The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Department of Commerce, intends to sponsor a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) to facilitate public-private collaboration for accelerating the widespread adoption of integrated cybersecurity tools and technologies.
This is the first of three notices which must be published over a 90-day period in order to advise the public of the agency’s intention to sponsor an FFRDC. DATES: Written comments must be received by 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on July 22, 2013.
Monthly Archives: April 2013
Not Quite Ready to Live in the Cloud
Google’s impressive Chromebook Pixel is just the latest in a series of devices which are trying to entice users to compute in a different way. With (almost) ubiquitous connectivity, and an increasing reliance upon web-based services for mail, calendars, document creation and more, might we be reaching a point at which the browser really can be our means of accessing everything? Philosophically, the idea resonates. And yet, although I am not a power user who needs to regularly process video or edit high resolution images (the usual excuses for not embracing the Chromebook vision), I still remain uncomfortable with giving up my non-browser tools. Despite living and working in the cloud, I find that locally installed client software continues to deliver real value. Maybe, the next time I upgrade a computer, I need to try installing nothing more than a browser for a week or two, and see if it’s as painful as I feel it could be… The cloud powers my business. The cloud is what I talk to clients about, it’s what I write about, it’s what people pay me to know about. The cloud (and, more generally, the web) make it possible for me to work with clients […]
Cloud Expo NY: Best Practices for Delivering Oracle Database as a Service
Many enterprises are pursuing cloud computing to reduce costs and speed time to value, all with lower risk and improved service levels. We’ve seen many customers succeed by organizing their transformation into distinct, manageable phases: a Journey to the Enterprise Cloud.
Service Delivery is an advanced phase of the journey, and provides elasticity, resiliency, automation and self-service capabilities. When the journey is planned and executed correctly, enabling these capabilities does not require upgrades or re-architecting. Instead, meeting these goals is a natural evolution that builds on the earlier phases by employing the relevant features and options.
Cloud Expo NY: Best Practices for Architecting Your Cloud Infrastructure
Before you start to envision and design your cloud, you’ll need to make sure it’s built on a solid architectural foundation.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Matt Mullins, Principal Consultant – Cloud Platform Implementation Engineer with Citrix Systems, will cover critical concepts and principles for architecting your cloud and best practices for supporting multiple workloads from a single cloud platform. You will learn about:
Components and architecture of a cloud orchestration
How workloads and workload availability drive cloud architecture
Sample reference architectures from leading implementations
Google Details Cause of Wednesday’s Widespread Apps Outage
Google issued an incident report on the Wednesday outage that affected less than one per cent of gmail users, but was significant for other services, including half of Admin Panel and 60% of Sync login requests. As has happened in the past, it was a configuration error for a central system, in this case Google Services Login, where the configuration glitch caused too many requests to be routed to too few servers, causing them to buckle under the load:
From 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. PT, some users received errors when trying to access Gmail, Drive, Talk, Google Sync, the Admin panel, and the Cloud Console, and to a lesser extent Groups, Sites, and Contacts. At the peak of the outage, this issue affected 50% of the Admin panel and 60% of Google Sync login requests. The percentages of affected users for other services were lower such as 0.18% users for Gmail. The root cause was an issue in the system that manages login requests for Google services.
At 5:00 a.m. as login traffic increased, the misconfigured servers were unable to process the load. This began to cause errors for some users logging in to Google services. The request load, exacerbated by retry requests from users and automated systems such as IMAP clients, initially appeared as the cause of the login errors. At 5:48 a.m., the Engineering team determined that the root cause was not excess traffic but insufficient capacity
The full report is less than two pages, and clearly outlines what happened and how they hope to prevent it in the future.
The New Standard: Intelligence-Driven Security
Network perimeters are all but erased and traditional security strategies such as stacking don’t adequately address the current needs of a modern enterprise. Many companies are still using strategies rooted in 2002 technologies and approaches. The new intelligence-based security model is one that integrates several alerting, analytical and preventative tools into a central monitor and management best practice.
In a recent blog post, Art Coviello, the executive chairman at RSA, posed an important question. How do we move from traditional security to intelligence-driven security? In his answer he described that the quickly interdependent exchanges between parties (B2C, B2B, B2P, etc) have grown beyond the traditional means of securing the enterprise.
NetApp Puts File Storage Proposal to OpenStack
At the OpenStack Summit this week NetApp submitted a prototype and proposal for consideration by the OpenStack Foundation Technical Committee and the unity at-large for file share service capabilities.
OpenStack doesn’t have native management support for file-based storage systems so NetApp is proposing to add a file-share service broad enough to address a range of file system types in the next Havana release of OpenStack.
It says it got good feedback for its blueprint during the previous Grizzly development cycle and its proposal is abstracted to address any number of shared or distributed file system types from CIFS and NFS/pNFS to Gluster or Ceph.
The widgetry, it says, could either be an extension to the existing Cinder project (currently referred to as OpenStack block storage) or implemented as a separate project.
The point of the integration is to extend access to applications written for file-based storage without needing a separate management interface.
Amazon announces S3 cloud storing two trillion objects
What’s the best way to put the kibosh on your competitor’s latest key cloud release?
Make a statement loaded with braggadocio yourself, as Amazon has done by announcing that two trillion (2 x 10¹²) objects are now stored on its S3 cloud – a turnaround of 1.1m requests per second.
Microsoft, of course, launched Windows Azure Infrastructure Services earlier this week, and knocked off the price of compute, storage and bandwidth between 21% and 33% in a bid for direct competition with Amazon Web Services.
As a result this latest update, in a blog post from AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr, becomes even more interesting.
Amazon hit one trillion objects in S3 back in June last year, with each object in the cloud ranging from zero to 5 TB in size.
“It took us six years to grow to one trillion stored objects, and less than a year …
Big Data and Cloud – A Perfect Match
“Like any successful software space in the technology world, open source in the cloud has and will be playing an important role in the overall success of cloud,” stated Sanjay Sharma, Principal Architect at Impetus Technologies, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “OpenStack, like open source technologies, enforces commercial vendors to continuously enhance their offerings while providing end users with a lot of options to choose from.”
Cloud Computing: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it’s about saving time – agree or disagree?
Sanjay Sharma: Totally agree. The move to the cloud not only saves money but also enables saving time and transforming business to be truly Agile to meet an ever-changing market and customers’ demands.
Cloud Expo NY: Fast-Track Your Transformation to Enterprise Private Cloud
What are all the requirements for planning, preparing, deploying, monitoring, and managing enterprise private clouds from a cloud builder’s perspective?
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Sr. Principal Product Director at Oracle, will show how Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle VM as well as Oracle’s full range of hardware including engineered systems are utilized to power an enterprise private cloud.
Anand Akela is Sr. Principal Product Director at Oracle, focusing on cloud, virtualization, and infrastructure management offerings within the Oracle Enterprise Manager portfolio. Prior to his current role at Oracle, he worked at HP in various product marketing, product management, and engineering roles in the systems management, servers, data center energy efficiency, and enterprise software areas. Akela serves as the chairman of Data Collection and Analysis workgroup at the Green Grid, an industry consortium developing and promoting energy efficiency for data centers and enterprise systems.