How IT needs to get ready for the next wave of connected devices.
When people talk about the Internet of Things (IoT), the most common examples
are smart cars, IP-addressable washing machines and Internet-connected nanny
cams.
But IoT is coming to the enterprise as well, and IT execs should already be
thinking about the ways that IoT will shake up the corporate network.
"Products and services which were previously outside their domain will
increasingly be under their jurisdiction," says Daniel Castro, senior analyst
with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based
research and educational institute.
So, what are these devices?
Castro says that companies increasingly will be operating in "smart buildings"
with advanced HVAC systems that are connected to the rest of the corporate
network.
Many utility companies will be deploying Web-connected smart meters at
customers' facilities to allow for remote monitoring.
Companies are tying their physical security to their network security, so that
data from security cameras and authentication readers are coming under the
purview of enterprise IT.
Retailers such as WalMart, Target and Best Buy already use RFID and other
tracking technologies to manage supply chain logistics, says IDC's Michael
Fauscette. IoT is a natural next step.
Then there's "operational technology," where enterprise assets such as
manufacturing equipment, fleet trucks, rail cars, even patient monitoring
equipment in hospitals, become networked devices, says Hung LeHong, research
vice president at Gartner.
"Those types of assets are becoming Internet enabled," LeHong says. And even
though they are managed by field operations or hospital services, he says, they
could become end points on the corporate network, just like smartphones and
tablets.
Other examples of operational technology might include companies deploying
vending machines that are connected to the Internet, so that they can be
automatically restocked when certain items run low. "These assets are becoming
part of online world, and they could now be on the enterprise network," LeHong
says.
Another key area where IoT is making an appearance is what Gartner calls the
digital supply chain. That's when a company's end products, such as consumer
electronics or large machinery, are Internet enabled so that the manufacturer
can keep track of things such as maintenance schedules.
"The digital supply chain continues after you deliver the physical product,"
LeHong says. A growing number of the more expensive assets and products that are
arriving on the market will have this capability, he says.
Another place where IoT is showing up is in consumer offerings such as home
automation and the smart grid. IT executives in industries such as gas and
electric utilities will need to stay abreast of developments such as how smart
meters and other types of data-generating solutions will affect IT and the
corporate network.
And finally, IoT is emerging in so-called smart cities, where all kinds of
devices and assets such as traffic lights, parking meters and garbage truck
fleets are gradually being connected to the Internet. Municipal government IT
executives will need to be aware of how these assets tie in to the network.
IT and OT convergence
What will likely happen is a convergence of operational technology and IT. "As
these machines go onto the corporate network the CIO or the COO need to start
talking together about what the future is going to look like when traditional IT
stuff and OT stuff are overlapping on the network," LeHong says.
"Who is responsible for providing security, for example," LeHong says. "There
are skill sets that exist in IT that are very developed, but that are new or not
a prime focus for the operations guy. There can be some synergies."
IT executives will need to prepare themselves for situations such as when an
IP-based vending machine is creating software replenishment orders for
out-of-stock items using an enterprise resource planning application, LeHong
says.
"When it creates the replenishment order does the vending machine need a user
license" for the ERP application, LeHong says. "CIOs need to get an
understanding of this. Even if they are not going to own the vending machines,
they need to worry about things like that. That's what we mean by convergence.
OT and IT can't sit in separate worlds anymore. They need to discuss things like
governance, security, software licensing and maintenance."
In terms of networking technology and strategies at enterprises, IoT will have a
significant impact. According to a report on IoT trends published by Gartner in
2012, things will be connected, but not necessarily in the ways most familiar to
companies today.
"Wi-Fi, 3G/4G cellular and Bluetooth are the wireless connectivity technologies
we are most familiar with; however, they will not be the only way things connect
to the Internet," the report states.
These network technologies and protocols consume lots of power and are designed
for higher-bandwidth applications, the firm says, but many things (for example,
a temperature/humidity sensor in a remote agricultural setting) will require low
bandwidth, long range and very low power consumption.
In addition, things will need to be addressable. Every computer, smartphone and
tablet is addressable on the Internet, directly or indirectly via IP, the
Gartner report says, and "it follows that things will also need to be
addressable so they can communicate with other things, applications and people
on the Internet."
While not every "thing" will have an IP address, it will need to be addressable.
Big Data
Then there are the data management issues. Getting the most value out of IoT
requires an ability to manage data and gain insight from analyzing that data,
Gartner says.
If everything has the potential to provide some type of data stream, companies
will need technologies to manage, store and analyze the data. While some
organizations might be able to leverage existing information management tools,
many will need to bring in new technologies designed to handle the real-time and
large-scale nature of the IoT.
Recent IT trends such as the move to the cloud and implementations of big data
and analytics will likely come into play with the IoT, experts say.
"Are you going to procure cloud services for hooking up these things to the
corporate network?" LeHong says. "And it's not just questions about the cloud,
but about end-point management and architecture. Let's say you have a jet engine
or a pump in an oil field that can produce a terabyte of information per day.
That's a lot of data."
From an architectural standpoint, IT and operations will need to decide whether
to store that data on site, in the cloud or in a corporate data store.
Looking ahead to the next few years, growth of the IoT will probably be greatest
in areas such as inventory tracking and supply chain management, Castro says.
But given the way technology is developing, it's likely that the IoT will be
pervasive in many aspects of business.
The Cisco CCNA network associate certification validates the ability to install, configure, operate, and troubleshoot medium-size routed and switched networks, more at http://www.certkingdom.com
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Saturday, January 5, 2013
CES scorecard: the biggest misses of CES 2012
There were many promises, but not all were delivered
The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas gets under way this weekend with big announcements from gadget makers keen to wow and convince us they have the next big thing. But it's worth remembering that some of the promises and predictions made at CES are about as solid as many New Year's resolutions.
Check out the gadgets at last year's show
So as you see the gadgets announced and the promises flow from the CES show floor, take a moment to remember some of the bigger misses of CES 2012.
Perhaps the award for most optimism goes to the Google TV camp. The company had big plans to shake up the way you watched television, delivering YouTube and other Internet content right alongside your existing channels. Some of the biggest names in TV were behind the plan: Samsung, LG and Sony all promised Google-enabled TVs at CES 2012.
But fast forward 12 months and the selection of Google TV devices is pretty thin: a single TV from LG, and set top boxes from Sony and Vizio.
And talking of TV, does anyone remember the big MySpace announcement? The company declared its latest -- and as it turned out, not its only relaunch of 2012 -- would be on televisions. MySpace TV was billed as a video on demand service with a social twist: you can "discover, share and comment" on what you're watching with your friends. We're still waiting for it.
One prediction that fell flat on its face was the XO-3 low-cost tablet from One Laptop Per Child. The promised 8-inch tablet was to be a low-cost computing tool for students in developing countries.A It would only cost $100, project leader Nicholas NegroponteA said, but like most OLPC projects the grand pronouncements turned out a little too ambitious. By November, the entire project was canceled without a single XO-3 making it into the hands of a student.
Intel talked up its Ultrabook line of thin laptops at CES 2012 and talked down tablets. "People like to create in order to express themselves," Intel exec Mooly Eden said. They are not "consumption cows," he added, taking a shot at tablets, which are often viewed as mere content consumption devices. Twelve months later, the tablet market is going gangbusters.
Alongside the product misses, there were also announcements that turned out to be a little optimistic.
Take Huawei's Ascend P1, for example. Billed as the world's slimmest smartphone, the Android-powered device was to be available worldwide from April, but April just brought further launch details. It was out in some Asian markets, Latin America and Europe by the middle of the year, but the promised U.S. launch is still yet to happen.
And Belkin came to CES 2012 with good news for Mac users eager to make the most of the new Thunderbolt connectors that had begun appearing on Apple computers. Belkin showed off a dock that provided two Thunderbolt ports and a host of others. Originally due in September last year, it's still not on the market and now promised early this year.
The Consumer Electronics Show runs from Jan. 8 to 11. Most of the major news from product vendors will come during events on Jan. 6 and 7.
The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas gets under way this weekend with big announcements from gadget makers keen to wow and convince us they have the next big thing. But it's worth remembering that some of the promises and predictions made at CES are about as solid as many New Year's resolutions.
Check out the gadgets at last year's show
So as you see the gadgets announced and the promises flow from the CES show floor, take a moment to remember some of the bigger misses of CES 2012.
Perhaps the award for most optimism goes to the Google TV camp. The company had big plans to shake up the way you watched television, delivering YouTube and other Internet content right alongside your existing channels. Some of the biggest names in TV were behind the plan: Samsung, LG and Sony all promised Google-enabled TVs at CES 2012.
But fast forward 12 months and the selection of Google TV devices is pretty thin: a single TV from LG, and set top boxes from Sony and Vizio.
And talking of TV, does anyone remember the big MySpace announcement? The company declared its latest -- and as it turned out, not its only relaunch of 2012 -- would be on televisions. MySpace TV was billed as a video on demand service with a social twist: you can "discover, share and comment" on what you're watching with your friends. We're still waiting for it.
One prediction that fell flat on its face was the XO-3 low-cost tablet from One Laptop Per Child. The promised 8-inch tablet was to be a low-cost computing tool for students in developing countries.A It would only cost $100, project leader Nicholas NegroponteA said, but like most OLPC projects the grand pronouncements turned out a little too ambitious. By November, the entire project was canceled without a single XO-3 making it into the hands of a student.
Intel talked up its Ultrabook line of thin laptops at CES 2012 and talked down tablets. "People like to create in order to express themselves," Intel exec Mooly Eden said. They are not "consumption cows," he added, taking a shot at tablets, which are often viewed as mere content consumption devices. Twelve months later, the tablet market is going gangbusters.
Alongside the product misses, there were also announcements that turned out to be a little optimistic.
Take Huawei's Ascend P1, for example. Billed as the world's slimmest smartphone, the Android-powered device was to be available worldwide from April, but April just brought further launch details. It was out in some Asian markets, Latin America and Europe by the middle of the year, but the promised U.S. launch is still yet to happen.
And Belkin came to CES 2012 with good news for Mac users eager to make the most of the new Thunderbolt connectors that had begun appearing on Apple computers. Belkin showed off a dock that provided two Thunderbolt ports and a host of others. Originally due in September last year, it's still not on the market and now promised early this year.
The Consumer Electronics Show runs from Jan. 8 to 11. Most of the major news from product vendors will come during events on Jan. 6 and 7.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Office 365 email conks out twice within a week
Office 365 email conks out twice within a week
Antivirus issue, infrastructure failures to blame
Microsoft's Office 365 service has suffered two email outages within a week of each other that affected some customers in North and South America that stemmed from different causes but ended in the same result: failed email delivery.
The first outage Nov. 8 stemmed from an overwhelmed antivirus engine and the subsequent backup that caused the service degradation. The second on Nov. 13 resulted from the failure of unspecified network elements, routine maintenance and increased load that combined to degrade service, according to the Office 365 blog posted by Rajesh Jha, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Office division.
HELP: 11 (FREE!) Microsoft tools to make life easier
NEWS: AT&T offers Microsoft Office 365
He didn't say how many customers were affected or where they were located other than somewhere on the two continents. Both outages affected just Office 365 Exchange Online mail services.
Affected customers are entitled to a service credit. Jha apologizes and promises a post mortem on the outages as well as an update on how the Office 365 service level agreement was affected.
The Nov. 8 incident started when an antivirus engine bogged down as it processed emails that the engine determined carried a particular virus. That delay processing emails led to retries that further bottlenecked email flow including legitimate emails, he says.
The issue was resolved by intercepting the tainted messages and quarantining them directly.
To head off similar problems down the line, the company has set a lower threshold for diverting problem emails and implementing faster remediation tools. It is also adding unspecified safeguards that automate remediation of this type of problem, Jha says.
The second incident Nov. 13 started with some scheduled maintenance that required shifting some of the load out of those data centers undergoing maintenance. During this work unspecified network elements failed but sent no alerts of their failure, he says. And finally the entire infrastructure was handling more traffic from new customers, all of which resulted in some customers being unable to access email services.
Traffic for affected users was shifted to healthy data centers while the issues were dealt with.
Jha says the company is in the midst of increasing capacity and is automating how equipment failures are handled to speed up recovery time.
In addition, the company is reviewing its processes to head off future outages.
"As I've said before," Jha blogs, "all of us in the Office 365 team and at Microsoft appreciate the serious responsibility we have as a service provider to you, and we know that any issue with the service is a disruption to your business - that's not acceptable. I want to assure you that we are investing the time and resources required to ensure we are living up to your - and our own - expectations for a quality service experience every day."
Microsoft MCTS Certification, MCITP Certification and over 3000+
Exams with Life Time Access Membership at http://www.actualkey.com
Antivirus issue, infrastructure failures to blame
Microsoft's Office 365 service has suffered two email outages within a week of each other that affected some customers in North and South America that stemmed from different causes but ended in the same result: failed email delivery.
The first outage Nov. 8 stemmed from an overwhelmed antivirus engine and the subsequent backup that caused the service degradation. The second on Nov. 13 resulted from the failure of unspecified network elements, routine maintenance and increased load that combined to degrade service, according to the Office 365 blog posted by Rajesh Jha, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Office division.
HELP: 11 (FREE!) Microsoft tools to make life easier
NEWS: AT&T offers Microsoft Office 365
He didn't say how many customers were affected or where they were located other than somewhere on the two continents. Both outages affected just Office 365 Exchange Online mail services.
Affected customers are entitled to a service credit. Jha apologizes and promises a post mortem on the outages as well as an update on how the Office 365 service level agreement was affected.
The Nov. 8 incident started when an antivirus engine bogged down as it processed emails that the engine determined carried a particular virus. That delay processing emails led to retries that further bottlenecked email flow including legitimate emails, he says.
The issue was resolved by intercepting the tainted messages and quarantining them directly.
To head off similar problems down the line, the company has set a lower threshold for diverting problem emails and implementing faster remediation tools. It is also adding unspecified safeguards that automate remediation of this type of problem, Jha says.
The second incident Nov. 13 started with some scheduled maintenance that required shifting some of the load out of those data centers undergoing maintenance. During this work unspecified network elements failed but sent no alerts of their failure, he says. And finally the entire infrastructure was handling more traffic from new customers, all of which resulted in some customers being unable to access email services.
Traffic for affected users was shifted to healthy data centers while the issues were dealt with.
Jha says the company is in the midst of increasing capacity and is automating how equipment failures are handled to speed up recovery time.
In addition, the company is reviewing its processes to head off future outages.
"As I've said before," Jha blogs, "all of us in the Office 365 team and at Microsoft appreciate the serious responsibility we have as a service provider to you, and we know that any issue with the service is a disruption to your business - that's not acceptable. I want to assure you that we are investing the time and resources required to ensure we are living up to your - and our own - expectations for a quality service experience every day."
Microsoft MCTS Certification, MCITP Certification and over 3000+
Exams with Life Time Access Membership at http://www.actualkey.com
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Skype prepaid vouchers hit UK high street
Gift
cards come to WH Smith, Currys, Asda and more Skype users will now be able to top-up their credit with prepaid vouchers after the Microsoft-owned company signed a deal with UK retailers.
Skype cards will now be available from 1,400 stores in the UK, including WH Smith, Asda, Sainsbury's, PC World and Currys and can be easily redeemed at Skype.com
Although Skype-to-Skype calls and instant messages are free, the credit can be used to make cheap calls to landlines and mobiles, access the video conferencing functionality and connect to Skype Wi-Fi hotspots.
The cards, which will cost between £10 and £20 can also be used to buy Skype subscriptions, such as the monthly unlimited calls to landlines in Europe (£5.74 a month) and around the world (£9.76 a month).
Keeping in touch
Enrico Noseda, Head of Market Development for the EMEA region at Skype said: "We see Skype Prepaid Cards as yet another option for users to get more out of the Skype experience, either as a way to add Skype Credit to their account or as a perfect gift for friends and family to allow them to keep in touch more easily.
"The Skype Credit can be used in whichever way and on whichever device best suits the user, making it as easy as possible to be together whenever we are apart."
Microsoft MCTS Certification, MCITP Certification and over 3000+
Exams with Life Time Access Membership at http://www.actualkey.com
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
How to Get Your Arms Around Big Data
How to Get Your Arms Around Big Data
As solution providers' customers increasingly employ business intelligence tools, dealing with "big data" is becoming a greater challenge. It's an ideal opportunity for solution providers, as many business execs are unfamiliar with mining this type of information. In fact, a recent CompTIA study found only 37 percent of IT and business executives report being very familiar or mostly familiar with the concept. Ironically, approximately one in five businesses said they have a big data initiative underway; 36 percent plan to embark on one in the next 12 months,. Here, Tom Chew, National General Manager of Slalom Consulting, offers advice on getting a handle on all that data.—Jennifer Bosavage, editor
“Big data” is a term with two small words that describes a very large issue looming for many businesses. The term means exactly what it says: huge volumes of data. Big data is usually measured in terabytes or petabytes, often consolidated from multiple sources into a central location—or sometimes it’s unstructured data or information that companies must keep because they don’t yet know how they might use it (i.e., “gray data”).
[Related: How To Prepare and Develop Talent for Big Data ]
Big data is a fact of life for a rapidly increasing range of solution providers' customers. Consider, for example, the billions of images and posts that a popular social network must retain and organize, or the analytical power required of scientists to decode genomes. For most businesses, however, big data becomes a concern in their data warehouses when considering the business intelligence functions that are essential to operations, forecasting, and understanding the marketplace.
Technology developers have responded to the emergence of big data with a range of solutions that can store, manage, and streamline the trillions of bytes of data that many businesses need to analyze. How that technology should be applied by a solution provider in any particular organization relates to five conditions—the Five Vs— that indicate whether an enterprise can benefit from a big-data solution in a cost-effective way:
1. Volume: Whether they deal with incoming or outgoing requests, companies with exceptionally large amounts of data always look for faster, more efficient, and lower-cost solutions for data storage and access requirements.
2. Velocity: A high rate of data arriving from multiple, disparate sources in various formats requires solutions that rapidly process query requests for large data, and also support the acquisition and retention of data just as quickly.
3. Variety: Traditionally, companies have only analyzed data in structured formats and have either fought to generate value from unstructured data or have confined their analysis to a structured part of the overall picture. Today’s technology, such as “Not Only SQL” (NoSQL) platforms, let businesses combine structured data with unstructured and semi-structured data to answer questions spanning all of their managed data.
4. Value: IT departments have had to make tough decisions about which data to keep and how long to keep it, and the processing power required to perform large and complex ad hoc analysis often has been beyond the department’s capacity and budget. Big-data solutions can provide value through insights gained by combining larger sets of data than were previously possible to manage. Now, companies can harvest more external data on market conditions, customer satisfaction, and competitive analysis, performing what-if scenarios for new insights.
5. Variability: The variability in data structure and how users want to interpret that data in the short and long term are considerations that may help a solution provider steer an organization toward a big data solution. Often the initial structure and content of data can change over time, and similar data from different sources can exhibit wide variability in structure and format. Big data solutions allow data to be stored in its original form and transformed for in-depth analysis when a user queries the data.
For all those reasons, a big data solution may help organizations make better sense and better use of their data. Such solutions involve any of the three primary architectures:
• Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)
• Massively parallel processing (MMP) data warehousing appliances
• NoSQL platforms
SMP
SMP is an updated version of the traditional symmetric multiprocessing solutions that form the foundation of most data warehouse/business intelligence environments. SMP systems use multiple processors that share a common operating system (OS) and memory. Thus, they are limited by the capacity of the OS to manage the architecture, necessitating solutions with 16 to 32 processors.
Today’s big data technology, like the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Fast Track Data Warehouse platform, is specifically designed to manage large data sets with a vast increase in the performance capability of SMP. They entail shorter implementation timelines, are less costly to deploy and support, and offer a lower acquisition price and total cost of ownership. These solutions are ideal for handling data in the 5 to 50 terabyte range.
MPP
MPP systems harness numerous processors working on different parts of an operation in a coordinated way. Each processor has its own operating system and memory, so MPP systems can grow horizontally simply by adding more processors. MPP solutions often contain 50 to 200 processors or more. MPP pure data-warehousing appliances offer both hardware and software in a single package, while more broadly based appliances provide software with the option of different hardware configurations. Microsoft’s Parallel Data Warehouse solution furnishes the full performance capability of a data-warehouse appliance while permitting the organization to select from hardware options based on their current and future needs.
NoSQL platforms are currently a hot topic. They increase performance at a lower cost, with linear scalability, true commodity hardware, a schema-free structure, and more relaxed data-consistency validation. NoSQL solutions, like Hadoop, perform well with either extremely high data volumes or high levels of unstructured data content, such as documents, multimedia files, and social media content. Microsoft offers a Windows OS, cloud-based version of Hadoop on Microsoft Azure that enables organizations to explore the benefits of a Hadoop platform with minimal initial startup time and investment.
As solution providers' customers increasingly employ business intelligence tools, dealing with "big data" is becoming a greater challenge. It's an ideal opportunity for solution providers, as many business execs are unfamiliar with mining this type of information. In fact, a recent CompTIA study found only 37 percent of IT and business executives report being very familiar or mostly familiar with the concept. Ironically, approximately one in five businesses said they have a big data initiative underway; 36 percent plan to embark on one in the next 12 months,. Here, Tom Chew, National General Manager of Slalom Consulting, offers advice on getting a handle on all that data.—Jennifer Bosavage, editor
“Big data” is a term with two small words that describes a very large issue looming for many businesses. The term means exactly what it says: huge volumes of data. Big data is usually measured in terabytes or petabytes, often consolidated from multiple sources into a central location—or sometimes it’s unstructured data or information that companies must keep because they don’t yet know how they might use it (i.e., “gray data”).
[Related: How To Prepare and Develop Talent for Big Data ]
Big data is a fact of life for a rapidly increasing range of solution providers' customers. Consider, for example, the billions of images and posts that a popular social network must retain and organize, or the analytical power required of scientists to decode genomes. For most businesses, however, big data becomes a concern in their data warehouses when considering the business intelligence functions that are essential to operations, forecasting, and understanding the marketplace.
Technology developers have responded to the emergence of big data with a range of solutions that can store, manage, and streamline the trillions of bytes of data that many businesses need to analyze. How that technology should be applied by a solution provider in any particular organization relates to five conditions—the Five Vs— that indicate whether an enterprise can benefit from a big-data solution in a cost-effective way:
1. Volume: Whether they deal with incoming or outgoing requests, companies with exceptionally large amounts of data always look for faster, more efficient, and lower-cost solutions for data storage and access requirements.
2. Velocity: A high rate of data arriving from multiple, disparate sources in various formats requires solutions that rapidly process query requests for large data, and also support the acquisition and retention of data just as quickly.
3. Variety: Traditionally, companies have only analyzed data in structured formats and have either fought to generate value from unstructured data or have confined their analysis to a structured part of the overall picture. Today’s technology, such as “Not Only SQL” (NoSQL) platforms, let businesses combine structured data with unstructured and semi-structured data to answer questions spanning all of their managed data.
4. Value: IT departments have had to make tough decisions about which data to keep and how long to keep it, and the processing power required to perform large and complex ad hoc analysis often has been beyond the department’s capacity and budget. Big-data solutions can provide value through insights gained by combining larger sets of data than were previously possible to manage. Now, companies can harvest more external data on market conditions, customer satisfaction, and competitive analysis, performing what-if scenarios for new insights.
5. Variability: The variability in data structure and how users want to interpret that data in the short and long term are considerations that may help a solution provider steer an organization toward a big data solution. Often the initial structure and content of data can change over time, and similar data from different sources can exhibit wide variability in structure and format. Big data solutions allow data to be stored in its original form and transformed for in-depth analysis when a user queries the data.
For all those reasons, a big data solution may help organizations make better sense and better use of their data. Such solutions involve any of the three primary architectures:
• Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)
• Massively parallel processing (MMP) data warehousing appliances
• NoSQL platforms
SMP
SMP is an updated version of the traditional symmetric multiprocessing solutions that form the foundation of most data warehouse/business intelligence environments. SMP systems use multiple processors that share a common operating system (OS) and memory. Thus, they are limited by the capacity of the OS to manage the architecture, necessitating solutions with 16 to 32 processors.
Today’s big data technology, like the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Fast Track Data Warehouse platform, is specifically designed to manage large data sets with a vast increase in the performance capability of SMP. They entail shorter implementation timelines, are less costly to deploy and support, and offer a lower acquisition price and total cost of ownership. These solutions are ideal for handling data in the 5 to 50 terabyte range.
MPP
MPP systems harness numerous processors working on different parts of an operation in a coordinated way. Each processor has its own operating system and memory, so MPP systems can grow horizontally simply by adding more processors. MPP solutions often contain 50 to 200 processors or more. MPP pure data-warehousing appliances offer both hardware and software in a single package, while more broadly based appliances provide software with the option of different hardware configurations. Microsoft’s Parallel Data Warehouse solution furnishes the full performance capability of a data-warehouse appliance while permitting the organization to select from hardware options based on their current and future needs.
NoSQL platforms are currently a hot topic. They increase performance at a lower cost, with linear scalability, true commodity hardware, a schema-free structure, and more relaxed data-consistency validation. NoSQL solutions, like Hadoop, perform well with either extremely high data volumes or high levels of unstructured data content, such as documents, multimedia files, and social media content. Microsoft offers a Windows OS, cloud-based version of Hadoop on Microsoft Azure that enables organizations to explore the benefits of a Hadoop platform with minimal initial startup time and investment.
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Free Share 642-374 Study Guide
QUESTION 1
A potential client wants inexpensive remote access and fast deployment of new sites. Which two
options would you focus on? (Choose two)
A. ACL management
B. cable and DSL route models
C. CiscoAnyConnect and SSL VPN
D. CBAC
E. remote security
Answer: B,C
QUESTION 2
When should you run multiple protocols?
A. when you want to decrease the complexity of the network
B. when you want easier optimization
C. when you migrate from an old IGP to a new IGP
D. when you want higher efficiency
Answer: C
QUESTION 3
Which statement concerning the Active/Active failover feature is correct?
A. ASA security Appliance failover pair must have either an Unrestricted and UR license or a UR
and FO-A/A license to be able to support Active/Active failover
B. If an active security context within the primary security appliance fails, the status of the primary
security appliance unit changes tofailed , while the secondary failover security appliance unit
transitions to active
C. Active/Active failover is supported in multiple modeconfiguration only
D. Active/Active failover supports site-to-site IPSec VPNstateful failover
Answer: C
QUESTION 4
Cisco ISR Routers offer which three of these security benefits?(Choose three)
A. Onboard VPN accelerator
B. events correlation and proactive response
C. high-performance AIM VPN modules
D. virtual firewall
E. Cisco IOS firewall and IOS IPS
F. transparent firewall
Answer: A,C,E
QUESTION 5
What is used to avoid power drops and running power to access points?
A. CiscoAironet 1140 series
B. End-point PSE
C. Midspan PSE
D. PoE-enabled switches
Answer: D
Friday, September 21, 2012
U.S. tech workers by the numbers
Median earnings for computer and math jobs rose 2.8% between 2010 and 2011
Computerworld - Median earnings for computer and math jobs rose 2.8% between 2010 and 2011 to $70,594, according to data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. The data includes salaries for occupations like math teachers and statisticians as well as those working in IT.
[Also see Computerworld's 2012 Salary Survey for additional data on IT wages by category, region and more]
Median earnings by job type
Job category 2010 2011 Change
Computer and math $68,672 $70,594 2.8%
Architecture and engineering $69,653 $70,504 1.2%
Life, physical, and social science $52,174 $53,069 1.7%
All computer, engineering and science $66,268 $67,402 1.7%
All civilian employed $31,728 $32,096 1.2%
Source: U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey 2010 and 2011
While that may sound somewhat paltry, it's a larger increase than the 1.7% for all computer, engineering and science occupations and 1.2% for U.S. jobs across all sectors.
Women holding computer and math jobs earned 85% of what their male counterparts did, with median earnings of $62,155 vs. $70,594. That's down from 89% in 2010. However, it's not clear from this data whether that's because more women tend to hold lower-paying jobs within those fields; whether they have fewer average years in the workforce; or whether there is unequal pay for similar work.
2011 female and male median earnings
Job category Women Men Pct
Computer and math $62,155 $73,063 85.1%
Architecture and engineering $57,758 $71,945 80.3%
Life, physical, and social science $49,307 $59,773 82.5%
All computer, engineering and science $57,354 $71,421 80.3%
All civilian employed $27,225 $37,935 71.8%
Source: U.S. Census Bureau's 2011 American Community Survey
The percent of tech workers in the American workforce stayed constant from 2010 to 2011 at 5.2%, with a margin of error at 0.1%. Unlike the census undertaken every 10 years, which aims to question every U.S. household, the yearly ACS surveys a sample of 50,000 or so and asks more detailed questions about demographics, occupation and earnings. Tech worker is defined as anyone in computer, engineering and science occupations.
Washington, D.C. had the highest proportion of techies in its workforce at 10.3%, followed by Maryland (8.6%) and Virginia (7.8%), all likely related to the federal government. Massachusetts had the highest percent of tech workers outside the D.C. area at 7.5%, followed by Washington state and Colorado, each at 7.4%.
Computerworld - Median earnings for computer and math jobs rose 2.8% between 2010 and 2011 to $70,594, according to data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. The data includes salaries for occupations like math teachers and statisticians as well as those working in IT.
[Also see Computerworld's 2012 Salary Survey for additional data on IT wages by category, region and more]
Median earnings by job type
Job category 2010 2011 Change
Computer and math $68,672 $70,594 2.8%
Architecture and engineering $69,653 $70,504 1.2%
Life, physical, and social science $52,174 $53,069 1.7%
All computer, engineering and science $66,268 $67,402 1.7%
All civilian employed $31,728 $32,096 1.2%
Source: U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey 2010 and 2011
While that may sound somewhat paltry, it's a larger increase than the 1.7% for all computer, engineering and science occupations and 1.2% for U.S. jobs across all sectors.
Women holding computer and math jobs earned 85% of what their male counterparts did, with median earnings of $62,155 vs. $70,594. That's down from 89% in 2010. However, it's not clear from this data whether that's because more women tend to hold lower-paying jobs within those fields; whether they have fewer average years in the workforce; or whether there is unequal pay for similar work.
2011 female and male median earnings
Job category Women Men Pct
Computer and math $62,155 $73,063 85.1%
Architecture and engineering $57,758 $71,945 80.3%
Life, physical, and social science $49,307 $59,773 82.5%
All computer, engineering and science $57,354 $71,421 80.3%
All civilian employed $27,225 $37,935 71.8%
Source: U.S. Census Bureau's 2011 American Community Survey
The percent of tech workers in the American workforce stayed constant from 2010 to 2011 at 5.2%, with a margin of error at 0.1%. Unlike the census undertaken every 10 years, which aims to question every U.S. household, the yearly ACS surveys a sample of 50,000 or so and asks more detailed questions about demographics, occupation and earnings. Tech worker is defined as anyone in computer, engineering and science occupations.
Washington, D.C. had the highest proportion of techies in its workforce at 10.3%, followed by Maryland (8.6%) and Virginia (7.8%), all likely related to the federal government. Massachusetts had the highest percent of tech workers outside the D.C. area at 7.5%, followed by Washington state and Colorado, each at 7.4%.
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