Socialcast from VMware

Socialcast, started in 2005, creates and deploys social software to thousands of companies across industries. It was acquired by VMware in May 2011.

One of the major pain areas for companies is engaging employees and increasing productivity due to communication overload and knowledge silos. Socialcast creats a simple, data rich collaborative space where employees can find information from applications, systems and people across the enterprise. It creates an awareness on what everyone is doing, saying and thinking in the company.

It increases efficiency by opening new lines of communications and enables faster data flow between applications and various users and teams.  By allowing collaborations and discussions to happen on the site, it avoids unnecessary meeting and mail trails which improves productivity.

This enterprise social network creates a central hub for information sharing and knowledge does not remain in silos with each employee.  People can learn about the organization tree, access the executives, share their ideas and know what is happening in the company. 

In short, with Socialcast, companies can establish a open culture in the company, give them the experience of working together without being in the same room or location, improve the flow of information and ideas and benefit from these ideas which otherwise would have gone unheard.

For more information visit www.socialcast.com

Coud Discovey Workshop by HP

I had a chance to attend the Cloud Discovery Workshop organized by HP for one of our clients.

The format was a welcome change. The agenda, layout, discussion points were very different from normal workshops / seminars.  It is a full day slide free workshop, which lets you visualize all aspects around cloud computing, using cloud services or becoming a cloud service provider.

The HP Technology Services team, through their knowledge pool, interactions with customers globally, experience and industry best practices, has defined 9-10 key topics, on which discussion need to happen when an organization  embarks on a cloud journey.

The carefully selected topics cover a wide range, consisting of cloud computing trends, concepts, business value and ROI, technology needs, management and process capabilities, cloud enablement of applications, multi tenant security, compliance, change management , service governance and many more.

It is not a traditional sitting down format. Instead, the group gathers around a placard of each topic and discusses various aspects of each topic.  It is a highly interactive discussion, where the HP team acts more as a enabler / catalyst for the discussion and only interjects where some information is to be shared.  Each of these discussions helps to bring forth ideas, inhibitions, organizational readiness related to that topic.  These points are captured by the HP team.

Once each topic is covered, the group gathers around a planner and writes down the current and desired state of the company on each topic and the action points to reach the desired state.  A timeline is decided for each timeline.

At  the end of the workshop, based on the inputs captured though out the day and the final planner, HP gives a detailed report to the customer on its cloud awareness, readiness, and the roadmap to cloud.

The most unique thing about this workshop is that it is a purely consultative approach and nowhere in the discussion any HP product related to cloud is discussed.

Two approaches to manage and use “Big Data”

We are in an era of explosive data growth. Huge amount of data, both user generated (digital photos, videos, social media) and machine generated (financial analysis, behavior tracking) is putting enormous pressure on the existing infrastructures and creating new challenges.  Some of the challenges include, designing solutions for containing the data, efficient analysis to get the correct information and improved performance to manage the huge workloads to reduce time to information.

I am enclosing the links to two white papers which discuss the solutions to these challenges.

The one from Netapp talks about how Netapp has divided the solution sets to manage Big Data into 3 main areas – Analytics, Bandwidth and Content, or “The Big Data ABCs”

The Big Data ABCs - Netapp

The other from HP-Vertica talks about data compression, column oriented storage to lower costs and accelerate performance.

The Power Of Compression In Data Warehousing - Vertica-HP

NetApp SnapProtect Management Software

SnapProtect software can help meet backup windows and rapidly restore data while reducing administrative costs. With its single management console, you can create, catalog, and manage application-aware Snapshot copies across disk-to-disk-to-tape. It uses Snapshot copies that have

very little impact on production operations, so you can back up more often, reduce backup

windows, and minimize the risk of data loss.

NetApp high-speed Snapshot copies consume less capacity than traditional backups and lower your costs through the use of NetApp storage efficiency technologies including deduplication, compression, and thin replication.

Some key points of SnapProtect are:

·         Shrinks backup window with NetApp Snapshot copies and replication.

·         Minimizes downtime and data loss with application awareness and virtualization.

·         Cuts costs and reduce storage usage up to 90%

·         Recovers, literally in minutes, with fully cataloged snapshot copies.

·         Simplification, with one console for snapshot copies, replication and tape.

To know more, visit: NetApp SnapProtect Management Software - Datasheet

HP Vertica Analytics System

The new HP Vertica Analytics System is purpose-built to help companies extract value from big data at the speed and scale they need to thrive in today's economy.

HP combines the Vertica Analytics Platform with HP Converged Infrastructure in a unique appliance, to help customers analyze large amounts of complex data in physical, virtual, and cloud environments, all in real-time. With this capability, customers can quickly gain critical business insights and make faster, more effective decisions.

Some of the key features are :

Real-time analytics

·         Real-time query and loading to capture the time value of data

·         Native columnar storage and execution for up to 1000x faster query performance

·         Aggressive data compression enables up to one Petabyte database in a single rack

Agile environment

·         MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) architecture for linear scale out on low-cost industry standard servers

·         Automatic high availability for non-stop operation with automatic redundancy, failover and recovery

·         Seamless integration with ecosystem of analytics solutions

Faster time to value

·         Built on HP Converged Infrastructure—optimized at every layer of the solution

·         Appliance delivery model for rapid deployment

·         Minimal setup and configuration for optimized performance

For more details , visit : HP Vertica Analytics System - Solution Brief

VMware vShield Product Family

VMware vShield family provides a single comprehensive framework that secures virtual data centers and cloud environments at all levels – host, network, application, data and end point and integrates with VMware vCenter Server.

It reduces the complexity of endpoint, application and edge network security by consolidating your security infrastructure.  vShield works seamlessly with existing enterprise IT security measures through REST APIs.    Adaptive security travels with virtual machines as they migrate from host to host providing secure support for virtual machines in dynamic cloud environments.

The vShield family consists of following components :

·         VMware vShield App

·         VMware vShield Edge

·         VMware vShield Endpoint

·         VMware vShield Zones

·         VMware vShield Manager

To watch the video and know more about the components, visit :

VMware vShield Product Family

Cisco Identity Service Engine

Cisco Identity Service Engine enables you to delivery cross domain application and network services more securely and reliably.

You can get visibility and control over all the users and devices on your network. You can create consistent policy across the infrastructure for corporate governance. And you can increase efficiency by automating labor intensive tasks and simplifying service delivery.

Some of the highlights are :

• Gathers information from users, devices, infrastructure, and network services to enable organizations to enforce contextual-based business policies across the network.
• Create and enforce consistent policy from the head office to the branch office.
• Let IT see who and what is on the network for advanced discovery and troubleshooting.
• It has a flexible architecture combining authentication, authorization, and accounting, profiling, and guest management.

To know more, visit :  Cisco Identity Service engine - Overview

And watch the video at : Cisco ISE Fundamentals - Video