Month: February 2022

How Cloud Computing is Helping to Solve 3 Problems: COVID-19 Spread, Pharmaceutical Safety, and School Bus Routing

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Today’s users are looking for opportunities to reduce cost, analyze massive quantities of data, increase the speed and power of their calculations, access the latest and best new technology, put greater computing power in the hands of their data scientists and analysts and outsource the building and maintenance of expensive hardware. Cloud computing allows organizations to access more and better computing power more easily and at lower cost.

In this special guest feature, Dr. Viral B. Shah, CEO of Julia Computing, offers 3 Julia language-based examples of the way that cloud computing is revolutionizing data science. Dr. Viral B. Shah is one of the creators of the Julia language and co-founder and CEO of Julia Computing. Julia combines the ease of use of Python with the speed of C. It has been downloaded over 30 million times, and is now taught at MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, and many universities worldwide. Dr. Shah and two other Julia co-creators were awarded the prestigious James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software in 2018. Dr. Shah earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In recent years, improvements in cloud computing ease of use, speed and capacity and lower costs have resulted in increased use of cloud computing to solve important problems, including analyzing the spread of COVID-19, pharmaceutical safety and school bus routing.

For example, this dashboard, built using Julia, demonstrates how open source data, in this case, from the New York Times, can be presented for data scientists and other users to inform everything from personal decision-making (e.g. how safe is it to travel to a particular location during the holidays) to public policy.

This free dashboard is hosted in the cloud, and all of the code is available for users to analyze, copy, modify and use.

Another area in which cloud computing is revolutionizing health research is pharmaceutical safety. Pumas-AI uses Julia in the cloud for every stage of pharmaceutical development and testing. The cloud makes this possible by providing access to infinite and immediate scalability for models involving millions of data points and complex simulations.

A third area in which cloud computing is having a real-world impact is school bus routing. AlphaRoute uses Julia in the cloud to design optimal school bus routes for school districts including Boston and San Francisco. The superior computational capabilities of cloud-based infrastructure power solutions that save school districts tens of millions of dollars, allow students to follow sleep schedules that are age appropriate and help them start school rested and ready to learn, reduce traffic and carbon emissions.

These are just three examples of the way that cloud computing is revolutionizing data science.

Why is cloud computing so powerful?

Scalability: A single user operating a laptop or desktop computer can instantly scale up to dozens, hundreds or thousands of processing units.
Cost: With pay-as-you-go pricing, you only pay for the computing power you actually use. No need to invest thousands of dollars up front in hardware.
Access to Latest Technology: The newest, fastest and best processing units – including GPUs, TPUs and more – are instantly accessible online.
Flexibility: No long term commitment to any particular number of compute hours, number of processing units, hardware configuration or type of hardware. Instantly scale up or down, shift from one type of processing unit to another.
Democratization: The cloud puts the power of a supercomputer or computing cluster in the hands of any individual user.
Speed: With instant access to so much top-of-the-line hardware at the click of a mouse, users can run complex simulations and calculations faster than ever.
Power: The cloud allows users to crunch more numbers and run complex models and simulations that would have been otherwise impossible.
Openness: Computing power in the cloud can be accessed using any major computing or data science language and any major data format.
Ease of Use: Any user can easily access the cloud – no need for an IT professional to set up, access or use new hardware.
Maintenance: Each network is managed by its operators. Users do not need an IT professional or department to maintain an expensive cluster or server farm.

Today’s users are looking for opportunities to reduce cost, analyze massive quantities of data, increase the speed and power of their calculations, access the latest and best new technology, put greater computing power in the hands of their data scientists and analysts and outsource the building and maintenance of expensive hardware. Cloud computing allows organizations to access more and better computing power more easily and at lower cost.

18 Feb

Hyperconverged tech investment set to rise

Hyperconvergence News by Editorial

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Hyperconverged Infrastructure, or HCI, is an IT framework that combines all the elements of a traditional data center, such as storage, computing and networking, into one unified system.

Source: SPGGlobal
By Anser Haider

Investment in hyperconverged infrastructure is set to boom this year as companies that had already invested in the technology realize the potential for the blended IT model to modernize their workloads, according to a survey conducted by 451 Research, a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure, or HCI, is an IT framework that combines all the elements of a traditional data center, such as storage, computing and networking, into one unified system. Dell Technologies Inc., VMware Inc. and Nutanix Inc. are among the major IT vendors that offer HCI platforms to organizations seeking to reduce the operational complexity inherent in traditional, stand-alone infrastructure. A rising number of companies are turning to HCI to deploy and simplify the notoriously complex virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platforms that are used for remote work, for example.

451’s “Voice of the Enterprise: Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Technology & Platform Innovation 2020” survey, which published in late December, found that HCI adoption sits at about 35% of the overall IT market, but a significant percentage of customers are testing the platforms or plan to adopt them in the near future. Meanwhile, organizations currently using HCI — whether in production or as a proof of concept — plan to increase their HCI budgets by an average of 50% in 2021 compared to 2020.

Christian Perry, a senior research analyst covering IT infrastructure at 451 Research and the author of the survey report, said that there is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic was a tremendous driver for HCI tech.

“As organizations scrambled to outfit their businesses for remote work, some of them found that they can be up and running quickly with HCI,” Perry said. “Deployments of that technology can be very complex, but HCI makes the process far easier.”

Some government agencies wound up adopting HCI in 2020 in response to the pandemic, Perry said. Police departments, for example, turned to the technology to digitally track various uprisings and protests in the past year, he said.

“Once HCI is within an IT ecosystem, it tends to expand like wildfire, mostly because the experience is very positive and not tremendously different from a standard virtualization server experience,” Perry said.

HCI investment is often strategically deployed for specific IT initiatives and projects. Thirty-six percent of surveyed organizations cited new IT initiatives and/or project requirements as the primary reason for increased HCI investment, whereas 15% of organizations said the investments were part of a broad infrastructure refresh.

“The survey results support the point that HCI budgets are now designed for organizations to expand their HCI footprints to support the convergence of IT and critical businesses,” Perry said.

Enterprises choose their HCI platforms based on factors including scaling, networking and hybrid cloud capabilities. Ease of scaling — or the ability to add compute or storage capacity without downtime — is the leading feature that drives HCI platform selection, with 50% of surveyed organizations identifying it as important. This became especially important in 2020 when organizations were forced to speed up their digital transformation efforts amid the pandemic, Perry said.

Other important technology features on the radar for HCI platform selection are networking (43%) and hybrid cloud workload mobility to public and/or private clouds (42%).

The study also found that HCI is not necessarily the power-efficient infrastructure that customers expect. Although some IT teams say HCI saves power compared with stand-alone, three-tier infrastructure, 41% of adopters say that HCI has actually increased their data center power requirements to date. Meanwhile, 31% say it has decreased power requirements, and 28% say it has had no effect.

“While everything else about HCI is very efficient, we found that power requirements can actually increase due to the far denser, fully virtualized servers,” Perry said. “However, that’s a good thing, because it means the technology is functioning properly and the customers are getting their money’s worth, even if they have to deal with greater electricity and cooling platforms.”

Perry said that once organizations get more accustomed to their HCI platforms, they are able to more easily optimize and manage the power requirements.

15 Feb

Capitalizing on important technology trends of 2022

Hyperconvergence News by Editorial

Weaving the fabric of continued business success

Data literacy within private and public organisations is of the utmost importance during 2022 and beyond, as leaders historically had to understand only the finances to manage their business. But these days, you need data savvy leaders that can comprehend all the systems and all the outputs of the business, so they’re able to quickly pivot and make decisions that impact the organisation – its offerings, it’s engagement with its staff, engagement with its market or clientele in a very dynamic manner.

While the big corporates with the bigger budgets certainly invest in big data platforms and analytics tools, mid-market organisations and even SMEs that don’t necessarily have these big budgets also have the ability to drive access to those insights across structured and unstructured data, irrespective of its location inside the organisation or the platform that it resides on.

And there are really trend-setting innovative platforms out there that do this, including Microsoft Synapse, which is an interesting new approach to data and data warehouse management across a heterogeneous ecosystem.

Keeping corporate data secure and sensitive data private

The adoption of digital technologies has been exponential in the market, but with that comes a responsibility to make sure that we are able to transact in a secure manner. Data privacy is a big concern for a lot of organisations because having access to platforms across any connectivity medium creates a challenge: how do you govern their access to that data? With the Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act now having become a real concern in South Africa, it’s become also quite locally relevant, so security and data governance is sort of a bundle deal.

With regards to this, one of the biggest security pitfalls in cloud and cloud technologies is misconfiguration. Data platforms are so complex and have so many features that companies are quick to adopt, but it takes a certain core skill in order to properly run and manage these platforms in a secure manner. So, it’s not malicious intent from my external party that creates an exploit or some sort of risk in the business, but simply that there’s a system that came with security features; however, these security features weren’t configured.

To address this, companies can ensure that these fairly complex environments are secure through security operations centre (SOC) service. Consequently, Logicalis invested heavily in a fully resourced security socket within South Africa, and we have a co-delivery model with our colleagues in Jersey, so it’s also not a standalone SOC. So, this results in the capability to drive intelligence on the environment, doing the log ingestion, understanding what all the systems and platforms and technologies in the environment look like, whether they are secure and then adding to that the security, automation and orchestration component. One of the big SIEM/SOAR platforms that we focus on is Microsoft Sentinel, which allows for automation to significantly cut down on remediation times and costs of the service. It’s quite efficient.

When IT met OT for a hyperconvergence rendezvous

In the fourth industrial era, internet of things is increasingly and quickly becoming part of the set-up on factory floors, in manufacturing facilities, as well as within buildings for remote monitoring purposes. Where OT managers and IT managers previously might not necessarily have had to sit around the same table, this hyperconvergence together with trends like robotics now necessitates close collaboration between IT and operational technology.

Ultimately, 2021 brought a lot of challenges to companies, including the need to rapidly transform digitally to enable hybrid working, and 2022 will continue to introduce challenges and market opportunities. Organisations simply need to capitalise on technological trends like these mentioned above in order to take these opportunities up and address any challenges experience throughout the course of the year.