DevOps Automation Service lets a development team rapidly expand its development infrastructure without taking up more systems management tasks. Top 10 Cloud Fiascos (click image for larger view) Platform-as-a-service is a battleground for firms that like to help customers build next-generation applications for deployment within the cloud. Cloud providers Red Hat, VMware, Microsoft, and others say their sorts of PaaS can assist development teams move toward a DevOps-form of software implementation. Rackspace is coming from the wrong way, saying its support team has the ops expertise to assist developers move projects toward worry-free development and deployment operations. Thursday, Rackspace announced DevOps Automated Service, which could provide automated operations on-premises, as a service from Rackspace, or as a hybrid operation. In short, Rackspace is making an attempt to increase its DevOps technical-support expertise to a customer’s preferred site to automate development operations. That may be Xen or KVM virtual machines at the Rackspace public cloud, or it’d be simply the virtualized component to the customer’s own... Read More »

The big data community needs better app development tools, no more Hadoop whizzes, says Continuuity’s CEO. 16 Top Big Data Analytics Platforms (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) “Big data for the loads” is a well-liked rallying cry among those that see the complexity of Hadoop and related tools as an impediment to an information-driven nirvana. a contemporary Wikibon survey of giant data vendors and repair providers shows that companies’ technical staff often lack the educational to cope the notoriously complex Hadoop effectively. But in preference to training more Hadoop experts, enterprises should specialize in convalescing tools to aid their developers build big data apps, says Jonathan Gray, CEO and cofounder of Continuuity, a two-year-old startup with an app development platform designed specifically for Hadoop. The Palo Alto, Calif., company has 30 employees, two-thirds of whom are engineers. “We’re a Hadoop-focused company. What makes us different from everyone else is that we’re a developer-focused company,” Gray told InformationWeek in a phone interview. “We’ve built... Read More »

Join ConocoPhillips CIO Mike Pfister and InformationWeek editors for a live discussion of huge data and IT leadership issues on Tuesday. Big data and the web of items are sky high at the buzzword charts lately, but a glance into how ConocoPhillips uses both to extend natural gas production shows why these concepts are greater than hype. ConocoPhillips, the No. 2 company at the InformationWeek 500 ranking this year, put more sensors on its natural gas wells and took readings a lot more often — about every minute, in place of hourly or daily. The corporate tracks pressure and temperature data at different parts of a well to identify those who aren’t producing efficiently. ConocoPhillips had to overcome obstacles to make this concept work, inclusive of: Spreadsheets not cut it for data sharing and collaboration, so it created performance dashboards for each well. Connectivity was difficult to a few remote wells, so it had to build its own radio and WiFi towers where there... Read More »

The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative offered a good chance to redeploy resources. But agencies that did not seize it now face a tougher investment environment. A group of federal IT executives recently asked me what i presumed in regards to the progress of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) over the last four years. I responded, “lots of opportunities,” as i really believe that’s the case. Let me explain. As any government CIO can inform you, all of it begins with the maths, where 80% of the IT budget is already committed to operations and upkeep per the company Executive Board. The sole strategy to move your company forward is to cut back support costs — and datacenters offer the foremost opportunities. This was certainly my experience as CIO/CTO for the u. s. Postal Service, where I consolidated 19 datacenters all the way down to two. By this as a possibility to standardize, centralize and simplify IT, i used to be in a... Read More »

IBM says it can “rebalance” its workforce in 2014 after a steep slide in hardware sales, but additionally put money into cloud, mobile, analytics, big data, and security to fireside up growth. IBM Predicts Next 5 Life-Changing Tech Innovations (Click image for larger view.) IBM keeps meeting ever-higher earnings-per-share targets, but after reporting another year of declining growth in 2013, the corporate on Tuesday announced plans for “workforce rebalancing” — code words for layoffs — in addition to new investments in emerging areas aimed toward returning the corporate to growth. Its lackluster performance in 2013 was marked by a 5% year-over-year decline in revenue (2% in constant currencies) to $99.8 billion. Operating income was up 2% from the prior year to $18 billion, despite a whopping $1.7 billion decline in profit tied to IBM’s struggling hardware business. Declining sales and currency headwinds notwithstanding, IBM managed to tug out a 7% (non-GAAP) year-over-year increase in earnings per share to $16.28. That financial... Read More »