IT WEEK

Google's London Store Signals Retail Push

Google's London store isn't a freestanding structure, but a shop-within-a-shop. The search engine giant is also showing off its new Chromebook Pixel.

8 Google Projects To Watch in 2015

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Google's timid entry into the retail business advanced another step on Wednesday with the opening of the first Google-branded shop.

It's not quite a free-standing, logo-bearing structure along the lines of an Apple Store; rather, it's a "shop in shop," called "the Google shop," that sits within the confines of Currys PC World, located on Tottenham Court Road in London.

Nonetheless, customers can experiment with Google's Android, Chromebook, and Chromecast devices, and can actually purchase in-stock items with the help of a Google specialist.

"This is the first Google shop experience Google has opened anywhere in the world," Google said in a statement.

(Image: Google)

The company has, however, operated temporary outlets before the London experiment. In 2013, it opened pop-up product showrooms called Winter Wonderlabs in six US cities, where visitors could order Google products but could not actually obtain merchandise.

[Read about Android security concerns.]

That same year, Google tried to open a showroom built atop a barge on San Francisco's waterfront, but failed to find a way to operate its floating technology gallery within California law.

Apple has made the appeal of retail stores apparent to its competitors.

At its media event on March 9, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that 120 million people visited Apple Stores in the fourth quarter of 2014. Apple has over 450 stores. While it earns only about 12% of its annual revenue from its retail locations, it derives benefits beyond sales: marketing, customer relations, and customer support.

Google undoubtedly wants to sell products -- it just revised its online Google Store to promote its newly updated Chromebook Pixel ($999-$1,299) -- but the company also recognizes that a retail presence can provide value through interactions as well as through transactions.

"With the Google shop, we want to offer people a place where they can play, experiment and learn about all of what Google has to offer; from an incredible range of devices to a totally-connected, seamless online life," said James Elias, the UK marketing director for Google, in a March 11 statement.

(Image: Google)

Toward that end, the Google shop offers an immersive surround screen installation, dubbed "Portal," that simulates flying around in Google Earth. There's also a Doodle Wall on which customers can digitally revise Google's logo and then share the results through social media, if they feel like advertising for Google. And there's a Chromecast Pod for viewing videos from Google Play, YouTube, and other sources.

Google is also planning to host classes and events in its Google shop that combine education with platform evangelism. The company says these may include "Virtual Space Camps," to teach basic programming skills to kids, and teacher training sessions focused on Google's free educational tools.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

Google Nearline Cloud Service Targets Microsoft, Amazon

Google is helping businesses store cold data on the cheap with Google Cloud Storage Nearline. The service, announced March 11, could change how companies feel about online storage.

Nearline offers a means of storing corporate data that is not frequently accessed by employees or customers -- so-called cold data -- but that should be available when needed. The amount of global data, especially the data that business need to store for legal or regulatory reasons, is growing at an exponential rate.

Businesses need easy access to frequently used data and cold data when necessary, but they also need to move easily between the two.

"Organizations can no longer afford to throw data away, as it's critical to conducting analysis and gaining market intelligence," wrote Avtandil Garakanidze, product manager for the Google Cloud team, in a blog post on the news. "But they also can't afford to overpay for growing volumes of storage."

[More on Cloud: Microsoft, Cisco expand partnership.]

Google doesn't want companies to feel that they have to delete data or move files to cold storage. The company has created a fast-response service that backs up data and provides easy access to data for a cost of one cent per month for each gigabyte of data at rest. Nearline automatically spreads copies of data throughout multiple data centers, where it is reportedly retrievable within three seconds.

Nearline has the same durability and comparable availability to its Standard storage service, according to Google, but at a lower price. The competitive price is possible because Nearline uses the same system as Google's other storage offerings and offers the same security features. It also shares APIs with Google's Standard storage.

Cold-storage services for non-essential data are nothing new. More businesses have been growing used to the idea of storing data in tiers depending on how often it's needed. Cold storage is usually ideal for data that can't be thrown away, but doesn't always need to be readily available.

(Image: Google)

Google's Nearline is the latest indication that more businesses are trusing their data in the cloud. The service, which is now available in beta, could prove a competitive threat to Amazon's Glacier and Microsoft's Azure cloud service.

To broaden its reach, Google has partnered with multiple storage companies as Nearline is introduced. Participants include NetApp, Geminare, Veritas/Symantec, and Iron Mountain, which will accept disks of data and directly upload them into Nearline.

NTP's Fate Hinges On 'Father Time'

In April, one of the open source code movement's first and biggest success stories, the Network Time Protocol, will reach a decision point. At 30 years old, will NTP continue as the preeminent time synchronization system for Macs, Windows, and Linux computers and most servers on networks?

Or will this protocol go into a decline marked by drastically slowed development, fewer bug fixes, and greater security risks for the computers that use it? The question hinges to a surprising degree on the personal finances of a 59-year-old technologist in Talent, Ore., named Harlan Stenn.

The Network Time Protocol is important enough that the likes of Google and Apple speak up if they find a bug in the protocol that needs fixing, or a modification they think is needed. But NTP has worked so well for so long that few people think there's any problem.

Not all is well within the NTP open source project. The number of volunteer contributors -- those who submit code for periodic updates, examine bug reports, and write fixes -- has shrunk over its long lifespan, even as its importance has increased. Its ongoing development and maintenance now rest mostly on the shoulders of Stenn, and that's why NTP faces a turning point. Stenn, who also works sporadically on his own consulting business, has given himself a deadline: Garner more financial support by April, "or look for regular work.”

(Image: Margaret Clark)

Stenn's shaky personal finances illustrate one very real risk to the future of the Internet. A number of widely used foundations of the Internet -- such as OpenSSL, the Domain Name System, and NTP -- are based on open source code. Open source means no one owns the software, anyone can use it, and it's maintained through a collaborative process of people submitting changes to a central governing group. Some open source projects, such as the Android mobile OS, have a rich uncle like Google that pays people who maintain the code as a side job. Or, the project is trendy enough that working on it helps to spur consulting work. But a project like NTP, which is buried deep in the infrastructure, doesn't have a clear-cut financial backer. That leaves support up to people like Stenn.

For the last three-and-a-half years, Stenn said he's worked 100-plus hours a week answering emails, accepting patches, rewriting patches to work across multiple operating systems, piecing together new releases, and administering the NTP mailing list. If NTP should get hacked or for some reason stop functioning, hundreds of thousands of systems would feel the consequences. "If that happened, all the critics would say, 'See, you can't trust open source code,'" said Stenn.

Sam Ramji, CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, cited Stenn’s work in an address at the Open Compute Summit 2015 in San Jose Mar. 11. He dubbed him "Father Time," and said he was "scraping by" as he continued to work on NTP.

Stenn is hardly the only open source coder living in such straits. Ramji also mentioned Werner Koch in Germany, the author and maintainer of Gnu Privacy Guard, which is used in three popular email encryption programs. In a Feb. 5 article, Koch told ProPublica that he was "going broke" on $25,000 a year since 2001. Chet Ramey, part of the networking infrastructure team at Case Western Reserve, has been the primary maintainer of the Bash shell for Unix since 1990 with minimal support.

Ramji noted that OpenSSL developers had been receiving less than $2,000 a year in donations when the Heartbleed exploit of OpenSSL broke out last April. "Secure code is hard to write and maintain," Ramji noted. Users have to decide whether they want to leave these projects to survive as best they can.

Juniper Regroups, Debuts New Spine Switches & Silicon

After a tough year, the networking company launches a barrage of new hardware and software.

Since the abrupt resignation of its CEO in November, Juniper Networks seemed to be keeping something of a low profile, perhaps regrouping after a year of upheaval that included restructuring and layoffs. On Wednesday, it came out swinging with a slew of new products, including a line of spine switches, silicon, and new security functionality.

At Juniper's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., CEO Rami Rahim, who replaced Shaygan Kheradpir, appeared with Jonathan Davidson, the newly appointed EVP and general manager of Juniper development and innovation, to unveil the new products.

"We've streamlined, we've reorganized, we’ve made it far easier to make decisions and innovate," Rahim said. "It certainly feels like a startup. It feels like we're innovating like a startup."

The last year was one of significant change for the company, he said later during a Q&A session. "It wasn't an easy year. It was a year of aligning our strategy, restructuring, and extracting inefficiencies," Rahim said, adding that the company feels confident in its position in the industry now.

New spine switches

Juniper's new QFX10000 spine switch line targets cloud providers and enterprise data centers. It features new custom silicon, the Q5, and comes in three models. Juniper touted the QFX10002, which comes in a fixed 2-rack unit, as the most compact 100 Gigabit Ethernet spine switch. The other two models are chassis-based; the eight-slot chassis provides up to 48 Tbps of capacity while 16-slot chassis has capacity up to 96 Tbps.

Juniper said the Q5 ASIC provides reliability for the switches and an architecture to support demanding applications. Juniper also debuted new silicon for its core routing platform, which it claimed is the "world's most advanced silicon," capable of 500 Gbps of throughput in one direction.

Davidson said the company isn't against merchant silicon, but that it doesn't always meet customer requirements. "If we could have gotten merchant silicon to do what we needed to do, we would have used it," he said.

With so much new hardware, Juniper seems to be bucking the trend in networking where software reigns supreme with the rise of software-defined networking and disaggregated networking based on commodity hardware.

"I joked to myself, 'Someone forgot to tell Juniper everything is software now'," networking expert Tom Hollingsworth of Gestalt IT told me in an email.

"I think these are great releases. It makes you remember that the underlay is still important no matter how much software you put on top of it," he added. "They are really planning ahead with their ASICs."

Ethan Banks, a senior network architect and editor at Packet Pushers, said in an email interview, "Hardware still matters. The industry is seeing not only the need for ease of operation and flexible network configuration, but also the need for outstanding forwarding capacity. Traffic volumes never seem to fall."

The QFX10000 fills a hole in Juniper's switching line that its QFX5100 wasn't quite able to fill by itself, Banks said. "Since QFabric has not taken the market by storm, this was a needed play. I see this box as putting Juniper back into the conversation customers needing massive data center scale might be having with Arista or Cisco," he said.

The smallest spine switch will be available in the second quarter with the other two available in the second half, Davidson said.

Along with the QFX10000 switches, Juniper unveiled new Junos Fusion software designed to provide a single point of management inside the data center. Using Fusion with Ethernet VPN (EVPN) and VXLAN provides customers with the agility of SDN without deploying a controller, Davidson told me in an interview. If they decide to deploy a controller, they can use VMware NSX or Juniper Contrail overlay technologies, he said.

Juniper's new virtual buffer technology helps customers address performance problems when deploying burst-producing workloads like Hadoop, Davidson said. "Competitors say you need to rip out your top-of-rack switches," he said. "This technology lets you keep your physical investment."

Boosting network security

Security was a big part of Wednesday's event as Juniper announced several new network security functions, including positioning its SRX security gateways as a platform for open policy enforcement. This allows the SRX to act as a single policy enforcement platform across the entire environment, Davidson said. "You don't have to continue to chain devices together at the edge of your network," he said.

"Networking and security comes closer together," he told me.

Juniper also debuted Express Path for its SRX5000 gateways, which is designed to boost throughput to 1 Tbps and reduce latency. Another new security capability, AppSecure 2.0, provides next-generation firewall capabilities for its virtual firewall vSRX, which was previously called Firefly Perimeter.

AppSecure addresses the need for "micro-perimeterization," Davidson said, by protecting individual application instances as they are spun up.

10 Hyperconvergence Trendsetters

Hyperconverged infrastructure has quickly become one of the hottest trends in IT today. There are dozens of companies, from startups to established vendors, touting systems that integrate compute, storage, virtualization resources, networking and other software components.

Howard Marks, Network Computing contributor and Interopspeaker, noted that the term "hyperconverged" was coined in 2012 by former VMware CTO Steve Chambers. Storage consultants the Taneja Group also lay claim to the name, supposedly to describe Scale Computing's offering. Whatever the origin, it's used to differentiate new integrated appliances from startups like Nutanix from converged systems like VCE's Vblock. The introduction of VMware's EVO:RAIL platform in August brought hyperconverged systems into the mainstream lexicon.

Hyperconverged systems now make up a fast-growing part of the overall converged infrastructure market, which was estimated by Gartner (which refers to it as integrated systems) to exceed $6 billion in revenue last year.

So what makes a hyperconverged system different from a converged system? In an InformationWeek blog post, Bhargav Shukla, director of product research and innovation at KEMP Technologies, described converged systems as typically consisting of "separate components that are designed to work together" compared to hyperconverged systems, which he said "are truly modular, resulting in a scale-out approach as opposed to a scale-up one."

The first generation of converged infrastructure products integrate storage arrays with servers and networking, Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Stuart Miniman wrote in a January blog post. "While these solutions offer simplicity and better economics than traditional infrastructure, there has been an opportunity to take advantage of the latest technology (including flash storage, services in software and increased density of cores) to create a new architecture that both reduces the components of infrastructure while enabling distributed solutions."

These hyperconverged systems are usually delivered in an appliance form factor, he added.

According to SimpliVity, an early hyperconvergence player, there are a few defining features that distinguish truly hyperconverged systems, including a focus on the virtual machine, the ability to easily scale out resources by adding x86 nodes, native data protection, and a software-centric design. These systems are developed and supported by a single vendor, per SimpliVity's definition.

The ultimate goal of hyperconvergence is to enable IT departments to improve efficiency, reduce operational complexity, and quickly scale to meet growing requirements.

Lots of vendors are jumping on the hyperconvergence bandwagon. As part of our inaugural "Top in Tech" series, we've picked 10 that are leading the way and making their mark in this new hyperconverged world.

You can learn more about hyperconvergence at Interop Las Vegas this spring. Stuart Miniman will be speaking about Hyperconvergence & the Death of the Storage Array, and virtualization guru Chris Wahl will present the session A No-Nonsense Approach to Hyperconvergence. In addition, there are almost 100 other educational presentations, workshops, and discussions, covering the breadth of IT. Register now for Interop, taking place April 27 to May 1.

Nanosecond Storage Performance Latencies? Get Ready

Predictable and persistent microsecond storage performance will usher in new possibilities in application development and capabilities in the data center.

In its natural state, nitroglycerin is extremely sensitive to shock and prone to unexpected explosions. Alfred Nobel invented a process to stabilize this volatile compound into a more practical form -- dynamite -- and helped usher in a new era of development by enabling hydropower, oil exploration, transcontinental railroads, and many other innovations of the Industrial Revolution.

Likewise in the enterprise, the inability of random access memory (RAM) to retain its contents in the event of power loss precluded its use for primary data storage, despite its high performance characteristics. But the enterprise is finding its stabilizing element.

The current generation of Intel Xeon processors are able to support up to 1.5 TB of memory each. In true "virtuous cycle" fashion, VMware recently announced support for up to 12 TB of RAM per host in its flagship product, vSphere 6, to take full advantage. Driven by the possibilities afforded by this trend toward expanding server memory footprints, independent software vendors are making an effort to harness the potential of this resource to increase application performance. However, most attempts up to this point have also significantly affected IT operations and services.

There has been a range of different attempts to solve this problem, with varying results:

Memory-caching libraries: Implementations using memory-caching libraries are able to use vast amounts of memory to accelerate data. Unfortunately, this method requires the user to change the application, which clearly isn't a walk in the park and limits its reach.
In-memory applications: Some vendors embraced the large memory trend early on and did the heavy lifting for their user bases. Did they solve the volatile nature of memory? Unfortunately not! For example, although SAP HANA is an in-memory database platform, logs have to be written outside the volatile memory structure to provide ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) guarantees for the database transactions to be processed reliably.

In fact, SAP recommends using local storage resources, such as flash, to provide sufficient performance and data protection for these operations. Virtualizing such a platform becomes a challenge as mobility is reduced due to the use of isolated server-side storage resources which impede the operations and clustering services that virtualized data centers have relied on for almost a decade.
Distributed fault tolerance memory (DFTM): Solutions that enable DFTM allow every application in the virtualized data center to benefit from the storage performance potential of RAM with no operational or management overhead.

In many ways, the introduction of DFTM solutions is comparable to the introduction of vSphere High Availability (HA). Before vSphere HA, the architect had to choose between application-level HA capabilities or clustering services such as Veritas Cluster Server or Microsoft Clustering Services with each solution impacting IT operations in their own way.

vSphere HA empowers every virtual machine and every application by providing robust failover capabilities the moment you configure a simple vSphere cluster service. Similarly, DFTM solutions defuse the volatile nature of memory by providing fault tolerant write acceleration, synchronously writing copies of data to acceleration resources on multiple hosts to protect against device or network failure.

The net effect is that you are able to get predictable and persistent microsecond storage performance. Further, with new developments popping up in the industry every day, it is not strange to wonder when we will hit nanosecond latencies for storage performance. When the industry can ponder the possibility of these types of speeds, we can absolutely and fundamentally change what applications expect out of storage infrastructure.

Application developers used to expect storage platforms to only provide performance in the millisecond range. This hindered innovation: Lack of storage performance was perceived as a barrier that prevented code improvement beyond a certain point. For the first time, storage performance is not the bottleneck and, with memory as a server-side acceleration resource, extremely fast storage is affordable.

Now the real question becomes: What if you can have a virtual data center with millions of IOPS available at microsecond latency levels? What would you do with that power? What new type of application would you develop, and what new use cases would it enable? If we can change the core assumption around the storage subsystem and the way it performs, then we can spur a new revolution in application development and open a new, exciting world of possibilities.

IoT Adds New Wrinkle To MDM, BYOD

For the past few years, BYOD and MDM has focused on smartphones and tablets. Now, companies like AirWatch are turning their attention to the Internet of Things.

VR, Smartwatches, Wearables: 8 Cool Gadgets From MWC

(Click image for larger view and slideshow.)

Every year, CIOs and IT managers are confronted with an ever increasing number of mobile devices used by their workers within their enterprises. In addition, these employee-owned devices are used to access, store, and work with corporate data, creating a huge potential for cybertheft.

Now, however, it's not just smartphones. Executives and employees have access to a wide array of tablets, laptops, smartwatches, and Android Wear gadgets, as well as a growing number of devices that can be categorized as the Internet of Things. Mobile Device Management (MDM) has grown to a $2 billion industry in just a few years, and it's expected to grow to $4 billion by 2019.

If you're looking for a leader in this ever expanding industry, my money is on AirWatch. The 12-year-old Atlanta-based company was acquired last year by VMware in a $1.5 billion deal.

AirWatch has found a degree of success in selling its MDM tools to large corporations, governments, security firms, schools, and other organizations eager to better manage mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

MDM was a hot topic at MWC earlier this month.

(Image: Pablo Valerio)

Most other MDM products come from device manufacturers such as Samsung's Knox, which offers two-way support for AirWatch, and Blackberry. Other software vendors playing in this field include MobileIron and Good Technology.

While in the past few years the challenge was to control the explosion of those mobile devices and the BYOD phenomenon, companies such as AirWatch now see IoT as the biggest management issue for all players in the ecosystem.

Other vendors are trying to capture a piece of this lucrative market, and some are proving successful, but right now AirWatch seems to be king. The company's showing at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona seems to prove that point, especially with a new Google partnership, and the creation of a new group that looks to make applications safer for work and easier for IT to approve.

First, AirWatch and Google announced their partnership at the MWC to bring Android for Work to the AirWatch platform.

Android for Work lets users of smartphones with Android OS 5.0 (Lollipop) have a separate work profile with security, management, and application support built-in. There is a downloadable app for users of previous versions. In the enterprise, IT managers can use the features to interface with popular MDM solutions.

[Read about Android for Work.]

But the big announcement during the MWC was the launch of ACE (App Configuration for Enterprise), which included AirWatch, along with Box, Cisco, Workday, and Xamarin. The idea behind ACE is to provide app developers a set of tools and guidelines to make their applications enterprise and MDM friendly.

These tools will enable them to create security and management features that enterprise IT managers require in order to certify that applications are safe for use within the company, school, or government organization.

Another important topic of discussion at the show was the management of IoT devices.

MDM companies are looking at IoT as the next big challenge for organizations, and similar to the BYOD revolution a few years ago. IoT devices can potentially create the biggest security challenge as they connect to corporate and public networks, and they need to be managed efficiently.

In September John Marshall, AirWatch's senior vice president and general manager, said during the AirWatch Connect conference in London:

The future is all about the Internet of Things, it is all about data, is all about information, all about management, and it is all about location, so when you walk into a certain area you are going to get, and provide, information. When companies plan for the IoT they need to think how they can better secure the devices, serve their users, and make sure that it makes them more productive while managing the IoT properly.

MDM has grown from being a basic set of rules related to the use of personal smartphones at work to the full management of every kind of mobile device, such as tablets, laptops, and even eBook readers. Now, with the introduction of wearables and IoT devices, together with the data they collect, the challenges for MDM services and IT departments will be more complex than ever, and this is only the beginning.