Ready for Cloud Storage? Key Considerations & Lessons Learned

Have you wondered which solution--on-premise, cloud, or hybrid—is the right Unified Communications architecture for your organization? Would you like to know which provider costs the most—and least?
Nemertes has the answer!
In this first episode of our five-part series on Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC), Robin Gareiss, Nemertes President and Founder, will present findings from our real-world research on UCC costs—based on the cost data from our 2018-19 Unified Communications and Collaboration Research study.
She also will introduce The Nemertes UC Cost Analysis Tool, our on-line, interactive, customizable tool that allows you to cost-compare solutions and providers. With this tool you’ll find out which architecture, and which provider, are the best fit for your organization.
This episode will take an in-depth look at UC Total Cost of Ownership and will cover:
• How to use Nemertes’ Online Cost Analysis Tool to get the data you need to make the best decisions
• How operational, implementation, and capital costs vary with on-prem, cloud, and hybrid deployments
• The Nemertes True Cost of Operations™ of key collaboration technologies including telephony, meetings, team collaboration, and more
• Which providers offer the lowest costs and best value, based on cost data and provider ratings from IT leaders across all industries
• What you’ll save on operational costs by investing in management and monitoring tools

We look forward to sharing all this information with you and to answering as many of your questions as possible!

Microservices aren’t for every organization, but if you know what to expect and prepare accordingly—and if you pair them with Docker containers—they can bring unprecedented agility and scalability to application development and deployment, especially in large, complex projects where speed is crucial and small errors can be disastrous.

In this high-level presentation geared toward executives and other decision-makers, Parminder Kocher, author of the newly published book, Microservices and Containers, will break down these potentially game-changing technologies. First, are they right for you? Making the switch to microservices is a large undertaking with a steep learning curve, both operationally and culturally, so it's crucial to assess the risks before taking the plunge. Second, what should you expect if and when you decide to move forward with the shift? Kocher draws from his own personal experience to help you with the transition. By the end of the presentation, you should have a good idea how microservices—especially when paired with Docker containers—can bring unprecedented agility and scalability to application development and deployment, especially in large, complex projects where time to market and scalability are paramount.

About the presenter:

As the Engineering Director for the Cisco Networking Academy, Parminder currently leads the team responsible for developing the Academy’s platform, which is accessed by 1.5 million students in 180 countries. In addition to bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science, Kocher has an executive MBA from Baylor’s Hankamer School of Business, an executive certificate in strategy and innovation from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a certificate in Professional Coaching from iPEC, an International Coach Federation (ICF)-accredited coaching training program. His first book, Microservices and Containers, was published by Addison-Wesley earlier this month.

Looking for more cost-effective ways to implement fibre channel cabling? Learn why proper cabling is important and how it fits into data center designs. Join this webcast to hear FCIA experts discuss:
- Cable and connector types, cassettes, patch panels and other cabling products
- Variables in Fiber Optic and Copper Cables: Reflectance, Insertion Loss,
Crosstalk, Speed/Length Limitations and more
- Different variations of Structured Cabling in an environment with FC
- Helpful tips when planning and implementing a cabling infrastructure within a SAN

The SNIA Swordfish™ specification helps to provide a unified approach for the management of storage and servers in hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments, making it easier for IT administrators to integrate scalable solutions into their data centers. Swordfish builds on the Distributed Management Task Force’s (DMTF’s) Redfish® specification using the same easy-to-use RESTful methods and lightweight JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) formatting. Join this session to receive an overview of Swordfish including the new functionality added in version 1.0.6 released in March, 2018.

To simplify the development process, microservice development is increasingly being conducted using containers. However, the picture is not always rosy, especially in an enterprise environment where both old and new processes must be managed simultaneously and elegantly in order to avoid chaos.

This session will review the top issues that must be addressed when making this transition--including development, operations, and even the finance department--with a focus on microservice development in hybrid cloud environments.

About the presenter:
Robert Starmer is a cloud advisor and the founder of Kumulus Technologies. At Kumulus, Robert and his team provide infrastructure-focused DevOps, systems reliability engineering, and cloud computing consulting, enabling companies at all levels to optimize their cloud usage. He also uses his more than 20 years of experience in cloud, SRE, and DevOps to educate the industry through articles, presentations, and curriculum development. Robert is a Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) and a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Leading The Intelligent Operations with Micro Focus Operations Bridge (OpsBridge)

The management of IT Operations in a dynamic and highly scalable MSP environment can be difficult. With the right partner and strong expertise, you can be helped to lead in the “New”. Join Kulvinder Singh from Accenture as he discusses the deployment of OpsBridge as standard within their MSP Platform. Learn the objectives, scope, methodology, and results of their deployment, as Accenture continues to scale and mature this capability with the increasing number of their clients.

Join us for the next upcoming SIG Talk on Tuesday, May 17, 2018: http://www.vivit-worldwide.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1089263&group=.

This Vivit SIG Talk session will feature 2 speakers who will share their vast knowledge and experience on SACM Practice and Micro Focus Operations Bridge. Vivit is excited to present this informative SIG Talk on these important topics.
Shown below is an outline of the agenda and topics:

Speaker: Bill Curran
Areas of Focus to Create a Successful SACM Practice: For Citizens Bank, major difficulties were encountered not just in implementing software itself, but in creating a sustainable and successful Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM) practice. Come and learn 3 key areas to focus on to create and sustain a successful SACM process in order to:
- Provide robust reporting for audit and regulations
- Promote and maintain confidence in the quality of CMS data
- Provide ITSM users with the information they need, when they
need it

Speaker: Kulvinder Singh
Leading The Intelligent Operations with Micro Focus Operations Bridge (OpsBridge): The management of IT Operations in a dynamic and highly scalable MSP environment can be difficult. With the right partner and strong expertise, you can be helped to lead in the “New”. Join Kulvinder Singh from Accenture as he discusses the deployment of OpsBridge as standard within their MSP Platform. Learn the objectives, scope, methodology, and results of their deployment, as Accenture continues to scale and mature this capability with the increasing number of their clients.

Join us for the next upcoming SIG Talk on Tuesday, May 17, 2018: http://www.vivit-worldwide.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1089263&group=.

Form3 Chief Platform Architect, Edward Wilde, shares his experience of building a pure microservices architecture for real-time payment processing. Architecture includes Terraform, Docker, Vault, Consul, Linkerd and AWS: SQS, SNS, EC2, RDS.

Essentially these technologies enable high levels of availability, processing performance and continuous product deployment, all at a fraction of the cost of legacy software deployed in proprietary data centers. Even the most sophisticated challenger bank and Fintech’s have said this is a technology stack that they really want to have in the future!

About the presenter:

Edward Wilde is the Platform Architect at Form3, leading the development of a novel distributed payment system allowing connectivity, payment processing, clearing and settlement services for a wide range of regulated financial institutions, including leading banks and fintechs.

The use of microservice architectures has exploded over the past couple years, but does that mean they are right for every business? When it comes to building a business case for containers and microservices, how do you determine whether or not this model is the right fit for your organization?

Join this live expert panel moderated by Haidee McMahon, SDDC Technical Solutions Marketing Manager at Intel, for a deeper look and discussion around deriving value from microservices. Whether in a complex data center app or a web or mobile app hosted on cloud infrastructure, what is the underlying architecture behind the scenes? What are the pros and cons from a UX/UI perspective, if any, and how do you make a case for microservices in your enterprise?

Panelists:
Chris Priest, Senior Consultant & Technical Lead, Amido
Duncan Doyle, JBoss Technology Evangelist, Red Hat
Roel Hodzelmans, Senior Solution Architect, Red Hat

Brought to you by the Vivit Automation & Cloud Builders Special Interest (SIG) Group.

Attend this webinar to receive a live demonstration of public cloud service brokering, aggregation and governance using the Micro Focus Hybrid Cloud Management solution. HCM allows IT to easily aggregate public cloud resources into an end-user catalog, while providing governance and analytics to ensure business unit consumption is visible and within budget. In addition, learn how improved control of public cloud spending can help you start building a strong business case for cloud management.

Cloud Aggregation & Brokering
- Cloud service aggregation to quickly aggregate hybrid cloud services and publish offerings in catalog
- Self-service web portal access to catalog services for end users to consume services

Hybrid Cloud Governance
- Get visibility into IT cloud costs with show-back reporting for LOBs/organizations
- Policy-based budget quota management to proactively track cloud costs and notify on quota overages

What are the common challenges and success factors for implementing containerization and microservices? Learn about field implementations of different container, container orchestration, and microservices implementations across organizations of many sizes.

This webcast will show what the common pitfalls are, industry learnings, and how your organization can take the lessons of others to assess and implement your own microservices and/or containerization strategy.

Follow Eric Wright, Technology Evangelist at Turbonomic, at discoposse.com and @discoposse.

File vs. Block vs. Object Storage

When it comes to storage, a byte is a byte is a byte, isn’t it?

One of the enduring truths about simplicity is that scale makes everything hard, and with that comes complexity. And when we’re not processing the data, how do we store it and access it?

The only way to manage large quantities of data is to make it addressable in larger pieces, above the byte level. For that, we’ve designed sets of data management protocols that help us do several things: address large lumps of data by some kind of name or handle, organize it for storage on external storage devices with different characteristics, and provide protocols that allow us to programmatically write and read it.

In this webcast, we'll compare three types of data access: file, block and object storage, and the access methods that support them. Each has its own use cases, and advantages and disadvantages; each provides simple to sophisticated data management; and each makes different demands on storage devices and programming technologies.

Perhaps you’re comfortable with block and file, but are interested in investigating the more recent class of object storage and access. Perhaps you’re happy with your understanding of objects, but would really like to understand files better, and what advantages or disadvantages they have compared to each other. Or perhaps you want to understand how file, block and object are implemented on the underlying storage systems – and how one can be made to look like the other, depending on how the storage is accessed. Join us as we discuss and debate:

Storage devices
oHow different types of storage drive different management & access solutions
Block
oWhere everything is in fixed-size chunks
oSCSI and SCSI-based protocols, and how FC and iSCSI fit in
Files
oWhen everything is a stream of bytes
oNFS and SMB
Objects
oWhen everything is a blob
oHTTP, key value and RESTful interfaces
Altogether…
oWhen files, blocks and objects collide

Shown below is an outline of the agenda and topics:

Speaker: Mark Ford
Integrate your SDLC Tools Quickly and Easily with Tasktop Hub: Integrating your Micro Focus tools with other SDLC tools can bridge gaps and facilitate far better communication paths than emails and excel sheets alone. Sure, it would be great to have everyone under the same umbrella, but that’s not always the reality we live in. So why not allow other teams to work on the same Micro Focus ALM Requirement, Test, or Defect from their own SDLC tool? I’ll show you how you can set up a basic Defect synchronization between Micro Focus ALM and Atlassian JIRA for example in as little as 5 minutes using a product from Micro Focus partner Tasktop called Tasktop Hub
.
Speaker: Arvind Namasivayam
Tips and Tricks of Installing, Administering and Using Micro Focus Mobile Center: In this segment you will be introduced to a quick overview on Micro Focus Mobile Center. Arvind will explain some o the challenges that he faced while installing the tool. He will also share valuable tips and tricks on effectively implementing and using Micro Focus Mobile Center.

Join us for the next upcoming SIG Talk on Tuesday, May 8, 2018: http://www.vivit-worldwide.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1089251&group=.

Integrate your SDLC Tools Quickly and Easily with Tasktop Hub

Integrating your Micro Focus tools with other SDLC tools can bridge gaps and facilitate far better communication paths than emails and excel sheets alone. Sure, it would be great to have everyone under the same umbrella, but that’s not always the reality we live in. So why not allow other teams to work on the same Micro Focus ALM Requirement, Test, or Defect from their own SDLC tool? I’ll show you how you can set up a basic Defect synchronization between Micro Focus ALM and Atlassian JIRA for example in as little as 5 minutes using a product from Micro Focus partner Tasktop called Tasktop Hub.

Join us for the next upcoming SIG Talk on Tuesday, May 8, 2018: http://www.vivit-worldwide.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1089251&group=.