Word of the Day – OpenStack definition

“If you look at all the companies involved in the OpenStack community, those are some big technology players and they’re all going to be looking for OpenStack talent.” – Tony Campbell

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is OpenStack, an open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) initiative for creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers in a cloud computing environment. OpenStack was set up to compete with Amazon and is often referred to as the “Linux of the cloud.”   In September, the OpenStack foundation formally took over development and approved VMware as a member.  That was when the you-know-what hit the fan and bloggers began speculating what VMware was up to and whether their admittance to the party spelled doom for the OpenStack initiative.

Word of the Day: multifactor authentication definition

“Although some security experts question whether multifactor authentication actually increases security — they say it isn’t perfect and can be cracked just like any other authentication system — it does add an extra layer of security for identity and access management (IAM) suites.” – Joel Dubin

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is multifactor authentication. There are three ways to authenticate an end user — by what they know (password), by what they have (smart card) and by who they are (biometric verification). Multifactor authentication requires that at least two out of three methods be used.

Word of the Day: object storage definition

“Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Microsoft Azure and Nirvanix Cloud Storage are storage clouds based on object storage.” – Rich Castagna

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is object storage, a generic term that describes an approach to addressing and manipulating discrete units of storage called objects. Like files, objects contain data — but unlike files, objects are not organized in a hierarchy. Every object exists at the same level in a flat address space called a storage pool and one object cannot be placed inside another object.

Word of the Day: data scientist definition

“Data scientists are the guys who walk along the beach with those sweepers looking for that nugget of information that no one knows is in that sea of sand or sea of data” – Nicole Laskowski

Today’s Whatis.com Word of the Day is data scientist, a job title for an employee or business intelligence (BI) consultant who excels at analyzing big data.

Word of the Day – fishbone diagram definition

“The fishbone diagram template forces the user to brainstorm all of the possible causes and weigh each of them, instead of focusing on one or two of the obvious.” – Wendy Schuchart

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is fishbone diagram, a useful tool for helping a team focus their conversation during a brainstorming session and pinpoint the root cause of a problem. Other popular brainstorming tools include:

PMI – brainstorming activity that encourages participants in a discussion to look at an idea from more than one viewpoint.

5 Whys – a guided team exercise for identifying the root cause of a problem by repeatedly asking the question “why?”

Six Hats – segments different aspects of a discussion into pre-defined parts called hats. Is especially useful for the reviewing the conclusions of a brainstorming session.

PICK – often used after brainstorming sessions to help an individual or group identify which ideas can be implemented easily and have a high payoff.

Word of the Day: PCoIP definition

“The advantage of bitmap-streaming protocols like RDP with RemoteFX and PCoIP is that they handle multimedia and extreme graphics well, and they have very low client-side hardware requirements. But the downside is that they basically shift all of the processing over to the remote host, which leads to an increased CPU load on the remote host.” – Brian Madden

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is PCoIP, the technology VMware licenses to stream virtual desktops from the datacenter to clients.

Word of the Day – SIEM definition

“The architecture of a SIEM system typically consists of a central processing engine, which is fed by agents or collectors that are distributed throughout the managed environment.” — Andrew Hutchison

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is security information and event management (SIEM). SIEM systems can be very expensive and difficult to manage, but when done right they can save a lot of man-hours, handling minor events automatically by following business rules.

Word of the Day: Amazon Glacier definition

“Amazon’s penny-a-gigabyte pricing model will certainly be tough to match by smaller competitors that can’t afford to store data at that price. That makes Glacier appealing for organizations looking to move large archives off tape and to the cloud.” – Sonia Lelii

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is Glacier, a new low-cost cloud storage service from Amazon for archiving data.  According to industry insiders, Glacier got it’s name because (1) it provides inexpensive cold storage and (2) retrieval time is quite, quite slow.

Word of the Day: text analtyics definition

“Of all the types of software that ought to be put through the paces with a proof of concept or a testing protocol before purchase, text analytics is unique in that it is fundamentally iterative and demands ongoing development even as you try it out.” – Jonathan Gourlay

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is text analtyics. It the holy grail for marketers who want to use all that unstructured data in social media more effectively. It’s also big in e-discovery.

Word of the Day: gray market definition

“Name me a company with a data center and I guarantee it’s used the gray market.” – David Dadian

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is gray market, a term used to describe unauthorized sales channels. It includes products you buy second-hand or refurbished products that aren’t guaranteed by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM). It also includes cheap, reverse-engineered products commonly referred to as knock-offs.  Gray market products are legal, but are often of inferior quality. When dealing with gray market products, it’s definitely buyer beware.