There are a lot of important things happening all around the world these days. Some of them have people upset or angry, to the point where they feel the desire to march or boycott to raise awareness and demonstrate their frustrations. As a company that believes in open communities and open discussions, we appreciate the need […]
Quelle: OpenShift
In a distributed and connected cloud-hosted application economy, networking plays a key role.
Companies looking to host their workloads with cloud service providers (CSPs) must make informed decisions on how to connect to cloud infrastructures. When choosing CSPs, companies sometimes overlook the importance evaluating networking options. It’s not just about having a network connection, it also requires considering speed, flexibility, latency, the number of hops, redundancy, reliability, telecommunications vendor option and additional provisions.
In addition, companies should evaluate where their users are located, how they would connect to the business application and how users would be authenticated using centrally managed direct structures. Some companies prefer that all users and employees first connect to their corporate network, then ride their intranet to connect to cloud hosted applications.
Here are three networking items to consider:
1. Connecting your corporate network to a cloud vendor.
The two prevalent networking options for connecting to cloud are virtual private networks (VPN) and dedicated lines with defined bandwith.
A VPN is an encrypted tunnel over the internet for data exchange. It’s simple to set up and is used 85 to 90 percent of the time by customers. However, this connection is limited by the provider’s internet bandwidth and is shared traffic over the internet.
For example, a retailer may require each of its geo-dispersed store to constantly connect to an application for access to its hosted enterprise application hosted at the CSP. A VPN may be best suited here.
A dedicated line with defined bandwidth can be provided by large telecommunications vendors that set up their routers in CSP data centers or in their point of presence (POP). It enables a separate, encrypted channel through which customer traffic can reach the CSP.
Internally, telecommunications locations are connected through high-speed fiber lines, which are shared among clients. Dedicated lines can provide much better redundancy and reduced latency than a public network. However, ordering and setting these lines takes a considerable amount of time. Customers should make use of their existing telecommunications providers and connect to their CSPs’ primary and disaster recovery sites.
Large applications such as SAP and Oracle, with many geographically diverse users, require a dedicated line to host their core business application in many cases. Some hosting vendors provide customers the option to connect to one of the POP and internally ride their high-speed fiber to connect all their data centers.
2. Using firewalls and load balancers.
Firewalls are like the automated front gate of a house; you only give entry to someone you know. It separates internal and external traffic. CSPs provide multiple firewalls to segregate data flow based on type of traffic.
Load Balancers redirect global and local traffic to the right host in the network. These are inherent part of the cloud and are provided as load balance as a service (LbaaS).
3. Extending your company IPs and domain names to the CSP.
This is like extending your company’s corporate network to another data center. Even the active directory can be replicated to a CSP for quicker and central user authentication.
Business application transformation to the cloud becomes easier when the infrastructure virtual machine is set up in the company’s own domain and own IP, and authentication is done at the CSP site itself.
Networking is complicated. I have heard IT management calling it “rocket science.” But cloud commoditization and automation tools during enablement have reduced complexity and setup time significantly for many networking options.
Join the biggest companies, the most innovative new startups and the world’s foremost technical experts at IBM InterConnect 2017.
The post 3 tips for networking in the cloud-hosted economy appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud
The post Evolving The Mirantis Brand appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
A while back, I shared some of the colorful history of Mirantis swag. Ever since our early days as OpenStack pioneers, our brand has been important to us. It’s helped us stand out among a noisy OpenStack ecosystem and get noticed among much larger organizations. Our booths at OpenStack Summits are always engaging points of interest: a bar, picture search, driving simulator, and robotic hockey table. And our employee swag is over-the-top: jean jackets; track suits; and in Vancouver, hockey jerseys that the OpenStack community still talks about today.
Our brand is also a source of pride, a reflection of our collective spirit, and a testament to our commitment to our ideals. We believe in Pure Play Open Cloud, and many of our earliest t-shirt designs reflected this value, using analogies to Ikea and Breaking Bad. We have celebrated the open source communities in which we participate, with our Zelda-inspired App Catalog shirt, Japan’s Megarantis (“defender of pure openstack!”) and Austin’s OpenStack release beer labels. We’ve even embraced our global company culture by lovingly poking fun at Russian stereotypes.
As our company has evolved, so has our brand. This year, we renewed our focus on managed services, and embraced Kubernetes to help us deliver those services continuously. As we make this shift, our branding team is responding. And this time, we felt the time was right for our company evolution to extend to our logo.
Our logo evolution
Any time a company decides to change its logo or name, it’s a decision that can’t be taken lightly or entered into hastily. Our old logo and color palette served us well for quite a while, and many people may not know that it has already undergone some revisions over time:
The Mirantis logo is more than a decade old, and its original designer and meaning have become company folklore. Personally, it reminds me of the variable x — i.e., when working with customers, Mirantis “solves for x” and builds a cloud that meets their unique needs. Others think that the black swoosh looks like two “helping hands”. Some believe the arrow represents the upward trajectory of our customers’ business results.
Regardless of interpretation, the logo mark presented several design challenges. The arrow is really skinny. The white cutouts in the black swoosh are noisy, particularly when the logo is a smaller size. The swooshes are different widths, increasing the horizontal bias of the mark. The swooshes don’t align with the edges of the “Mirantis” word mark below. Lastly, the typeface of the word mark includes an “M” that has angled legs, contributing to the uneven or irregular shape of the combined logo and word marks.
When we started work on our new logo, all options were on the table. We considered a complete overhaul, and fully developed a few radically different alternatives. Ultimately, we decided that despite its flaws, our logo has a distinctive, recognizable shape that has considerable cachet in our market. So, we went with an evolutionary approach:
The new logo streamlines our previous logo’s appearance, improves its suitability for printed materials, and imbues it with a more contemporary visual appearance. We also updated the typeface used for “Mirantis” to increase its readability, improve its interplay with the logo mark, and to make it more compatible with the fonts included in our brand’s current visual identity. Our color palette is refreshed with a more intense primary red, a new “icy teal” complementary color, and a deep, warm plum for dark color fills and backgrounds. (You’ll notice that these colors have become staples on our website, as well.)
If you need any of our visual assets or color values, you can find them on our logo page.
We at Mirantis like to have fun with our brand while promoting our values: pure play, openness, and community; and we’re definitely not going to stop having fun while delivering those messages. In the coming months, we’ll extend our branding to our booth at OpenStack Summit Boston in May, and for several other open source events. We hope you’ll come say hi and check out our latest swag.
Connect With Mirantis
If you’re not already connected with us, we encourage you to sign up for our newsletter and follow us on your preferred social networks:
The post Evolving The Mirantis Brand appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
Quelle: Mirantis
Inquiring minds in the manufacturing industry want to know: how is it possible to use a process control network for distributed automation?
Manufacturing companies work with a networking standard called PROFINET. It’s a fieldbus system based on TCP/IP technology. In other words, it’s a network used for process control in industrial automation that optimizes manufacturing. It enables direct access to data from automation systems at the control and production level.
Because PROFINET uses Ethernet for end-to-end data transfer, it can only connect devices within a closed network. My company, Phoenix Contact, a global market leader and innovator in the field of electrical engineering, wanted to open the PROFINET network and communicate with standard controllers over the internet, which would enable distributed automation.
Taking PROFINET to the cloud
As the name suggests, Phoenix Contact’s PROFICLOUD solution extends PROFINET to the cloud. This simplifies communications among industrial machines and makes distributed automation a possibility. It doesn’t matter where the network devices are located.
It’s also possible for an organization to customize the PROFICLOUD solution with integrated data services. These might include weather, local time, tariffs or complex calculations.
Deployed on IBM Bluemix virtual servers
To enable distributed automation and other functionality for PROFINET, Phoenix Contact sought a cloud services provider that had a strong presence in Europe because of local data requirements. It also needed to have connection points worldwide.
Phoenix Contact already had a long-term relationship with IBM, which demonstrated the advantages of the IBM Bluemix environment over other platforms. With Bluemix, as Phoenix Contact’s customers grow, our company can scale up and get needed support from the IBM team at no additional cost.
Predictive maintenance
One of Phoenix Contact’s waterworks customers uses PROFICLOUD to control and monitor decentralized pump stations. The customer programmed a device to incorporate weather data and to get information about river water levels in its country through an open database from the government.
Now the organization knows that in two days it will rain and the river level will rise. It can do a predictive check of the pumps to be sure they’re working. If they aren’t, it can send out the maintenance crew.
More control over automation
PROFICLOUD helps Phoenix Contact customers optimize and control their processes through distributed automation. One could think of PROFICLOUD as breathing new life into old machines. Just imagine a big building with a lot of machines and a lot of lights blinking.
One machine normally works without any people monitoring it, but one day there’s an error. No matter where the operator is in the building, he can immediately receive notification of the error on his smartwatch.
PROFICLOUD makes machines smarter by incorporating the possibilities and advantages that the internet offers.
Learn how IBM clients are poised for success using the IBM Cloud as their foundation.
The post Cloud makes distributed automation possible appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud
Tensorflow is an open-source software library created by Google for Machine Intelligence. And Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text with others. Throughout this series, we’ll be using these two applications primarily, but we’ll also venture into other popular frameworks as well. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to run a linear regression (the “hello world” of ML) inside a container you built running in a cloud.
Quelle: OpenShift
In this briefing, Alban Crequy of Kinvolk.io gives a quick introduction to the Weave Scope open source tool for monitoring for containers running on Kubernetes, then dives into using the Traffic Control plugin to test applications and detect degraded networks.
Quelle: OpenShift
This week, we look at Red Hat CloudForms capabilities for self-service and how it can be used to manage services across private, public and hybrid clouds. We explore:
self-service portal for end-user consumers
service catalog with examples of deployments (new infrastructure, multi-tier application, etc)
service dialog allowing customization and automation
day 2 operations, services life-cycle and monitoring
remote access using Cockpit administration tools
Additional information on Red Hat CloudForms can be found on the Red Hat website.
Quelle: CloudForms
As the OpenStack market continues to mature, some organizations have made the move and put OpenStack projects into production. They have done this in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons. However, other organizations have waited to see what these first-movers are doing with it and whether or not they are successful before exploring for themselves.
As such, we’re pleased to announce the availability of 4 new analyst white papers from 451 Research on how organizations are using OpenStack in production. The information in these papers is based on 451 Research&8217;s own insights as well as interviews with customers who have put OpenStack into production.
Here are the four papers:
OpenStack delivers for private cloud users
OpenStack is the leading open source option for private clouds, according to 451 Research. Learn how two organizations gained efficiency with OpenStack.
Service providers embracing OpenStack NFV
Communications services providers are increasingly using OpenStack network function virtualization (NFV) as a more flexible infrastructure. Find out why.
OpenStack in support of public cloud
This paper discusses 2 organizations that have adopted OpenStack® public cloud and the wisdom of having a trusted partner. Read the analyst paper.
Containers rise to the challenge of hybrid IT
Get enhanced security, greater operational efficiency, and more rapid cloud-aware app development. Read about 2 case studies in this analyst paper.
In addition to these new papers, 451 Research will be presenting the findings and additional insights in a free public webinar on February 22, 2017. You can sign up for the webinar here:
How organizations are using OpenStack – 4 use cases
In this webinar, 451 Research&8217;s Al Sadowski will teach you:
What kinds of organizations are adopting OpenStack.
What drives them to adopt OpenStack in the first place.
What they hope to achieve with OpenStack, and their progress thus far.
What the future holds for organizations adopting OpenStack.
So if you&8217;re one of the organizations who wants to know how others are using OpenStack, I encourage you to download the papers above and join us on February 22 for the webinar.
Quelle: RedHat Stack
Independent research and advisory firm Blue Hill Research has both good news and bad about streaming video.
The good news is that the growth of video is astonishing. By 2020, it’s likely that video data will make up 80 percent of all global IP traffic. People upload a year’s worth of video (nearly 9,000 hours) every 20 minutes.
The bad news is that this fast-growing volume of video is overwhelming traditional capabilities to effectively analyze and categorize content. Producers who want to identify the next big star and media companies that want to curate their collections to maximize viewer satisfaction are at a loss.
That’s why, Blue Hill notes, a recent IBM announcement of several new Watson-based cloud video technology services is so compelling. One new service will support live-reaction analysis as a video streams of viewer sentiments on social media. Another service automatically detects discrete scenes in a video to simplify indexing, speed up editing and unlock hidden or “dark” metadata. A third new Watson service analyzes the social media footprint of viewers to suggest what kind of content each person would most enjoy.
Blue Hill predicts that as a result of these new services, organizations have an increased capability to automatically translate video content into ongoing value.
Learn more in this complimentary Blue Hill Research report.
The post Blue Hill Research: New Watson services will add value for video content owners appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud
Why did the chicken cross the road? As the old saying goes, to get the other side. Why did the company move to microservices? That answer isn’t nearly as simple. While the buzz around microservices continues to grow, it can be valuable to look at various paths that companies take to achieve their ultimate goals […]
Quelle: OpenShift
