ESG Blogs

What happens when you combine two field-proven, widely-adopted technologies from tech power houses? You get a super flexible, scalable Hadoop platform to address your big data analytic needs. And the best part is that it really doesn’t matter where you currently fall on the Hadoop adoption spectrum. Deploying a traditional Hadoop distribution? Expanding one that’s already deployed?  Starting a brand new Hadoop implementation to merge with your existing IT infrastructure? VCE and Isilon have come together to make your life easier.

Shortly after VMware announced its EVO Rail initiative, whereby hardware partners could start delivering a very dense compute, storage, and networking solution within a wholly-contained appliance – I started exploring the data protection aspects of an EVO Rail solution.  The nice folks in ESG’s video studio have produced a whole series on this … in two-minute increments.

In the earlier video capsules, we looked at the protection of EVO Rail systems in production.  For part 6 in the series, let’s look at EVO RAIL as perhaps the ideal BC/DR infrastructure.

Earlier this year, ESG published a research report titled, Network Security Trends In the Era of Cloud and Mobile Computing.  As part of this report, ESG surveyed 321 security professionals working at enterprise organizations (i.e., more than 1,000 employees) about their networking and network security strategies. 

Let’s face it, tools for backing up your data have become ubiquitous. Everyone can do it. It provides peace of mind, especially for small businesses (think law or a doctor’s office) who don’t have IT pros on staff. “All my data is backed up somewhere so if something bad happens, I’m covered.” Unfortunately backup is only a piece of the data protection puzzle. How do you get the backed up data back into production if something goes wrong? How long will it take to get up and running again? And the killer question: How will it impact my small business if it takes a long time to recover? Recovery is just as important as backup, and probably MORE important.

Dell is concentrating on just that for small businesses. It’s not just about backup. It’s about guaranteeing application uptime through various recovery options. And replication for disaster recovery. And archiving to the cloud. And keeping costs down. And making it dead simple for anybody to set up and manage a data protection solution. The Dell DL1000 Backup and Recovery Appliance is designed for smaller organizations to address their data protection concerns. It has a compact, lightweight design, runs quietly, cools easily, and won’t consume lots of power. And it comes packaged with Dell AppAssure software, which provides protection for local servers through incremental snapshotting.

Over the last few months, I’ve talked to a number of CISOs and security analytics professionals about threat intelligence as I’m about to dig into this topic with some primary research. 

One of the things I’ve learned is that large enterprises are consuming lots of open source and commercial threat intelligence feeds. In some cases, these feeds are discrete services from vendors like iSight Partners, Norse, or Vorstack. Alternatively, they also purchase threat intelligence along with products from security vendors like Blue Coat, Check Point, Cisco, FireEye, Fortinet, IBM, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, Trend Micro, Webroot, and a cast of a thousand others. 

New businesses like Uber and Tesla depend on big data analytics to provide cutting-edge services. They need a fast and free Internet to flourish.

In the past, cybersecurity was thought of as an IT problem where CISOs were given meager budgets and told to handle IT security with basic technical safeguards and a small staff of security administrators. Fast forward to 2014 and things have certainly changed now that business mucky-mucks read about data breaches in the Wall Street Journal on a daily basis. 

AWS held its 3^rd annual re:Invent user conference with 13,500 attendees in Las Vegas. While the event had similarities to other IT conferences that included an expo floor, keynotes, and sessions I was fascinated by, AWS has the potential to disrupt the way businesses consume IT, IT organizational structure, high margin IT infrastructure business models, and product marketing. 

I recently had the opportunity to attend DellWorld 2014 in my hometown of Austin, Texas. One year after going private, Dell seems, at least to this outside observer, to be filled with excitement and optimism for the future. The positive atmosphere comes as a welcome change from what seems to be a sea of turmoil encompassing the remaining server-storage players in the IT market these days. HP recently announced plans to split the company into two, separating the consumer and enterprise pieces. This news comes in the wake of IBM selling its X-series server business to Lenovo. The list of end-to-end IT providers is rapidly shrinking.

Okay, I admit that I’m a geek and have read numerous books on the history of IT and the Internet. Katie Hafner’s Where Wizards Stay up Late, The Origins of the Internet is a particular favorite of mine. 

Along these lines, I just finished a book called, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, by Andrew Blum, a Wired Magazine correspondent. Tubes does provide a bit of Internet history around the Arpanet project, BBN, the Interface Message Processor (IMP), and the original Internet node at UCLA, but it takes the story in a different direction. Tubes goes on to look at the physical stuff like routers, cables, buildings, spinning disk drives, etc.—where they are, how they got there, who built them, and who manages them.

Dell World took place last week in Dell’s part of the world: Austin, Texas. As is ESG’s wont these days we travel with our video equipment….and in just a few lines from now you can click to watch our 7 minute summary of what struck us as most interesting.  Now of course our interest tends to follow the coverage areas of the attending ESG analysts (this time, myself and Scott Sinclair on the storage beat, and Nik Rouda looking out for all things big data/analytics), so let me just start with an overall impression from the event. To me the biggest takeaway was to see the genuine and renewed sense of confidence pervading Dell, whereas a year or two back it had seemed somewhat "lost"). Going private (this was the 1 year anniversary of that) has clearly had a strong, positive impact….now of course Dell now has no obligation to share any specific details regarding results or sales, so it did at times sound a bit like the "everything is wonderful" mantra that one naturally gets from startups. However the confidence was not just stage-based....there was a palpable comfort and high morale from the staff.

Ask a security professional in North America to describe Trend Micro and you will likely hear about antivirus software and a grouping of vendors that also includes McAfee and Symantec.  Funny, but you’d get a completely different answer if you asked the same question in Brazil, Germany, or Japan.  In these geographies, you’d hear about a billion dollar-plus enterprise-class security leader with a full portfolio of products, partnerships, and managed services.

Why the disconnect?  Trend is an Asian company that hasn’t pushed too hard into the North American market until recently (other than the consumer sector).  Furthermore, Trend isn’t known for guerilla marketing tactics, cybersecurity exposés, or expensive marketing campaigns at Black Hat and RSA. 

With the glitz of Las Vegas as a background, Intel Security (aka McAfee) held its annual FOCUS event last week attracting analysts, customers, and the press alike. 

Last week saw the 14th edition of NetApp's Insight event...and the first to officially open its doors to users, media, and analysts. Keen to stick to its technical roots, the vendor kept the production values of the event at a workman-like level rather than piling on the flashy marketeering. WIth the resulting high levels of candor from—and access to—key NetApp personnel, the event was compelling. More important perhaps, a lot of the PowerPoint promise of NetApp's emerging vision of recent years seemed to finally coalesce and make sense. What were the key aims and take-aways? The following 6 minute video should serve to answer that question:

A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the surprising effort and capabilities that Dot Hill puts into its hardware platforms. Today, it unveiled its most comprehensive and compelling software functionality yet: RealStor 2.0. In a nutshell, it offers every major storage capability that a mid-range user could want, plus a few that until now those users thought were the strict preserve of enterprise systems alone. I recently spoke with members of the Dot Hill product and maketing teams to produce a succinct video summary of the RealStor 2.0 highlights

Hitachi held court at its own Innovation Forum in Tokyo, Japan last week, and the main message was the imperative for "social innovation," defined as using technology to create a better world and improve people's lives. This is not to be confused with the social innovations of Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, or the like, and while it sounds like the loftiest of corporate mission statements, there is some real potential here. 

Let's face it, you built your data center for one reason: to generate revenue. The return on investment of your hardware, software, and people really depends on what you do with that infrastructure: Is it mostly used for production activities? Or is there a lot of time when users are stymied because there’s a backup running? How much time is spent on essential—but non-production—activities like data protection?

Backup is the first line of defense, and if you’re like most organizations, you do some kind of backup daily, weekly, and monthly. To get the most out of your infrastructure and IT staff, you want to spend as little time and effort as possible on backup, but still be ready to restore fast. To that end, a common practice is to do incremental backups daily, and then once a week or so roll those incremental changes up into a synthetic full backup. This gives you a full backup that’s easier to restore from, but taking less time out of production. 

As we head toward the mid-term elections in the US, I figured that "cloud" is an IT term worthy of an electability check! I was reminded of a political story from the UK a few years back about the third party [in politics that is] and I wonder whether the cloud—of whatever flavor—is the technology equivalent of that particular lifeform?