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Posts Tagged ‘Deployment’

Sometimes it Pays to Solve Hard Problems: CA Acquires 3Tera

As ReadWriteWeb’s Richard MacManus reported in 2006, 3Tera is a company to watch: “3Tera strikes me as a company to keep an eye on – they’re tackling a complex problem and they have a lot of potential customers out there.”

CA must agree. The companies have entered into a definitive agreement for CA to purchase 3Tera, adding it to CA’s growing list of cloud acquisitions.

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Simplifying Deployment

3Tera’s focus is simplifying the deployment of environments. The tools also helps synchronize capabilities between cloud providers and so-called “private clouds” hosted inside a company’s data center.

The company has a GUI based application to help visualize, manage, and deploy solutions in the cloud. This is an important thing to solve, especially if time is of the essence in getting your cloud-based application supported by your IT team, and keeping your choices open after it is deployed.

The Cloud is Mainstream

As self-reported by the 3Tera team in their blog, this acquisition represented cloud computing becoming mainstream in IT. CA sees a need to fill in this piece in their portfolio and IT leaders are asking for tools to deploy and manage cloud infrastructure assets.

“We started 3Tera to radically ease the way IT deploys, maintains and scales – MANAGES – applications. Our AppLogic® cloud computing platform provides the foundation of our partners’ orchestration of cloud services for public and private clouds around the world. Today, we’re taking the next step in moving toward making cloud computing mainstream by joining CA.”

It looks like cloud computing is becoming essential to the enterprise. Is it in yours?

Discuss

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NTT DoCoMo will demo LTE prototype at MWC, launch service this year
Still on track to launch its LTE network this year, Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo has today announced that its first prototype handset designed specifically to handle all that bandwidth will be unveiled at MWC 2010. We already knew a cool $10.4 billion or thereabouts were to be spent on Japanese LTE deployment, and now we can break that figure down a little by noting that NTT will be spending between $3.3b and $4.4b on its infrastructure alone. All we know of the new phone so far is that it’ll be the product of the overall partnership with NEC, Fujitsu and Panasonic, but jidging from NTT DoCoMo’s last prototype to grace these pages, we’re unlikely to be left wanting.

NTT DoCoMo will demo LTE prototype at MWC, launch service this year originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Cloudkick: Helping Customers Get the Most Out of the Cloud

The optimism for cloud computing is ebullient. But a problem is brewing in the fevered boil.

Customers need better ways to monitor performance. Deploying to the cloud is one matter. Monitoring in a way that optimizes deployment is a whole other issue. Every cloud service provider has a different dashboard. Deploying to multiple cloud service providers means monitoring multiple dashboards.

Cloudkick is a Y Combinator startup that has developed a Web application to help monitor performance so a customer may receive a unified view of its deployment.

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Today the company announced that its service is now commercially available, supported by cloud computing services that include: Rackspace Cloud, Amazon EC2, Linode, GoGrid, Slicehost, RimuHosting and VPS.NET.

Large IT organizations may have the manpower and expertise to manage cloud services but small and mid-size companies do not have the same capabilities. This is critically important as companies shift to outsourcing IT assets.

This trend is rapidly taking shape. Gartner predicts that by 2012, one in five companies will outsource its IT assets. Companies like Cloudkick faciliate this move by providing a level of service on top of what is provided by companies like Amazon and Rackspace.

Cloudkick provides a unified API that allows a view into the performance of the provider. For example, a customer can see all their servers in the cloud, turn them on and off at will and receive notifications through email or voice mail.

Competitors could include companies like RightScale and potentially the service providers. But Cloudkick appears to be the only company that focuses solely on monitoring performance.

Interestingly, Cloudkick has also recently emerged as a tool for scrutinizing the performance of cloud computing service providers.

Earlier this month, Cloudkick looked at network issues on Amazon servers. Cloudkick discovered problems that had started before Christmas. For the record, Cloudkick hosts its application on the SliceHost service owned by Rackspace.

For its part, Amazon said it does not have issues with over capacity.

Nonetheless, the story points to the important role that service providers can play in this emerging market. With more scrutiny it only follows that there should be better service by the providers.

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Multi-hop matters: the state of wireless mesh networking

Multi-hop mesh networks, confined to university labs at the start of this decade, are now widely available from commercial vendors. These vendors tout a number of advantages for mesh technologies: lower costs of deployment, easier administration, better coverage, and lower power consumption. Mesh networking is now being used in an impressive range of applications, from large-scale institutional deployments to networks of tiny sensors.

Mesh networking is sometimes mentioned as a solution to the much-discussed “last mile” problem in US telecommunications policy. Unfortunately, the inherent capacity limits of the wireless medium means that mesh networks are unlikely to provide a serious alternative to fiber or coax broadband connections in this market. Mesh is a reasonable way to provide broadband to consumers in developing countries who might not otherwise be able to afford access at all. But in the developed world, mesh technologies are best viewed as a supplement to wired Internet connections and traditional single-hop access points.

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SPDY: Google Plans to Speed Up the Web With New Protocol

Google just announced that it is working on a a new protocol that will minimize latency and speed up the web experience for users. SPDY (pronounced “speedy) is not meant to replace HTTP, the protocol that allows web servers and browsers to talk to each other today, but it does augment HTTP. The new protocol incorporates features like multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression. Google has already developed a prototype web server and a version of Google Chrome with built-in SPDY support.

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Google claims that pages loaded up 64% faster in lab tests where the research team downloaded the top 25 websites. Now that the SPDY team has developed workable prototypes, Google decided to open up the process and is soliciting the “active participation, feedback and assistance of the web community.”

In today’s announcement, Google stresses that SPDY is not a replacement for HTTP. It uses HTTP methods and headers, but it overrides the parts of the protocol that manage connections and data transfer formats.

Google will soon release an open-source SPDY-enabled web server. The source code for the SPDY-enabled version Chrome can be found here.

Creating a Faster and More Secure Web

According to the SPDY white paper, the project’s goals are to reduce page load times by 50%, minimize deployment complexity and to avoid the need for website owners to make any changes to their sites to implement SPDY. Instead, all the hard work will happen in the client and the web server.

The team also wants SPDY to allow many concurrent HTTP requests to run across one TCP session and to make SLL the standard transport protocol.

According to Google, these are the basic improvement of SPDY over HTTP:

• Multiplexed requests. There is no limit to the number of requests that can be issued concurrently over a single SPDY connection.  Because requests are interleaved on a single channel, the efficiency of TCP is much higher.
• Prioritized requests. Clients can request certain resources to be delivered first.  This avoids the problem of congesting the network channel with non-critical resources when a high-priority request is pending.
• Compressed headers.  Clients today send a significant amount of redundant data in the form of HTTP headers.  Because a single web page may require 50 or 100 subrequests, this data is significant. Compressing the headers saves a significant amount of latency and bandwidth compared to HTTP.

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Test, package .NET apps for Linux with Visual Studio add-in

Linux vendor Novell is offering a new commercial add-in for Visual Studio that will allow software developers to test and package .NET applications for Linux without having to leave their Windows development environment. The new tools could potentially help boost the availability of third-party software for Linux.

Novell’s Mono project, an open source implementation of the .NET runtime, makes it possible to run quite a bit of .NET software on the Linux platform. It opens up the door for .NET shops to expand their audience by making their programs available for deployment on Linux, but the additional effort involved in testing and packaging is an impediment in some cases. Novell’s new Mono Tools for Visual Studio (MonoVS) add-in will help to lower the barriers and simplify the process.

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Want 50Mbps Internet in your town? Threaten to roll out your own

Regional telco TDS Telecommunications last week issued a press release announcing a major milestone for the company: 50Mbps service over fiber optic cable to residents of Monticello, Minnesota. The Minneapolis suburb became one of the few non-FiOS communities in the country to experience full fiber-to-the-home deployment, and subscribers will all receive a free upgrade from 25Mbps service to the new 50Mbps tier.

Even better is the price, which starts at $49.95 a month for 50Mbps fiber service without the need to buy other services.

TDS is thrilled. “This is a huge first for TDS,” said market manager Tom Ollig. “TDS is working incredibly hard to deliver the faster speeds customers want.”

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US looking to deploy long-endurance hybrid airship over Afghanistan

We may see more airship proposals than actual airships ’round these parts, but it looks like this massive dirigible from Lockheed Martin will indeed be taking flight sooner rather than later, and could see action in Afghanistan by mid-2011. Dubbed the LEMV (or Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle), the airship is apparently “optionally manned,” and can stay aloft at 20,000 feet for up to 21 days at a time, while also carrying a payload of up to 2,500 pounds. That relatively fast deployment is aided in part by the fact that the airship is basically a larger version of Lockheed’s P-791 (twice as big, in fact), which has already flown six times and, as you can see in the video after the break, is pretty massive in its own right.

[Via The Register]

Continue reading US looking to deploy long-endurance hybrid airship over Afghanistan

Filed under: Transportation

US looking to deploy long-endurance hybrid airship over Afghanistan originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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