“We are excited to enable the next generation of software-defined data centers and drive complexity out of the most challenging layer of the data center today — storage,” said Anil Virmani, senior vice president of engineering at Coraid, as the Redwood City based leading developer of Ethernet-based storage solutions today unveiled its EtherCloud platform for software-defined storage.
Worst Web Outages (Infographic)
Whose data is it anyway?
22nd August 2012
With more and more trust being placed in the cloud, is it time to reevaluate our data storage concerns? Matt Gordon-Smith, Director of Security for Attenda explains why, despite recent high-profile criticism, organisations still continue to drive the cloud movement forward.
Architecting Scalable Infrastructures: CPS versus DPS
Infrastructure metrics have always been focused on speeds and feeds. Throughput, packets per second, connections per second, etc… These metrics have been used to evaluate and compare network infrastructure for years, ultimately being used as a critical component in data center design.
This makes sense. After all, it’s not rocket science to figure out that a firewall capable of handling 10,000 connections per second (CPS) will overwhelm a next hop (load balancer, A/V scanner, etc… ) device only capable of 5,000 CPS.
Cybersecurity: A Human Problem
We’re here to help you understand the reality of the situation in order to provide insight. And like it or not, we have a Cyberwar on our hands—and as with other wars, technology defines and constrains the rules of engagement. Yesterday we may have spoken about tanks or guns; today we speak of viruses and worms. But as with traditional machines of war, the human element is every bit as important as the technology, if not more so.
The latest Cyberattack to hit the news: a worm called Gauss, a relative of Stuxnet, targeted certain Lebanese banks. Kaspersky, a Russian security firm, discovered the attack. On their blog post, the Kaspersky researchers note that “after looking at Stuxnet…, we can say with a high degree of certainty that Gauss comes from the same ‘factory’ or ‘factories.’ All these attack toolkits represent the high end of nation-state sponsored cyber-espionage and cyberwar operations, pretty much defining the meaning of ‘sophisticated malware.’” They go on to say that “this is actually the first time we’ve observed a nation-state cyber-espionage campaign with a banking Trojan component.”
Microsoft Private Cloud 2.0 – Build Your Own Infopedia
A headline theme for our next webinar will be ‘Microsoft Private Cloud 2.0′. Private Cloud Application Platform Two years ago I described an upcoming market that I initially defined as the Private Cloud Application Platform. Recently Microsoft began prosecuting this space with their PCSS initiative, the Private Cloud Solutions Suite, bringing together a partner group […]
Coraid Delivers Flash Cache Performance for Cloud Applications
Coraid on Wednesday unveiled EtherFlash Cache, a flexible programmable cache that uses solid-state drives (SSDs) to accelerate read performance for demanding server virtualization, web, database and email applications. Users can provision and then rapidly re-assign application priorities in the cache to provide a performance boost to the applications that need it most.
“The explosive growth of dynamic virtualized and cloud architectures has made ensuring application service levels ever more challenging,” said Doug Dooley, vice president, product management, at Coraid. “Software-defined storage platforms combine smart software and scale-out commodity hardware like SSDs to get the right resources to the right application at the right time. EtherFlash Cache allows operators of cloud infrastructures to dynamically apply policies and priorities to applications.”
Hey IT! Get with the Program and Make Operations a Strategic Weapon
Too often, Information Technology leadership lives in its own world, far removed from business decision-making. This can result in IT being an easy target for blame. If everything goes well, IT is a high-spend cost center. If things go poorly, then IT isn’t doing its job. Non-strategic IT departments are too often seen as the bad guys—They are an obstacle, a process-loving bureaucratic group that slows everything down…Other departments must find a way around IT in order to launch those pet projects quickly. Now you, the CIO, are caught in a downward spiral, spending more time fighting political battles, less time addressing your organization’s immediate tech needs and zero time planning for the future. The IT Ops team is in a constant scramble to keep up, overburdened with administrivia and maintaining uptime. In this bleak picture, IT isn’t exactly a potent weapon in the battle for innovation.
Think Through Your Cloud Plans – Or Else
Enterprise IT has a disturbing tendency to get excited about technology rather than architecture and planning.
According to David Linthicum, this sorry state is quite evident as cloud computing begins to take hold in the standard IT technology arsenal.
“The fact of the matter is that there are two worlds. One involves the hype and good feelings about next-gen IT, such as cloud computing, that tells us the technology itself will save us from the mistakes of the past. Then there’s the world of planning, architecture, and design that makes the technology actually useful – despite IT’s aversion to this crucial stage,” Linthicum writes.
The problem is not the fault of hyped technology, nor of those whom build and sell it. In many cases, the hyped technology works. Cloud computing is no exception.
Gartner Highlights the Importance of Third-Party Validation
Gartner recently published a report that highlights the growing importance of Cloud Access Security Brokers – solution providers that offer unified cloud security platforms. This solution category includes a new class of products that Gartner terms Cloud Encryption Gateways, which encrypt or tokenize sensitive information before it leaves an organization’s firewall. These solutions, if designed properly, allow organizations to maintain control of sensitive data since they replace the original “clear-text” values with indecipherable replacement values in the cloud. Businesses are adopting these solutions to address issues raised by data residency requirements and data privacy regulations driven by a host of industry compliance mandates. In addition to enabling organizations to satisfy the data protection needs, products like those from PerspecSys also preserve the user experience with the SaaS application (such as Salesforce.com or Oracle CRM). With PerspecSys, critical functionality like Search is retained even when strong encryption (e.g., FIPS 140-2 validated modules) or tokenization is used to protect the data being sent to the cloud.