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Why business should bet on open source

G-Cloud buyers fail to share savings data with government

Lotus F1 gears up with Microsoft Dynamics

Diversity could boost development in the software industry

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Buyer’s guide to next-generation service management

Businesses need to look beyond compliance to build trust

OpenStack Swift 101: The object store for OpenStack apps

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Businesses open doors to open source

There is growing acceptance of open-source software among enterprise CIOs

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One-third of schools admit to making no investment in coding training for teachers One-third of schools have not invested in training teachers to deliver the new computing cur-riculum, according to research. Freedom of information requests by enterprise software company MapR revealed that the support teachers are receiving is inconsistent across the country, with some schools investing nothing in training and others investing more than £3,000.

Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applicationsAl Rayan Bank, the only Sharia-compliant bank in the West, believes it can make changes more quickly than established banks, thanks to its investment in cloud applications. The bank’s head of IT and change delivery, Matthew Glover, says its use of cloud gives it a competitive advantage against big banks, and its customer base of 60,000 gives it an edge against challenger banks.

GDS builds in-house PaaS to host government servicesThe government plans to build an in-house platform-as-a-service (PaaS) system to host digital ser-vices, instead of paying an external provider. The Government Digital Service (GDS) has set out plans to build a single, centralised, multi-tenant PaaS system. It wants all departments and agencies to use it to host their digital services, rather than waste time and duplicate effort creating their own stacks.

Intel invests in quantum researchIntel is setting aside $50m for quan-tum computing research over the next 10 years. But at $5m per year, the investment is less than 0.05% of the chipmaker’s annual research and development budget, which was $11.5bn in 2014, according to the IC Insights Strategic Reviews database. Intel said quantum computing holds the promise of solving complex problems that are practically insur-mountable today.

O2 wins £6.5m mobile networking services contract with TfLTransport for London (TfL) has awarded mobile network operator O2 a £6.5m networking services contract. The three-year deal covers bespoke mobile network services and smartphone and tablet tech-nology that will give TfL staff up-to-date information to help support customers on the capital’s transport network. It comes following a lengthy procurement pro-cess conducted jointly with the Greater London Authority.

❯Catch up with the latest IT news online

NEWS IN BRIEF

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http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500253068/One-third-of-schools-admit-to-making-no-investment-in-coding-training-for-teachers














http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500252667/Al-Rayan-Bank-finds-business-agility-in-cloud-applications













http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500253132/Government-Digital-Service-builds-in-house-PaaS-to-host-government-services














http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500252888/Intel-spends-a-little-to-make-quantum-leap













http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500253134/Transport-for-London-awards-O2-mobile-networking-services-contract
















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NEWS IN BRIEF

Small businesses swap Windows laptops for tabletsResearch by EE has revealed that smaller businesses are abandoning PCs in favour of tablet devices. The survey found 31% of businesses believe laptop use is declining and gradually being replaced by tablets, with 24% of respondents having already made the transition.

Cornwall Council and BT go to court over botched outsourcing dealCornwall Council and BT will meet in the High Court in December 2015 as the council attempts to end its £260m outsourcing deal with BT. When Cornwall Council announced plans to terminate the contract, BT filed an injunction to stop it.

Conventional security measures hit productivity, study showsCommon access management pro-cesses limit productivity and force employees to find risky worka-rounds, according to a global secu-rity survey commissioned by Dell.

Initial timeframe for Universal Credit project was two yearsEarly plans for the Universal Credit welfare reform programme show the government originally expected to complete the project in two years. The initiative – launched in 2011 – has since been heavily rescoped and rescheduled after major problems were revealed.

Samsung workforce cuts expectedSamsung Electronics is under-stood to be preparing a major round of redundancies as it strug-gles to compete effectively in the smartphone market. According to reports, Samsung plans to cull 10% of its employees to pre-empt fur-ther disruption in the market.

NHS England’s Care.data programme on hold againThe Care.data pilots in Leeds, Blackburn and Derwent, West Hampshire and Somerset have been put on hold again as the NHS works on new opt-out and consent models. n

Britain a smartphone-obsessed nationThe UK is fast becoming a smartphone-dependent society, with penetration now reaching 76% of UK adults, who collectively check their devices 1.1 billion times a day, the equivalent of almost 400 billion times a year, according to business advisory Deloitte.

❯ UK tops global cyber crime hit list.

❯ UK CIOs lament lack of IT support for cloud services.

❯ Researchers discover Android PIN locker ransomware.

❯ DH and NHS England develop vision for NHS.uk.

❯Catch up with the latest IT news online

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http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500252931/Smaller-businesses-swap-traditional-Windows-laptops-for-tablets










http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500253043/Cornwall-Council-and-BT-to-meet-in-court-over-botched-outsourcing-deal









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http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500253123/Drastic-cuts-coming-to-Samsung-workforce









http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500253004/NHS-Englands-controversial-Caredata-programme-on-hold-again







http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500253060/Britain-a-smartphone-obsessed-nation-says-Deloitte









http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500253226/UK-tops-global-cyber-crime-hit-list

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500253235/UK-CIOs-lament-lack-of-IT-support-for-cloud-services

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500253237/Researchers-discover-Android-PIN-locker-ransomware

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500253243/DoH-and-NHS-England-join-forces-to-develop-vision-for-NHSUK



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Why business should bet on open sourceOnline bookie William Hill deploys open-source tools to present time-sensitive web content, writes Cliff Saran

Gambling business William Hill has developed a data plat-form based on open-source toolkits, functional program-ming and Docker containers to support recommenda-

tions and gamification. Its technology stack gives a glimpse of the benefits of developing open-source website architecture.

Five years ago, analyst company Gartner used to receive about 12 enquiries a year about open-source databases. Last year, it received 110, according to Open Source: the new database standard paper from EnterpriseDB.

The numbers may be small, but they illustrate growing accept-ance of open source among enterprise CIOs.

Lower software licence costs used to be a big driver for selecting open-source software (OSS) – especially in a business where web traffic peaks were unpredictable – since there is no need to pay per server, per core or per user licence fees.

But, given that some open-source tools are created by hugely successful websites, the technology proves it can work at scale to solve problems inherent in webscale businesses. For instance, LinkedIn’s engineering team developed and built Apache Kafka to provide the messaging backbone that helps the company’s appli-cations work together in a loosely coupled manner.

In a blog posted earlier this year, LinkedIn’s head of engineer-ing, Mammad Zadeh, wrote: “LinkedIn relies heavily on the scal-ability and reliability of Kafka and a surrounding ecosystem of both open-source and internal components. We are continuing to invest in Kafka to ensure that our messaging backbone stays healthy as we ask more and more from it.”

Open-source oddsWilliam Hill developed the open-source Omni platform from an innovation exercise at the firm’s Shoreditch office, for real-time data and business analytics to drive customer engagement.

Patrick Di Loreto, research and development lead at William Hill, said the firm wanted its betting website to combine data from external sources, such as Twitter, with a punter’s profile.

“If you tweet about Liverpool and five seconds later you come to our site, we already know what you are interested in,” he said.

William Hill’s recommendation engine is the company’s first application built for Omni. “When someone places a bet, we have a real-time graph so we can see who has placed a bet, and com-bine this information to present which bets other people have placed,” said Di Loreto.

ANALYSIS


http://www.techtarget.com/es/contribuidor/Cliff-Saran

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500252257/William-Hill-kicks-off-football-season-with-blast-from-the-past

http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/news/2240222951/Apache-Kafka-committer-Jay-Kreps-on-the-way-of-the-log

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Apache-Kafka

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240175664/William-Hill-bets-on-mobile-for-gambling-on-the-go


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Building on open sourceThe betting site uses Apache Kakfa to track customers’ naviga-tion. Kafka distributes the data to a number of subsystems in the Omni architecture, so it is consumed as quickly as possible, which the company needs for its recommendation engine.

“The data is sent to two layers – a speed layer and a batch layer. The speed layer is used to calculate ‘best bets’. The batch layer uses it for long-term business intelligence to create a better pro-file of the user,” said Di Loreto.

William Hill built the Omni platform using a Java-like program-ming language called Scala because it offers a functional pro-gramming model, which Di Loreto said better suited the highly distributed nature of the platform. “We felt it would let us han-dle all the data-wrangling and logic required to manage the data streams on our users,” he said.

Di Loreto said Scala offered a paradigm of programming which enabled developers to use object-oriented programming for web services, interpretative programming and functional program-ming, where appropriate.

The open-source Apache Spark general engine for big data processing from Berkeley University’s Algorithms, Machines and People (AMP) lab was used on top of Scala to handle complex, associative data queries. Spark Streaming, which is built into Spark, enables William Hill to handle hundreds of thousands of data operations distributed across multiple processors.

The information about the website’s users is organised into timelines stored in the Cassandra open-source distributed data-base management system.

Di Loreto said William Hill also used the open-source Akka toolkit, which provides a transparent processing framework for all requests, to enable the Spark Streaming real-time data process-ing tool to process the data feed from Kafka.

With this architecture, Di Loreto said William Hill had used logical reasoning to present relevant content to users. “Because you always place a bet on Liverpool, then you are likely to be a Liverpool supporter,” he said.

The site has also been designed for failure using the open-source Docker container technology, which provides a more lightweight way to run applications, compared with a virtual machine (VM). “If an application crashes in a virtual machine, it could corrupt the whole VM, including all other applications. But if you have a failure in a containerised Docker application, there is no impact on the rest of the system,” said Di Loreto.

Why choose open source?Among the benefits of OSS is that it is hardly ever a standalone product. Most OSS is built on other open-source projects. Because of the way it is licensed, these enhancements are then passed back to the open-source community, so the software constantly evolves.

So, if such open-source technology is readily available, and has proved its scalability in webscale businesses, why re-invent the wheel? Tony Lock, distinguished analyst at Freeform Dynamics, said open source is certainly more accepted in the enterprise.

“It is suitable for all businesses, not just for webscale busi-nesses,” he said. n

ANALYSIS

❯Gartner has reported a shift to open-source platforms in the middleware market


http://www.theserverside.com/feature/Finding-the-Scala-sweet-spot-Balancing-people-process-and-tools

http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/definition/Apache-Spark

http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/quiz/Apache-Spark-architecture-quiz-Do-you-know-Spark

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240163022/Liverpool-FC-moves-to-the-cloud-with-Amazon-Web-Services

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500250361/IBM-steps-up-open-source-cloud-commitment-to-developers

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500244917/Gartner-Enterprises-opt-for-Open-source-and-cloud-middleware-alternatives


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Majority of G-Cloud buyers fail to share savings data with governmentFreedom of Information response reveals four out of five G-Cloud buyers are failing to share details of the savings they have made through using the framework. Caroline Donnelly reports

The government’s reliance on self-reporting when calculating the money G-Cloud users save has been called into question, as data suggests few buyers are bothering

to share their data.The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) introduced the Customer

Benefits Record (CBR) system in October 2014 so G-Cloud users could notify the government every time they enter into a call-off agreement by filling in and submitting an online form.

The document asks users to set out the length of the deal, along with its forecasted cost, and details of what they previously paid for a similar service. This, the government claims, is so it can “monitor the performance and capture the benefits of the G-Cloud frameworks”.

Computer Weekly recently filed a freedom of information (FOI) request asking CCS to confirm how many CBR forms have been submitted since the requirement was introduced, and was informed that, as of August 2015, just 135 had been received. CCS pointed out in the response that one CBR form can cover multiple

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By August 2015, just 135 Customer Benefits Records

had been received


http://www.techtarget.com/contributor/Caroline-Donnelly

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500251034/SME-G-Cloud-deal-volumes-are-being-under-reported-claim-suppliers

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240240672/Whats-going-wrong-with-government-procurement

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500251584/FOI-response-reveals-G-Cloud-suppliers-escape-fines-for-missing-MISO-sales-data-deadlines


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invoices, but G-Cloud suppliers have privately expressed their surprise at how few forms have reportedly been turned in to date.

The government’s own G-Cloud spending data shows that since the CBR requirement was introduced in October 2014, nearly 600 public sector organisations have used the framework and taken part in 22,789 deals.

G-Cloud data dumpsThe data submitted through the CBR reports was used to help calculate the average savings data CCS published about G-Cloud in its recent annual report, the Cabinet Office confirmed to Computer Weekly. The report, published in July 2015, stated that G-Cloud users make average savings of 20% by shunning legacy-based, single-supplier agreements.

“The reported savings are from buying through the G-Cloud framework, and have been evidenced using agreed and audited benefit methodologies,” a Cabinet Office spokesperson said. “This information is taken from the Customer Benefit Records.”

Even so, doubts have been cast by multiple sources in the G-Cloud community about the accuracy of this figure, in light of how few CBR forms have been submitted.

Jessica Figueras, research director at IT analyst house Kable, said the misgivings about the data are understandable, as there is a risk users might only report favourable deals through CBR. “It seems likely that buyers would tend to over-report good deals and under-report uncompetitive deals,” she said.

Therefore, CCS needs to ensure there are measures in place to protect against this, Figueras added. “The Cabinet Office would

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Many users of G-Cloud have reportedly failed to reveal their financial savings made through deals using the service



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need to do a random compulsory audit of call-offs, rather than relying on this small, self-selecting sample,” she said.

A Cabinet Office spokesperson said it stands by the data, and that it is working to encourage more G-Cloud users to participate in the CBR system: “Savings are calculated using an agreed benefit methodology, which has been reviewed by the Government Internal Audit Agency.”

Quantifying the benefits of G-CloudThis is not the first time the CCS’s attempts to quantify the amount of business put through G-Cloud have been scrutinised recently. Concerns were raised in August 2015 that small and medium-sized enterprises could be neglecting to report all the deals they do, causing the government to underestimate the contribution they make to the framework.

Georgina O’Toole, public sector-focused research director at analyst firm TechMarketView, said that, CBR forms aside, working out how much money G-Cloud users save by shunning legacy frameworks can be a tricky business.

“Merely measuring how much cheaper G-Cloud is compared with legacy contracts is unlikely to provide a complete picture, and there will not always be a direct like-for-like comparison with a previous contract,” she said. “In addition, as arrangements are disaggregated to incorporate G-Cloud contracts and other arrangements, some spend will be shifted internally.”

For example, some of the savings made may be eaten up by recruiting or training staff to help public sector organisations negotiate the “increasingly complex” procurement landscape,

said O’Toole. “Rather than concentrating on the savings made by G-Cloud alone – which, granted, is able to provide a cheaper and easier procurement channel – it might be better to measure the overall ICT spend of the department, including both internal and

external spend, versus any previous end-to-end ICT outsourcing arrangements,” she added.

This is a view shared by Kable’s Figueras, who said there are other benefits to using G-Cloud that might be difficult to quantify in a form. “G-Cloud offers benefits above and beyond lower price tags. The G-Cloud call-off process was designed to help buyers speed through competitive tendering, rather than spending months on a full-scale procurement process, which in itself can be extremely expensive and lock out smaller suppliers,” she said. n

“G-Cloud offers benefits above and beyond lower priCe taGs. the

Call-off proCess was desiGned to help buyers speed throuGh

Competitive tenderinG”Jessica Figueras, Kable

ANALYSIS

❯Public sector firms have saved over £120m by buying services through G-Cloud


http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240115063/ICO-asks-government-to-extend-powers-of-compulsory-audit

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240230486/Design-firm-adopts-sole-supplier-for-outsourced-IT

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240230486/Design-firm-adopts-sole-supplier-for-outsourced-IT

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240203513/SMEs-struggling-to-win-G-Cloud-contracts-due-to-accreditation-complexities

http://www.microscope.co.uk/news/2240179466/SMEs-turn-away-from-channel-for-ICT-procurement

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500250491/Interview-CCS-director-Sarah-Hurrell-on-improving-government-technology-purchasing

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240218888/G-Cloud-chief-claims-120m-savings-so-far


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Lotus F1 gears up with Microsoft DynamicsMicrosoft tools drive Lotus F1 Team’s data analytics in ratcheting up the performance of its cars, engineers – and business, writes Clare McDonald

The 2015 Silverstone Grand Prix took place in July and, for spectators, the event is now over – at least for another year. But Lotus F1 Team is busy analysing as much data as

it can to ensure its cars and its company are as fast, efficient and cost-effective as possible.

The Lotus team has been working with Microsoft since 2012, using Microsoft Dynamics cloud and collaboration tools to ensure the best performance possible for its cars.

“That’s the only goal we have, the only thing we want to do is win,” said Thomas Mayer, COO of Lotus. “That’s why data is so important to us.”

Lotus has a team of 500, half of them engineers that design and run the two Lotus Formula 1 (F1) cars. The cars themselves have around 200 different sensors, capturing more than 1,000 data points – all of which will be collected and monitored to see what improvements can be made.

Mobility is important for Lotus to distribute all the data to eve-ryone who needs it; what they see on trackside they also see back in the lab. Lotus uses other methods of communication, such as Skype, to share as much data as possible.

The substantial amounts of data transferred makes the network important, so only extremely important data goes straight from the car to track; some of it is downloaded later.

A live stream from the car will be received both at the track-side and in the factory. Engineers find out how the car is running by crunching data based around 2,000 different statistics. These statistics create virtual models of future cars, with a 60% scale model used in the wind tunnel to simulate road conditions.

Many of the models in the wind tunnel are only tested for three minutes, by which time it will be clear if the car can achieve the desired results.

Sometimes up to 400 different models are tested but, due to Federation Internationale De L’Automobile (FIA) regulations, only a certain amount of time can be spent using the wind tunnels and crunching the data.

A full-scale model of successful simulations will be made, tested and built, as data collected from the track come full circle.

“We monitor everything about the car,” explains Mayer. “The more data we have and the more we can analyse the better we can make this correlation.”

CASE STUDY


http://www.techtarget.com/contributor/Clare-McDonald

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240221423/Silverstone-uses-ticketing-to-enhance-customer-experience

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240230671/Microsoft-pitches-new-Dynamics-CRM-2015-as-one-cloud-for-all

http://www.computerweekly.com/photostory/4500246296/Intel-future-showcase-The-past-present-and-future-of-technology/5/Safety-in-sensors

http://www.computerweekly.com/photostory/2240242445/VM-backup-down-as-a-priority-while-disaster-recovery-still-tops-to-do-lists/5/Mobility-top-priority-but-mobile-backup-absent

http://www.computerweekly.com/ezine/Computer-Weekly/Googles-big-data-vision

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/How-building-information-modelling-is-changing-the-construction-industry


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Business data saves time and moneyTime is of the essence in F1, as there is only a limited amount of time to get the car from concept to track.

The pace of change in F1 is rapid, and the use of data has led teams to approach design from a completely different angle, by using technologies such as rapid prototyping and simulations.

These virtual cars allow adaptations for each driver to be made virtually before thousands of different parts are developed and adapted, allowing quicker and less costly development.

“This is only possible because of the data. Data is changing the way we do things,” says Mayer.

But to get the most out of a limited budget, business data is very important to ensure everything runs efficiently. “Making all of these decisions, you need the information about how much money is involved,” says Mayer.

“We’re tracking this all in Microsoft Dynamics.”Lotus F1 uses Microsoft Dynamics AX for all of its business

areas – including finance, expenses, budgeting, purchasing, human resources (HR) and payroll processes.

CASE STUDY

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The Lotus F1 car at the 2015 Silverstone Grand Prix:

The trackside team shared live data which engineers are

still analysing to optimise the car’s performance

“we don’t outspend the other teams, we out-think the other

teams – that’s our Competition”Thomas mayer, loTus


http://www.computerweekly.com/photostory/2240237943/International-CES-2015-The-themes-at-the-biggest-tech-show-of-the-year/6/CES-2015-3D-Printing

https://www.flickr.com/photos/bluebirdwfc/


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Its previous system had a “clunky” user interface and separate teams in the organi-sation had separate systems to help the departments operate at cost.

The Dynamics AX implemen-tation integrated these systems and prevented the organisation from falling into a siloed struc-ture, instead promoting innova-tion and agile working.

The business runs in a two-week innovation cycle which will be different for each race, so it uses Microsoft Dynamics to track time-driven projects. “It’s not just about one-off improvements – it’s about an innova-tion road map.” says Mayer.

The future of the business relies on continuous development and comparing historical data with current data, to drive innova-tion in just the same way as in any other business.

Developing the automotive industry“It doesn’t mean the more information you have, the better deci-sions you make – you can get information overload, you need the business intelligence,” explains Christian Pedersen, general manager of Dynamics AX for Microsoft.

The innovation is the same as in other companies but the pace is much faster. Pedersen says Microsoft works closely with companies such as Lotus, as their technology can shape the future.

Microsoft engineers work in the Lotus factory to promote technical engagement between teams. Pedersen says an F1 car is an internet of things (IoT) device using big data.

There are sensors all over the car providing data which, com-bined with third-party data, can determine the outcome of the

competition before race day even starts, he says. This has given life to machine learning with the car’s system automatically fore-casting based on past, current and third-party data – such as weather, track temperature and traction – to find the correlation between the wind tunnel and the track.

And technologies such as these are now appearing in the pub-lic automotive market with technology such as personalised keys, insurance black boxes, predictive windscreen wipers and smart-phone-controlled navigation systems.

“We don’t outspend the other teams, we out-think the other teams – that’s our competition,” concludes Lotus’s Mayer. n

CASE STUDY

❯F1 team Williams Martini Racing is seeing the benefits of its 100Mbps network

The Lotus F1 Team at the trackside M

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http://www.computerweekly.com/ehandbook/Agile-Foundations-the-Agile-Manifesto

http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/How-to-secure-the-internet-of-things

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240237682/CES-2015-Cars-companies-showcase-automotive-digitisation

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500250303/Ultrafast-network-helps-Williams-Martini-Racing-stay-among-F1-contenders

https://www.flickr.com/photos/pestoverde/


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Increased diversity will help to improve development in the software industryElizabeth Eastaugh, director of technology at Expedia, believes greater diversity is needed to increase advancement in the software industry. Karl Flinders reports

Elizabeth Eastaugh says people who think engineers all look the same and have the same backgrounds are wide of the mark, but, at the same time, it is one of her life aims to make

the software engineering community more diverse.Eastaugh left the world of financial services software

development to join Expedia in 2007 and has grown within the online travel group to her current role, in which she heads teams of engineers working on core customer-facing applications.

It all began for Eastaugh in the days when entire schools shared a single computer. “I started mucking around with things like BBC Basic when there was one computer for the whole school,” she says. “I read a lot of Asimov and wanted to be a roboticist, and then, when I heard about Bletchley Park, I wanted to be a codebreaker.”

Improving communicationBut given the limited demand for codebreakers and roboticists at the time, Eastaugh went to university to study computer science, with a bit of artificial intelligence thrown in for good measure.

INTERVIEW

Eastaugh: “I wanted to be a roboticist, and then,

when I heard about Bletchley Park, I wanted to

be a codebreaker”


http://www.techtarget.com/contributor/Karl-Flinders

http://www.computerweekly.com/photostory/4500249379/Most-influential-women-in-UK-IT-Rising-Stars-2015/2/Elizabeth-Eastaugh-director-of-technology-at-Expedia

http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Smart-Machines-Raise-Challenging-Questions


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After graduating, her first job was in the financial services sector, working with the middleware that helps banks’ systems communicate with those of other banks.

“Making systems talk to each other when they didn’t really want to was quite exciting,” she says.

Eastaugh remained in the financial sector for a while, but then found it “became a bit staid” and decided she “wanted to be on the cutting edge of technology”. She points out that regulatory requirements make it difficult for finance firms to harness new technology. She started to look around, and stumbled upon Expedia. “Although it was not in my top 10, I was really rather impressed when I came to talk to the company,” she says.

Gradual migrationAt the time, Expedia’s entire offering was built on an old C++ platform. “What they wanted was someone to come in, build a new Java platform and migrate to it bit by bit,” says Eastaugh. “So I came in as a web developer, having not done much web development before.”

As director of technology, she is in charge of the development of two core applications and runs development teams in India, Hungary, the US and the UK.

The main application Eastaugh is charged with is Checkout, which is basically the cash register of the Expedia-branded websites. The other major system she handles is Global Offer Services, which uses business intelligence to understand the customer and can personalise their experience with relevant offers based on usage factors.

Eastaugh’s biggest project at Expedia so far has involved the Checkout applications, which shook up Expedia’s software development rule book.

The five-year project has seen the company migrate different business lines, one at a time, from a single C++ based system to a Java platform with different versions for different

business lines. “It used to be one big onion for all the Expedia brands,” she observes.

The project has been challenging and interesting because the team made a break from the past in its methods, says Eastaugh. “What was great is we got to innovate and we went from the old-fashioned way of developing software, with everything lumped together into one big deliverable with releases every four months, to a service-oriented architecture built on a new platform using

INTERVIEW

“we Got to innovate and went from the old-fashioned

way of developinG software to a serviCe-oriented arChiteCture

built on a new platform”elizabeTh easTaugh, expedia


http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240222602/Travel-group-Expedia-aims-to-predict-your-holiday-plans

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/answer/Multi-platform-Java-based-malware-Reducing-Java-risks

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Java. “Every line of business has its own quirks and challenges, and we had to work with the different businesses, which was fun and educational,” she says.

The original migration is now finished and Eastaugh says the team is now attempting to innovate further to make Checkout even better.

The team uses the concept of “fail fast” to guide it. “We try to find really small hypotheses, and then turn them into test and learn. We test a hypothesis [on small groups of customers]. If it fails, we get rid of it and start a new one. But if it succeeds in helping our customers make transactions, we will roll it out,” she says.

Eastaugh’s second biggest system is Global Offer Services, which analyses users to ensure the company makes relevant offers to customers at the right time. Her team is currently integrating it to search engine marketing channels across Expedia.com.

Increased diversityThe technology has also been put behind email campaigns to ensure relevant content goes to the right customers. She describes it as software that different parts of the business can use when they need to improve customer understanding.

Other software developments include a platform that enables customers to use multiple devices for the same booking by remembering them so they don’t have to start from scratch, and a system known as Scratchpad that can alert relevant customers to opportunities, such as a price reduction for flights on a certain route.

Beyond her role in driving development, Eastaugh has strong views on increasing diversity in IT teams. She says too many people stereotype software engineers, and that managing a team of developers in different parts of the world has strengthened her belief that diversity helps development. “I am trying to build really diverse teams,” she says. “I have been very lucky to have

people from across the world contribute, and I have found that having people from different backgrounds, cultures and genders means you get different ideas. By keeping up diversity levels, we are innovating in a much more successful way.

“I am pushing to try to bring diversity, or the conversation of diversity, to graduates and people in industry. I want to bring different people in to solve things in different ways.” n

“havinG people from different baCkGrounds, Cultures and

Genders means you Get different ideas. by keepinG up diversity levels, we are innovatinG in a

muCh more suCCessful way”elizabeTh easTaugh, expedia

INTERVIEW

❯London revealed as the driving force for diversity in UK startups


http://searchaws.techtarget.com/tip/Overcome-AWS-problems-during-cloud-migration

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Open source takes the digital spotlight

One of the defining characteristics of digital transformation for most organisations is the realisation that software development is a core business activity. For much of the 1990s and 2000s, building your own software was something to be outsourced – often to low-cost offshore providers. “We’re not a software company,” boardrooms would cry; “Why would we spend money

employing programmers?”Now, software is increasingly central to customer engagement and so, for many organisations, that means ongoing iteration and

enhancement of that software is a key process. As such, the question for many IT and digital leaders is changing, from insource or out-source, to buy or build.

With an IT infrastructure that is agile, increasingly using cloud services, built on service-oriented architecture, there is an increasing element of commoditisation working its way through the application stack. Where requirements are unique – perhaps even central to the competitive advantage of your company – you’d be inclined to build. Where it’s a commodity function, you’re likely to buy. But the debate about where you draw that line is yet to be resolved.

The Government Digital Service, for example, recently revealed a project to develop a standard platform as a service (PaaS) capabil-ity across Whitehall. Critics jumped on this and asked, with many PaaS solutions available on the market, why build when it could buy?

IT leaders need to have a firm understanding of how software differentiates their business, and so where to draw the blurred line between what to build and what to buy. One of the most interesting facets of this distinction has come in the dramatic rise of open source.

Once upon a time in IT, using open source simply meant Linux instead of Windows, or maybe MySQL instead of Oracle. Now, there is a huge diversity of open-source tools, and almost every leading digital business and tech startup is making extensive use of them. Open source is driving the further commoditisation of software capabilities, and as such is driving the move to greater in-house software development resource and more collaborative approaches.

It’s been a remarkable turnaround for open source over the past 10 years, placing the trend firmly at the heart of the digital revolution. And it’s another indicator of the enormous changes that will continue to challenge traditional software suppliers whose licensing models will find it ever harder to fit with the emerging digital strategies of their customers. n

Bryan Glick, editor in chief

❯Read the latest Computer Weekly blogs

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Achieving the right balance in the workforce can play an important role in transforming businesses, driving innovation in the workplace and enabling the next

generation to play a crucial role in the future of IT.My own experience, working in many different organisations in

the technology industry, has shown me first-hand how business leaders are increasingly exploring new ways to attract and build a more diverse pool of employees in the tech sector.

But we should be under no illusions. The technology sector in the UK and around the world still has a long way to go if it is to create the kind of modern workforce that will not only deliver opportunity and success for every potential employee, but will also provide the industry with the diverse skills and ideas that are essential to its success.

Encouraging women into technologyIt is perhaps best not to assume that we all appreciate the need for a gender-balanced workforce, and how this will deliver greater return on investment (ROI) for businesses.

Campaigns to attract more women into technology careers are often positioned in the media as “more women for women’s sake”. But increasing women’s presence in the technology industry is not simply the latest corporate social responsibility initiative. It is a management strategy that can deliver a more talented and productive workforce with tangible business outcomes.

The UK is suffering from a skills shortage in the science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) industries, while the

OPINION

The ROI of a gender-balanced workforceThe gender imbalance in the technology industry is impeding productivity and preventing businesses from achieving optimum success, writes Jacqueline de Rojas


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benefits of boosting this workforce are clear. Earlier this year, for example, Engineering UK commissioned research that showed how hiring 182,000 skilled workers a year by 2020 could increase the UK’s GDP by £27bn. But the UK currently employs only 55,000 such workers.

Similarly, despite being at the forefront of innovation and ideas in terms of delivery, the tech industry still struggles to attract and

develop a workforce truly representative of the modern world. The cost? When unable to find the talent at home, firms are forced to look overseas with potentially expensive recruitment programmes to fill positions. Or, worse still, we lose our innovative British businesses to other countries where there is more talent.

Women are a largely untapped resource in the Stem sectors, representing a pitiful 13% of its workforce despite making up 47% of the British labour market as a whole.

Boosting the ROIBut beyond boosting numbers, it has been found that women make a positive impact on a business’s bottom line.

A recent McKinsey whitepaper looking at gender equality in French multinational firm Sodexo analysed the data from 50,000 managers across 90 entities worldwide, and found clear evidence that teams with a male-female ratio between 40% and 60% produce more sustained and predictable results than those of unbalanced teams.

Having women on the board is also shown to be aligned with a positive performance. A catalyst study into corporate performance and women’s representation on boards in Fortune 500 companies found that those companies with more female board directors outperform those with the least on a return on capital investment by 66%, on a return on sales by 42%, and on a return on equity by 53%.

Facilitating entry to the marketImproving education and support alone will not increase the number of women in technology and other Stem industries. Businesses that are keen to benefit from a greater representation of women in their teams must ensure that women do not only feel valued within their company (and industry), but also utilise their assets to attract the best talent from alternative career paths.

The technology industry, in particular, needs to start practising what it preaches. With the rise of cloud and the consumerisation of IT, innumerable companies are professing the advantages of

“women are a larGely untapped resourCe in the stem seCtors,

representinG 13% of its workforCe despite makinG up 47%

of the british labour market”Jacqueline de roJas, TechuK and ciTrix

OPINION


http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500244804/Nordics-top-gender-equality-but-IT-still-mens-club

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mobile working technologies and how these can be a key driver in attracting a diverse range of professionals into the IT workforce.

By harnessing these solutions, the technology industry can lead the way in breaking down some of the barriers that could put off women and other groups from working in full-time and part-time tech roles.

Flexible workingBusinesses that offer flexible working options not only attract more women who value the balance of home and work life, but could also greatly reduce the drop-off of talent often seen following maternity leave. However, flexible working opportunities will truly benefit the company only if there is a cultural shift and the wider organisation embraces an end to the nine-to-five mentality

Breaking down barriersTo succeed in developing a more diverse and gender-balanced workforce, corporate leaders must be prepared to stand up against practices such as “showing face”.

Breaking down barriers built around the traditional male-orientated work culture is important to ensure that those who work flexibly are as championed as their office counterparts. This may involve challenging the traditional outlook of executive committees to drive commitment and ensure accountability.

Working togetherIf we are to succeed in becoming a digital nation of significance, businesses, government and organisations such as TechUK must

work together to tackle diversity, gender balance and digital inclusion. Without this, the UK risks overseeing a technology revolution without the diverse workforce to enable it to achieve its true potential.

The value of increasing women’s representation in the UK Stem workforce has significant potential for both individual companies, and the Stem industries and the wider economy. n

Jacqueline de Rojas is president of TechUK and

area vice-president, northern Europe, at Citrix.

“the teChnoloGy industry Can lead the way in breakinG down some of the barriers that Could

put off women and other Groups from workinG in teCh roles”Jacqueline de roJas, TechuK and ciTrix

OPINION


http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240242174/A-third-of-Britons-claim-companies-still-dont-offer-flexible-working

http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Women-in-Technology-Learning-the-rules-of-a-boys-game

http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Women-in-Technology-Learning-the-rules-of-a-boys-game


For the past 10 years, IT professionals have considered the configuration management database (CMDB) and con-figuration management system (CMS) the linchpins of service management.

CMS concerns mapping applications to infrastructure compo-nents. It is a management tool for business services and was cre-ated at a time when IT professionals built and ran infrastructure on-premises and a user device meant a laptop or desktop running Microsoft Windows.

This made sense in the context of key processes such as change, incident and capacity-management, and automated dependency discovery tools. But the CMS proved too slow for the complexity of applications and infrastructures in a dynamic and fast-moving environment. Numerous manual corrections and the very scale of the required reconciliation tasks led to very high resource con-sumption and high CMS project failure rates.

However, the effect of digital disruption on the business and technology is now at the core of technology management’s renewed interest in CMS projects.

To fulfil the business requirements of this digital disruption, IT managers have to pursue a dual agenda that includes systems of record and systems of engagement.

In the age of the customer – where you must tie together sys-tems of record and systems of engagement to optimise customer experiences and business outcomes – the CMS has an expanded

An application ecosystem for the all-digital era

Digital disruption is forcing IT to adopt new operating models and CIOs must face the challenges it brings, says Jean-Pierre Garbani

BUYER’S GUIDE TO NEXT-GENERATION SERVICE MANAGEMENT | PART 1 OF 3

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role. It needs to facilitate the evolution of systems of record and their integration with systems of engagement.

Traditional systems of record are typically a mix of in-house, enterprise-specific management software, often built from layers of legacy hardware and software. Systems of engagement, on the other hand, focus on interactions with people such as custom-ers, partners or employees – first through websites, portals and e-commerce, and increasingly through mobile apps. While sys-tems of record require care and support – consuming a large por-tion of the technology management budget – systems of engagement need innovation, flexibility and speed to keep the business ahead of the competition.

The need to acquire or develop more applications and the complex-ity of linking systems of engage-ment to systems of record means organisations must shift budget from maintaining systems of record to innovating in systems of engagement.

The CMS plays a critical role in reducing the maintenance and operating costs of systems and equipment. Reviewing the appli-cation portfolio forces the business and technology management organisations to determine what they’re actually using and which applications are redundant or replaceable by another technology, such as a cloud-based software-as-a-service package. It also pre-pares for application modernisation. The IT department needs to create a complete inventory of what was done and how it worked,

if it is to prepare the whole technology management organisation for the all-digital era without major business disruption.

The CMS must change for application ecosystemsThe CMS is the cornerstone of service management. But ser-vice management as we know it, and as defined by the informa-tion technology infrastructure library (ITIL), is fast becoming a thing of the past – or is at least in need of a serious revamp-ing when you take into account infrastructure evolution and the

focus on systems of engagement. Does this mean the CMS is obso-lete? Actually, it just means that it has to expand to answer emerging problems posed by digital disrup-tion, such as:n The use of hybrid and cloud envi-ronments. If you create the CMS with a quasi real-time ability to

detect changes, you still don’t have much information when it comes to orchestrating applications into a different infrastruc-ture, such as from a physical to virtual environment, or from a virtual to cloud environment.n The introduction of DevOps. Systems of engagement require rapid changes to applications delivered in small increments. Application-release automation requires data about items such as configurations and datasets that do not figure in today’s CMS.n The increasing use of microservices and containers. As mod-ern applications evolve, re-usable services gradually shrink in

BUYER’S GUIDE

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itil – is fast beCominG a thinG of the past



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size and scope from relatively large subsystems to smaller services that are easier to write, test and re-use. But microservices are too small to warrant a full virtual machine; and, without such isolation, they risk creating hidden dependencies. To solve this problem, containers such as those supported by Docker have exploded in popularity. Containers provide simple, lightweight infrastructure on which developers can deploy microservices.n The rise of composite applications. Platform-as-a-service offerings from leading cloud providers give software develop-ment teams foundational capabilities and rich sets of services to rapidly build and deploy complex applications with a mini-mum of coding. These platforms enable companies to build rich applications and focus on creating differentiating value, without having to create complex supporting software. This results in an explosion of many-to-many relationships between applications and services.

A tall order for the IT departmentCreating a CMS – especially in large organisations – is not a walk in the park. You should approach it with a serious project plan, an understanding of the limitations of off-the-shelf systems and reason-able expectations of the time and resources it will take. Most dependency discovery solutions today

are based on a bottom-up process – but a top-down approach may yield better results. Why? Because start-ing at the critical business service level may make it easier to collect data, and you can approach CMS creation incrementally rather than trying to boil the ocean.

Based on a modern CMS, a service information system (SIS) adds data from diverse sources to create a business service eco-system that condenses information from all corners of the IT organisation. Building an application ecosystem through the SIS forces the IT organisation to work together toward a common goal. Because information-gathering touches many aspects of production, it exposes many of the processes IT uses, and vali-dates or invalidates their effectiveness.

If building a CMS and SIS sounds like a tall order to impose on the IT department, that’s because it is. Digital disruption is forcing IT to adopt new operating models in the near future. We need to move from a Jurassic period of IT – where each technology gen-

eration deposits layers upon layers of sediment – to a rational and competitive business technology that focuses on user value rather than technologi-cal prowess. n

BUYER’S GUIDE

if buildinG a ConfiGuration manaGement system sounds like a tall order to impose on the it department, that’s beCause it is

This article is an extract from the Forrester report The all-digital era

requires an application ecosystem (June, 2015) by vice-president

and principal analyst Jean-Pierre Garbani.

❯Customers expect the same levels of service, however

they contact you – by phone, in store or on the web.

So how do you deliver the best multi-channel experience?


http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Managing-your-customers-multi-channel-service-experience







Data is an increasingly valuable good. That is why organisations are so eager to collect as much of it as possible. And that is also why consumers and govern-ments are increasingly concerned about what organi-

sations will do with their data.The European Union (EU) has been actively involved in data

protection and the data movement for many years. The most vis-ible result of these activities was the Directive of the European Parliament in 1995 “on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data”.

This directive, which stipulated basic human rights such as pri-vacy and access to their own personal data on the one hand, and free movement of data between member states of the EU on the other, was to be the foundation for national laws in each individual member state.

The freedom for each member state to interpret this directive according to the local culture and views on data privacy seemed the best possible solution, given the sometimes huge differences between those member states.

Don’t wait for regulation to practise data ethics

The EU is working towards a unified law on data privacy – but you should look beyond compliance to gain trust, writes Stef Gyssels

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“When you compare some more privacy-prone southern countries to the Scandinavian countries, where even salary and tax return details are posted online, you can understand it is not easy to find a common ground that covers the needs of all,” says Deloitte UK research director Harvey Lewis.

Outdated and confusingYet the need for a unified law across the various member states has become increasingly pressing. International companies struggle with the current situation, according to Lewis. “Many of our customers have to deal with a patchwork of data protection regulations in the various member states. That makes it very dif-ficult to do business in Europe at times,” he says.

On top of that, European consumers are also concerned with what happens to their data when it’s moved across the border to another member state, where a quite different set of regulations is in force. And the technological advances between 1995 and today weren’t all covered by the 20-year-old directive.

That is why the European Commission decided to draft a European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which should be a reflection of the current state of affairs and should supersede the Data Protection Directive and all of its derived national laws. “It’s a dream for companies but a nightmare for European bureaucrats,” says Lewis.

It is indeed a long struggle to have each nation’s interests and priorities integrated in the new regulation. To have everybody’s interests protected and reconciled, a working committee was

formed: the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which includes representatives from each member state.

The committee’s website provides a summary of all activities taking place in this area. It also features a recent announcement that the committee has handed over a summary of all findings and agree-ments to the European Commission, Parliament

and Council – an important step towards reaching a European-wide regulation. Officially, the target date is set at the end of this year. But everybody agrees this is a very ambitious target.

Why wait?But companies cannot afford to wait for the European authori-ties to agree on this new regulation – they need to move forward now. “Not everything can be covered in this new regulation,” says ING Belgium information architect Dirk Coutuer. “Some things are better left to common sense – general knowledge such as ‘don’t give your password to third parties’, for instance.”

Companies don’t need a regulation to know how to gain cus-tomers’ trust, says Coutuer. “That is why I think it would be a good idea for organisations to jointly write down a set of rules and best practices that they can guarantee to comply with,” he says.

In the meantime, companies should strive for maximum trans-parency, so that consumers know what data is being used and how they can prevent this from happening – a decision that does not necessarily differ that much between citizens from different countries, according to Coutuer.

DATA PRIVACY

❯Ethics aren’t an easy conversation to have in a

business: The topic is huge, messy and personal – and it

tends to get tacked on to a pile of pressing obligations.


http://www.computerweekly.com/video/CW500-Harvey-Lewis-on-the-challenges-of-tackling-big-data

http://www.computerweekly.com/guides/Essential-guide-What-the-EU-Data-Protection-Regulation-changes-mean-to-you

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“I see more of a difference between generations than between countries,” he says. “The younger generation doesn’t worry about privacy at all. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do that for them. Freedom – including freedom of your personal data – is too valuable to just give away without a good fight.”

A virtuous circle of data ethicsFrank Buytendijk, a data ethics analyst at Gartner, agrees that companies shouldn’t just focus on the European GDPR. “Technology shows what you can do, laws and regulations tell you what you’re allowed to do – but ethics tell you what you should do. If you limit yourself to complying with laws and regulations, you get stuck at the level of a toddler that only obeys because it is forced to do so, not because it wants to,” he says.

Buytendijk distinguishes three more levels of data ethics. First, the level of risk avoidance and, second, the level of distinctive capabilities where you use data ethics as a competitive advan-tage: “TomTom includes privacy by design in its products to dis-tinguish itself from the GPS suppliers that can’t guarantee you the privacy of your travel details,” he says.

And finally, there is the level of inherent data ethics: “These are the adult organisations that practise data ethics because they believe in doing the right thing,” says Buytendijk.

Compliance is but one side to data ethics. In the end, firms should convince the customer to trust them by being transparent, flexible and morally correct, not just by complying with the law. “Customers will start to expect that from every firm. That’s how you create a virtuous circle of data ethics,” Lewis concludes. n

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Companies should not wait for the European Parliament to agree the European General Data Protection Regulation before gaining their customers’ trust


http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/buytendijk/


OpenStack is a collection of projects that deliver the components required to deploy a service-based pri-vate cloud. Code is delivered through twice-yearly alphabetically codenamed releases that introduce

new projects, features and enhancements, typically in April and October.

The basic elements of OpenStack include compute (Nova, which delivers virtual machines), networking (Neutron) and stor-age (handled by Cinder, Swift and Manila).

Cinder delivers support for block-based storage, allowing virtual machine states to be maintained across the creation and destruc-tion of instances. It is an evolution of what were originally called “Nova volumes”.

Block-based storage is great for storing a virtual machine image but less flexible for storing application data. Cinder volumes can’t be shared between running Nova instances, making it difficult to distribute access to data in an environment designed around the transient nature of an individual virtual machine or instance.

OpenStack Swift 101: The object store for

OpenStack appsChris Evans runs the rule over the OpenStack Swift object storage

architecture, its key components, how it achieves resiliency and the data protection methods in use and development

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To meet the needs for applica-tion data storage in OpenStack, the Swift project delivers a reli-able, scalable and multi-user accessible object store.

Incidentally, the OpenStack project has also recently intro-duced Manila, a scale-out file storage system.

Swift is implemented as an object store, distributed across multiple nodes in an OpenStack infrastructure, using commodity disk storage components such as hard-disk drives and solid-state disks.

The term object store implies no specific data format and content is effectively stored as binary objects with associated metadata. Data is stored in and retrieved from a Swift cluster using representational state transfer-based application programming interface (API) calls that are based on standard HTTP/S web protocols.

The use of representational state transfer (Rest) means that each object in the Swift object store can be accessed through a unique URL, which includes a reference to the object – the object ID – and its location. The open-source version of Swift distributed with OpenStack allows user-generated object IDs to be used when referencing objects in the store.

As OpenStack is by nature a multi-tenant environment, objects can be stored in Swift with

some degree of hierarchy. A Swift object store is divided into accounts – also known as tenants or projects – and containers.

The use of containers provides the ability to apply storage policies to object data – for example, to set the number

of replicas kept of each object. Policies are established at the container level. Note that containers in this context are not related to those being popularised by companies such as CoreOS and Docker; they are analogous to buckets used in public object stores.

OpenStack Swift architectureSwift is implemented through a number of separate service components that deliver the scale-out and resiliency capabilities expected of object stores. These include container servers, account servers, proxy servers and object servers, which are combined into an entity known as a “ring”.

Actual object data is stored on object servers, with other services used to implement features such as metadata management and distributed data access and protection.

A service doesn’t imply a separate server. Some services can be run on the same hardware infrastructure, but high levels of resiliency are achieved by running multiple services across separate hardware appliances.

STORAGE

❯OpenStack Cinder 101: The fundamentals of Cinder, how

it is implemented, how to provision it, how it works with third-party storage arrays, its

features and more.

separatinG data aCCess serviCes from data storaGe serviCes allows a swift instanCe to sCale out in both

CapaCity and performanCe


http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500250703/OpenStack-Swift-101-The-object-store-for-applications-in-OpenStack

http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/definition/RESTful-API

http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/definition/RESTful-API

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/multi-tenancy

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Docker-storage-101-How-storage-works-in-Docker

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/metadata

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/definition/resiliency








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Separating data access services from data storage services allows a Swift instance to scale out in both capacity and performance. Data resiliency is implemented through the use of zones. A zone describes the sub-component of a Swift ring used to store one copy of data.

Resiliency is achieved by creating multiple redundant copies of data (called replicas) and distributing replicas across redundant components (zones) in the infrastructure. This can mean either a single disk drive or separate server, which provides the ability to create high availability through the geographic dispersal of data between datacentres.

Requests to read data objects are delivered by the nearest, most consistent copy of that object.

In common with many object stores, Swift implements the concept of eventual consistency for data that is replicated between zones. Block-based storage is focused on the idea of either synchronous (immediate) or asynchronous replication (time-delayed) consistency.

Eventual consistency is similar to asynchronous replication in that the consistency of data is managed in the background, separate from the writing and reading of objects. Object repli-cas are created as background tasks and replication completed

STORAGE

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bloCk-based storaGe is foCused on the idea of either synChronous or

asynChronous repliCation ConsistenCy


http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Backup-vs-replication-snapshots-CDP-in-data-protection-strategy


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as system resources – including network bandwidth – allow. This kind of replication is more suited to the scale-out Swift model, where individual servers may be offline or inaccessible as part of normal operations.

Erasure coding in SwiftMost commercial object store systems now support the pro-tection of data using erasure coding. Data protection using rep-licas is expensive in terms of storage capacity – especially with flash storage – whereas erasure coding provides data protection with only a fractional overhead in capacity. The trade-off comes in performance as erasure cod-ing uses algorithms in both the reading and writing of data that transform an object into a set of shards that are distributed across the infrastructure.

Erasure coding is currently only supported in beta mode in Swift, so users should be careful about deploying it in production envi-ronments. However, we can expect erasure coding to be a future standard in Swift deployments, especially those at scale where the space/cost savings are the most beneficial.

This is not to say improvements aren’t being made to existing data protection features. The Grizzly release of OpenStack, for example, brought more granular controls to manage replica counts.

Commercial alternatives to SwiftSwift is an open-source platform, with a large amount of the support and coding coming from SwiftStack, a company that provides commercial support for Swift deployments. Other plat-forms are also available that support the Swift API and can there-fore be used to replace or emulate the use of an open-source Swift deployment.

Implementations of the Swift Rest API are supported in object store platforms from Scality – since the Juno OpenStack

release – Cleversafe, Cloudian, EMC Isilon, Hitachi HCP and others.

The benefits of using a com-mercial storage provider are obvious. Data is protected by hardware and operational pro-cesses with which the cus-tomer is already familiar. And hardware can be shared with OpenStack and non-OpenStack environments to allow data to be

exchanged or moved in and out of a Swift-supported environment while providing data access through traditional protocols such as Network File System and Server Message Block.

Using external storage also gives the ability to make use of fea-tures such as backup, encryption and mature role-based access controls that are still somewhat scarce in the open-source imple-mentation of Swift. n

STORAGE

the benefits of usinG a CommerCial storaGe provider are obvious.

data is proteCted by hardware and operational proCesses with whiCh the Customer is already familiar


http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Erasure-coding-versus-RAID-as-a-data-protection-method

http://searchenterprisedesktop.techtarget.com/definition/Network-File-System


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McAfee for US presidentRumour has it that John McAfee has entered the US presidential race with the Cyber Party. The founder of McAfee antivirus soft-ware, who fled Belize in 2012 as police investigated the murder of his neighbour, looks set to run as an independent in the US presi-dential elections.

Downtime reckons Hillary Clinton’s camp might be some-what concerned if it turns out her rogue email server was run-ning McAfee software, especially as, according to a quote John McAfee gave the BBC when asked why Intel was dropping the McAfee brand name: “I am now everlastingly grateful to Intel for

freeing me from this terrible association with the worst software on the planet. These are not my words, but the words of millions of irate users.” n

“pull quote here pull bitter bold small Caps 22pt xx

xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx”

DOWNTIME

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