February 2013 | Snel.com

Microsoft joins open data center group

Companies looking to make the deployment and management of their data centers more streamlined may welcome the news that Microsoft is set to join an organisation campaigning for greater openness and interoperability in the cloud computing and data center markets. Work to create a more standardised system that businesses across all industries can take advantage of could be hugely important in the coming years. With the amount of information growing all the time, data centers are being put under more strain than ever before, so moves to make operations easier could have wide-ranging benefits.

Multi-industry approach

Some of the world's largest companies from all sectors have already signed up to the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), which should give an indicator of just how important improving these operations is to industry. Microsoft will be joining the likes of BMW, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase and Lockheed Martin in the cross-industry body, which operates as a voice for enterprise IT, with topics including interoperability of systems, cloud computing and best practices for implementing big data solutions into data center operations.

However, there are hundreds of organisations participating in the group, which are all collaborating to shape the future of enterprise-grade cloud data center solutions based on new industry
standard solutions that could make it much simpler for firms to get up and running without having to worry about issues such as compatibility.

Commitment to openness

The software maker stated joining the ODCA is a key part of Microsoft's commitment to openness and interoperability with its enterprise IT products, such as its Windows Azure cloud computing tool. General manager of Windows Azure Bill Hilf said: "We are dedicated to serving the industry and customers by providing an open, reliable and global approach to the cloud and we look forward to contributing to the ODCA's mission."

With the IT environment undergoing huge changes in recent years as many companies shift from on-premises solutions to hosted dedicated servers and cloud computing, having clear standards for the technology could be hugely beneficial in ensuring such deployments are successful.

Hadoop technology comes to Windows Server

For many businesses, one of the key challenges in the current era is dealing with the ever-increasing amount of data their company generates. One tool many firms have turned to in order to help with this in their data centers is Apache Hadoop, an open-source platform that enables companies to take control of huge data sets. And now, the tool has become even better with the announcement of new availability for Microsoft solutions.

Windows Server availability

One of the leading contributors to Hadoop, Hortonworks, has unveiled its new Hortonworks Data Platform (HPD) for Windows, which it claims is the industry's first Hadoop distribution for use with both Linux operating systems and Microsoft's data center solutions.
It is said that users on either platform will be able to benefit from an identical experience, which could make it a great choice for administrators having to deal with multiple environments, due to the interoperability of the tool.

Powerful functionality

HDP for Windows is able to allow organisations to capture, process and share data in any format and at scale, something that will be more important than ever in the future as data volumes grow exponentially. It also includes all of the necessary components to refine and explore new data sources and draw new business insights from these.

Big step forward

Microsoft has welcomed the news, with a spokesman for the firm stating the platform is an important step for ensuring that Hadoop's capabilities are accessible to as many people as possible. It was noted that the company is committed to providing customers with access to Hadoop-based tools as part of its efforts to support big data solutions.
Shaun Connolly, vice-president of corporate strategy at Hortonworks, added: "Hortonworks Data Platform for Windows extends the Hadoop ecosystem across the Windows operating system, providing organisations with an enterprise-grade, production-tested platform for big data deployments."

This could therefore be great news for any company running Microsoft Windows Server-based data centers that is looking for the most powerful solutions to help them manage the data explosion.

When should you be using load balancing?

If you're looking to create a robust website that can handle high traffic and cope with outages, load balancing is a solution you should be looking into. This essentially involves spreading out traffic on your site to several servers, while maintaining a single external IP address. Web browsers will be able to send their requests to a server with the available resources to handle the traffic, to make sure you're up and running at all times.

Keep your speed high

If you only have a low-traffic website, you probably don't need this solution, as a single web server should be capable of meeting your needs. But if you're a rapidly growing company or experiencing a significant spike in interest, having load balancing capabilities can greatly improve the speed of your site and therefore offer a better user experience.
So if you're expecting a jump in demand due to a new publicity drive or you're already struggling to cope with increased numbers of visitors on a daily basis, using multiple web servers and implementing load balancing could be the way forward.

Defend against attacks

Another great benefit of using load balancing is to defend your websites against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, it was noted by the Seattle Pi newspaper.
These have become the weapon of choice for many hackers looking to make a point against businesses, as it's relatively easy to instruct a botnet to flood a website with traffic, overloading its servers with requests. In recent months, some of the world's largest companies have been targeted by this form of attack.
The result of this is it becomes impossible for legitimate traffic to get through. However, by utilising load balancing you can ensure that traffic is routed to an available server, while routers can be used to handle the flood of requests.

Build redundancies

What's more, if you're using load balancing, you can ensure that your site remains available even if you suffer an unexpected failure in one of your servers. If one server fails - whether due to problems with the hardware, software or human errors - you have a fully functioning copy on secondary servers. This means any potential downtime can be avoided, as even if one server goes down the others will be available to keep the site live.

Create a staging environment

This solution can also be great if you want to make changes to your site, as having multiple web servers available means you have an enclosed staging environment where you can test any new code. If you only have a single server, you'll have no way of knowing if there are any errors before you go live, which can result in costly downtime while you strip out the changes and make sure any new code works as intended.
However, with multiple servers, you can test production changes on a single solution to be sure it works as expected before rolling it out to the others, thereby ensuring your site remains available at all times.

How you can boost the speed of your website

For anybody trying to run an online business, having web pages that are slow to load can be one of the most harmful things to the success of a web-based enterprise. With download speeds for end-users growing all the time and new technologies such as fibre-optic becoming more common, there's very little tolerance for even the slightest delays.
You might not think it makes much difference, but when it comes to loading speeds, every second counts. A study reported last year by digital marketing resource Econsultancy showed three-quarters of people will abandon a web page that takes more than five seconds to load, while Google will start relegating pages in its rankings once they take more than 1.5 seconds to load.

Have the best servers

So what can you do to make sure this isn't a problem for your site? There are several steps you can take, but one of the most effective will be to ensure that your web servers are using the best technology available. Dedicated servers will be one way to do this, as this guarantees you won't be sharing your bandwidth with any other users, which could be vital at busy times.

Optimise your content

A recent article on advice website Business 2 Community noted another great way to improve the performance of your site is to look closely at the design and content of your pages. Usually, the root cause of slow-loaded pages was said to be traced either to the web server or the database server and, if it's the former that is causing the problem, the best way to tackle this is to reduce the load by removing the largest files.

For most web pages, these will typically be images. The publication stated: "The typical medium-sized website image is about 400 kilobytes - about 50 times as large [as a text-only page]. That means for every medium image on your site, your web server could serve 50 articles in roughly the same amount of time."
Obviously, cutting all image content from your site would leave you with a bland and uninteresting page, so there's no need to be drastic, but its important to find a balance between vibrant, engaging content and a streamlined, faster user experience.
Targeting images that are unnecessarily duplicated on your most popular pages is a good way to start, while if you don't want to get rid of pictures altogether, moving them to another server can be a great way to keep websites running quickly without compromising on content.

Cut down on add-ons

Another good step would be to remove content that requires plugins or other add-ons to work. These can be a major drain on websites where space is at a premium as they can be large resource hogs, reprioritising processes in order to deliver the best results, at the expense of your overall site, so this is something you need to think carefully about before adding them to a web page.

Researchers look to boost internet speeds

No matter how carefully you design your website and optimise it to be as smooth and fast as possible, one thing you can't help with is the quality of the connection at the other end.

While there are many things you can do you make your website faster, such as using dedicated servers with appropriate bandwidth to handle the traffic and tweaking your web servers to make them as efficient as possible, its inescapable that some end-users will be coming in from poor lines.

What this could mean to these individuals is they will have to wait longer for pages to load, while video could be jerky and require extensive buffering.

New research for websites boost

However, this could be set to change in the coming years if new research being conducted in the UK is a success. A team at the University of Aberdeen are embarking on a project they hope will significantly boost internet speeds by rewriting the way in which computers communicate with one another.

Internet engineer at the university professor Gorry Fairhurst explained: "It's a problem we all notice when you're using a program like Skype. If anyone else in the house is watching a video at the same time your video connection becomes jerky and often crashes."

Benefits to gamers

One of the reasons why some people may experience problems when streaming data is because the current internet is set up to increase the volume of traffic it can handle. A consequence of this is that real-time interactions such as video streaming and gaming suffers due to buffers within the network.

Individuals who play online games frequently are among those who are set to benefit from the innovations, which will seek to cut down on the latency issues experienced by people with poor connections.

"Often it's not more bandwidth that's needed to go faster - it's less delay. We think we can reduce this delay by making a set of small but important changes to the way computers and the network process the internet data," Prof Fairhurst said.

If successful, this could be great news for anybody who wants to play online games using dedicated servers or stream large amounts of video.

Popularity of PHP ‘just keeps growing’

More companies than ever are said to be turning to the PHP scripting technology when it comes to creating solutions for use in their web servers. Therefore, if you're looking to create a website, it's likely that the technology is going to be high on your list of priorities, at least if recent figures from internet monitoring firm NetCraft are anything to go by.
According to its most recent statistics from January this year, PHP was found on 244 million sites, equating to 39 per cent of domains studied in its Web Server Survey. Of these, 78% use Linux as these platform, while 8% run on FreeBSD and windows accounts for 7% of PHP users.

Range of PHP features

But why is PHP continuing to have such strong success among web servers? The most recent major version of the solution, PHP 5, has been around since 2004 and uses the Zend Engine, which offers a high level of performance and includes features to support HTTP sessions, more web servers and output buffering.
Its also very easy to get started with programming in PHP, which attracts a wide range of developers from hobbyists to professionals at some of the world's largest firms.
If you're using some of the most popular web applications, such as WordPress, osCommerce or Magento, you'll find these include PHP technology. In fact, these tools - along with Joomla, Drupal and Zencart - were found to be in use on 32 million websites last month.

Be aware of security

However, if you're using PHP, you need to be wary, as it has been suggested the platform is starting to become a victim of its own success. Because it attracts so many inexperienced programmers due to its ease of use, a large number of insecure applications are being created.
This presents a huge opportunity for criminals as there is a large and attractive attack surface for them to target.
"Netcraft's anti-phishing services find wave upon wave of phishing attacks hosted on compromised PHP applications and the US National Vulnerability Database contains several thousand unique vulnerabilities that relate either to PHP itself, or to applications written in PHP," it was stated.