast interview with Fritz Ferstl on the Grid Engine State of the Union.
In related news, Univa is partnering with us at insideHPC on a Technical Computing User Survey. Please participate. We’ll share our results and you’ll get a chance to win valuable prizes.
