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Data is the foundation of businesses today. Thus, database technology is a critical component of any IT infrastructure. In a typical enterprise IT environment, it’s not uncommon to see engineers and developers create hundreds or even thousands of databases and the bare metal machines or VMs needed to run them. That raises the issue of a significant problem for companies, both large and small -- database sprawl. The Uptime Institute estimates that up to 30% of servers in this country alone are "comatose," but still "racked and running." In the typical enterprise environment there are huge numbers of resources sitting idle, poorly optimized, under-utilized, or completely forgotten. A digital footprint like that consumes more in resources than many companies care even to think about.

The Problem of Database Sprawl

Management of IT sprawl is more than simply an administrative headache. There are both tangible and intangible costs that impact an organization’s IT operations, and those costs can add up quickly. Here is just a sample:

• Poor Use of Resources - IT personnel now have the added responsibilities of administering databases and maintaining servers.
• Best Practices Overlooked - The fact is, all databases are not implemented or maintained in the same

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CenturyLink demonstrates its commitment to provide automation and productivity on our Hybrid IT Services Platform, which makes it easy for you to manage and control your virtualized application and network resources.

Relational DB is a MySQL-compatible Database-as-a-Service (RDBaaS) designed to meet the needs of the developer for rapid software development while providing accelerated IT on-demand. For example, you can easily provision database environments without incurring any of the usual costs related to dedicated hardware and licensing. Developers can spin up high-performing, dynamic MySQL-compatible databases instantly to support their software delivery needs while minimizing infrastructure costs and reducing the time required to manage.

Deployment Options

Companies look for an advantage in the marketplace while also looking to control costs. There are basically two database deployment options facing many enterprises both large or small. In either case, the option begins with defining your need. The decision is determining which of the two makes the most sense for your business.

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud® blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Tom Coffing, President and CEO at Coffing Data Warehousing.

Experts say that up to 75% of the entire world’s data will be on Hadoop by the year 2020. Yes, that’s right — 75%! This means a huge influx of data over the next several years, which translates into a huge opportunity for your organization! This means data not captured today will become commonplace over the next several years.

What is Hadoop, Where did it Come From, and why is it so Popular?

Hadoop was created by the genius minds at Google to analyze massive amounts of web data. It was then utilized and expanded by Yahoo! who began working with the open source community. The name Hadoop came from Doug Cutting, chief architect of Cloudera and one of the original creators. Cutting's son, then 2-years old, was just beginning to talk and called his beloved stuffed yellow elephant "Hadoop".

Hadoop is so popular is because it is all about unstructured data. As much as...

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Relational DataBase Service Overview

The CenturyLink Relational Database (DB) team is excited to announce the General Availability of Relational DB, a MySQL-compatible Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) product that has been in beta since August of 2015. This product complements the CenturyLink Cloud® portfolio and reiterates our commitment to cloud native applications by providing developers instant access to a high-performance, enterprise-hardened MySQL-compatible database instance built on the Hyperscale platform from CenturyLink Cloud.

Designed for Enterprise and SMB customers, our Relational DB Service includes:

• Available in VA1, UC1 and IL1; global expansion throughout 2016

• Flexible provisioning options – choose any combination of CPU, RAM and storage within the platform limits

• Scale CPU, RAM, and storage independently of each other as your needs grow through self-service automation

• Daily backups with configurable backup time

• In data center replication option with auto-failover for high-availability

• SSL Certificate provided to encrypt connection and data in transit

• Access to REST APIs

• Built on enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure

Enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure is critical for database performance. The CenturyLink Cloud Platform powered by Hyperscale servers out-performed other high profile competitors in an independent benchmark study by CloudHarmony. By leveraging this platform, Relational DB benefits from SSD storage which is local to the host. This maximizes storage...

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What is WordPress?

Today, nearly 25% of the sites on the Internet are WordPress sites. WordPress is an open source project that started out as just a blogging site has grown into a robust user-driven Content Management System (CMS). With WordPress, the use-cases are unlimited. There are thousands of plugins, themes, and widgets that help extend and add to the functionality available in WordPress.

In addition to all that WordPress has to offer, there is an extensive and helpful community of WordPress users around the world. Questions and answers can be found in support forums, mailing lists, WordCamps and, if that is not enough, thousands of video presentations exist and are being added to on wordpress.tv to help everyone, from the beginner to the expert.

Ways to Integrate WordPress on CenturyLink Cloud

WordPress - Blueprint

The CenturyLink Blueprint provides a click-through solution to install and configure WordPress on a new or existing server in the Linux platform.

CenturyLink Cloud works with Bitnami to provide open source software integrations to its customers. Bitnami is a library of popular server applications and development environments that can be installed with one click, either in your laptop, on a virtual machine (VM) or hosted in the cloud. Bitnami takes care...

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