Showing posts with label VMware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label VMware. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Data Security


Edward Snowden showed the government is dipping into data centers at will. That set off alarm bells. It's not just the government. There are many prying eyes.

The “Soft and Chewy Centers” That Put Your Data at Risk
More and more sensitive data is being entrusted to data centers connected to the Internet. ...... The interior of those complex networks is mostly unobserved or protected, meaning that attackers who manage to remotely access the computers can explore mostly as they please .... Servers inside modern data centers usually run multiple copies of Windows, or Linux-based operating systems at the same time. Illumio’s product works by attaching software “agents” to each of the operating systems inside every server. The data those agents send back to Illumio’s central control panel provide a global view of the data moving around inside a data center. Responses to suspicious activity can then be sent back to the software agents for enforcement—potentially shutting down hacking attacks as they happen. ..... “Overall, network security solutions haven’t evolved for the past 20-plus years”

Sunday, April 24, 2011

The Cloud Outage

O'Reilly Community: The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment: if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn't Amazon's fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon's cloud computing model....... two dueling architectural models of cloud computing applications: "design for failure" and traditional. ..... The Amazon model is the "design for failure" model. Under the "design for failure" model, combinations of your software and management tools take responsibility for application availability. The actual infrastructure availability is entirely irrelevant to your application availability. 100% uptime should be achievable even when your cloud provider has a massive, data-center-wide outage. ...... The advantage of the "design for failure" model is that the application developer has total control of their availability with only their data model and volume imposing geographical limitations. The downside of the "design for failure" model is that you must "design for failure" up front. ...... Physical redundancy encompasses all traditional "n+1" concepts: redundant hardware, data center redundancy, the ability to do vMotion or equivalents, and the ability to replicate an entire network topology in the face of massive infrastructural failure. ...... If you had redundancy across availability zones, you would have survived every outage suffered to date in the Amazon cloud. ...... If you had regional redundancy in place, you would have come through the recent outage without any problems except maybe an increased workload for your surviving virtual resources. ...... Cloud redundancy enables you to survive the complete loss of a cloud provider. ....... Being home to the world’s reserve currency confers great advantages on the U.S. economy. Because of it, our government, companies and households can borrow money more easily and cheaply. And because all that demand for dollars artificially raises its value, we can import goods at a cheaper price than other countries. ...... Applications built with "design for failure" in mind ..... will achieve uptimes you can't dream of with other architectures and survive extreme failures in the cloud infrastructure. ...... no humans, no 2am calls, and no outage! ..... Netflix, an AWS customer that kept on going because they had proper "design for failure" .. ? Try doing that in your private IT infrastructure with the complete loss of a data center.
I should have, but I did not expect this to happen. Servers are known to go down. Heck, PCs crash. The browser freezes. The cloud went down. In a big way. What's next? Datacenters? I think it did happen once. One Google datacenter went down. Correct me if I am not remembering it right. What if Facebook's datacenter in Oregon went down for an hour?

So the cloud went down. And there has been much talk. The Amazon Web Services is pretty much the cloud that most of us are privy to. And you thought Jeff Bezos was in the business of selling books.

The cloud should not go down. The cloud can not go down. It is like when there is a power cut the generator turns on on its own immediately, and so although there was a power cut, you did not feel it. The cloud needs that mechanism. Otherwise it is not a proper cloud. The cloud is not like the rest of us. The cloud is not supposed to go down.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Cisco Unified Computing System: To Tidy Up Data Centers


Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior: "We're going to compete with HP. I don't want to sugarcoat that."
Looks like Cisco wants to do to data centers what Apple did to cellphones with its iPhone.

In this tight economy it is but natural that once partners will elbow into each other's space. But that is the cynical view to take. This is a story in innovation. As to how it will play out, we will have to wait and watch.



Tech companies like Amazon and Oracle have swam upstream in this dire economy. And now Cisco has come up with a major announcement. This will boost the morale of the larger economy. Otherwise it feels like there is bad news on every page of the newspaper.

In The News

Cisco's Unified Computing System Products Unavailable Through ... ChannelWeb
Cisco's Unified Computing Vision - Is It Too Much Cisco? InformationWeek
Cisco's Unified Computing system ITworld.com
Cisco's Unified Computing System stirs competition, old and new Search Networking
One Cisco Unified Computing System beats 15 coal-fired energy plants ZDNet A single Cisco chassis can hold as many as eight blade servers. A “networking fabric extender” can tie together 40 such chassis, bringing 320 servers under the control and supervision of Cisco’s Unified Computing System Manager software. ...... Every second, Web users view 1,200 videos on YouTube, share 11,000 songs and send 2,000,000 emails. This plus the equivalent of 3,000,000 trees turned into paper and printed can fit in the system memory of one Cisco Unified Computing System. ........ All 138,893,908 Individual Tax returns filed last year in the United States could be stored in the memory of one Cisco Unified Computing System. ....... It takes only 40% of the Cisco UCS’s system resources to host all of the US Wikipedia. ...... The amount of obsolete cabling and support infrastructure that could be eliminated equates to 3,007 miles of legacy servers and infrastructure, when set side by side. ......... 31,103,864,053 Kilowatt hours per year saved, by unifying aging traditional servers and supporting infrastructure. .......

This could:

  • Double the available electricity in the ten poorest countries worldwide increasing education, healthcare, and overall standard of living.
  • Equal the energy output of more than 15 U.S. coal-fired electric plants and 35 million tons of C02.
  • Almost equal the entire amount of wind energy produced in U.S.



Cisco Systems, Inc.Image via Wikipedia

Is Cisco really going to take on Apple? Not quite.

ZDNet - ‎Mar 20, 2009‎
Cisco’s acquisition of Pure Digital, maker of the Flip camcorder, has sparked a lot of discussion about the networking giant’s intentions. ...

Cisco Needs BMC To Supply Unified Virtual Management

InformationWeek - ‎Mar 19, 2009‎
At stake is Cisco's blade server, which will combine converged network components, then link to virtualized network and store resources under a single ...

Cisco, Red Hat to bring unified computing system to Malaysia

NetworkWorld.com - ‎Mar 20, 2009‎
"UCS will result in a unified architecture tantamount to next generation data centres: data centre 3.0," said Cisco Malaysia managing director Anne Abraham. ...

Cisco's consumer electronics dream

CNET News - ‎Mar 20, 2009‎
by Marguerite Reardon If you haven't noticed, Cisco Systems, whose products have been used to build the Internet for 20 years, has spent the past 6 years ...

BusinessWeek’s Burrows: Cisco to battle Apple? Not likely

MacDailyNews - ‎12 hours ago‎
"Put me down as a skeptic regarding Cisco’s acquisition yesterday of Pure Digital, the maker of Flip video recorders. In fact, my first thought wasn’t ...

Home IBM Why Is IBM, Not Cisco, Buying Sun?

eWeek - ‎Mar 18, 2009‎
Cisco Systems, with its ambitions for dominance in the data center, seems like a much better suitor for Sun. Commenting on a pending acquisition is like ...
Video: Money Minute: IBM, AIG, Compensation

Cisco Israel head resigns

Ha'aretz - ‎2 hours ago‎
By Amitai Ziv Bina Rezinovsky, the general manager of Cisco Israel, announced her resignation at the end of last week. Rezinovsky, 41, has managed Cisco's ...

Laid-Off Janitors Protest At Cisco Headquarters

CBS 5 - ‎Mar 19, 2009‎
Read more in our Privacy Policy At least 200 people gathered outside Cisco Systems headquarters in San Jose on Thursday to protest the layoffs of about 75 ...
Fisher: Taking back the economy San Jose Mercury News

Around the Web 3.19.09: Cisco now makes servers, IE8 comes out ...

Los Angeles Times - ‎Mar 19, 2009‎
Personal Technology -- Cisco Systems released its server computer -- an affront on companies for which it usually provides software. ...

Citigroup, FedEx, Alcoa, Cisco among big movers

The Associated Press - ‎Mar 19, 2009‎
NASDAQ Cisco Systems Inc., down 27 cents at $16.23 The computer networking gear maker will buy Pure Digital, maker of the popular Flip Video camcorder, ...




















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