GigaOM » sungard

Managed hosting providers offer up early-stage SDN use cases

Jordan Novet — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 19:00:39 +0000

Software-defined networking (SDN) use cases are slowly emerging, giving IT people ideas about how improved agility and lower capital expenditures could play out in different settings. Who’s releasing the use cases? Managed hosting service providers, among others.

Earlier this week I wrote about how NTT Communications has been rolling out SDN at multiple data centers around the world, to automate network configurations and provide other benefits. I also learned about how Peer 1 Hosting has signed up for SDN vendor Embrane’s software to round out the Peer 1 Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offering, and I found out that SunGard has started using those same products to lower response times for its Recover2Cloud disaster-recovery enterprise cloud. The increased agility from SDN and other innovations lets SunGard promise response times that are 30 to 40 percent shorter, and the company expects to offer better service-level agreements to its own customers as a result.

Meanwhile, SDN company Nicira, which VMware acquired last year, has identified Rackspace, AT&T and DreamHost as customers. All three of those companies provide hosting services alongside other offerings.

In 1999 or thereabouts, service providers were quick to jump onto the multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) bandwagon as a way to help information travel faster on a network, said Ram Shanmugam, SunGard’s senior director of product management. Now many of those same companies are standing up as early adopters of software-defined networking.

And as that happens, it’s only natural for enterprises to witness the benefits of SDN and decide to give it a try, Shanmugam said. And thanks to SunGard’s market position, the shift could happen soon: Over 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies use SunGard for disaster recovery, Shanmugam said. Going forward, more SunGard clients could get exposed to the perks of SDN, as the company has been discussing the inclusion of SDN as well as software-defined storage for SunGard’s enterprise cloud.

More SDN products hitting the market will also speed up adoption of the technology, which virtualizes networks and enables users to automatically provision firewalls and load balancers in a few minutes — something that took an engineer hours or days to do with a hardware appliance. The vendors are ready for the demand increase, or getting closer to that point. Networking hardware vendor Juniper Networks, soon after acquiring startup Contrail Systems, announced plans to release products later this year and next year that will allow for consolidation of hardware and connect network services on multiple devices. Cisco said in November 2012 it would buy Cariden, a company that’s come up with SDN strategy. And just last week F5 Networks, another hardware vendor, acquired LineRate Systems, which is looking to help companies take on more web traffic with more easily scalable networks, as my colleague Derrick Harris wrote.

So far, the promise of better agility has been one of the best motivators for companies to try out Embrane’s SDN products, and cost savings have taken a back seat, said Dante Malagrinò, Embrane’s CEO. This is somewhat a contrast to the adoption of server virtualization, where costs savings drove adoption among enterprise customers and the benefits of agility were only perceived later.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Amazon gets (more) serious about the enterprise. No kidding

Barb Darrow — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:55:05 +0000

If you still don’t think Amazon is serious about winning enterprise accounts for Amazon Web Services, you need to get over it. The public cloud leader wants to be the preferred cloud for even the largest and most security-obsessed companies. In fact, attracting enterprise users — and reassuring C-level execs about the safety and reliability of Amazon’s cloud — was a primary rationale for last November’s inaugural AWS: Reinvent.

But until recently, the hiring spree underlying this effort — Amazon has been seeking (and in some cases poaching) high-level sales engineers from enterprise IT companies like Sungard, HP, Oracle and EMC for a year or so — was a bit under the radar, as GigaOM reported in November.

Can you sell to a CIO? AWS wants you

What’s new, as Business Insider reported this week, is that it’s now out in the open; Amazon has posted lots of listings for enterprise-focused sales reps and sales managers. BI claimed 75 — I didn’t count them all, but the list is pretty rich. As of Thursday morning, AWS was seeking enterprise sales managers for New York, Dallas, Herndon, Virg., San Francisco, Irvine, Calif., and Seattle, among other areas. As one listing puts it:

“As an Enterprise Sales leader you will have the exciting opportunity to help drive the growth and shape the future of an emerging technology. Your responsibilities will include driving revenue, adoption, and market penetration in enterprise accounts within the local geography. Your responsibilities will include building and managing a highly talented sales team focused on driving revenue, adoption, and market penetration in the Enterprise market. The ideal candidate will possess a technology sales management background that enables them to lead a team of senior enterprise sale representatives with engagements at the CXO level.”

Brian McCallion, founder and CEO of New York-based Bronze Drum Consulting, sees a tangible change in his AWS interactions of late. “What I see as a difference from 2012 is also the kinds of people AWS is hiring … the new Enterprise Account Manager and AWS Solution Architect I met with this week and last are more focused on eliminating organizational barriers that limit consumption of Cloud Services. And the focus area seems to be enabling Direct Connect for enterprise to simplify how enterprise connects to AWS.”

Startups and enterprises: two different animals

The fact that an established enterprise is, by definition, not a startup, illustrates Amazon’s conundrum. Selling services to developers in startups is one thing and AWS was built on that business. But selling into an established enterprise with existing IT and with an internal bureaucracy is a whole other matter.

For all of AWS’s momentum — it claims enterprise accounts including Nasdaq and systems integration partners like Accenture, Deloitte and Capgemini — some still doubt that big companies will trust mission critical loads to what they see as shared, and therefore insecure, infrastructure.

Amazon has worked to ease these concerns with new enterprise support options; with Virtual Private Cloud, which cordons off a section of Amazon’s cloud for a given company’s use; and management tools like Trusted Advisor.

And then there are such enterprise-y services as RedShift data warehousing, the Data Pipeline data consolidation service, and any number of new big data and other services promised by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at Structure: Europe last year. The Register picked up on yet another job listing indicating more big data goodies to come from AWS. Perhaps some sort of big data managed service similar to DynamoDB would be in order.

Christopher Smith, cloud analyst at Cloud Technology Partners, a Boston-based systems integrator, says corporate customers are warming up to AWS and are getting more sophisticated about the notion of putting IT loads outside the firewall. “”Obviously [AWS is] the elephant in public cloud space. Clients are hesitant because of associated compliance and governance risk, but we’re seeing more openness due to key enabling technologies, while at the same time a cultural shift and greater understanding that just because you can see and touch the box, doesn’t mean its secure.”

But that new-found understanding comes as more cloud providers enter the scene. Going forward, Amazon will face more enterprise-focused competition for those business accounts. EMC chief strategist Paul Maritz will doubtless speak about Pivotal Labs’ take on cloud infrastructure at GigaOM’s upcoming Structure:Data conference in New York, March 20-21. And, as Rackspace, HP and Red Hat gear up their OpenStack-based clouds — IBM will likely say more about its OpenStack plans at the upcoming OpenStack Summit — one thing is for sure: Amazon may be the biggest cloud seeking enterprise customers, but it won’t be alone. And all of those rivals sport enterprise relationships that Amazon still craves.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:55:04 +0000

With enterprises now open to hybrid clouds, Amazon Web Services finally relaxed its rigid public-cloud-only stance and launched services to support hybrid-cloud deployments in the first quarter of 2012. On the big data front, the Hadoop players realized very few companies have teams of systems engineers to learn MapReduce. This has meant adding support for SQL and integrating Hadoop with existing data-management tools and systems. In other words, Hadoop has grown up and is now being taken seriously by companies like Oracle and Microsoft. This quarterly report examines these trends as well the exciting M&A and IPO news in this arena. It also includes a near-term outlook for the next 12–18 months.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Hadoop cloud services don’t go far enough

Jo Maitland — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:00:03 +0000

GoGrid and Sungard join a long list of service providers offering Hadoop in the cloud, but these services are missing a key ingredient at the top of the stack that will appeal to the mainstream.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Sungard wants to sell you Hadoop as a service

Derrick Harris — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 11:55:44 +0000

Managed hosting provider Sungard is getting into the big data space with a new Hadoop service that gives users on-demand access to the popular data-storage and processing platform. Called Unified Analytics Service, Sungard’s new offering joins the growing ranks of cloud-based Hadoop offerings from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and IBM, as well as startups such as InfoChimps and Mortar Data.

Running Hadoop in the cloud is gaining popularity as an option because although the open source software is a powerful tool for analyzing large amounts of unstructured data, it can be very difficult to build and maintain Hadoop systems. Using a managed Hadoop service means IT departments can get the benefits of Hadoop for analytics without having to know, for example, which version to use or how to design the system for high availability.

Sungard CTO Indu Kodukula told me during an interview that Sungard is really embracing the cloud aspects of the new service, both technologically and business-wise. On the business front, explained that customers will be billed monthly based on how many terabytes they’re using, and that the service is designed to make it easy for customers to import and export their data.

Technogically, Kodukula explained, Sungard is working with the University of Texas to make Hadoop run optimally in a cloud environment. While it performs just fine now, the new research — which Kodukula hopes will be done in 2013 — will let Sungard optimize its Hadoop service to run atop a multitenant infrastructure and to boost reliability and performance by working around the problematic NameNode architecture of the Hadoop Distributed File System.

However, the one issue nobody has figured out when it comes to running Hadoop in the cloud is the difficulty of uploading potentially dozens of terabytes into the new environment. Kodukula acknowledges that simply sending it a hard drive might be the easiest option, although customers also can choose to use the public Internet or a dedicated connection. Once the data’s in the cloud, though, he said it’s “absolutely reasonable” to deal with change to the data set over the network, and many customers will probably want to add new data straight from web sources or public data sets that don’t require such large transfers.

Sungard’s Hadoop service is in technical preview mode and will be generally available in Q3. Kodukula said early interest has been strongest among financial services, government and health care users.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 17:30:33 +0000

Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement over the past few years. As its promise has grown, though, so too has its scope. This report covers six key sectors in cloud computing: commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprise IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud storage and private clouds. We highlight the current state of each and provide informed insights into where they — and cloud computing in general — are headed. Much like any market in a still-evolving state, the infrastructure of the cloud-computing transition is still being built by startups, practitioners and even a big-name company or two. Companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Amazon, Nasuni, Terremark and Heroku. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.