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Oracle teams up with AWS to make its database services – Autonomous Database and Exadata Database Services – available on the hyperscaler’s infrastructure.
The launch of Oracle Database@AWS will allow Oracle customers on AWS to access the services directly within AWS.
This is Oracle’s third collaboration that collocates the service to a bigger cloud platform. The company previously signed deals with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud making its database services available to a broader userbase.
In the press release, Oracle said that the ability to connect enterprise data to applications on Amazon EC2 and AI services will allow for a “unified experience” for the customers.
Oracle Database@AWS will run on dedicated hardware within AWS. Unified customer support will be provided to all customers using Oracle services on AWS, accompanied by combined billing and database administration services.
Oracle Database@AWS is currently in preview, and will GA in 2025.
“This is a very impactful announcement, and a key takeaway is that it’s giving Oracle more multi-cloud credibility,” said Ron Westfall, analyst with The Futurum Group. “Oracle has been most proactive amongst the major cloud providers addressing customer demand for multi-cloud flexibility. They already have a relationship with Microsoft Azure and as well as Google Cloud, and following up with AWS was a highly anticipated and most welcomed move.”
Watch this week’s Gestalt IT News Rundown for a detailed coverage of this report.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Oracle Links Oracle Autonomous Database Services to AWS Expanding Footprint on Hyperscaler Infrastructure
Juniper Networks has added two new capabilities to the Apstra Cloud Services suite. Service Assurance and Impact Analysis provide improved app-to-network visibility enabling better datacenter assurance with AIOPs.
Available as part of Marvis VNA under the Apstra Premium License tier, the solutions jointly elevate service awareness and reduce time to resolution, says Juniper Networks.
Service or App Awareness integrates app and service data with the Juniper network knowledge graph. This organically amps up visibility of apps and services allowing teams to explore dependencies and communications across the network.
Impact Analysis enriches this data by correlating issues and impacts with machine learning. This helps IT teams to troubleshoot issues promptly and ensure optimum app performance and availability.
“It makes a lot of sense to the tactical operations side of things” says Tom Hollingsworth. “This enhancement takes what Marvis has built, which historically has been very focused on wireless and campus networking, and it drags that into the datacenter with AI-native networking which is the tagline Juniper has been using for quite a while. There’s a real opportunity here to bring that focus into the datacenter and that is hugely important for post Juniper and HPE acquisition.”
To learn more, be sure to watch this week’s Gestalt IT Rundown where Tom Hollingsworth and Ron Westfall discuss the new enhancements and talk about how they can help Juniper Networks position itself post-acquisition.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Juniper Networks Adds New AIOps Enhancements to Datacenter Assurance
Cisco recently announced its intent to acquire Israeli startup company, Robust Intelligence, for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition marks a significant step forward for Cisco as it plans to expand into the emerging field of AI security.
In a rapidly evolving threat landscape, protecting AI assets has rose to a top priority for organizations. AI security technologies like Robust Intelligence’s aim to eliminate inherent weaknesses in AI models and systems giving them protection against a plethora of threats.
Robust Intelligence specializes in automated security and vulnerability testing for AI models, a technology that aligns organically with Cisco’s AI security play.In the press release, Cisco laid out its vision for the acquisition. Robust Intelligence’s technology will serve as a safety layer for Cisco Security Cloud providing AI applications and models default protection. Additionally, the company’s AI security expertise will lend itself to drive Cisco’s in-house innovation in the same.
To learn more, check out this week’s Gestalt IT News Rundown, or give Krista Macomber’s article on this a read at The Futurum Group website.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Cisco Ventures into AI Security with the Acquisition of Robust Intelligence
Last week was a big week for tech. Several companies made headlines with announcements of acquisitions and mergers.
After AMD, HPE is headed for a planned acquisition. The company announced on 15th that it is acquiring long-time partner, hybrid cloud management company, Morpheus Data.
Executive vice president and CTO, Fidelma Russo said that the acquisition marks a significant step for HPE as it will help launch GreenLake as “the de facto platform for innovation” in the hybrid space.
HPE’s flagship product, GreenLake, leverages Morpheus under the covers. It is the orchestration and automation solution that powers many of GreenLake’s offerings like ProLiant and Ezmeral. The acquisition will further enhance GreenLake’s capabilities expanding HPE’s footprints into the intelligent CloudOps market.
The buy will enable HPE to provide seamless provisioning and workload management across cloud environments. These will include brownfield public and private infrastructures. GreenLake will also inherit Morpheus’ cost-optimization and FinOps capabilities. This will bring to GreenLake customers control to monitor and optimize their cloud usage and costs.
The new capabilities will make GreenLake the first full-stack solution for hybrid cloud management. Morpheus will also be available to HPE customers as a separate product
The deal is expected to close by the fourth fiscal quarter of 2024.
Watch the Gestalt IT Rundown that discusses the details of the acquisition. Also check out the SixFive Webcast episode by The Futurum Group where Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead explain why this a powerful alliance.
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You may have heard of Vela, IBM’s AI supercomputer. Vela meets customers with varying compute needs for GenAI model training right where they are.
Born in the IBM Cloud in 2022, Vela was designed keeping in mind the variable compute demands across the different stages of the AI lifecycle. Many IBM’s internal AI technologies have been trained and prototyped on this supercomputer.
Sulagna Saha / For Gestalt ITWhile Vela continues to provide extensive support for AI workflows, IBM is stepping up the game. It is expanding Vela’s capabilities. Last year, the company started development of a more powerful version of Vela, named Blue Vela, that will support IBM Research’s AI training jobs.
It is said that Blue Vela is threefold faster, and packs significant compute capacities for bigger model training jobs. That opens door for IBM to leverage it for rapid development of its most complex models. Unlike Vela, the Blue Vela cluster is stationed in IBM’s on-premise Research datacenter.
On Gestalt IT Rundown this past week, hosts Stephen Foskett and Tom Hollingsworth discusses the architecture and performance of Blue Vela, telling the audience what to expect. Take a listen, and for more stories like this one, sign up for the Gestalt IT newsletter today.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: IBM Continues Work on AI-Optimized Supercomputing Infrastructure with Blue Vela for the Most Ambitious Model Training Jobs
The rapid rise of AI is a phenomenon to behold. But behind its allure are well-kept secrets some of which are slowly coming to light. At Black Hat USA 2024, Zenity, a company that designs security controls for enterprise chatbots, claimed that all defaults in Microsoft Copilot Studio, the drag-and-drop tool for building bespoke AI assistants, are insecure.
Copilot has proven its worth as a very handy enterprise tool with clever, low-code capabilities. Copilot Studio extends Microsoft’s AI technology to customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) where non-technical administrators can take advantage of ready-made models to create custom conversational bots for internal use.
Fine-tuned with internal business data, these bots are extremely useful for targeting specific enterprise use cases. But they come with serious holes in the security controls.
Zenity CTO, Michael Bargury, in an interview with The Register, said that building a safe Copilot Studio bot is tricky. The platform’s loose controls make the chatbots vulnerable by design.
If successful, an adversary can potentially take command of a chatbot and provide false outputs for its enterprise users, while harvesting credentials from the backend.
Zenity claimed that they have found over 3000 Copilot bots online that were meant to strictly be used inside organizations . Due to Copilot Studio’s weak security defaults, these bots are discoverable on the Internet, and accessible to the public.
In the presentation, Zenity showed how using malicious code injections, these chatbots can be made to expose sensitive company information.
Stephen Foskett and Tom Hollingsworth go over this in last week’s Rundown where they talk about the dangers of relying on chatbots without putting safety controls in place. Check it out to learn why businesses should be wary, and what needs to be done before deploying a copilot in the environment.
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Qlik Connect 2024 had an on-point theme. All sessions and workshops focused on data insights through AI, a topic that is on everyone’s minds and lips. As data takes centerstage, and AI rises to be the technology of choice to harvest it, Qlik seizes the opportunity to bring the two together to amplify their value through each other.
This week’s Rundown takes a Closer Look at the key highlights from Qlik Connect 2024. Presenting from the floors of Qlik Connect in Orlando, Florida, cohosts, Stephen Foskett and Gina Rosenthal, bring to the audience witty observations and insights on the top announcements, and the latest news in tech.
Be sure to check out this week’s News Rundown at GestaltIt.com.
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One of the things announced at the Red Hat Summit this year is InstructLab. An AI community project, InstructLab is the product of the collaboration between Red Hat and IBM.
For quite some time, IBM has been working on a new methodology called Large-scale Alignment for Chatbots, abbreviated as LAB. It is a way to introduce new data into foundational models to improve their scalability at the fine-tuning phase. Based on the same approach, InstructLab provides large LLMs for GenAI applications. This lends enterprises an easy and affordable way to tweak and continually improve their models.
The project seeks to make the alignment of LLMs better while encouraging people with limited AI skills to contribute to the community.
In this episode of Gestalt IT News Rundown, Tom Hollingsworth and Stephen Foskett share their views on this announcement, and what this collaboration means for the individual companies.
To get a rundown of the announcements from the Red Hat Summit 2024, check out Paul Nashawaty’s article on this. Be sure to catch the News Rundown every Wednesday for more such interesting editorial discussions on technology.
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Since Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, a lot of changes have taken place internally. But what has made the biggest impact on the customers is Broadcom’s revision of VMware’s software licensing price list. Prices have jumped up from 5% to 25% as licensing tiers have been merged and restructured.
Camberley Bates, VP of Data Infrastructure, and Steven Dickens, VP and Practice Leader at The Futurum Group, drill down on the implications of the price changes for vSphere and VCF, and predict how it might make way for new competition in the market.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITCheck out their Market Insight Report – “Server Virtualization: To Be or Not to Be vSphere” on the Futurum website for more insights on this. Keep reading here at GestaltIT.com for more such interesting stories.
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The 2024 ISC Top500 supercomputer edition was just announced. The list that famously tracks down the fastest supercomputers in the world, features many known names and some surprising entries. Gestalt IT News Rundown takes its customary Closer Look, and reveals some of the most consequential supercomputing trends of this year.
Watch host Stephen Foskett, and Principal Analyst of Techstrong Group, Mitch Ashley, offer a deep dive in this episode of Rundown.
Be sure to catch the News Rundown Wednesdays for more interesting news from the world of tech.
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The transition from typical office-based work to remote and hybrid styles is accompanied by myriad challenges. Top among them is adapting the current ways of communication and collaboration to the changed working conditions.
Luckily companies that are supplying the technology to support this shift are stepping forward. Logitech is helping companies drive this technological transformation with a host of AI-powered software features within its products. RightSense is purpose-built to provide employees elevated audio-visual performances during virtual meetings.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITEmbedded within Logitech devices like cameras and microphones, the technology optimizes the audio-visual output no matter what the choice of video-conferencing platform is.
Keith Kirkpatrick, Research Director and Analyst at The Futurum Group, of which Gestalt IT is now a part, publishes an extensive report on this. Titled “Enhancing Employee Experience with Logitech’s AI-Enabled Features”, the report is free to download at the Futurum website.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Virtual Meetings Got More Immersive with Logitech
Since the beginning of cybercrime, businesses have been vulnerable to a gamut of email-based threats. One of organizations’ weakest links, emails have been the portal that cyber criminals have leveraged over and over to deliver malwares and bots.
The option to reject or delete emails from unknown senders with attachments was always a part of Microsoft 365’s email service, but isn’t enough in the present-day threat landscape. Experts recommend blocking .zip and .mov top-level domains (TLDs) from the network for good measure.
Image: Sulagna Saha @ Gestalt ITJoey D’Antoni, IT veteran and Field Day delegate, takes the readers through the process of enabling it, in his blog “Blocking .zip and .mov Top Level Domains from Office 365 Email”. He writes,
Last week, Google announced that they were selling domain registrations for the .zip and .mov top-level domains (TLDs). Google registered these TLDs as part of ICANN’s generic top level domain program. Spammers and threat actors everywhere have rejoiced at this notion–.zip and .mov files are very common malware vectors. While there haven’t been any real-world observations of attacks the SANS institute is recommended proactively blocking these domains from your network, until we better understand their behavior.
To learn how these domains can be blocked, read his blog – “Blocking .zip and .mov Top Level Domains from Office 365 Email”. For more such stories, sign up to our weekly newsletter and get notified about interesting posts from our community.
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In tech, small footprints equal eco-friendly. Together with cost benefits, the promises of small setups have led a lot of small to mid-tier companies to opt for 2-node clusters. At a much smaller footprint, the 2-node config delivers performance, and availability, all the same reducing impacts, as seen in the StorMagic presentation at the recent Edge Field Day event. Compared to some bulkier configurations, this combination is a better fit for edge deployments.
Image: Sulagna Saha @ Gestalt ITAlthough perfect in a lot of ways, a 2-node cluster configuration has one shortfall – it cannot handle split-brain scenarios unless designed to do so.
In his recent article, “Cluster with 2-Nodes only – How about quorum?”, Vladan Seget, independent consultant, and Field Day delegate, addresses this and proposes a workaround. He writes,
If you’re thinking about 2-Node cluster configuration, one of the challenges might be the question on how split-brain scenarios are handled?
To learn how you can get around this problem and still be on a small setup, read Seget’s blog – “Cluster with 2-Nodes only – How about quorum?”. For more such stories, sign up to our weekly newsletter and get notified about interesting posts from our community.
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Consistent work stress presents greater risks to health than previously realized, studies say. The long work weeks, packed with back-to-back meetings and deadlines spawns FOMO, and the pressure to stay tuned 24/7 leaves us restless and fatigued. Ironically, the more hours you put in, the more the feeling deepens until it becomes an ever-present cycle of anxiety and exhaustion. Some call it burnout.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITJ Michel Metz, Chair of SNIA’s Board of Directors, and Technical Director at AMD, shares his wake-up moment as he experiences the passing away of a dear colleague, and what he taught him about work-life balance. In his blog “A Wake-Up Call”, Metz writes,
The last few weeks have been pedal-to-the-metal.
I’ve been putting out a nearly obscene amount of output. I’ve written nearly 20,000 words on various documents (that few people will likely ever read – the joys of being in tech), I’ve been pulling 60, 70, even 80-hour weeks. When it rains, it pours; the number of fire-drills has increased almost exponentially.
Read the full story in his blog “A Wake-Up Call”. For more updates like this, sign up to our free weekly newsletter and get notified about more such interesting posts from our community.
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Cloud Field Day 18 brought together a great delegate panel, and many of these joined Nathan Bennett for an “after-action report” immediately following the event. This panel included Field Day delegates Nathan Bennett, Eric Wright, John Hildebrand, Chris Hildebrandt, and Ken Nalbone. Later, Matyáš Prokop, also a Field Day delegate, and event organizer Stephen Foskett joined in. Check out the full video below, and read on for a summary!
Juniper Networks was in the spotlight, introducing AI integration into Apstra. Their Terraform demonstration and AI clustering solutions received positive feedback, emphasizing Apstra’s solid product and unique use case. The focus on customer feedback and potential for future success highlights Juniper Networks as a forward-thinking tech company.
Mezmo, in a special Field Day Introduction session, presented its telemetry capabilities and consolidated approach. Attendees praised the user-friendly interface and recognized Mezmo’s potential for future growth. It’s exciting to see new players entering the tech arena with innovative solutions.
Prosimo stood out with its network automation and cross-cloud capabilities, hinting at further integration with data centers. The tech world is evolving rapidly, and companies like Prosimo are making strides to keep up.
VMware, a long-standing player in the industry, shouldn’t be written off. They’re adapting to the multi-cloud environment and are well aware of the hurdles they need to overcome to stay competitive. VMware’s transformation journey is a testament to their determination to remain a significant player.
WEKA, a data solution for AI, ML, and HPC, showcased a unique architecture tailored to specific use cases. WEKA’s emphasis on efficiency and cost reduction, along with their sustainability message, resonated well with the audience. The software-based approach they employ offers flexibility and optimization for their users.
Fortinet impressed with their automation and API mapping capabilities, particularly their ability to self-document undocumented APIs. They made a compelling case for using their WAF over cloud provider offerings, underscoring the importance of well-documented APIs in application development. Fortinet is undoubtedly one to watch in the security space.
In conclusion, Cloud Field Day 18 was an opportunity for the delegates to explore a wide variety of solutions and witness the evolution of the enterprise cloud. With established players like Juniper Networks and VMware, alongside newcomers like Mezmo and innovative companies like WEKA and Fortinet, the future of technology looks promising! Special thanks to Nathan Bennett for organizing this after-action video!
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A narrative that has been consistent around Kubernetes is that it’s complex. The orchestrator’s high learning curve has been its biggest adoption barrier till date. Regardless, if your company is like most enterprises, it probably uses multi-cloud and needs to upgrade to Kubernetes for better interoperability in multi-cloud environments.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITPacket Pushers hosts a podcast series, “Kubernetes Unpacked”, that talks about all things Kubernetes. In the latest episode, hosts and Field Day delegates, Michael Levan and Kristina Devochko, talk to guest, Geoff Burke, about data protection in Kubernetes. Levan notes,
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I feel like data protection is just like one of the things that nobody talks about all that much.
The conversation touches on the deep nuances of Kubernetes when it comes to data, and explores the backup and recovery options in K8s. Listen to the conversation here – “Kubernetes Unpacked 026: Data Backup and Recovery in Kubernetes”. For more updates like this, sign up to our free weekly newsletter today.
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Is your place a smart home? If yes, then you probably already use some kind of home automation application like Home Assistant to stay on top of your energy footprint. A popularly used open-source tool, Home Assistant provides actionable insights about energy consumption which are helpful to optimize utilization and reduce cost.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITFor long-term storing of sensor data, InfluxDB is the storage of choice. A time-series database, it records events at the rate of thousands of points per second. But as the volume of data starts to grow, one might find it difficult, and after a while, wild to mange it in InfluxDB.
In the blog, titled “Home Assistant: InfluxDB Data Management (LXC)”, long-time infrastructure-specialist-turned-cybersecurity-expert, Derek Seaman, demonstrates two approaches to managing InfluxDB data effectively when large amounts of data are involved. He writes,
This post covers a two pronged approach to managing your Home Assistant InfluxDB data. First, you can setup InfluxDB includes/excludes in Home Assistant which limit what data is sent to InfluxDB in the first place. This is highly configurable and what you want to keep long term is entirely up to you. Second, you can downsample your data.
To read about the solutions in depth, be sure to read Seaman’s article – “Home Assistant: InfluxDB Data Management (LXC)”. For more updates like this, sign up to our free weekly newsletter today.
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The semiconductor industry has been on a rollercoaster ride the past few years. First, the government crackdown on Chinese manufacturers brought things to a standstill. Now a parade of innovation and a worldwide wave of new semiconductor manufacturers are getting things started back again, depositing a fresh crop of new and exciting solutions in the market.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITAt MemCon 2023, Calif, Allyson Klein, Principal of TechArena and a Field Day delegate, met with Letizia Guiliano, VP of Product Marketing and Management at Alphawave Semi. Alphawave Semi is a 2017 semiconductor IP company that is known for high-speed connectivity silicon and IP solutions. Based out of UK, the company has made footprints globally with a portfolio that is catching a lot of eyeballs.
The conversation covered a wide range of germaine topics ranging from Alphawave’s homemade solutions to what in Guiliano’s view, is in the horizon of the semi industry. Klein kicks off the conversation by asking who Alphawave’s target customers are.
Alphawave has a very broad silicon portfolio, it’s quite expansive. When you look at what you’re offering in the industry, can you talk about the markets you’re serving and how you’re prioritizing the products that you’re delivering for your customers?
Check out Klein’s podcast – “The Future of Semi Innovation from Disruptive Memory to Chiplets with Alphawave Semi” to listen to the whole conversation. For more updates like this, sign up for our free weekly newsletter.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: The Future of Semiconductor, with a Budding Manufacturer
Marketing is a widely misplaced term in business. Interpreted differently across the board, the word “marketing” is often understood as the way to promote and sell a product or service. But in theory, marketing is as much about product as it is about promotion.
Image: Corey Dirrig (c) Gestalt ITGenerally, a product or service that is good and that fills a need not currently met in the market creates its own demand. Marketing, in this case, generates interest and elevates awareness in the target audience which is its true purpose. But often, a disproportionate amount of emphasis is laid on making products look outstanding than making products that stand out on their own.
A big reason for that is marketing offers a way for companies to put a pretty bow on a perfectly mediocre or even substandard product. With a little spit and polish, and marketing charm, it is quite possible to present a bad product as an irresistible one. Put into practice, this can blur the line between a good product and a bad one, leaving buyers misguided and confused.
On a recent episode of Tech Aunties Podcast, Angelia McFarland, and Field Day delegate, Gina Rosenthal peel back the layers of marketing practices to reveal the realities of marketing in the current economy. McFarland says,
I have watched as marketing has lost its seat at the table at so many corporations and the discipline of marketing has been diffused so much across so many other roles to the point where it has become innocuous at best and harmful at worst.
Check out the podcast – “S1E2: Episode 1: The road to Wussville – or Marketing’s not so grand adventure” to listen to the entire conversation.
https://traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/9f4fb5b2-fcdb-41e1-b57d-ae68015d3ceb/04b636b9-55c4-46a9-a081-afe1012fd3a6/18654e88-e756-4ce3-8433-affb01609deb/audio.mp3
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In this article, Sulagna Saha brings to light Gina Rosenthal's illuminating thoughts on how to make machines more intelligent with AI.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha brings to light a tutorial from Michael Levan on how to configure HashiCorp's Vault in AWS to store secrets for Kubernetes workloads.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha highlight's Sarah Leah thoughts on the best features of Azure Arc.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha brings to light Rasika Nayanajith's review of the Ekahau Optimizer and providing a list of its best features.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha highlights Sara Lean's roundup of the key infrastructure announcements on her website.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha brings to light Brian Greenberg's top five cybersecurity issues of 2023 and ways to protect yourself from them.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha highlights Jody Gajic's thoughts on the generative AI wave and the facts behind the tech.
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One of the biggest news on the social media front today is the slow fading of Twitter. Twitter has lost a substantial chunk of its user base in the recent months, following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform and his subsequent parade of off-kilter decisions. But Twitter’s decline has been underway since a long time, and has its root not in these events, but in the gradual evolution of the platform.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITA lot of active users who frequently used Twitter to voice ideas and viewpoints have sounded frustration on the platform’s preferential engagement policies. Twitter’s strategic boosting of engagement and reach by undermining the interests of users has turned many users away over the years.
In an article titled “Consuming Content the Way You Want”, former network engineer, and Field Day lead, Tom Hollingsworth shares his experience of moving away from Twitter. He writes,
When I first started out on Twitter I could post things that were interesting to me. I could craft the way I posted those short updates. Did I want to be factual and dry? Or should I be more humorous and snarky? I crafted my own voice as I shared with others. My community grew organically. People that were interested in what I had to say joined up. Others chose to stick with their own circles. The key is that I was allowed to develop what I wanted to present to those around me.
Read the full story on NetworkingNerd.net. For more stories like this, sign up to our weekly newsletter.
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It was KubeCon Europe 2023 this last April. Like each year, this year too, KubeCon treated the audience to many releases, and announcements around new innovation. But the overarching theme was a growing diversity of competing solutions, hinting at a need for consolidation.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITA lot of the talks was around tackling old challenges in new ways. Architect and Field Day delegate, Chris Evans shares his impressions of the event in his article – “What’s Old is New at KubeCon”. He writes,
I’m just back from a few days at KubeCon 2023, where I enjoyed catching up with old friends and making some new ones. From the perspective of the CNCF project, it seems that what forms part of a mature operational IT strategy continues to be reinvented for the modern computing age.
To learn his impressions of the event, read the full story on Architecting IT. For more stories like this, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
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One of the hottest discussions in IT today is data gravity. It is the characteristic of bigger datasets to attract other smaller datasets, services and applications towards them. With data and applications congregating in one place, data gravity causes huge management overheads. But, with data that has no value, it leads to an even bigger problem – data clutter.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITIn a personal blog, Preston de Guise discusses the problems of data gravity, and explains how holding on to valueless data can bring unfavorable outcomes for organizations.
I’ve been thinking about data hoarding for a while. You see, in the last days of December 2022, my father died. Dad was many things, but he was also a compulsive hoarder. There was nothing healthy about the way he hoarded things. In the year before he died, he managed to let go of his LP collection of more than 40,000 33s, 45s and 78s, but that was a rare victory for the family. He maintained a belief (that we had repeatedly, at times gently and at times bluntly tried to disabuse him of) that once he died, my brother and I would take 6-12 months away from our jobs to sort through everything he had accumulated and auction it all for ‘maximum’ value. Instead, after he died, my relatives mounted a Herculean effort and organised the removal of several tonnes of junk.
Read Guise’s blog – Data Hoarding is Probably Holding your Business Back – to know how data hoarding happens, ways data gravity can impact businesses, and how it can be avoided. For more stories like this, sign up to our weekly newsletter.
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Moving to public cloud was like going with the flow for companies. But unmet expectations are now bringing them back to on-prem infrastructures.
As a last-ditch effort to check infrastructure cost, companies are shifting away from public cloud and setting up private infrastructures closer to home.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITStorage evangelist and long-time Field Day delegate, Chin-Fah Heoh drills into cloud repatriation in his recent article – “Reverting the Cloud First mindset”. The article delves into things that went wrong in cloud, and why industries are once again favoring on-premises and co-locations.
When cloud computing was all the rage, every business wanted to be on-board. Those who resisted felt the heat as the FOMO (fear of missing out) feeling set in, especially those who were doing this thing called “Digital Transformation“. The public cloud service providers took advantage of the cloud computing frenzy, calling for a “Cloud First” strategy. For a number of years, the marketing worked. The cloud first mentality became the tip of the tongue of many, encouraging droves to cloud adoption.
For the full story, read Heoh’s article – “Reverting the Cloud First mindset”. For more stories like this, sign up to our weekly newsletter.
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Adopting Kubernetes can be the smartest decision for an engineering company, but it comes with its fair share of complexities. And unless the teams are prepared for it, it can be a disruptor to otherwise smooth operations.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITEngineer in the Kubernetes space, and Field Day delegate, Michael Levan writes about the fences around adopting Kubernetes. In his article, he writes,
Kubernetes is going to be a major upgrade for you, how you deploy, and how you manage services. Kubernetes truly does make engineers’ lives easier. That said, Kubernetes and containerization as a whole can be incredibly complex for engineers to learn and organizations to adopt.
To know what hurdles companies should be ready to tackle when committing to Kubernetes, read the article “Barriers to Kubernetes”. For more stories like this, sign up to our weekly newsletter.
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No matter how happy you are with the internet connection at your home, there are always ways to make it better. There’s no such thing as too much bandwidth, and even a small upgrade can make a big difference to experiences with working from home, streaming Netflix and playing online games.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITCybersecurity expert, Derek Seaman wrote a network upgrade tutorial in his blog Derek Seaman’s IT Blog, where he shares his own experience upgrading his home network, and offers a step-by-step approach for the readers. He writes,
Along with a few updates to my 2023 dream home office setup (see post here), I also felt it was the time to do a whole house network upgrade. This post covers my network “refresh” that is built to support multi-gig, 10Gbps, PoE and enterprise WiFi. Nothing was broken with my old network, but it was put together over several years and wasn’t built to support anything higher than 1Gbps networking. 2023 is the year of my network upgrade!
Read his article – “Home Network Upgrade (2023 Edition)” to learn what you can do to get faster Internet around the house. For more stories like this, sign up to our weekly newsletter and never miss an update.
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Wikipedia defines tribal knowledge as knowledge that only exists within a certain group, and that which is not known outside of it. In IT, tribal knowledge exists within all workgroups, and while it enriches the quality of work and collaboration internally, it poses certain risks in the software development process.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITBrian Chambers, Lead Enterprise Architect at Chick-fil-A, and an active Field Day delegate, reveals the risks of tribal knowledge and shares tips to abate them. In his article – “Chamber of Tech Secrets #1”, he writes,
Our Chick-fil-A EA Principles: Build vs Buy post triggered some great questions. One that surprised me was a question about tribal knowledge, and if it has a higher likelihood to emerge and cause problems in build situations. This matter because every organization wants to be able to 1) operate their important business systems 2) continue to build in the future. They do not want human points-of-failure to prohibit that.
Check out the rest of the story in the post – “Chamber of Tech Secrets #1”. For more stories like this, sign up to our newsletter and get them in your inbox every week.
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Making a technical decision is a difficult responsibility. Often there isn’t a clear best choice, and sometimes, the scope of impact of a decision is so vast that you want to weigh the pluses and minuses over and over, instead of just going with your gut.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITRebecca Fitzhugh, author, consulting architect, and a Field Day delegate lays out the steps of making sound technical decisions. In an article titled “Making a Technical Decision”, she writes –
Decision-making is the cognitive process of selecting a course of action among several possible alternative options. Technical decision-making is less about the tool to pick and more about the problem to solve. Once the problem space is well defined, then evaluating the possible solutions becomes a lot easier. Technical decision-making cannot be outsourced.
Read the rest of the story “Making a Technical Decision”, where she takes the readers through the dos and don’ts, and explains the best process. For more stories like this, sign up to our weekly newsletter.
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We often don’t realize how nuanced cybersecurity terminologies are. Pick any word from the security word soup, and it has a meaning that is sacrosanct, and unique to it alone.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITNetworking professional and Field Day delegate, Tim Bertino backs this up. In a short illuminating article curiously titled “Security+ Journey – Lions, Tigers, and Bears”, Bertino chooses four most-used terms in cyber security – vulnerabilities, threats, risks and exploits that are often interchangeably used in the press, and explains their different meanings. He writes,
Yeah I know, I went for the catchy title to try to draw you into reading this. However, when looking at the topic of vulnerabilities, threats, and risks in my list, the title above is what came to mind. Thinking through it though, that title seems to work. Vulnerabilities, threats, and risks are all scary things we have to consider and account for. Now, depending on where you live, lions, tigers, and bears may not be as applicable in your daily life as vulnerabilities, threats, and risks, but I think you get the idea.
To know how some of the supposedly synonymous cybersecurity terms are different from each other in meaning, read Bertino’s article – “Security+ Journey – Lions, Tigers, and Bears”. To stay in the know, sign up to our weekly newsletter that delivers stories like this right to your inbox.
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One of the key trends to have dominated the industries through the turbulent years of the pandemic, and still continue to do so, is distributed working. Remote work, by eradicating the constraints of physical distance, has unlocked a kind of flexibility never experienced before. But more and most, it has reshaped the contours of network, changing networking forever.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITIn his article titled “NEW DRIVERS FOR WFH”, former college professor, and Field Day delegate, Peter Welcher discusses the current impacts of distributed working, and predicts its possible future effects on networking. He writes,
COVID started some shifts, U.S. or other politics may also start to be a factor, and climate change may also play a role. What will those shifts mean for networking?
To find the answer, read “NEW DRIVERS FOR WFH”, currently published on NetCraftsmen.com. For more tidbits like this, sign up to our free weekly newsletter.
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The biggest disruptor in AI currently is an experimental chatbot that we know as ChatGPT. Based on generative AI, ChatGPT can perform a surprisingly long list of things that range from answering questions to coming up with ideas to explaining concepts in plain speak. But opinions around it is mixed, and in fact quite conflicting. And the biggest of them is the lingering question – is the purpose of AI to enable or replace humans?
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITTim M. Crawford, a top CIO and a Field Day delegate, answers this question. In the article titled – “Is generative AI disruptive or enabling?”, Crawford shares his views on this. He writes,
In just the past 48 hours, both Google and Microsoft have made major announcements about their generative AI endeavors. Yesterday, Google announced a new conversational AI service called Bard which is based on LaMDA. Today, Microsoft announced they are reinventing search with new AI-powered Bing and Edge browsers.
Read the rest of the article – “Is generative AI disruptive or enabling?” to learn his perspective as a CIO on generative AI. For more such interesting stories, sign up to our weekly newsletter for free.
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Wikipedia defines technical debt as “the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.” That sounds like something we do all the time, and each time we do it, we accrue a little debt.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITIn software development, the measure of this cost is directly proportional to how long an organization goes without paying down the debt. The consequence of a really complex technical debt can be steep, but sometimes, the rework is necessary, even helpful for developers.
In an article titled “Debt”, Ed Summers talks about technical debt in a different light. He shows how it can mean very different things for different entities. He writes,
While it certainly is the case that technical debt accrues over time for the reasons that Eghbal goes on to describe, this definition implies that maintenance, and the paying down of technical debt, is something that comes after the software is conceived or released, and not there from the beginning and part of an ongoing practice.
Read the full story to understand how technical debt is a necessary part of learning, and can in fact, provide value. For more such interesting stories, sign up for our free newsletter.
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Blocks & Files recently published an interview with author and technical evangelist, W Curtis Preston, aka “Mr. Backup”. In the interview, Preston shares a wealth of information about backup from his experience of 30 years in the storage industry.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITThe author of Backup & Recovery, and long-time Field Day delegate said,
The biggest advancement in the last three decades – no question – is deduplication. VTLs were a bandaid. PBBAs are being replaced by SaaS. Very few people are using LTO in their backup systems. Yes, many are moving their backups to the cloud. But virtually all advancements in backups in the last two decades have dedupe to thank for them, because dedupe makes the physics and cost of backing up to disk and the cloud possible.
Read the interview – “Mr Backup spills the beans on 30 years in the storage industry” to know about the biggest advances in backup in the past years, the reason why tape is still a great option, backup in times of ransomware, and much more from an industry veteran. For more stories like this, sign up to our mailing list today.
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The last couple of months have been a nightmare for fliers. Two major outages forced authorities to ground numerous flights leading to long delays and impromptu cancellations. If you had somewhere to fly out to over the holiday season, you’re probably livid like the rest of the passengers stranded in the airport, paying for a fault that was not theirs. So, what caused the outages, and couldn’t they have been avoided?
The disruption was digital, which means someone out there could have done something to prevent the whole fiasco from happening, should they have been proactive. Field Day delegate, Chris Hayner offers a breakdown of what happened in his article – “Murphy’s Endgame : It’ll Definitely Go Wrong If We Never Even Try To Fix It”. In the article, Hayner writes,
So there were some interesting oopsies in the kind-of-important-not-to-have-oopsies airline industry at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. I’m going to highlight two of them that you probably heard about: The Southwest meltdown that caused something like 65% of flights to be canceled over the holidays, and the failure of the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions (or NOTAM) system. That one caused a 2-ish-hour “pause on all domestic departures.” These were both bad, for different reasons. But as we will see they share some unfortunate commonalities- not only with each other, but with a great many other organizations and businesses around the globe.
Read the rest of the story to get a full picture of what broke and caused the outages. For more such interesting stories, be on our mailing list.
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The Internet is one big place for everyone, right? Wrong! The Internet is more divided than you know. It belongs to the big corporations that have been using their influence to monopolize and privatize it right before our eyes. And these monopolies have made the democratic Internet that we knew a thing of the past. But none of it is news because we all have known it on some level.
In the article titled “Internet for the People”, software developer and researcher, Ed Summers refers to the titular book by Ben Tarnoff to point out the political economy that is at play within the modern-day internet. He writes,
We must strike while the iron is hot to break apart monopolies up and down the infrastructural stack (both providers and platforms) wherever and whenever we can. This needs to happen both from the outside and from within these monopolies.
Follow his thoughts and give the article “Internet for the People” a read. For more such interesting stories, sign up for our weekly newsletter for free.
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When purchasing or subscribing to a new solution, organizations can send out a set of documents requesting information. These documents are of three different types, namely RFI or request for information, RFP or request for proposal and RFQ or request for price quotation.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITJust from their names, these requests may seem very similar, if not the same, but they have some sharp distinction. A company needs to fully understand those differences to exercise their right to information and get the most out of their investment.
In the article titled “Cloud Essentials+ Journey – Request for What?”, longtime IT professional and Field Day delegate, Tim Bertino talks about these requests outlining their differences. He writes,
Purchasing and implementing new solutions is a big part of the game for IT departments. Any time we deal with purchasing new gear or solutions, we are working with vendors, partners, and resellers. When working with these outside entities, there are different requests that we can draft to send to our partners/resellers/service providers. These are named request for information (RFI), request for proposal (RFP), and request for quote (RFQ). Here are my interpretations of these three request types.
To read the rest of the article, head over to Bertino’s blog Netication.com. Check out his “Cloud Essentials+ Journey” series for more resourceful materials on cloud journey. For more such interesting stories, sign up to our mailing list or follow us on social media.
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Artificial Intelligence is making strides in all directions. It’s presence in certain spheres of IT has made technologies sharper, and day jobs of engineers a lot easier. One of the areas where AI is outpacing other technologies is network security.
Lately the employment of AI in network security has yielded remarkable results in reducing security incidents. But AI is a sharp tool, and in the wrong hands, it can very easily be our undoing.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITIT professional and Field Day delegate Tony Mattke shares his insider view on using artificial intelligence in network security, and predicts if AI will gain more purchase in Information Security in 2023. In a recently posted article, he writes,
Gartner has been saying that “next big thing” in network security is the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies for years now… Mainly because these technologies have the potential to revolutionize the way that network security is managed by enabling systems to learn and adapt to new threats in real-time.
Read the rest of the article – “Will 2023 be the year of Artificial Intelligence of InfoSec?” on Mattke’s blog Router Jockey. For more interesting stories like this, sign up to our mailing list for free.
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Network automation, if done right, can produce results equal to magic, but that is an outsize promise and might I say, even a bit misleading, to make to someone who has merely scratched the surface. The first steps to tapping into network automation is to understand the engineering part of it, and the best way to do that is through training.
If you’re looking to getting handsy with network automation or somewhere mid-way dizzy with confusion, you’re in luck. The internet presents information galore straight from the mouths of IT professionals’ that can help you there.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITOne of those resources is Anton Karneliuk’s article on network automation. In response to the questions he gets from his readers, Karneliuk, a network expert, put together a list of helpful tips for network engineers on how to start and continue to use network automation. He writes,
The amount of things you need to learn in order to succeed is huge and growing daily with new tools and platforms released. However, the good news is that we provide you everything you need to start successfully in the role.
To read the tips, read Karneliuk’s article – “Tips For Network Engineers Willing to Transit to Network Automation”. Sign up to our weekly newsletter and never miss a story again.
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Network switch failures are common occurrences. The more the switches, the higher the number of failures. Sometimes, a failure happens within the first couple months of deployment, while in other cases, it happens after years. The causes of failure are as varied as the switches themselves. They range from hardware flaws to power failure to software glitches.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITNetwork guru and long-time Field Day delegate Russ White takes the lid off network switch failures to offer a closer look at the root of the problem. In an article posted on Packet Pushers, White writes,
I’ve used the example of some (very) old lab testing with EIGRP to show how increasing the number of redundant (parallel) links or paths in a network doesn’t necessarily increase the resilience of a network. This Microsoft paper gives us some real numbers.
Read his article – “Thoughts On Switch Failures” to understand the factors that contribute to switch failures. For more such stories, sign up for our free weekly newsletter.
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In October Apple announced that the new models of iPad Pro will feature support for Wi-Fi 6E. That made iPad Pro the first, and so far the only device in Apple’s portfolio to have Wi-Fi 6E. This instantly stirred up the Apple users community. I mean, what can be more exciting than using the 6GHz band on the best ever tablet? 6E already means faster and more reliable connectivity, but you can up the game by optimizing 6E networks for the devices.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt IT In a recently posted article, Ben Toner, Founder and CEO of Numerous Networks and an avid blogger takes the readers through the steps of setting up a 6E network explaining how you can get the most out of it on your iPad Pro. He writes,
The new iPad Pro marks a milestone for Apple as the first Apple device to support of Wi-Fi 6E, utilising the relatively new 6GHz band. This is a significant step, but in true Apple style, the implementation is one which sets out to protect the user experience by way of battery consumption, device responsiveness and best network selection. So how do you go about optimizing Wi-Fi 6E networks for Apple Devices?
Read Toner’s article – “Optimizing Wi-Fi 6E networks for Apple Devices” for a step-by-step tutorial. For more stories like this, be sure to sign up to our mailing list today.
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As Internet archives fill up with CXL tutorials, vaunted industry experts take turns parsing the technology to the bone, in their effort to find answers to some of the most pressing public questions. For example, we know that CXL enables high composability at datacenters by unlocking massive memory for surprisingly low cost – and that is a golden ticket for organizations handling memory-intensive workloads – but what about latency?
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITHistorically, we have seen that putting memory away from CPU does not help lower latency. So what is the memory latency like with CXL? Is it as bad as we have seen in the past, or is it any better?
In his article “Just How Bad IS CXL Memory Latency”, author Tobias Mann compares CXL’s latency with other architectures, and delivers a verdict. He writes,
Conventional wisdom says that trying to attach system memory to the PCI-Express bus is a bad idea if you care at all about latency. The further the memory is from the CPU, the higher the latency gets, which is why memory DIMMs are usually crammed as close to the socket as possible.
“JUST HOW BAD IS CXL MEMORY LATENCY” is published on The Next Platform where Mann is a regular contributor. Give the article a read to learn about the latency numbers of CXL when paired with the most powerful processors in the market. To take a deep dive into CXL, give a listen to the Gestalt IT podcast series on CXL, Utilizing CXL.
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UnifabriX, a 2020 startup from Israel laser-focused on CXL, came out of stealth with the first-in-the-market Smart Memory Node based on CXL 3.0. The company gave its first live demo at SC22, the international conference for HPC computing in November.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITUnifabriX is the first company to develop a performance-focused CXL-based system, leveling the misalignment between processor and memory. The Smart Memory Node promises heavy performance uplifts for datacenters handling HPC workloads. With its high-performance memory pooling and sharing, and high bandwidth, datacenter operators now have a proven way to overcome performance bottlenecks.
Blocks & Files’ Chris Mellor covers this in his recently posted article – “Startup UnifabriX exits stealth model with CXL 3.0 Smart Memory device demo” He writes,
UnifabriX was started in January 2020 by Hyatt and CTO Danny Volkind. Seed funding was provided by VCS and angel investors. Hyatt is an ex-platform architect in Intel’s Data Center Group who joined Huawei as a Smart Platforms CTO in 2018. He left to launch UnifabriX. Volkind was a system architect at Intel and was employed by Huawei as a Chief Architect. Both were at PMC Sierra before Intel and attended Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology.
Give the article – “Startup UnifabriX exits stealth model with CXL 3.0 Smart Memory device demo” a read to know more about the technology. For more breaking news and immersive discussions on CXL, be sure to watch our Utilizing CXL series.
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The age of information brings with it tidal waves of data that carry rich, valuable information. But that has a downside, and its more than a problem of data inflation. There’s a larger discussion happening out there, and it is about information warfare.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITFalse information is being fabricated and spoon-fed systematically to the masses through the internet. And profit-seeking social media platforms with their poor moderation policies and practices are fueling this coup. Some of these platforms have wound up being mouthpieces for peddlers of misinformation, amplifying their voices and extending their reach.
This is a clear testament to the fact that information can both be a blessing and a curse. While on one hand, it is the lifeblood of civilizations and movements, the same information at the wrong hands pollutes young minds, and grossly manipulates the thinking of the masses. That is the power of information.
Chin-Fah Heoh, a storage evangelist and Field Day delegate talks about the yin and yang of data in his article- “Societies in crisis. Data at fault”. He writes,
The deluge of data is astounding. We get bombarded and attacked by data every single waking minute of our day. And it will get even worse. Our senses will be numbed into submission. In the end, I ask in the sense of it all. Do we need this much information force fed to us at every second of our lives?
Check out Heoh’s article “Societies in crisis. Data at fault” for an enlightening read on how information is the double-edged sword of the digital era.
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If you, like the rest of the Internet, are done with Twitter – or not – you must follow the Mastodon chatter. Because, users quitting Twitter now have a choice – an even better alternative.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITTwitter was the first of its kind. No other social media platform was like it – professional, but fun, a mouthpiece for anybody seeking a global audience, and most importantly, not a cesspool of nonsensical memes and toxic misinformation. Twitter had the reputation of being the social media of intellectuals and artists, politicians and entrepreneurs, and their follower base. Post Elon Musk, Twitter is a wholly different place.
So, as people are leaving the Twitter turmoil behind, there is an emerging platform that is pulling the crowd to it – its Mastodon. Developed by Eugen Rochko, a 25-year-old entrepreneur, Mastodon is first and foremost, not-for-profit. It’s free of ads, and if you can believe it, self-moderated. It’s now possible create your own communities and make your own set of rules. It is that customizable, and for that reason, removed from the sphere of influence of other communities.
Michelle Laverick, an IT professional from Derbyshire, UK and a Field Day delegate has a deeply interesting story on the emergence of Mastodon and downfall of Twitter, and the bigger backdrop on which these are happening. She writes,
It’s no irony to me that the up-and-coming internet platform is named after a once-extinct animal whose period on earth ended some 5 million years ago. For many, it’s a refreshing reminder of the idealism of the early days of mass internet use ushered in the 90s. Oh, how sweetly naive and innocent we all were back then – with our talk of “information superhighways”. Little did we know what kind of virtual world we were constructing almost 30 years hence.
To follow her thoughts, read the rest of the article – “Mastodon and the Miocene Era of the Internet”. For more interesting stories like this, sign up to our free weekly newsletter, or watch our weekly News Rundown show.
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Microsoft HPC guru Glenn K. Lockwood attended SC22 and provided a great overview of the event. Although perhaps a bit underwhelmed by exascale, quantum, and composability, there was still a lot to see, notably cloud HPC, DAOS, and of course his specialty, I/O. We are especially interested in DAOS, since Intel’s cancellation of Optane made many wonder where that technology would go. It seems that DAOS will not only live on (with NAND flash) but continues to gain momentum from some of the biggest cloud and supercomputing users!
The most surprising observation of the tutorial is how many attendees aren’t using MPI anymore. We got a lot of questions last year about task-oriented I/O, and this year had some great questions about trying to understand or tune the I/O performed by Python-based analytics frameworks. We decided to add support for Darshan to profile non-MPI applications back in 2019 which is now paying dividends by ensuring it is a relevant tool for these new analytics and AI workloads, and we’ll probably have to give more attention to optimizing these workloads’ I/O in the future.
Read Glenn’s entire article on his blog: SC’22 Recap
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As multicloud became mainstream, organizations with deep pockets are found jumping headfirst into it, because why not? Being in multicloud is like sampling different flavors of cloud till you find your favorite flavors to build a personalized home in the cloud. But there is a caveat to joining the multicloud club – it is loaded with security challenges.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITField Day delegate and long-time technology analyst Melissa Palmer addresses the security challenges in multicloud in her recent article – A Closer Look at Chef Cloud Security – where she reviews Progress Chef’s multicloud security solution, Chef Cloud Security that provides users full visibility into their multicloud accounts. Users can centrally monitor and mitigate configuration errors that often enhance the risk profile of an organization in multicloud. She writes,
One of the most common misconceptions organizations succumb to when moving to the cloud is the cloud is inherently secure. This couldn’t be farther from the truth and many organizations end up with more risk than they bargained for. The worst part? Because organizations often leverage multiple cloud providers, they don’t have a handle on where the risk falls in each of their cloud environments.
To know what security challenges you are likely to face in multicloud and how Chef Cloud Security can help combat them, read the full article – A Closer Look at Chef Cloud Security.
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Lately data protection and data security have become interchangeable terms, and that is worth noticing. Many organizations in the data protection space market themselves as data security companies. While in textbooks, data protection is a section that appears under the bigger umbrella of data security, in marketing vocabulary, it has rose to consume and replace data security. It makes one wonder if this rebranding is only a marketing maneuver or is it an indication of what’s to come.
Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt ITIn a recently posted article – “Data Security is the new Data Protection” – Field Day delegate and architect, Chris Evans talks about this and shares his own stance on how this changes the way we protect our data. He writes,
Back in the early 2010s, data protection was in a depressing state. There had been little or no innovation over the previous decade, save perhaps for the transition to disk-based backups and data-deduplication appliances. CDP turned out to be a busted flush, as end users realised the misalignment between a transaction and block-based storage updates.
To follow his thoughts, read the rest of the article – “Data Security is the new Data Protection“. For more interesting news updates, be sure to catch the weekly News Rundown show every Wednesday on Gestalt IT.
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When the world is moving in the direction of cloud, there are a few outliers headed the other way – getting off of it. That may sound absurd, even unambitious, or excessively bold, but it’s happening.
Technology Evangelist and Field Day delegate Ben Kepes cites the example of one such company that believes in doing things differently. Sharing the story with his readers, Ben reveals if getting off the cloud is the best decision for them. He writes,
In my youth I was a bit of a fan of Bible stories. Not for religious reasons, mind, but simply because they strike me as being interesting historical vignettes that are sometimes applicable to modern situations. One I particularly liked was that of the Tower of Babel. For those who sadly missed Bible for Beginners, this tale tells of a united human race that spoke a single language.
Read Kepes’ article – “This company is moving off the cloud. Is that a sign of things to come?” for the full story. For more stories like this, keep reading here at gestaltit.com.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha highlights Timothy Prickett Morgan's discussion on the Ada Lovelace GPU and compares the performance of L40 GPU accelerator with that of its precursor Ampere A40.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha brings to light Chris Evans' thoughts on his test drive with Verge.io's software-defined data center.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha highlights Brian Krebs' look at the anatomy of ATM skimmers and writes on how to protect yourself from them.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha highlights Backblaze's study on the SSDsin the Backblaze Cloud Storage platform.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha how Jeffrey Burt establishes the power of using the network to connect the data center, public cloud, edge, and more.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha brings to light Chris Evans thoughts on if Dell is seeing enough traction with APEX storage services.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha brings to light Henrietta Ijenebe's thoughts on Shikitega, a brand new multi-stage infection chain Linux based malware.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha brings to light Timothy Prickett Morgan's deep dive on Tesla's Dojo AI Supercomputer.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha highlights Chris Hayner's thoughts on what makes a good leader and his takeaways.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha brings to light Chris Mellor's thoughts on Folio Photonics new multi-layer optical disk system.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha brings to light Field Day Delegate Rowell Dionicio's list of mistakes that are likely to cause performance issues with Wi-Fi.
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In this article, Sulagna Saha brings to light a list of updates on VMware Cloud on AWS from Field Day delegate Ather Beg.
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