Caching your Application, OS, or Storage

There is a new set of tools available for Caching up and down the stack which we covered within Caching through out the Stack, however in reality where is the best place to cache data for your application and what are the ramifications of using such a cache. Recently, we had a caching problem, actually two of them. Both caused by the same thing, a lack of full understanding about what was being cached. For any application, the best way to cache is to cache in memory as close to the application stack as possible, which in our stack could be within the application, the OS, or even a hypervisor based disk cache. However, which does your application actually use?

A Look at Network Automations Automate 9

A look at Network Automations Automate 9: Last month I wrote a post titled “Is Automation Killing the Engineering?” For this post I want to explore the idea that it is not the automation that might be killing the engineering but rather how far and good some of the 3rd party application are in pretty much doing the work for you. One prime example of that concept is Network Automations’ AutoMate 9.

Big Data Security Tools

On the May 30th Virtualization Security Podcast, Michael Webster (@vcdxnz001) joined us Live from HP Discover to discuss what we found at the show and other similar tools around the industry. The big data security news was a loosely coupled product named HAVEn which is derived from several products: Hadoop, Autonomy, Vertica, Enterprise Security, and any number of Apps. HAVEn’s main goal is to provide a platform on top of which HP and others can produce big data applications using Autonomy for unstructured data, Vertica for structured data, Enterprise Security for data governance and hadoop. HP has already built several security tools upon HAVEn, and I expect more. Even so, HAVEn is not the only tools to provide this functionality, but it may be the only one to include data governance in from the beginning.

Public Cloud Use Cases

There are different public cloud use cases. Here at The Virtualization Practice we moved our datacenter from the north to the south part of the country and utilized the cloud to host the workloads during the transition. Edward Haletky, yesterday posted about Evaluating the Cloud: Keeping your Cloud Presence and presented the question and his thoughts of is it worth staying in the cloud or bringing the data home.

Delegate User Problem and Proxies

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?