Jun 29
Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today announced important advancements to help customers safely tap… Read more at VMblog.com.
Jun 29
With the 2010 summer solstice having occurred in the northern hemisphere that means it is time for a quick out and about update. It has been a busy winter and spring in the office, on the road as well as at home.
Some results of this recent activity have appeared in blog, on my web site as well as via other sites and venues. For example, activity or content ranges from Industry Trends and Perspectives white papers, reports, blogs, newsletter commentary, interviews, Internet TV, videos, web cast, pod casts (including several appearances on StorageMonkeys Infosmack as well as Rich Brambleys Virtumania), ask the expert (ATE) questions, twitter tweets, tips and columns. Then there were the many in person presentations, key note and seminar events, conferences, briefing sessions along with virtual conferencing and advisory consulting sessions (read and see more here).
Jun 29
Recently it was discovered that the Zeus botnet was running an unauthorized command and control center on a public cloud computing infrastructure, marking the first time the cloud has been used for this type of illegal activity. It appears that hackers exploited a web server VM, using it as a botnet control point.
Fortunately, the Zeus software has been removed, but the potential unfolding of events could have been significantly bad. Imagine, malware compromises a cloud VM. The malware leverages loose security controls to infect other VMs in the cloud. The malware leverages the compromised cloud VMs as a launch-pad for further attacks. And so on.
Jun 29
Green IT is no longer just a fashionable subject for debate among systems managers. At a time when companies of all sizes are forced to do more with less, establishing environmental policies actually allows companies to increase their efficiency, reduce costs and improve their corporate image.
“Green IT continues to be a significant initiative for many small and large businesses, but in these economic times, it is simply not enough to just be green,” said Julio Olivares, CEO of DocPath. “Any green program must save money and time, in addition to helping the environment, and document management and printing represents an often overlooked area that has significant potential for cost savings within any organization.”
According to www.reduce.org, the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper per year in the United States alone. That translates into nearly 3.7 million tons, or 700 billion sheets annually. Beyond the costs and waste generated from the paper itself, energy, ink and equipment costs associated with the production of each one of those pages must be also considered.
DocPath (www.docpath.com), which makes software that helps companies efficiently manage their document and printing needs, offers these tips to help companies reduce the waste and the costs associated with the printed page.
Jun 29
VMware vet also makes move to Web2.0 mothership
A Google engineering director and key player in the company’s Chrome OS and WebGL projects has quit Mountain View in favour of a job over at Facebook.…
Jun 29
On Monday Savvis Symphony officially launches with the release of Savvis Symphony Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC), a new cloud computing offering from Savvis, Inc. that provides clients with 100 percent enterprise-class cloud. Savvis Symphony offers fully managed hosting services on top of fully managed, enterprise-class infrastructure. The Savvis Symphony suite of cloud services includes: […]
Jun 28
It used to be that if you were replicating database or file storage to a remote location you had few options if your connection was not the best. You could use rate shaping to give more of the pipe over to your replication, increase TCP window sizes, turn on jumbo frames… All relatively primitive stuff. image
As time went on, the speed and reliability of data connections grew, which increased our usage of such connections to replicate data, which decreased the reliability of the connections because we were pouring more data through pipes every day. So we grew the pipes, but latency and packet loss were beyond our control.
And then, as inevitably happens, we outgrew those larger connections too. And the cycle commenced. Replicating anything over a WAN connection is a lot of data to transfer, no matter how you slice it, and if the analysts are to be believed, the amount of data we need to transfer just continues to grow, making the problem ever more complex. And now there is increasing pressure to secure that data in-flight over the WAN, not an unreasonable request, but definitely one that is technologically complex.
Jun 28
Hello again!
The scalloped hammerhead is one of the few creatures in the world that has 360 degree vision. Wouldn’t it be great if those of us involved in the service provider market could have the hammerhead’s panoramic view and easy access to the content we need to make the best business decisions? In today’s constantly evolving communications landscape, we can see that content is everywhere…video, events, webinars, podcasts, articles, industry research, white papers.
In this sea of ubiquitous communication vehicles, it’s easy to miss relevant, potentially useful information that’s been swept away by the torrent of articles that are constantly competing for our attention. Fortunately, you now have a new tool that automatically aggregates Service Provider Data Center, Virtualization & Cloud content from a variety of sources and puts it all into one organized and easily accessible place so you can find the content you need when you need it.
For example, we recently posted a video blog that features TELUS, a Canadian service provider, which has leveraged Cisco Unified Service Delivery architecture to unify data center and networking resources. The aggregator widget links to the video, as well as other Service Provider Data Center, Virtualization & Cloud multimedia, so you can quickly find related content.
Our content widget can be downloaded to the desktop, where you can - customize it with your own RSS feed. Or, you can embed the standard version in your own web page.
Jun 25
Recently we talked about scaling up for Zettabyte Era growth. However, what’s important to remember is that traffic will often be carried over many networks to reach its destination - and somewhere, somehow there must be a way to interconnect them. Ethernet is far and away the most popular way to do that not just for its flexibility but also because it is the most cost effective. As a Local Area Network technology, Ethernet (and let’s not forget to capitalize that “E”!) wasn’t originally designed for interconnecting carriers - a number of innovations were needed before it could be called “Carrier Ethernet.” For example, there was no easy way to troubleshoot connections, to scale the number of virtual local area networks, or VLANs, needed in a service provider environment, or even a set of industry standards that could be referenced to ensure that services across multiple carriers and equipment vendors could interoperate.
Jun 25
From time to time, you may hear that cloud computing and virtualization are forcing functions. Exactly what they serve as a forcing function for varies, ranging from IT security to process inefficiency. What does this mean? Quite simply, in many cases cloud computing and virtualization are forcing enterprises to address certain topics, which historically fall into the overlooked and underappreciated column. I would like to add one to the list of topics to which these movements will serve as a forcing function: service standardization.