Dark Star Cloud Enterprise Class Cloud Computing Solution by Aivars Lode

Dark Star Cloud is a Global Solution

Dark Star Cloud delivers truly global, enterprise class cloud computing. We can prepare today for the leaders of tomorrow.

Recognition of the need to collaborate throughout the supply chain is increasing

According to the 2011 Supermarket News Technology Survey:

"Retailers and their supplier trading partners have been making an ever-increasing effort to collaborate across a wide array of promotional and supply chain initiatives over the past few years...28.9% of respondents said they are sharing data with their suppliers. Moreover, the survey reveals that 40% of larger retailers (with 50 or more stores) are sharing data, while 23.3% of smaller retailers (fewer than 50 stores) are doing so.

The economic downturn of the past few years has impacted not only what individual IT investments retailers have made but their overall spending on technology. In fact,SN’s survey indicates that many retailers are still somewhat conservative with their IT spending, with 42.2% spending the same amount now as they did at the peak of the recession, and less than one-fourth (24.4%) spending more.

Still, 42.2% of respondents said they would increase their IT budgets in 2011 from 1% to 10%."

The solution to achieving grocery supply chain efficiency is Best Results IRP® running on the Dark Star Cloud platform.

Together these tools improve collaboration, communications, minimise stock outs, improve the efficiency of logistics planning and stock movements for any definable or extended supply chain.  In addition, being able to define your conversion requirements and control the costs of migration help you control spending while driving revenue directly to your bottom line.

Why settle for poor forecast accuracy and high cost IT & overly complex solutions?  Don’t settle for sub-optimal solutions anymore.

Everything grocery manufacturers and retailers have been asking for through the Global Commerce Initiative is deliverable now with IRP®.  The solution to achieving grocery supply chain efficiency is  Best Results IRP® running on the  Dark Star Cloud  platform.

Can the VCE Coalition really help?

This is all Intel. Millions of little VM's running around. Intel is fine for Web2.0 Linux, and Windows departmental, apps but... It does not address enterprise class applications.  70% of all business transactions, most of what is in the data-center, is still enterprise class applications. That is the Dark Star target segment. 

Hundreds of vendors, including this group, are all fighting for a slice of the intel server segment of computing (VMware, Microsoft, Linux), which is the smallest part.  It gets all the press because it is sexy.

There is NO substitute for mainframes when it comes to heavy lifting.  One mainframe processor still has the computing power of 1000+ Intel high-end processors.

Our mainframe software is ROCK solid. Proven. Thirty year unmatched track record.  If  VCE  wants to be serious about performance, proven, robust, stability and reliability, they need to take a look at Dark Star.

Dark Star is EC3 - Enterprise Class Cloud Computing:

• Solid
• Robust
• Enormous performance and ultimate reliability
• Never Been Hacked
• Never Goes Down
• Rarely if ever gets a patch of any kind - NO "Service Packs"
• Runs most of the world's business

Cloud Computing - Done Right - Can truly Save the Govt. Billions - It can be done!

A recent article in PRNewswire states:
"The U.S. government is the world's largest consumer of information technology (IT), spending more than $76 billion annually on more than 10,000 different systems – more than $600 billion over the past decade. Fragmentation of systems, poor project execution, and the drag of legacy technology in the federal government have presented barriers to achieving the productivity and performance gains found when technology is deployed effectively in the private sectors."


Done correctly, leveraging enterprise class cloud computing, implementing best practices capabilities for the entire value chain and creating projects that can have cost, time and performance guarantees, the government truly can save not only billions of dollars but significant time which leads to massive improvements in performance and the ability to serve.

The government has identified it needs a true hierarchical database in order to keep data secure.  This cannot be done with relational databases and therefore it is not able to achieve the cost savings through multi-tenancy.

Is the Cloud Computing Commission trying to help or are they trying to direct sales?

A recent article by The Washington Post identifies a new "non-profit" group is spearheading the effort to "put their stamp" on the deployment of cloud computing in the federal government and forming a panel  that will make recommendations to the federal chief information officer and the commerce secretary.


According to the article, 

"The TechAmerica Foundation, a nonprofit group affiliated with industry association TechAmerica, is spearheading the effort. It announced last week that Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive of the Web-based sales management company Salesforce.com, and Michael D. Capellas, chief executive of VCE, a coalition formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel, will co-chair the team."

Having the chief executives of several providers of  cloud computing solutions on an advisory board doesn't seem right somehow.  Are they taking themselves and their companies out of the potential providers of the solutions?  Are they going to be able to be fair and unbiased in their recommendations?  Are they going to be able to look at the entire enterprise and what is best for the government or are they going to be "clouding" the efforts of the best solutions to be researched?

What’s so important about the Utility & Ubiquity in Cloud based business solutions?

Utility is partly the, intrinsic benefit or convenience of some-thing.

Ubiquity is the ready availability, and ability to access that thing easily from anywhere.

An example to illustrate the key ideas of Utility combined with Ubiquity:

If I have a cell phone, and you have a cell phone we each have a point of attachment into a telecommunications network.  We may share the same infrastructure (carrier) and even talk to the same people. 

In the world of cellular phones that “Shared infrastructure and community of users” is the norm.  This pattern is also true for a wide variety of other everyday usable items. There is a Utility provided by the network service provider and Ubiquity in it being accessible by each individual user from anywhere.

The Utility & Ubiquity also means anyone else can easily acquire this technology...So; Where’s the differentiator and the value?

The physical form of network has a parallel in the world of the Internet and with Cloud Computing.

The answer to that question is the heart of how does a user generate a “Value Proposition” from a Utility.  The issue boils down to this...

There is a difference between Utility and Value.  Utility represents the availability, capacity and service level in some-thing that we may all use.  The roads, car-parks and the telephone network are good examples of Utility based on a shared infrastructure.  The reason we share the infrastructure is that it is too expensive for each of us to build our own infrastructure.

I have my car / phone and you have yours.  The relative operating costs will be different for each user, and predominantly flows from their form and the capacity of access, however, the value I extract from a connection into, and usage of, those networks is a function of what I do with my “point of attachment into that network” not the underlying shared infrastructure itself.

To illustrate; In a business context, all businesses will have a shared connection into the power / water utilities/ roads / Internet and their staff use these facilities...

Same points apply.  It is how efficiently we turn our access and use of those inputs (Quantity used or total input costs per unit of output) into Value that determines the overall profitability of a business. 

At this time in business, with Cloud Infrastructures, everyone (big and small businesses) has the opportunity to have the same capabilities in their infrastructures (in-house applications / cloud, hybrid, whatever).

So the large capital costs that were a traditional barrier to entry for the smaller players have been largely removed by the Cloud (SaaS /Iass/  PaaS) delivery Models.

The challenge now facing individual businesses today is how we leverage and use these assets to collaborate with our partners and create value in our products and services.  That piece is largely unaddressed.  There is a solution in www.darkstarcloud.com and its delivery model.

Cloud can and should be the platform to provide Utility and Ubiquity. 

It holds the promise to the move the current IT paradigm to business processes and away from enterprise centric applications and their data.


Post courtesy of Rob McWhirter

Looking for business Value in Cloud Computing? The business value is in what you do with it, not the underlying platform.

In all the Hype over Cloud Computing at the moment many people are getting caught up in the technology and the “what and how” of Cloud and seem to have lost sight of “why” you would do this.  The business answer to that is “because there is a significant business benefit/ competitive advantage in it” – that’s why...

Sadly, the majority of Cloud Based solutions being offered today involve a simple virtualisation or consolidation of an existing I.T infrastructure.  That is not to say that taking underutilised equipment and consolidating that is not a good idea – in most case it is.

However, the basic premise of having someone else manage a facility for you is not significantly different to the whole “managed services scenario” that has been around in IT for more than 20 years...

The current approaches to the operational aspects of Cloud Computing have a parallel in Managed Services / Hosting and can be grouped operationally into one of the following (Operational Architecture types):

• ·       On Premises Hosted
• ·       Off Premises Hosted
• ·       Single Instance (SaaS/ IaaS / PaaS)
• ·       Multi-Instance (SaaS/ IaaS / PaaS)
• ·       Multi-Tenant (SaaS/ IaaS / PaaS)

These approaches represent nothing more than a simple change in an operating Model...That DOES NOT deliver any sustainable differentiator or net new value proposition.

There is nothing unique in these solutions or approaches that cannot be readily copied by your competitors.

If you do the transitioning work properly, you may save on your OPEX...

(This is the core of a value proposition in Outsourcing – that proposition is to give to someone who can do what you do - only the work which they can do faster / better / cheaper...  The one thing you should never outsource is your strategy.

Assuming there is a value - Once you have saved that money in OPEX and outsourced those skills and disengaged the now redundant in-house I.T resources - then what is your differentiator?

Ignoring the technology aspect of “what” and “how” -  let us look at “why” you would consider Cloud...

The thing you need to look for before you think about a Cloud  deployment is “why”:

What is my source of Value?

What is it in my business operations that gives the business a competitive or strategic advantage?

If you can answer those questions; now try to answer the question “why cloud” improves those positions?


Thanks to Rob McWhirter for this post.

Collaboration is the only source of a real and sustainable value proposition in Cloud Computing...

Within Supply Chains, and at the Enterprise level, at the moment we have many business methods and processes that are not significantly different to what was being done in the 1990’s.

Viewed from the network level we can see a “whole supply chain” - Each organisation goes about doing work separately (generally in isolation) to produce what it considers to be an Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) and a material Forecast. 

Using traditional techniques each participating organisation crunches the numbers using their ERP / MRP2 Systems to work out (based on historical data and assumptions about demand / supply lead times) what levels of inventory we should hold and when orders should be placed and synchronised. 

That scenario is silo based and definitely not an “aligned supply chain”. At some time in that cycle data is passed to the Suppliers & transport providers all of whom make their calculations.

The only thing that links that stream is the data and messages that are sent between the various trading entities.  The typical medium being Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) which currently has a value proposition based on it being a slightly more secure / reliable version of a Fax or e-mail.

In the early days of the internet the ability to do these exchanges had a slightly higher value proposition than it does now – now it is routine.  There is adequate bandwidth in the internet and even large file transfers (several gigabytes) can be accomplished and verified quite easily. Even using EDI, traditionally there is very little in the way of end-to-end visibility and no “timeliness” in the data flows...Most participants have no way of knowing the stock positions until someone responds to a forecast or provides an Advanced Shipping Notification (ASN).

As a consequence at every step the whole chain gets a sub-optimal inventory & EOQ position, that isolated planning, is repeated at each node in that supply chain.   This is reflected in the “overstock” and “understocks”.  This method and the associated planning scenarios also produce the classic “bullwhip” effect.

There is a better way: 

The Chain needs to share Process not Data.

Sharing a Process establishes Context & Timeliness in the shared data – these are attributes that do not exist in a raw EDI stream. 

Post courtesy of Rob McWhirter

Teradata agrees to buy Aster Data Systems

Cloud companies continue to broaden their reach beyond their parochial segment (beyond just applications or platform or infrastructure).  HP/3Par.  Are  EMC's purchases of Isilon and Greenplum comparative? Regardless the drum keeps on beating for the reach.
Post courtesy of Bill Grigsby

Whitehouse wants 'disruptive' shift in IT strategy

The White House is pushing for dramatic change in federal information technology strategy away from infrastructure ownership and toward provisioning of services, which will require new approaches and collaborations, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra said at a federal CIO panel discussion today.

“There is a huge shift in federal IT,” Kundra said at the AFCEA Bethesda panel event. “We want to make sure the shift is disruptive.”

The trend encompasses not only moving e-mail systems to the cloud and consolidating data centers but also eventually will affect large enterprise systems and information security by 2012, Kundra said. Read Full Article

The White House wants disruptive technologies... that is why the components of Dark Star Cloud are relevant as they allow projects to be completed much quicker, with greater quality, certainty of price and delivery on time!

 

Even Google has Issues in the Cloud

Google said Tuesday it was still working on restoring Gmail access to the 0.02 percent of its users affected by Sunday's outage. The company said the restoration process was taking longer than usual because the data had to be retrieved from offline tape backups that were protected from the errant software update. 

Can you afford to have your enterprise down for 3 days?  Imagine that you are the new Sabre of cargo and you are down for 3 days! Would not happen if you were using Dark Star Cloud! 

Microsoft patches bug in security software

Microsoft last week patched a vulnerability in its Malware Protection Engine that could have allowed ordinary system users to gain full administrative control of a machine. Security researcher Cesar Cerrudo, who reported the bug to Microsoft last July, said exploiting the bug would be possible remotely in some cases, but generally would require physical access to a machine. Read article in Computerworld

Just another reason why you need a totally secure solution like Dark Star Cloud to build enterprise class applications in the cloud.

Hewlett Packard just announced Q1 figures and it appears their focus was on expanding margin at the expense of market share

HP needs to change the rules and leverage the investment made in EDS and the customer base. HP is already one of IBM’s largest mainframe customers and needs to have a differentiated strategy that has some neutrality from IBM. HP needs to be offering enterprise class cloud computing solutions like those that Dark Star Cloud delivers.