vCloud Air Attack: Back to Basics

VMware recently announced an upgrade to vSphere, 5.5 Update 2d, that fixes an issue with transparent page sharing (TPS). This issue allowed an attacker to break encryption keys if VMs shared the same server even for a small amount of time. This is not a trivial problem, but it brings me to a simple point. …

Unique Modern-Day Data Centers

When you hear the phrase “data center” in a conversation, what kind of image does that instill in your mind? Just for fun and reference, here is the definition from Wikipedia: “A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes redundant …

Passwords Are Dead or Dying

Passwords are dead or dying: According to Google security executive Heather Adkins, Passwords are dead for Google and warned that any startups that will rely on passwords are going to be dead in the water. Heather Adkins did not offer any real specifics on how Google is going to innovate tomorrow’s security but did hint that Google is experimenting with hardware-based tokens as well as something that Motorola has created that authenticated users by having them touch a device to something embedded.

Gaming as a Service

Gaming as a Service: When we talk about Cloud Computing Systems we may be mainly focusing on Platform, Infrastructure, Software and Network as a service as the main and common areas that are presented to us, but there is another area to watch and keep an eye on as it gets a stronger foothold into the cloud and that newcomer is Gaming as a Service (GaaS).

OpenCompute – Facebook drives Data Center and Cloud evolution

Facebook (which had previously bought commodity servers and rented data center space) has opened up a whole new area of Open Source technology by publishing the full specification of both its new custom server and its new data center as “Open Source” at OpenCompute.org. Overall, Facebook claims that its new data centers are 38 per cent more efficient than its existing leased data centers, but the cost is about 20 per cent less. Published data (such as it exists) indicates that Facebook is at or ahead of rivals or peers such as Microsoft and Google. OpenCompute designs are released under new set of Open Source agreements. The intent seems to be to allow innovation within the published specification, but to ensure multiple providers of the technology. Facebook is clearly seeking to get multiple tier-1 third-party providers for both servers and data centers according to these designs, turning these Open Source specifications into a form of de-facto Standard, which could have broad impact by driving the marketplace away from shared storage models (such as Red Hat’s IAAS reference architecture) to local-storage-friendly IAAS architectures such as OpenStack or Eucalyptus.