Gestalt IT

Independent Experts United

Cloud is More Than a Data Center: The On-Premise IT Roundtable

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With all the hyperbolic claims of what the cloud can do for IT, what the cloud actually means gets lost in the process. The roundtable looks at what cloud actually means in the modern enterprise. This includes the changes in workflows that need to happen to successfully migrate to the cloud. They go on to frame the cloud’s influences historically within other industries.

NetApp Heads Into Microsoft’s Azure Cloud

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Although most of the attention at NetApp’s “Data Driven” event yesterday in Boulder, CO was focused on the new HCI offering, my interest was aroused by a different announcement: NetApp is now powering an enterprise-class storage offering integrated with Microsoft Azure. In the long run, this move into the cloud might well prove more important than even a solid entrant in the hot hyperconverged infrastructure market.

Microsoft Opening Data Centers in Africa

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When Amazon announced they were opening an AWS region in Sweden, I asked where they were going to expand next. If you look at their map, there’s a continent shaped hole. Amazon didn’t take the hint, but Microsoft seems to be onboard. The company announced they will be opening up data centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg, starting in 2018.

CapEx on Cloud up 22% in 2016

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The Wall Street Journal formally reported something most of us know implicitly, the big players in the cloud are investing heavily in it. Still it’s impressive to see the hard numbers. In 2016, Microsoft, Google, and (of course) Amazon invested over $31.54 billion in capital expenditures and leases. If you like more granular numbers, that works out to $1,000 per second.

How Stack Overflow plans to survive the next DNS attack

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Mark Henderson, a site engineer for Stack Overflow, walks through how the site picked their DNS provider. The site previously bounced between on-premises BIND servers and DNS services offered through Cloudflare. In light of the Dyn DDoS attack, the site wanted more robust protection from a future outage.

Flexible IT and the Path to the Services Future

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I’m an IT revolutionary. I talk all the time about the quaint backwards “state of the art” in enterprise IT, what with its (many) decades old protocols, paradigms, and practices. What we call modern is really just a charade of faked-out old-fashioned open systems infrastructure: Pretend servers talking to fake disks over frankenstein networking technology.

Are Microsoft and EMC beginning a renaissance of geek respect?

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What’s the difference between naughty and nice when it comes to IT companies? Microsoft and EMC would definitely not have made the nice list over the last decade, but things are changing. With their competition taking dents in the ongoing battles, Microsoft and EMC just don’t look so bad anymore.

The Public Corporate Face of Cloud Computing

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As cloud computing becomes more mainstream, investors will start looking to get in on the act. With that in mind, a friend and I began discussing which public companies were getting into the cloud computing market and to what extent. I have put together the following list, and encourage comments, suggestions, and contributions.

Gestalt – an organized field having properties that cannot be derived from the sum of component parts; a unified whole

Editors: Stephen Foskett, Tom Hollingsworth, Rich Stroffolino