TVP Category Archives

The Cloud and the SMB: Diversified?

I was reading the post Small Business Virtualization and that really got me thinking about Small to Medium Businesses and what part Cloud Computing will play in that market. There are plenty of small businesses in and around my area and I have a couple of friends that are the owners of a couple of these small businesses. A majority of these small businesses have a single or a couple of point of sale machines that feed to the accounting program. It is these businesses that I think of when I think of what a small business is. Would virtualization help these companies? Sure, I think so but would it really be worth the cost to setup and maintain?

Acquisitions by VMware and RSA Changing the Landscape

There were two announcements over the last few days that struck me as quite important to the virtualization community. While some may question this statement, the long reaching effects of these purchases will impact virtualization and cloud computing in not so distant future. In fact, these purchases could add a whole new layer to vSphere as we know it today. Which for VMware is a good thing. They need to continue to innovate to stay ahead of the pack. The purchases I talk about are:
VMware purchasing/taking over control of EMC Mozy
RSA purchasing NetWitness

Knowing where your Data is: Backup Security

On the second Virtualization Security Podcast of 2011, we had Doug Hazelman of Veeam as our guest panelist to discuss backup security. Since most of backup security relies on the underlying storage security, we did not discuss this aspect very much other than to state that the state of the art is still to encrypt data at rest and in motion. What we did discuss is how to determine where your data has been within the virtual or cloud environment. This all important fact is important if you need to know what disks or devices touched your data. An auditing requirement for high security locations. So we can take from this podcast several GRC and Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability elements

VNXe More than Just Storage

Given the VNXe’s expandability to include fibre channel cards in the future. This storage looks very attractive to those SMBs who have made the investment previously to move towards fibre. Making use of your existing infrastructure whether fabric or Ethernet would lower the cost of adoption for the low-end EMC product. The VNXe’s expandability is one of those items that makes it an attractive tool for other uses. What are those other uses with respect to security, DR, BC, and disaster avoidance?

EMC VNXe Spurs Thinking Outside the Box

Chad Sakac mentions on his blog that VNXe “uses a completely homegrown EMC innovation (C4LX and CSX) to virtualize, encapsulate whole kernels and other multiple high performance storage services into a tight, integrated package.” Well this has gotten me to thinking about other uses of VNXe. If EMC could manage to “refactor” or encapsulate a few more technologies, I think we have the makings of a killer virtualization security appliance. Why would a storage appliance spur on thinking about virtualization security?