By Jef Cozza / Top Tech News. Updated March 02, 2017.

"With these new Edge Gateways, customers will be able to securely transfer and analyze important data at the edge of the network to glean real-time intelligence from the physical world," Dell said in a statement, "Ideal deployments include a vehicle, a refrigerated trailer, a remote oil pump in the desert, digital signs in an elevator or inside of the HVAC units on a rooftop of a casino."

Real-Time Analysis

The 3000 series is designed to appeal to customers looking for faster, real-time analysis of massive amounts of data produced by devices on their networks in order to perform immediate decision-making, Dell said. In many cases, it can be too expensive for enterprises to move all the data from the edge of the network near the devices to the data center.

Computing at the edge, on the other hand, can help determine which data sets are relevant and need to be sent back to the data center or the cloud for further analytics and longer term storage, saving bandwidth and reducing costs and security concerns.

"As the number of connected devices becomes more ubiquitous, we know that intelligent computing at the edge of the network is critical. The IoT continues to enhance customer experience, drive business growth and improve lives, making it central to organizations' digital transformation strategies," said Andy Rhodes, vice president and general manager, Internet of Things at Dell, in the statement. "The small and mighty 3000 Series opens up new opportunities for our customers and partners to get smarter with their data and make big things happen."

A Rugged Alternative

The company said the 3000 Series is a rugged alternative to its 5000 Series, which is designed to excel in fixed use cases that require modular expansion, large sensor networks and more advanced edge analytics. The 3000 Series, however, is geared toward fixed and mobile use cases requiring smaller sensor networks, tight spaces and more simple analytics.

The series consists of three different models. The first is geared to the industrial automation and energy management markets, and comes with a multi-function I/O port and programmable serial ports. The second is aimed at the transportation and logistics markets, with a CAN bus for land/marine protocol and integrated ZigBee for mesh sensor networks.

The last model targets digital signage and retail enterprises, and is equipped with a display port output for video displays and 3.5mm line in/line out for quality audio streaming.

Each of the three models features an Intel Atom processor, 2 GB of RAM, and support for operating temperatures between minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit) and 70 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit).

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Oracle Expands Cloud Services with Launch of Exadata Cloud Machine - Top Tech News

By: David Mitchell Smith, vice president and Gartner Fellow

Cloud computing was originally a place to experiment, and has come a long way as a critical part of todays IT. After 10 years, companies should look for even wider scaleinvestments.

In its first decade, cloud computing was disruptive to IT, but looking into the second decade, it is becoming mature and an expected part of most next-generation disruptions (such as AI, Digital Business). For the past 10 years, cloud computing changed the expectations and capabilities of the IT department, but now it is a necessary catalyst for innovation across the company.

As the technology matures, objections to cloud computing are lessening, although myths and confusing technology terms continue to plague the space.

As it enters its second decade, cloud computing is increasingly becoming a vehicle for next-generation digital business, as well as for agile, scalable and elastic solutions. CIOs and other IT leaders need to constantly adapt their strategies to leverage cloud capabilities.

Its not too late to begin planning a roadmap to an all-in cloud future. A few predictions about what that future will look like.

By 2020, anything other than a cloud-only strategy for new IT initiatives will require justification at more than 30% of large-enterprise organizations.

During the past decade, cloud computing has matured on several fronts. Today, most security analysis suggests that mainstream cloud computing is more secure than on-premises IT. Cloud services are more often functionally complete, and vendors now offer migration options.

Importantly, innovation is rapidly shifting to the cloud, with many vendors employing a cloud-first approach (and some beginning cloud-only approaches) to product design and some technology and business innovations available only as cloud services. This includes innovations in the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence.

As the pressure to move to cloud services increases, more organizations are creating roadmaps that reflect the need to shift strategy. At these organizations, projects that propose on-site resources are considered conservative, as the reduced agility and innovation options decrease competitive agility. Enterprises will begin to pressure IT departments to embrace cloud computing.

Keep in mind that not all projects can utilize cloud services due to regulatory or security concerns.. Also, some enterprises might lack the correct skill sets and talent.

By 2021, more than half of global enterprises already using cloud today will adopt an all-in cloud strategy. The key to an all-in cloud strategy is not to lift and shift data center content. Instead, enterprises should evaluate what applications within the data center can be replaced with SaaS, refactored or rebuilt. However, an all-in strategy will have more impact on IT compared to a cloud-first strategy.

By and large, companies that have shifted to all-cloud have not returned to traditional on-premises data centers, with even large companies embracing third-party cloud infrastructure.

Enterprises should begin to plan a roadmap for their cloud strategy, and ensure that lift and shift is only being done when necessary, such as part of data center consolidation efforts.

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Cloud Computing Enters its Second Decade - DATAQUEST

Mashable

Amazon escapes the internet outage caused by its own cloud computing service Mashable When Amazon's cloud computing service failed on Tuesday, more than half of the internet's top 100 e-commerce websites were affected. Which site didn't get burned? Amazon.com, of course. The AWS S3 cloud computing service backs more than 150,000 ... AWS Outage Highlights Value of Multi-Cloud StrategyMSPmentor Cisco Adds Layering to Network Services Orchestrator TechnologyCIO Today Cloud Computing Makes the Internet More Reliable and Secure, Except When It Doesn'tSlate Magazine (blog) Savannah Morning News -Technabob (blog) all 123 news articles »

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Amazon escapes the internet outage caused by its own cloud computing service - Mashable

SAN FRANCISCO -- The ubiquitous cloud computing craze may not be long for this world if venture capitalist Peter Levine is right. The Andreessen Horowitz general partner said that as more computing capabilities move to so-called "edge" devices, including anything from driverless cars and drones to the boundless devices that make up the internet of things (IoT), the cloud will slowly evaporate.

"A large portion of computation that gets done in the cloud today will return to the edge," said Levine at the Wall Street Journal's CIO Network event here Tuesday.

Levine said the driverless car, whose 200-plus CPUs effectively make it a "data center on wheels," is a prime example of an edge device whose computing capabilities must be self-contained. Levine said that an autonomous vehicle relying on the cloud for data would blow through stop signs and crash because of the latency associated with transmitting data from the car to the cloud. The cloud will also cripple many scenarios for machine learning, which relies on speedy computing to deliver faster decision-making.

Edge computing is less a novelty than perhaps the next computing cycle, Levine said. Decades ago most computing was centralized in mainframes, with banks and most other large enterprise relying on the refrigerator-sized cabinets to manage their business operations.

Many mainframes were decommissioned to make room for the decentralized client-server era. The cloud is essentially the new mainframe hosted in a vendor's data center. If the natural ebb and flow of computing holds, the edge will accelerate the next leg of distributed computing. And that means the cloud "goes away in the not-too-distant future," Levine said.

It's a scary proposition for the thousands of vendors hawking cloud services. For the past decade, Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and others have stood up applications, infrastructure, storage and virtually every conceivable type of computing task imaginable as a service. But a venture capitalists job is to take a broader, longer view so that they can see what innovations are coming next. Levine is essentially saying the cloud disruptors will be disrupted in the next five to 10 years.

[ How to make hybrid cloud work ]

Diana McKenzie, CIO of cloud business application provider Workday, isnt buying the "provocative point" that the cloud will disappear. She said it will co-exist with the edge. For example, McKenzie said that companies will want to aggregate data collected from edge devices in a cloud for analysis and, ideally, business insights.

"I can't imagine there will ever not be a place for cloud computing," McKenzie tells CIO.com. "The challenge for us as CIOs is to make sure we're thinking about it more on a continuum than on a black and white basis. Then the next challenge is how you architect for that."

The cloud-to-edge debate was a hot topic, but it was hardly the only theme tackled by Levine and his panel peers -- Accel partners Rich Wong and General Catalyst Managing Director Steve Herrod offered some other thoughts about emerging trends.

From big data to machine learning: Big data 1.0 included collecting lots of information but the next wave involves predicting what is going to happen in the future, said Levine. "Machine learning unlocking these vast stores of information that we have... that can help us predict the future in better ways is absolutely happening right now," Levine said. For example, machine learning is used to predict cybersecurity attacks and IT system failures.

Wong said that enterprises can use machine learning to automate IT service functions, such as password resets for customers. Entrusting such corporate operations to machine algorithms can yield anywhere from 30 percent to 100 percent cost savings, the VCs said.

[ How to make hybrid cloud work ]

Bottoms up, the polite euphemism for shadow IT: Wong said that while VCs encourage portfolio companies to deploy a "land and expand" strategy and get into businesses through departments rather than going through the CIO,it's a delicate balance. The CIO must grapple with the challenges and risks associated with adopting potentially unproven technology but benefits from the speed of on-boarding employees. Thanks to the cloud, many are onboarding themselves. Levine says that shadow IT has extended to developers. "I've seen situations where if the organization doesn't provide what the developer needs, they go to another company to get services and tools," Levine says.

Proof-of-concepts -as-a-service: It's become fashionable for CIOs to fancy themselves as "IT-as-a-service" providers, essentially brokers of digital capabilities, including cloud, mobile, analytics and IoT. In this model, it makes sense for CIO to recognize that proof of concepts are a valuable way to evaluate new technology, Herrod said. He suggested that startups offer proof-of-concepts as a service to help.

The winner for hardest position for CIOs to hire goes to Data analysts: Levine says that if data is the most important ingredient in unlocking business value, then data scientists and analysts who can derive insights from the data and turn it into actionable information will be the toughest positions to fill.

Herrod disagrees and says that hes found the hardest hires are DevOps leaders because there is little consensus on what defines DevOps, a model for rapid software development model popularized by consumer internet companies. Herrod says that he's heard descriptions of DevOps managers range from scrum masters who run agile computing systems for speed and innovation to specialists who optimize cloud infrastructure.

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Edge computing will blow away the cloud - CIO

By Shirley Siluk / Top Tech News. Updated March 01, 2017.

Now resolved, the Feb. 28th outage of Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service) cloud-based object storage service caused many Web sites to be inaccessible or slow to load for several hours. Affected sites and services included Adobe, Coursera, Cracked, Imgur, Mailchimp, Medium, Quora, Slack, Trello as well as Internet health-tracking sites such as Downdetector and Is It Down Right Now.

S3 is an "object storage with a simple Web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the Web," according to Amazon. Used by more than 150,000 Web sites, S3 is designed for up to 99.99 percent availability. Yesterday's outage illustrated that one-in-ten-thousand chance of non-availability.

Problem at Virginia Data Center

While Amazon's cloud service health dashboard gave no indication of trouble, yesterday morning AWS noted on its Twitter account that S3 was "experiencing high error rates" that the company was working to recover. Because the dashboard wasn't showing alert color changes due to the S3 issue, Amazon also posted updates in a banner at the top of the Web page.

By 1:49 p.m. PST, all S3 services for object retrieval, listing, deletion and addition had been recovered and were back to working normally, Amazon said. The company said that the outage was traced to its US-EAST-1 gateway location, which is its data center in northern Virginia.

During the outage, Twitter became the place for various AWS customers and others to share information as well as to vent and post humorous items about the event. Adobe Customer Care, for example, posted a GIF of a puppy stampede to take customers' minds off the service outage, while another popular meme was a screenshot of Homer Simpson's dad with the headline, "Old Man Yells at Cloud."

Enterprises Need 'Balanced Approach'

In an analysis published today in Forbes, analyst Patrick Moorhead said yesterday's outage underscored a problem not with Amazon, but with enterprise users who don't fully consider the implications of moving key services into the cloud.

"This incident is an indictment, not of AWS or Amazon.com, but of business and IT decision makers," said Moorhead, who is founder, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. "Too often the decision to move IT services to the public cloud was driven by either cost or the thought that 'we need to get to the cloud to be competitive.' But not understanding the value that your IT can deliver today shortchanges the business."

While it makes sense for many enterprises to move some workloads into the public cloud, other services require a more balanced approach that might include use of private cloud as well as legacy systems, according to Moorhead.

The non-profit Institute for Local Self-Reliance made a similar observation in a report about Amazon published in November. "Amazon increasingly controls the underlying infrastructure of the economy," the report noted. "Its Amazon Web Services division provides the cloud computing backbone for much of the country, powering everyone from Netix to the CIA."

In its most recent quarterly financial report issued in early February, Amazon said its AWS operating income for the 12 months ending Dec. 31 amounted to $3.1 billion, compared to $1.5 billion for same 12 months in 2015.

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