In today’s unveiling of the sixth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2015-2020), cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7-fold, up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020. This rapid growth of cloud traffic is attributed to increased migration to cloud architectures due to their ability to scale quickly and efficiently support more workloads than traditional data centers.

With greater data center virtualization, cloud operators are also able to achieve greater operational efficiencies while flexibly delivering a growing variety of services to businesses and consumers with optimal performance. To better understand data center growth, new analysis on application workloads was developed for this year’s report. The following business and consumer projections were revealed:

In addition to its existing automated processes for SAM, the updated Snow Automation Platform introduces new off-the-shelf automation workbooks to manage mobile and cloud investments.

Grazed from OpenMinds. Author: Monica E. Oss.

Greetings from Washington, D.C.! As I prepared for tomorrow’s 2016 OPEN MINDS Technology & Informatics Institute, I came across some stats in a technology survey OPEN MINDS conducted in 2001. It was a trip down memory lane. Wikipedia launched online. Microsoft released the Xbox. The use of wireless local area networking (LANs) exploded. Apple released the iPod. AOL topped 35 million members. Those were the tech developments everyone was talking about. Where were health and human service provider organizations in 2001?

• 32% of organizations reported that all of their employees had access to the internet
• 22% of organizations communicated with consumers via email
• 78% of organizations had a public website
• 44% of organizations had practice management software…

Grazed from BitCoinist. Author: Editorial Staff.

Golem wants to provide what it calls the “Airbnb for computers,” a first-of-its-kind decentralized market for shared computing power. The company hopes the public will find its goals appealing, as it will open a crowdsale for the Golem Network Token (GNT) on November 11, 2016.

This decentralized, Ethereum-based service, once up and running, will reportedly allow people to rent out unused computing power in exchange for cryptocurrency. On the other end of the service, costs for resource-intensive processes will decline, according to Golem, making tasks such as CGI rendering, scientific calculation and machine learning more efficient and accessible…

This week Tintri announced that it has been named a Visionary in Gartner Inc.’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays. This is the third straight year that Tintri has received this distinction. Gartner placed Tintri in the Visionaries Quadrant for completeness of vision and ability to execute. 

This year, it was Tintri’s VMstore T800 Hybrid-Flash series that was evaluated. In its final 2016 report, Gartner notes, "Tight budgets and skills shortages have caused vendors and users to focus on technologies and features that lower acquisition and ownership costs while improving performance and throughput. This has resulted in thin-provisioning, auto-tiering, hybrid configurations (Flash and HDDs) and near-autonomic operation becoming ubiquitous general-purpose disk arrays. It is also driving the deployment of SSAs into I/O-intensive environments and creating opportunities for emerging storage companies that can refactor infrastructure designs to obtain incremental improvements in performance, economics and staff productivity." 

Available now at no additional charge to itopia partners, the Cielo app simplifies and streamlines the support cycle for IT service providers and MSPs while dramatically improving the user and customer experiences. The new app is also proven to help technicians make better use of their time and manage support costs by reducing — and in many cases eliminating — the need for onsite trouble-shooting resources.

Over the course of his career, Mr. Karidis has established a proven track record of success in leading high-growth businesses. Mr. Karidis served as chief strategy officer and chief operating officer at cloud infrastructure platform provider SoftLayer Technologies, which was acquired by IBM in 2013 for $2 billion. Mr. Karidis played an integral role in building SoftLayer into the largest privately held cloud infrastructure services provider at the time with revenues approaching $400 million. Most recently, Mr. Karidis held the position of president, Cloud Technology Services, at CompuCom, an IT managed services and infrastructure solutions provider. He also held roles at Devonshire Investors, a private equity firm, as well as industry analyst firm The Yankee Group.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced the release of its 2016 report "Guide to the Open Cloud: Current Trends and Open Source Projects".

This is its third paper on the open cloud and adds many new projects and technology categories that have gained importance in the past year. The report covers well-known projects like Cloud Foundry, CloudStack, Docker, KVM and OpenStack, and up-and-comers such as Ansible, Hygieia, Prometheus and Rancher.

The purpose of this guide is to help companies stay informed about the latest open source cloud technologies and trends. It takes a detailed look into cloud infrastructure, including projects in the areas of IaaS, PaaS, virtualization, containers, cloud operating systems, management and automation, unikernels, DevOps, configuration management, logging and monitoring, software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined storage and networking for containers.

"Data analysts and IT professionals consistently tell us that data discovery tools like Tableau are great tools for data drilling — but when they need to share insights with executives across the organization, or work with large data sets, their experience quickly descends into what they refer to as ‘Tableau Hell’," said Josh James, founder and CEO, Domo. "Everyone is thirsty for data yet today’s desktop analysis and on-premise tools are not built for scale and cause more frustration for data professionals who are forced to toggle between multiple tools to find insights and then distribute them into the hands of business decision makers."