Blog Posts From The Data Stack Tagged With cloud_computing

IBM Impact 2013: Heroes of IT, Please Take a Bow

tim.allen@intel.com — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:39:05 GMT

At last week’s IBM Impact conference, the focus was on “Technology in Motion,” and the keynote presentations were both inspiring and thought-provoking. The program celebrated some of the 400 IBM Champions from around the world who, as heroes of IT, help open new horizons and new audiences to technology.

Wednesday’s keynote kept with the “tech in motion” theme, and the most stirring presentations involved how IBM is helping open up access to computing for underserved communities. Doug Schmidt of Pearson Publishing described how his company uses innovative technologies based on IBM WebSphere MQ*, IBM Message Broker*, and IBM Operational Decision Management* to bring higher education to students in over 70 countries and in a variety of formats.

We also viewed a video presentation from P-TECH, the Pathways in Technology Early College High School, an innovative collaboration between New York public schools, the City University of New York, and IBM. The P-TECH schools (which include branches in Chicago and Idaho in addition to the original location in Brooklyn) bring together private-sector partners to design an academic program that’s heavy on high tech workplace skills. Students all have IBM mentors to help make sure they get the skills to land good, technology-oriented jobs. P-TECH program has been so successful that President Obama highlighted it in this year’s State of the Union Address: “We need to give every American student opportunities like this,” he stated. Is there a P-TECH school in my town for my kids?

As the focus of Impact is WebSphere middleware, IBM highlighted some recent testing between generations of Xeon^® processors and just upgraded IBM WebSphere* 8.5 vs. 8.1 performance gains. The nearly 260% performance gain with newer versions of software and hardware is huge for the middleware community and hopefully will be sufficient reason to upgrade both processor middleware versions. Details of new SPECjEnterprise2010 test results are detailed here: spec.org/jEnterprise2010.

Intel and IBM have worked together for over 15 years to optimize software performance on the Intel infrastructure, and their collaboration and co-engineering on IBM WebSphere 8.5 has led to very impressive performance gains. And when it comes to technology in motion, it’s this kind of optimized joint engineering that creates new IT heroes. Watch this interview with our Intel hero, Pauline Nist (@panist), general manager of Enterprise Software Alliances, and learn more about the growing collaboration between Intel and software partners such as IBM.

Follow Tim on @TimIntel and @IntelAdrenaline.

What to Discover at HP Discover US June 11-13

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:40:03 GMT

HP and Intel have a long standing partnership and it feels like there will be no shortage of exciting things to come the rest of 2013 and into 2014. We are very excited to once again be the premier Sponsor of HP Discover this year. Many of you who are reading this have attended Discover, either in the US or in Europe and we look forward to seeing you again and also seeing some new faces.

What have we got in store for you this year? Well, one thing is for sure, We won’t just bore you with speeds and feeds (okay, maybe a little) but we want to invite you into the platform and technology advancements that become essential to the way we work AND the way we live and interact socially. Our innovation theater sessions will cover both the technological keys to optimizing your datacenter for the future (with sneak peeks into Intel Labs) but also the human future and balance of social power that’s being morphed by the intersection of enlightenment and technology.

Whether you want to think of it as “Return on…” a)”Investment” b)”Information” c) “Innovation “ Intel continues to work with HP to provide the building blocks that are the heart of the datacenter. No longer can you think of the datacenter as silo’d compute servers that provide awesome performance and enable cloud and virtualized environments, but you have to think of the Storage, Networking, Solid State Drives and even geekier technologies that support and augment the datacenter to help you meet your customers’ needs and positively impact your bottom line.

At Discover, look for Intel and HP to take the lead and show you how we can help your organization tackle Hyperscale computing, Big Data,
Cloud and Virtualization. Get in touch! @ITSandhya www.intel.com/xeon

How can enterprise IT keep up with the lines of business?

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:18:37 GMT

We have tackled this fundamental question in The New CIO Agenda, a brochure aimed at helping you advance your cloud innovation strategies. Whether your business needs to transform the supply chain or go deeper into social media, cloud services are likely to be part of the solution. If you want to run as fast as the lines of business, capture opportunities from trends like big data and consumerization, or just keep the lights on as efficiently as possible, you need to transform your IT shop into an engine for service delivery.

The brochure, The New CIO Agenda tackles this challenge head-on by talking to some of the industry thought leaders. You will find insights from Intel’s CIO and other visionaries who are driving Intel’s cloud and technology strategies along with examples of companies that are leading their own cloud journeys.

Becoming an engine for service delivery doesn’t mean you need to do it all yourself—or that you immediately outsource everything to publicly hosted services. You start by building a plan which includes understanding the required services to run the business but also by looking for the services that are missing, but valued by the lines of business.

An essential step is to start by modernizing and standardizing your internal infrastructure, if you haven’t done so already. Chances are you’re well on your way to consolidating and virtualizing your server infrastructure—a key starting point for cloud computing. The next step in terms of infrastructure is to modernize and virtualize your storage architecture, migrating traditional scale-up storage platforms onto intelligent, distributed scale-out storage platforms. You’ll also want to unify your networks on 10/100 Gigabit Ethernet, and re-examine every layer of your security architecture. With these actions, you’re building a more secure, scalable foundation for cloud services and freeing up funds that can be used for innovative services.

In parallel, start developing a cloud services roadmap that spells out what services you’ll deploy and how. As a rule of thumb, you’ll want to keep core competencies and sources of competitive advantage on secure private clouds, so you can innovate quickly in areas that are critical to the business. This approach also retains critical expertise in-house. On the flip side, commodity functions are good candidates for externally hosted SaaS solutions.

Whether you’re hosting services internally or externally, you’ll need to clearly define each service, translating business goals into specific requirements and mapping service-level agreements back to the business owners. Pay close attention to requirements around performance, monitoring, auditing, and compliance, and identify ways of measuring them.

With each new service, you build your ability to rapidly deploy additional services, expand existing services, adjust on the fly—and create strategic value. Because one thing we know as IT professionals: The lines of business will continue to surprise us.

For more about building your cloud innovation strategies, watch a video about The New CIO Agenda and download the brochure.
Download technical presentations from the April 2013 Intel Developers Forum, including my presentation for Session CLDS007.
Follow Intel CIO Kim S. Stevenson on Twitter.

Two generations of Intel Atom SoC to power HP’s Moonshot servers in 2013

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:25:42 GMT

Intel Atom S1200 helps HP Moonshot to lift off today.

HP and Intel® have been collaborating for a few years on project Moonshot to bring new levels of density, efficiency and TCO for light weight web workloads such as static web and dedicated hosting. Yesterday, HP unveiled their first generation Moonshot systems and I am excited to see that the first and only production HP ProLiant Moonshot servers available today are based on the Intel® Atom® S1200 processor family.

HP chose to lead with the Intel Atom™ processor for many reasons. First, HP and Intel have a long history of collaboration and we have brought many innovations to market first on Intel and HP’s platforms. Second, the Intel Atom S1200 processor is the industry’s only available 64-bit SoC with critical data center class features such as full 64-bit software ecosystem support, ECC and Intel Virtualization Technology - all within an ultra-low power 6W TDP. This means that today the ProLiant Moonshot servers using Atom S1200 can drop into any environment and software applications will run seamlessly on the server without porting needed. The lower power you want, with the software applications you need. Third, this SoC was designed for targeted lightweight web scale workloads, including low-end dedicated hosting, simple content delivery, and offline batch analytics making Intel Atom S1200 the perfect SoC solution for HP Moonshot’s target markets.

Moonshot servers with the Intel Atom S1200 are shipping to customers today and receiving great reviews. We look forward to sharing more results from customers going forward as these implementations go public. We also look forward to seeing Moonshot systems that will take advantage of higher density HP ProLiant Moonshot servers using Intel’s next generation Atom SoC coming later this year. The next gen servers will be built on Intel’s 2nd generation 64-bit Intel Atom SoC, code named “Avoton”. Avoton is built on Intel’s leading 3D tri-gate 22-nanometer (nm) process technology and is based on a new microarchitecture codenamed “Silvermont”. It will feature an integrated Ethernet fabric controller and deliver improvements over today’s Intel Atom S1200 in performance per watt and energy efficiency through a combination of new capabilities, new microarchitecture and leadership manufacturing technology. Avoton is now being sampled to customers and the first systems are expected to be available in second half of 2013. Moonshot servers using Avoton will quadruple the density (4 Avoton SoCs per server) vs. the current generation just announced using Intel Atom S1200.

Want to see these two fabulous energy sipping SoCs? Here you go. Avoton is on my right, the Intel Atom S1200 on my left.

2013 is and will be a great year for Intel and HP Moonshot. We have not only enabled the first Moonshot system to lift-off but with Avoton we will also bring HP Moonshot’s customers a revolution in energy efficiency and performance per watt to drive major TCO improvements when processing lightweight web scale workloads. For more information on this announcement and the future of Intel’s microserver products, please visit www.intel.com/microserver or contact me on twitter with more questions - @RaejeanneS.

Transforming database technology for faster big data insights - IBM and Intel

tim.allen@intel.com — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:49:19 GMT

I started my career as a database administrator at Sequent computers, where I helped with the care and nurturing of the company’s Informix* database deployment. At the time, we considered it a real workhorse: It ran our corporate manufacturing database and ERP, plus supported our sales organization.

So it’s with many years of fond acquaintance that I note that Informix has just undergone a new release with version 12.1. Another foundational IBM database, IBM DB2*, has also just been re-released, in version 10.5. Additionally, IBM also upgraded IBM InfoSphere BigInsights* in their 2.1 version for Big Data. These new releases are more than incremental updates—each have been re-architected to massively accelerate analytic querying in particular, and information processing in general. This is particularly important news for IT organizations that face the challenge of spinning through mountains of data in search of hidden, business-changing insights and intelligence.

These new database releases from IBM build on close collaboration with Intel. Intel processors and software expertise, combined with IBM software co-engineered to make the most of Intel technology, have resulted in these truly revolutionary IBM database solutions.

Intel and IBM have worked together for decades to ensure that our customers get maximum performance and value from their investments. It’s never more urgent than now, when the challenges of big data require exceptional levels of processing power to extract intelligence from ever-growing mountains of raw data—arriving every day, faster, and from more diverse sources.

The new IBM DB2 release comes pre-integrated with BLU Acceleration, which adds the speed of columnar data processing to DB2’s traditional row/column-oriented data store. Columnar data processing is a much faster technology for scanning through massive data sets and performing analytical querying, while row store processing is faster for transactional computing. BLU Acceleration takes advantage of vector processing in multi-core Intel® processors to handle the column-based data, resulting in superfast analytics. What’s unique with the new release of DB2 is that the one database can perform both functions—in fact, you can draw on both row and columnar data at the same time to get answers that pull from both processing functions simultaneously, and at blinding speeds.

Columnar data is also much easier to compress, and the columnar format also enables unique in-memory technologies that stores frequently used data in RAM for instantaneous access, with less-frequently-accessed data stored on disk, where it remains compressed. It all adds up to speed-of-thought analytics and more cost-effective memory and storage systems.

In tests, query processing performance with DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration achieved 25x improvement over the previous release, DB2 10.1. To obtain these amazing gains in speed, IBM took advantage of the Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX/AVX2) instruction set on Intel® Xeon® processor E5-based systems. In addition, the new DB2 release uses the Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instruction set in Intel® Xeon® processors to pack multiple data elements into a single register. A single instruction can act on several data elements at once, munching right through masses of raw information in record time.

For more information on the science behind DB2 with BLU Acceleration, check out the article Borrowing from Science to Revolutionize Business Analytics by Chris Young.

The performance gains made on the new release of IBM Informix is even more astounding. Tests achieved a greater than 60 percent hardware performance improvement in query processing performance using Informix v12.1 when scaling from four socket Intel® Xeon® E7-4870 to eight socket Intel® Xeon® E7-8870 on the IBM System* x3850 server platform. In addition, the IBM Informix team has achieved a more than 500 percent software performance improvement using a geomean of 15 operational analytics from Informix v11.7 to Informix v12.1.

These new IBM database releases aren’t just about scaling performance. These platforms deliver higher power at a lower cost per query—they reduce costs by making the most efficient use of your system resources.

That’s the kind of performance gain you can take to the bank.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimIntel.

Invitel Builds a Secure, High-Performing Platform for Delivering Cloud Infrastructure Services

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:19:58 GMT

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Hungarian company Invitel needed to develop a new cloud infrastructure service to offer its enterprise clients a simple and high-performance way to enhance their IT hardware and software resources. The technology behind the service had to handle the simultaneous demands of thousands of clients and let Invitel guarantee the security and independence of customers’ data in a multi-tenanted IT environment.

The company chose servers from Dell powered by the Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family, running a virtualized computing environment based on software from VMware and Microsoft Windows* Server 2012. Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT) ensures the integrity of the virtualized operating environment by protecting against intrusion attempts on BIOS, firmware, and other pre-launch software components. And Intel® Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel® AES-NI), built into the processors, supports powerful encryption of data at rest, in applications, and when being transmitted--without impacting performance. The new secure, high-performance infrastructure has helped Invitel stay responsive to its growing customer base and get ready to expand outside Hungary.

“Basing our cloud offering on the processing performance of the Intel Xeon processor E5 family has enabled us to deliver the dependable service our business customers require, with data security protection in place to ensure compliance with Hungary’s laws and regulations," explained Gyongyver Gerlei, interim CSO for corporate business at Invitel. "The technology allows us to plan for the future expansion of the service, knowing that our platform offers the scalability and reliability to achieve this.”

To learn more, download our new Invitel business success story. You can find more like this one on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page or the Business Success Stories for IT Managers channel on iTunes. And to keep up to date on the latest business success stories, follow ReferenceRoom on Twitter.

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

Data centers: What does it take to heat things up?

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:00:25 GMT

This post originally appeared in GreenBiz on December 26, 2012

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Keeping things cool has long been a mantra for data center operators, but new research suggests it may not be essential for everyone.

Data centers have historically operated at temperatures ranging between 64° and 68° Fahrenheit (or 17° to 20° Celsius), prompting them to spend approximately 44 percent of their total power budgets on cooling.

Originally, the varied mix of equipment and associated warranties dictated these relativelycool temperatures, and service level agreements (SLAs) often included explicit language about how much deviation was acceptable.

But while it's true temperature control can affect equipment reliability and appropriatemanagement and monitoring is needed for business continuity, new research supports the idea that higher temperatures are beneficial for most data centers.

So, how do you know when to raise the temperature, and by how much? Are there any changes recommended to reduce business risks?

Should every data center cut back on cooling?

When we ask, many data center managers can’t tell us why they set the thermostat at a particular temperature. It’s just the way it has been done for years.

But when well-known companies -- including Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Korea Telecom andothers -- publicize their high temperature ambient (HTA) successes at 80°F and above, we all pay attention. And when research and on-the-ground examples support the efficacy of HTA data centers, suddenly we are all tempted to reduce our cooling costs by just pushing up the thermostat.

Before arbitrarily cutting back on cooling and letting the ambient temperature rise, however, as a data center manager, you’ll want to review your equipment warranties, SLAs and compliance requirements. For those responsible for data centers supporting legacy systems that require lower operating temperatures, or for those whose organizations are subject to extremely stringent compliance requirements, you’ll want to continue to take a very conservative approach.

HTA Best Practices

That said, today’s major vendors of data center equipment generally design and warrant systems and products for reliable operation at 40°C or 100°F. It makes economical sense to take advantage of the latest product specifications and warranties. This means considering simple as well as more involved changes:

Thermostat-only changes. Data centers potentially reduce cooling costs by 4 percent for every 1°C increase in operating temperature. (Cooling accounts for up to 44 percent of the power consumed in an un-optimized data center, which is the typical design being implemented in emerging economies.)
Retrofitting the data center. Besides raising ambient temperature, hot and cold air aisle separation drives up the savings, and replacing chillers with economizers (heat exchangers) can yield dramatic savings. In one of Intel’s data centers (with 900 production servers), retrofitting and raising the temperature to 33°C or 91.4°F has translated to a 67 percent annual power savings ($2.87 million in a 10MW data center).
Optimized data centers. Hot aisle containment, energy-efficient servers and a node-level power management solution capable of dynamic resource management (e.g., power capping servers, racks and rows; adjusting server performance and fan speeds) have been shown to dramatically drive up energy efficiency and support operation at the highest temperatures without increasing risk to the business. Real-world results show power utilization efficiencies can be increased so that IT power utilization improves from 50 percent to 81 percent of the total.

All things -- and temperatures -- in moderation

Your data center can take some steps to reap the cost benefits of HTA operation. Start with a plan to phase out, relocate or outsource any legacy system that is keeping your data center at the lower, more expensive operating temperatures. As soon as possible, bump up the temperature by one degree or two, to get on a path toward HTA.

However far along you are, an energy management solution may improve your visibility into energy use and thermal patterns within your data center. Among the foundations necessary for achieving power efficiency through HTA practices are real-time visibility and the abilities to log power and temperature data, and to analyze usage trends based on the logged data.

These same capabilities can also enable other energy management practices such as lowering carbon emissions, thus allowing you to expand a data center without exceeding power limits, and efficiently balancing services and workloads to avoid power spikes.

The cost and power savings achievable by adopting HTA as a model may well represent the new norm. The timing is perfect: Data centers currently consume 1.5 percent of all of the world’s power. Annual server energy costs exceed $27 billion. By 2014, these numbers are expected to double. Bumping up your data center’s ambient temperature directly reduces cooling costs and power consumption, and simultaneously reduces CO₂ emissions.

HTA makes business sense, and it makes sense for our planet. Get ready for the data center world to heat up!

Jeff Klaus is the director of Intel Data Center manager (DCM). Jeff leads a global team that designs, builds, sells, and supports Intel® DCM.

The Wild West of Big Data

tim.allen@intel.com — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 18:19:36 GMT

I recently returned from Santa Clara and the Feb 26 – 28 Strata Conference. I always enjoy Strata—the conference does a good job of balancing the contributions of longtime industry leaders, academics, and up-and-coming companies bursting with fresh ideas. There’s a fresh give-and-take dynamic, much different than business-based trade shows where the focus is just on sales.

At this year’s Strata, announcements about new distributions of Apache Hadoop* came fast and furious. In fact, there was so much activity around Hadoop that the conference was like a land rush – the Wild West of Big Data.

There were a number of major kickoffs.

EMC Greenplum launched a new Hadoop distribution called Pivotal HD* that operates in conjunction with HAWQ*, a new analytics and SQL processing tool. With optimized data availability and processing speeds, these new Greenplum releases seem aimed right at the bow of Impala*, the new insights tool from Cloudera.
HP announced HP ArcSight/Hadoop Integration Utility*, a platform that speeds the processing of Big Data raw security data to provide a more complete view into events and behavior patterns, and to more quickly identify security attack trends.
Hortonworks announced Hadoop distribution integration with Windows Azure*, which brings Hadoop to the Microsoft cloud environment
And of course, the Intel® Distribution of Apache Hadoop* was also announced, with integration for SAP HANA, the in-memory database.

In this flurry of announcements, how does one distribution stand out from the others? In the case of Intel, it’s all about a comprehensive platform that features baked-in optimization for Hadoop, from Intel^® Xeon^® processors at the heart of the enterprise data center to embedded Intel^® Atom™ processor-powered devices and sensors capturing data out in the wild. With a single, massively-integrated, edge-to-edge platform, Intel delivers manageability and performance that scales to the horizons of Big Data. With AES-NI encryption-decryption securing data transmission with virtually no performance hit, and 10GbE networking performance, the Intel Distribution of Apache Hadoop extends Big Data analytics across multiple large data centers, and across distributed physical geographies. The Intel platform is built from the silicon up for performance and security.

Another key differentiator for Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop is our continuing commitment to Open Source development; case and point, the Rhino project. After that flurry of announcements of new Hadoop distros, you can’t blame companies that have devoted themselves to Open Source and Hadoop for years for wondering about some of the players suddenly getting into the game. Like I said, it’s the Wild West of Big Data, and everyone is dreaming of striking it rich. But will other players remain true to the code, to the Open Source project at the heart of Hadoop?

For some, that remains to be seen. However, Intel pledges to continue to work with and give back to the Open Source community. We’ve been a top contributor to Open Source for over 15 years, and our distribution of Hadoop doesn’t change that commitment. We won’t branch the code, and we’ll continue to advocate for open standards.

That’s another way that we stand tall and set ourselves apart from the competition.

At the Intel booth, we had several technical discussions with our staff engineers including:

Overview of Intel^® Distribution for Apache Hadoop*

SAP HANA and Intel^® Distribution Interoperability

Project Rhino for Security

Project Panthera for Analytic SQL Engine on Apache Hadoop*

Intel^® Active Tuner

HiveQL with our partner Simba

Intel^® GraphBuilder for Apache Hadoop*

Heck, I even got in the action with Tim’s Video

To learn more about the Intel Distribution of Apache Hadoop or to get the 90-day trial, visit http://hadoop.intel.com.

For more big data and analytics updates follow Tim on Twitter @TimIntel.

Face the Big Data Challenge: Findout how others have put Intel's Distro of HADOOP to use

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:02:58 GMT

To make it easier to use the vast amounts of data being generated, collected, and stored every day—also known as big data—Intel recently announced Intel® Distribution for Apache Hadoop* software, built from the silicon up to deliver industry-leading performance and improved security features. Learn how two companies are already using it in these new business success stories:

NextBio Powers Genomic Data Analytics Breakthroughs with Intel® Technologies: Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software and Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family deliver scale and performance for life sciences computing.
Shanghai Ideal Gets Real-Time Video Surveillance Across Locations: Shanghai Ideal upgrades its regional Global Eye digital video monitoring system for real-time analytics and storage using Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software.

You can find more business success stories like these on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page or the Business Success Stories for IT Managers channel on iTunes. And to keep up to date on the latest stories, follow ReferenceRoom on Twitter.

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

RocKontrol and Waves Build Success with Intel® Xeon® Processor E5 Family

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 01:40:52 GMT

A great combination of performance, energy, and cost savings makes the Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family a perfect choice for your data center. In two new business success stories, you can learn how other companies are already putting it to work:

RocKontrol Boosts Internet of Things Services with Cloud: RocKontrol builds a cloud computing platform based on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 and Intel® Node Manager, providing high performance and low power for its data center.
Waves Rides the Wave of Innovation: Audio processing innovator Waves sets a new standard and supports its customers' goals with a new Intel Xeon processor E5 family-based platform.

SuperCloud Improves PUE for its Data Center Solutions

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 01:45:24 GMT

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China's SuperCloud is a leading cloud server provider delivering low power consumption, high density, customization, and green power for its customers. For the low power usage effectiveness (PUE) it needed, SuperCloud turned to Intel® Data Center Manager.

Intel Data Center Manager is a power management solution stack for the data center that provides accurate, real time power and thermal monitoring and management for individual servers, group of servers, racks, and IT equipment.

"With Intel Data Center Manager, our new 9000 series is released and we will do it much better," explained King Tsui, chief technology officer for SuperCloud, "and I believe not only can it save much power, but also this will be the new data center architecture. I think this is a major, major big change and big step."

For the whole story, watch our new SuperCloud video. As always, you can find many more business success stories on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page or the Business Success Stories for IT Managers channel on iTunes. And to keep up to date on the latest business success stories, follow ReferenceRoom on Twitter.

Catch the Big Data Wave: Pulling It All Together

tim.allen@intel.com — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:27:46 GMT

Big Data is about to get a lot bigger – and if your infrastructure isn’t ready, you might get left behind.

Watch our amusing animated video on the impact of sensor data on big data analytics. You’ll see how data coming in from billions of connected devices—such as location trackers, audio, video, smartphones, appliances, utility meters and other intelligent data sources—will soon deluge us with a rich and complex tsunami of existing corporate data.

Many of today’s Big Data systems, which are often just banks of outmoded servers cabled together to chew on data, simply aren’t up to the performance, security and scalability required to get value out of the coming Big Data senor data wave.

That’s why we’ve announced the Intel® Distribution for Apache Hadoop*. Apache Hadoop is the open source leader for managing Big Data, but ensuring the analytics opportunity inherent in Big Data scales to keep pace with exponential data growth requires a comprehensive computing platform with muscle and intelligence.

Intel’s approach to Big Data isn’t just about processing volume (though our Intel® Xeon® E5 and E7 processors have that covered), it’s about enabling analytics from end to end – from edge devices and clients to clouds and data centers – and from top to bottom. The Intel platform starts with software optimized to take advantage of forged-in-silicon processor performance, and extends to 10GbE networking, SSD storage, and even includes Xeon optimization for in-memory databases.

With this comprehensive platform supporting Apache Hadoop, Intel is able to deliver Big Data optimization at scale. The Intel platform can scale Hadoop across the wire, linking multiple data centers together and providing visibility, security and configurability across a unified Big Data infrastructure.

And the Intel Distribution of Apache Hadoop delivers optimization at scale from within the open source ecosystem, and with cost-saving energy efficiency that makes the benefit of Big Data affordable for many businesses. It may be too soon to start talking about the democratization of Big Data analytics, but with Intel Distribution of Apache Hadoop, it’s on the way.

For more big data and analytics updates follow Tim on Twitter @TimIntel.

Ask the Right Questions to Shorten your Path to the Cloud

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 16:40:37 GMT

If you’re in a sophisticated IT shop, you are already familiar with the outsourcing of IT services. Your knowledge and familiarity with the market gives you a leg up when you’re shopping for a service provider. You already have a bank of the right questions to ask.

But what happens when you’re moving an application to a cloud environment? The fact that a shared, multi-tenant environment will be hosting your application changes the dynamics and introduces a whole different set of questions to ask. As part of the due diligence process, you’ve got to identify a wide range of capabilities that you require from your cloud service provider.

Can the service providers give you SLA-based guarantees on performance, network uptime, data integrity, reliability, and resiliency? Are Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and compliance monitoring tools supported? Does the service provider offer availability zones with low latency?

These are just a few of the many questions you might need to ask to determine the cloud provider’s ability to meet your requirements for security, usability, quality, availability, technology, and more. And this is where it gets hard: How do you go about, first, putting together a comprehensive list of questions and, second, identifying service providers who have the right answers?

At Intel, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and a lot of time working with Intel IT and our service provider partners to identify best practices in cloud environments and the characteristics of enterprise-grade cloud solutions. We’ve taken these learnings and incorporated them into our online Cloud Finder tool.

When you visit this site you are first asked questions to define your required and desired features for your Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution. And here’s the good part: You don’t have to come up with a list of questions. We’ve done that for you. You just have to click to indicate, for example, whether the ability to specify storage durability requirements is essential, desirable, something you might want in the future, or something that is not applicable to your needs.

You can use the tool at two levels: a detailed search or a quick search. You can also explore the tool’s cloud guidance section, which offers a rich pool of resources covering cloud best practices, cloud solutions, and the cloud service providers who participate in the Cloud Finder program.

Of course, when you’re hunting for the right cloud provider, you need more than the right list of questions. You also need a way to identify and contact providers who have the right stuff for your cloud needs. The Cloud Finder tool helps you with these next steps.

When you complete the search process, the tool compares your responses to the services available from a select number of reputable IaaS providers worldwide and returns matching results. With the click of a mouse, you can learn more about each provider and reach out to matching providers to take the next step.

If you haven’t checked out this tool yet, I would strongly encourage you to do just that. Even if you’re not in the immediate market for a cloud provider, this tool will help you build a knowledge base to draw from when you get serious about moving apps to the cloud.

You can check out the tool at www.intelcloudfinder.com. After that, I’d love to hear any feedback you have. Were certain questions missing? Would you suggest any refinements to the tool? Did you find the tool helpful?

Strato Builds a Virtualized Cloud Storage Platform

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:33:36 GMT

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One of Europe’s biggest hosting companies, Strato provides a range of online services including HiDrive*, a subscription-based cloud storage platform for business users and consumers. To prepare the platform for future user growth and ensure the continued high performance of the service, Strato has enhanced its data center infrastructure with a new virtualized storage environment based on hardware including Intel® Xeon® processors E3 family, Intel® Solid-State Drives (Intel® SSDs) 710 and Intel® Ethernet 10 Gigabit Server Adapters. The new hardware platform offers a more cost-effective and flexible alternative to proprietary storage systems and provides the high performance, reliability, and scalability Strato needs as it looks to grow the user base for HiDrive.

“The performance we achieved with Intel’s technology in our benchmarking tests convinced us that it was the right choice for our new virtualized storage platform," explained René Wienholtz, CTO of Strato. "Our Intel-based deployment offers an ideal mix of speed, reliability and compatibility, and is more costeffective than the proprietary storage arrays we considered.”

For the whole story, download our new Strato business success story. As always, you can find many more like this one on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page or the Business Success Stories for IT Managers channel on iTunes. And to keep up to date on the latest business success stories, follow ReferenceRoom on Twitter.

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

Sensor Data: Where Big Data Gets Interesting

tim.allen@intel.com — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:06:08 GMT

Machines and human beings are generating some 2.5 exabytes of data each day, according to estimates from IBM. That’s 1 plus 18 zero’s worth of information daily, and it’s piling up so fast that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in just the last two years. Processing, storing and analyzing Big Data is driving some of the most compelling advances in technology. However, in terms of impact, Big Data is more talked about than felt in our everyday lives.

That’s about to change! Big Data from government, corporate and web sources has been available for years – information on weather, shopping patterns, Google searches, Facebook activity, and so on. Add sensor data to these analytics, and suddenly Big Data gets more interesting.

According to Harish Kotadia, in his article Big Data: The Coming Sensor Data Driven Productivity Revolution, we will begin to see big changes in industrial and business processes when we have pervasive real-time analytics of sensor data. “We are on the cusp of a major sensor data driven productivity revolution that will fundamentally change the way we do business, for the better!”

Sensor data comes from many sources – smart meters on your home utilities, traffic lights, GPS coordinates from your smartphone, TV viewing habits, security system readings, images from remote surveillance cameras, to name just a few. Information from the thousands of network-connected devices could potentially even add to this volume and variety.

Adding information from sensors injects a critical human dimension to Big Data analytics – and provides important predictive analysis for consumer behavior. Because if you’re looking for data on how people act and react in real-time situations, information from sensors is more accurate than surveys or interviews. Businesses can use this data to analyze, manage and build better products, and better understand customer behavior to differentiate and improve loyalty.

If sensor data is where Big Data gets interesting, it’s also where Big Data gets even more complex and demanding. Analyzing and storing the coming tidal wave of sensor data will require a new generation of Big Data technologies with the performance muscle to analyze masses of instantaneous sensor data and uncover insights into behavior and actions. Moving from today’s Big Data batch to real-time analytics is a natural evolution. And since this is people’s personal information we’re talking about here, Big Data platforms will require advanced defenses to protect privacy and maintain data security.

Adding sensor analysis to Big Data analytics has the potential to bring fundamental changes to how we live and do business. It will also push past the boundaries of much of today’s Big Data technology. If your organization plans to tap into the rich new insights derived from sensor analytics, it’s time to evaluate your platform and make sure you’re ready. Because a bigger, better Big Data is on the way.

Want to keep up with Big Data and enterprise computing news? Join me on Twitter. @TimIntel