In August, I had the opportunity to deliver a keynote address at SHARE Conference in Anaheim. SHARE is an industry wide Mainframe conference that attracts more than one thousand Mainframe participants and large multi-national companies. EMC and its Enterprise Storage Division have a strong presence in Mainframe environments and have served this market since its foundation. As someone who has developed information technology products for more than 30 years, this is by far the most exciting time period that I’ve seen to date; and those in the audience shared in my excitement.Cloud and Big Data are two of the biggest trends that are changing the IT landscape, and these mega trends are really top of mind for CIOs because they help businesses run smarter and more efficiently. Critical to this conversation is the hybrid cloud, a combination of your data center (private cloud) — which is becoming more and more virtualized, and your trusted service provider (public cloud).The industry’s take on hybrid cloud is that it is more predictable and reliable than simply using a public cloud and gives you control over the infrastructure so your data is not exposed to any compromises.The success of hybrid cloud is dependent on having the ability to dissolve the distance between the public and the private cloud with technology. The benefit is having the freedom of moving applications and the information of those apps to-and-from the data center without your customers ever knowing.Moving massive amounts of information from your own data center to your service provider can be very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Things like technology refresh and data migration will soon become artifacts of the past. When new information is created, it needs to be active around the globe, in real-time.Clouds of the future need to be connected from the data center to the service provider, and the branch office. Eliminating data center boundaries provides better caching technologies that shorten the latencies between these data centers and enables seamless workload migration across geographies.Innovation at the data layer becomes even more critical in the future as we approach large petascale environments. For decades, servers have talked to servers, and servers have talked to storage and other peripheral devices, but for whatever reason, storage devices could never really talk to each other. Up until now.Common language among peers is beginning to arrive and I call that, federation. As we look at the IT operations in the data center, or in the service provider, it’s very important that this technology around federation begins to rise and become predominant.Federation with automation will enable IT-as-a-Service. For years, customers have used System Managed Storage (SMS) and Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) to move data sets between memory, disk and tape. At the time, this was good enough. Now, we have proven that federation, along with technologies like Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), are complementary and provide greater efficiencies as they run together. This enables better automation, reduces cost of capital and operational costs of the data center. Hybrid cloud environments can provide better agility and efficiency and deliver on the promise of more flexibility and business agility.
This guest post was written by Sundi Balu, Chief Information Officer – Global Enterprise & Services and International, TelstraSimply offering cloud solutions is no longer a free pass to market leadership in Asia. With a third of global IT spending going to cloud-related investments, it’s quite safe to say that cloud adoption is the “new normal” for enterprises, rather than something exceptional. Many businesses will be rightly asking: how can I differentiate my organisation through the cloud?My answer: we need to move from “one cloud fits all” to an “unlimited cloud”. Rather than simply relying on a single vendor or type of cloud infrastructure, businesses need to give themselves the ability to rapidly shift between different clouds based on how they grow, scale, and pivot their operations. This has big implications for Asian businesses, because it tackles the cross-border disparity in regulation, skills, and consumer demands that otherwise hamstrings their technology and growth strategy.Keep it Simple, CIOMany CIOs will have read “unlimited clouds” with a look of terror on their faces. One cloud is complex enough to successfully operate, after all – why multiply that pain? The reason is simple: business agility. Asian enterprises operate in markets where their commercial viability depends on how fast and well they can adapt to changes in consumer demand, competition, regulation, and a whole host of other factors. Multiply that across numerous interlinked country markets, and the business is faced with a situation where there can never be a “one size fits all” approach to sales, marketing, or product development strategy. Why should that be the case for your cloud environment?An “unlimited cloud” model allows businesses to move between clouds based on what they need in any given market, at any time. Let’s take cross-border regulation and data residency as an example. Data sovereignty requirements differ across countries and over time – so what happens if one country suddenly demands that all data be hosted locally but a business is operating solely on public cloud? In this case, the business’ ability to adapt is going to determine whether it retains its licence to operate in that particular country or not.A business employing an “unlimited” model, however, can shift its affected data into a locally hosted private cloud, while potentially keeping core applications themselves in a public or hybrid setup to maintain uptime for customers. That’s exactly what we, at Telstra, are already doing, acting as “cloud brokers” for a number of our customers. The cloud broker turns the pain of migrating between these different clouds into a fully-managed, fully-orchestrated service, operating as part of a one-stop cloud shop in which network, storage, and compute are all integrated to work in any manner of configurations. As a result, we allow CIOs to focus on higher-value priorities like the company’s digital innovation strategy or service development roadmap.“Unlimited clouds” may seem complex, but when it’s delivered as a fully-managed offering it gives CIOs the time and ability to deliver the right services where and when they’re needed.The building-blocks of cloudsTelstra now offers everything from colocation to fully public cloud within that “unlimited” model. But in order for this model to work, it also needs to encompass a whole range of organisations and their highly varied levels of talent and skills maturity.The vagaries of talent across Asia make it impossible to support a “one cloud fits all” approach. Countries like Singapore, Australia, and Japan understandably have the most mature talent pools, yet emerging markets like Indonesia may be the ones which need cloud infrastructure most urgently to support business growth. In many Asian markets, relatively low staffing costs and close public-private sector ties have caused businesses to be less than enthusiastic about the upskilling and compliance costs of moving to the cloud. Yet as consumer demographics shift into “mobile-first, social-always” product and service consumption, these businesses need to be able to adapt – based on real-time information and insights that only the cloud can support – faster and at greater scale than ever before.The solution is in how the cloud is built, particularly for hybrid and private cloud. One of our technology partners is VCE, the market leader in converged infrastructure – a delivery model where network, storage, and compute infrastructure come as fully-integrated systems that can be deployed in any organisation within weeks instead of months. VCE’s converged infrastructure systems, called Vblocks, have helped businesses deploy new services more than four times faster and develop five times more applications while cutting “lights-on” cost economics by almost a third.Vblocks form one of the core building-blocks of our private clouds and hybrid cloud solutions because of their standardised simplicity. I think of them, and converged infrastructure systems generally, as the cloud version of the prefab units being used to construct the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Bridge in record time. Converged infrastructure allows enterprises, and the cloud brokers guiding them, to not only deploy clouds incredibly quickly but also move between them with ease because of their standardisation and high degree of inbuilt systems compatibility.Asia’s businesses are more connected, and face more market complexity than ever before. In a region that’s characterised by its heterogeneity, CIOs need not just one cloud but “unlimited clouds” that bolster them to take on their highest priorities: getting capabilities to market as fast as possible, in a way that can constantly adapt to changing consumer preferences. When built on converged infrastructure, “unlimited clouds” can get Asian enterprises past many of the issues around talent, regulation, and systems complexity that they’ve traditionally faced.Watch the interview which Anthony Elvey, VCE’s Managing Director for Asia Pacific and Japan, recently conducted with Sundi on this topic here.
When it comes to understanding customers, Michael Dell will say you need to have big ears. As a company that recently closed one of the biggest tech mergers in history with EMC, we made listening a top priority as we looked to unify our company culture as part of the new Dell Technologies. We turned our collective ears toward team members from both former Dell and EMC to define our corporate culture as the driver of how we run the business, go to market, work effectively together and provide inspirational leadership.We understood the importance of having a strong culture as our company’s cornerstone. Look at any HR or employment website these days and you’ll see article after article advising job-seekers to carefully take a company’s culture into account. What we heard from tens of thousands of our own team members on this front was inspiring and greatly informed the development of what we proudly call today our Culture Code.Our Core ValuesThe results of our listening led to the creation of a powerful set of values, beliefs and leadership principles that serve to unite the company and make for a great place to work. Simply put, Dell Technologies’ Culture Code was built atop extensive feedback from our team members around the world and encompasses how we lead, inspire and work together to create value for our customers, communities and our people. Overall, our team members resoundingly shared that our top five values for long-term success include:Customers: We believe our customer relationships are the ultimate differentiator and foundation for our success.Winning Together: We believe in and value our people. As a team, we perform better, are smarter and have more fun getting the job done.Innovation: We believe our ability to innovate and cultivate breakthrough thinking is an engine for growth, success and progress.Results: We believe in being accountable to an exceptional standard of excellence and performance.Integrity: We believe integrity must always govern our fierce desire to win.A Culture for SuccessAward-winning speaker and author Simon Sinek declares, “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” It’s a great philosophy and how all businesses should approach their own corporate culture. To better understand Dell’s Culture Code, I encourage you to check out our new video. </p><p>
WASHINGTON (AP) — House Democrats say the Senate should convict former President Donald Trump and bar him from office because he endangered the lives of all members of Congress when he aimed a mob of supporters “like a loaded cannon” at the U.S. Capitol last month. Trump’s lawyers deny that he incited rioters and call the upcoming Senate trial unconstitutional. Both sides filed their legal briefs Tuesday in advance of next week’s trial. The Democrats forcefully linked Trump’s baseless efforts to overturn the results of the presidential election to the deadly riot at the Capitol, saying he bears “unmistakable” blame. Trump’s lawyers rejected those charges and said the Senate can’t put him on trial now that he has left the White House.