Cloud Hosting

Reducing Cloud Hosting Costs for Allegro with Dynamically Scaling Resources

With the increasing popularity and availability of cloud computing in todays business marketplace, many companies are considering cloud hosted solutions as opposed to the more traditional option of managing servers in-house. Coupled with high reliability, a cloud server grid offers the benefit of having complete control over creating, starting, stopping, and scaling servers instantly while only paying for the servers when they are running. By utilizing this functionality in an Allegro implementation, a business can drastically increase server grid performance while minimizing server up time, thereby greatly, reducing the overall cost of hosting. At one of Opportunes retail power clients, costs were reduced by 60%!

Over the course of each day and week, there will be distinct periods of high and low system resource usage in any ETRM implementation. Traditionally, the periods of high server resource usage dictate the total amount of resources which need to be dedicated to the environment on a full-time basis. One of the typical side effects of this approach is long periods of time in which the environments system resources are not being utilized or are being underutilized. In a cloud implementation, underutilization means you are paying by the minute for something you are not using!

Allegro Dynamically Scaling Resources

Coupling the power of Allegro class events with the versatility of a cloud environment, it is possible to dynamically scale your infrastructure in order to have resources available when they are required and turned off when they are no longer needed. Control of the cloud servers is accomplished by integrating your cloud providers API into Allegro and then utilizing triggers to turn the cloud servers on and off at the appropriate times. Given the flexibility of Allegro class events, the triggers can range from simple to very complex. A few examples are:

The triggers for dynamically scaling resources can be modified to meet the needs of any organization hosting Allegro in the cloud with any number of servers.

Case Study of Cost Reduction

When you analyze server up time over the course of one month, it becomes apparent that there is a very high potential for reducing hosting costs by dynamically scaling resources. To illustrate this point, consider a company that has an Allegro grid of 3 web servers. For the majority of the week, this particular company does not need to be running more than one server at a time, but 2 nights per week they run a very large valuation that requires 3 grid servers to finish on time for business the following day. In a traditional environment, it would be necessary to run all three servers full time even though two of them are only truly needed twice a week for a few hours. A cloud environment allows the possibility to run one of those servers full-time, and the other two for only five hours per week each. Over a one-month period, that equates to reducing approximately 1400 hours of time or 60% from your hosting costs.

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Value Added

Utilizing cloud hosting for an Allegro implementation offers a wide variety of inherent advantages, but those advantages come at a cost that is charged on a minute by minute basis. By implementing dynamically scaling resources, your organization has the potential to drastically reduce its hosting costs, while actually increasing the performance of your Allegro grid. Whether your organization is starting a new Allegro implementation, upgrading an existing Allegro implementation, or considering transitioning an existing Allegro environment to cloud hosting, the cost saving potential of dynamically scaling resources is so substantial that your company should take advantage of the opportunity right away.

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More here:
Dynamically Scaling Resources: How to Save 60% on Costs with Cloud Hosting for Allegro - Lexology (registration)

At its InterConnect conference in Las Vegas this week, IBM is announcing new features for its open source cloud-hosted blockchain service in an attempt to bring this distributed database technology from its initial use of powering Bitcoin to a broader market, including the financial services industry.

Blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a continually growing list of records that can be verified using hashing techniques. Vendors such as IBM and Microsoft are attempting to commercialize it by offering customers a platform for hosting their own implementations. Analysts say the market to do so is just emerging.

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IBM has supported blockchain implementations for more than a year, but this week the company is announcing a beta version 1.0 of its service, which is based off the open source Hyperledger Fabric a Linux Foundation project. Its available in IBMs Bluemix Cloud. IBM says Hyperledger can process up to 1,000 transactions per second.

Also new in the 1.0 version are a series of tools that IBM says will make it easier to manage blockchain implementations. These include policies for administrators to set up blockchain networks, assign roles and levels of visibility, manage membership and enforce compliance.

IBM is also launching a Fabric Composer, which is a platform for making APIs that integrate with the hosted blockchain service. The idea is that IBM would host the secure, cloud-based infrastructure that blockchain implementations would run on.

Forrester Research Principal Analyst Martha Bennett says these are significant steps toward adding enterprise functionality to this technology, but there are many steps that need to follow.

Despite the significant amount of hype around blockchain, Gartner Research Director Rajesh Kandaswamy says the market is still in its earliest stages. Its a really interesting market because there is so much potential, he says. At the same time, theres this disconnect between the work thats in trials and proof of concept versus what is going on in production.

Blockchain implementations have a handful of defining characteristics, Bennett says: Its a write-once and append-only system (meaning records in the database cannot be changed, records can only be added to the ledger); its distributed and at least partially replicated in multiple locations; its crypto-secured through a public or private key infrastructure and it uses hashes.

The hash functionality is particularly important, Bennett notes. Each individual transaction is hashed into the chain, and each block, which contains a bunch of transactions, is also hashed, which links it to the previous block, she explains. The moment anyone tries to change a transaction, everyone who has access to the chain would know immediately that its been tampered with because the hash wouldnt match.

This creates a platform where multiple parties can share data, but all have proof that past records have not been changed. Its quite a remarkable platform, but its in the very, very early stages of maturity, she says. The fact that IBM has commercialized the 1.0 version of Hyperledger fabric in Bluemix and introduced some management tools are good steps, she says.

Kandaswamy cites Gartner estimates that blockchain could produce $176 billion in business value-add by 2025. Most of the initial blockchain trails have been in the financial services industry, but he says use cases are expanding, especially in the area of supply chain management for retailers, manufacturers or any company that needs to track a product life cycle in a secure way with multiple parties.

IBM cites a customer in Beijing its been working with named Energy-Blockchain Labs, which created a carbon credit asset management system based on IBMs blockchain offering. Other customers IBM cites include startup Everledger, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ and Northern Trust.

Original post:
How IBM wants to bring blockchain from Bitcoin to your data center - Network World