By far, the lowest hanging fruit of virtualization and cloud environment security is the segregation of your management control from your workloads. Separation of data and control planes have been recommended for everything from storage (EMC ViPR) up to the workloads running within virtual machines. The same holds true for cloud and virtual environment management tools, tasks, and functions. Up to now there have been very few choices in how such segregation could occur using properly placed firewalls or by using some form of proxy and the only proxy available was HyTrust. But this has changed. There are some other tools that will help with this segregation of data from control and do they give the level of auditing we require to solve the delegate user problem?
TVP Strategy Archives
Edward L. Haletky, aka Texiwill, is an analyst, author, architect, technologist, and out-of-the-box thinker. As an analyst, Edward looks at all things IoT, big data, cloud, security, and DevOps. As an author, he has written about virtualization and security. As an architect, Edward creates peer-reviewed reference architectures for hybrid cloud, cloud-native applications, and many other aspects of the modern business. As a technologist, Edward creates code prototypes for parts of those architectures. Edward is solving today’s problems in an implementable fashion.
Virtualization Backup: Tape Still Around
In a recent set of announcements the make virtualization backup and data protection companies have announced support for tape. Tape has always been supported indirectly by virtualization backup companies such as Veeam, Quantum, and PhD Virtual as well as directly by Symantec, HP, CommVault, etc. It is interesting to note that there is a convergence on tape support using two distinct methods. The first is to add support for tape libraries directly into their products: Veeam. The second is to add tape support by better integration with their existing product suite: Quantum. Even so, we know that tape still reigns for storing of large amounts of data. We just cannot seem to be rid of it nor do I think we ever will.
Cloud Scale Apps, Cloud Scale Testing
While at Interop I participated in a Tech Field Day event where Spirent was talking about their new Axon product as well as the possibility of usage of Blitz.io. It was an interesting discussion but gave me some food for thought. As we move to cloud scale apps based on platforms such as Pivotal (EMC World was just down the street), OpenShift, and others, we need a way to test those applications at scale. Spirent and Ixia provide these tools, but would they be used in this new model.
EMC ViPR as a Part of a SDDC
At EMC World 2013, EMC announced ViPR as the answer to storage within the software defined data center. ViPR presents multiple types of storage while segmenting the control plane from the data plane. In addition, ViPR is a head end, fronting traditional storage arrays as an automation and control point and does not replace any array, but, possibly, makes it easier to use those arrays as we move to the software defined data center. Yet, ViPR also raises several questions about how storage will be accessed by the software defined data center, is ViPR the future or is there more to happen?
Can you Pivot to Pivotal?
At EMCworld 2013, one of the big stories was Pivotal and it’s importance to the EMC2 family and the future of computing. Pivotal is geared to provide the next generation of computing. According to EMC2 have gone past the Client-Server style to a scale-out, scale-up, big data, fast data Internet of Things form of computing. The real question however, is how can we move traditional business critical applications to this new model, or should we? Is there migration path one can take?
Internet of Things: Expectation of Privacy
For years we have had an expectation of privacy while using our computers, tablets, phones, email, etc. However, with the advent of big data analysis and everything being on the internet, the internet of things, there is no longer the veil that makes up an Expectation of Privacy.