Security baselines and security health checks are an important part of any modern day infrastructure. These checks are done periodically throughout the year, usually ever quarter. In my opinion this is a good thing to check and make sure your security settings are following the guidelines that the company has set out to achieve. Here is where I do have a problem. When setting up the guidelines for the different technologies in your infrastructure it would make the most sense that the people establishing the guidelines need to fully understand the technology they are working with. After all, would you really want the midrange or mainframe group to write the policies and guidelines for the Microsoft Windows Servers in your environment?
TVP Category Archives
Development Tools and Application Servers for the Cloud
Development tools like Eclipse and Visual Stuio are being built to ensur applications can be deployed in to the cloud on application servers. Key challenges include the manageability and scalability of application servers. Innovations include the use of non-java languages like Groovy and Jython and even PHP and Javascript on JVMs, and the final demise of SQL as object caches offer more natural scalability.
Veeam SureBackup
Veeam has introduced a new product named SureBackup. SureBackup is designed to not only use Veeam’s Backup technology to backup your virtual machines (VMs) but will also test the restoration of each of these VMs to ensure that they at least boot and at most the applications involved are actually running within the VM.
What User Virtualization Certifications are Necessary?
In many ways, the IT world has gone certification happy. Nearly every job requirement lists certifications as well as length of service, however, in the realm of cloud computing and virtualization what do these certifications mean? Are they even valuable? Is there a general enough certification that covers all the hypervisors, is there a third party certification available?
Microsoft and Citrix offer a "Rescue for VMware VDI"
On March 18, Microsoft embarked on a major offensive to focus the desktop virtualisation market away from VMware View. Microsoft announced updates for their desktop virtualization technologies and solutions, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The question is, are these announcements marketing hype or do they actually help deliver an improved VDI experience? Indeed, are you a VMware View in peril? The announcements from Microsoft and Citrix to little to impact on this marketing statement especially when we consider that, licensing changes aside, this announcement is an announcement of things to come, not an announcement of things available now.Perhaps an effective rescue for VMWare’s VDI will be to for VMware to deliver their client side hypervisor first and offer a single management environment for a business desktop delivery, regardless of device.
Eucalyptus/Terracotta a scalable Java Cloud Platform?
We recently received a presentation on a combined solution from Eucalyptus and Terracotta. Initially we were suspicious because they clearly share an investor – Benchmark Capital. Was this a PowerPoint integration dreamt up by two Venture Capitalists over a power breakfast? However, the combined solution was presented by some very plausible techies with a real-live demo and does look as though it starts to provide a generally-useful abstraction over which to deploy scalable applications (specifically Java stacks), and it too works with commodity hardware. It’s not as slick as the 3Tera solution, more of a command-line approach, but it potentially has the edge in scalability.