Here are comes my long list of computer technology trends for 2015:
Digitalisation is coming to change all business sectors and through our daily work even more than before. Digitalisation also changes the IT sector: Traditional software package are moving rapidly into the cloud. Need to own or rent own IT infrastructure is dramatically reduced. Automation application for configuration and monitoring will be truly possible. Workloads software implementation projects will be reduced significantly as software is a need to adjust less. Traditional IT outsourcing is definitely threatened. The security management is one of the key factors to change as security threats are increasingly digital world. IT sector digitalisation simply means: “more cheaper and better.”
The phrase “Communications Transforming Business” is becoming the new normal. The pace of change in enterprise communications and collaboration is very fast. A new set of capabilities, empowered by the combination of Mobility, the Cloud, Video, software architectures and Unified Communications, is changing expectations for what IT can deliver.
Global Citizenship: Technology Is Rapidly Dissolving National Borders. Besides your passport, what really defines your nationality these days? Is it where you were live? Where you work? The language you speak? The currency you use? If it is, then we may see the idea of “nationality” quickly dissolve in the decades ahead. Language, currency and residency are rapidly being disrupted and dematerialized by technology. Increasingly, technological developments will allow us to live and work almost anywhere on the planet… (and even beyond). In my mind, a borderless world will be a more creative, lucrative, healthy, and frankly, exciting one. Especially for entrepreneurs.
The traditional enterprise workflow is ripe for huge change as the focus moves away from working in a single context on a single device to the workflow being portable and contextual. InfoWorld’s executive editor, Galen Gruman, has coined a phrase for this: “liquid computing.” The increase in productivity is promised be stunning, but the loss of control over data will cross an alarming threshold for many IT professionals.
Mobile will be used more and more. Currently, 49 percent of businesses across North America adopt between one and ten mobile applications, indicating a significant acceptance of these solutions. Embracing mobility promises to increase visibility and responsiveness in the supply chain when properly leveraged. Increased employee productivity and business process efficiencies are seen as key business impacts.
The Internet of things is a big, confusing field waiting to explode. Answer a call or go to a conference these days, and someone is likely trying to sell you on the concept of the Internet of things. However, the Internet of things doesn’t necessarily involve the Internet, and sometimes things aren’t actually on it, either.
The next IT revolution will come from an emerging confluence of Liquid computing plus the Internet of things. Those the two trends are connected — or should connect, at least. If we are to trust on consultants, are in sweet spot for significant change in computing that all companies and users should look forward to.
Cloud will be talked a lot and taken more into use. Cloud is the next-generation of supply chain for IT. A global survey of executives predicted a growing shift towards third party providers to supplement internal capabilities with external resources. CIOs are expected to adopt a more service-centric enterprise IT model. Global business spending for infrastructure and services related to the cloud will reach an estimated $174.2 billion in 2014 (up a 20% from $145.2 billion in 2013), and growth will continue to be fast (“By 2017, enterprise spending on the cloud will amount to a projected $235.1 billion, triple the $78.2 billion in 2011“).
The rapid growth in mobile, big data, and cloud technologies has profoundly changed market dynamics in every industry, driving the convergence of the digital and physical worlds, and changing customer behavior. It’s an evolution that IT organizations struggle to keep up with.To success in this situation there is need to combine traditional IT with agile and web-scale innovation. There is value in both the back-end operational systems and the fast-changing world of user engagement. You are now effectively operating two-speed IT (bimodal IT, two-speed IT, or traditional IT/agile IT). You need a new API-centric layer in the enterprise stack, one that enables two-speed IT.
As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up. Although fears that technology will displace jobs are at least as old as the Luddites, there are signs that this time may really be different. The technological breakthroughs of recent years — allowing machines to mimic the human mind — are enabling machines to do knowledge jobs and service jobs, in addition to factory and clerical work. Automation is not only replacing manufacturing jobs, it is displacing knowledge and service workers too.
In many countries IT recruitment market is flying, having picked up to a post-recession high. Employers beware – after years of relative inactivity, job seekers are gearing up for change. Economic improvements and an increase in business confidence have led to a burgeoning jobs market and an epidemic of itchy feet.
Hopefully the IT department is increasingly being seen as a profit rather than a cost centre with IT budgets commonly split between keeping the lights on and spend on innovation and revenue-generating projects. Historically IT was about keeping the infrastructure running and there was no real understanding outside of that, but the days of IT being locked in a basement are gradually changing.CIOs and CMOs must work more closely to increase focus on customers next year or risk losing market share, Forrester Research has warned.
Good questions to ask: Where do you see the corporate IT department in five years’ time? With the consumerization of IT continuing to drive employee expectations of corporate IT, how will this potentially disrupt the way companies deliver IT? What IT process or activity is the most important in creating superior user experiences to boost user/customer satisfaction?
Windows Server 2003 goes end of life in summer 2015 (July 14 2015). There are millions of servers globally still running the 13 year-old OS with one in five customers forecast to miss the 14 July deadline when Microsoft turns off extended support. There were estimated to be 2.7 million WS2003 servers in operation in Europe some months back. This will keep the system administrators busy, because there is just around half year time and update for Windows Server 2008 or Windows 2012 to may be have difficulties. Microsoft and support companies do not seem to be interested in continuing Windows Server 2003 support, so those who need that the custom pricing can be ” incredibly expensive”. At this point is seems that many organizations have the desire for new architecture and consider one option to to move the servers to cloud.
Windows 10 is coming to PCs and Mobile devices. Just few months back Microsoft unveiled a new operating system Windows 10. The new Windows 10 OS is designed to run across a wide range of machines, including everything from tiny “internet of things” devices in business offices to phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops to computer servers. Windows 10 will have exactly the same requirements as Windows 8.1 (same minimum PC requirements that have existed since 2006: 1GHz, 32-bit chip with just 1GB of RAM). There is technical review available. Microsoft says to expect AWESOME things of Windows 10 in January. Microsoft will share more about the Windows 10 ‘consumer experience’ at an event on January 21 in Redmond and is expected to show Windows 10 mobile SKU at the event.
Microsoft is going to monetize Windows differently than earlier.Microsoft Windows has made headway in the market for low-end laptops and tablets this year by reducing the price it charges device manufacturers, charging no royalty on devices with screens of 9 inches or less. That has resulted in a new wave of Windows notebooks in the $200 price range and tablets in the $99 price range. The long-term success of the strategy against Android tablets and Chromebooks remains to be seen.
Microsoft is pushing Universal Apps concept. Microsoft has announced Universal Windows Apps, allowing a single app to run across Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 for the first time, with additional support for Xbox coming. Microsoft promotes a unified Windows Store for all Windows devices. Windows Phone Store and Windows Store would be unified with the release of Windows 10.
Under new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft realizes that, in the modern world, its software must run on more than just Windows. Microsoft has already revealed Microsoft office programs for Apple iPad and iPhone. It also has email client compatible on both iOS and Android mobile operating systems.
With Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome grabbing so much of the desktop market—and Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Google’s Android browser dominating the mobile market—Internet Explorer is no longer the force it once was. Microsoft May Soon Replace Internet Explorer With a New Web Browser article says that Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system will debut with an entirely new web browser code-named Spartan. This new browser is a departure from Internet Explorer, the Microsoft browser whose relevance has waned in recent years.
SSD capacity has always lag well behind hard disk drives (hard disks are in 6TB and 8TB territory while SSDs were primarily 256GB to 512GB). Intel and Micron will try to kill the hard drives with new flash technologies. Intel announced it will begin offering 3D NAND drives in the second half of next year as part of its joint flash venture with Micron. Later (next two years) Intel promises 10TB+ SSDs thanks to 3D Vertical NAND flash memory. Also interfaces to SSD are evolving from traditional hard disk interfaces. PCIe flash and NVDIMMs will make their way into shared storage devices more in 2015. The ULLtraDIMM™ SSD connects flash storage to the memory channel via standard DIMM slots, in order to close the gap between storage devices and system memory (less than five microseconds write latency at the DIMM level).
Hard disks will be still made in large amounts in 2015. It seems that NAND is not taking over the data centre immediately. The huge great problem is $/GB. Estimates of shipped disk and SSD capacity out to 2018 shows disk growing faster than flash. The world’s ability to make and ship SSDs is falling behind its ability to make and ship disk drives – for SSD capacity to match disk by 2018 we would need roughly eight times more flash foundry capacity than we have. New disk technologies such as shingling, TDMR and HAMR are upping areal density per platter and bringing down cost/GB faster than NAND technology can. At present solid-state drives with extreme capacities are very expensive. I expect that with 2015, the prices for SSD will will still be so much higher than hard disks, that everybody who needs to store large amounts of data wants to consider SSD + hard disk hybrid storage systems.
PC sales, and even laptops, are down, and manufacturers are pulling out of the market. The future is all about the device. We have entered the post-PC era so deeply, that even tablet market seem to be saturating as most people who want one have already one. The crazy years of huge tables sales growth are over. The tablet shipment in 2014 was already quite low (7.2% In 2014 To 235.7M units). There is no great reasons or growth or decline to be seen in tablet market in 2015, so I expect it to be stable. IDC expects that iPad Sees First-Ever Decline, and I expect that also because the market seems to be more and more taken by Android tablets that have turned to be “good enough”. Wearables, Bitcoin or messaging may underpin the next consumer computing epoch, after the PC, internet, and mobile.
There will be new tiny PC form factors coming. Intel is shrinking PCs to thumb-sized “compute sticks” that will be out next year. The stick will plug into the back of a smart TV or monitor “and bring intelligence to that”. It is likened the compute stick to similar thumb PCs that plug to HDMI port and are offered by PC makers with the Android OS and ARM processor (for example Wyse Cloud Connect and many cheap Android sticks). Such devices typically don’t have internal storage, but can be used to access files and services in the cloud. Intel expects that sticks size PC market will grow to tens of millions of devices.
We have entered the Post-Microsoft, post-PC programming: The portable REVOLUTION era. Tablets and smart phones are fine for consuming information: a great way to browse the web, check email, stay in touch with friends, and so on. But what does a post-PC world mean for creating things? If you’re writing platform-specific mobile apps in Objective C or Java then no, the iPad alone is not going to cut it. You’ll need some kind of iPad-to-server setup in which your iPad becomes a mythical thin client for the development environment running on your PC or in cloud. If, however, you’re working with scripting languages (such as Python and Ruby) or building web-based applications, the iPad or other tablet could be an useable development environment. At least worth to test.
You need prepare to learn new languages that are good for specific tasks. Attack of the one-letter programming languages: From D to R, these lesser-known languages tackle specific problems in ways worthy of a cult following. Watch out! The coder in the next cubicle might have been bitten and infected with a crazy-eyed obsession with a programming language that is not Java and goes by the mysterious one letter name. Each offers compelling ideas that could do the trick in solving a particular problem you need fixed.
HTML5′s “Dirty Little Secret”: It’s Already Everywhere, Even In Mobile. Just look under the hood. “The dirty little secret of native [app] development is that huge swaths of the UIs we interact with every day are powered by Web technologies under the hood.” When people say Web technology lags behind native development, what they’re really talking about is the distribution model. It’s not that the pace of innovation on the Web is slower, it’s just solving a problem that is an order of magnitude more challenging than how to build and distribute trusted apps for a single platform. Efforts like the Extensible Web Manifesto have been largely successful at overhauling the historically glacial pace of standardization. Vine is a great example of a modern JavaScript app. It’s lightning fast on desktop and on mobile, and shares the same codebase for ease of maintenance.
Docker, meet hype. Hype, meet Docker. Docker: Sorry, you’re just going to have to learn about it. Containers aren’t a new idea, and Docker isn’t remotely the only company working on productising containers. It is, however, the one that has captured hearts and minds. Docker containers are supported by very many Linux systems. And it is not just only Linux anymore as Docker’s app containers are coming to Windows Server, says Microsoft. Containerization lets you do is launch multiple applications that share the same OS kernel and other system resources but otherwise act as though they’re running on separate machines. Each is sandboxed off from the others so that they can’t interfere with each other. What Docker brings to the table is an easy way to package, distribute, deploy, and manage containerized applications.
Domestic Software is on rise in China. China is Planning to Purge Foreign Technology and Replace With Homegrown Suppliers. China is aiming to purge most foreign technology from banks, the military, state-owned enterprises and key government agencies by 2020, stepping up efforts to shift to Chinese suppliers, according to people familiar with the effort. In tests workers have replaced Microsoft Corp.’s Windows with a homegrown operating system called NeoKylin (FreeBSD based desktop O/S). Dell Commercial PCs to Preinstall NeoKylin in China. The plan for changes is driven by national security concerns and marks an increasingly determined move away from foreign suppliers. There are cases of replacing foreign products at all layers from application, middleware down to the infrastructure software and hardware. Foreign suppliers may be able to avoid replacement if they share their core technology or give China’s security inspectors access to their products. The campaign could have lasting consequences for U.S. companies including Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Intel Corp. (INTC) and Hewlett-Packard Co. A key government motivation is to bring China up from low-end manufacturing to the high end.
Data center markets will grow. MarketsandMarkets forecasts the data center rack server market to grow from $22.01 billion in 2014 to $40.25 billion by 2019, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.17%. North America (NA) is expected to be the largest region for the market’s growth in terms of revenues generated, but Asia-Pacific (APAC) is also expected to emerge as a high-growth market.
The rising need for virtualized data centers and incessantly increasing data traffic is considered as a strong driver for the global data center automation market. The SDDC comprises software defined storage (SDS), software defined networking (SDN) and software defined server/compute, wherein all the three components of networking are empowered by specialized controllers, which abstract the controlling plane from the underlying physical equipment. This controller virtualizes the network, server and storage capabilities of a data center, thereby giving a better visibility into data traffic routing and server utilization.
Large data center operators will be using more and more of their own custom hardware instead of standard PC from traditional computer manufacturers. Intel Betting on (Customized) Commodity Chips for Cloud Computing and it expects that Over half the chips Intel will sell to public clouds in 2015 will have custom designs. The biggest public clouds (Amazon Web Services, Google Compute, Microsoft Azure),other big players (like Facebook or China’s Baidu) and other public clouds (like Twitter and eBay) all have huge data centers that they want to run optimally. Companies like A.W.S. “are running a million servers, so floor space, power, cooling, people — you want to optimize everything”. That is why they want specialized chips. Customers are willing to pay a little more for the special run of chips. While most of Intel’s chips still go into PCs, about one-quarter of Intel’s revenue, and a much bigger share of its profits, come from semiconductors for data centers. In the first nine months of 2014, the average selling price of PC chips fell 4 percent, but the average price on data center chips was up 10 percent.
We have seen GPU acceleration taken in to wider use. Special servers and supercomputer systems have long been accelerated by moving the calculation of the graphics processors. The next step in acceleration will be adding FPGA to accelerate x86 servers. FPGAs provide a unique combination of highly parallel custom computation, relatively low manufacturing/engineering costs, and low power requirements. FPGA circuits may provide a lot more power out of a much lower power consumption, but traditionally programming then has been time consuming. But this can change with the introduction of new tools (just next step from technologies learned from GPU accelerations). Xilinx has developed a SDAccel-tools to to develop algorithms in C, C ++ – and OpenCL languages and translated it to FPGA easily. IBM and Xilinx have already demoed FPGA accelerated systems. Microsoft is also doing research on Accelerating Applications with FPGAs.
Universal Memory for Instant-On Computing will be talked about. New memory technologies promise to be strong contenders for replacing the entire memory hierarchy for instant-on operation in computers. HP is working with memristor memories that are promised to be akin to RAM but can hold data without power. The memristor is also denser than DRAM, the current RAM technology used for main memory. According to HP, it is 64 and 128 times denser, in fact. You could very well have a 512 GB memristor RAM in the near future. HP has what it calls “The Machine”, practically a researcher’s plaything for experimenting on emerging computer technologies. Hewlett-Packard’s ambitious plan to reinvent computing will begin with the release of a prototype operating system in 2015 (Linux++, in June 2015). HP must still make significant progress in both software and hardware to make its new computer a reality. A working prototype of The Machine should be ready by 2016.
Chip designs that enable everything from a 6 Gbit/s smartphone interface to the world’s smallest SRAM cell will be described at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in February 2015. Intel will describe a Xeon processor packing 5.56 billion transistors, and AMD will disclose an integrated processor sporting a new x86 core, according to a just-released preview of the event. The annual ISSCC covers the waterfront of chip designs that enable faster speeds, longer battery life, more performance, more memory, and interesting new capabilities. There will be many presentations on first designs made in 16 and 14 nm FinFET processes at IBM, Samsung, and TSMC.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Toshiba’s Satellite Radius 12 combines a 4K display with a Windows Hello camera
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/2/9240199/toshiba-satellite-radius-12-4k-laptop
It feels like it has been years since Toshiba announced an exciting Windows laptop, but it looks like the wait is finally over. At IFA today, Toshiba is revealing the Satellite Radius 12 convertible. The name might sound a little boring, but the specifications certainly aren’t. Toshiba claims it’s the “world’s first 12.5-inch Ultra HD 4K convertible.”
Toshiba’s Satellite Radius 12 will be released in Full HD (1920 x 1080) or 4K (3840 x 2160) displays. Inside there’s Intel’s latest Skylake processors up to the Core i7, and up to 8GB of RAM.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nick Bilton / Vanity Fair:
Observations of notable investors as they confront the seemingly ubiquitous signs of a tech bubble — Is Silicon Valley in Another Bubble . . . and What Could Burst It? — With the tech industry awash in cash and 100 “unicorn” start-ups now valued at $1 billion or more, Silicon Valley can’t escape the question.
Is Silicon Valley in Another Bubble . . . and What Could Burst It?
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/08/is-silicon-valley-in-another-bubble
With the tech industry awash in cash and 100 “unicorn” start-ups now valued at $1 billion or more, Silicon Valley can’t escape the question. Nick Bilton reports.
Tomi Engdahl says:
LLVM 3.7 Delivers OpenMP 3.1 Support, ORC JIT API, New Optimizations
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/09/01/2314242/llvm-37-delivers-openmp-31-support-orc-jit-api-new-optimizations?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
LLVM 3.7 was released today as the newest six-month update. LLVM 3.7 has OpenMP 3.1 support via Clang, a new On-Request Compilation JIT API, the Berkeley Packet Filter back-end was added, the AMDGPU back-end now supports OpenGL 4.1 when paired with Mesa 11.0, and many other functional changes.
LLVM Clang 3.7 vs. GCC Compiler Benchmarks On Linux
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=clang-37-gcc52&num=1
With the official release of LLVM 3.7 being imminent, here are some fresh compiler benchmarks comparing its performance on Linux x86_64 to that of LLVM Clang 3.6 as well as GCC 4.9 and GCC 5.2.
Tomi Engdahl says:
China Server Upstart Hits Spotlight
Unknown startup behind ambitious ARM SoC
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327572&
Phytium Technology Co. Ltd. went from being an unknown to the equivalent of a rock star in the microprocessor world last week. That’s when the China-based company disclosed details at the annual Hot Chips event of its Mars design, one of the most aggressive ARM-based server SoCs to date.
After the event, EE Times spoke by phone with Charles Zhang, the director of research of Phytium, to find about more about this little-known company that maintains a skeletal Web site.
It turns out Phytium is a startup inside the belly of a giant — China Electronics Corp., one of China’s oldest and largest state-run enterprises in the industry. The conglomerate employs 70,000 people and develops everything from military and space electronics to consumer appliances and education software.
Amid many efforts to ramp up China’s chip design and production, CEC invested several hundred million renminbi in Phytium and provided most of the about 300 engineers in its processor design team. Since Phytium’s founding in 2012 in Guangzhou, a few processor designers have joined who have worked at well-known chip design companies in China including HiSilicon, Longsoon and Spreadtrum.
Indeed, Phytium is focused on finding sockets for its Mars chip in a new class of systems it hopes China’s server makers will sell in the indigenous market.
http://www.phytium.com.cn/
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD Says More Than One Way to Do Virtualization
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327579&
AMD’s Add-in-Boards come with special multi-user technology embedded into the GPU, thus delivering consistent and predictable performance.
When a GPU is virtualized for remote graphics, the GPU is shared among several users, just like a CPU was in the old time sharing days. A hypervisor manages the users and send jobs to the GPU. And it’s done on a load demand basis mostly. (The term “hypervisor” was most likely coined by Dave Tuttle at IBM in late 1971).
AMD says their Add-in-Boards (AIBs) are different and are equipped with special multi-user technology embedded into the GPU, and through its use it can deliver consistent and predictable performance. When appropriately configured (to the needs of an organization), end users get the same access to the GPU regardless of their workload. Each user, says AMD, is provided with the virtualized performance to design, create and execute their workflows without any one user tying up the entire GPU.
This new solution from AMD, says the company, enables a virtualized workstation-class experience with full ISV certifications and local desktop-like performance. AMD says that with their multiuser GPU solution, IT pros can configure the GPUs to allow up to 15 users on a single AMD GPU. AMD demonstrated its virtualization solutions at VMworld.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Red Hat has officially released Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7, the latest version. Other new products include a tool that simplifies installation and facilitates the management of the platform.
Red Hat to combine Red Hat Enterprise Linux reliability and proven usability advanced OpenStack technology. Thus, the company can provide highly scalable and secure use platform for creating and managing private or public cloud environments.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3273:red-hat-helpotti-yritys-linuxin-asennusta&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Do So Many Tech Workers Dislike Their Jobs?
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/09/02/1951206/why-do-so-many-tech-workers-dislike-their-jobs
So what if you work for a tech company that offers free lunch, in-house gym, and dry cleaning? A new survey suggests that a majority of software engineers, developers, and sysadmins are miserable.
it’s nonetheless insightful into the reasons why a lot of tech pros apparently dislike their jobs.
Why Tech Pros Aren’t Happy
http://insights.dice.com/2015/09/02/why-tech-pros-arent-happy/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_
In a bid to keep top tech talent in the building, some tech companies have resorted to extraordinary perks, from free sushi at lunch to in-house gyms and dry cleaning. But is the talent actually happy? According to a new survey, software engineers, developers, and sysadmins are pretty miserable in the office.
The company conducting the survey, TinyPulse, asked 5,000 employees in the tech space about their individual experience on the job, including overall happiness. Only 19 percent of respondents felt overwhelmingly positive about their work life; another 17 percent said they felt valued at work; and a mere 47 percent believed they had strong relationships with co-workers.
Compared with the responses from employees in marketing and finance (also surveyed by TinyPulse), those numbers are dismal. In addition to generalized unhappiness, only 36 percent of tech employees felt their promotion and career path were clear—compared to 50 percent of non-tech employees.
“There’s widespread workplace dissatisfaction in the tech space, and it’s undermining the happiness and engagement of these employees,” TinyPulse concluded. “The problem goes beyond workplace satisfaction—Gallup found that engagement is one of the key ingredients for employee innovation.”
THE STATE OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IN TECH
4 Big Bad Trends That Are Hitting This Workforce Hard
https://www.tinypulse.com/resources/the-state-of-employee-engagement-in-tech
The answer is: not well. It was clear that there’s a significant disparity between the two groups, with tech employees falling behind on several areas of job satisfaction.
Here are the major areas of concern:
An unhappy work experience: The workplace is being dragged down by dissatisfaction. Only 19% of IT employees gave a strongly positive answer when asked how happy they were on the job.
Feeling trapped: Among non-IT employees, a solid 50% say their promotion and career path is clear to them. But for IT employees, that number drops to 36%. Employees don’t see any opportunity for professional growth, either because there aren’t options or they don’t have support from management to pursue them.
Thankless work: Only 17% of IT employees feel strongly valued at work. What’s more, there’s a strong relationship (r = 0.56) between how valued an employee feels at work and the likelihood that they would reapply to their job.
Alignment with the company: Only 28% of IT employees know their company’s vision, mission, and cultural values — 15% less than of all other employees. Worse, some of them do know the company values but disagree with them, or at least how they’re being put into practice.
Relationship with coworkers: Job dissatisfaction makes for poor teammates, at least according to our survey respondents. Only 47% of IT employees say they have strong relationships with their coworkers. In other industries, that number jumps to 56%.
All these roadblocks are holding IT employees back from doing their best work. This isn’t just bad news for the tech industry — it hurts everyone whose work relies on their innovation. If your business benefits from having newer and better technologies, then you should be paying attention.
Tomi Engdahl says:
128TB SSD by 2018? Toshiba promises much, delivers … a little
Fat solid state flash drive for the masses?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/03/128tb_ssd_toshiba_promises_by_2018/
FA 2015 “By 2018, SSD technology including 3D Flash could reach up to 128TB”, Toshiba storage product manager Paul Han Lin told The Register today at IFA in Berlin.
Toshiba has announced two new SSD drives this week. The Q300 Pro has a capacity from 128GB to 512GB and is aimed at the professional market, with fancy features like QSBC (Quadruple Swing By Code) error correction, while the Q300 is for mainstream users and comes in capacities from 120GB to 960GB.
That’s nothing compared with what’s to come, according to Han Lin.
“In August this year we announced the technology of four bit per cell,” he said, meaning that the same physical footprint has greater capacity. “We also announced 3D flash, a 47-layer stack of three bit per cell, almost like a small skyscraper to allow more storage in the same space. It is an interesting time where HDD and SDD is coming together.”
“The four-bit technology exists, the next step is production. We said that by 2018 the disk technology including 3D Flash could reach up to 128TB,” he added.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wangling my way into the 4K gaming club with a water-cooled whopper
Catching a glimpse of uncanny valley
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/04/feature_4k_gaming/
The other week a Viewsonic VX2475Smhl-4K monitor, boasting a 3840×2160 resolution running at 60Hz – though only 24-inches of it – shows up at my door. I’m happy as a clam until it dawns on me that this isn’t a job my faithful little NUC, the Gigabyte Brix Pro, is up to. I was going to need a rig and a half, probably costing more than my last two cars combined, to make use of this number of Pixels Per Degree of Vision (PPD).
Water cooled and to die for, I was sent the beef cake Infinity Vesuvius gaming PC powered by a quad-core Intel Core i7 4770K overclocked to 4.7GHz, with 16GB of RAM.
4K gaming? No sweat, with its AMD dual-Radeon R9 295X2 GPUs configured in quad Crossfire mode, it pumps out the pixels on cue. Just watch your energy bill, this Corsair H105 closed-loop, water-cooled mosasaurus is as quiet as a mouse but runs from a 1500W Silverstone Strider ST1500 power supply. Needless to say, it arrived on a pallet.
Booting up this monster rig, I’m well aware there are few who have the resources to equip themselves with such high-end gaming hardware. This may be last year’s model that fetched £4,000 at the time but I’m not complaining, as suddenly I’m a member of an elite club.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Larry Ellison’s yacht isn’t threatened by NoSQL – yet
But he might have to buy a NoSQL dinghy to tie to the back of it
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/04/the_irriestable_rise_of_nosql/
Another month, another series of gains by NoSQL databases on their relational database peers.
In fact, according to the September data from DB-Engines, we’re not far away from seeing a NoSQL database crack the top three databases globally. So, for those who “can’t wait for NoSQL to die,” they’re going to be waiting a long, long time.
Not everyone agrees. For example, Milo co-founder and former Googler Ted Dziuba argues that NoSQL “will eventually get marginalised”, because it doesn’t solve problems that real companies have. Or, rather, NoSQL databases don’t deliver on promises that RDBMS mainstays like MySQL or Postgres do.
Because… well, because no one has the scale issues that Big Data creates, he writes.
Hence, as Big Data has grown, relational databases have stumbled as big data-friendly NoSQL databases have soared. This isn’t to suggest that companies are dumping their RDBMSes wholesale. Not at all. Rather, they are increasingly looking to NoSQL for new workloads.
And while it’s easy to look at that nearly 800-point delta between SQL Server and MongoDB and assume it’s an insurmountable one, we may not be far off from seeing MongoDB – the firm I used to work for – surpass it. Just look at the respective growth trajectories for the different databases
The one RDBMS that has hit a second wind and is growing well is Postgres. All others are flat or declining relative to their NoSQL peers. Turn this ship around, as Franklin intimates – this isn’t going to change anytime soon. We’re simply not going back to rigid structure for data.
Even areas that were previously off-limits for NoSQL are now available. Take, for example, IBM’s support for MongoDB on its z Systems mainframe.
As DataStax’s Scott Hirleman told me: “NoSQL databases enable companies to be more agile, especially while deploying new features; more flexible (store varied and/or complex data types); and able to support scale without high costs and complexity.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIO enjoys dual role of cloud strategist and company pitchman
http://www.cio.com/article/2980183/cio-role/cio-enjoys-dual-role-of-cloud-strategist-and-company-pitchman.html
VMware’s Bask Iyer spends his days refining the company’s private cloud system, which he uses to sell the software maker’s technology to fellow CIOs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Debian upgrades Wheezy and Jessie with a combined 372 updates
Patch deluge awaits Penguinistas after weekend emissions
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/07/debian_upgrades_wheezy_and_jessie_with_a_combined_372_updates/
Popular GNU/Linux distribution Debian published the second update to its “Jessie” stable release over the weekend and the ninth update for its older “Wheezy” edition.
Debian Jessie 8.2 “mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems”, according to the distro’s announcement of its new release. The Reg has counted 60 security fixes and 68 updated packages in the new release.
By our count Wheezy 7.9, also revealed over the weekend, updates 60 packages and offers 184 security fixes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is ‘MetaPod’: a) a Pokemon; b) servers running OpenStack?
Cisco replacing ‘respiratory disease’ with ‘a useless person’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/07/borg_lops_toolong_product_name_to_metapod/
We only break out LogoWatch for special occasions, and this is surely counts: Cisco has decided that its OpenStack Private Cloud is a tad dull, uses too many words and, worst of all, gave rise to jokes.
As of now, The Borg wants users to kindly remember that the correct name for Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud is “Cisco MetaPod”.
Ciscan Niki Acosta (an OpenStack evangelist) got the joyful job of blogging about the name change here.
The product name apparently bumped against The Borg’s branding guidelines
“Metacloud OpenStack was a recognised distribution of OpenStack, but when we were acquired, we were able to transfer the distribution rights to Cisco.”
Alas, the resulting Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud was too long, people abbreviated it to COPC, and that “sounds like a respiratory disease”.
Cisco OpenStack® Private Cloud is now Cisco Metapod™
http://blogs.cisco.com/cloud/cisco-openstack-private-cloud-is-now-cisco-metapod
Tomi Engdahl says:
Strong dollar will deal death to US firms’ overseas growth
2015 will be ‘pretty awful’, according to analyst firm Forrester
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/07/us_dollar_hits_business_forrester/
2015 is shaping up to be “pretty awful” for US tech vendors, which have been hit by a one-two of strong international competition and a strong US dollar.
That’s according to Forrester, which reckons global tech purchases in local currencies will grow by 3.6 per cent this year – down from the 5.3 per cent growth forecast in January.
The biggest decline, though, will hit sales of products measured in the US dollar. Forrester now no longer anticipates any growth, instead predicting a decline of 3.1 per cent, a reversal on the gain of 4.1 per cent which was forecast in January.
This will be a problem for US tech firms with big overseas revenues.
The analyst expects a return to growth next year, at a rate of 4.4 per cent, saying it thinks the weakening of the euro and other currencies against the dollar is temporary.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New voice transcription feature in Google Docs censors (some!) swearwords
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2015/09/03/new-voice-transcription-feature-in-google-docs-censors-some-swearwords/
Google Docs announced today that you can now create documents using your voice. And of course, like any good linguist, I immediately went to try to stump it. It’s pretty good, actually — it recognized both pronunciations of “gif” and “aunt” in the contexts “animated ___” and “uncle and ___” although it tended to assume that I might have the bit/bet merger, which I most emphatically do not, and thus presented me with a few transcriptions that felt like odd candidates to me.
But then I tried swearwords and hit the fucking jackpot
Tomi Engdahl says:
Layabout, sun-blushed techies have pick of IT job market, says survey
Demand is so great that many would-be workers took summer off
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/07/it_staff_demand_grows/
UK techies can pick and choose where they want their next job to be – so much so that many of them took the summer off completely to sip on pina coladas and top up their tans.
That’s the finding of a new survey, which revealed that according to a seasonally adjusted index measuring permanent vacancies in the IT sector, demand to fill permanent staffer jobs in the IT market had risen to 64.4 per cent in the dog days of August, up from 62.8 per cent a month earlier.
But IT workers were pretty relaxed about the whole thing, apparently opting to enjoy the sunshine while it lasted before plonking for a job in a cold, dark server room.
Meanwhile, demand from Blighty companies to hire temporary techies fell to 58.7 per cent from 59.1 per cent in July.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP learns to walk and chew virtual gum at the same time
After dumping EVO:RAIL, HP bounces back with deeper VMware partnership
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/06/hp_learns_to_walk_and_chew_virtual_gum_at_the_same_time/
HP’s decision to bail out of VMware’s EVO:RAIL hyper-converged happiness project wasn’t due to any dissatisfaction with the product. Instead, HP decided it could not ask its salesforce and channel to wrap their heads around EVO:RAIL and its own StorVirtual-based hyper-converged products, so chose to go it alone.
at VMworld HP signed up for a “global sales, support and go-to-market agreement” to resell and doservices for VMware’s NSX. VMware’s very pleased with that and will certify bits of HP networking kit for NSX.
HP’s also announced a new Converged Architecture 700 that blends its own BladeSystem, 3PAR Storage and OneView with vSphere and VMware vRealize Operations.
The soon-to-split company has also decided it needs a Software-Defined Infrastructure consulting practice, more VDI goodies based on VMware Horizon 6.1 and NVIDIA Grid 2.0, and even new HP-conducted training courses for vSphere 6.0.
A cynic might remark that HP didn’t have the bandwidth to sell EVO:RAIL and StorVirtual, but can figure out how to sell both NSX and OpenFlow.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will Oculus explode or flop like Google Glass?
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/06/will-oculus-explode-or-flop-like-google-glass/
The virtual reality display manufacturer Oculus made news in July when it was announced that the company, owned by Facebook, had acquired the 3D gesture and tracking startup Pebbles Interfaces for a whopping $60 million. This buyout is one of the latest in a series of companies working in the field of VR that have been snatched up in recent months by companies like Oculus: What are they up to?
Up to this point, the whole VR field has been treated with a fair amount of skepticism, with many remembering the early ‘90s when clunky forms of VR systems were presented as the next stage in gaming before being quickly discarded in favor of faster versions of the standard consoles. While different developers have continued to work on VR related projects, they gained little notice until Facebook joined the party with their 2014 purchase of Oculus for a price tag of $2 billion and 23.1 shares of Facebook stock.
The intrigue surrounding Oculus and it Rift console is its promise of adding a new dimension to the world of gaming. So why has the social media and advertising giant Facebook taken such a keen interest in VR and what does this say about the future of the technology in consumer culture? Ultimately, is this the right move, or is Facebook making a similar mistake to Google’s Glass?
Tomi Engdahl says:
7 Flash Memory Products Not to Miss
Solid state drives dominates memory products last month
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327611&
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Safe’ screens touted for those who just can’t look away
http://phys.org/news/2015-09-safe-screens-touted.html
As it gets harder to tear our eyes away from smartphones, televisions, tablets or computers, concerns are growing over a blue light emitted by their screens, blamed for harming the retina and causing interrupted sleep.
Electronics giants are turning crisis into an opportunity—quickly declaring that their latest products feature “safe” screens.
At the IFA mega consumer electronics show in Berlin, Dutch company Philips is showcasing a new technology for its computer screens called “SoftBlue,” which it claims is gentler on the retina.
“We are shifting the harmful blue light frequencies, which are below 450 nanometers, to above 460 nanometers,” said Philips’ marketing director Stefan Sommer.
Other brands like Asus and BenQ, along with American firm ViewSonic, have also seized on “safe” screens as a new selling point.
It is all scare-mongering or scientific fact? Serge Picaud, a researcher at the Institute of Sight in Paris, has a more measured take on it.
“We should not be so afraid that we bin all our screens,” he said.
Picaud carried out a study in 2013 in which he exposed sample retina cells from a pig—similar to those found in humans—to different wavelengths of light, and showed that those between 415 and 455 nanometres killed the cells.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-09-safe-screens-touted.html#jCp
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle plugs socket numbers on DIY Standard Edition
Web scale comes at a price. Larry’s price
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/07/oracle_se2_licensing_clamp_down/
Oracle is clamping down on uses of its entry-level Standard Edition database by throttling threads.
Larry Ellison’s giant has cut by half the number of sockets users are allowed to run with Database 12.1.0.2 Standard Edition (SE2), released at the start of this month.
SE2 users are now restricted to just two threads, down from four in the earlier versions. Even on Real Application Clusters, (RAC), users will be limited to two nodes per cluster and one socket per node.
Furthermore, each Oracle Database SE2 uses a maximum of 16 CPU threads at any time – no matter what your existing license agreements say.
Despite the tightening of the Ts&Cs, price per socket remains unchanged at $17,500. The existing SE and SE1 editions are to be eliminated from Oracle’s price list as of 1 December.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon to Release $50 Tablet as It Struggles to Sell Pricier Devices
New device has 6-inch screen and is half the price of cheapest Fire tablet
http://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-release-50-tablet-as-it-struggles-to-sell-pricier-devices-1441653902
Amazon.com Inc. has struggled to draw customers to its pricier tablets. So it’s going further down-market.
The Seattle online retailer plans to release a $50 tablet with a 6-inch screen, in time for this year’s holidays, according to people familiar with the matter. That would make it one of the least-expensive tablets on the market and half the price of the company’s current Fire HD 6-inch tablet.
The move would potentially attract buyers looking for a simple—and effectively disposable—device for straightforward tasks like streaming video at home and shopping on Amazon.com. But such inexpensive tablets typically come with compromises like inferior screen quality, durability or battery life in comparison to more expensive tablets like Amazon’s larger Fire tablets and industry-leading devices like Apple Inc. ’s iPad.
The $50 device is part of a slate Amazon is planning to release this year that will also include tablets with 8-inch and 10-inch screens, according to the people familiar.
Tomi Engdahl says:
We asked a maker of PCIe storage switches to prove the tech is more interesting than soggy cardboard
Why not just use 10GE?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/07/pmc_switchtec_interview/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Dell expects PC makers to consolidate in the next few years
http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/07/michael-dell-expects-pc-makers-to-consolidate-in-the-next-few-years/
The top three global PC makers would be able to raise market share in the next few years through consolidation amid shrinking sales of personal computers, Dell Inc Chief Executive Michael Dell said on Monday.
Lenovo Group Ltd tops global PC shipment ranking with a 20.3 percent market share, followed by Hewlett-Packard Co at 18.5 percent and Dell at 14.5 percent, according to research firm International Data Corp.
The top three companies could corner about 80 percent of the market in the next 5 to 7 years, Dell said at a roundtable conference with journalists in Bengaluru, India.
DC last month forecast PC shipments to fall 8.7 percent this year, steeper than its earlier estimate of a 6.2 percent decline, and said they are expected to return to growth in 2017.
Once the leader in personal computers sales, Dell, like its peers, has been hit by a rapidly declining PC market as consumers move to smartphones and tablets.
“I think there are maybe only one or two companies who make a profit in the smartphone business today and there are quite a few companies that lose substantial sums of money in the smartphone business,” Dell said.
“So, no thank you! I do not want to be in the smartphone business.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Business Arrow Government
Lawrence Lessig’s White House tilt hits crowdfunding goal
One meeellion bucks pledged for doomed presidential campaign to end all campaigns
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/08/lawrence_lessigs_white_house_tilt_hits_crowdfunding_goal/
Law professor and internet luminary Lawrence Lessig will run for the US Presidency after hitting his US$1million crowdfunding goal.
Lessig announced his conditional candidacy, and a platform to take money out of US politics, in early August. A week later, Wikipedian Jimbo Wales clambered aboard the bandwagon.
Both admitted the bandwagon was rickety and had no chance of rolling into the White House, but feel that Lessig’s platform to “fix democracy” was worth advancing even with a futile campaign … if you, the people, stumped up US$1million in a crowdfunding campaign.
You, the people, happily provided that sum, so Lessig will run.
The campaigns’s even attracted sufficient attention that Lessig feels he may be eligible for public funding in some US States. The candidate is optimistic that recent opinion polls suggests he may also have attracted enough voter interest to be considered for an appearance in the Democratic Party’s televised debates
Tomi Engdahl says:
DSSD says Violin’s right: SSD format is WRONG for flash memory
Upstart makes bold statement, dumps kit in our laps with puppy-dog eyes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/07/dssd_says_violin_is_right_ssd_format_wrong/
The SSD format is wrong for flash memory storage arrays. That is the message from DSSD, EMC’s rack-scale, shared flash array development.
The Register has seen pictures of DSSD’s flash modules and these are not disk bay form factor SSDs. Rather, they resemble Violin Memory VIMM – Violin In-Line Memory Modules – instead.
Pure Storage and others have dissed Violin for not using commodity SSDs and thus falling behind the flash storage technology development curve.
However, our understanding is that Pure Storage* is also developing its own flash-carrying modules and stepping away from the SSD format, as has DSSD.
Developing proprietary flash cards can lead to lower power budgets, less heat generation, and faster data access times compared to standard SSD or PCIe form factors.
The traditional server has a CPU, some memory and some direct-attached storage (DAS) and it connects across a FC/Ethernet network to a shared storage area network (SAN) or filer.
What is being envisaged is fast PCIe fabric-linked, core shared flash storage resource, conceptually surrounded by a ring of compute engines, each with DRAM and, say, CrossPoint memory. The core DSSD array will stream old data off to a slower bulk capacity disk drive array and/or to the public cloud.
In this sense, the DSSD design is a revolutionary approach which, as well as rewriting the rules for flash arrays, will cause servers to be redesigned as well.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Updates to Skylake Discrete Graphics Performance: PCIe Optimizations Incoming
by Ian Cutress on September 8, 2015 5:00 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9607/skylake-discrete-graphics-performance-pcie-optimizations
Tomi Engdahl says:
Software Is Hiring, But Manufacturing Is Bleeding
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/09/08/1641237/software-is-hiring-but-manufacturing-is-bleeding
Which tech segment added the most jobs in August? According to new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, tech consulting gained 7,000 positions in August, (Dice link) below July’s gains of 11,100, but enough to set it ahead of data processing, hosting, and related services (which added 1,600 jobs) and computer and electronic-product manufacturing (which lost 1,800 jobs).
The latest numbers reflect some longtime trends: The rise of cloud services and infrastructure has contributed to slackening demand for PCs and other hardware, eroding manufacturing jobs. At the same time, increased appetite for everything from Web developers to information-systems managers has kept employers adding positions in other technology segments.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The MacBook Air is on a path to extinction
Apple is squeezing the air out of the Air
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/8/9275157/apple-macbook-air-pro-retina-redesign-phase-out
When Apple redesigned the MacBook Air in 2010, it created one of the best machines to ever carry its Mac label. That new laptop was a revelation: extremely thin and light, like the original Air, yet also powerful enough for most tasks and equipped with a long-lasting battery. For years, the MacBook Air has been a standard-bearer, the role model for every Windows ultrabook, but 2015 has not been so kind to its leadership position. Apple introduced the new 12-inch MacBook and updated the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, both directly competing with the Air, and for those not umbilically attached to OS X, Dell’s XPS 13 offered a compelling Windows alternative. And this week there’s the looming threat of the iPad Pro on the horizon. Has Apple forsaken what was once its best PC?
Until this year, I wondered why anyone would buy the MacBook Pro, a laptop I considered to be a fatter, slightly more powerful version of the Air. Its battery didn’t last as long, it was thicker and heavier, and it was more expensive. After reviewing the 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina display, however, I’m asking myself why I am still stuck with the Air. The difference between the two machines is as simple as it is compelling: the display.
Apple is not a company that can be accused of doing things thoughtlessly, and the decision to leave the Air’s display at the lower quality and resolution must be taken as a deliberate one. In other words, Apple is comfortable with keeping the Air as a technological straggler in its lineup. That leaves us with a choice of two most likely scenarios: either the Air is destined for a future overhaul and its first redesign in five years or it has no future at all. There’s not enough room in Apple’s lineup for a MacBook, a MacBook Air, and a MacBook Pro
Tomi Engdahl says:
IFA 2015: the good, the bad and the ugly
The best and worst of Berlin’s biggest annual technology event
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/feature/2424888/ifa-2015-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly
IFA IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S biggest and longest-standing trade shows, and is a force to be reckoned with.
Each year in Berlin at the end of summer, thousands of technology journalists descend on the German capital to visit one of the world’s biggest and most badly designed conference centres – the Messe Berlin – which must have ignored everything the Germans are famed for (efficiency) when it was designed and built.
The ‘world’s first’ 4K smartphone
There wasn’t much innovation at IFA this year so we were happy to see that Sony unveiled a “world’s first” in the form of the Xperia Z5 Premium with 4K display.
Acer Revo Build Series mini PC
Acer kicked off IFA with something a little different on Wednesday, unveiling the Windows 10-powered Revo Build Series mini PC that’s a build-it-yourself modular PC tower.
The Bad
Lacking innovation
IFA this year was a throng of throw-away announcements about bog standard laptops, tablets, smartwatches and a few top-end smartphones, but there wasn’t anything truly innovative on show this time. Sony’s latest smartphone screen showed us something new in terms of design tech, but there was little else for us to gawp at when walking around the show floor.
Cheesy and patronising press conferences
Every year that we come to IFA we always forget how cringe-worthy the press conferences are.
Press scrums
Sometimes, when there’s a lot of press in one room, conferences can often turn into shoving matches between journalists
The Ugly
The Messe
The Messe conference centre is just that: a great big fat mess.
IFA is the same every year
Tomi Engdahl says:
What an IT Career Will Look Like 5 Years Out
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/09/09/0240233/what-an-it-career-will-look-like-5-years-out
InfoWorld’s Paul Heltzel reports on the impact that IT’s increasing reliance on the cloud for IT infrastructure will have on your career in the years ahead. “[O]ne fact is clear: Organizations of all stripes are increasingly moving IT infrastructure to the cloud. In fact, most IT pros who’ve pulled all-nighters, swapping in hard drives or upgrading systems while co-workers slept, probably won’t recognize their offices’ IT architecture — or the lack thereof — in five years.”
Clouds ahead: What an IT career will look like five years out
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2979872/it-careers/clouds-ahead-what-an-it-career-will-look-like-five-years-out.html
IT infrastructure is increasingly giving way to the cloud. Here’s how to remain relevant in the years ahead
Don’t get us wrong: In today’s quickly evolving tech world, it’s easy to get lost chasing the turbulent present moment. The pace of change can be dizzying, and keeping up on everything that’s emerging in IT today can drive even the most devoted tech worker to distraction.
But IT pros who don’t take the time to lift their heads and assess the likely IT landscape five years out may be asking for career trouble. Because one fact is clear: Organizations of all stripes are increasingly moving IT infrastructure to the cloud. In fact, most IT pros who’ve pulled all-nighters, swapping in hard drives or upgrading systems while co-workers slept, probably won’t recognize their offices’ IT architecture — or the lack thereof — in five years.
Cutting the wires
When you step off the elevator at the office or data center five years from now, what will you see? Fewer servers and fewer co-workers, most likely. Maintaining on-premises data centers is a costly endeavor, much more so than connecting to the cloud.
“Cloud services are disrupters,” concurs Jim Rogers, CMO at unified communications and cloud services company iCore Networks. “They disrupt the idea that IT departments need to spend most of their time on-site performing mundane tasks. IT departments now have more viable options to outsource and automate these tasks than ever before.”
“IT managers will need good network engineers, help desk staff, security managers, and business analysts,” says Chris McKewon, founder and chief architect of IT consulting company Xceptional Networks. “But they won’t need server/storage engineers, systems administrators, or data center managers.”
“The IT department won’t need to be onsite monitoring and recovering devices and systems to ensure they’re ready for use,” says iCore’s Rogers. “Instead, the IT professionals can spend more time as strategic planners and business analysts who ensure their organizations are structured appropriately to support cloud-based office communications. They’ll be responsible for vendor management and integration processes.” And, he says, IT pros “will be educators, hosting essential end-user trainings for colleagues.”
IT roles in flux
Here’s the big question: As the cloud continues to gain traction, will companies need a fully staffed IT department? As you may have guessed, few believe the IT department will disappear. Companies will still require talented staff who can — at the very least — manage systems integration. But an IT department five years from now will need to keep pace with nearly constant change.
“I will say that I think the number of implementation and ops-focused roles will decrease, and those IT staff will have to switch to a strategic mind-set,” says Roman Stanek, CEO of GoodData. “Leaders who were once focused on operations will have the opportunity to dive more deeply into the blending of business need with technologies, data science, data monetization. IT will no longer be the people who try to manage your database; they’ll be the people who are thinking of new ways to monetize, share, and use your data for organization-wide success.”
“The IT department isn’t going away, and the role of the CIO isn’t going to be marginalized. But as more workloads shift to the cloud, the construction of the IT department, by necessity, must change away from traditional roles to those more focused on vendor, business, security, and service management,” Quin says. “This doesn’t mean that development and administration jobs go away, just that there are fewer of them.”
GoodData’s Stanek also sees IT staffs merging with other departments: “We’re seeing completely new managers of IT departments now, which is very exciting. They might end up reporting to different areas in the line of business, based on their tech and cloud spending. So far, departments like marketing, finance, and operations have started to take some spend from the typical CIO role, so IT has moved across the organization.”
“We’re already seeing many ops tasks being taken over by cloud vendors, and this will continue to expand. So IT managers will be able to head up projects to improve their business — not fix its technical flaws,” Stanek says.
“The reality is, IT departments are already evolving,”
Potential hangups
Some see the cloud presenting the same hurdles as any other early-adopted technology. Some tough questions remain when we’re talking about more than shadow IT, more than communications and backup, but rather the core applications that the business needs to exist.
“Is the security in the cloud as good as what I have control over in my data center?” asks David Fowler of INetU, a company that offers managed cloud hosting services. “How do I manage capacity and performance when the environment is virtualized and there are variables I no longer have control over? How do I handle backups and [disaster recovery] in a virtualized world? How do I integrate the data in the cloud with the other systems that may be in my data center or a different cloud?”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Dell, HP, and Accenture will resell Surface Pro tablets as the first participants in Microsoft’s new Surface Enterprise Initiative
Dell, HP to resell Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablets
http://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-hp-to-resell-microsofts-surface-pro-tablets/
Microsoft is expanding its distribution of Surface Pro tablets and making enterprise services for them available via new partnerships with Dell and HP.
On September 8, Microsoft announced that Dell and HP will be reselling its Surface Pro tablets, and supplementing them with enterprise-grade services and apps.
These vendors are the first participants in Microsoft’s new Surface Enterprise Initiative, which is focused on furthering business adoption of Surfaces running Windows 10. But more partners may be coming, Microsoft officials said.
Dell will begin offering the Surface Pros and related accessories, including docking stations, covers and pens, to its customers in the U.S. and Canada starting in early October. Dell’s North American commercial sales force will sell Surface Pros alongside Dell’s own Venue Pro and Latitude tablets, which are also aimed at business users. Later this year, Dell will also sell Surfaces via its Dell.com/Work site.
Update: HP has released a few more details. Its sales force will begin offering Surface Pro 3s in October, a company spokesperson said. HP will also offer a new set of HP Care Packs “designed specifically to help customers to plan, configure, deploy and manage in enterprise environments,” as well as “some mobility workflow transformation tools and services that will be available next year,” according to a September 8 blog post.
Accenture/Avanade also are part of the new Surface Enterprise Initiative, too, though neither company will be reselling Surface hardware.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hadoop spinner Cloudera lights Spark on MapReduce retirement
Big Data pioneer succumbs to mounting pressure from the crowd
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/09/cloudera_to_swap_out_mapreduce/
Cloudera, one of the Big Data pioneers founded on Hadoop – the open-source implementation of Google’s MapReduce – is replacing… MapReduce.
On Wednesday, the firm announced the Open Platform Initiative, which will see it substitute MapReduce for the Apache Software Foundation’s Spark, a cluster-computing framework which has attracted big-name support.
Cloudera said its initiative would let Spark become the successor to Hadoop’s MapReduce framework for general Hadoop data processing. The firm claimed “wide adoption” of Spark among its customers in the last 18 months, with Spark also becoming the most popular open-source project in the Hadoop ecosystem.
Cloudera is no recent convert to Spark. The firm – along with IBM, Intel, DataBricks, and MapR – last year announced a collaboration to port the Apache Hive data warehouse to Apache Spark. The One Platform Initiative will tackle security, scale, management and streaming.
Hadoop was actually developed by Cloudera’s Doug Cutting, along with Mike Cafarella, as a project at their employer Yahoo! in 2005 and released in 2011. They’d used a paper on MapReduce released by that framework’s owner, Google.
Spark was developed by the AMPLab at the University of California, Berkeley, and open-souced under a BSD license in 2010, before being donated to ASF in 2013. It employs Spark SQL, streaming, a machine-learning framework called MLlib and a GraphX distributed graph processing framework.
It’s seen growing support from many in the Hadoop and MapReduce NoSQL ecosystem: NoSQL provider MapR announced Spark-based offerings for security, analytics and Genome sequencing software and Cloudera’s fellow Hadoop spinner Hortonworks released Spark as a part of its Hortonworks Data Platform in April.
MapReduce, and thus Hadoop, have long been under pressure for their complexity and lack of flexibility and performance, with many wondering what would come next.
Spark is seen as faster – able to process jobs between 10 to 100 times faster than MapReduce – and better for iterative and interactive processing, while it is able to run not just on Hadoop but also other Hadoopy tools such as Hive and Pig.
Tomi Engdahl says:
1st actual computer bug found, September 9, 1947
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4420729/1st-actual-computer-bug-found–September-9–1947?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150909&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150909&elq=d19ab76f8ebb4296853ab580093321c6&elqCampaignId=24702&elqaid=27993&elqat=1&elqTrackId=8c5e345abb3e4409a87084ddba70ddb8
“And one night she (Mark II) conked out and we went to look for the bug and found an actual large moth, about four inches in wing span, in one of the relays beaten to death”
Tomi Engdahl says:
When the IT department is ‘just another supplier’
The shift from centralised IT to core business systems team
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/09/decentralisation_it/
The traditional approach to IT within the average company is to have a central group that manages the technology and applications. This makes perfect sense, in principle: the underpinning technology has always been complex and has required a certain skill level in order to keep it running, patched and up to date.
But things have changed radically in recent years. IT isn’t the hideously complex beast it once was and that means reliance on the centralised IT team is beginning to fade away. we’re already starting to see the change.
The IT team has always been a service industry: its customers are the users around the company. Most importantly, it used to be a monopoly – but it isn’t any more. Departments are able these days to consider the IT department as “just another supplier” for many of the functions it provides – and are free to use someone else in many cases.
The growth of the Cloud has done the same for server provision. If you want a server these days, one of three things could happen:
First, the IT department might say: “OK, we need to procure a server” and place an order.
Second, they might say: “No problem”, and run you up a new virtual server in their VMware or Hyper-V environment.
Third, you might log onto Amazon or Azure and run yourself up a new VM.
The only chance your IT department has of its server team surviving is for the second of these three options to be the chosen one.
Is the IT department cost-effective?
Continuing this concept of the IT department being your service provider, what actually is the cost of it?
Of course, putting the choice in the hands of the end user isn’t a new thing in general.
So is it dead?
For services such as software development and equipment supply, centralised IT is losing the battle. The point is that it doesn’t need a centralised service as departments can do it themselves more cheaply and with their own resource instead of having to compete for shared central developers.
Even with corporate applications that are used across the business (email, the finance system and the like) it’s increasingly common for departments to have “power users” who have some form of training in the applications and can answer their colleagues questions instead of having to raise a ticket with the IT service desk.
There are, however, some functions that are likely to remain centralised – primarily because it’s the most economic way to run those functions.
The services that will remain central
The core services on which everyone relies work best when they’re centralised. A single corporate email system makes sense, because you need integrated address books, calendars, room lists and the like – to split the function would make it less efficient and harder to use. This doesn’t mean it needs to run on in-house kit, though: it could perfectly easily sit in the cloud.
Similarly the core procurement, HR and finance systems – which could have all three functions fulfilled by a single product or might equally be separate applications. Again these need to be centralised because splitting the data, the business rules and the processing would be hideously inefficient to do as compartmentalised setups.
So although we no longer have the old central monopoly, we’re not splitting absolutely everything up.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld:
AMD separates CPU and GPU units, restructures its graphics division as Radeon Technologies Group led by Raja Koduri
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2981813/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung’s new 12Gb DRAM modules allow for smartphones with 6GB of RAM
Smartphones and tablets will soon sport more memory than your average laptop.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/09/samsungs-new-12gb-dram-modules-allow-for-smartphones-with-6gb-of-ram/
Samsung has begun mass production of the industry’s first 12Gb LPDDR4 DRAM dies for mobile devices, fabricated on its 20nm manufacturing process. The new chips, which offer a 50 percent greater density than existing 8Gb dies, will allow manufacturers to offer mobile devices with more RAM than a mainstream laptop: 6GB, with four 12Gb dies in a single DRAM chip package.
Phones like Samsung’s own Galaxy Edge 6+ currently top out at 4GB, with 3GB being more common, even on high-end devices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Software Takes On School Science Tests In Search For Common Sense
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/09/09/1922253/software-takes-on-school-science-tests-in-search-for-common-sense
Making software take school tests designed for human kids can help the quest for machines with common sense, says researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. They’ve made software called Aristo that scores 75 percent on the multiple choice questions that make up most of New York State’s 4th grade science exam.
AI Software Goes Up Against Fourth Graders on Science Tests
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/541001/ai-software-goes-up-against-fourth-graders-on-science-tests/
Making AI software take real school exams might accelerate progress toward machines with common sense.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here’s why Apple made the stylus that Steve Jobs hated
Styluses and screens have come a long way
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/9/9298117/apple-pencil-stylus-ipad-pro-steve-jobs
When Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller announced that the company’s stylus for new iPad Pro would be called Pencil, the crowd audibly laughed in unison. On the surface, it was because it played into the stereotype that Apple lays claim to everyday inspirations. But on a deeper level it traces back to former CEO Steve Jobs, who famously said in 2007 at the initial iPhone reveal, “Who wants a stylus? You have to get em’, put em’ away. You lose them. Yuck.” Yet it turns out that eight years later, some people do want a stylus — and they’ve improved substantially alongside the devices with which they’re used.
Still, the online snark was immediate. “Apple just announced a product that Steve Jobs famously hated,” wrote Business Insider.
What’s missing from the reactions is the obvious acknowledgment that Jobs was not only talking about using a stylus with an entirely different product — the 3.5-inch iPhone 1 — but he was referring to both styluses and screens that have been blown out of the water by newer technology.
That first iPhone was one of the first smartphones to use a capacitive touchscreen, and arguably popularized them.
Styluses prior to the adoption of capacitive touch were meant to make up for the rudimentary capabilities of resistive touchscreens.
Eight years later, these types of styluses are more commonly found attached to the bottom of Nintendo’s 3DS.
Apple knows that capacitive allows for better finger input; it’s why Jobs tossed the idea of a stylus for the iPhone to the wayside in the first place. But the iPad Pro, for which the $99 Pencil stylus was designed, is not a small rectangle that fits in our pockets. It’s a 12.9-inch sheet of glass designed to be used in many different ways, from playing games and watching movies to writing documents and taking notes with the attachable keyboard.
And then there’s drawing
But now, the Pencil is an option for those who want to use the iPad Pro as if it were a sheet a paper and the stylus as if it were — wait for it — a real pencil. Apple has designed the pen so that it has little to no latency. It can draw thicker lines with applied pressure and orient its toolset to whether you’re tilting the pen, for shading, or dragging it along the surface to draw lines or form letters. These selling points make it clear that the Pencil is not designed to help you clean out your inbox.
Still, Apple will always face accusations of playing catch-up. After all, Samsung has repopularized the stylus with its ultra-large Galaxy Note smartphone line for years, while Microsoft has been adamant about including a pen with its Surface line of 2-in-1 devices.
The truth is that Apple has long been known to sit on obvious market trends — larger phones, smaller tablets, smartwatches, and super-large tablets — until the moment feels right to capitalize on them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lee Hutchinson / Ars Technica:
Apple announces next version of OS X, El Capitan, will be released to public Sept. 30 — Apple announces September 30 release date for OS X 10.11 — “El Capitan” will become generally available at the end of the month
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/09/apple-announces-september-30-release-date-for-os-x-10-11/
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT Must Partner and Adapt to Deliver Business Value
http://www.cio.com/article/2973040/cio-role/it-must-partner-and-adapt-to-deliver-business-value.html?nsdr=true
As IT continues to face evolving demands, CIOs must adapt strategies and partner with other departments to remain relevant.
The role and responsibilities of today’s CIO are evolving thanks to a myriad of new business trends and technologies. Increased demand for smartphones, tablets and wearable devices in the workplace brings along with it new challenges, such as managing BYOD devices and mitigating shadow IT. The deployment of SaaS-based tools is booming, and with it comes challenges related to security and convergence with other trends such as big data. Additionally, the workplace of the future demands a more mobile and social enterprise.
The times they are a-changin’, indeed. Particularly if you find yourself in an enterprise’s IT department.
It has been IT’s (often thankless) job to research, deploy and integrate new technologies into the workplace. At the same time, CIOs are charged with lowering costs.
So how will CIOs meet increasingly complex technology needs across an enterprise while cutting costs? Partnership and adaptation.
Partner with LOB leaders to deliver value
Leverage expertise in other departments
Embrace new responsibilities
CIOs boost their careers doing double duty
http://www.cio.com/article/2969379/cio-role/cios-boost-their-careers-doing-double-duty.html
Many CIOs find it exhilarating to take on business functions outside of IT. But CIO-plus roles require a new mindset and trusted deputies.
In search of more and bigger challenges, Hackenson approached her CEO and listed the groups and responsibilities that interested her.
She got what she asked for and more. Today, as CIO and senior vice president of technology and services, Hackenson oversees IT, cybersecurity, corporate services, the internal audit group, the global insurance group and a new energy business that includes a rooftop solar company.
“A lot of what’s been moved under me is stuff where you need strong relationships rather than command and control. It’s more about influence,” Hackenson says.
An emphasis on relationships and relationship-building is a common theme for executives with dual titles and so-called CIO-plus responsibilities. The primary reason is that IT increasingly permeates everything companies do. As technology is woven further into the overall business strategy, CIO roles–and titles–are expanding.
This expansion of duties has its benefits and practical challenges. IT already is tied to every single part of a business. As a result, technology executives have a keen horizontal perspective of all of a company’s business processes. From that unique perch, they can more readily identify business stumbling blocks and innovate process improvements that increase business value.
“The CIO is one of the few people in an organization who sees all the processes from cradle to grave and truly has an expansive point of view. That lends itself to leading other parts of the organization,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP overtakes Cisco in cloud infrastructure revenues
Duo soak up quarter of the market
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/10/hp_overtakes_cisco_in_cloud_infrastructure_revenues/
HP sells more cloud infrastructure equipment than anyone else, including Cisco, which was shunted into second place for the first time in Q2, 2015.
But we learn from its summary, released September 9, 2015, that servers, OS, storage and networking collectively account for 89 per cent of cloud infrastructure revenues. The rest of the money goes on cloud security, cloud management and virtualisation revenues.
Other major players cited by Synergy are Microsoft, Dell, IBM, EMC, VMware, Lenovo and Oracle.
As we all know, Cisco dominates networking equipment sales and is doing well in servers, while HP dominates cloud servers, a bigger market, and is ‘a main challenger’ in storage. Microsoft ranks highly by dint of its server OS and virtualization applications, and Dell and IBM score well across a “range of cloud technology markets”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Infrastructure Readiness? It’s time to get realistic
How future proof are your IT systems?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/10/infrastructure_readiness_temperature_check/
Temperature Check Many IT professionals believe their IT infrastructures are coping pretty well with current business requirements, but they are also aware that new and changing needs will lead to future capability gaps, if they are not doing so already. They also know that doing more of the same is not the answer in many areas. New architectures and delivery models will be necessary to effectively keep pace with evolving demands.
Mind the gap
Marketing people and pundits like to tell tales about how IT teams are generally failing to deliver. If you took everything you read on face value, you could easily get the impression that IT systems and infrastructures in most businesses were totally unfit for purpose. It’s a nice line for those trying to sell you stuff, but it doesn’t really help you understand where you are and where it really makes sense to focus your improvement efforts.
The truth is that every organisation is different. Business requirements and pressures vary considerably, while the way in which your IT infrastructure has evolved over time will likely have put you in a different place to most of your peers and competitors. Given this, the chances are that you’re doing well in some areas, and not so well in others.
Readiness for evolving demands
Some aspects of the business served by IT change faster than others.
Building on the right foundation?
Another question to consider is which specific parts of your infrastructure you regard to be future proof or otherwise – i.e. where are the strongest and weakest links. When it comes to core data centre infrastructure – servers, storage, networking, and so on – survey responses are still a bit mixed, but the overall picture is not too bad. However, more gaps are evident in relation to fast-moving areas such as cloud, desktop, mobile and security
The important point here is that continuing to extend systems based on traditional/familiar components and architectures only gets you so far. Older servers and storage devices, for example, tend to be more difficult to integrate, instrument, automate, scale and generally administer than more modern equivalents designed to work as good citizens in a dynamic infrastructure environment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Citrix reveals ‘USB redirection to cloud’ plans to vaporise desktop peripherals
Local peripherals driving hosted apps and desktops, for artists and security purposes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/11/citrix_reveals_usb_redirection_to_cloud_plans_to_vaporise_desktop_peripherals/
Citrix is working on something it calls “ USB redirection to cloud” that will allow input devices on local devices to work on virtual desktops.
Over the last year, everyone in the remote/virtual/as-a-service desktop business has been talking up their ability to virtualise the graphics-heavy apps that some users wield. It’s important for desktop virtualisers to be able to handle such applications because it turns out that demanding apps are in demand in out-of-the-way places where operating a fleet of PCs is hard to do. Oil rigs and mines are often mentioned to The Reg’s virtualisation desk as hotbeds of CAD users who can best be served with virtual desktops.
Citrix now thinks such users also want to be able to use peripherals like drawing tablets and stylii with virtual desktops, but have been prevented from doing so by latency.
USB redirection to cloud is an effort to overcome that problem.
At VMworld 2015 last week Citrix demonstrated a WACOM tablet being used to drive Autodesk Mudbox, running inside a Citrix XenDesktop session. Even over conference-grade WiFi, and a trip over the public internet to Citrix’s bit barns, the tablet and its stylus worked, complete with pressure-senstive nuances.
So far, so niche. But Citrix thinks this could also in handy for applications like signature pads on credit card machines.
Citrix says “USB Redirection to Cloud will be part of a future XenDesktop and XenApp release.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Are you in the 1%? The 1% of sysadmins who need specialized flash?
Sometimes ordinary hardware won’t cut it – and array makers are relying on that
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/10/specialized_hardware_flash_storage/
Last week at Tech Field Day during VMworld, I met Violin Memory. A company that has been a pioneer in flash storage, but now struggles because, I believe, it has lost some of its credibility due to the lack of a decent feature set.
I’m thinking of data services, integration with hypervisors and OSs, and so on. They are catching up on features with the Concerto 7000 family, but, looking at their revenues too, they are still in trouble.
Perhaps this is more of a marketing problem than a real technical one, but now Violin has to maintain both hardware and software research and development, which adds cost, less flexibility, and longer product development cycles.
For example, some startups in this space have already released products based on TLC and 3D NAND, lowering prices and now competing at around $1/GB.
Someone needs more
99 per cent of workloads can be solved with general purpose arrays. But in some cases, you are in that 1 per cent and there isn’t commodity hardware in that space. Economically speaking, for most vendors, it simply doesn’t make sense to produce denser, more efficient and faster hardware: they can’t sell enough of it to justify R&D and production costs.
But it is also true that if money is not a problem and you want more performance and efficiency, the only solution is specialized hardware. Companies like EMC, DSSD – and, once, Violin – target these markets (and they are in that 1 per cent): high-speed financial trading, some big data applications and very high-end transactional DBs just give you results that much faster if you give them more resources.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM Buys StrongLoop To Add Node.js API Development To Its Cloud Platform
http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/10/ibm-buys-strongloop-to-add-node-js-app-development-to-its-cloud-platform/#.ojwuxm:J7U6
IBM has today made another acquisition to expand its business in cloud services — specifically in the area of enterprise app development. It has acquired StrongLoop, a startup based in San Mateo that builds application development software for enterprises using the open source JavaScript programming language Node.js. This in turn enables enterprises to build mobile and cloud-based apps equipped with APIs to integrate with each other and handle high volumes of data between mobile, web and Internet-of-Things apps.
IBM says it will be integrating StrongLoop’s Node.js features into its wider software portfolio to sit alongside MobileFirst and WebSphere. The main benefit of adding a Node.js development framework is to address a demand from enterprises who are interested in building apps with APIs that can handle large amounts of data and also connect on the back-end with other enterprise applications. (It should also help IBM compete better with the likes of Amazon, which has been offering a Node.js development platform since 2013.)
IBM says Node.js is one of the fastest-growing frameworks for developers, which also may point to demand that IBM has been seeing directly from its customers.
IBM says that from today, Node.js developers can use IBM’s Bluemix, the company’s platform-as-a-service offering.
Node.js is an open source technology and IBM intends to use the acquisition to further its ties to that community. It is a founding member and Platinum member of Node.js Foundation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Modernise and prosper: It’s time to imbibe server orchestration
Live long by transporting what you know to a virtual environment
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/11/learn_cloud_orchestration/
Server farm deployment used to be a simple enough process. Sometimes it was manual, sometimes it was automated. The odd shell script here or there, or some basic file manipulation was the order of the day along with PXE and other automation tools. It was workable at best.
As virtualisation technology matured, so did the automation of virtual deployments.
Fast forward to the last few years and cloud and elastic compute have driven automated deployment to new levels of efficiency and ease. The administrator of old needs to reskill and understand that the days of performing manual deployments are almost over.
Orchestration and workflows are the new way forward for all but the smallest of enterprises. To be clear, to fully utilise an orchestration solution and see the returns, a company needs to be of a certain size and do more than a few deployments a week. Orchestration comes into its own when you have hundreds or thousands of virtual machines per week.
Just about every cloud offering has orchestration capabilities. But what is orchestration exactly?
A good working definition is something which describes a way to automate the management of systems, software and services. The key words here are “automate” and “management”. Put simply, orchestration is the process of automating server builds, but taking the process further and building business logic and intelligence into the deployment.
Orchestration can also mean less paperwork and less manual interaction. A good example of this is in a well-configured orchestration environment, where all the requirements to stand up a server (IP pools, DNS entries and such) are all available ahead of time. Not having these potential bottlenecks can slash provisioning time from days to hours, or even quicker.
Orchestration isn’t solely used for machine deployment. It can be used to offload service catalogue items such as power cycles, snapshot requests, passwords resets and such like from the IT service provider to local administrators or team leaders, for example. Such tools are critical in a multi-tenanted environment.
Underlying orchestration logic can also be configured to simplify complex issues that tend to consume precious admin cycles
Whilst this may sound like something that a basic portal could do, the real secret sauce is that in a well-created orchestration system, the back end of the orchestration system will also handle jobs such as adding the server DNS entries, IP address and CMDB (system configuration databases). The orchestration logic is simple enough.
The interesting part is how orchestration logic is married to the business logic. The two most difficult parts of setting up an orchestration system are getting the system to work well with third-party systems and getting the business logic just right. Once done, however, it pays dividends in cost of deployment and lower management overhead.
Hopefully, by now you are convinced that orchestration is a useful tool. The big question is how this affects you, as the system administrator. In small companies that stand a handful of servers per month, not a lot. Those of you that work for service providers or larger companies, however, need to get on board with orchestration.
Working within an organisation, I have seen jobs that consumed most of the day for a staff member and two at peak times (deployments) become fully automated. The workload dropped by a good 80 per cent. There will, of course, always be exceptions to the rule, which are not automated for whatever reason – usually involving very complex and specific designs, as well as deployment of pre-packaged machines, such as OVF deployments.
So, my fellow admins, it is time to get ahead of the curve rather than be left behind. There is exceptionally good money to be had if you are proficient at it. What makes getting good at orchestration a really good idea is that it is no longer a purely administrative task.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM Acquires StrongLoop to Extend Enterprise Reach using IBM Cloud
https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47577.wss
Offers Fast Path for Developers to Rapidly Build and Deliver APIs for Mobile, Internet of Things and Web Applications
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the acquisition of StrongLoop, Inc., a software provider, to help developers connect enterprise applications to mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and web applications in the cloud.
StrongLoop is a leading provider of popular application development software — known as enterprise Node.js — that enables software developers to build applications using APIs (application programming interfaces).
IBM intends to integrate Node.js capabilities from StrongLoop with its software portfolio, which already includes MobileFirst and WebSphere®, to help clients better use enterprise data and conduct transactions whether in the cloud or on-premises. These new capabilities will enable clients and developers to build scalable APIs, and to more easily connect existing back-end, enterprise processes with front-end mobile, IoT and web apps in an open, hybrid cloud. Node.js is one of the fastest growing development frameworks for creating and delivering APIs.
“Enterprises are focused on digital transformation to reach new channels, tap new business models, and personalize their engagement with clients,” said Marie Wieck, general manager, Middleware, IBM Systems. “APIs are a critical ingredient. By bringing together StrongLoop’s Node.js capabilities to rapidly create APIs with IBM’s leadership in Java and API Management on our cloud platform, we are unlocking the innovation potential of two vibrant development communities.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cell Phone Memory already as fast as a PC memory
Samsung has introduced a new LPDDR4-memory for mobile devices. Their clock frequency will reach as early as 4266 MHz. Cell Phone Memory is thus already virtually as fast as the fastest PCs modules.
Samsung’s new feature is the market, December 1 gigabit mobile phone memory. Samsung itself believes that the market will move at an accelerated rate to a newer DDR4 bus.
Compared to the previous 8-gigabit LPDDR4 memories of Samsung’s newest circuit is faster by 30 percent. It is twice as fast as PC machines on the basic level of DDR4 memory, even consumes 20 percent less power.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3312:kannykkamuisti-jo-yhta-nopeaa-kuin-pc-ssa&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sony’s Project Morpheus is now ‘PlayStation VR’
http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/15/project-morpheus-is-now-playstation-vr/
Sony’s Project Morpheus VR system has a new, more obvious name: PlayStation VR. The announcement came today at the company’s Tokyo Game Show press conference, but that’s about the only new information Sony was willing to part with.
Sony is working closely with 3rd parties and in-house studios to ensure there are actually some games for the thing when it launches. There’s still no official release date for the headset, which is due for release at some point in early 2016.