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The market for enterprise AI platforms is exploding with new companies appearing every day. Many of these are fresh designs built from the ground up around the present wave of large language models (LLMs).

Veritone, with a decade of history, and big-name applications and customers to its credit, is different. Their aiWARE platform is bigger and better than the new crop of competing products, many of which are simply an aggregation of open-source models.

aiWARE represents a fully developed, enterprise-ready AI platform that has a record of successful deployments spanning years. It owes to Veritone’s audio and video processing foundation – one of the early uses of modern AI – now adapted to a wide range of data types and industries.

A Modular, Containerized ArchitectureThe modular, containerized design of aiWARE lends a versatility rare in other products. Built around Docker containers with webhooks for input and output, the architecture allows developers to easily integrate Veritone’s 400+ AI services into cohesive, enterprise-ready applications.

The design makes services event-driven ,and configurable to very specific workflows without extensive customization, said Al Brown, CTO and Lance Gorji, director of product management during a briefing with Gestalt IT this week. Each AI service—whether it’s audio transcription, facial recognition, entity extraction, or geolocation—can be deployed individually or combined into complex workflows, creating a robust foundation for scalable AI applications.

It also positions Veritone to support the emerging Agentic AI trend, where autonomous AI agents act independently based on predefined parameters. Because aiWARE is inherently event-driven, developers can easily set up AI agents that trigger, process, and act upon data inputs without manual intervention, making it highly adaptable for applications that require real-time responsiveness.

The webhook-based design supports would-be agents to be deployed in different configurations, with filters and processing steps plugged in where needed.

Vertical-Specific Solutions that Highlight Flexibility and ScalabilityaiWARE aims to meet the unique demands of sectors like Media & Entertainment, Public Sector, and Human Resources (HR), where specialized workflows require more than generic AI capabilities.

In Media & Entertainment, for instance, Veritone has deployed its platform to enhance live event broadcasting at NASCAR: aiWARE analyzes and transcribes driver communications in real-time, adding timecoded context to generate searchable records. Broadcasters and team analysts use these insights for content creation, detecting trends during the race.

In healthcare, Veritone supports patient care through processing and summarization of data from audio and video interactions with patients. Healthcare providers take advantage of its actionable treatment summaries to make more informed decision.

By combining its cognitive engines—such as speech-to-text, entity recognition, and natural language processing—Veritone also enables healthcare teams to monitor and document patient interactions, ensuring that essential information is accessible for review and oversight.

Veritone’s capabilities support the Public Sector with deployments that include solutions for government operations like the Joint AI Command, where Veritone’s platform aggregates and analyzes data from public and private sources to generate timely intelligence.

In all of these scenarios, Veritone demonstrates a commitment to keeping humans “on the loop” but not as roadblocks. aiWARE’s design allows human operators to supervise and intervene in workflows, ensuring ethical and transparent use of AI in areas where accountability is essential.

aiWARE as an Enterprise AI Operating SystemThe aiWARE AI operating system is designed to handle large-scale, complex data processing tasks across various domains. Hosted in the cloud, on AWS or Azure, it is secure, scalable, and adaptable to a broad range of enterprise needs.

The platform’s cognitive engines are organized into categories that serve as specialized transformers—for example, an audio stream can be transformed into a searchable transcript complete with timecodes, ready for further analysis, filtering, or output.

The AI services available on aiWARE support both real-time and batch processing, making it versatile enough to meet the needs of time-sensitive applications, as well as those that require in-depth analysis over longer periods. Because of its event-based design, each service can trigger additional workflows or connect with other cognitive engines to create dynamic, multi-step processes. Coupled with Veritone’s containerized architecture, it provides enterprises with a powerful toolkit for deploying AI in complex, data-intensive settings.

Ready for Agentic AI and BeyondWith a modular, containerized architecture, an extensive array of AI services, and a proven commitment to responsible AI practices, Veritone has built a solid and proven foundation. That and the platform’s modular and action-based design give it a head start in the development of Agentic AI solutions in the future. However, that’s not the most impressive thing about Veritone aiWARE. It is its long history of real-world use by major customers that few other enterprise AI platforms can match.

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Commvault Shift 2024 is exploring how Commvault is redefining the way we think about approaching cyber resilience for the AI era. We invite you to follow our live blog of the event or register here.

And that's a wrap. Your 5 key takeaways from #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/wSWESlaXqj

— Karen Lopez (@datachick) October 9, 2024

Ethan Banks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanbanks_commvaultshift-activity-7249878364717494273-XAob/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Key Takeaways#CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience @Commvault pic.twitter.com/n1dvInYlOf

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

6 Principles of Resilient Systems. #CommvaultSHIFT pic.twitter.com/6WJkynBz5s

— Karen Lopez (@datachick) October 9, 2024

What makes it a competitive advantage: complex systems are hard to duplicate.#CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience @Commvault

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113279280236576925

Jack Poller on Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@poller/113279310249245425

Reeves is using the human immune system as an example of a resilient system@Commvault#CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Resilience is formed of 6 principle highlights @MartinKReeves @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/CFMuc9JXbd

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113279272462638481

Embeddedness: making sure your resilient system is embedded in a resilient system@Commvault#CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

The 6 principles of resilient systems@Commvault#CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience pic.twitter.com/ccS4aQVztq

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

4th phase: instead of recovering to the current state, reimagine possibilities to recover to a new, better state@Commvault#CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Interesting take on the 4 phases of resiliency@Commvault#CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience pic.twitter.com/juRtw5xq90

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Jack Poller on Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@poller/113279274158247487

Final session is Martin Reeves author of "The Imagination Machine" talking about resilience as a competitive advantage@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience pic.twitter.com/QmoJqeyJVH

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Panel is talking about typical data security concerns re: data classification and how that might be used by AI.

What about the massive volume of data generated by AI that is unreproducible?@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

More at the link below!Ethan Banks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanbanks_commvaultshift-activity-7249861825406607361-DX1t/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Bonus session is another panel discussing AI.

First up, how are people using AI: for offensive and defensive activities@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Getting ready for a bonus session on AI and Cyber Resilience@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

"I work in the fastest and slowest moving industry in the world" We cannot even change passwords on one side, and on the other we have the potential of AI and Quantum Computing fuelled. Resilience is very important! @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/0UvFOjZ20V

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Stephen Foskett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sfoskett_commvaultshift-activity-7249841116894695424-43Xw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113279064402837161

AI is a key business imperative, but letting it run along unregulated isn't a good idea either. #CommvaultSHIFT

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

Panel: Now talking about regulating AI – governments see regulation as a way for nation/states to gain control and economic advantage@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113279021182402976

Criminal do have access to the same tools that we do. The upside? We know how they will use them. #CommvaultSHIFT

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

I'm curious about DORA. It keeps coming up ominously. #CommvaultSHIFT

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

"Handling DORA isn't a project, it's a transformation" @darrencthomson with a truth bomb about how seriously we need to take new AI and Data governance regulations. @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/x3IEMrJd31

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Panel: 1st step is make a list of your crown jewels.

Reinforces my thesis that the #1 cybersecurity problem is visibility: you can't protect what you don't know about@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Jack Poller on Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@poller/113278992860392085

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113278976335127041

Panel discussion on Compliance with Harvard Business Review #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience @Commvault pic.twitter.com/fn93D8AKoM

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113278928043332026

Article Link: https://pivotnine.com/the-crux/archive/swearing-in-source-code/

An impressive suite of announcements summarised by @ksrajiv but headlined by the Craig David ?endorsed Cloud Rewind, enhanced S3 and @awscloud support, AD Forest Recovery (Wow!) and @Google Workspace support. @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/uIwEFzK159

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

"We just want stuff to work, we don't want to think about it. If it doesn't, patients will ultimately suffer" @UmangPatel1 Chief Clinical Information Officer at @Microsoft lays out the importance of a speedy and accurate recovery. @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/CZDzAW2olV

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113278913822437917

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113278788833474012

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113278783659368946

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113278740102740573

Justin Warren on Mastondon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113278713802559266

News https://buff.ly/3XTIvo2Commvault announces support for #AWS for Air Gap protect, Cleanroom Recovery.#CommvaultSHIFT

— Karen (Kitty) Lopez (@datachick.bsky.social) 2024-10-09T18:24:50.712Z

Ethan Banks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanbanks_commvaultshift-activity-7249846749987536896-HCs_/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

The prospect of Air Gap Protect and Cleanroom Recovery being native @awscloud EC2 instances is quite interesting. @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/dUHH77FzlN

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Connecting with new faces and reconnecting with my @TechFieldDay OG peeps @Commvault SHIFT in London! Always fun when @SFoskett is around. #CommvaultSHIFT #techfielday @ArchitectingIT @maxmortillaro ?? pic.twitter.com/pkCkHSeIS0

— Colleen wants to see The Hives in concert!? (@colleencoll) October 9, 2024

Commvault integrates w/ @PaloAltoNtwks XSOAR to automatically spin up a clean room during an incident to accelerate recovery#CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience @Commvault

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Major enhancements to Air Gap Protect and Cleanroom Recovery on @awscloud @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/sC1cbBmf84

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Factory reset enables recovery of host to clean copy w/ no risk of malware/ransomware

Proactive and automated resiliency solution#CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience @Commvault

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Cleanroom now supports AWS – data is closer and you can specify AWS as a cleanroom target to bring up your initial environment during recovery#CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience @Commvault

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

50% of organizations with remote operations have experience a cyberattack. Increased footprint means more entry points. #CommvaultSHIFT

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

93% of businesses don't have a reliable backup

#CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience @Commvault

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Announcing HyperScale X Compute and Edge: a scale-out solution that combines data protection software, compute, operating system, and storage to simplify data protection and backup management @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/IQbCfpUNui

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

HyperScale Edge is hyperconvered, but HyperScale Compute doesn't include storage. #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience @Commvault

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

HyperScale X, HyperScale Computer, HyperScale Edge – various hyperconvered(?) solutions for cyber resiliency that can be centrally managed#CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience@Commvault

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Jack Poller on Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@poller/113278799940326539

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113278376406634479

Jack Poller on Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@poller/113278799940326539

Ethan Banks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanbanks_commvaultshift-activity-7249842272639299584-8VQ4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Pranay Ahlawat explains the breadth and depth of support for @Microsoft 365, and the new abilities across @Google Workspace @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/K2GElzr6E6

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Commvault announces the ability to recover AD forests — this is really hard and complicated, takes days when doing it manually. Only 2 other vendors can do this!@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience pic.twitter.com/3t3egfDmSa

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Commvault claims that 9/10 attacks are targeted at Active Directory@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Don't assume your SaaS vendor is backing up your data. Sure, it may not be on a dead drive but how often does it get accidentally deleted? #CommvaultSHIFT

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

Commvault now protects Google Workspace in addition to MSFT M365@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience pic.twitter.com/HgvCoc01AF

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

"The cost is a fraction of using the large hyperscalers" Venkata Sudhakar Nagandla with a bold statement @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/caaXbvI3fZ

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Commvault announces new support for
Azure Data Lake Gen 2
Databricks
Cosmos DB
Mongo DB
RAG extensions for Postgres
AWS S3

via Cloud Rewind#cloud pic.twitter.com/s3UbTeEFW5

— Karen Lopez (@datachick) October 9, 2024

Stephen Foskett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sfoskett_commvaultshift-activity-7249841116894695424-43Xw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Cloud Rewind is the evolution of the Appranix acquisition and helps you deal w/ config drift, cyber-attacks, and infrastructure failures@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Cloud Rewind is more than data recovery – it's the ability to recover the infrastructure: apps, storage, network, and data@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Platform https://t.co/dsYEsTrReg

Moving from just backups to "Continuous business" by embracing multi-cloud, working with Azure, AWS, and Google Clouds.

Today, they are announcing support for AWS for Commvault Cloud. pic.twitter.com/kWNuTFgDPt

— Karen Lopez (@datachick) October 9, 2024

Over 70% of cloud resources are not protected¹. This means that recovering and rebuilding all cloud configurations after an attack takes an average of 24 days and costs organizations billions in lost revenue and brand reputation. https://t.co/OOK52pkdXs pic.twitter.com/3YvKpaAskd

— Karen Lopez (@datachick) October 9, 2024

Ethan Banks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanbanks_commvaultshift-activity-7249839020585721856-cgAP?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Jack Poller on Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@poller/113278717856816033

Cloud Rewind…when the Cloud says "yo, rewind me" ?@TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift #CraigDavidLivesOn pic.twitter.com/K8UGylORI0

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113278376406634479

Commvault claims they now recover at 2.5TB/hr, 6x improvement in the last year@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Over 3 weeks to recover from an outage? Could you go 3 weeks without getting paid? #CommvaultSHIFT

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

Here are a few more photos from #CommvaultShift live in London yesterday! @Commvault @ClumioInc pic.twitter.com/MNYR3fUufO

— Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) October 9, 2024

Let's not underestimate the impact of TCO when discussing these solutions. Let's see how much that is referenced moving forwards in the announcements @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/cpweOrj3jy

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

5 key challenges for protecting data in the cloud

full stack environment, TCO, Security/Compliance, fragmentation, recovery of infra + data@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience pic.twitter.com/5DnOrP49rw

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Now it's @ksrajiv "24 days to recover from a compromised system" That's a loooong time for large orgs. @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/yh3Xol5TZP

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Joep Piscaer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jpiscaer_commvaultshift-activity-7249804692652707842-tnUE/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

Stephen Foskett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sfoskett_commvaultshift-activity-7249836139342106625-6rfP/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

Ethan Banks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanbanks_commvaultshift-activity-7249833457835499543-cgf0?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113278376406634479

Jack Poller on Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@poller/113278575155991656

Jumping to the next #CommvaultSHIFT session: Innovating Our Platform To Create a New Paradigm

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

In summary, @ClumioInc is bringing @awscloud S3 Bucket Version Control to @Commvault to easily be able to restate your bucket position post-corruption @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/dLDj9ueatk

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113278376406634479

SHIFT Virtual | 2024 https://t.co/4dEjvU05HE

Still time to join us for announcements from Commvautl pic.twitter.com/eZ5FRgbUXL

— Karen Lopez (@datachick) October 9, 2024

The Clumio solution is helping Commvault expand from Azure into AWS (and hopefully, GCP)@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

With Clumio, you can manage S3 object versioning stack, rolling back to any point in time, for any scale of S3 – another form of Cloud Rewind@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Ethan Banks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanbanks_commvaultshift-activity-7249832474522857472-D72g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113278376406634479

Love hearing from the @ClumioInc folks during #CommvaultSHIFT!

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

Appranix is now Cloud Rewind. I like it. #CommvaultSHIFT

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

Cloud Rewind is a statement announcement, and now we get to meet @ClumioInc, who acquired to help solve cyber recovery challenges on the public cloud. @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/aq47SRqxDn

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Ethan Banks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7249830637753245696/

Cloud Rewind (leveraging Appranix acquisition) enables restoration of your infrastructure and data – go back to last known good state@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience pic.twitter.com/WDu9ODVEXC

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Commvault now has a new built-in cyber resilience dashboard to analyze your readiness and recovery capabilities@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Continuous security is something you should be doing all the time. This isn't a checkbox, it should be a way of life. #CommvaultSHIFT

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

"Cyber recovery should not be a guessing game" as we discuss Cleanroom Recovery @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/GvKjRj8l4e

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Continuous business is a big driver for today's resilience initiatives. Remember when ESPN and HBO didn't do programming after 2am? #CommvaultSHIFT

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

Over 1,000 people tuning in on the #CommvaultSHIFT live stream. Quite impressive!

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

Fewer than half of all companies are confident in their recovery plans; 20% don't test recovery at all@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Continous Rebalancing leverages mirroring your data to all your clouds so you can make necessary adjustments@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience pic.twitter.com/DNXNuVkvHi

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

Jack Poller on Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@poller/113278575155991656

Justin Warren on Mastodon: https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113278376406634479

Say Goodbye to old assumptions, say Hello to Commvault Cloud – it's your cloud, Commvault is there to help@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience pic.twitter.com/xN2lKzeig0

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

"One size does NOT fit all" Gen AI datasets needs a different approach to Cloud Native and SaaS applications @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/e9y2EWFJxe

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Jack Poller on Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@poller/113278566885370245

"Own Your Cloud – If your Business is in the cloud, then CLOUD is your business" Straight shooting from @mirchi111 but I like It @TechFieldDay @Commvault#CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/UgI3Tmp8oF

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Commvault is shifting to the concept of Continuous Business – always on availability and resilience@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience pic.twitter.com/cvXd13hjIc

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

First up is Sanjay Mirchandani! He always cuts an impressive figure in these keynotes. #CommvaultSHIFT

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

The first session is Reimagining Resilience for the Cloud-First Enterprise. Can I just say I love "resilience"? #CommvaultSHIFT

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

"Bolted on processes on existing data process" @mirchi111 describes the state of play before we enter the era of Continuous Business @TechFieldDay @Commvault #CommvaultShift pic.twitter.com/dOPjWveAQ7

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

Commvault SHIFT is starting!@Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

In a few minutes, it's time to join @Commvault #CommvaultSHIFT, the premier cyber resiliency event that offers a radical shift in perspective, helping orgs embrace cyber readiness and recoverability for always-on continuous business. I'm on deck representing @TechFieldDay? pic.twitter.com/QrxZKl18EM

— Brian Booden (@brian_booden) October 9, 2024

I'm going to be live blogging the #CommvaultShift video stream here today starting at 1pm ET! You can also keep up with all the other coverage by checking out this page: https://t.co/AHryx6ZMhX

— Tom Hollingsworth (@NetworkingNerd) October 9, 2024

Only 1 hour from the start of Commvault SHIFT, where Commvault will describe their shift in perspective to cyber resiliency in a cloud-first world#CommvaultSHIFT @Commvault #ContinuousBusiness #CyberResilience

— Jack L. Poller (@poller) October 9, 2024

I attended #CommvaultSHIFT yesterday, and I'll be covering their cyber resilience and business continuity livestream in this thread. I'm hoping to hear more about the recent @Clumio acquisition, as well as integrations of @Appranix into the portfolio. Let's dive in! pic.twitter.com/G4wZ9JDj3u

— Joep Piscaer (@jpiscaer) October 9, 2024

Colleen Coll: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/colleen-coll-b971505_dataprotection-commvaultshift-cyberresilience-activity-7249801934168084480-yVWx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Read more on Six Five Media: https://sixfivemedia.com/all-videos/shifting-to-cloud-first-cyber-resilience-with-commvault/

ScreenshotStephen Foskett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/commvault-embraces-shift-continuous-business-2024-stephen-foskett-ssuae/

Gestalt IT on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gestalt-it_cybersecurity-cyberresilience-commvaultshift-activity-7249414742950178819-KOf1/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

Gestalt IT on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gestalt-it_commvaultshift-activity-7249060031449436160-Vf36/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

Jack Poller on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jackpoller_commvaultshift-continuousbusiness-cyberreadiness-activity-7249465839488221185-Kp9I?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Colleen Coll: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/colleen-coll-b971505_cyberresiliency-commvaultshift-continuousbusiness-activity-7249403692909539330-t_ON/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

Stephen Foskett: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sfoskett_shift-virtual-2024-activity-7246904266865414149-Y0o0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Stephen Foskett: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sfoskett_commvault-buys-clumio-activity-7245147682246135808-I-oL/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Ethan Banks: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanbanks_shift-virtual-2024-activity-7246586952093720576-KygW

Justin Warren: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7247338513820459010

Joep Piscaer: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7246561014610108417

Joep Piscaer: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/colleen-coll-b971505_commvaultshift-continuousbusiness-cyberresilience-activity-7246671971680182274-vx-D/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Colleen Coll: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/colleen-coll-b971505_commvaultshift-continuousbusiness-cyberresilience-activity-7246671971680182274-vx-D/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Learn more about Commvault and their approach to cyber resilience on this episode of the Tech Field Day Podcast.

Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day are part of The Futurum Group.

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AMD announced that it is planning to acquire computer hardware design company ZT Systems, for a cash-and-stock deal of $4.9 billion.

The acquisition significantly expands AMD’s footprint in AI chips and hardware space. Chief Executive Lisa Su hopes that the acquisition will bring big momentum to AMD’s long-term goal of rapidly delivering training and inferencing solutions.

Analysts are calling this a calculated move that revalidates AMD’s commitment to stay in the race and better compete with NVIDIA.

The deal that is expected to close by the first quarter of 2025 has already earned AMD stocks gains of 4.5%. But there are some speculations that the cost of the acquisition may hurt AMD’s gross margins.

President of Tech Field Day, Stephen Foskett, is optimistic and calls it a “masterstroke”. “I believe that this is a combination of strategic and opportunistic goals on the part of AMD’s management.”

Challenging NVIDIA’s DominionThe success of NVIDIA in the AI space owes largely to the pre-integrated rack-scale systems it designs. Think of the NVIDIA DGX platform – the very best of NVIDIA’s AI portfolio in a single solution. The DGX platform is an all-in-one product that combines the trifecta of purpose-built hardware, AI software and enterprise support, basically a world-class infrastructure in a box. With it, NVIDIA hands out breakthrough performance, full-stack optimizations and direct access to DGXperts, the ultimate formula to fast-track AI deployment.

“AMD has a competitive product in the AI GPU space. Their MI250X and MI300X are really excellent products but they’ve seen modest sales success,” he observes.

The biggest headwind AMD faces is NVIDIA’s sway over the market. “The NVIDIA juggernaut is hard to derail. They have relationships, incredible software stack, and allegiance of software developers to the CUDA platform, not to mention this incredible integrated rack-scale AI concept which has really allowed it to extract maximum revenue and build maximum market share in the AI supercomputer space.”

AMD needs comparable full-stack AI solutions to keep up. “There are a couple things AMD needs to break into this market,” he explains. “One, it needs to be able to shake some people loose from the CUDA ecosystem, and the other thing it needs is a competitor for DGX.”

NVIDIA has been gathering moss and strengthening its portfolio with new allies and partnerships in the AI market for some time. “Leading up to the acquisition, there was news that Foxconn is going to be increasingly involved in NVIDIA as supply chain for their big rack-scale AI systems,” he says.

The collaboration began in 2023. In a press release, NVIDIA announced that it is collaborating with Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn) to build AI factories and computing infrastructures with NVIDIA GPUs.

ScreenshotThe Next Big Leap for AMDA similar partnership with an AI equipment maker that has command over design and engineering, and customer enablement, will give AMD the firepower it needs to develop this competing product. ZT Systems checks all the boxes.

“ZT Systems is a company that has gone unsung. It has been around a long time building servers, PCs and racks, basically the stuff we think of when we think computer servers and computer hardware,” he notes.

As a bonus, ZT Systems also enjoys excellent relationships with a broad customer base that ranges from small customers to the largest systems buyers in the market.

“The problem for ZT is that they are facing a lot of competition from Taiwan, China, and companies like Foxconn, that are out there building systems for hyperscalers and OEMs,” Stephen points out. “Foxconn and NVIDIA getting closer together in terms of building these integrated AI systems leaves ZT out in the cold.”

So an acquisition can prove strategic and most opportune for both AMD and ZT Systems. ZT’s system design and expertise around rack-scale solutions can be the perfect addition for AMD to build on its investments and flex its datacenter AI systems portfolio with complete AI solutions.

The acquisition also comes with the additional perk of getting 1000 trained engineers experienced in the work of designing rack-scale infrastructure. “[AMD] is going to have to eat some salaries for these smart people, but let’s be fair, they’re going to pay for themselves,” says co-host and team lead of the Tech Field Day event series, Tom Hollingsworth.

But AMD recognizes that ZT’s server business is of no real value to it. Su said in an interview to Wall Street Journal that AMD will only retain the systems design business while selling off the server manufacturing unit after the deal closes.

“What AMD is going to do is essentially, it will sell off the manufacturing assets that make all of ZT’s revenues,” Stephen explains. “If you look at ZT’s numbers, it’s actually pretty likely that AMD may refute some or maybe even all. They might even make a profit reselling ZT’s manufacturing capability to an OEM or ODM and there are lots of companies in the US and Europe that would benefit from having server and systems manufacturing. I think there’s going to be a long line of customers waiting to bid on that aspect of ZT.”

Tom agrees, “If they have to ingest all of this manufacturing capability that quite honestly doesn’t synergize with what they’ve got right now, why not sell it off and recoup some of that investment? It will give them a head start because what they don’t have to deal with is technical debt of a factory.”

Hear the full conversation in the Closer Look segment on last week’s Rundown. The Six Five Webcast also highlights this story. Check out Episode 228 to watch Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorehead dig into the deal and provide a breakdown of what it means for AMD.

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Those of you who have been keeping a loose eye on the cloud space would know that three colossuses maintain a monopoly over the cloud market – AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This dominance has recently attracted scrutiny, as it has left smaller companies within the industry doggedly competing for slim shares in regional niches.

Cloud oligopoly as it is referred to is a phenomenon observed worldwide. The competitors may be different in different regions, but the notion is the same – wielding unaccountable influence over the market.

This accumulation of market powers in the hands of one or a group of companies is deemed unhealthy. This anti-competitive behavior bars entry for new competitors, and is often the reason behind price fixes.

“HPE, Lenovo, and Dell are all growing with hybrid cloud offerings.”Seeking a Monopoly in Public CloudCollectively, the three big companies seize up about 65% of the total cloud spend worldwide, says a research from Synergy Research Group.

Their earning calls indicate a positive year-over-year revenue growth. “Google reported earnings last week and revenue went from 8 billion to over 10 billion on a quarterly basis,” says Steven Dickens, chief technology advisor at The Futurum Group, while talking about this at the Techstrong Gang in July.

For smaller players however, the turnover is significantly small, and their market shares are steadily arcing southward.

Interestingly, in China where local players like Alibaba and Huawei prevail, the stats are a bit different for these international brands. Under the Chinese trade law, an outside brand can only penetrate the market if they work through local partners. As a result, a market dominance for them is a distant possibility.

In some sectors, on-premise datacenters also hold significant market shares. “In some of the highly regulated industries, cloud penetration is as low as 5%,” Dickens says. “If you look at the financial services, organizations are still really huge on on-premise deployments. HPE, Lenovo, and Dell are all growing with hybrid cloud offerings.”

Drivers of Vertical IntegrationThe big three operate primarily in the infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service markets. It is interesting to note that despite competing in a closed space, they don’t use pricing as a differentiating factor. Their price points are in fact quite similar. Then what makes the customers prefer keeping their workloads with them?

There are several reasons for that. For one, consumers tend to put more faith in providers that are recognized and established as opposed to those that are not. Secondly, the draw of cloud giants is their offerings. “It’s not just marketing power or sales power that’s leading to this in many ways. It is what I would call “feature power”,” says Stephen Foskett, president of Tech Field Day.

“Amazon is constantly adding new features, functions and capabilities to AWS. Those are very attractive to customers whether they’re modern web-scale startups, app developers or more traditional enterprises.”The biggest cloud companies make their offerings attractive by continually rolling out new features.

“Amazon for example is constantly adding new features, functions and capabilities to AWS. Those are very attractive to customers whether they’re modern web-scale startups, app developers or more traditional enterprises,” he says.

“Azure has long been the darling of enterprise IT simply because Microsoft has seemed so laser-focused on providing enterprise-grade services in Azure that are friendly and easy to implement for IT companies. Google is really leaning into its enterprise storage, networking and security features.”

The enticement of more ensures that companies continue their subscriptions and consume resources incrementally. However, it is quality of infrastructure which prompts the decision of choosing a platform in the first place. This is where smaller platforms like Oracle, IBM Cloud and Akamai fall behind.

For customers, it is supremely comforting to know that everything they will ever need can be found under the same roof, or roofs.

But counter-intuitively, it also makes it harder for them to walk away. “The more differentiated features these platforms add, the harder it is for customers to balance and get their workloads out,” he says.

Mike Vizard, chief content officer at Techstrong, points to the licensing agreement as an added contributor to the vendor lock-in. Cloud providers offer savings plans and discount offers designed to reduce the cloud bill in exchange for a spend commitment. To take advantage of that, decision-makers from higher up the chain often push developers to consume more services from a particular cloud provider as opposed to others, further driving up dependency.

A downstream impact of that is increased likelihood of service disruptions. Dickens alludes to the recent Microsoft Azure outage as an example. The outage which came less than two weeks after the CrowdStrike disruption which halted businesses worldwide, lasted a total of 14 hours, and was a double blow for Azure customers.

“3 availability zones went down at the same time. Numerous vendors were without e-mail plus a whole bunch of services were affected,” Dickens says.

So is there a way for customers to step out of the walled garden of cloud oligopoly? One way to resist monopoly is to cut dependency on the top providers only. Intuitively architecting the stack with both native services and independent solutions from external vendors help dodge the downsides of it.

Let’s say Red Hat OpenShift, Mirantis, etc. These can improve the capabilities and maintain the ability to have infrastructure independence, he says.

Having this mixed bag lets customers freely re-platform workloads when they need to without worrying about losing a chunk of the capabilities they rely on.

“There is a natural intention of cloud providers to lock you in but smart enterprise architecture, and thinking through some of the locking points, give you self-control,” he concludes.

TakeawaysCloud adoption is still at a nascent stage, but the level of competition is growing every day. To steer clear of the trappings of vendor lock-in, companies must consider using multiple vendors, even those outside the obvious choices. A solutions stack that is supported by offerings from various vendors, not only keeps cloud consumption and cost optimized, but also helps avoid over-relying on a particular provider or providers. And in the bigger scheme, an equitable distribution of market share makes way for more challengers to enter the arena and balance out the power equation making a market perfectly competitive.

Listen to the whole conversation at Techstrongtv.com. For more stories like this, keep reading here at Gestaltit.com.

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One of the Techstrong websites, Digital CXO, recently published an article that talks about how digital transformation can be measured and expressed as value of investment in a competitive landscape. The article covers a set of key metrics and a framework that can help tell if a company’s digital initiatives are paying off the way they should.

What’s Digital Transformation in Plainspeak?As businesses trod purposefully towards a future where they live online more fully, spotlight is being shone on digital transformation. Once a buzzword that lived in the fringes, the term “digital transformation” has slid into the heart of the organizational playbook.

Simply put, digital transformation is the transition to digital. It’s when an organization capitalizes technology to accelerate internal processes, meet customer expectations and deliver a differentiated experience. Some facets of digital transformation are automation, data analytics, e-commerce and so on.

But what is all the fuss about? It has become plain to businesses over the past few years that they cannot reap the advantages of next-gen technologies without setting digital transformation in motion.

Why? Because the digital and physical worlds are rapidly becoming one, and to lead a company into this next chapter, one needs to amp up their investments in technology.

Digital transformation is the force-multiplier that will shape and mold businesses making them more resilient and adaptive to change in the coming days. Some are calling it a primer – a preparatory coat – to futureproof the business. It’s not romantic; it’s just maths and numbers.

The first wave of digital transformation started when businesses recognized that the online platform was underleveraged, and they began the work of making information accessible online and products more connected.

This was no small jump in terms of the work involved. The overhaul took decades. Businesses that got it right made record increments in revenue, growing substantially as a result of the change.

During the COVID-focused months, enterprises once again doubled down on digital transformation moving businesses wholly to a place where anybody connecting from anywhere in the world can have access and visibility to the resources they need.

“It became all about optimization of business processes to drive more value out of it and going back in and re-engineering what we already had,” says Mike Vizard, author and chief content officer at Techstrong. “Now we’re on the cusp of a bunch of emerging technologies including AI and it feels like we might be driving a whole set of new use cases that are going to feed back into these digital process transformation initiatives.”

Steps and PrinciplesLet’s talk about the core constructs of digital transformation. These include speed, value and customer satisfaction. Automation of business processes is a key example of digital transformation. It not only accelerates those functions providing shorter time-to-market, but also enables the processes to evolve and enhance on their own.

Increasingly businesses are relying on tooling to look at KPIs, gauge progress, determine targets to shoot for, and overall make decisions that enable and empower the people across the organization and the customers.

“The way to prove to businesspeople that there’s value in digital transformation is to prove value using metrics they understand,” says Stephen Foskett during his appearance on Techstrong Gang.“It’s a little unsexy, especially for techies, to talk about metrics and value and business transformation but it actually makes a lot of sense,” comments Stephen Foskett, president of Tech Field Day, during his appearance on Techstrong Gang. “Ultimately we have to prove that there is value to the things that we’re doing.”

“The way to prove to businesspeople that there’s value ,” he continues, “is to prove value using metrics that they understand. We have to look at things like customer satisfaction surveys, performance, net promoter score, resource utilization, and quality financial performance, because ultimately everything we’re doing in business is supposed to be related to the financial performance of the business.”

But a lot gets lost in transit as information travels through the different levels and divisions. “Technology organizations tend to be guilty of creating metrics that are meaningful to them but mean nothing to the business. Like for example, the number of deploys per hour. Nobody tells you why do we need to do it, and what is the right number,” says Mitch Ashley, technology executive and analyst. “What I preach is to always create metrics that are in line of sight to a business metric.”

A good way of measuring and weighing returns of digital transformation is through technologies that can measure performance and provide automated intelligence. An example is Broadcom’s ValueOps Insights, a platform that ingests data from various solutions, and produce automated reports and analytics on the performance of digital value streams. This provides eye-opening insights on how investments are aligned with the outcomes.

Organizations are also working on embedding value-tracking capabilities into their software as a way to monitor and manage the value alongside the project without going through a separate point solution.

TakeawaysCEOs care most about profit and loss, and how an investment translates into a revenue stream determines their future decisions. But digital transformation is more than simple gross margins and scaling of customers. It is vital to keeping pace in the digital arms race because falling behind can simply put an organization out of business.

Alan Shimel, founder and CEO of the Tech Strong Group reminds, “Perfunctory transformation is not going to be enough.” To become a digital organization that evolves continually through use of technology in all aspects of the business, a company needs to actively track its journey, identifying signals, and respond constantly to what the metrics are saying.

Be sure to catch the Techstrong Gang show for more, or check out Digital CXO for more interesting reads on digital transformation. For more stories like this, keep reading here at Gestaltit.com.

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If you follow IT discussions, and stay abreast with news and industry trends, you’d know that a spot of concern has emerged around the viability of network engineering as a career.

Frustration is trickling down from the topmost levels as responsibilities around the role have shifted over the years. Many have started to look at it as a dead-end job.

From being a booming career path, how did network engineering end up a shrinking niche? At the recent Networking Field Day event, Tom Hollingsworth, former network engineer, and event lead of the Tech Field Day event series, sits down with network engineer, Andy Lapteff, and network architect, Remington Loose, to get the insider’s view.

From an Unsinkable Career to a Dying ProfessionLapteff hosts a podcast, The Art of Network Engineering, that focuses on tools, technologies and everyday people in IT. Having the opportunity to meet and interact with people from the networking world every day on the show, Lapteff knows that there is no smoke without fire.

“Something has been on my mind for a while,” he says. “I’ve been in tech about 15 years. When I got in, I was really excited about it. It was a great career, promised a lot of growth. Everything was connected to the network. The number of connected devices were almost like Moore’s law – doubling every year.”

That enthusiasm has dulled lately. “Over the past ten years, it just feels less and less like a good career choice,” he says with a hint of frustration in his voice.

Among working professionals, networking is no longer seen as an incentivizing career. Many have deflected to other areas of IT causing the population to dwindle rapidly.

“When we get into the nitty gritty of the network, what it is supporting and how it functions and what it does, a lot of the folks tune out or turn off or do not want to go into that field,” Loose points out.

Seemingly, their hesitance stems from an influx of new opportunities in other more up and coming niches that are deemed more glamorous and more promising. Cybersecurity, software development, and AI/ML are prime examples.

A Gradual RegressionThere is a history behind how network engineering as a career got here. For the rest of IT, the plumbing and maintenance works that happens under the hood are good as invisible. It is something that is taken for granted as long as the lights turn on when the switch is flipped.

This, exacerbated by long working hours, tight deadlines, and stressful work situations, contributed to making networking an exacting, but thankless job.

In sharp contrast, careers like AI specialist, cybersecurity analyst and software developer are thriving. People joining and working in these areas are touted as the heroes of IT. They are seen, heard about, and cheered every day.

But glory in workplace is never handed out on a silver platter, less so in a competitive field like IT. It is something that is earned with hard work and sweat.

“People want to skip to the end and get to the part where they’re making lots of money, driving a fancy car, and are well-respected, but that respect is not given, its earned,” reminds Tom Hollingsworth.

New niches may woo the crowd easily, but it is worth remembering that these jobs are not without trials and tribulations. The initial struggles are just as real as it is in networking.

The Shock of ChangeLooking back, network engineers too enjoyed elevated status, much like AI engineers and cybersecurity specialists today, in the early 2000s when connectivity speeds were just picking up.

“It took a market crash to shake everything out,” he says. “Network engineering is still reeling from the last few readjustments, and nobody sees it as the thing that they want to do. The people who do it, see it as the thing they are doing and therefore they’re defending their turf as it were.”

There has been pushback on hiring as many network engineers as before in enterprises. Several factors account for this.

The dominos started to fall with the uptick of cloud. White-glove service models shrunk the role of network engineers overnight.

“A lot of the network engineering component has either been commoditized out because we’re consuming it through cloud, or has been moved into a different role that’s handled by someone else,” Loose says. “It’s no longer what we have historically called “network engineering”. In a lot of environments, we don’t have to do that much real engineering the way that we did before”

The cloud’s business model made small and medium enterprises question the need for these professionals. Layoffs and job cuts in networking have increased over the years as businesses have switched to the cloud operational model.

Behind the curtain, decision-makers and people in C-suite have started to favor automation solutions over hiring new network engineers.

“If decision-makers at Fortune100 companies are asking how many network engineers they can get rid of if they buy automation platforms, how can you ignore that?” asks Lapteff.

The need for “artisanal networking” is fading as vendors are baking in more engineering in the hardware. “The infrastructure has gotten good enough,” Loose says. “Switching capacity is enough. You don’t really have to replace as much, or do as much maintenance once it gets in. Wi-Fi is up and functioning; no one needs to touch it.”

Many complex networking jobs have been automated in an effort to make the network reliable, and to reduce costs. As a result, the incentive to pursue networking engineering has reduced significantly among people entering IT.

“For a lot of those junior folks, to get started in simpler, more basic environments which we all potentially had, the opportunity to do so is going away.”

Reviving Networking Engineering for a New Generation of WorkersAll said and done, networking engineering is a well-paid job, and there are still ample openings to bring in fresh candidates. Like any other field, it promises education, experience and connections. But a concerted effort must be made by those in the profession to turn the tide.

Much can be achieved if existing professionals take to mentoring and motivating younger professionals assuring them of the promises and prospects of the field. The panel advises veteran network engineers to embrace a positive and welcoming attitude instead of exhibiting a cold and intimidating demeanor.

Fostering a culture of support and collaboration goes a long way in getting new people interested. By contrast, pulling a U-turn, midway in the career, is infinitely harder. After all, looking for a new job is in itself a full-time job.

Be sure to watch the Tech Field Day podcast – Network Engineering Is a Dying Profession – to listen to the full discussion.

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I had the chance to interview CTO and Co-founder Brandon Heller of Forward Networks during Cisco Live and he had some great stories to tell me about the future of the company. They’ve been working hard to solve customer issues and unlock the critical information that has been stored away for so long with no way to understand what is important.

The first story he shared was about how Michael Wynston of Fiserv used the power of digital twins to understand his network better and pull information out of it. If you don’t know what a digital twin is, Brandon does a great job of explaining it in simple detail. It’s a digital representation of a physical thing, like Google Maps standing in for the real world. With Forward Networks, that digital twin is of your physical network. Which means you can pull data from many sources and concentrate it in such a way as to understand what’s going on in the network.

Digital twins let you understand the behavior of the network and see what would happen when, say, packets arrive at a certain location or some event triggers a routing protocol change. You can find out why applications behave in certain ways and be sure that the results that you see in the digital twin will apply in the real world too.

Brandon also discussed why having a neutral model of your network is so critical. Having a multivendor approach means you aren’t creating islands of darkness in areas where your solution can’t understand the data that the devices are sharing. This is especially true in organizations that have grown through acquisition and have very heterogeneous networks. Solutions like Forward Networks allow you to model the entire network and understand every part to help with your troubleshooting process.

It references something that was mentioned in the Cisco Live keynote. Far too many times we see marathon support calls with multiple people sitting on a conference bridge banging their heads against a wall because no one knows what the answer is and no one knows how to ask the right questions to find the data that will ensure proper resolution. Sometimes knowing what to ask is just as important as what the answer might be.

Forward Networks Network Query Engine (NQE) gives you the power to ask the right questions in plain language. One example Brandon gave was “show me all interfaces that are configured as up but are showing as down”. That little query could take hours to solve in a system without wider data access. Forward Networks is able to poll devices and understand the configuration to return the results easily. That means faster answers for stakeholders and less time wasted for your engineering talent.

For more information, make sure to visit Forward Networks’ website and see all the interviews and content from Cisco Live and more.

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We can all agree that secure file transfer should be the bare minimum communication method for critical information, right? No more emailing account numbers or other personally identifiable information (PII) in clear text to other people. That is the utopia we should all be trying to accomplish. Sadly, we’re not there yet. We still get documents mailed in the clear where they can be intercepted or stored in a manner which could lead to compromise. There has to be a better solution.

Secure Workflow TransfersEnter RheoWorx from Entegria Systems. I had the opportunity to get a briefing from them shortly after the launch of the product and I was very thrilled to see they take security as seriously as I do. It made sense to me as I spoke with CTO and co-founder Tony Tancredi. He came from a medical background and I can assure that the regulations around medical information leaking out would make your head spin. Making a secure file transfer application for that environment is a must.

Entegria didn’t stop there, however. While FTP might have been the most popular method of file transfer there isn’t always a direct connection between two endpoints that would allow for a more secure connection. Some of these systems are isolated by design. So RheoWorx includes the capability to transfer files through the Entegria cloud intermediary. Systems can upload the files to Entegria’s cloud, which runs on IBM’s cloud platform, and notify users on the other side to download them. The files are not stored directly in the cloud but instead are just transferred. You can verify that the files were sent and also that they were removed from the cloud to ensure chain-of-custody or even audit guidelines for specific data. Communications use message queues or TCP/IP and are TLS 1.3 secured. That means you’re using the best possible method for keeping data private in transit.

If all RheoWorx did was transfer files it might not stand out. However, the real power behind the system in the demo was in the workflow manager. This is where the power of the platform can really be extended. RheoWorx lets you build custom workflows to do things with transfers. This solves a huge problem of what to do when you have data that needs to be sent but you don’t always have someone there to send it. Imagine something like an unattended kiosk that has data captured, like camera footage or survey documents. You want to send those files securely but you don’t have anyone manning the kiosk all the time. Do you just have the machine download the files every night? That could leave the data exposed for hours. Do you have someone stop by every few hours to dump the data to a secure server? That is going to increase your costs.

With Rheoworx, you can build a simple workflow that has multiple parts and intelligence built in. If a file is saved in a directory RheoWorx can be configured to see the file and initiate a secure transfer to a remote system. Once verification is received it can then delete the file to ensure it isn’t being stored and is susceptible to being stolen. Because the workflows can be configured to be one-way only you can also ensure that data can’t be siphoned back in the other direction should your kiosk become compromised. Workflows are a powerful way to build systems with checks to ensure security is followed at every step while also removing the need for a human to be involved at every point of the process. You can also create manual workflows that aren’t dependent on time and can be initiated whenever someone wants to get the data.

All of this must cost a fortune, right? After all, security is only really valuable if you’re paying through the nose. Thankfully, Entegria must have missed that memo because RheoWorx is a reasonably priced software-as-a-service offering that’s based on the number of agents and workflow connections and not on usage or transfers. For users that have a low number of systems but a large amount of data, such as a hospital MRI machine or a business transferring large image files, the data caps could be deal breakers. However, RheoWorx is priced to be used by companies that have the need to keep their data transfers safe. They even have a free account with two agents and five workflows for you to try out!

Bringing It All TogetherThe world doesn’t need another simple file transfer system. What we need is one with the logic and capabilities to build secure workflows that happen to include file transfers. That kind of thinking and planning ensures that we can audit every step of the path to ensure data is never caught out in the wild unsecured. That means that the power behind RheoWorx is more than just a simple point-to-point secure FTP solution. It’s the brains behind it that ensure you set up your transfers the right way every time and keep regulators, auditors, and users happy.

For more information about Entegria Systems and RheoWorx, make sure you check out the RheoWorx product page.

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The truth of the universe is always sitting there just beyond your reach. You only need to know the right questions to ask in order to unlock it. You might think that sounds like some kind of Zen philosophy but it applies to more things than you know, especially in tech. When I think back to the early days of my computer skills training and professional career I realize that the information that I needed to make better decisions about how to deploy equipment or empower users was right there the whole time. I just didn’t know how to ask the right questions to find it.

Step into the modern world and it feels like information overload all the time. We have status notifications and log file outputs feeding into dashboards and alerts. I have seen people with inboxes containing tens of thousands of unread messages thanks to pointless alerts. When you quiz someone about the status of a given system or indicator they’re lucky if they even remember that is a device they maintain. It feels like the majority of the time everyone is getting by on the hope that things are running correctly most of the time and when they aren’t an alert will arrive just in the nick of time to save the day. Does that sound like a way to operate your cloud environment?

Prosimo KnowsThe rise of AI features being added to modern systems has be rapid over the past year. We’ve accelerated from hinting about the capabilities of artificial intelligence to having full-blown assistants ready to go in less than a calendar year. That speaks to the perceived value of having a feature set like this to build on. While a number of companies have been putting out a virtual assistant add-on to their product line all of the ones I’ve been briefed on so far seem to be focused on providing information and querying capabilities for an on-prem deployment or a single group of private sites.

On the other hand, Prosimo is leveraging their multicloud capabilities to help bring real value to an AI assistant. Prosmio already has a significant investment in doing multicloud networking properly. Even in this latest release they’re providing ways to accelerate AI applications that have components stored across multiple clouds. But that’s just the tip of iceberg when it comes to implementing AI functions into the system. For the next part we need to head into outer space.

Image of Prosimo Nebula DashboardNebula is the Prosimo answer for AIOps in a multicloud world. Nebula is ingesting all of the metadata that your multicloud network is producing and analyzing it for ease of retrieval. Compared to the old days of trying to sift through endless screens of error reports or trying to match up overlapping comparisons, Nebula provides an easy-to-use natural language query interface to get information you need quickly.

Two of the areas that Prosimo have really been highlighting for Nebula are compliance and IP overlap. The second of these is pretty straightforward. You can ask Nebula to show you which IP spaces overlap in your deployments to prevent any issues from deploying new applications or trying to integrate with other systems. Having had to use NAT to solve these challenges in the past I can assure you that you really want to know how to fix these problems ahead of time instead of being forced to figure it out halfway through the process. If you know there is a significant overlap in the address space up front you can plan ahead. Nebula gives you the capability to find this out sooner.

Compliance is a big area where data is even more critical. Think of something like GDPR. You have governance requirements as well as standards that need to be upheld. If your system migrates data across the wrong threshold you’re on the hook to figure out when it happened and how long it was somewhere it shouldn’t have been. Today that information is locked behind transfer logs and other unreadable files that will take many hours to sift through to understand what happened. If those hours just happen to be in the company of regulators then you’re going to be even more stressed. With Prosimo Nebula, you just ask the system Did any of my data violate GDPR boundaries and for how long? and the answers appear right there. Now your compliance is only a query away.

Nebula leverages OpenAI and Google Bard/Gemini currently for their LLM. They’ve also functionally split the LLM access into different log areas, such as alerts, policy, access, and so on. The goal is to help reduces the costs associated with feeding the data to the LLM to be analyzed. They’re also using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to help reduce the instances of hallucinations when the LLM returns a result that is false based on the data being analyzed. Nebula is also in beta right now but is improving by leaps and bounds with every iteration.

Bringing It All TogetherI think that the Prosimo approach to using an AI assistant is critical because it gives a complex solution set like multicloud networking a real force multiplier when it comes to unwinding the difficulty of the problem set. Right now the focus is absolutely on common issues like IP address overlap and compliance but with the rate at which Nebula is improving it wot’ be long until it’s able to answer all manner of questions about the state of a multicloud deployment and help operations teams understand what’s going on and how things can be fixed or improved. It also helps non-technical stakeholders understand the state of things and can answer questions for them that might otherwise occupy operations teams.

For more information about Prosimo and their new Nebula offering, make sure you check out their website. You can see previous Tech Field Day presentations as well by visiting the Tech Field Day website.

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One of the hardest parts of working on a team is making sure everyone is up to date on what the project or ticket status is at any given time. This is especially true for things like incident response. Protocols followed and steps taken matter and documenting all of it so that you don’t lost track of where you are and regress to an earlier phase are critical. You must know where everyone is and what’s going on, especially when a new team comes on board to help, or you must hand off in a “follow the sun” model.

That handoff period is where so many mistakes can happen. I’ve worked on enough help desks in my career to know that improper documentation can lead to repeating unnecessary steps or losing data. Even having proper documentation isn’t enough in a stressful situation where someone might skim your notes and arrive at the wrong conclusion. If you can’t make sure that the handoff goes well, you’re going to be caught in a vicious cycle that doesn’t end well for anyone.

We Can Be HeroesYou might have noticed that many companies have started adding AI functionality into their platforms in recent months. I’m always on the lookout for interesting ways to apply this hot new technology in ways that make life better for those in the trenches every day. Novel uses are sure to catch my eye.

Enter Swimlane. This company has been working hard to make automation easy and secure for companies. Their technology ensures you have the right tools at your disposal to integrate solutions and work around challenges. It’s more than just building packages to deploy for endpoints. Swimlane is all about reducing the amount of code needed as well as improving human decision making in the process. Their latest addition to the Swimlane Turbine security automation platform is Hero AI. It’s a new way to integrate the power of generative AI into your workflow. With Hero AI, you can get help crafting AI prompts and building code to make your automations run smoothly. But one of the things that jumped out at me was AI-assisted case summarization.

Using Hero AI, Swimlane Turbine can assist your SecOps teams in looking at cases and summarizing the important details. You can get an immediate overview of what’s going on with a given case as well as suggestions for remediation or mitigation. It’s a powerful way to help your teams arrive at conclusions and act on information faster. It’s also a wonderful way to collect pertinent information and pass it along as necessary to those that need it.

Imagine having an immediate case summary for an incident that you can hand off to the incoming team so they can pick right up where you left off and keep going while you get some sleep or even a quick meal. You can also create summary reports to send on to the CISO or other stakeholders when they ask for an update on your progress that’s tailored to include the information they want and none of the specific details that will just raise more questions. Rather than spending time figuring out what to tell them you can just ask Hero AI to give you the information they want. It saves everyone time and keeps the whole team in the loop, top to bottom. And because Swimlane has a security-first mindset you can be sure that this information isn’t being leaked to an online LLM service that could incorporate your data without your knowledge or permission.

Bringing It All TogetherAutomated case summarization may not sound like the most groundbreaking part of AI but I think it’s something important that will solve real problems that engineers have every day. And it’s only a small part of the much larger Turbine platform. Once you’ve given yourself some extra time with automated summarization you can dig into the Schema Inference tools or see how you can use their LLM to scan Swimlane documentation for help directly within the platform. It’s a force multiplier that allows you to gain valuable time when responding to threats or building out your automation solution to ensure you and your team are as efficient as possible. If Swimlane Turbine can help you hand off a project to the next team with a minimum of fuss and confusion, then you’ll look like a hero to everyone.

For more information about Hero AI and Swimlane Turbine make sure you check out the details on Swimlane’s website.

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The sustainability race looks a lot different today than when it started. Companies have moved on from hollow posturing to taking meaningful actions to curb environmental impacts. Connected technology has unlocked new avenues to accelerate corporate sustainability practices. At the recent Mobility Field Day event, we had the opportunity to chat about this with delegate and networking veteran, Troy Martin whose one of many interests is sustainable IoT.

LoRaWAN for Low-Power ConnectivityThe question that’s lately been in everybody’s minds is how we can leave behind a healthy habitable planet for the future generations. LoRaWAN has been a positive force on that front. It’s a technology that has underlined many sustainability discussions. Short for low-power, wide-area networking, LoRaWAN is a networking protocol to wirelessly connect end devices to the internet and enable bidirectional communication.

Founded by Cycleo, a startup company in France, LoRaWAN uses Chirp Spread Spectrum or CSS modulation, a communication technique used in aviation and maritime for signaling.

LoRaWAN has gained significant traction, and adoption has started to blossom in certain industries. “LoRaWAN is used in a lot of different applications and offers a lot more benefits than you see in traditional wireless technologies like Wi-Fi. One of the things that it is actively engaging in is the agricultural space, in tracking and trending the amount of moisture in the soil, monitoring wind velocities, sunlight hours, etc. All this data gives users predictability into the yields come harvest season,” says Martin.

Ultra-Long RangeA number of other compelling use cases have emerged from the growing LoRaWAN ecosystem. Unlike Wi-Fi that offers high bandwidth connectivity over low range, LoRaWan can provide coverage of 6 to 12 miles. The longest recorded LoRaWAN coverage is a distance of 830 miles off the coasts of Portugal. This has set a world record.

The long range is key to overcoming a vital Wi-Fi challenge. “With Wi-Fi technology, you typically build a mesh on the perimeters of the fields. It can be difficult to deploy sensors out in the fields, power them, and gain connectivity for the power consuming Wi-Fi access points,” points out Martin.

LoRaWAN provides the perfect alternative. When combined with low-energy sensors, users can collect data from far into the fields and backhaul it to a centralized database for analysis.

Leaning into this, a lot of networking hardware manufacturers including giants like Cisco, have started building low-power LoRaWAN-enabled devices with lifespans ranging from 5 years to up to a decade. The gateways and sensors are hardened to function in challenging and open environments – smart cities, industry floors, mines, power grids, and so on.

Regional ParametersBut there are tradeoffs. LoRaWAN has significantly lower bandwidth compared to wireless technologies like Wi-Fi. As of now, LoRaWAN network’s throughput is roughly tens of kilobits. Martin does not recommend it for production type of deployments. However, it is important to note that even though this kind of throughput is not enough to push video and image feeds, it is perfectly sufficient for transmitting sensor data.

“We’re able to perfectly monitor things like open or closed doors, get temperature updates from a thermostat, or do local processing of information on-site and then sending highly optimized packet or payload across LoRaWAN networks,” he explains.

This makes IoT projects like building management, cattle tracking, smart irrigation, parking and asset tracking the ideal applications for LoRaWAN networks.

But at IoT’s scale, we are talking hundreds and thousands of endpoints and devices. How does a network of its throughput hold up to the demand? LoRaWAN can support considerably large networks of sensors, depending on where in the world it is. Because LoRaWAN uses low radio frequencies over long distances, it has to comply to certain regional parameters based on country-specific restrictions. For example, in North America, it operates on 915 MHz Frequency Band Channels, whereas in Europe, it runs on EU868.

Countries also have caps on airtime. “There are regulatory limits that prevent you from consuming too much airtime. After a certain amount of time, you have to stop talking and give another device chance to transmit,” elaborates Martin. “But there’s no limit necessarily on the amount of data that could be transmitted as long as those pauses are taken.”

To give you an example, Europe allows airtime of 36 seconds every 60 minutes. In the US, that is 400 milliseconds only for signal bandwidths south of 500 kHz. The spreading factor of LoRaWAN controls the rates and speeds of transmission. Lower spreading factors equal smaller frame sizes and higher transmission rates, whereas higher spreading factors mean reduced transmission rates.

Contrary to how people tend to see it, this is not necessarily a limiting factor. In fact, it offsets some of the latency enabling users to enjoy the highest network speeds possible. The Things Network offers a LoRaWAN airtime calculator that provides the precise airtime of a LoRa frame. This helps users determine the spreading factors and save battery life and reduce gateway utilization.

With its presence kicking off worldwide, is there a possibility that LoRaWAN will rival technologies like Wi-Fi or 5G? As of today, LoRaWAN is better suited for industrial, agricultural and IoT deployments. Its key competitors are in the carrier space, says Martin, that offer equivalent connectivity at range.

Wrapping UpSustainability has found a firm footing in not just discussions, but also in strategies and policies of organizations. LoRaWAN plays a leading role in driving a sustainable IoT ecosystem. It has opened ways to apply technology at an atomic level in tech-averse industries, and facilitate new discoveries.

Listen to the full interview from Mobility Field Day event, and check out The Things Network website to learn about LoRaWAN specifications. For a more hands-on experience, the Wireless LAN Professionals Conference in February will conduct a LoRaWAN bootcamp for attendees where you can learn how to build the LoRaWAN network with Raspberry Pi, and LoRaWAN gateways.

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When something is wrong with the network, it is often assumed to be a Wi-Fi problem. For decades, connection problems have been relegated to Wi-Fi issues, making Wi-Fi support the reluctant winner of the “fix-what-is-broken-department” title.

This hit a nerve as more people started to connect to the network for daily activities and the number of tickets exploded. It is undeniably vexing to have to deal with problems daily that are far removed from one’s own area of work. Inevitably, the issues get escalated and passed on downstream with a hint of frustration.

But professionals maybe overlooking the bigger picture, says Sam Clements, Technical Solutions Architect and a Field Day delegate. Host, Tom Hollingsworth sat down with Clements at the Mobility Field Day event, to talk about how this maybe an opportunity to embed a user-first imperative within organizations.

A Perception ProblemThe chagrin of Wi-Fi teams is easy to explain. “When something goes wrong, nobody wants people to look at their thing as being the thing that is broken,” says Clements.

The teams encounter hundreds of issues every day that they are under the pressure to resolve as quickly as possible. Unrelated tasks for which they have no real solutions for simply add to their workload. It is confusing and irksome, but Clements urges Wi-Fi professionals to look at it through a different lens.

“If you take a step back from the knee jerk reaction and instead think of what you can do to help the users, we can build these bridges with them,” he says.

The customer-first approach is always the best approach for businesses. It translates to customer loyalty and business success. Self-justifying does not align with that thinking, he says. “It drives a wedge between the users who are using the solution and those whom they are going to for support.”

Prioritizing User ExperienceInstead, Clements advises handling it in a professional way. “You have to put yourself in the shoes of a user 9 times out of 10 and you have to understand that they don’t have anywhere to go,” he says.

One may not necessarily have all the answers, but taking ownership of problems, and demonstrating a willingness to resolve them goes a long way to making customers feel heard.

One may argue that the customer-first philosophy is a teamwork, not something that can be executed on the back of one team. Clements emphasizes that putting users at the center of everything is only an attitude, not a job description. It only means that the support team puts the needs and expectations of the users first instead of taking it personally, and seek ways to deliver the best resolution possible.

It’s worth nothing that it does not mean that one must solve complex problems outside their niche. It only takes a few extra steps to confront a problem rather than deflecting it. Identify the issue, analyze it, look at the possible resolutions, and guide the user to a specialist.

It’s a fundamental shift from the way tickets are traditionally resolved. Advocates of technology will have to let go of the tunnel vision, and espouse a less siloed focus. It will also take some upskilling for all involved, but in the end, it is what will drive sustained growth in a highly competitive marketplace.

“We have the skills foundationally. So instead of passing the ball, if we learn new things from other domains, we can be helpful to the users, the vendors, and the organization,” says Clements.

Demonstrating a sense of agency and engaging in problem-solving is the essence of being an employee. “It doesn’t matter if someone started a ticket on your Wi-Fi team even if it’s not a Wi-Fi problem per se, because you’re helping the users which is after all the point of the team,” he reminds.

Wrapping UpOne can’t deny that keeping users happy has its rewards. Users are the biggest promoters helping shape a positive brand image from their experiences. Addressing their pain points encourages this. In the end, it is not just a responsibility for companies, it is in their interest to truly solve the problems.

For more, check out the Tech Talk with Sam Clements, and for more such interesting talks, be sure to tune in to the Gestalt IT Tech Talk series from the Field Day events.

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When delivering presentations, people often resort to slide decks, and PowerPoint, and to be fair, these tools communicate ideas and information reasonably well, but what catches on more is a presentation that tells a thought-provoking story worthy of a broader audience.

Managing Director of Wireless LAN Professionals, and many years a Field Day delegate, Keith Parsons, puts together a simple set of rules from his experience of watching hundreds of discourses and talks on the job, that can take presentations from being middling to killer.

Breaking Down the ArtCrafting a technical talk comes with the pressures of coming off as a specialist. But the secret is not to overprepare. Instead, putting some thought into the topic goes a long way to show that one is passionate, says Parsons at a Tech Talk while attending the Mobility Field Day event in California.

The best presentations are often the ones that aim to provide a solution to a real-world problem that is relatable to the audience. What makes it compelling is the speaker’s first-hand experience with it.

To highlight the effectivity of a product, tech talk speakers tend to elaborate on the problem overmuch at the cost of overlooking the conclusion. Glossing up the problem when you can garner so much more attention with the result is just a waste of time, says Parsons.

There is a simple formula to avoid this. You’ll notice this with all good technical presentations – a bottom-up approach.

The format is the real hook, says Parsons. “Turn it backwards. Don’t build up to a conclusion.”

To put it simply, the conclusion should be the lede of the presentation, not the problem. The only thing that the audience expects to hear through the course of a presentation – and that the speaker should work on getting right – is the solution. So, if a speaker must bring one thing with them, it is answers.

But getting to the solution is where the real work lies. Parsons recommends speakers to get hands-on with the problem, run experiments, and bring the data to the presentations. If one circumvents this steps, the audience can tell.

How to Tell a Visual StoryBetween oral and visual talks, is one better than the other? “Graphics can support what the premise is,” says Parsons. But it’s equally important to not go overboard. Keep the slides to few, and make them visually clean, Parsons advises.

As for the type of graphics, that depends on the audience. Use stats and charts if you must, but pick them based on your audiences’ preference, Parsons says. A visually dynamic slide does not overuse bullets or graphics. As a result, it affords the speaker time to augment the information while giving the audience a chance to read it on the fly. Chances are that the audience will read the slide ahead of the presenter, and if it is too descriptive, they will no longer be interested in the explanation.

Brevity Is Not Lack of ClarityA good talk is one that is compact, snappy and short. In order to achieve that, speakers must condense information and most importantly, avoid fluff. And that starts with avoiding overexplaining. The audience may already know a lot of it, and there’s no harm in assuming that.

A technical presentation does not need to be educational to that degree, Parsons says. A short presentation is not for that purpose. If somethings go unaddressed, it gives the audience a chance to follow up with questions. Make sure you give them the time for a Q&A before wrapping up.

Wrapping UpThere are two key takeaways here. A presentation must have a structure, and one that starts with the conclusion is an easy winner. Follow-up questions are welcome over a dry response. As a presenter, the one thing that you absolutely don’t want is to give a talk that falls flat with the audience. So remember to keep it real and personal.

The Wireless LAN Professionals publishes all presentations on their YouTube for public viewing. If you are preparing for a talk or working on sharpening your pitch, Parsons recommends studying the top 10 presentations on their WLP website. You can also dig into our Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day archives for samples of great presentations that have reached a broader audience. For more such Tech Talks, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.

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Firewalls are not the easiest things to manage in IT. Every time you configure a new rule you run the risk of invalidating an older rule or even the whole configuration. Trying to figure out which rules are used for which programs is an undertaking on the best of days and when nothing is properly documented it’s a task of epic proportions. Now, imagine trying to do that across dozens or even hundreds of devices in your enterprise. It’s enough to drive you mad.

Capirca and AerleonRecently, I had a chance to sit down and talk to Rob Ankeny and Jason Benterou at Invariant. They’re taking a great approach to solving the problems associated with firewall ACLs. It all started with a little project that Rob worked on at Google called Capirca. Note that’s not caprica because the project had a typo when it was created and they ran with it. Caprica helped Rob and the other firewall engineers at Google maintain ACLs from a normalized data source. Rob left Google and because of that the project stopped being maintained as well as having some questions around the ownership of Capirca.

Rob forked the project into Aerleon, using the name of another Battlestar Galactica planet this time. The project is designed to take data from a normalized set of inputs for policy and addressing and output a configuration for a firewall device. Aerleon works to build the ACLs from inputs and give you output that can be used in any supported device. They also modified the language to use YAML instead of the closed format of Capirca. That means you can feed Aerleon a YAML input and you’ll get a configuration that could work for Juniper, Cisco, and more. Without the need to adjust anything manually.

Enter InvariantHow do we get from Aerleon to Invariant? Well, that involves the introduction of Batfish. Batfish is a validation tool that allows you to take the output of a given configuration file and test it first to make sure it’s not going to break anything. Just as important as getting the ACL right is making sure that implementing it won’t cause other issues with other entries or even devices. Batfish could be a whole post in and of itself but it works closely with Aerleon to make it easy for engineers and operations people to ensure that firewall rules do what they’re supposed to do.

Invariant takes the ACL capabilities from Aerleon and uses Batfish to figure out what’s going to happen when you deploy them. It packages it up as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that can interpret all manner of configuration files and give you the output that you can be sure works. It scales to more than just a single firewall. Instead of the need to feed the inputs per device, Invariant scales it out to encompass all the devices it can support.

Note that the process for getting Invariant to work on your files is still manual right now. You have to export the configuration and upload it to Invariant in the cloud to get the configuration files you want. It will not directly connect to a device to capture the configuration and Invariant won’t push the configuration back to those devices. Given that the solution is still in the beta testing phase I think this is a reasonable limitation have now. It’s also important to realize that creating the capability to scale Invariant to offer those kinds of services is going to take development time and resources, which Rob and Jason and their team are hoping to get by pricing Invariant appropriately for the market.

If you would like to sign up for the current beta of Invariant and test it out you can do so right here on their home page. Don’t forget to give them feedback about how things work and what can be improved to make this a useful service for engineers and operations teams everywhere!

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Modern networks can provide huge competitive advantage for business organizations by simply enabling more connections. They can make infinite numbers of APs, endpoints, and devices pair and share information on autopilot.

Unfortunately, this has also opened companies up to a gamut of risks. At the Networking Field Day event, Tom Hollingsworth talked to Systems Architect and Field Day delegate, Tim Bertino about how companies can create a safe online space for data and users.

A Fast-Changing Online EnvironmentThe pandemic has accelerated sweeping digital transformations, and overnight connections have exploded. Users have started flocking online for work, recreation, shopping and socializing like never before.

For cybercriminals, this is a use-or-lose opportunity, and they are going for it. According to data, cybercrime went up by a shocking 400% the following year, and has been trending upwards steadily to this day.

Conventional wisdom says that if there are assets in the network that are at risk of getting compromised, keeping them under lock and key is a smart way to avert crisis. But as savvy attackers are increasingly deploying advanced and covert tactics to breach perimeters and steal from company data, enterprises are forced to revisit their security efforts.

One of the things that has become increasingly popular and widely adopted over the past few years is microsegmentation, a technique that keeps networks and tools separate. Network segmentation does two key things – first, it shrinks the attack surface, and second, prevents unauthorized lateral movement in the network.

“Network segmentation has been very prevalent lately with things like ransomware attacks. If someone gets into the network and compromises the system, if all they’re able to do is to talk to one specific thing and not the entire network, that can be seen as a win,” says Bertino.

Microsegmention, a Step Towards Zero TrustBut before digging in further, it must be noted that microsegmentation is an important component of the zero-trust scheme. The practice of sectioning off networks into subnets or other logical groups to control access and insulate devices has been going on for years. When attackers try to make malicious access, segmentation ensures that certain assets and components are out of bounds.

Microsegmentation happens at the more granular level – think VMs, containers and workloads.

Bertino sees it as policy-based segmentation. “We talk about the network being an enforcement point. It needs to be taken a step further because it’s all well and good if the network can apply policy. But you also need to understand what that policy should be.”

In plain-speak, microsegmentation hardens the network equipment by installing a checkpoint on each of them, enabling granular implementation of ZTNA. The goal is to inspect and validate all movements and accesses within the network, enforcing zero-trust principle at every point. Any machine or user that requests access to a component is scrutinized before granting access.

This fundamentally changes the way users access systems, but also the way systems exchange information between themselves. With more security enforcement points, every communication takes place with prior authorization.

“It is dynamic profiling of devices and users on the network, and then using the network to push things like dynamic ACLs and scalable group tags,” elaborates Bertino.

This means that when accessing from verified locations, members of a certain group will have access to select resources at certain times of the day. It is a continuous authentication mechanism that performs continual verification and monitoring of accesses.

There are multiple benefits to this. “Policies can be created on the fly whether by engineers or by suggestion of a heuristic. It enables networking admins to create better outcomes for their users, for example, preventing the spread of ransomware and malware throughout the network, or to just make lives easier,” says Bertino.

Viewed from another angle, it’s not just stronger security, but it even creates a synergy between the security and the networking teams who have historically been at odds. Microsegmentation allows the security team to put in place the necessary controls without obstructing the networking team.

“Device onboarding can be very difficult in zero trust or in closed authentication. You need a way to be able to profile devices and make sure that they are what you think they are and then get the proper policy,” he says.

In the FutureBertino predicts that in the future, AI will penetrate network segmentation eliminating its potential for human error. “The network sees all that data. If you have some sort of technology that can analyze it and be able to create benchmarks and policies, I think that’s where the industry is going to have to go.”

With an AI-powered technology that can sift through data and draw out intelligence, it will make implementation really low-effort. “At the end of the day it’s about minimizing and mitigating risks. You’re never going to take it to zero, but doing things like adopting zero trust network architectures and network segmentation will get a lot closer,” he says.

Be sure to watch the Tech Talk with Tim Bertino from the Networking Field Day event. For more such interesting conversations, check out the Gestalt IT Tech Talks that each focus on a different topic of interest from the enterprise IT world.

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KubeCon has grown from an esoteric event to one of the most exclusive conferences in tech. The tremendous success enjoyed by it is evident in its sprawling guestlist and stellar reputation in the community.

This year, 10,000 guests attended the event from the world over. Gestalt IT too was present in the scene, taking the pulse and getting vis-à-vis with the industry luminaries and many of our delegates.

We had the opportunity of catching up with Michael Levan, Kubernetes expert, and Field Day delegate, who was present in person, to talk about KubeCon and its growing popularity in the Kubernetes community.

A Platform for EngineersThe idea of KubeCon is built around giving everybody from a newly hired engineer to an industry veteran the platform to interact. “It’s very engineering-focused and community-driven,” agrees Levan. “It’s very much around the idea of helping engineers and letting them network with each other.”

Since the beginning, KubeCon has been dominated by engineers and developers who spend significant hours of their days working on Kubernetes. The event offers ample knowledge and education on the subject through talks and sessions – a refreshing break from the marketing marathon that many industry events are known to have become

KubeCon 2023 was a vibrant event packed with compact keynotes, interactive technical deep-dive sessions, and networking opportunity for all attendees. Giddy engineers, industry celebrities, renowned analysts, press, the event was swarming with people who had gathered for the love of Kubernetes.

But Kubernetes is not the only theme of the event. As known to all, KubeCon and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) are early proponents of open source and multi-vendor ecosystems. Every year, thousands of people from the open source community – organizations and practitioners – show up to be a part of it.

“CNCF is not focused on vendor-specific things. In today’s world, practitioners are the ones leading the way. Vendors want to be here because they know how big it is, and because the engineers are here,” Levan says.

The Open Source RevolutionA big contributing factor to the event’s deep reach and wide success is the rise of open source. Of late, the market has seen the ascendence of a myriad of open-source alternatives in the product space. These solutions continue to be key to driving innovation in enterprises. Companies too have done their part to support open source by adopting it and aligning their businesses around it. Thanks to that, many businesses in the recent years have come together and collaborated on open-source projects.

“Open source removes the fact that you only have one option. Yes, it creates a little bit more friction because you’ve got too many options sometimes, but it does give you the ability to actually dive in and work on it,” notes Levan.

Open source offers a software stack that is free for all to use. Anybody with relevant expertise can come in and work on the product, make it better. Being free of cost has made them some of the most financially sustainable solutions found in the market. As a result, a whole ecosystem has grown around it. The community comprises a mix of companies – really big ones that are funding large projects, and small startups that are building open technologies from the ground up to support other organizations like it.

But with products galore, picking any one is a mighty hard task. “We’re trying to figure out what these app stacks should be, the categorization, what it all looks like. It’s not massively defied right now,” told Levan.

That’s where an event like KubeCon comes in. Companies attending the event welcome practitioners to try out their products, and get educated about the solutions’ use cases. This encourages the product selection process to start from the bottom or at the middle where the real users are. Buy-ins from the top often leave out the viewpoints and expectations of those actually working with the technology. The interactive demos allow people in the trenches to learn about the technology and test it out to consider how they will be useful in their daily jobs.

For more information, watch the interview with Michael Levan from KubeCon 2023. Also be sure to check out another interesting conversation with Levan on Kubernetes and open source recently published on Gestalt IT. Thank you CNCF for supporting us and we look forward to coming back.

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Enterprises around the world are tapping into a growing obsession with data to optimize business processes, streamline operations, and improve efficiency. The rapid advances made by AI makes it possible to perform queries and draw insights from raw data without expertise or training. This was unthinkable a few years ago for organizations without an internal data science team.

Working at the intersection of data and AI, Qlik helps customers maximize value from their data, using it to access insights, inform decisions and increasingly, underpin the implementation of AI models. This week, the company unveiled a brand-new look for its logo and website to mark this shift in strategy.

“Its a change in our brand definition and how we show up,” says Kathryn Kane, VP of Brand, Media and Web.

Competitive Advantage Lies in DataQlik is a data integration and analytics company that helps businesses unlock the full value of data in an increasingly complex technological landscape. From the outset, companies face many challenges in their data journey – from governance, to generating insights from a dramatically increasing volume of information. The process is accompanied by a sharp learning curve which is costly, and a barrier to seamless delivery.

Qlik helps enterprises harness AI effectively by ensuring that all data is managed and governed effectively. The rebranding gives Qlik a new personality, but also sends a key message about how Qlik’s core value and mission has aligned to the evolution of the market.

Qlik’s new brand manifesto is “Wherever there’s data, there’s opportunity.” As a company committed to delivering analytical and AI capabilities broadly within organizations, Qlik knows that the impact of AI on business is going to be profound, and data is the fuel that will power it. With its growing portfolio, Qlik aims to provide businesses with a foundation upon which they can parse and analyze data, learn and adapt.

A Brand New IdentityWith the new look and feel, the company is doubling down on Qlik’s brand attributes and ethos of impact, trust, optimism and vision. Alongside, it is debuting a new market position that is heavily aligned with the increasing importance of data in business, and AI being at the heart of that.

From a multitude of aesthetic choices, Qlik assembled a color palette comprising hues like green, gray, blue and white. The new logo exhibits a clean design, and reflects transparency and efficiency that Qlik stands for.

“The fresh, modern typography of our logo and its streamlined design is our pledge to clarity and efficiency, ensuring that our advanced solutions remain user-centric,” says Qlik.

Purposeful use of limited colors and a white backdrop resulted in a logo that is clean, simple and makes a good first impression. The style extends to the website as well which accurately reflects the personality behind the brand. While retaining the identifiable look and feel, the new website fosters a strong first impression with a sense of singularity helping the brand to stand out instantly.

Wrapping UpData analytics has penetrated businesses in all sectors. It is increasingly important as the foundation of real-world AI use cases. When armed with versatile tools like Qlik, enterprises show greater confidence in their ability to examine and understand data, and those reported to have high concentrations of analytics achieve faster outcomes and better bottom lines. Qlik’s updated look, besides triggering a favorable psychological reaction, reflects the positive experience that it promises. But more importantly, its repositioning shows a commitment to furthering the advantage and potential of data and AI to all businesses.

To learn more, head over to Qlik’s new-look website. Also, be sure to check out the Qlik Tech Talks from AWS re:Invent 2023 here at Gestalt IT.

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The IT world by now is all too familiar with Kubernetes. Dubbed the holy grail, it is said to have solved every problem short of climate change. Does this narrative have its base in facts, or is it just a fantasy? We asked Jon Hildebrand, tech vet and Tech Field Day delegate, at the recent Cloud Field Day event in California.

Is Kubernetes a Bit Over-Hyped?“To really boil it down, it’s a glorified orchestrator between different infrastructure stacks that has been basically taken one step further from an abstraction layer to make it easier to manage those layers and allow programmers to access them moving forward. It’s really nothing more than that,” replied Hildebrand.

But let’s back up a little. For those who haven’t tried their hand at Kubernetes but are familiar with its acclaim, here’s a quick recap. In an off itself, Kubernetes is a platform – a platform that was designed to help orchestrate and manage containerized applications in the most efficient manner. It lets you automate complex things like scaling, auto-healing, provisioning, orchestration, deployment and so on. In a very real sense, it helps enterprises sidestep the pains and problems of infrastructure management in the cloud as it were.

But Kubernetes is not the first orchestration software. Albeit the best-in-class, but certainly not a novelty. Nor was the goal ever to make it an end-all-be-all solution that people think it to be.

“Kubernetes has become a buzzword. People often struggle to understand exactly what it brings to the table and immediately think that it’s going to solve all of the problems when in fact, it’s another layer of infrastructure management, another layer of development management that they have to worry about. It’s just more worry on top of your existing systems that you have within your environment,” said Hildebrand.

But that is not to say that it doesn’t deserve the spotlight. Kubernetes has many uses and advantages. To start with, it has condensed the entire datacenter infrastructure into one system with a single API to interact with, and standardized configurations and policies across the board. That’s nothing short of phenomenal.

But one can’t not see the 800-pound gorilla in the room – Kubernetes has an extremely high adoption curve. It is why so many early adopters described their experience as trying and stressful. The technology is complex to harness and requires serious upskilling.

What It Really Solves?For those who are unclear about what Kubernetes really does, Hildebrand laid it out in simple terms – “An abstraction layer that helps jumpstart application development.”

The intended use of Kubernetes is to simplify access to various infrastructure components. “I consider it to be a pluggable infrastructure. You have the boiled-down simplified calls that a developer would need to do to make to a storage or a network environment to make things happen, define where the data is going to be stored when it comes to these containerized applications. It is trying to simplify down access to those particular infrastructure components,” he explained.

The unnatural popularity has led many enterprises to use Kubernetes for the wrong reasons. “One of the things that I see is especially from those who are heavily invested in virtualization trying to assume that virtualization equals containerization. You can take an application and essentially change the clothes it is wearing. But that’s not necessarily how containerization and the Kubernetes systems are ultimately going to be able to successfully move that application to a cloud-native approach,” he noted.

But credit must be given where it is due. Kubernetes may disappointingly not be the silver bullet for all of IT’s problems, but it is groundbreaking in the way it has simplified application management through automation. Along the way, it has melded the worlds of infrastructure and operations giving developers a taste of infrastructure management which used to be a very niche discipline earlier.

Irrespective of the debate, Kubernetes is extremely relevant today and is at the heart of the cloud-native conversation. “Now’s the time to start learning about Kubernetes if you want to take your infrastructure career to the next level and give it a new arc. Given the direction application development is going with cloud-native components being added to applications left and right, Kubernetes is going to be where you’re going to be spending a lot of time making sure that the infrastructure is working well from that abstraction layer,” concluded Hildebrand.

Hildebrand advises professionals to look for learning guides and resources online. Google documents and paid courses, he says, are a great place to start learning about the technology.

Be sure to watch the Tech Talk with Jon Hildebrand and other interesting interviews from the Cloud Field Day event.

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There are several ways to counter ransomware attacks. To have security fully enmeshed in every part of the network is a start. A more targeted approach is to have an early warning system in place that reports back every suspicious event in the environment instantly. It should make no mistake, and send out just the right amount of alerts required to keep the environment safe, and not keep the teams busy all day long. It seems Commvault has a solid understanding of these key requirements of data security in the age of ransomware, and delivers to them through its line of solutions.

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Perhaps no computing technology has been as consistently-compatible and yet cutting edge as PCI Express (PCIe). This Gestalt IT Tech Talk features Richard Solomon of the PCI-SIG discussing the journey of PCI through decades of compatibility and innovation with Stephen Foskett. Uncover the story behind the backbone of modern computing systems and gain insights into the future of PCIe’s evolution.

Connect with Richard SolomonRichard Solomon is the Technical Marketing Manager, PCI Express Controller IP at Synopsys and the Vice President of PCI-SIG. You can connect with Richard on LinkedIn and find out more about Synopsys on their website. Learn more about standardization from PCI-SIG on their website.

Decades of Compatibility and Evolution of PCI ExpressPCI is the standard for interconnection of peripherals in modern computers, from portable devices to the datacenter and HPC. This discussion, recorded at the Flash Memory Summit, features Richard Solomon, Technical Marketing Manager at Synopsys, and Stephen Foskett as they explore the remarkable journey of PCI Express (PCIe) and its pivotal role in modern computing systems. With decades of compatibility and innovation under its belt, PCIe has emerged as an essential technology powering seamless data center operations.

As the standards group dedicated to developing the PCIe specification, the PCI-SIG ensures that diverse hardware components collaborate cohesively, from CPUs to SSDs, graphics cards, and more. The conversation centered on the need for standards to enable flawless interactions across an array of devices and platforms.

Solomon highlighted the astonishing fact that the PCI-SIG has maintained backward compatibility for decades. A testament to the organization’s commitment, devices designed in the early 2000s remain functional in modern PCIe 5.0 systems. This continuity is pivotal, as it ensures that legacy hardware and new technologies can seamlessly coexist, offering both familiarity and future-proofing to end-users.

The conversation traversed through PCIe’s recent evolution, starting from the 16 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) in PCIe 4.0 to the latest 64 GT/s in PCIe 6.0. Solomon shared insights into PCIe 7.0, boasting an incredible 128 GT/s speed and building upon the foundation laid by its predecessors. The transition to higher speeds while maintaining backward and forward compatibility exemplifies the delicate balance between innovation and stability.

Solomon delved into the expansion of PCIe into optical domains. The newly formed optical work group under the PCI-SIG aims to simplify optical connectivity across different speeds, allowing for extended reach and resiliency where needed. While the industry is not at the point where copper can’t handle the speeds, optical solutions are being nurtured to create a more versatile ecosystem that accommodates various technological requirements.

As the conversation drew to a close, Solomon shed light on the upcoming Super Compute 23 event in Denver, where attendees can explore the latest PCIe developments and demonstrations. The legacy of PCI Express continues to thrive, paving the way for enhanced compatibility and innovation in computing and beyond.

This Tech Talk illuminated the exceptional journey of PCI Express, showcasing the power of standardization in the ever-evolving world of technology. With backward and forward compatibility woven into its DNA, PCIe has not only facilitated seamless hardware integration but also exemplified the balance between innovation and stability. As PCIe embarks on new frontiers, the industry anticipates the continued impact of this pivotal technology on the future of computing.

Learn more about standardization from PCI-SIG on their website. You can follow PCI-SIG on Twitter and on LinkedIn.

Watch all of the Gestalt IT Tech Talks from Flash Memory Summit 2023!* ###### Unifying Storage Management with SNIA Swordfish * ###### Realizing the Potential of CXL with Jim Pappas and Kurtis Bowman * ###### Exploring SDXI for Memory-to-Memory Movement and Transformation with Shyam Iyer

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There are many definitions of a good data protection solution. Some put application-centric protection at the top. Others differ, putting more priority on usability features like low learning curve, zero management, point-and-click simplicity and so on. Drawing from that argument, it is safe to say that if security is one half of data protection, the other half is integration, multi-cloud compatibility, low house-keeping and so on. Thought in those terms, one provider comes to mind immediately, that covers all bases – HYCU.

At the most recent Cloud Field Day event in Boston, HYCU demoed their solution explaining how it caters differently to users on different platforms. So we were naturally thrilled to catch up with them again at the VMware Explore US 2023.

HYCU for VMwareWe talked to Shiva Raja, Technical Solutions Architect at HYCU, this time learning about what HYCU brings to the table for VMware administrators.

“We have a purpose-built solution for VMware. What I mean by that is, we have several integration points with VMware. This actually deals with vSAN, VADP and vVols. This is one of the most core integration points when it comes to offering high-performance backups with zero impact on production,” said Raja.

Although HYCU keeps a reputation of being partner-friendly, and the VMware integration is further evidence of that, we were curious to learn what drives its tight integration with an ecosystem like VMware’s.

“One of the core aspects of why we’re really good at VMware is scale,” said Raja. Big VMware infrastructures consume a lot of compute power. This means most data protection providers require customers to add more infrastructure on-premises.”

HYCU has that down to a minimum, giving users huge cost savings, and is one of the reasons why HYCU such a known name in the VMware user community.

HYCU offers agentless backup and recovery for all resources – files, folders, VMs, VM disks, applications, databases, what have you – to all major public cloud vendors.

“When you’re using our solution, you’re basically future-proofing it by having the ability to restore all these backups to any of your public cloud vendor which is a huge story when it comes to VMware on cloud, especially when it deals with the lift and transform story,” Raja highlights.

Integration with vSANOne of the highlights is HYCU’s vSAN integration which lends users the ability to leverage the solutions’ native features. vSAN is VMware’s native storage platform, a solution that is as ubiquitous as virtualization itself. To vSAN, HYCU brings snapshot level integration that offers app-consistent and crash-consistent backups. Using these snapshots, HYCU delivers fast and granular restores for all said resources.

The good news is, on cloud, every VMware deployment uses these. “That’s why when you deploy HYCU on VMware on any public cloud infrastructure, you have that native integration that offers high performance backups with zero performance impact,” he highlights.

Raja highlights that HYCU performs backup in object storage, which means customers get to enjoy cost and security advantages, besides the performance benefits of cloud-native object storage.

“We’re basically making use of the underlying platform, meaning that we are leveraging the customers’ investment to carve out a solid data protection strategy,” said Raja.

In doing so, HYCU unlocks the full potential of VMware resources in the cloud, enabling users to fully utilize them for secondary uses like data protection without ratcheting up infrastructure costs.

Backups in the Multi-CloudA big differentiator, that was the discussion at VMware Explore, is HYCU’s support for multi-cloud.

“Back in the day, a lift and shift sounded so attractive. It is good theoretically, but as folks try to migrate their workloads, it isn’t such an easy task. They are moving from one platform to a totally different one, which is why they pivoted from lift and shift to lift and transform,” noted Raja.

To tackle this challenge, HYCU offers fully transparent backups. In other words, HYCU backups can be restored anywhere in public cloud – AWS, Google or Azure.

“That is the flexibility that you have with HYCU. You’re not just investing in backups of your VMware, but you are also future-proofing your workloads to be cloud-ready.”

In addition to these, HYCU also offers data backup and recovery for a broad spectrum of SaaS workloads that run the gamut from Salesforce, Jira and Confluence, to cloud-native applications like Cloud SQL and BigQuery, as well as productivity tools, like Office 365 and Google Workspace.

“That’s just the start. Our roadmap is aggressive. We’re planning to support more than one hundred SaaS applications by the end of this year. A very ambitious roadmap, but it is only possible because of the flexibility offered within our platform,” said Raja.

To learn more about HYCU’s backup solutions for VMware, check out their website, or reach out for info at info@HYCU.com. To try out their solution on VMware and other supported platforms, visit TryHYCU.com. Also, be sure to check out HYCU’s in-depth presentations of their solutions from the last Cloud Field Day event on Techfieldday.com.

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When ransomware attacks first came into news, they were targeted at big businesses. The rest of the world quickly dismissed it as a problem of the big corporations, and went about their day. Now new data has emerged that shows no organization is safe from it.

As ransomware tore through the nation in the past couple years, several city governments have declared states of emergency. Schools were canceled mid-week. Airline companies have been forced to cancel flights last minute. Hospitals lost patients’ private medical information. And countless small businesses have shut down never to open again.

Last week, at VMware Explore US 2023 in Las Vegas, Gestalt IT interviewed David Aldrich, Director of Sales Engineering at Zerto. Zerto is a Hewlett Packard company that specializes in disaster recovery and ransomware resilience. We asked Aldrich what companies can do to stay safe from the ongoing digital assault, and what Zerto is doing to warrant safety of its customers.

We learned that Zerto has announced the new Zerto 10 in May. The new version comes with two powerful enhancements designed to unlock early detection and rapid recovery. The first is real-time encryption detection, and the second, a Cyber Resilience Vault. Combined, the features provide a two-pronged approach to achieving the ultimate defense against ransomware.

Time Is of the EssenceThe most recent cases of ransomware have made it amply clear that time is on the side of the attackers. Despite racing against the clock detecting and eliminating threats, security operators are outfoxed by clever attack tactics that are not only untraceable, but also frighteningly fast.

“Ransomware has really come to the forefront, and our customers need to be able to detect and react quickly when they see a ransomware type of event,” said Aldrich.

To beat attackers at their game, these companies need a solution that provides the twin benefits of spotting cloaked threats, and spotting them prematurely. That’s just where Zerto 10 cuts its teeth in. Its real-time encryption detection makes all monitoring tools appear sleepy and sloppy.

Real-time encryption detection allows Zerto to inspect data for encryption as it enters the environment. Within minutes of data streaming in, Zerto 10 alerts users about all suspicious elements present, unlocking swift elimination.

“Our whole intention with designing this encryption detection solution was to allow our customers to have recovery time objectives (RTOs) to minutes,” said Aldrich.

What can take a standard backup solution up to 24 hours to discover, Zerto 10 does in minutes. But more importantly, it can zero down an encryption to the second it began. This allows operators to roll back to the precise point in time.

The precision is made possible by Zerto’s virtual replication journal present in every VM protected by Zerto. These journals record changes at a frequency of few seconds with a checkpoint time-stamp, making point-in-time recovery precise.

Precision is in Zerto’s DNA, and it extends to the platform’s alert fidelity as well. In its latest version, the alerts are minimal. In other words, every alert generated is a priority. “We’re going out and having conversations with our customers that a lot of these are not false positive alerts, and they really need to take these seriously,” Aldrich emphasized.

Being API-based, Zerto 10 integrates with a broad ecosystem of security tools allowing operators to cast a wide net.

An Impact-Free Zone Untouched by RansomwareTwinned with continuous monitoring and early detection, Zerto has introduced a second element to Zerto 10 that is key to cyber resilience – immutability and air-gapping.

“Back a year or so ago, it was a nice-to-have. Now it’s a need-to -have for a lot of organizations,” noted Aldrich.

The Cyber Resilience Vault is a clean, physically air-gapped space where immutable data copies can be saved in a zero-trust architecture. The vault is completed isolated from the rest of the environment, so much so that it has no connection to the production network or the internet. For maximum safety, it is made free of compute – the lifeforce of ransomware. “We don’t have compute powered on in the actual vault and that’s a big difference,” Adrich commented.

Fuss-Free SupportOf late, vendors have increasingly embraced security trends like real-time detection and zero-trust security, resulting in overly complex solutions. Overwhelmingly, these solutions contribute to add to the workload of IT staff.

“Some of the IT staff is really overwhelmed and understaffed. They don’t have enough manpower,” Aldrich pointed out.

Zerto was resolved to make a difference with the Zerto platform. So it packed in white-glove support service to make it easy and consumable for customers. Available in what Zerto calls “t-shirt sizes” – small, medium, large and XL – it provides customers different types of professional support for deploying the Zerto Cyber Resilient Vault and help tune it to meet their requirements.

The support is an extension of HPE’s robust and centralized support system, giving all customers “one number to call and one support process to engage through”, said Aldrich.

Among things in the horizon, Zerto is focused on continuing the work of improving the solution, streamlining and fine-tuning the two features in the upcoming versions of the platform.

“As we move through this process, we get customer feedbacks, and get it more out into the field at that point,” he said.

Wrapping UpNo enterprise must not take ransomware trivially. Coming out of an attack is not like paying a few hundred dollars and getting stolen items back. Ransomware penetrations are deep and catastrophic. The only way the situation can reverse is, if enterprises, instead of furnishing the possibilities with cavalier disregard, fight back with lethal weapons of cybersecurity that can destroy the resolve of attackers and turn them away to try different doors. For this, Zerto 10 is a solution of great value.

For information on Zerto real-time encryption detection and Cyber Resiliency Vault of Zerto 10, head over to Zerto.com. Be sure to take advantage of their on-demand labs to explore and test out the solution before getting in touch with their field team for an in-depth demo. Check out the full interview above, or their in-depth presentations at the recent Cloud Field Day event.

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As companies embrace chiplet technology, the need for a standard like UCIe is becoming critical. Explore the realm of chiplet integration in this Gestalt IT Tech Talk with Brian Rea, Co-Chair of UCIe’s Marketing Work Group, and Stephen Foskett. Uncover how UCIe is revolutionizing chip design by establishing open standards that foster collaboration, interoperability, and cutting-edge custom chip solutions. As UCIe continues to refine its specifications and garner industry support, its impact on the chip landscape promises to be transformative, ushering in an era of specialized processors.

Connect with Brian Rea Brian Rea is a Technology Initiative and Ecosystem Enablement Manager at Intel and Co-Chair for the Marketing Work Group for Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe). You can connect with Brian on LinkedIn and find out more about UCIe on their website.

Standardization and Integration of Chiplets Using UCIeMany of the most modern processors are composed of multiple chiplets bonded together to form a single unit. Although this technology is widely used, the standard for interoperability between processors and vendors is just emerging. In this Gestalt IT Tech Talk, Brian Rea, the Marketing Work Group Co-Chair for Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe), delved into the transformative power of standardization in chiplet integration. This conversation illuminated the pivotal role of UCIe in fostering a new era of chip design that embraces open standards to enhance interoperability and innovation.

The Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, provided a platform for Brian Rea to explain the significance of UCIe’s standardization initiative. Brian highlighted how UCIe is spearheading an industry-wide push to establish an open standard for chiplet integration and interconnects. UCIe’s approach aims to streamline chip integration processes and facilitate collaboration across diverse players in the industry.

The conversation centered on the foundational concept of chiplets, highlighting how UCIe’s standardized approach revolutionizes chip design. Brian described how chiplets serve as modular building blocks, enabling various capabilities to be compartmentalized into distinct dies. By adhering to open standards set by UCIe, chip manufacturers can seamlessly integrate chiplets from different sources, unlocking unprecedented flexibility in design.

Drawing parallels between UCIe and the widely adopted PCIe standard, Brian and Stephen Foskett underscored the effectiveness of open standards in fostering innovation. Brian emphasized how UCIe builds upon the success of PCIe, offering a comprehensive framework that encompasses multiple stack layers, from physical connections to software protocols. This approach enables chiplet integration to leverage existing industry standards, facilitating compatibility while accommodating proprietary advancements.

Brian offered insights into UCIe’s rapid evolution since its inception, highlighting the consortium’s growth to over a hundred member companies. With a diverse cross-section of industry players onboard, including foundries, chip manufacturers, and cloud service providers, UCIe embodies a collaborative ecosystem driving standardization forward. Brian’s discussion of the 1.1 specification update showcased UCIe’s commitment to refining its standard based on active feedback and industry trends.

Brian and Stephen discussed the potential of standardization to reshape chip design across industries. The implications of UCIe’s approach extend beyond individual companies, as open standards pave the way for shared innovation and interoperability. With UCIe’s emphasis on chiplet integration, a new horizon emerges where custom chips can be assembled for specialized applications, bolstering efficiency and performance.

The Gestalt IT Tech Talk with Brian Rea shed light on UCIe’s instrumental role in shaping the future of chip design through standardization. UCIe’s dedication to open standards not only streamlines chiplet integration but also lays the foundation for collaborative innovation across the industry. As UCIe continues to refine its specifications and garner industry support, its impact on the chip landscape promises to be transformative, embracing openness and driving progress.

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In the bustling halls of VMware Explore in Las Vegas, a buzz is in the air, and its name is “GenAI.” But what exactly is GenAI? Is it just another instance of AI hype, or does it hold real value for VMware’s strategic focus? In this article, we delve into the essence of GenAI, its implications for VMware, and its potential impact on the enterprise technology landscape.

Is GenAI Just a Buzzword?The term “GenAI” has been circulating widely, raising eyebrows and curiosity. But what does it really mean? At its core, GenAI is a shorthand for generative artificial intelligence. Just as terms like “on-premises” and even “cloud” are convenient but linguistically inaccurate, GenAI condenses a complex concept into a compact form. However, when we dissect the term, it becomes evident that GenAI primarily refers to generative AI models powering applications like ChatGPT, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E. These models, often featured in news headlines, are the products of generative AI-based artificial intelligence. So, when marketers tout GenAI, they are essentially alluding to these remarkable AI applications.

When enterprise technology vendors champion their support for GenAI, they aren’t proposing that businesses will develop massive new language models. Instead, their intention is to empower enterprises to deploy and harness the potential of existing large language models. This translates to infrastructure designed to facilitate the retraining, validation, and implementation of these models, not necessarily the creation of brand-new ones. The emphasis is on enabling competitive advantages through integration with applications, which entails technology infrastructure supporting both transfer learning and model training, as well as their regular use.

VMware’s Role in the GenAI LandscapeAs the spotlight shines on GenAI, VMware emerges as a significant player in this arena. But how does VMware fit into the GenAI narrative? VMware’s core technology revolves around aggregating physical hardware resources, creating a pool of segmented assets that can be allocated as needed. This resource allocation mechanism, applied to CPUs, memory, IO, and storage, can also be extended to GPUs. This capability becomes instrumental in supporting dynamic architectures for AI applications.

For instance, a machine with multiple GPUs can have them allocated and reassigned as required, facilitating tasks like PyTorch execution and transfer learning. Surprisingly, these dynamically configured systems can outperform bare metal machines due to VMware’s expertise in memory over-provisioning, storage acceleration, and networking enhancement.

Contrary to unfounded AI supercomputer expectations, VMware’s role in GenAI lies in creating GPU-driven machines with dynamic reconfiguration capabilities. These machines can be tailored for a spectrum of tasks, from transfer learning to lighter training and inferencing. This aligns with the evolving landscape where flexible virtual machines play a pivotal role in AI workloads. This practical approach positions VMware uniquely, as it leverages its existing technologies to cater to the needs of the AI domain.

Stephen’s Stance: GenAI Makes Sense for VMwareIn summary, the notion of GenAI isn’t mere AI washing; it’s a practical extension of VMware’s expertise into the realm of generative AI. The company’s ability to build and reconfigure GPU-powered machines aligns well with the dynamic requirements of AI applications, from training to inferencing. While futuristic technologies like CXL may reshape the landscape in the long term, VMware stands firmly positioned to offer real-world solutions for enterprises seeking to harness the power of AI. Amidst the hype and buzz, GenAI emerges as a viable and pragmatic avenue for VMware’s continued growth and innovation.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha discusses how open source projects have permeated every sector that paid applications have ever touched. This is underpinned by the rise of open source database systems like PostgreSQL. While a majority of the IT community is excited about PostgreSQL, few know how to tap into its potential. For them, EnterpriseDB offers a line of handy solutions that acts as the missing link, melding Oracle‘s capabilities with the convenience and practicality of PostgreSQL, all while giving customers the care and feeding they need to go open source.

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Discover the potential of the new Smart Data Acceleration Interface (SDXI) standard created by SNIA, which enables memory-to-memory data movement and transformation. Explore its impact on virtualization, computational storage, security, and more in this Gestalt IT Tech Talk from Flash Memory Summit featuring Shyam Iyer, SDXI working group chair, and Stephen Foskett. Learn how SDXI is positioned to reshape the storage landscape, with its adaptability, standardization, and potential to drive efficiency and innovation throughout the industry.

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Compute Express Link (CXL), a high-speed, low latency interconnect designed to expand memory and heterogeneous compute devices, was top of mind at the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) in Santa Clara this year. In this Gestalt IT Tech Talk, Jim Pappas and Kurtis Bowman discuss the current status of CXL, including the 2.0 devices, the adoption of the 3.0 specification, and the widespread support for CXL in the latest processors from Intel, AMD, and ARM. Learn more about CXL and get involved in the CXL Consortium!

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha discusses AI EdgeLabs and their AI based solution to security to deploy at the edge. Touted the holy grail of real-time processing, the edge is poised to go big. But a myriad of remote and physical attacks is weakening its foundation, making decentralized computing a thing of the future. As enterprises put one foot before the other making footprints in the edge world, they need to bring their A game in security to mindfully circumvent the tinderbox. And for that, a solution like AI EdgeLabs is consequential.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha discusses GigaIO's Composable Platform in the Data Center. In the new wave of composability, enterprises are looking to embrace multi-vendor solutions that abate the incompatibility of proprietary solutions and let datacenter managers nurture new ways to design the datacenter fabric. GigaIO’s solutions unlock supreme computing power, cost optimizations of unforeseen kind, and a cloud-level agility on-premises. GigaIO may not be the inventors of composability, but it’s safe to say that they have it down to a science. With an open-standard, multi-chip design, GigaIO’s solutions are set to herald a new beginning, after a prolonged period of slow, sclerotic and expensive computing.

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In the Tech Talk recorded at Flash Memory Summit, Stephen Foskett talks with Richelle Ahlvers about SNIA’s Swordfish, an extension of the DMTF Redfish standard to enable storage and fabric management. Designed for comprehensive storage observability and control, Swordfish encompasses configuration, monitoring, event notifications, and more, and is key to managing NVMe storage environments. With integration capabilities into existing Redfish systems, Swordfish offers cross-platform administration, a feat recognized with a Best in Show award. Learn more about SNIA Swordfish in this Gestalt IT Tech Talk!

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In this Tech Talk, John Osmon talks about his experience in the Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) space. He mentions the challenges with getting connectivity to remote users. He also discusses the various metrics that define the quality of service that your connection can have and why bandwidth isn’t always the best measure of how “good” your connection might be. He also discusses what the future of smaller ISPs will look like with federal funding and how consumers can ask the right questions to ensure good service to their location.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha discusses PeerIQ from Peer Software and how it unifies analytics for heterogenous storage topologies. Since the start of multi-cloud, vendors have churned out new observability solutions that the press has slapped new names to. But each time, output has been mediocre, or limited at best. With PeerIQ, here is a possibility for enterprises to level up their visibility game while availing solutions from multiple vendors. With a single source of truth that transcends the barriers of infrastructures, probing and poking systems for performance and health is so much easier. PeerIQ does all the three things of monitoring, visibility, and analytics with great granularity assuring that teams are on top of everything in the environment, and that nothing degrades the system performance. With visibility goal front and center, Peer Software, will continue to sharpen the analytics, perhaps reducing the latency between spotting problems and service disruptions down to near-zero, in the future iterations.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha discusses how Infinidat caters to what can be best described as a broad and heterogenous audience that constitutes very large accounts worth billions, to small outfits on limited budget. As a company that 25% of Fortune 50 companies rely on, it has a very high bar to meet. But as a provider for smaller clients, it also has to maintain a value factor, and Infinidat never loses sight of either. In all its releases, as in these, it’s focus on treading that fine line and delivering value for money is evident. Both the solutions enrich the Infinidat storage experience by extending the utilities of the InfiniBox platform, and optimizing it for more modern workloads - a feat that will likely bring more target audience into Infinidat’s fold.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha discusses Tanium's XEM Platform. The irony of modern technology is that it has the ability to both enable and encumber. Using too many tools at once can easily undo the benefits that users might be getting from a single solution. Having said that, security is not a make-shift arrangement. It’s a long-term commitment, and multi-purpose tools provides infinitely more value for money, and muscle power to fight off threats than an armory of point solutions can.

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In this Tech Talk, Girard Kavelines discusses XDR. He talks about the differences between XDR and EDR as well as how the technology has evolved since the early days of securing devices. Girard also brings up the integrations that XDR has with cloud security platforms and how it can be used to provide a more holistic approach to keeping users safe and secure. Also discussed is the automated nature of XDR and how AI can enhance and extend the capabilities of any XDR solution.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha discusses Lightbend's Kalix. With programmers left to focus solely on building the application business logic, without spending time on learning specialized skills, Kalix provides cost-optimization of breakthrough kinds. It ensures lower data-related costs, low investment on application middleware and optimum resource utilization – all of which contribute to a favorable develop experience.

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In this exclusive article, Andrew Green discusses the near edge and far edge, their response times, and how they function. The major distinction between near Edge and far Edge use cases is the flow of data. For the far Edge (Edge Platforms, CDNs, and Clouds), you would push data onto the end users. That means that you deliver videos, support real-time personalization of user sessions, optimize website performance, and deliver gaming experiences. For the Near Edge (deployment of hardware on-premises) data is generated and processed at the edge, and then it is pulled to a central system for other non-real-time use cases. For example, you would monitor and process in real-time an OT system for unexpected behaviors and then would pull the data from multiple Edge deployments to a central system for long-term analysis.

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In this Tech Talk, Mohammad Ali discusses Private 5G. He talks about the origins of the technology and how it’s different from standard 5G available to consumers as well as Wi-Fi networking. He talks about the advantages of using this new protocol to cover large areas and which applications would benefit the most from deployment. He also talks about the challenges faced by client devices and how practitioners can ensure Private 5G installations work smoothly for operations teams and end users alike.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha discusses how Lenovo has created a value network that is exemplary through innovations and breakthroughs with partners upstream, and distribution of products in native and foreign markets through partners downstream. It goes to show that businesses operating in the same industry need to be overly competitive with each other to stay in the race. In fact, some of the biggest engineering feats in technology have been the result of strong collaborations between organizations. As they say, two heads are better than one. If more companies can keep their ego aside and see opportunity where others see buyouts and acquisitions, businesses do not need to sideswipe each other off the road or squabble over the bigger market share. United, they can create a climate and culture of participation and shared values that promote new opportunities and fuel innovation, in the end, driving growth and revenue for all involved.

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VAST Data is one of the leading innovators in enterprise storage, winning customers and partnerships with its scale-out storage platform. But the company is emphasizing the "Data" part of their name with a new platform designed to support data, analytics, and AI. The VAST DataPlatform is designed to merge storage and data to enable AI-assisted computation. Let's take a look at the core features of this new VAST DataPlatform and its potential impact on the data and AI landscape.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha discusses how Opsly's drag and drop interface allows developers to create solutions in AWS, Azure and GCP without going into the technical nuts and bolts. It also gives users the option to export code for deployed infrastructures as Terraform code. With just a click, full repos of code can be generated line by line on Terraform.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha discusses how Forescout XDR helps beat the alert fatigue by filtering out the noise and leaving only actionable notifications for SOC. This cuts down the work of chasing false leads, and at the same time ensures that no threats are missed. The platform’s robust ability to ingest, correlate, refine and respond does the bulk of the work, helping security staff skip the mad dash and improve efficiency.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha discusses Catalogic Software's Catalogic DPX and how DPX GuardMode can scan data continuously for warning signs and prevents bad data from ending up in the backup and compromising the whole stack. DPX GuardMode can be an aggressive countermeasure against evolving extortion tactics that beats attackers at their own game.

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In this interview, Tom Hollingsworth welcomes Roy Chua, the founder and Principal at AvidThink, as one of our newest Tech Field Day delegates. Roy shares his background starting as a network software engineer, moving into product management, and eventually transitioning into the analyst space. He discusses the challenges of staying up-to-date with the rapidly evolving technology landscape and how his company focuses on more targeted and cutting-edge areas to add value. When asked about his dream job, Roy expresses a fondness for books and mentions that running a small bookshop would be a really fun job for him. Thanks for joining us at Security Field Day, Roy!

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In this Gestalt IT Tech Talk, Stephen Foskett interviews Steve McDowell, a principal analyst at NAND Research, about the concept of disaggregated architecture. They discuss the benefits of hiding complexity through disaggregation, the role of accelerators like GPUs and IO accelerators, and the potential of technologies like CXL (Compute Express Link) in enabling seamless expansion and interconnectivity of system components. They also touch upon examples of disaggregated systems and express excitement about the future possibilities of leveraging hardware resources in a more seamless and abstracted manner.

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In this Gestalt IT Tech Talk, Stephen Foskett and Ethan Banks delve into the intricacies of network automation and the evolving landscape of the unified infrastructure stack. They explore the challenges posed by vendor variations, data normalization, and the need for standardized approaches. The conversation also highlights the diminishing gap between networking and other IT domains, emphasizing the growing trend towards a unified stack. With a call for collaboration and true unification, the discussion offers valuable insights into the future of network automation and infrastructure management.

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In this Gestalt IT Tech Talk, Stephen Foskett asks Lino Telera about cloud automation orchestration. Lino emphasizes the significance of automation in delivering applications and infrastructure efficiently, without the need for constant manual intervention. He highlights the importance of maintaining a healthy infrastructure and leveraging automation to accelerate time to market while governing application and infrastructure aspects. The discussion covers the distinction between scripting and automation, the complexity of automation processes, and the key tools such as Ansible, Chef, and Terraform.

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Max Mortillaro highlights the multifaceted nature of sustainability within the framework of Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG), in this Gestalt IT Tech Talk. Genuine sustainability efforts involve considering factors such as energy efficiency, renewable energy sourcing, minimizing waste, and extending the lifespan of technology through reusability and in-place upgrades. Differentiating between authentic sustainability and greenwashing requires a comprehensive evaluation of the entire product life cycle, including production, energy consumption, and waste production.

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Stephen Foskett and Eric Wright discuss service mesh, a networking tool for secure communication between services and applications in cloud environments. It is commonly used in cloud-native setups like Kubernetes and addresses the challenge of limited IPv4 addresses through dynamic networks and load balancers. Service mesh enhances application performance, ensures secure communication, and enables automation, though implementation requires organizational alignment.

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During Cloud Field Day in June, Stephen Foskett sat down with Michael Levan to discuss his contributions to the Kubernetes community as part of the release team. Michael's role primarily involves documenting features and providing technical insights to the community, a path others can follow to get more involved. The discussion also dives into the effectiveness of concise content on LinkedIn and the significance of audience engagement.

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In this Tech Field Day article, Denny Cherry discusses how any company that is worried about ransomware should regularly scan their enterprise for ransomware. CyberSense by Index Engines can do that scanning for them, detecting all signs of corruption before a full-scale attack unfolds.

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The enterprise world is embracing a growing arsenal of open-source tools, and it is giving companies a major competitive advantage in the market.

Enterprises that develop software in-house do not need to be sold on the benefits of open source. Open source constitutes over 70% of modern software solutions. Over 50% Fortune 500 behemoths already use it for mission-critical works.

Properly adopted, open-source projects can greatly improve the value of software companies are building, and tailor them to individual use cases. But much like automation, leveraging open-source projects comes with a heavy technical burden. Without expertise to integrate and support, the freedom and flexibility they bring is moot.

In a conversation with Miroslav Miklus, Chief Product Officer at PANTHEON.tech, we learned how adoption of free-for-all open-source technologies can be made easy for organizations.

PANTHEON.tech provides technical expertise and support to integrate open-source alternatives with datacenter solutions, promoting growth of businesses and value of products.

PANTHEON.techBorn in Slovakia, PANTHEON.tech is a software company that provides global organizations development, support and consulting services. Established in 2001, PANTHEON.tech started out as a contractor for telecommunication companies making bespoke projects. To this day, most of its development team operates out of Slovakia.

PANTHEON.tech focuses on network technologies, and has over 200 successful projects with the world’s top service providers and network vendors under its belt.

But PANTHEON.tech is not just a service company. It has its own line of solutions as well.

“There is a half and half division. We have developers who are directly working with customers providing support of their own deployments, and then we have a product team that is developing the products that we are selling based on licensing model,” explained Mr. Miklus.

Since the last couple years, PANTHEON.tech has expanded its footprint by developing its own line of products around open-source projects it supports.

Powering Open SourceThe company has been a close contributor of the OpenDaylight Project since its launch in 2013. OpenDaylight was founded by Linux Foundation as an open-source platform for customizing and automating networks of any size and scale. Its goal is to accelerate adoption of software-defined networking (SDN), and support network standardization.

PANTHEON.tech helps companies integrate projects like OpenDaylight into their production and operational networks, by bringing them the support and expertise they require.

Being closely associated with the project through ten years of its life puts PANTHEON.tech in the league with household names like Verizon and Rakuten.

“We have a quite large team that is currently providing support for the OpenDaylight Project, and we have products that are built on top of that, like Lighty.io and SandWork,” said Mr. Miklus.

Solutions Surrounding Open SourcePANTHEON.tech’s product portfolio focuses on customers’ commercial, technical and operational network challenges providing solutions derived from open-source projects in Network Functions, Automation, Orchestration and Virtual Private Networking.

Lighty.io is one of their automation solutions. Powered by OpenDaylight, it is a software development kit designed for programmers and architects to develop software-defined networking solutions in Java and Python.

PANTHEON.tech leverages the inherent capabilities of open-source projects in its products.

“We are using OpenDaylight to talk to the network elements. So, when we find a bug or develop a new feature which is not directly related to the orchestration part of the software, we push it upstream. It helps to better integrate with various vendors,” he said.

Latest ReleaseTheir latest release is a SONiC Enterprise fabric orchestrator called SandWork. SONiC, a project developed and open-sourced by Microsoft, is a network operating system based on Linux. Short for Software for Open Networking in the Cloud, it provides a set of functionalities for building network solutions. Increasingly popular in the recent years, SONiC is in use at large enterprises and hyperscalers.

SandWork builds on the capabilities of SONiC. As a programmable platform, it helps operators to automate configuration and manage network devices and overlay services at the datacenter. SandWork boasts of a modular design that is customizable to fit a wide array of customer use cases. SandWork is available for general consumption since April.

In ConclusionOpen-source solutions have some wide and clear benefits. They provide low-cost alternatives to proprietary solutions, and open companies up to a realm of enterprise tech environment that was formerly siloed and privatized. But without prior experience and support, adopting open source is tricky.

PANTHEON.tech helps companies leverage open-source platforms, and build a financially sustainable tech ecosystem within the organization that yields immense value. Its portfolio of support services and solutions is engineered to enable easy integration of open-source tools, and help increase adoption of technologies at enterprise level. The painless management and orchestration enabled by some of its products is key to reaping the benefits of open-source products for organizations.

Check out PANTHEON.tech’s products and services at their website. For more stories like this one, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.

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This week Mirantis announced the launch of Lens Control Center, a solution for big corporations using Lens Pro to centrally manage and operate their deployments.

Kubernetes Complexity Fatigue Is a Real ProblemAfter Kubernetes became the standard platform for cloud-native computing, the tone shifted markedly as developers and operators hit a wall with the platform’s ceaseless complexity.

Most companies are still experimenting with how to use Kubernetes. For those getting started, Kubernetes sets a high bar. It has a highly dynamic architecture which requires keeping a firm grip over the many moving parts. This opens up rooms for oversights and slips, making the development loop lengthy, cumbersome and error-prone.

Operators’ opinions of Kubernetes oscillate between good and bad. 4 out 5 people say that they find Kubernetes more difficult than the other technologies they have used in past.

For companies using the orchestrator as a de-facto system, it has brough both gains and losses. Statics show that while on one hand inescapable complexity has slowed down productivity, those with adequate support and resources to spare have made huge gains from the platform’s spectrum of services.

As a way out, a lot of companies are resorting to using an assortment of third-party tools to offload portions of the operational overhead.

But using too many software can also stifle productivity and slow down innovation.

Getting Comfortable with KubernetesSome years back, Mirantis launched a product called Lens that offers IT teams working with Kubernetes a chance to avoid dealing with its complexity on a daily basis. Lens was designed to enhance developers’ experience with Kubernetes and drive up mainstream adoption. Today there are over 1 million Lens users that benefit from the application’s low-touch, auto-pilot capabilities.

Lens runs on all major operating systems, namely Linux, Windows and macOS.

Since its launch, Mirantis has pushed out many versions of Lens. With each version, Lens has provided developers a more intuitive experience, and more time to code. Without the repeatable DevOps tasks that no developer loves, Kubernetes has become more and more powerful.

Lens Pro, which released mid-year in 2022, provides users a breadth of advanced capabilities aimed at improving developers’ productivity. These accumulate to fuss-free and seamless management, development, deployment, monitoring and troubleshooting of applications. This ease and speed is consistent across all workloads and clusters.

Lens Pro added on-demand live support, vulnerability reporting, built-in local K8s cluster, and easy setup of container image scanning, to the platform’s existing capabilities.

The All New Lens Control CentralOnce again, Mirantis is flexing its Lens’ muscle, this time, with the release of the Lens Control Center. The Lens Control Center provides large corporations the ability to centrally manage their Lens Pro deployments.

The new product comes with a bundle of features designed to improve network control and enable easier management.

Lens Control Center adds support for SAML and OIDCSecurity gets tighter with Lens Control Center’s Single Sign-On (SSO) integration, enabling individuals to sign in securely into Lens using credentials generated by identity management services like Active Directory and Okta.

Where disparate policies create operational issues causing tension and friction between teams, Lens Control Center enables centralized control. This allows teams to manage Lens configurations and Lens Pro features centrally across users. With it, Lens Pro features can be centrally turned on and off making sure that teams enjoy a consistent experience across the board.

Lens Control Center also allows business divisions to consolidate bills. With its a single pane-of-glass view of the customer accounts, teams can control feature configurations, and mange billing centrally in a coherent fashion.

Better enforcement of network security policies is ensured with a new feature that restricts Lens from connecting to the Internet for all outbound traffic where policy forbids it. This is particularly helpful in maintaining air-tight security that highly regulated industries need.

In ConclusionDespite advances in software management and operations, Kubernetes is still out of reach of many companies, on account of operational complexity. Lens Pro is designed to undo these barriers and expose the intelligent and useful parts of the platform to the users. Lens Control Center provides teams greater firepower. With its advanced controls, users can further eliminate management pains, and get more out of Len Pro.

For more information, check out Mirantis’ website. For more stories like this one, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.

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This week we invited “Mr. Backup”, W. Curtis Preston, to join us on the most recent episode of our weekly Rundown of the week’s news, focusing on the escalating ransomware landscape. These attacks continue to wreak havoc across various sectors, targeting critical industries and inflicting substantial financial and operational losses.

Ransomware EverywhereFederal authorities have issued warnings about the surge in cyber attacks exploiting high severity vulnerabilities, notably within Veeam software, which not only allows unauthorized access but also amplifies the risk of ransomware deployment. The implications are dire, particularly for healthcare organizations heavily reliant on Veeam for robust data protection, exacerbating concerns regarding these attacks.

Moreover, specific incidents like the ransomware attack on Dole have demonstrated the severe consequences, resulting in a direct cost impact of $10.5 million. Although their data protection system performed as designed, the subsequent restoration process incurred an additional cost of approximately $6 million. This hefty price tag, coupled with the operational disruptions endured while their systems were down, further underscores the detrimental aftermath of ransomware attacks.

Another case in point is the ongoing assault on the Dallas municipal court building, which has not only disrupted legal proceedings but also potentially exposed sensitive information. Regrettably, these instances are not isolated, as demonstrated by a ransomware group’s assault on Costa Rica’s federal infrastructure. In a single blow, the group incapacitated crucial federal agencies akin to the FBI, CIA, and Supreme Court, even targeting their backup systems. The repercussions persist even a year later, with Costa Rica still grappling to rebuild their federal infrastructure from scratch. These alarming events underscore the importance of contemplating the broader ramifications—ransomware attacks threaten not only financial losses but also the very existence of an organization.

What Can Be Done About Ransomware?W. Curtis Preston emphasized the criticality of understanding the gravity of the ransomware landscape. The potential for a company’s demise looms large, making it imperative to secure backup infrastructure as the last line of defense. Safeguarding the backup system requires implementing preventive measures to detect and prevent ransomware, alongside bolstering overall infrastructure security. One key aspect is to disallow direct access to the backup system from active directories, minimizing vulnerabilities. Additionally, data stored for backups should possess a high level of immutability, rendering it resistant to unauthorized alterations. One recommended approach is storing at least one backup copy in the cloud using write-protected immutable storage.

In the face of the alarming number of Veeam customers who have yet to apply the necessary patch, Preston expressed his disappointment. He urges these organizations to take immediate action by reaching out to their backup vendors for guidance on implementing essential security measures. By leveraging the expertise of backup vendors, organizations can enhance the security of their backups and fortify their defenses against ransomware threats. In a landscape where company survival is at stake, comprehensive security measures and prompt response are paramount to mitigating the risks and consequences of ransomware attacks.

The Evolving Nature of RansomwareStephen Foskett raised concerns about the widespread prevalence of unpatched and outdated systems, emphasizing the need for proactive measures. He called attention to the disparity in responses between physical attacks and cyber attacks, highlighting the urgent need for a shift in mindset and treating cyber attacks with the same gravity. Stephen anticipates that governments may eventually intervene more actively in cyber attacks, but acknowledged the potential escalation and advises IT professionals to take responsibility for protecting their systems.

The conversation then turned to the evolving nature of ransomware attacks, with Stephen reflecting on the growing trend of double extortion tactics. W. Curtis Preston discussed how threat actors leverage data exfiltration as leverage, threatening to release sensitive information unless the ransom is paid. He disapproves of paying ransoms, as it perpetuates the cycle and incentivizes further attacks. Instead, he emphasized the importance of having robust backup systems and implementing measures like DNS, DHCP, and IPAM (DDI) and intrusion detection prevention systems (IDPS) to detect and prevent data exfiltration.

Preston acknowledged the challenge posed by attacks that involve the extortion of sensitive information, highlighting the difficulty in remediation compared to attacks that solely rely on encryption. He stressed the need for organizations to invest in DDI systems and proactive security measures to address data exfiltration attempts. However, he expressed frustration with companies neglecting fundamental security practices, such as enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) and implementing proper password management.

Take Action to Protect and PrepareIn conclusion, Preston emphasized the significance of implementing basic security measures, including patch management, password hygiene, and MFA, as they can significantly mitigate a large percentage of attacks. Foskett concluded by emphasizing the importance of taking control over what can be controlled and preparing for the inevitability of encountering ransomware attacks in the future.

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Data management is a critical aspect of business operations, but traditional databases require dedicated hardware and extensive maintenance, which can be expensive and time-consuming. Cloud databases offer a flexible and scalable alternative, and enable access to data from anywhere in the world. In this article, I will explore the definition, benefits, and considerations of cloud databases.

June 1 is National Cloud Database Day! Gestalt IT is celebrating along with Couchbase, and we’re integrating this with Cloud Field Day 17, which takes place May 31 and June 1.A Database in the CloudPut simply, a cloud database is a database service that is accessed through a cloud platform. It is hosted, managed, and maintained remotely on cloud infrastructure rather than locally. The database can be implemented and managed by a service provider or provisioned in a cloud by the end user, but is not managed in the traditional way on an ongoing basis. Various database management systems are supported, including relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL, and NoSQL databases like MongoDB, Apache CouchDB, and Couchbase.

Cloud databases offer several benefits over traditional databases, including ease of access, scalability, and disaster recovery. One of the primary advantages of cloud databases is their ease of access. Users can access cloud databases from virtually anywhere, using a vendor’s API or web interface. This allows for increased productivity and flexibility in accessing and managing data.

Scalability is another significant benefit of cloud databases. Cloud databases can expand their storage capacities on run-time to accommodate changing needs. Organizations only pay for what they use, allowing for cost-efficient management of data storage.

In addition to these benefits, cloud databases also offer robust disaster recovery options. In the event of a natural disaster, equipment failure, or power outage, data is kept secure through backups on remote servers. This ensures the continuity of business operations, even in challenging situations.

ConsiderationsWhen considering a cloud database, there are several variables and considerations to keep in mind. Users can opt for a virtual machine image managed like a traditional database or a provider’s database as a service (DBaaS). DBaaS options allow for less management and maintenance, but they also provide less control over the database’s configuration.

Database technology is another crucial factor to consider. SQL databases are difficult to scale but are very common. NoSQL databases scale more easily but do not work with some applications. Security is also a vital consideration. Most cloud database providers encrypt data and provide other security measures, but organizations should research their options carefully.

Finally, maintenance is another consideration. When using a virtual machine image, one should ensure that IT staffers can maintain the underlying infrastructure. Organizations need to consider their requirements, budgets, and technical expertise before choosing a cloud database solution.

Stephen’s StanceCloud databases offer a flexible and scalable solution to data management. They provide many benefits over traditional databases, including ease of access, scalability, and disaster recovery. However, organizations must consider various factors before choosing a cloud database solution. By carefully evaluating their options, organizations can choose the right cloud database solution to meet their specific needs.

Learn more about cloud databases at the Couchbase National Cloud Database Day page, and tune live in for the Couchbase presentation at Cloud Field Day on June 1 at 10:30 US/Eastern time, or watch for the recording on the Tech Field Day YouTube page!

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Businesses all over the world are struggling to grasp the confounding complexities at the edge. Although the world at the edge had always existed in the form of shops and stores, the recent infusion of technology at these sites has forced businesses to engage with IT solutions in a way that is new and precipitous.

The Edge Is EverywhereThere is a growing concern that the cornucopia of advantages that the edge promises is slipping out of hands of companies that are not at tech’s leading edge.

CIOs say that managing edge infrastructures at scale is becoming increasingly expensive, requiring high-level of expertise on-site, leaving many companies unable to leverage the merits of the edge.

The problem they say is scattered geographies and distances across which edge’s nano-scale environments are spread. The administrative burden of operating distributed environments in far and away places, doubled by the growing heterogeneity of the application pool puts increasing pressure on enterprises to hire more skills, and amp up their IT investment to compete.

Ending the Struggle at the EdgeKeen to share his view on this is Carlo Daffara, CEO and Co-founder of NodeWeaver. Mr. Daffara has a vaunted career at the European Commission which spans 26 years.

Appointed director of research, Mr. Daffara and his team has spent years building prototype technologies to uplift small-scale companies in rural Europe, enabling them to grow IT resiliency.

The research behind NodeWeaver’s development comes from the same people. NodeWeaver was initially funded by the European Commission that still finances its tests and betas. Drawing on homegrown innovations, about 2 to 3 years ago, NodeWeaver was born and launched commercially in the market.

“Lots of companies are struggling to adopt the edge because it is complex. It’s complex because it’s geographically distributed – you have lots of applications, not to mention geographical restriction in terms of legal requirement,” said Mr. Daffara.

NodeWeaver helps obscure these complexities in the edge infrastructure, increasing businesses’ prospects for success.

The edge infrastructure constitutes countless small compute clusters spread across distributed locations. Managing these clusters in a low-touch, unified fashion can solve a lot of the problems at the edge.

NodeWeaver tunes the underlying design with a rich feature-set powered with automation and self-healing capabilities, so that it does not feel like steering straight into a hurricane for companies that do not have much IT skills at hand.

“Having a platform that is able to do everything out-of-the-box, maybe 99% of what you need, leaving you to compensate for the remaining 1%, means that companies are able to start using just a part of the platform and then expand its use,” he explained.

Edge-Enabled, with NodeWeaverNodeWeaver ties together storage, networking and virtualization all into a single solution. It is a thin, software-defined operating platform that serves as an execution layer, packing deployment, secure remote access, orchestration, and autonomous hardware management capabilities.

Being ultra-light, NodeWeaver can do more with less. “Consider that we do everything – software-defined storage, software-defined networking, orchestration, remediation, monitoring and management in slightly over 1 GB of memory, and less than one physical core,” informs Mr. Daffara.

NodeWeaver’s customers include companies that run applications in system-on-chip devices with the smallest memory.

Running on bare metal, it is highly extensible and agonistic to hardware. The platform runs on any x86-based system.

“You don’t have to ship it before installing, change configurations or do anything outside of the fact of being able to boot,” says Mr. Daffara. “It’s designed to run on embedded systems, fanless machines, but it can also run on traditional datacenter hardware from multiple manufacturers,” he added.

Being vendor-neutral, the platform can convert any hardware stack into what NodeWeaver calls a “nano-cloud” that behaves like a traditional cloud.

NodeWeaver has a predictable scale-out model that enables customers to sidestep hefty up-front investments. They can start with an infrastructure of a suitable size matching their current workload, and expand as they go by adding nodes, one at a time.

All hardware is managed by NodeWeaver.

Zero-ManagementAt the core of the NodeWeaver platform runs an autonomy engine that virtualizes and manages the resources and properties of the physical hardware.

One of the things that separates NodeWeaver from other like solutions is that it guarantees high availability without human intervention. High availability is maintained with self-healing properties. Injected at various layers of the infrastructure, these perform auto-remediation preventing a component failure from impairing swathes of the grid, or cause downtime to applications.

NodeWeaver is autonomous at scale. Deployment, management and orchestration of the infrastructure and applications are self-driven and automated for the most part. This allows thousands of compute clusters to be managed programmatically instead of manually.

It’s zero-touch deployment model performs installation sans keyboards or monitors. “Just plug in a special USB key which is universal and works for all the deployments out there, and the system will do all on its.”

The NodeWeaver app Marketplace provides a selection of pre-made application stacks and service templates that can be downloaded, and deployed with a single click.

When it comes to workloads, NodeWeaver is equally agnostic. Its computing layer supports all applications, be it virtual machines, Kubernetes applications, or real-time workloads.

“This kind of ability of run any kind of workloads is fairly important in our vertical,” says Mr. Daffara.

In ConclusionA wellspring of innovations, the edge is redefining what’s possible, and will eventually power new generations of cutting-edge products and services. But as many early adopters have faced and many still do, there are several missing pieces without which organizations cannot bring the edge to realize their strategic vision, nor drive up business returns.

NodeWeaver brings the cloud experience to the edge. By making edge environments simpler to manage, and inexpensive to own with a zero-touch fabric, it makes it possible for any organization to harness hyperscale-like technologies at the edge and still enjoy low housekeeping. NodeWeaver’s autonomic capabilities of deployment, management, monitoring and orchestration, offload management overheads and eliminate operational nightmares. In a very true sense, it makes every edge environment a “nano cloud”.

Check out NodeWeaver’s website for more information on the platform. For more stories like this one, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.

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As data piles high in distributed environments, hackers are increasingly targeting backup systems to make off with classified information. The worry that critical data will be exposed to bad actors deepens every day, keeping enterprise security teams sleepless at night.

A New TrendOne of the leading causes of data exfiltration in organizations is ransomware attack. Studies conducted on the recent wave of ransomware attacks against businesses show that attackers are employing double extortion tactic to exploit targets.

As soon as cybercriminals have access to a mission-critical data stack, they encrypt it maliciously, making it inaccessible to the organization. They then hold it for a ransom. The organization has a short window to pay the ransom money and get the asset back, failing which, the attackers publish the information on dark web, or sell it to the highest bidders.

Key FindingsRubrik Zero Labs, the research and analysis wing of Rubrik, recently released a report on real-life cyber-attacks in which 1600 respondents shared their stats. 7 out of 10 participating companies reported that they paid ransom to get stolen data back. But even less than 2 out of those organizations confirmed that were able to fully recover data after a ransomware encryption.

CIOs say that one of the biggest challenges that enterprises are grappling with in the fight against cyberwarfare, is identifying sensitive information. Data is being shared across enterprise, cloud and SaaS environments every minute. An accidental export can put sensitive user information at risk just as much as a predator hiding in the corner.

A multitude of classified content traverses the company network – PII, PCI, trade secrets, source codes, high-value forms. Living across cloud, this data, whether at rest or in motion, faces an elevated risk of security breach.

A Partnership to Secure Customer DataRecently, Rubrik and Zscaler, the two of the industry’s frontline cybersecurity companies, have partnered up and jointly launched a double extortion ransomware solution.

The first of its kind, the solution integrates Rubrik Security Cloud with Zscaler’s Index Tool to provide sensitive data loss protection. In the past, data prevention loss (DPL) has been a key strategy in stopping unauthorized data exfiltration. But DPL checks are not 100% effective, if it does not know how to scan and spot sensitive data.

Companies with data estates sprawling across distributed environments, and limited vision, do not have stand a chance of knowing what dataset contains sensitive content that cannot pass the firewall boundaries.

Rubrik and Zscaler’s combined solution provides automatic sensitive data file detection. It tells operators what sensitive data they have, where in the environment they are, and who have access to them.

Optimizing Security Posture with Rubrik and ZscalerRubrik’s integration with Zscaler allows classified files from Rubrik Backup to be sent to the Zscaler index tool for fingerprinting into data protection index. The Zscaler Indexed Document Match applies data protection polices to these critical files making them extra safe from exfiltration.

Zscaler’s ability to protect classified data across the data lifecycle – from creation to usage to sharing – provides the extra boost of protection required for critical data.

Rubrik provides organizations resiliency against vicious cyberattacks and sensitive data loss.The solution is quite simple to use. Rubrik can be configured with a compliance policy to target specific objects and types of data. It then scans backup data to spot sensitive content in keeping with the policy it was configured with. This scanning process is light, and has zero impact on production.

The Rubrik Security Cloud feeds all detected sensitive files to the Zscaler Index tool. Zscaler indexed document matching enforces the policies and control the information flow from Rubrik backup, preventing exfiltration to user devices, SaaS applications or cloud platforms.

All policy violations are flagged and alerted on the Zscaler console. An in-depth review of the same is published for administrators, giving them the minutiae of the offending actions.

The solution requires no additional infrastructure to deploy. Classification of data happens out-of-band causing no impact to production.

In ConclusionSince the past two years, there has been a steady year-over-year increase in reports of ransomware attacks in organizations. In total, potential losses from cyberattacks exceed billions yearly. Cybersecurity experts say that a lot of these attacks could be prevented by just staying vigilant. To sustain and thrive, organizations need to double down on data protection. The Rubrik integration with Zscaler provides improved data loss prevention, and adds that extra layer of protection to confidential and high-value information, making losses from hacking incidents less likely. Extra points for the set-and-forget administration that requires no attention past configuration.

To know more about the solution, head over to Rubrik’s website. Watch Rubrik’s presentations from this past Security Field Day event for a deep-dive of the Rubrik architecture. For more such stories, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.

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The rapid infusion of technology across sectors has brought to life a new paradigm that we know as the edge. Growing at a rapid pace, the edge is fueled by advances in high-performance connectivity, and low-powered compute. IT leaders are increasingly seeing its potential to drive business value.

Already a majority of businesses have their one foot in the edge without realizing it. Inside factories, AI computer vision apps are being used to identify risks and improve safety in industrial environments. Retail warehouses are tracking inventory, doing defect control, and managing production flows using automation.

But as the ecosystem is expanding, the edge infrastructure is buckling under the weight, and organizations are scrambling to keep up with the demands.

We met with Julian Chesterfield, founder and CTO of Sunlight – a UK-based company whose mission it is to help enterprises realize their edge objectives – to dive deeper into this. Sunlight has a simple, but pivotal motto – to make edge simple.

“Our focus is on the edge and all of the technology acquisition and automation that we’re seeing in that space,” says Mr. Chesterfield.

A Shared PredicamentThe retail industry is one of the biggest user of smart applications at the edge. With stores trying to extend the convenience and speed of online shopping to the in-store shoppers, there has been a massive adoption of applications like mobile POS, smart signage, traffic analysis, smart mirrors and inventory management, at the edge locations lately.

But a slew of challenges pushes the merits of these technologies out of reach for companies. Cost is a growing concern among mid-size and smaller organizations trying to tap into edge applications. The edge infrastructure sprawl has quickly skyrocketed costs, leaving fewer companies with easy access to technological firepower that is a must to leverage the edge. Limited physical space is an added constraint to that.

The proliferation of devices at the edge has brought ashore tidal waves of data that has rendered cloud computing unrealistically costly and somewhat impractical.

“The costs of transmitting data still massively outweigh the cost of putting compute infrastructure into a location where you can actually process and work on data,” noted Mr. Chesterfield.

Pushing all the data to a central processing system in the cloud has a gnarly cost. Processing data locally is a much more practical alternative to avoid additional latency.

But building a compute infrastructure and compute capabilities on-site is another worry. It is exponentially expensive, requiring complex computing to be done in store with little to no IT skills at hand.

New Rule for a New Paradigm“A lot of challenges around consolidation that we saw in datacenters originally are now seen at the edge,” comments Mr. Chesterfield. “The challenge we’re seeing is very similar to the original motivation that we saw for cloud adoption twenty years ago – this move towards consolidating applications but being able to do that very efficiently,” he added.

Industries are shifting away from investing in single-purpose systems that can efficiently do just one thing, and having to roll out infrastructure and solutions to manage things in parallel, to having a general-purpose compute framework where disparate applications and solutions can deploy in parallel, he says.

“The economics of cloud always functioned on the fact that you could overcommit resources because the majority of instances actually run. While you might think they consume a lot of resources, the reality is that they don’t and the same is absolutely true with legacy applications at the edge.”

Within an infrastructure where edge applications can be run and managed granularly and easily like in the cloud, operators can take a seemingly bloated application that is actually sitting idle, and run it parallel to other applications for increased efficiency.

Being able to do this on a large scale is what drives adoption of edge technologies, he opines.

Making Edge Simple and SeamlessSunlight is a light-weight, purpose-built, hyperconverged infrastructure platform that allows centralized remote management of applications across thousands of edge locations. Built for companies with edge locations in scattered addresses, it helps manage and centralize IT functions without compromising the ability to run applications at the edge.

“We’re the only platform that is really a purpose-built, hyperconverged edge stack,” he says.

Sunlight is a light-weight, hyperconverged infrastructure platform that provides quick deployment and centralized management of edge applications across locations worldwide.Sunlight is different from a lot of the hyperconverged technologies that have evolved out of core datacenter – Nutanix and VMware for example – that are designed to run in large-scale datacenter environments.

Contrary to those, Sunlight is engineered to run in constrained, mobile device type environments. “We can scale up into the datacenter, but our focus is very much on managing and supporting delivery of applications and services onto what we call as edge-appropriate infrastructure and doing that at scale.”

Sunlight is a type 1 hypervisor, meaning it behaves like a thin OS, and supports a plethora of edge applications from the legacy and modern camps. Think robotics, digital twin, predictive maintenance as well as enterprise resource planning and supply chain planning applications.

Being ultra-light, it consumes zero CPU resources. “A hypervisor node for us consumes on the order of a couple of 100 MB of memory in order to execute,” informs Mr. Chesterfield.

Designed to deliver edge-as-a-service, Sunlight has a quite simple consumption model. Nodes can be ordered preconfigured and preinstalled from preferred vendors on Sunlight’s list of partners. Devices are shipped directly to the edge locations, no matter where in the world they are. Simply plugging them into the network connects the devices to the customer’s Sunlight dashboard. As soon as the apps are pushed down, users can start managing the environment.

“In many cases, they can come shipped with 5G and LTE connectivity on box. So they can literally just power on and start to work in those edge environments,” says Mr. Chesterfield.

The central component of Sunlight is an infrastructure manager called NexCenter. It is a centralized dashboard that runs on public cloud and on-prem. Users can perform a number of functions like managing secure connectivity to edge sites and scaling across sites, from it.

At the briefing, Mr. Chesterfield highlighted the Sunlight marketplace or app library. Based around Ansible, it allows dragging and dropping automation playbooks into the graphic interface of the dashboard.

“You can control deployment of any application and service to any of these connected edge sites that are managed via that dashboard,” he says.

Centralized and granular management of edge applications across locations unlocks huge cost benefits. By consolidating disparate edge infrastructures into a single layer that is available everywhere cuts down TCO, putting an end to the worrying trend of skyrocketing costs.

Sunlight claims to cut down deployment time for edge systems by 70% by reducing support burden with a standardized procedure across locations. With automatic deployment and update of new applications, innovation and time to market is set on a fast track.

In ConclusionThe quest for value creation has made edge the launchpad of new innovations. Enterprises spending millions on edge solutions is going to bear fruit when applications can be deployed and managed in a way that generates value for businesses. Sunlight enables easy consumption of edge applications, turning each edge site into a highly available individual stacks similar to cloud in efficiency and management. A central dashboard consolidates the disparate environments across thousands of sites into a single layer that oversees the availability, security and deployment.

For a free demo, head over to Sunlight’s website. For more stories like this one, keep reading here at Gestaltit.com.

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If I asked you to build a table you might be able to figure it out. You’d look for drawings or some other kind of plans online and get to work. Maybe you’re the kind of person that will just start cutting some lumber and figuring out how to put it together. If I asked you to build a computer desk with integrated power, motors to raise it to a standing desk, and some LED lighting for ambiance you might have a hard time, right? After all you’re not an expert in building desks with all those additional features that have to work well together.

The expertise that people have in their chosen field cannot be understated. The time and effort that professionals put in when it comes to learning the regulations, analyzing the data, and making expert recommendations is beyond useful to those that need it. We go to doctors and lawyers for their expert opinions. Likewise, when it comes to IT solutions you need to consult with the experts as well.

The Antenna ExpertsVentev is a company that is experienced in the field of wireless antennas and power. They have spent years building solutions for organizations that need something more than a standard omnidirectional antenna for a wireless access point. Perhaps you’re trying to cover the seating at a stadium. You could be trying to deal with a room that has solid ceilings that can’t be modified. Perhaps you’re looking to deploy the new Wi-Fi 6E standard when it is ratified for use by the FCC and you don’t know the first place to start.

Ventev has spent thousands of hours building solutions for these problems. They know exactly how to engineer an antenna to operate in all three spectrum bands available to wireless professionals today. One antenna that covers all your needs. They also have specialized solutions to address things like the solid ceilings. Ventev can give you a way to conceal the equipment in a floor tile to make the wireless coverage flow up instead of down.

Image provided by VentevThe Challenges of IoTIn a recent interview with Jared van Allen, I talked to him about the solutions that Ventev has for one of the fastest growing segments of the market. IoT is more than just thermostats and smart toasters. Industrial IoT is one of the biggest segments of Venter’s customer base. Their solutions for a variety of hostile environments are unmatched. It starts with the understanding of how to integrate systems.

The Aruba CX4100iis a rugged IoT access switch with PoE+ and 60-watt PoE ports to run all manner of devices, from access points to cameras and more. It can operate in a variety of environmental extremes and offers you the capability to extend your network right to the edge to bring industrial IoT devices online. However, the switch is only part of the story. As Jared points out, if you buy a switch and an access point you have an angry customer because you don’t have a way to power those devices.

Ventev has an integrated enclosure solution that offers a cooled NEMA 3R box to contain your new Aruba switch. The enclosure also has AC and DC power as well as an integrated UPS to ensure that your devices stay powered during a potential outage. More importantly, the CX4100i and the UPS can communicate and use intelligence to know which ports of the switch to disable to preserve runtime for connected devices. You can tag certain ports to shut down in the event of a power loss first and preserve other ports with critical machinery as long as possible. This ensures flexibility and can keep your remote devices running longer than a less capable system.

The entire unit makes it easy to install as well. You can configure the switch on the ground by hooking up the box to power before climbing up to mount it. As someone that has found themselves typing in CLI commands from the top of a shaky ladder I can appreciate the simplicity of being able to do it from the ground to allow someone without a fear of heights to scale that ladder and get your device mounted and operational. Add in the IP68 connectors for your connections and you can see how the Ventev enclosure is a much more serene environment as compared to the typical hostile atmosphere found on a shop or manufacturing floor.

Image provided by VentevBringing It All TogetherVentev has the experts and the expertise to help you with your challenges. They know how to put together a winning combination of antenna designs, power, and more to solve your wireless and IoT needs. They don’t just start building without doing the research and providing the data you need to address your unique concerns. When it comes to projects that challenge your knowledge don’t be afraid to engage the power of those that know.

For more information about Ventev and their lineup of IoT solutions, including their integrated IoT solutions, make sure to check out their Aruba product page.

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According to Gartner, roughly 92% organizations have a multi-cloud roadmap for the future. With companies always on the swivel, racing towards the newest trends and technologies, this is not surprising. The cloud multiverse holds infinite promises, providing big thrusts to innovation and pouring out a steady stream of cutting-edge capabilities. But multi-cloud adoption is a zigzag course that has many highs and lows.

We, recently met up with Kumorai, a startup that works in the lower layers of multi-cloud enablement to talk about the journey, and the way to achieve multi-cloud resiliency. In an interview with Harris Haider, Founder and CEO, we learned about the biggest barrier to multi-cloud adoption, and what Kumorai is doing to solve problems for the long haul.

A Hard RealityAn IT veteran with experience working for both technology provider and consumer companies, Mr. Haider has watched the seismic shifts in IT from close quarters. The early idea of Kumorai took seed when differing infrastructures of multi-cloud opened up a skill gap, and a need for an orchestration platform was born from it.

“I was working with some large financial institutions where we saw the CIO had a mandate of migrating all their sixteen thousand applications in the cloud. I knew immediately that lifting and shifting applications in the cloud in the form of virtualized VMs as well as containers is easier than the network and security piece,” said Mr. Haider.

Multi-cloud brings with it demands for very specific skillsets that are imperative to understanding, managing and securing multi-cloud.

“There’s a knowledge gap when it comes to the understanding of cloud, along with the automation skillset that the network and security teams have – they are busy managing and operating their existing datacenter networks, and trying to automate. Now they’re tasked with additional responsibility of cloud and automation,” he comments.

The Way AroundKumorai was founded with the vision to bridge this gap. Based out of San Francisco, Kumorai is plugging efforts toward making it possible to adopt and migrate to multi-cloud in a frictionless fashion.

For an IT company, the name Kumorai sparks curiosity. Mr. Haider revealed that Kumorai is Japanese for “cloud” and “lightning fast” – in its case lightning-fast orchestration of multi-cloud.

A No-Code Orchestration Layer that Ties It all TogetherKumorai is a cloud-hosted SaaS platform, designed to offer “automation as a service” for Infra teams to quickly build standardized and repeatable application infrastructure in minutes and securely connect across multi-cloud universe.

Kumorai describes it as “multi-cloud management platform for infrastructure teams to design, deploy, modify and operate cloud infrastructure in an efficient and cost-effective manner.” It helps Infra teams become efficient service providers, giving DevOps teams self-service capabilities.

Where Infrastructure as Code makes it possible for teams to provision infrastructure, it does not provide end-to-end service lifecycle management, such as audit trail, compliance validation and approval processes. Kumorai fills in the gap and takes it a step further with what Mr. Haider calls infrastructure as design (IaD). It helps IT teams to visually design their application infrastructure, and the platform is smart enough to translate into IaC code such as Terraform.

Kumorai ties together disparate public cloud infrastructures into a single plane of abstraction that enables seamless, no-fuss management.Kumorai leverages cloud-native technologies for scalability and security, and integrates with popular configuration engines to eliminate configuration drift. In multi-cloud, configuration drift, caused by unrecorded ad hoc changes, often leads to unexpected system behavior, opening up infrastructures to security vulnerabilities. Kumorai “enforces deployment standardization across cloud and eliminates configuration drift.”

Its key capability is that it’s a no-code platform. As network and security teams are left with no time on their hands to learn cloud or coding, the platform “creates a framework of its own that translates visual designs to appropriate codes.” This lets them have the same level of control that they had on-premises, without writing their own code.

Under the hood, the platform framework reveals modules that are plugged in to provide end-to-end process automation, and centralized security and management across cloud providers.

“Our goal is to bridge the gap between the Net, Sec and DevOps. So, we’re trying to build a whole NetSecDevOps platform where we can accommodate all different types of IT personas,” informs Mr. Haider.

With provisioning being one of its key functions, Kumorai has been previously mistaken for a rival of Terraform. Mr. Haider explained that the goal by no means is to replace Terraform. Instead, Kumorai provides a layer of abstraction on top of underlying provisioning engines like Ansible, Terraform and CloudFormation.

“Think of it as nothing more than a management plane in the world of SDN that unifies your multi-cloud data plane infrastructure to a centralized engine,” he says.

Kumorai is non-disruptive, meaning that the code configurations it generates stays even if a user decides to rip and replace it.

In ConclusionThe growing vacuum of critical knowledge makes engagement with technologies increasingly harder. It a problem too big to be compensated by upskilling employees, and too unpredictable to be ready for ahead of time. Kumorai’s zero-code orchestration capabilities are built to ease skill gap woes. It lends multi-cloud organizations a code-free, low-cost way of adopting multi-cloud, that infuses well in the existing system, and can be used across the board. Its seamless integration with the underlying systems is more than we can say for many products.

For more information, head over to Kumorai’s website. For more stories like this, keep reading here at Gestaltit.com.

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One of the top trends shaping industries right now is application sprawl. Enterprises have a ballooning number of applications deployed on their IT systems, and it is a crucial element to their becoming first-class enterprises.

We are surrounded by an infinite number of software that are designed to trim down the slog and struggle with quick and easy one-click operations. There are wealth management apps to help plan and monitor investments from self-service dashboards, cybersecurity applications to keep you in the know, and predict and prevent attacks, analytics applications providing pre-packaged intelligence.

But as diverse an ecosystem as it is, modern applications all aim to serve the same set of requirements – lightning-fast access – in real-time or near real-time, rich user experience with ready predictive analytics, effortless scalability, and easy deployment.

For the past several years, SingleStore has been working towards transforming the environments that modern applications sit in. All of their research work and innovation have been around expanding the capabilities of these applications from within. Their goal is to guarantee better analytics, flashing-fast access, friction-less scalability, and cost optimization.

We met with Vijay Raja, Sr. Director of Product Marketing to learn how SingleStore is helping enterprises get ahead of the curve.

An Overflowing Architecture“Companies are carrying a lot of legacy baggage today,” said Mr. Raja.

The modern database ecosystem is a full house of applications, both legacy and modern kinds. A different database for a different use case accumulates to an absurdly large number of applications, making the environment excruciatingly complex to navigate, and painfully slow to scale.

With low latency still the expectation no matter what the supporting architecture looks like, the pressure of speed rests squarely on the developers.

“This whole thing is a rather inefficient and complex way to power your applications, because you are managing multiple systems, you’re moving data around, it starts to impact the performance, and you can’t scale fast enough,” told Mr. Raja.

A rich variety of data – real-time, operational, analytics, ML – compels teams to top the existing stack with new sets of analytics engines, machine learning libraries, so on.

One of the biggest hurdles that engineers face with an overcrowded environment is data bottleneck that makes applications frustratingly slow. The slack leaves teams with stale data and slow queries to work with, and users with irresponsive applications. Factor in the cost of moving data around via replication, and you have a system that works more than it needs to, and costs twice than it should.

SingleStoreDB – One Database for Many Use CasesSingleStoreDB is a silver-bullet to the myriad of problems stemming from such environments. To begin with, it is a single store that is designed for operational analytics. Users can bring in batch, operational and third-party data for quick processing.

With built-in capabilities to process different types of data, SingleStoreDB eliminates the need for different databases and separate analytics engines.

Primarily a relational database, SingleStore says that it is the “world’s fastest real-time distributed SQL database.”

SingleStoreDB combines transactions and analytics into one engine, providing blazing fast access to data-intensive applications.SingleStoreDB is multi-model, that “beyond structural or relational data”, can also handle “JSON data, key value data, time series, geospatial, full text search” and much more. It treats JSON as first-class citizen.

But the real power of SingleStoreDB is not that it’s a transactional database. “We combine transactions and analytics in a single engine and that’s really what makes us unique,” says Mr. Raja.

SingleStoreDB is a performance- first database that delivers low latency analytics on transactional data at scale.

“You no longer need to do ETL (extract, transform and load) between one set of engines to other engines. This makes it incredibly simple, easy, fast and efficient.”

Mr. Raja informed that what’s driving the adoption of SingleStoreDB is not the opportunity to cut out databases, but the ability to “power both applications as well as analytics”, and scale easily.

With no replication involved, data is accessible in a single domain, but placed in different tiers based on the data type. SingleStore offers three tiers of storage – in-memory row store, disk-based column store and cloud-based object store. Data moves fluidly between the tiers offering consistently low-latency access.

“Hot data will probably rest in memory. Warm data is probably on the disk, and the cooler data is probably on the cloud,” says Mr. Raja.

SingleStore is designed for varied use cases – real-time customer analytics, real-time applications, cyber security, fraud analytics, IoT. “We have customers who are bringing time-series data and then doing analytics on this exact same storage engine. It’s just another data type that we process.”

The Inside TechnologySingleStore leverages a patented technology that it calls “Universal Storage.” The secret to SingleStoreDB’s broad compatibility is that it combines both in-memory row-based store of transactional databases, and on-disk column-based store of analytical databases.

“Universal store brings together the best of row and column store into a single table type,” says Mr. Raja.

Analytics can be performed on data as it lands without any movement. The SingleStore engine can process both transactions and analytics on the same table.

Similar to hybrid transaction analytical processing (HTAP) engines, SingleStore sits between the older OLTP applications and OLAP engines. Its key capabilities are unified transactions and analytics in the same engine, and a scale-out architecture optimized for the cloud that allows easy scaling up and out. Others features include ultra-fast data ingestion, low-latency processing, and simple deployment.

In ConclusionWith most organizations still preoccupied with learning how to power data-intensive applications effectively, SingleStoreDB offers a way to nimbly adapt to the changing digital realities. It is a stand-off product because where no one database is good at everything, it is a multi-purpose one that serves numerous use cases. Brownie points for performance gains and cost cuts.

For more information, visit SingleStore’s website. For more stories like this one, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.

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Calyptia is an enterprise observability platform based on Fluent Bit, a lightweight data collector and forwarder. The platform aims to help customers extract more value from their data by filtering noisy data, routing it to the right location, and removing redundant data. By providing real-time alerts and advanced business logic in pipelines, Calyptia simplifies observability, allowing customers to be more productive and efficient.

Observability and Telemetry PipelinesObservability is a critical aspect of modern IT operations. The term refers to the ability to measure and understand the behavior of complex systems. In the context of IT operations, observability involves monitoring and collecting data from various sources, such as applications, infrastructure, and network devices, to gain insights into the system’s behavior and performance. Observability is essential for detecting and resolving issues quickly and efficiently, as well as improving the overall quality and reliability of the system.

Telemetry pipelines are responsible for collecting, processing, and analyzing data from various sources, such as logs, metrics, traces, and events, and transforming it into meaningful insights. They provide a centralized and scalable way to collect and manage data from distributed systems, which is critical for observability. Telemetry pipelines also provide filtering, aggregation, and enrichment capabilities, allowing users to focus on the most relevant data and gain deeper insights into system behavior.

From Fluent Bit to CalyptiaCalyptia is a company that specializes in enterprise observability solutions, specifically in the area of telemetry pipelines. The company was founded by the same people responsible for the development of Fluentd and Fluent Bit, and Calyptia builds on this work. Calyptia Core extends Fluent Bit’s capabilities with enterprise-grade features, such as low-code data filtering, routing, and redaction, as well as integration with popular monitoring and analytics tools, such as MongoDB, Splunk, Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and many more.

Calyptia Core is designed to help organizations gain deeper insights into their systems by providing a scalable and efficient way to collect and manage telemetry data. It can handle data from various sources and provides a flexible and extensible platform for filtering and processing the data. Calyptia Core’s filtering capabilities allow users to remove noisy or irrelevant data, while routing and redaction capabilities ensure that sensitive data is protected and compliance requirements are met.

Calyptia Core is also designed to be easy to use and integrate with existing monitoring and analytics tools. It provides a simple and intuitive user interface for configuring data sources and destinations, as well as a comprehensive set of APIs for programmatic integration. They also offer an enterprise-grade supported LTS edition of Fluent Bit.

Stephen’s StanceObservability and telemetry pipelines are critical components of modern software development and operations. Calyptia provides enterprise-grade observability solutions, specifically in the area of telemetry pipelines, to help organizations gain deeper insights into their systems and improve their overall quality and reliability. With its efficient and scalable platform, flexible filtering and processing capabilities, and easy integration with existing tools, Calyptia Core is a powerful solution for any organization looking to improve its observability capabilities.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Calyptia offering is the possibility that it could enable new value to be extracted from data. By reducing the amount of data to be stored and directing data to the correct location, applications can be more effective while also reducing overall storage and transmission cost. This is the central paradox of data: By processing close to the source and reducing redundancy we can handle larger volumes, include new data sources, and ultimately reveal more value. Learn more about Calyptia on their website.

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Trying to properly size a firewall has to be one of the most infuriating things a security operations person can do. Since you’re required to buy one that’s big enough to handle an ever-increasing number of flows in your enterprise you have to play the guessing game. Should I buy one that will fit the projected amount of data in three years? Are the numbers from the vendor reliable for minimum packet sizes only? Should I just throw a dart and double the numbers?

If you think that elastic software firewalls aren’t affect by these issues you probably haven’t deployed enough of them. Deploying a firewall intelligently does alleviate some of the sizing issues. However there are other considerations to think about. Whereas a physical hardware firewall will hit a limit in the number of connections and then fail, a software firewall will just keep chugging along. In fact, in the cloud it can scale up to take all the flows you can throw at it. Sounds awesome, right? Now think about what happens when you get the bill for a firewall that tripled in size over the last month. Worse yet, how can you be sure the flows traversing the firewall need to be doing so in the first place? Can you even separate the mess?

Proper Policing with ProsimoProsimo knows the pain of this particular challenge. In their latest cloud-native software release a couple of weeks ago they introduced a tool that looks to solve this particular issue quite elegantly. Adaptive Service Insertion is, on the surface, a very competent tool to deploy firewall resources in appropriate locations with a minimum of fuss.

Adaptive Service Insertion is completely spokeless, which means no need to deploy compute nodes to get the service up and running. You can define your policies to examine traffic based on app definitions, CIDR IP blocks, or even individual flows. Yes, Prosimo allows you to define single flows that transit through their firewall service. This, in and of itself, is a big deal. The ability to redirect critical flows through security services helps support the business rules that govern how you operate. If you are in need of PCI compliance for credit card data you can now send just that traffic through a Prosimo instance and ensure you’re protected. You can also force your local user traffic to exit out to the Internet without needing to transit back to a spoke location like the HQ.

The flexibility of the policy definitions also means you that can identify large flows and deal with them to find out why they’re consuming so many resources. The earlier example of the software firewall becoming a cost chokepoint is one that Prosimo has actually dealt with for a customer. Rather than having one big construct that has thousands of flows being piped through it with no way to figure out what’s consuming all the CPU cycles you can instead break out the flows into their own instances and gain control of the chaos. Once you’ve identified the top talkers you can implement controls to keep them from growing out of control and shocking your stakeholders when the bills come due.

Bringing It All TogetherYour security teams and networking teams are probably still fragmented despite our best efforts to help the work together in the new world of cloud-driven services. The traditional methods of securing data don’t scale well in the cloud and the new methods can scale out of control if you don’t have a way to keep them from getting that way. With solutions like the ones from Prosimo you don’t have to worry about creating a monster firewall that threatens to take over your security team. Instead you can intelligently deploy services where they are needed and analyze the data you get to find out how to tame the beasts.

For more information on Prosmio and their newest cloud-native solutions, make sure you check out their website.

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In the past three years, one in every five organizations encountered one high-profile outage at the least, stats show. Outage trends suggest that the gap between the start of the outage and full recovery has stretched in that time, and will continue to grow linearly.

Historically, businesses have relied on poor disaster recovery (DR) strategies that involve having a backup server in the office basement, or under someone’s desk. But in the past ten years, business continuity solutions have leapfrogged ushering organizations into a new era of DR protection.

Recent technological innovation in the DR and HA (high availability) sectors has brought to companies more options than ever before. Now, there are HA solutions to the rescue. Cloud too offers DR protection with its service availability SLAs.

But modern businesses deploy many mission-critical applications and databases that have very low tolerance for downtime. Cloud availability zones though offer decent protection against failures, do not cover network outages and natural disasters, which puts organizations one emergency away from unplanned financial losses.

High complexity and reduced control that are typical to public cloud further make DR testing a struggle for IT teams.

SIOS, a company working at the substrata of disaster recovery and high availability, recently launched a new version of their high-availability software, LifeKeeper for Linux. It features a set of replication capabilities aimed at maintaining high availability for SAP HANA databases.

So we sat down with SIOS to learn about the newly released HANA multitarget replication features packed in the LifeKeeper of Linux v9.7.

Downtimes Carry Hefty Price TagsOne of the biggest complaints of SAP HANA customers is around high availability protection. The growing number of manual tasks involved in DR testing and failover maintenance creates room for errors and omissions which translate to prolonged downtime and lost revenue.

When disaster strikes, the common expectation is that the IT team will come up with a magic remedy that gets things back up and running within a day or so. Unfortunately, the IT teams have no such trick up their sleeves that can restore an entire IT infrastructure without financial ramification mounting to thousands of dollars.

Cloud makes businesses less likely to lose critical business data in events of disaster. That maybe so, but things like network outages and natural disasters are well outside the scope of cloud availability SLAs. Furthermore, the shortcomings of HA clustering solutions make failover across multiple availability zones and cloud regions an ongoing struggle.

SIOS LifeKeeper for LinuxSIOS LifeKeeper for Linux is a high-availability software for databases on Linux. It is designed to provide applications high availability in Linux environments, whether it’s in public cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid cloud environment.

SIOS detects application availability issues and orchestrates automatic failover eliminating downtime.LifeKeeper for Linux enables automated orchestration of failover when applications need it the most, providing reliable and consistent uptime protection. Sitting in the background, it observes the stack for faults and failures. Plug-ins for different applications collect application-specific intelligence that keeps LifeKeeper informed about what the software need. Offering complex applications running in SAP HANA, Oracle and other systems availability round the clock, LifeKeeper remains one of SIOS’s flagship solutions.

The New ReleaseFormerly, LifeKeeper supported multitarget replication of up to three nodes. The new multitarget replication capabilities extend that to up to four nodes for SAP HANA. Other databases supported by LifeKeeper include SQL Server, MaxDB, and Oracle.

LifeKeeper minimizes downtime by running two or more redundant servers so that when operation fails on one, the standby server/servers take over. LifeKeeper supports synchronous and asynchronous replication, meaning databases can be replicated from a primary HANA node to a secondary node in the same cloud region synchronously, and from a primary to a tertiary node in a different location, asynchronously.

With the new version, customers can have up to four nodes. LifeKeeper leverages the HANA System Replication to provide automatic failover when required. The HANA Multitarget node replication feature enables organizations to run a multitarget availability environment for HANA databases, taking this failover process to the next level.

Customers can configure failover depending on the unique setup and requirements of the applications, to leverage an efficient switchover that takes near zero downtime maintenance. Automatic replication to DR site ensures that recovery from failures, disruptions and disasters happens at zero effort.

Users can add extra nodes to their DR locations without having to do complex scripting or manual works. The HANA application recovery kit (ARK) responsible for automation of cluster configuration makes ongoing management remarkably simple and convenient.

Next Phase of DevelopmentAlready LifeKeeper provides huge time and cost benefits by replacing error-prone manual DR testing and failover maintenance tasks with automation, eliminating expensive downtimes. The software installs within an hour, and works significantly faster than other clustering solutions. But SIOS has more features on the way.

In the next phase of development, SIOS is focusing on the usability and GUI, introducing more innovation and making sure that customers’ interaction with the product is seamless.

In ConclusionWhere critical applications are concerned, even the briefest downtimes can have catastrophic consequences. SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux powered with the HANA multitarget replication feature for up to 4 nodes enables organizations to avert costly IT disruptions and ensure business continuity with reliable DR protection across availability zones, cloud regions and geographical locations. By leveraging this solution, organizations can cutback downtime halts that puts limits on organizations’ ability to operate, with reliable and effective failover.

For more on SIOS LifeKeeper and its new replication capabilities, visit their website. For more stories like this, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.

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On Monday, Kyligence announced the general availability of the Kyligence Zen metrics platform. Already a leading OLAP (online analytical processing) engine to its name, with the new product, Kyligence is expanding use cases to include all IT personas that work with data metrics.

We met with Kai Liu, Director of Field Engineering at Kyligence, to learn about the new product, how it fits in with the rest of the platform, and what makes it different from other metrics solutions.

A Mark of DistinctionKyligence is a data intelligence company that was founded in 2016 by the creators of Apache Kylin, an open-source project with over 1500 free, and 100 commercial users worldwide. Kyligence Zen is powered by this same analytics engine.

Mr. Liu emphasized that Kyligence Zen metrics platform is markedly different from the metrics layers or metric stores that we have seen so far.

Kyligence Zen Metrics Platform“We call it the metrics platform because we are not a single layer. We are a combination of their data processing, data modeling and metrics layer. That’s why we call it a metrics platform.”

Mr. Liu outlined the three core capabilities of Kyligence Zen – an SQL query engine, data modelling and the new metrics layer that pulls all data metrics into a unified catalog system. Kylin, the OLAP engine, fuels this solution with its ability to perform data pre-calculation.

“We also have the capability to define data models by joining the tables together allowing the users to define dimensions, metrics, calculations, and so on.”

A Deterrent to Fast Decision-MakingSo what made Kyligence add this new metrics layer? A common problem within businesses is the lack of consistent definitions of key metrics.

Between multiple business units and teams, there are numerous data stacks and analytics tools. Too many tools and data in scattered locations create silos, leading to misaligned definitions of metrics and eventually, a chaotic operations.

An All-in-One Metrics CatalogueWith a unified, all-in-one metrics catalogue, these divergent definitions can be aligned into shared and consistent ones across the organization that all IT personas can consume.

“The target is to abstract data modeling more for the business users so that they don’t have to understand all of the details of data modeling, like how the tables are joined together for example, leaving them to just focus on their business definition of those metrics,” says Mr. Liu.

The unified metrics catalog is designed to “create, maintain and manage all of their metrics together into a single layer,” for better quality data, and elimination of data silos. With it, Mr. Liu says, administrators can define, compute, share, organize and analyze metrics all in one place.

This may sound similar to what OLAP does, but he reminded that OLAP leverages multiple data tools and the data silo problem still persists with it.

The platform works with all types of metrics – “basic metrics directly from the data sources, derived metrics like metrics on metrics, several metrics put together, for example the year over year, or any other complicated calculations, to define new metrics.”

Leveraging the capabilities of the OLAP engine, it also offers smart caching with which precalculated data is cached for easy fetching.

A Magic LanguageWho do this benefit most? Data engineers and business users, says Mr. Liu. Kyligence Zen uses ZenML, a user-friendly YAML-based descriptive language that allows data engineers to maintain and define metrics, dimensions and underlying relational datasets like codes. It is how “data engineers team reduce their efforts maintaining their daily works.”

The system generates metrics based on users’ definitions without engineers needing to write any code. Business users can consume technical data easily as ZenML converts it into business metrics.

“Also with this, we can define very restricted workflows for the business users. They can submit their own changes in this config file, and for the IT team, they can do the review and approval and then promote it to the production environment. That’s how they can maintain thousands of metrics without operating in the UI or writing any code.”

An OLAP Engine under the Hood and Open APIsThe AI-augmented OLAP engine that sits underneath performs all of the metrics calculation providing time-saving automation. The engine automates the whole of the pipeline including data appropriation, data processing and data consuming so that performance does not have to be manually tuned. “The system will guarantee performance automatically,” says Liu.

Kyligence Zen has open APIs that allows users to connect consistent metrics to any third-party business intelligence or SaaS tools that business users prefer. Mr. Liu says, “We provide these open APIs because we maintain everything on a single layer. Consumers are not limited to only business intelligence tools, but also other applications that they can use through these open APIs.”

In ConclusionBy introducing a common data language across organization, Kyligence Zen helps IT personas like data engineers to develop and manage metrics at low effort, and business analysts to yield faster and higher-quality decisions. The metrics catalogue provides a single source of truth where key business metrics are consistent across all teams and tools. The muscle behind it, the OLAP engine, unlocks the full power of automation saving businesses time, effort and cost in their data analysis initiatives.

For more information on the Kyligence Zen intelligent metrics platform, head over to their website. For more stories like this one, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.

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It’s been almost ten years since my last job change. I can still remember when I walked into the room to tell my boss that I was leaving my VAR engineer role to go to work for Tech Field Day. I was a bit nervous because I wasn’t sure how he would react. I knew him well and figured he’d be happy for me but I also worried that he’d decide that I needed to take my two weeks of notice and just leave on the spot. I’d seen that happen on a couple of occasions.

If you’ve only ever worked in an engineering role you probably think the idea of dismissing an employee as soon as they give notice is odd. Those two weeks are crucial for knowledge transfer and ensuring that things are read to transition to the next team. However, in a sales organization those two weeks are an opportunity for less scrupulous employees to make off with valuable assets. They aren’t going to take a laptop or a desk chair. They’re going to take things that are much more valuable, namely data. Customer lists, email archives, and even salary data are prime targets.

Have you ever wondered if that policy of sending employees home during their two weeks is effective? The employee has been working toward their departure for a while if they initiated it. Who is to say they don’t already have the data they want before they ever turn in their notice? How would you even know?

Doing DLP With IntelligenceOne of the companies that is working to provide more visibility into situations like this is Concentric AI. I’ve talked to them in the past and I recently sat down with Karthik Krishnan to get an update on their platform. Karthik reiterated to me that their goal is to make data security easy for customers. Given the speed with which organizations are facing bigger security threats that’s a welcome opportunity.

During our discussion I asked him about Data Loss Prevention (DLP) scenarios. The Concentric platform allows you to intelligently identify data that contains personally identifiable information (PII) and secure it when it’s somewhere it’s not supposed to be. That could be a contract on a shared drive, which is unstructured data, or an unsecured database that could be exposed to attackers, which is a more structured type of data storage. No matter where the PII is being stored it’s a risk.

The power of Concentric is that it’s not looking at simple hash values. If I were the sneaky type I’d do something creative to avoid detection if I were going to take important data. Such as adding a value of three to every social security number I harvest. Or adding extra characters into the email addresses of customers that are easy to remove when I look at them later but defeat the strict scanning of typical DLP systems.

Concentric can see those changes and alert you when they happen. They can also see PII hiding inside of other unstructured documents to help prevent clever exfiltration attempts. If someone creates IncomingFaxes.xlsx and it’s populated with email addresses and social security numbers you can get an alert. You can then drill down into the other activity that the user has had for the last 30 days to see if other files were created or moved around. You can easily track file activity during the off-boarding process to see if your employees were trying to transfer their knowledge into the company or extra more of it for their own uses.

The power behind Concentric is context. DLP that just does pattern matching doesn’t know that specific kinds of PII appearing in the wrong places creates the potential for exposure. A list of numerical currency values is expected in a contract. However, a list of them appearing in a spreadsheet attached to employee names that is readable to the whole company instead of just the accounting department could violate labor laws. Concentric allows you to define the context and keep it updates as new data is classified as PII. You don’t even need to rescan when you make the updates. Concentric already knows what’s going on and will alert you when those changes mean new data needs to be acknowledge and dealt with.

Bringing It All TogetherThe part of the off-boarding process that sticks out most to me is the trust issues it creates. Employees that have otherwise been trusted members of the organization are suddenly under scrutiny for choosing to leave. That aura of distrust could even push an otherwise trustworthy employee to do something rash as a response to the way they’re treated. With the help of solutions like Concentric you can provide the trust that is missing. Employers can see that their departing employees are above board with their actions. Should the employee be tempted to abuse that trust relationship your security team will know right away. That kind of visibility ensures everyone parts ways happy and safe.

For more information about Concentric and their posture management platform, make sure to check out their website.

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Have you ever thought about how a search function operates? On the surface it sounds pretty easy. You take a dataset and you look for things in it. I’m sure that Google and Microsoft will tell you that it’s a lot harder than that but we’ll keep it simple for now. How do you know what’s in the dataset? You have to look at it before you can search through it, right? That means ingesting the data before you can perform operations on it.

When the dataset is just the contents of your phone or your laptop that doesn’t sound like a difficult proposition. When the dataset is petabytes of information in the cloud or the entire Internet it’s an entirely different animal to tame. Setting aside the whole issue of algorithms and ranking for now you have to consider some even more basic challenges. How do you ingest a petabyte worth of data? How long would it take to transfer the data to your search platform? If this is happening in the cloud will you be paying to get that data to the destination just to return smaller results? Why should you have to pay to move something only to leave it there?

Searching SmarterIf you’re scratching your head and wondering why search feels backwards you’re not alone. Cribl is a company that has asked those same questions and figured out a better answer. I had the chance to sit down recently with Nick Heudecker and talk about the latest quarterly release, Cribl 4.1. Cribl search especially got some new enhancements in this version that got my attention.

Cribl’s flagship product is Stream. Stream is an observability pipeline that lets people see what’s going on in the data. You need to feed Stream in order to observe things and the product has been growing by leaps and bounds. But you also need to winnow down the data that you’re seeing and that’s why Cribl built Search late last year.

Search is a federated query engine that lets you look through datasets, with a specific focus on security. Nick told me that Cribl specifically focuses on customers that don’t want to run two different environments to separate observability and security.

Cribl Search launched last year and here’s a great video introduction to it that happened at Security Field Day:

In Search 4.1, Cribl is getting even smarter. There’s a new S3 destination that can be added to the pipeline. There’s also a new send operator that allows Search to send data to Stream. This is one of the pieces that I think has the potential for a massive impact on the way that observability platforms operate. Rather than ingesting a huge amount of data and then combing through it you flip the whole idea around. Cribl Search looks in the data where it lives and returns results you want. Those results are then fed into Cribl Stream for your operations teams to make decisions.

While I was talking to Nick about the impact this could have on the way we consume data, he had a quote that stuck with me:

We have no more empathy for our compute infrastructure. — Nick Heudecker

That’s a pretty accurate assessment of the way that most organizations treat their data lakes. Just keep feeding it and eventually something will come out that is important. However, with the traditional search model your attempts to search that data lake are going to look more like a dam bursting. You have to move all the data into the search platform which means paying the costs to get that data out of the cloud. If you haven’t checked recently you might be shocked to see what Amazon wants to charge you to get that data back into your organization.

By using Cribl Search instead you can ensure that only the most interesting parts of the data are sent back. You can make decisions based on what you want to see and not have to pay for the rest of the uninteresting parts. More importantly, you can then use Search to find other things and feed them back into Stream. You have the flexibility to keep looking without moving the data around over and over again. That leads to reduced costs and a reduced carbon footprint over time. You get your precious minutes back and you can work on saving the planet at the same time.

Bringing It All TogetherCribl has committed to a quarterly release schedule, which is something I really like. By having a cutoff for features to make it into the release they can go out when they’re done, not when a deadline needs to be met. Incremental improvements in new tools like Search can be rolled out to help augment mature products like Stream. The rapid build process also allows Cribl customers to request new data types for ingestion. That means the platform is always on the cutting edge for their customers. I’m excited to see where Search will be in the next six months.

For more information about Cribl and their newest release, make sure to check out https://Cribl.com. To see more of their presentation at Security Field Day you can go to the Cribl presentation page.

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With cloud-native computing trending upwards, businesses are gravitating towards technologies that enable easy leveraging and fuss-free management of the base-layer functions of the cloud infrastructure. eBPF and Cilium are the two technologies that are changing the instrumentation of cloud-native systems.

To understand eBPF and Cilium better, we sat down with the makers – Isovalent, and learned the way these revolutionary technologies are changing the kernel of the cloud.

A Shift in RequirementsOne of the themes coming out of the IT industry today is the need to keep the number of applications and software down to a minimum, and retain only those that are core to the business. As organizations look for ways to get out of the unnecessary heavy-lifting, they are actively unburdening portions of their IT footprints to the cloud. This marks the beginning of a new era of cloud-native computing.

Cloud providers do their part to soften their landing on cloud with ready-to-use infrastructures and interesting choices of services at diverse price points. Over the years, they have also upleveled infrastructure abstractions to alleviate infrastructure-level complexity, but demand for self-service technologies that can change and tune the base layer functions to be simpler and more efficient from within continues to grow.

Supporting Workload DemandseBPF is a kernel technology designed to respond to this demand. With origins in the Linux kernel, eBPF or Extended Berkeley Packet Filter runs sandboxed programs that can work like natively compiled kernel codes or those in the kernel module, extending the capabilities of a computing kernel without needing to change its source code or load its modules.

Cilium is one of the projects through which eBPF is implemented. Cilium was created by Isovalent, and open-sourced in 2015. Thomas Graf, Co-Founder and CTO, was involved first-hand in the development of the project. Graf who had a long career at Red Hat as the Technical Lead, partnered with Dan Wendlandt, now CEO, and founded Isovalent on Swiss soil in 2017.

At a high-level, the Cilium project constitutes applications that are deployed to connect, secure and observe workloads efficiently.

“Cilium has been originally built for containers, to essentially bring in eBPF to the new era of container networking,. A lot of the Cilium founding members are eBPF kernel developers way back from 2014. The idea was to extend eBPF further to the point where we could then build Cilium with the goal to bring a new level of networking, initially container networking, and now broader than this,” said Mr. Graf.

Cilium provides a higher-level abstraction on top of the underlying eBPF, giving users the ability to set intent-based definitions to implement with eBPF, without having to write programs directly.

“At the core of everything that Cilium does is eBPF. It’s the JavaScript engine for the Linux kernel. Everything that Cilium does on the data path level is being built from scratch using eBPF. That’s essentially the differentiator.”

One of the key USPs of Cilium is that it is aligned for the advantages of Kubernetes orchestration. Injecting eBPF programs strategically in the Linux kernel, it creates a layer of connectivity on top. This layer enables network packets to circumvent parts of the host stack saving time and travel.

Without having to navigate the network twice, first in the pod namespace and then again in the host, packets can reach destinations faster, resulting in enormous performance gains.

Cilium is currently supported by all the three major cloud providers – AWS, Azure and Google – in their Kubernetes services, namely, AWS EKS Anywhere, Azure AKS and Google GKE.

Flavors of CiliumUnder the Cilium umbrella, there are several applications, namely Cilium CNI, Cilium Service Mesh, Hubble and Tetragon. In the briefing, Mr. Graf highlighted the first three solutions.

The Cilium CNI (container networking interface) plugin offers identity-driven implementation of Kubernetes network policies.

Cilium reverses the approach of using iptables filters for policy enforcement in K8s with eBPF maps. These are data stored in the kernel that eBPF programs use to route packets. This approach ensures faster lookups and tighter security.

Cilium ensures that communication between pods happens only where required. Compatible with all Kubernetes proxy models, it monitors the addition and removal of services and endpoints (similar to the way kube proxy does), but with the addition of updating eBPF maps timely on the nodes.

Hubble is Cilium’s container networking observability platform that provides details of network flows at Layers 3, 4 and 7. With eyes on cloud-native focused observability, it provides metrics, logs and traces linked with dependency maps that allow operators to see clearly how pods and services are interacting internally and externally.

“All of this observability is transparent just like a network solution would provide. There’s no application instrumentation going on; it’s all done transparently on the network.”

Cilium’s network connectivity, security and observability features converge into one on the Cilium Service Mesh. Aimed to minimize overheads and complexity, the Cilium Service Mesh is sidecarless, meaning users can avoid the extra cost and work of injecting each and every pod with sidecars.

Cilium reduces the learning curve of adopting service mesh by providing multiple abstractions at varying levels of complexity.

“The main difference that we bring to the table is that we’re the first service mesh to really pitch sidecar-free models instead of running sidecar containers for service mesh. We essentially brought in a combination of eBPF and Envoy proxy running on the node itself. Since then, Ambient Mesh from the Istio project has adopted this model as well.”

In ConclusionIn the last couple years, Cilium has seen widespread adoption with eBPF enabling more efficient networking and unlocking huge performance gains and scalability across the cloud-native stack. Isovalent’s open source and enterprise editions of Cilium meet the exclusive demands of cloud-native computing with a clearly defined angle towards Kubernetes.

For more on Cilium, head over to Isovalent’s website. For more stories like this, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.

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The media industry is on an up-curve. Skyrocketing consumption of digital content has caused new opportunities to emerge, and companies with deep pockets are seizing them to deliver on-demand capabilities to consumers. But a lot of these opportunities are still untapped for traditional companies constrained by steep storage costs.

Recently, XenData rolled out an object storage archive solution that may be the answer that these companies need. The XenData E-Series archive appliance is optimized for media files and offers on-prem disk storage of up to 1.12 petabytes.

Out of Control CostsMedia workflows are inherently bulky because unlike other kinds of files, video files are fixed content. Any changes made to them during the editing process apply only to the final cut.

Resources like high-res videos fill up expensive storage space very fast. Media teams are perpetually debating putting these in backup. Due to their enormous sizes, they tend to weigh down backup systems making them sluggish.

One option that can keep storage costs in check for these companies is object storage. Archiving finished projects and data that is infrequently accessed in on-prem storage systems saves companies from depleting their budgets on expensive storage. Archiving data makes new room for the next projects while keeping storage requirements under control.

XenData E-Series Object Storage Archive ApplianceXenData’s E-Series Object Storage Archive appliance can safely store huge caches of data. It offers disk storage of 280 TB to up to 1.12 PB. The storage can be used both as an S3-compatible object storage, as well as a Windows file system.

Video files can be played directly from the appliance. The E-Series supports partial file restores. Pieces of bigger files can be restored flexibly that the media team can use to produce clips instead of restoring full-size files that occupy way more space.

Easy archival, retrieval and distribution are enabled with wide compatibility with Media Asset Management (MAM) systems like Aveco, EditShare, IPV, Dalet and more. With the E-Series, teams can create a centralized storage system for access and collaboration.

As a key feature, the E-Series provides three types of data protection – mirror to LTO data tape in an attached robotic library, mirror to object storage in a public cloud, and mirror to another E-Series appliance in another location.

The E-Series brings significant cost advantages with deep archival. With the available data protection options, objects are converted to lightweight, space-saving stub files. Files in deep archive can be easily restored by reading the stub files.

As noted earlier, the E-Series can be accessed as a Windows file system. In that mode, it leverages Microsoft’s security, whereas as an S3 object storage, it can be accessed through secure HTTPS.

The base configuration of E-Series comes with a usable capacity of 280 TB. That can be expanded to up to 1.12 PB by adding three additional nodes, each adding 280 TB of extra space to the system.

The E-Series Object Storage Archive Appliance is priced at $64,800 per node. As of today, it is available for purchase in the market.

In ConclusionThe media industry is gathering momentum. To tap into its fast-paced growth, creative organizations must ditch overpriced storage options for more cost-effective alternatives that can deliver much lower cost per TB. The new E-Series Object Storage Archive Appliance from XenData promises significant cost advantages for storing large-size media files. It’s an affordable long-term, scalable storage solution that can be set up locally on-premises, works with a variety of MAMs, ensures optimum utilization, and offers great data protection options. That’s enough reason to not fall into the delusion of expensive storage, and adopt a smarter, much more affordable alternative.

For more information on the XenData E-Series Object Storage Archive Appliance, head over to their website. For more stories like this, keep reading here at Gestaltit.com.

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With the world moving everything to the cloud in today’s IT landscape it should come as no surprise that desktops are next on the list. Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) is the newest iteration of offering virtual machines for users to access from anywhere to get work done. It may feel like the eventual arrival of the virtual desktop will never arrive for some but it’s not due to lack of innovation.

Cloud-based DaaS presents its own challenges. How can you provide a seamless experience when you could potentially be serving users from multiple providers? How can you manage everything when you’re constantly moving back and forth between management consoles for one set of platforms that does different things than the others? How can you secure all of your user traffic without using VPN technology that doesn’t scale and can be very expensive? How can you be sure that your users have the proper resources for their workflows?

Leostream DeliversThe answers to all of those DaaS questions could halt your deployment. You need to find a solution that addresses the issues while providing ease-of-use for your operations teams. I had the chance to sit down and talk to Karen Gondoly, CEO of Leostream about these challenges and how they can be solved. Leostream is an Emmy-award winning company that focuses on Remote Desktop Access solutions. They have been around for quite a while working with virtualization and virtual desktops in particular.

Karen told me that Leostream is focused on creating a platform that makes it seamless for users to access their virtual workstations while also making operations teams more efficient when it comes to deployments. They use their Leostream Gateway system to securely connect users to things no matter where they are without the need to configure traditional VPN services. That gives you the ability to deploy your virtual environments to places where users can expect great performance from wherever they happen to be. It also gives your administrators the ability to analyze user workflows and size the machines appropriate to keep your capacity costs reasonable.

The big announcement from Leostream is around Amazon Workspaces. Leostream will be integrating with Workspaces and bringing their platform enhancements to enterprises looking to make the move to DaaS. With Leostream you can integrate with IAM roles in AWS to avoid the need to send out access keys. You can use multiple protocols through the Leostream Gateway to meet the needs of your remote users instead of the two that Amazon supports currently.. And you can do it all from one easy-to-understand interface with Leostream that keeps your operations groups for swiveling their chairs back and forth needlessly to configure features.

Leostream has done a lot to enhance Remote Desktop Access in the enterprise over the years. With this new integration into Amazon Workspaces you can also get the same great experience in the cloud as well. You gain all the flexibility of using the cloud while also having a powerful interface to add features and remove complexity for users. It’s a powerful solution that has been used by a number of people in the oil and gas, aerospace, and entertainment industries.

Bringing It All TogetherAs workers continue to do their jobs from all over the place you need to offer them the ability to complete their workflows with the same level of flexibility. Moving to the cloud creates excitement as well as some anxiety. Finding a provider to enhance your capabilities and reduce friction with users is the way to ensure that your Remote Desktop Access plans aren’t scuttled before they even launch. If you’re looking to make the move to Amazon Workspaces or even start your own DaaS journey it’s worth your time to check out what Leostream has to offer.

For more information about Leostream and their solutions for Remote Desktop Access as well as their new integrations with Amazon Workspaces, make sure to check out their website at http://Leostream.com

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Unless you’re Dr. Emmett Brown or a Time Lord you know that time travel is just a fantasy for our favorite books and TV shows. We know that we can’t go back and change the past and we can’t see the future no matter how much we might like. However, the idea of being able to control the past, present, and future isn’t as far fetched as you might think.

One of the companies that is giving us a peek into the possibilities is Spyderbat. An earlier contender for Most Awesome Company Name, Spyderbat is focused on providing security for cloud-native software. Their platform has distinct components that allow you to see things as they were, as they are, and how they should be. I had a chance to sit down with Seth Goldhammer, VP of Marketing, to talk about what Spyderbat is doing and how it relates to the world of runtime security.

The PastThe first part of the platform is Flashback. Flashback is a recorder that captures information from the workloads and stores it for future reference. Using eBPF, Spyderbat is able to grab all the traces from the containers and store them for analysis. Perhaps you want to be able to figure out why your app was offline on a Tuesday at 9:17am. Flashback can give you the exact details of what was going on at that point in time.

Troubleshooting root cause isn’t something that happens in the heat of the moment. Triage is more concerned with getting things online right now and worrying about the other issues later. With Flashback you can capture the state of the runtime now and figure out how to fix the issue and then go back later and analyze what caused it. Was it a badd configuration that was pushed to production? Or could it be a nefarious actor looking to gain a foothold? With Flashback you’ll know for sure.

The community version of Spyderbat allows you to store up to 30 days of traces from up to five devices. The flagship offering has storage for up to 90 days of traces. If you need more the enterprise solution has an unlimited amount of storage.

The PresentCapturing data from your infrastructure is nice but how do you prevent the kinds of problems that take down your environment? It’s not always a malicious problem. Sometimes your newest developer doesn’t understand why things are done the way they’re done and tries to be helpful by removing a bunch of unimportant lines of code before pushing those changes to production on a Friday.

Keeping your software running right now means having guardrails to prevent unintended changes from taking things down. Spyderbat’s solution for today is Guardian. Guardian takes a look at what your current environment looks like and compares the changes that are being made to it for errors. Perhaps the code is correct from a syntax perspective but violates some other constraint, such as publishing API keys. Guardian can be configured to look for these violations and send an alert or require authorization before they can be pushed into production.

Guardian can also be set up to execute changes during configured windows. No more pushing changes in the workday to get this out the door. Now you can ensure that authorized updates only happen on a schedule to prevent the kind of chaos that a sleepy developer can cause after a weekend of too little rest. And if there is an updated process that needs to be changed it’s easy to go in and change the guardrails because the configuration files for Guardian’s polices are built using YAML.

The FutureWhile we might know how to troubleshoot our existing issues and keep our developers from doing things they aren’t supposed to do you can’t always know what’s coming. Maybe there’s a new exploit that has just been found that gives attackers a way to get into your system. It could be a set of stolen credentials that allows for privilege escalation on a system. No matter what could happen you need to be prepared to respond to it quickly so the dwell time is minimized.

Spyderbat has a solution for the future too. Interceptor is designed to look at runtime attack patterns and keep them from executing. Leveraging the MITRE attack framework, Interceptor can ensure that unauthorized access doesn’t become an event that gets you on the news. You can stop traces from executing as they happen to prevent lateral movement and ensure systems stay safe. This can happen in real-time instead of munging mountains of log files in the hopes of isolating something that might look out of place. No machine learning algorithm is going to help you if the attackers are already in the building. Interceptor gets them before they get through the door.

Bringing It All TogetherThe power of a solution like Spyderbat is that you have to handle all three parts of time travel. You have to know what happened, what’s going on, and what could happen before you know it. Thanks to solutions like Flashback, Guardian, and Interceptor you can get a handle on the whole process from beginning to end. If you want to give Spyderbat a try you can download their free community edition for no charge and try it out. There’s even a great learning tool included to help you understand how they catch problems and identify attacks as they’re happening. If you’re ready to be a container time lord or master the arts of run-time travel make sure you check out Spyderbat.

For more information on Spyderbat and their platform and to try out their community edition, make sure to check out Spyderbat’s website.

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In the past two years, news of cyber-attacks on Monday mornings have been routine for enterprises. Hackers have increasingly gained access into protected digital environments during lightly staffed hours, compromised assets and made away with huge payouts. Nearly all big businesses by now have reported one, if not multiple incidents of ransomware attack on their networks.

However, the lesser-known story is that this wave of cybercrime does not stop with the known names. Reports have shown that an alarming number of small businesses have also been hit by ransomware attacks in recent times. These are companies that were believed to be unlikely targets of cyber-attacks.

As the rest of the cybersecurity industry is absorbed in devising ways to immunize the biggest networks from novel threats, one company is helping small businesses recover their paralyzed systems from vicious ransomware attacks. Founded in 2011, Infrascale is a data protection company built to serve small and medium businesses. The Infrascale Cloud Backup (ICB) solution provides high levels of ransomware protection and enables data recovery, all at a very affordable cost.

A Spot of VulnerabilityThe surge in ransomware attacks on small and medium-sized businesses reveals the troubling truth about poor cyber hygiene of these organizations. Experts say that a majority of small business owners are not concerned about ransomware attacks. These are low hanging fruits for cybercriminals. They rely on very basic backup solutions to store their data, and security tools that offer little to no advanced protection.

That has left doors open for hackers who are now aggressively targeting backups to seize control. They sneak in through endpoints and head straight for the backups where 80% of the data is.

Backups where data is stored in an immutable state are the hardest to crack. Unfortunately, most low-end backup systems are devoid of this capability, and have wide attack surfaces that are very easy to breach with today’s sophisticated attack techniques, allowing hackers to alter and remove files, or infect them at will.

Fighting the Good FightInfrascale’s goal is to bring to this minority, cyber awareness and vigilance. Their mission statement is to eliminate downtime and data loss.

“Everything that Infrascale does starts with our customers and their data,” said Infrascale during a Cloud Field Day appearance back in 2021.

As small businesses face big threats, Infrascale strives to provide timely threat intelligence, and the confidence to operate unafraid in the present-day digital landscape. Their Cloud Backup solution curated specifically for businesses this size, includes a breadth of capabilities geared at making backup push-button simple, and ransomware-safe.

Built with ease-of-use top of mind, their solution not only makes performing backups easy for organizations that do not have a lot of technical expertise at their disposal, but also offers effortless and quick backup restores.

Infrascale Cloud BackupICB is a cloud-based solution that is sold as a storage-based subscription. It offers unlimited versioning, and can be used to backup and restore any number of endpoint devices ranging from desktops and laptops to mobile devices.

ICB brings to small businesses the gold standard immutability that renders data unchangeable. Infrascale encrypts data and stores it in the cloud in a protected state making it impossible for bad actors to delete, change or infect it. In case of a ransomware attack, organizations can quickly replace the compromised data with the untouched version in the cloud, thus averting paying a ransom.

ICB comes integrated with anomaly detection capabilities. Users can configure anomaly warnings and get proactively alerted about large and suspicious file modifications. This allows them to isolate an infection early in the chain, before it takes over the entire system and locks them out, and recover the compromised data.

Additionally, ICB offers features like multi-factor authentication (MFA) for access, single sign-on authentication for secure sign-ins, and remote wipe for erasure of data remotely on a device.

The Infrascale Dashboard offers a single-pane-of-glass management of the backup. All data protection needs can be defined and managed granularly from this console. Additionally, users can avail Infrascale’s award-winning customer support for any issues encountered while using the solution.

Wrapping UpIn the wildfire of ransomware infections that has gripped small business entities, companies need a silver bullet like the Infrascale Cloud Backup solution that can patch backup vulnerabilities, and keep data safe without requiring high-end technologies. ICB adds multiple layers of defense to the security posture, and guarantees fast and easy recovery of files so that businesses are not forced to pay ransom to cybercriminals.

For more information on ICB, check out Infrascale’s website. Also check out their presentations from this past Cloud Field Day event for a deep-dive of the Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery (IBDR) solution. For more stories like this one, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.

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There’s no debate whether an organization, in today’s digital economy, should migrate to cloud. Cloud offers the most enhanced opportunities for innovation in decades. Things like high availability, scalability, accelerated deployment and low housekeeping make some of the biggest reasons to shift to cloud. But enterprises face some shared challenges when it comes to moving data to cloud. It’s an inherently inefficient process, that when organizations jump into without thinking, or planning, leads to wasted time and effort, not to mention a struggle that lasts the entire journey.

Frequent Field Day presenter, Komprise offers a way to overcome the barriers of data migration to cloud. A company whose domain expertise is management and mobility of unstructured data, Komprise recently released a solution – Komprise Hypertransfer for Elastic Data Migration – that fast-tracks data migration to cloud, making the process a lot less messy, and way more efficient. Komprise tops this off with enhanced migration security.

Running into ObstaclesData migration, especially when it comes to cold data, is a slow and rigorous process. It begins with pulling petabytes of data from scattered addresses.

When moving to a destination in the cloud, the data has to go through several routing protocols and countless handshakes, all of which levy a heavy toll on the transfer speed. Additionally, each of the billions of small files that constitute the datasets add overheads that further impact the roundtrip times.

The other half of the problem is the network itself. More WAN traffic equals high latency. This on top of a limited bandwidth makes bottlenecks inevitable. That explains why transferring large volumes of data over the network is time-intensive, and typically disruptive.

Smart Migration with KompriseKomprise enables smart data migration with a structured approach that begins with analytics. To get enterprises started, Komprise provides deep analytics of the data and the environment. Information such as type, size and age of data, cost and usage, and possible bottlenecks help enterprises prepare ahead of the migration, and choose the best migration path. This approach has huge cost advantages.

From the time data goes in, to the time it comes out the other side, users can centrally locate, monitor and manage all migrations. Komprise provides status updates for hundreds of datasets on the go through reports displayed on the dashboard.

Komprise Elastic Data Migration with HypertransferWith Komprise’s Elastic Data Migration, users can get shorter migration times for all file and object data. Komprise claims that Hypertransfer delivers a 25 times faster SMB data transfer compared to other alternatives. This is based on results achieved from testing Komprise Hypertransfer for transferring small files to the cloud.

Komprise leverages parallelism to fully utilize available resources at multiple levels such as, threads, directories, shares, etc. Each migration task in Komprise Elastic Data Migration, is split into smaller subtasks, and executed individually in Komprise Observers which are virtual appliances present in the Komprise Intelligent Data Management platform. This parallelism is applied automatically for all transfers.

Komprise Elastic Data Migration delivers consistent performance over high-latency networks by minimizing network usage.

The cherry on top is, Komprise’s accelerated data migration comes with enhanced security. Hypertransfer for Elastic Data Migration transmits data through private virtual channels that run across the WAN network, from source to destination. This method dramatically improves ransomware protection, and speeds of transfer. Data integrity is preserved through access control and routine file-level integrity checks.

Komprise Elastic Data Migration is sold as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. It is available as a point product, as well as a feature in the bigger Komprise Intelligent Data Management platform.

Wrapping UpWhen you think about it, the part where you put data in and wait for it to come out in the cloud, is really the last mile. What comes before and that which determines the outcome is planning and preparation, and enterprises need to have a good, workable plan right from the onset. Komprise provides datapoints for a strategic plan, and performs the execution. By providing comprehensive analytics prior to the process, it lays the groundwork for a successful and cost-effective migration. With the new Hypertransfer for Elastic Data Migration speeding up the process, and layering it with an extra blanket of security, moving high volumes of unstructured data, especially for data-heavy industries like genomics, life sciences, media and entertainment, can now be quick and painless.

For more information, visit Komprise’s website. Also check out Komprise’s presentations on smart data migration from this last year’s Cloud Field Day event. For more stories like this one, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.

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Organizations, since the pandemic, have been in over their head setting up workforces to operate remotely. Now two years later, as remote work is reaching an equilibrium with in-office setup, and is a de-facto model in most companies, an avalanche of tech issues associated with productivity tools has started to slow down employee productivity.

Field Day presenter, Apica Systems’ announcement of the Apica Microsoft 365 Monitoring Suite came just in time to address this situation.

The Inevitable Headaches of Working RemoteThough enterprises have wasted no time in stepping up to mitigate the emerging tech situations with remote workers, the writing was on the wall all along. Work-from-home veterans have been there, done it. For years, they have struggled with issues like application performance problems, app outages and connectivity disruptions.

The corporate infrastructure was never designed to support a distributed workforce, and with the cornucopia of complex technologies taking over the workdays of professionals, it’s just a disaster waiting to happen.

Without an IT department to rescue, employees are on their own. This has not only created uncomfortable work situations on a daily basis, for many, it has caused their productivity to decline through no fault of their own.

A Technical PerspectiveApplication performance monitoring (APM) provides an elegant solution to this. APM tools have been on the up and up the past few years as software have become part of our daily lives. These tools have provided companies a reliable way to understand the experience of interaction between users and technologies. They provide a technical perspective to an application’s performance and an opportunity to abate problems proactively. Thanks to them, remote employees are able to get out of frustrating work setups and enjoy consistent low-friction experiences.

For those who are unfamiliar, APM tools are software solutions designed to monitor and manage application performance and availability round the clock. They keep users informed about errors, speed dips, uptime, and such phenomena through a set of metrics. The goal of a good APM tool is to resolve customer-experience challenges by maintaining strong observability through a deep set of metrics, and keep problems predictable.

Apica Microsoft 365 Monitoring Suite at a GlanceApica Systems is a name that often comes up in the context of APM. Widely known in the IT community for their signature Apica Platform which now goes by the name Apica Ascent, Apica Systems is dedicated to reducing friction for users. The platform diagnoses application performance problems, correlates them for easy root cause finding, and augments the knowledge of teams with deep observability for reduced Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).

In a recent update, the company introduced several new capabilities to the platform, including Scripted Checks and Grafana integration making it even easier for consumers to monitor critical applications in the new Web 3.0 phase.

This week, Apica Systems announced the launch of the new Apica Microsoft 365 Monitoring Suite. The new solution is capable of monitoring the availability and quality of tools and services in the Microsoft 365 Suite. Built into the Apica Ascent platform, the solution runs SLA and API checks, and provides intelligence and insights in the form of performance reports. The applications it monitors include Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange.

The Apica Microsoft 365 Monitoring Suite can be deployed in branch offices, where it can identify emerging issues and analyze them for root causes. All performance anomalies are proactively detected, flagged and displayed on the dashboard.

Developed in-house, the solution aims to replace point solutions which companies often have to rely on to get visibility of all the components in the stack. With the Apica Microsoft 365 Monitoring Suite, users can be in the know about all critical issues in any of the tools in the suite. This ensures easy troubleshooting and promises optimal performance for the users.

The Apica Microsoft 365 Monitoring Suite is currently available for use. It comes in three packages – Basic, Standard and Enterprise. The first two cover one location only, whereas the Enterprise version can be deployed in two or more locations and can cover up to 6 services in the Microsoft 365 Suite.

To request pricing, head over to Apica’s website. Also, check out Apica’s presentations on their active monitoring platform from their appearance at this past Tech Field Day event. For more interesting updates like this one, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.

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Today’s enterprises have a complexity problem. On one hand, technologies have become increasingly complex. And on the other hand, companies are struggling to hire skilled professionals in what is the tightest labor market in decades. This gap has turned networks into minefields of failures. Notwithstanding, organizations are expected to deliver consistent, low-friction experiences to users.

We recently had the opportunity of meeting with a company that works at this intersection of shifting patterns and sprawling complexity in IT. Their mission – to tame runaway complexity in network management, and enable enterprises to be at the cutting edge of technology without the toil.

Former network engineer and Tech Field Day Events Lead, Tom Hollingsworth, met with Josh Stephens, CTO, at BackBox to talk about the toll that quotidian network administrative tasks take on engineers’ productivity, and learn how Backbox promises better outcomes with user-friendly, reliable automation.

Automation of AutomationNetwork automation was introduced as the way to navigate through the frightening wilderness of complexities, but leveraging automation is a whole other test, the first rules of which are hours of coding, and making do with dumb out-of-box functions.

“If you look at the network automation market, you’d find that there are some easy to use but feature-poor products at the network config management level of the market, and some really comprehensive but hard-to-use products at the high end,” Mr. Stephens pointed out.

Leveraging either type means appointing members of the team who are skilled in writing scripts to implement and extend the product. For high-end solutions, there needs to be a dedicated automation team that can manage the platform and implement automation at scale.

But with intelligent, ready-to-use automation, there is a way to go around hiring extra skills, and take the pressure off of existing engineers to upskill and absorb new responsibilities that may or may not be in their expertise.

“What we have to do is educate buyers on the fact that, we’re not taking their jobs away. We’re actually empowering them to do much more work,” added Mr. Stephens.

BackBox Sits in the MiddleBackBox labels itself as a network security infrastructure automation company. Born in Israel in 2009, BackBox was an MSP before moving to Dallas, Texas, where it is headquartered since 2021. During the interview, Stephens who has a strong background in network automation and management, laid out what BackBox does in layman’s term – “We automate tasks necessary to maintain, manage and secure modern IT networks.”

Their product, the BackBox Network Automation Platform, he explained is designed to automate configuration changes, and management tasks associated with infrastructure devices.

As of today, BackBox serves over 500 enterprise customers, a third of which are large Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs) looking to automate managed networks at scale. That translates to managing over 100,000 networks a day.

Mr. Stephens highlighted that out of the box, BackBox supports 180 vendors and thousand device types. It is how they automate multi-vendor networks end to end.

On being asked if such broad support for devices comes through API integration, Mr. Stephens replied that APIs are the preferred way, but BackBox can handpick the most intelligent protocols for access which also include SNMP, SSH, Telnet and more.

“The product does have the ability to fall back and try other methods, but in general when we add support for a device, part of that support is not only the protocol or access method, but within that access method, the details of how you get different information that you might need,” explained Mr. Stephens.

The BackBox Network Automation PlatformSr Product Manager, Perry Greenwood, who also joined the conversation showed a quick demo of the product explaining its key capabilities.

Backbox packs some powerful automation features which allow it to serve use cases from multi-vendor network management to task automation, network backup and recovery, and last but not the least, security and compliance.

In everyday things, BackBox automates patches and upgrades reducing the routine workload and time spent on them. Teams can run network health checks with BackBox IntelliChecks that monitor system health and provide deeper app-level intelligence.

One of their most distinguishing features which is a part of the platform’s latest version is one-click disaster recovery. BackBox lets users schedule automated backups of every device in the network. It builds a central backup of all config files that can be pulled for quick recovery any time, without scripts or coding.

Stephens explained that recovery on BackBox is failsafe because of the 5-step verification method it uses to verify the files.

“Part of what makes the product ultra-reliable is, not only does it have the ability to do very comprehensive backups, but there is a set of check procedures done on every backup, to make sure that the files are valid and could be used to restore. There are recursive workflows that you could use to retry a backup if it failed later, and learn why it failed. Our backups are intended to be restored with one click.”

Once verified, configurations can be restored with a click of a mouse.

The platform has a set of pre-built tasks with which it can change configuration settings, make upgrades, implement fixes simultaneously to multiple devices with just one click.

Backbox comes with a centralized dashboard where users can view live status information and time-lapse of device health, push changes into devices, check compliance history and much more.

BackBox can be deployed on-premises, and in the public cloud in a customer-managed model. There’s also a new hybrid SaaS model which is managed by Backbox.

In ConclusionAs a network infrastructure automation platform, BackBox ticks a lot of the boxes that enterprises look for in an automation solution. Aside from the host of capabilities it has, things that stood out to me, and have the most appeal to the customers are ease-of-use and simplicity. Requiring no coding skills whatsoever, BackBox is a user-friendly solution built for teams to be able perform routine tasks in much shorter time, and implement end-to-end automation, reliably and at scale.

For more information, head over to BackBox’s website. For more articles like this one, keep reading here at Gestaltit.com.

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Most of us can’t imagine computers before SSDs. SSDs, without a doubt, stand for the best of innovation in storage in the recent years. In one fell swoop, they changed the storage game everywhere, from consumer electronics to datacenters. But as innovation marches on, the top-tier workloads are once again in need of more capacity and processing power. As we approach the limit of computing power, the demanding nature of new workloads is telling us one thing- we need a better SSD.

Recently, Gestalt IT’s publisher Stephen Foskett met with JB Baker, VP of Marketing at ScaleFlux to learn about their offerings that seem to perfectly fit the definition of a better SSD.

More of the SameThe past few years, vendors have been working at a frantic pace, bringing to the market new lines of SSDs from budget SATA to blazing fast NVMe. For the most part, these products live up to the hype. But they don’t particularly stand out from one another in any significant way that matters to the workloads.

“If they’re on PCIe Gen 4, they all have this same range of performance. It’s a similar curve for everybody in terms of how they perform across various workloads,” noted Mr. Baker. “A 1 Drive Write Per Day (DWPD) class product that has one group of performance curves, and a 3 Drive Write Per Day will have a slightly higher set of performance curves,” he added.

Vendors make their case on performance numbers and prices, but with very narrow margins, they are really more of the same. In the end, they’re unable to fully meet the skyrocketing requirements of high-performance workloads like AI/ML and data analytics. As far as enterprises are concerned, their workloads are still starved of performance-optimized storage.

ScaleFlux and Computational StorageScaleFlux’s SSDs are however a class of their own. ScaleFlux took an ordinary NVMe SSD, and elevated it with computational storage.

For years, compute and storage have been put in separate bins. Now architects have reason to believe that moving data between storage and CPU wastes power which can be otherwise used to process data. Computational storage is an architecture that provides computational storage capabilities within the storage.

By bringing compute to where the data is, computational storage enables faster data-processing by taking load off of CPU. Reduced data movement and workload offloading also lead to lower power consumption.

Image Provided by ScaleFluxWith innovation focused around computational storage, ScaleFlux has come up with two lines of drives – CSD 2000 and the more recent CSD 3000 that deliver significantly better performance and surprisingly more capacity.

“What we have done is integrate a computational storage engine into an ordinary NVMe SSD functionality. That’s how we get to being a better SSD,” informed Mr. Baker.

High performance workloads can greatly benefit from ScaleFlux’s SSDs for the obvious reason that they introduce computation capabilities in storage itself, thus reducing latency. But the benefits don’t end there. ScaleFlux intelligent SSDs have onboard compression and decompression engines that perform transparent in-line compression for optimized capacity. Data is compressed as it’s written and uncompressed when reading. This allows users to store data up to 4 times the physical capacity of the drives.

“We do compression right in the drive. So as long as the data isn’t encrypted before it gets to the drive, we get to see a benefit in terms of the performance, endurance, and latency,” said Mr. Baker.

ScaleFlux integrates everything into a single chip for significant, power, space and cost savings. In addition to that, ScaleFlux SSDs also retain the standard capabilities of enterprise-class SSDs.

“We provide power loss protection, and end to end data protection on all of the buses.”

ScaleFlux is simple to deploy and works with any NVMe compatible server. ScaleFlux drives come in U.2 form factor.

Wrapping UpScaleFlux drives undercut a lot of the products in the market in terms of performance, capacity and economics. They’re fast and highly capable, and offer good value for money when compared to other drives. But their real superpower is high capacity, increased endurance, and most importantly, superior application performance at an overall low cost per GB, which means users can take advantage of them for a lot of burdensome workloads.

To get a demo, head over to ScaleFlux’s website. For more such stories, keep reading here at Gestalt IT.

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It should come as no surprise that cloud infrastructure and operations are the status quo for today’s enterprises. With remote work a must for many employees, the flexibility the cloud provides is rivaled only by the potential complexities it adds to IT administration. Breakthroughs like Infrastructure as Code have helped improve cloud sysadmins’ abilities to more effectively manage their cloud instances, but often is limited by its scope of reach. That is, until now.

Meet evn0Env0 is paving the way to simplifying Infrastructure as Code at scale. Operating out of Israel and the US, the company is helmed and co-founded by Omry Hay, who recently sat down with Gestalt IT’s Stephen Foskett to discuss the env0 platform.

As Hay describes it, env0 provides IT admins a single tool to manage all of their IaC deployments across tools like Terraform, Pulumi, Kubernetes, and others. He likens it to what GitHub did for Git but for infrastructure, allowing teams to manage their code deployments coincidentally across all of their frameworks—and clouds—at play.

In practice, env0 is used for managing RBAC, auditing, self service, etc. in cloud infrastructure effectively through a single platform. Optimized for infrastructure deployments (although not app development), env0 customers use the tool to manage security policies at scale across their clouds as well.

Digging DeeperAmidst the discussion, Hay broke into a demo to showcase env0 in action. Env0 works across clouds, with customers using it to simultaneously manage AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM, Oracle, and even vCenter or Dreamware instances. Built around Terraform, env0 is cloud agnostic, making it ideal for large and small enterprises alike.

For ease of use, env0 contains a number of pre-built templates which can be used to point directly to repos like AWS S3 buckets to easily manage code deployments at an organizational level. Users of env0 can create their own templates as well by simply defining their frameworks, their clouds, and then assigning the proper repos and variables.

Beyond these templates, env0 users may also specify which environments their changes will be made to, whether it be dev, live production, or elsewhere. Going further, admins in the platform can even define roles within env0 itself, ensuring that certain employees must undergo an approval flow before pushing code changes live as necessary. Other features include Slack notifications for new code pushes, project-specific policies like number of users or TTL, and more.

Using env0 for Enterprise-Scale IaCIn addition to the normal use features, env0 also provides infrastructure environment usage information, such as run cost, number of resources in use, deployment logs, and other key insights into operations. Since they are SaaS-based (or potentially hybrid using downloaded agents), all of these capabilities come out of the box, as it were. Env0 even handles the deployment provided you enter the correct repo and your preferred framework.

When it comes to managing massive cloud deployments, env0 simplifies the process tremendously. In a day and age where Infrastructure as Code can be an admin’s best friend, env0 makes it even easier to manage those IaC deployments at scale.

To learn more about env0’s offering, visit their website. Want to learn more about other companies and products changing the face of enterprise IT? Read more at GestaltIT.com.

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As we delve into edge computing, one topic that has come up repeatedly is the applicability of Kubernetes as an orchestration platform. Originally created for large-scale cloud environments, Kubernetes has become popular from the datacenter to the edge. But is it really a good fit? This will certainly become a topic of discussion at Edge Field Day!

Does Kubernetes make sense in small devices running outside the datacenter?Kubernetes and EdgeKubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that has become popular in cloud and enterprise for managing and scaling containerized applications. Although intended for use in the cloud, Kubernetes can also be used to manage and deploy containers in other environments, including at the edge.

As previously discussed, edge computing refers to the processing and storage of data in a dispersed manner, closer to consumers and sensors. Edge compute can be beneficial for applications that require low latency or have data transmission or processing challenges. By deploying Kubernetes at the edge, organizations are attempting to move containerized applications closer to the source of the data while getting the management and orchestration benefits of the cloud.

Using Kubernetes at the edge has some of the same benefits as in the cloud or datacenter: The ability easily to deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications using a centralized centralized “control plane.” The scalability of Kubernetes is particularly appealing in edge environments due to the number of devices and the amount of data collected there. The “cattle” approach is also appealing, since most edge devices are deployed anonymously in un-supervised environments and often need to be remotely wiped and reconfigured.

Organizations deploying Kubernetes at the edge are typically seeking to integrate with Kubernetes environments in the cloud or datacenter. A wide range of applications can be deployed as Kubernetes-controlled containers, and this has become the standard in modern IT. This includes a wide range of edge-specific applications, such as edge gateways, IoT solutions, and edge analytics platforms.

Kubernetes can also be helpful in terms of security. Security is one of the key concerns when it comes to edge deployments, and Kubernetes can provide security features like role-based access control, network segmentation, and encryption. When used properly, these can help organizations secure their containerized applications at the edge.

Shortcomings of Kubernetes at the EdgeKubernetes brings a lot of benefits for managing containerized applications, but it does have some limitations when it comes to edge environments.

Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of Kubernetes at the edge is its complexity. Kubernetes is complex to set up and manage properly and must be carefully tailored for automated operation in edge environments where human interaction is at a premium. Most edge Kubernetes implementations are designed to be fully “lights out, hands off” but this poses a great engineering challenge. I’ve recently discussed this with Edgegap and recommend reading Brian Chambers Medium post for more. But this is a huge concern.

Another issue for Kubernetes at the edge is network latency and outages. Kubernetes relies on a centralized control plane, and network latency or instability can interfere with proper operation. Considering that edge is all about low-latency processing, such as retail or IoT applications, this is a real worry. But many companies (including Edge Field Day presenter Mako Networks) are developing redundant networking capability to help make sure these applications stay connected.

Limited resources can pose another challenge for Kubernetes in edge environments. Most edge servers have limited system resources (memory, storage, and CPU power) and even “light” Kubernetes can be taxing. I deployed Rancher on a fleet of Atom NUCs in my lab and k3s was taking up more CPU, RAM, and storage than my test applications. So Kubernetes may not be the best choice for very light systems. Luckily hardware advances all the time and we’re already seeing a proliferation of RAM and CPU in devices like the Intel NUC.

My NUC lab is slightly unconventional in appearance…Lastly, Kubernetes (and general-purpose Linux) support for arm architectures and other specialized hardware isn’t quite where we’d like it. This can be a problem for edge deployments that use specialized hardware, especially locked-down special-purpose appliances like routers or storage systems. This is also improving rapidly, however, and many of these devices are bringing better APIs and native Kubernetes support.

It is worth noting that Kubernetes is being adapted to work in edge environments, with solutions like edge clusters, Rancher, and k3s (a lightweight k8s distribution for edge computing). These are designed to overcome some of the limitations of Kubernetes at the edge and make it more compact, easier to deploy, and easier to manage.

Stephen’s StanceKubernetes is a powerful container orchestration system that can be used to manage and deploy containerized applications at the edge. By using Kubernetes at the edge, organizations can easily scale and manage their applications, integrate with other technologies, and secure their applications. But complexity, network latency, limited resources, and support for edge devices are all concerns. As edge computing continues to grow in popularity and support for Kubernetes expands, I expect that it will become a key tool for managing and deploying containerized applications at the edge. Watch for Edge Field Day on February 22 and 23, 2023 as we dive into all these questions!

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As data becomes pervasive across all industries, a sharp rise in storage consumption is being seen, and especially, a divergence from traditional storage towards cloud-native options. A market study showed that the cloud-native storage market will reach $71.87 billion by 2030. But for now, the market is steadily steering towards app-centricity.

We recently sat down with Richard Olver, CEO of Ondat, to talk about the potential drivers and restraints, and learn about how Ondat is leading the market with a competitive, container-native storage solution.

Founded in 2015, Ondat was formerly known as StorageOS. In 2021, the company had a fresh start when it rebranded to Ondat securing a massive Series B funding. In January of 2022, Ondat launched its first SaaS management platform that allows easy deployment and management of stateful Kubernetes applications.

The Rise of App-Centric CultureOlver addressed the market requirements of data storage, shining light on why traditional storage fails to meet the demands. The two key attributes that give cloud-native storage an edge over traditional counterparts, are cost and speed. Cloud native storage platforms offer agility, consistent high-performance, and infrastructure compatibility, as opposed to the closed, cost-heavy and sticky alternative of on-prem storage.

The demands are continuously evolving, pushing providers to amp up their solutions with new features to remain competitive. There is a strong drive towards principles like app-centric, vendor-agnostic, Kubernetes nativity, container nativity and cloud-native style operation.

Container-Native Storage for KubernetesOndat’s container-native Kubernetes storage solution checks all the boxes. Ondat’s goal with its platform is to build a developer-focused storage solution that puts their needs first. Ondat’s platform enables all levels of users, from a single developer to distributed teams in corporations.

“A lot of the cloud native developers mention Ondat as an example of the kind of storage they’re looking for, or the kind of storage they’re using. It’s really great to see the message taking hold with non-storage, non-enterprise people, that it’s really reaching the developers,” said Gestalt IT’s publisher, Stephen Foskett.

Developers like storage that is built into containers and can run as containers. Ondat’s container-native solution is tightly integrated with Kubernetes, and gives developers the option of self-service. They can provision and manage their own storage, as opposed to depending on the storage team to do it.

Ondat has a hybrid route to market that “focuses on the ecosystem, for driving brand awareness” and to provide “a combined solution” to the customers. Attracted by its pliant architecture and simple integration, companies like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kasten, Red Hat and HashiCorp have become part of its partner ecosystem.

Olver said, “Everything we do is syndicated through partners. We also have a heavy focus on our community edition, which is a freemium go to market, where we’re trying to offload the qualification, especially for technical buyers who don’t want to talk to salespeople to self-qualify.”

Ondat’s freemium edition is accessible through their primary, self-service channel. It gives users access to unlimited clusters and nodes. Customers also have the option to upgrade to paid editions, that offer high levels of support and have a consumption-based model. Ondat is available in all marketplaces.

The Big DifferentiatorsAs a platform, Ondat brings to customers capabilities that modern container-native applications require, such as integration with Kubernetes, self-service storage provisioning, and horizontal scaling, in addition to providing availability, composability, and security for stateful workloads. With Ondat’s container-native storage, databases run on Kubernetes with a software-defined storage and data services.

Remembering his own struggles with traditional storage systems, Customer Success Architect, Chris Milsted said, “The biggest problem was that storage was owned by the storage team.” Ondat takes that solution and turns it into “a developer-led” or “developer-involved” solution that can be easily deployed into a Kubernetes cluster like everything else, and that Ondat cluster can be run by the application team as well as the storage team.

“We’re definitely seeing (app-centric storage) in the emerging requirements where network-based storage isn’t working in the cloud. A good example is with AWS and EKS, where customers will default to EBS, but EBS doesn’t have the failover that they need. So they go to EFS, and EFS doesn’t perform because it’s a network-connected, file-based storage solution. Then they might try ONTAP from NetApp, which is a better version of EFS, but it doesn’t solve the developer problems of having to maintain storage.”

Compared to that, Ondat makes a preferred choice, because it offers storage that is local, on-host, rather than network-attached.

“Customers running microservices want the data to be as close to the application as possible. Most importantly, they want the description and definition of storage to be as code. If the storage is sitting outside of the application tier, it’s unaware of what’s going on.”

When compared to other vendors, Ondat’s architecture has some unique points of difference. As noted earlier, it is a software-only solution that can be deployed as a container. It has a shared-nothing architecture which essentially ensures fault-tolerance and less downtime. Integrated control plane allows for centralized management of state, health, placement and failover. With no hardware dependencies, it can be horizontally scaled, and no Linux kernel drivers limit ensures that it has the broadest compatibility.

As an example of how things are relatively simpler with Ondat, Olver explained, “If you need to encrypt an application on a node, the storage side encryption is dumb to that information. Whereas we are doing the encryption just by implementing a label in the declarative code procedures of a platform engineer. So, they just write it in the code, and it’s done, and it’s enforceable. You can’t do that with server-side storage.”

In ConclusionThe sheer volume and diversity of modern applications says that apps are the engine of the digital era. Their dynamic nature requires storage systems to be flexible, container-native, and most importantly app-centric. An intelligent, app-focused storage solution like Ondat’s reduces cost nightmares and application downtimes, but more importantly, it brings to the customers an app-centric resilience that is a rare commodity in the storage systems of the last decade.

For more on the Ondat’s container-native storage, head over to their website, or check out the recently released reports on Container Native Storage Performance in the AWS Public Cloud and performance advantage over Portworx. Also check out Ondat’s presentations on Kube-native storage from Cloud Field Day. For more stories like this, keep reading here at Gestaltit.com.

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As I recently wrote, edge computing is a technology that allows for processing and storage of data closer to its source. This can be beneficial for applications that require low latency, such as real-time video, retail, or industrial IoT or control, but there are some limits to what works at the edge. All of these will be part of the discussion during Edge Field Day next month.

Cost, Power, Security, and ScalabilityOne of the main things holding back deployment of edge computing is the novelty and cost of deploying and maintaining edge devices. Although individual devices are often inexpensive, the cost of deploying them at scale, covering many remote locations, can quickly add up. The cost of ongoing maintenance and updates must also be considered, along with the challenge of accessing them. And edge computing is still a novelty, requiring investment in training and architecture.

Edge computing devices also tend to be limited in terms of processing power and storage capacity. Although their capability is rapidly increasing, they may not be able to handle large amounts of data or perform complex computations in a reasonable envelope of cost and power. Still, they are likely good enough for basic tasks like image analysis, data filtering, and industrial control. And advances in GPU and xPU technology mean that the next wave of devices will be much more capable.

Another concern about edge computing revolves around security. Since edge devices are located outside the walls of the datacenter they are exposed to many environmental and human risks. Theft, sabotage, and infiltration are a real concern for devices in retail or industrial settings. They are also connected to networks that have different security profiles or might not be secure at all. Encryption, authentication, and tamper sensors are critical.

Additionally, edge computing poses a scalability risk. As the number of devices and the amount of data they generate increases, so does the difficulty of management and analysis. Data must be filtered locally to avoid flooding storage and compute capacity, network links, and centralized services. We have heard stories of 5G-connected edge devices using up their monthly allocation of data in just a day or two when not properly configured.

Stephen’s StanceAlthough edge computing has the potential to improve the performance and efficiency of distributed applications, it also has many limitations. The cost of deployment and maintenance, limited processing power and storage capacity, concerns about security, and the question of scalability all come into play. These are the topics we will be considering as we dive into edge computing at Edge Field Day in February!

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A study published by Global Market Insights Inc. predicts that the NAS (Network Attached Storage) market will overshoot the $100 billion mark before 2032. The forecast is a jolting reminder of the rapidly accelerating demand for data storage.

Through a Clear LensUnfettered data growth is a prominent driver for market demand for network attached storage. Businesses need additional space to catch the spillover data in a cost-efficient and access-friendly manner. Further blowing up the market revenue is the rising investment in AI, 5G and infrastructure expansion plans.

Underneath that all, what’s inflaming the demand more and most is an elevated awareness. The customers today know what an efficient storage system should look like. Based on that, the business requirements that have rose to the top are centralized storage, simplified data management, and of course, rock-solid data protection, and traditional NAS comes up short.

NasuniA major participant in this space is Nasuni Corporation. Amid companies like HPE and NetApp that are rolling out their versions of affordable storage, Nasuni is garnering a lot of attention as a provider that puts mitigating cost, capacity and security challenges above all things.

Its competitive differentiator is that it gives users a way to do more with less. Nasuni’s flagship File Data Platform is a comprehensive solution that helps organizations meet the newer business challenges with consistent performance, cost optimization and ease of management. Cost being top of mind, Nasuni offers the solution on flexible and pocket-friendly plans targeted at a cost-conscious market.

TechTarget named Nasuni the silver winner of the best enterprise cloud storage two years in a row. The judges rated Nasuni based on its File Data Platform’s breadth of capabilities. Unlike traditional NAS, Nasuni offers a cloud-centric file data service that connects users to data anywhere, anytime. The solution offers a common namespace where NAS and cloud file storage can be combined and collaborated.

Nasuni is vendor and cloud-agnostic which gives users the additional flexibility to collect and collaborate files, no matter their location. The platform differs from other storage solutions by offering a global file system that can store massive sets of unstructured data, and scale limitlessly.

The Nasuni File Data PlatformWhen it comes to building a file storage service, Nasuni lets the biggest industry trends guide it. With hybrid work becoming a standard, Nasuni’s platform features an add-on Access Anywhere service which allows accessing from any location without any security risk to the data. With its file solution, a widely distributed workforce can collaborate across locations without experiencing any difference in access performance or connectivity.

A big area of focus for Nasuni is data protection. Nasuni’s File Data Platform has built-in, always-on ransomware protection that detects threats in real time, and recovers files under minutes. The protection spans cloud to edge, empowering organizations to rapidly recover from attacks across multiple locations, and avert costly shutdowns.

Nasuni steps away from the traditional backup and recovery to avoid its limitations. As an alternative, Nasuni offers a cloud storage file backup and recovery service that is built into the platform. File backup runs in the background without user intervention. What better, Nasuni’s file solution scales infinitely, meaning even though backup happens at a higher frequency than on-prem backups, users can never run out of space.

Nasuni leverages object storage which promises higher capacity and lower cost, thus making a perfect fit for volume-heavy unstructured data. Simplicity is assured with a single console management, on-demand capacity and built-in backup and DR. It’s flexible architecture allows deploying cloud, on-prem and hybrid applications easily.

Nasuni in 2022In 2022, Nasuni made two significant acquisitions bolstering its platform’s capabilities even more. First, it bought startup company, DBM Cloud Systems, in a 60-million-dollar acquisition in May.

Then in June, it made a second acquisition by absorbing an UK-based, file data management company, Storage Made Easy (SME), for an undisclosed sum. This acquisition was targeted toward improving file accessibility and giving customers high-performance access from home and branch offices, as well as from field locations with limited bandwidth.

Nasuni is a regular presenter at Field Day events. Watch them present their latest solutions at this past Tech Field Day event in Silicon Valley.

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UK-based chip designer Arm is rapidly growing its automotive chip portfolio. The company, owned by SoftBank Group Corp, that you may have heard of in connection to the recent news of Arm’s possible listing on Nasdaq, is making headway despite stiff competition.

Arm’s chip designs power a majority of the smartphones and IoT devices in the market. The other big player is Intel. Intel dominates the laptops and desktop computer space. And now, both the behemoths are in automotive, building designs to power the most advanced fleet of self-driving cars of the decade.

A Much-Needed Course CorrectionA few years back, Arm maneuvered into a rapidly flourishing auto market, a decision that proved to be most astute for its future. For several years, Arm has been down on its luck, being faced with heavy-weight contenders. Investing in its automotive portfolio proved be a game-changer.

In February 2022, Arm unveiled a new image signal processor (ISP) for ADAS, the Mali-C78AE ISP, adding to its rapidly growing AE series. Believed to be critical to achieving complete driving autonomy, all of Arm’s processor IP from the AE series meet the ISO safety standards.

Apart from being the brain of the driver, automotive ISP also replaces the eyes. The sensors’ ISP picks up information that the processor computes to make decision.

But what gives Arm a competitive edge over OEMs like Qualcomm and Intel Mobileye, is that its processor IP comes with the safety requirements that make execution of L3+ ADAS a distinct possibility.

Image provided by ArmIn addition to vehicle perimeter, Arm is also pushing boundaries in in-vehicle infotainment or IVI. Arm has a range of solutions designed to deliver a “digital cockpit” by bringing to the customers a rich set of features inside the cabin. Heads-up Display (HUD), driver monitoring, HVAC control, rear-view camera, instrument cluster, rear passenger entertainment – ARM processors power a growing number of under-the-hood applications.

Financial Times reports a two-fold jump in its automotive business revenue since 2020. This spurt was followed by a 35% upshot in 2022, amounting to a fivefold growth in four years.

But Arm’s ambition does not stop there. Ahead of its public listing, Arm is seeking new avenues to pursue, and for now, the automotive market sits directly in its line of sight.

As rivals like Intel and MIPS get their hooks into the industry, Arm is redoubling its efforts to counter the competition, and gain control over bigger stakes in the market.

In an interview with Financial Times, Arm’s VP of Go-to-Market, Dennis Laudick said that development in automobiles has outpaced smartphones and datacenters. He added that the chip demand in cars is bigger now than ever before, because an extraordinary number of chips go into making feats like ADAS and AD possible in high-end cars.

Suffice to say that Arm’s concerted push is backed by strong market demands, and predictions of a chip shortage on the horizon. Already Arm holds about 85% of the market share for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) globally, and 55% of the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and is increasingly gaining purchase on the auto race.

Pushing AheadWhile Arm’s prospects are undoubtedly big, things aren’t entirely hunky-dory. In the past months, Arm has faced stiff competition from an exploding ecosystem of rivals, in particular, from one RISC-V. RISC-V Foundation, a Swiss non-profit outfit, has an open-source instruction set architecture which it markets as an alternative to Arm’s system IP. RISC-V’s open-source architecture lets engineers tweak and tune the IP to what they need, without paying royalties.

RISC-V is gaining traction in the Chinese market amid mounting trade restrictions. The open, expanding RISC-V ecosystem gives Chinese organizations a way to work around the restrictions and gain self-sufficiency in the semiconductor business. Arm on the other hand has chosen not to sell its high-performance Neoverse V line of chips to Chinese tech company, Alibaba, following the export restrictions of UK and US governments. However, Google’s recent endorsement of the RISC-V architecture proves that the attraction to open-source architecture is here to stay and grow.

New architectures like RISC-V may steer away some business from the established standards, but not all is sold on them. Experts believe that it will be long before everybody is a convert.

Arm is not likely to succumb to these market shifts. Already, the chip giant has invested heavily on its automotive portfolio, on both hardware and software sides, giving chipmakers more options to tinker with the designs before purchasing. Furthermore, it is leading the way with new and more capable solutions designed to provide clear and accurate information and powerfully quick decision-making. And given its track record in application processors for smartphones, Arm is well-positioned for continued sustainable growth in the auto industry.

Arm Vs IntelArm and Intel are the two chief forces in the microprocessor market. Arm does not manufacture its chips like Intel does. Instead, it licenses the ARM processor designs to companies like Snapdragon and Tensor who manufacture the chips in-house.

Image provided by ArmAs noted before, Intel controls the high-performance device market, while Arm reigns supreme in the low-power device sector that includes smartphones and tablets. In the past, Intel had attempted to make inroads in the smartphone processor market, but was largely unsuccessful.

Arm too has taken shots at penetrating Intel’s market by designing processors for laptops and computers, focusing on the low-power models and single-board systems. The Apple M1 chips which Arm collaborated on, showed that ARM processors can live up to the high standards of x86 chips.

As for the architecture, although both are aimed at providing devices more speed and power, Arm and Intel’s processors don’t share the same design. The ARM architecture is based on Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) ISA which delivers simpler tasks at higher efficiency, while Intel’s use Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) that is made for handling complex tasks.

Supermicro’s Latest AnnouncementIn December last year, Supermicro, one of the biggest OEMs in the market, added a new series of ARM-based servers to its product line. Expanding on Supermicro’s MegaDC family, the Mt. Hamilton platform delivers high performance per watt and low latency responses.

A modular platform designed to meet a wide range of workload objectives, Mt. Hamilton addresses use cases spanning cloud-native applications, traditional workloads and AI. Mt. Hamilton uses Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max processors from Ampere Computing, and has a single motherboard design.

Arm Neoverse – From Cloud to EdgeArm’s growing participation in the automotive sector does not mean that it’s resting its laurels in other areas. In fact, around the same time that Arm started to involve in the auto market, it announced its Neoverse line of infrastructure CPU designs. It was Arm’s way of taking on the infrastructure market with renewed energy, after a period of stalemate, this time targeting the server and edge segments.

Arm has three lines of Neoverse core designs, namely E, N and V, optimized for edge, cloud and 5G networks. The classes E, N and V target efficiency, flexibility and max performance, respectively.

In September 2022, Arm launched the second generations of V and E cores, having already released the second iteration of N core design in 2021. In its second generation, the V2 platform transitioned from the older Amrv8.4 ISA to the new and more feature-rich Armv9 architecture getting significant security enhancements.

To check out Arm’s updated product line, head over to their website. For more stories like this, keep reading here at Gestaltit.com.

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When Intel unveiled the Gen 4 Xeon Scalable processors (covered in this latest piece, and in the Rundown) earlier this month, some of Intel’s most recognized partners threw their weight behind it. And just days later, so many of them rolled out their respective lines of Gen 4 Xeon powered server systems.

Host Stephen Foskett noted in today’s Rundown, “Now that the Sapphire Rapids products have been officially announced, we’re seeing a lot more people talking about what the processor can do. It’s important to recognize that Sapphire Rapids has actually been out there for about a year. I’m hearing that some of the hyperscalers are already rolling it out in volume for customers. There certainly have been a lot of appearances of Sapphire Rapids servers at events like OCP and SC22, and so we’re finally getting a look at where the rubber meets the road, which is servers and storage devices that are using Sapphire Rapids in production.”

As a quick refresher, here’s what the new generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors bring to the table – the highest number of built-in accelerators of any processor, support for PCIe Gen 5, DDR5 memory and introduction of CXL 1.1.

One major point of difference is improved multi-socket scaling. Its 4 and new 8 socket configs are still unsupported by AMD processors.

Supermicro X13The same week that Intel rolled out the new generation of Xeon Scalable processors, Supermicro launched its X13 generation of servers. Supermicro’s launch claimed the top spot in the long line of server launches witnessed this week. Where other companies rolled out a handful of new models, Supermicro stood out with its release of a full stack comprising 15 new server families.

Powered with the new Intel Xeon Scalable processors, the X13 range offers multiple flavors ranging from 8-socket systems to high-density servers, accelerated servers with GPU to company flagship models. Optimized for a wide variety of workloads, the servers can handle anything from cutting-edge AI and Deep Learning tasks, Metaverse and 3D simulation, to cloud, media and enterprise applications. More on this in today’s Rundown.

HPE ProLiant Gen11HPE joined the chorus with the launch of the new ProLiant Gen11 servers for Intel. The servers include four models, namely, ProLiant DL320 Gen 11, ProLiant DL360 Gen 11, ProLiant DL380 Gen 11 and ProLiant ML350 Gen 11. Designed to take on a broad range of workloads from private and hybrid cloud to VDI, the models use Sapphire Rapids at the core.

HPE also released a set of ProLiant Gen11 servers for AMD late last year. This lineup utilizes the newest AMD EPYC Genoa processors.

Dell PowerEdge ServersAt SC22 last year, Dell previewed some of the new PowerEdge servers. This week, just days after the launch of the Intel Sapphire Rapids, Dell introduced 13 PowerEdge servers with the new Intel Xeon processors.

This is a big upgrade for Dell. Up until Sapphire Rapids, Dell was using Skylake Xeon SP processors from back in 2017. Having missed the 3rd Gen, Cooperlake, that was launched in 2020, the Sapphire Rapids platform will bring extra compute power and efficiency gains for Dell’s customers.

For this generation, Dell also embraced the Nvidia DGX H100 platform bringing to the customer’s its own flavor of DGX H100 systems.

Cisco UCS C-Series and X-Series Gen7Timed with the release of Intel’s release last week, Cisco unveiled the Cisco UCS C-Series and X-Series 7th Gen servers. Powered by the new Intel Sapphire Rapids processors, both the series of servers address the key demands of compute and storage for modern workloads like AI/ML and data analytics.

NVIDIA DGX H100Piggybacking on Intel’s launch of Sapphire Rapids, NVIDIA and its partners debuted the new generation of NVIDIA DGX H100 systems, expanding on its accelerated computing systems lineup, NVIDIA Hopper. The computing systems are turbocharged with NVIDIA’s proprietary H100 Tensor Core GPUs and the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

Powered by energy-efficient AI, the systems have proven to deliver 25 times greater efficiency and big cost savings compared to standard datacenter servers. NVIDIA is calling it “the greenest generation” thus far. The new systems will provide impressive gen-over-gen performance and efficiency increases, delivering more computation per watt.

In 2023, we will likely hear some announcements on more flexible and interesting servers using CXL memory. CXL 2.0 and 3.0 should come in the next generation of AMD and Intel processors and servers.

To explore more, follow the embedded links. Be sure to check out this week’s Rundown where hosts Stephen Foskett and Jon Myer cover the releases in detail. And for more stories like this, keep reading here at Gestaltit.com.

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When companies think of affordable cloud storage, they think of Backblaze. For years, organizations have fawned over Backblaze’s clear and considerate pricing. But it’s time to celebrate Backblaze for something else also.

Over the past few years, the cloud economy has shaped up before our eyes. Hyperscalers have emerged and taken control of the market, and what may very well be the age of cloud colonialism has begun. As consumers stand by, waiting for the macroeconomic ill wind to blow over, the fight for greater market share rages on.

In a very real sense, these companies cultivate and control the cloud culture, shaping the future of the industry. We are quick to put a premium on their robust infrastructures and services. But we are often slow to admit how, in the battle of these titans, interests of customers with shallow pockets or those pulling back on CAPEX expenses are grossly overlooked.

These underserved classes of customers require an easy and affordable path to cloud. For them, hyperscalers have little to offer.

As cloud giants rake up business, a few cloud providers are unselfishly dedicated to making cloud costs predictable to those who need it to be. But most importantly, these companies are making organizations’ journey to the cloud easy, and uncomplicated.

Backblaze is one such company that has been working through the years to deliver cloud storage for low cost, in a simple format consumable to these outfits. We had the opportunity to catch up with Pat Patterson, Chief Tech Evangelist, at Backblaze, to talk about the past, present and future of the company.

A New IdentityGestalt IT’s Stephen Foskett kicked off the conversation by asking whether Backblaze still identifies as a data protection company.

Patterson revealed that Backblaze, in recent years, has moved on from data protection to pursue the avenue of S3-compatible storage. Patterson explained that the B2 Cloud Storage which is their on-demand cloud storage solution services three distinct market segments – archive and backup, media and entertainment, and the third and most interesting, application storage.

“That (application storage) is where companies are actually interacting with our APIs rather than just plugging the key and secret into a third-party tool. They’re building apps against our S3-compatible API and that’s the area 9 out of 20 of our biggest customers are,” informed Patterson.

Backblaze offers two suites of APIs – S3 compatible for a wider support, and B2 Native for functionalities not covered by the former.

The Open-Bucket FiascoOpen S3 buckets are one of the potential sources of data breach. This problem has preyed on some of the industry’s biggest players. For some of its customers, Backblaze is responsible for full data lifecycle from the point of upload to deletion. On being asked if stories of vulnerabilities and security incidents cause worry for Backblaze, Patterson replied that Backblaze has a whole different approach to avert the problem.

“We are S3 compatible – we are not a clone of S3. And one of the ways in which we’re different is managing visibility of data. It is much simpler in Backblaze.”

Big vendors like AWS offer differential visibility which besides ensuring flexibility, tends to make things complicated at the customers’ end. In Backblaze, things are pretty simple and painless. Backblaze offers equal visibility for all objects in the bucket. There are two settings – private and public-read, and that works for a majority of the applications.

Something Old2021 marked a bend in the road for Backblaze when the beloved Backblaze Storage Pods came to an end. Backblaze started building storage pods back in 2009, when it was the only vendor to assemble them in-house. After its 10th anniversary, word got out that Backblaze was planning to build the next generation of pods, Storage Pod 7.0.

But things took a turn and in 2021, Backblaze decided to altogether terminate the production of Storage Pods. The reason they cited was pretty apparent – the emergence of high-density storage servers in the market and their cost-competitiveness rendered the once popular Storage Pods dated and unpractical.

Something NewStorage Pods coming to an end was a sad day for Backblaze, but in the bigger scheme of things, it was a minor wrinkle in the plan. Backblaze has since staged a remarkable rebound and is moving full speed ahead to a future in cloud.

When it comes to lowering costs, Backblaze talks the talk and walks the walk. It’s budget-friendly cloud storage solution is already proof of that. But, more recently, Backblaze added another service to the catalogue- the Universal Data Migration which takes that initiative to the next level. The cloud-to-cloud migration service allows users to move volumes of data to B2 Cloud Storage without paying high egress fees. At no cost to the users, they can lift and shift large datasets to Backblaze B2 using integration partners like Flexify.IO.

Backblack Universal Data Migration Service Like everything else with Backblaze, this too is a cut-and-dried drill. Users can avoid the whole fuss of manually offloading and repopulating data from their current storage to Backblaze. Flexify.IO simplifies the transition.

Flexify.IO is a migration interconnect that helps organizations jump from one cloud provider to another easily and flexibly. Using inter-cloud bandwidth, Flexify.IO copies data from the current storage to Backblaze B2 at cloud-native speed. This allows faster and more secure migration of data. On Backblaze B2, users can enjoy a reliable and on-demand cloud storage at a fraction of the cost of competition.

In ConclusionClearly, there is more to Backblaze than meets the eye at once. As the bigger players fight over the bigger slice of pie, Backblaze is trying to bring cloud storage within the reach of customers for whom the big providers do not bring particularly fitting choices. Its continued effort has made it a shorthand for low-cost and simplified object storage, bringing to customers unlimited S3 compatible storage for less. While the Internet continues to enjoy the fun, educational resources Backblaze puts out for the community, we look forward to them expanding on their inventory of user-friendly cloud storage solutions that accelerate the cloud journey for one and all.

To explore their list of offerings, head over to Backblaze’s website. For more stories like this, keep reading here at Gestaltit.com.

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Yesterday, Intel unveiled the highly-anticipated, fire-breathing 4th generation Xeon Scalable processors – Intel Xeon CPU and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series. Intel promises colossal performance and efficiency gains with the new line of processors, calling them drivers for workload acceleration.

The launch event which was streamed live on Intel’s website, was star-studded with high-ranking executives from Intel including CEO, Pat Gelsinger himself, and Sandra L. Rivera and Lisa Spelman.

Gelsinger, kicked off the event with a keynote speech that nicely summed up the products.

“The 4th Gen and the Max family deliver extraordinary performance gains, efficiency, security, and breakthrough new capacities in AI, cloud and networking, delivering the world’s most powerful supercomputers that have ever been built.”

On Jan. 10, 2023, Intel introduced 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, delivering the most built-in accelerators of any central processing unit in the world. (Credit: Intel Corporation)The 4th Gen Xeon processors are built with the current computing challenges top of the mind. Sandra Rivera, executive VP and GM of Intel’s Data Center and AI Group set the stage for the release. Referring to the Xeon family of processors, she said, “For three generations of Intel scalable processors, we’ve architected our datacenter solutions with your business needs in mind. Our unique approach is focused on providing real-world purpose-built workload acceleration that delivers superior system performance at greater efficiencies.”

Intel targets industries widely from edge to cloud, datacenters to 5G networking, with the Xeon line of processors. More than 100 million Xeon Scalable processors are deployed in the market today.

But Intel does not view “purpose-built workload acceleration” as something achievable with just stuffing more cores in. For Intel, true workload acceleration takes “a true system level approach” in which “highly optimized software is tuned to the differentiated features in the hardware in order to accelerate the most critical business workloads including AI, networking, HPC and security.” The 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors realize this with an architecture optimized with max compute density and high-bandwidth memory to power some of the world’s most cutting-edge workloads.

A Paradigm ShiftRivera noted that the 4th generation processors set in motion “a paradigm shift” as with them, organizations will be able to overcome decades of computing challenges, especially in high-performance computing industries.

Intel is working with the industry’s leading OEMs and ODMs on this. The 4th Gen Xeon processors are already activated by a lot of Intel’s peers in the industry including, AWS, IBM, Oracle, Google Cloud, Cisco and Fujitsu, all of whom have experienced breakthrough results.

The Intel Data Center GPU Max Series is code-named Ponte Vecchio, and the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and the Intel Xeon CPU Max Series go by the highly familiar names of Sapphire Rapids and Sapphire Rapids HBM.

Power Savings and Efficiency GainsThe Gen 4 Xeon processors have the most built-in accelerators seen in any datacenter processor in the market. When tested with general workloads, the processors showed an average of 2.9 times increase in performance-per-watt efficiency, which Intel claims are real world numbers.

Intel promises lower total costs of ownership and operations in datacenters with the new processors. Built with differentiated features which allow optimal utilization of resources and greater power efficiency, the 4th Gen Xeon processors deliver improvements of up to 66%.

SustainabilityIntel has made massive strides in sustainability with the latest generation of processors. According to a press release published in Intel’s News section of the website, the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors are Intel’s most sustainable processors for datacenter till date. The processors unlock massive power and performance thresholds by optimal utilization of CPU resources for maximum sustainability.

AI and Deep LearningIntel continues to democratize AI with its hardware, and the latest series of Xeon processors pushes AI deeper into datacenters. Gen-over-gen, the latest Xeon Scalable processors offer 10 times higher performance for PyTorch real-time inference and training. Intel QuickAssist Technology enables data encryption with 47% fewer cores maintaining the same level of performance.

Lisa Spelman, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Intel Xeon products who has so far been part of 8 Xeon processor launches informed that Intel’s journey of built-in AI acceleration in Xeon started in 2017. Intel has since added to the hardware acceleration working closely with the software ecosystem making sure that the out-of-box performance is better with each generation.

Intel introduced the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series for high performance computing and artificial intelligence. The Data Center GPU Max Series is a high-density processor, packing over 100 billion transistors into a 47-tile package with up to 128 gigabytes of high bandwidth memory. (Credit: Intel Corporation)“With this improved performance, you can deliver deep learning, and training DL and inference workloads like natural language processing (NLP), recommendation systems, image recognition.”

“For the first time Intel is integrating high-bandwidth memory into the Xeon processor and delivering Xeon Max.” Xeon Max is Intel’s first x86 based processor to have integrated bandwidth memory. Intel’s goal was to tackle the memory bandwidth inadequacy that often starves high performance computing workloads like life sciences and genomics, high energy physics and such.

Xeon Max overcomes the problem of wasted resources like compute cycles, energy and cost with increased memory bandwidth. Compared to other systems, the product brings 3.7 times performance improvement, and consumes 68% less energy.

SecurityRivera noted, “Intel is the only silicon provider to offer Application-level Isolation with Intel Software Guard Extensions which provide the smallest attack surface for confidential computing, whether that’s in private, public or edge computing cloud environments.”

The 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors further empower confidential computing with a new Virtual Machine Isolation technology, the Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX). Already in use in Microsoft Azure that will debut TDX later this year ahead of its general availability, the technology helps cloud providers lift and shift applications to a secure confidential computing environment in the cloud without making laborious code changes.

4th Gen Xeon offers communication service providers twice the performance per Watt which is critical to fulfilling high quality of service, scaling and energy requirements for vRAN workloads. Compared to the previous generation, the new generation will also offer 30% better performance for their 5G workloads. “This improvement is delivered through new instructions but also through our next generation platform which delivers improved memory and PCIe bandwidth, and it’s all delivered in the same power envelope as the prior generation.”

Watch Intel present Intel Habana Labs AI accelerators for Deep Learning at the recent AI Field Day event in Silicon Valley.

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Gartner defines multi-cloud as “the deliberate use of cloud services from multiple cloud providers for the same general class of IT solutions or workloads”. But in practice, multi-cloud is more complicated than that. Imagine using a multi-cloud strategy for all your data. You portion out volumes of data to various public clouds to avail the best-of-breed service. This would solve a lot of the data inflation problem that we are grappling with, but not without presenting its own exclusive set of challenges.

Recently, Gestalt IT had the opportunity of having a briefing from Faction, Inc. We met with Matthew Wallace, CTO at Faction to talk about the problems faced by enterprises in multi-cloud, and how Faction seeks to solve them.

The Less-Than-Elegant Realities of Multi-CloudEnterprises sitting on a glut of data sees multi-cloud as the way to make it work. One can argue that scattering data and applications across cloud platforms has many merits, not the least of which are freedom from notorious vendor lock-ins and access to best-in-class services, but there’re bigger problems tied to it that need to be dealt with too.

One of chief ones that Wallace drew attention to was data gravity. Data gravity is a problem that challenges the idée fixe that multi-cloud is the easy answer to data proliferation in enterprises.

The literal meaning of the phrase “data gravity” goes something like this – bigger bodies of data exert a pull toward smaller applications and datasets much like gravity. Because of this, the smaller bodies end up closer to the large volumes of data. This gravity is often likened to the force that keeps planetary bodies of smaller mass orbiting around those of bigger masses.

In a network, this may seem like a good thing because the closer the apps are to data, the lower the latency. But as these smaller datasets grow in size, processing them becomes precarious.

Aside from data gravity, woes of data migration and compliance headaches in multi-cloud are equally debilitating to business outcomes. But there is another thing that is causing big worries for enterprises going multi-cloud. Industry-wide, CIOs have vented their discomfort and frustration over growing cloud costs engendered by data gravity. Enterprises are starting to recognize that stitching together applications or pouring out data into multiple cloud comes as at steep cost. The ensuing rise in storage needs is ratcheting up their cloud bills.

Uncoupling Multi-Cloud from Its Headaches“Multicloud is not multiple clouds,” pointed out Wallace. There is a clear distinction between the two and that makes all the difference. Where using multiple clouds involves making multiple copies of the same data to keep it accessible via all clouds in question, multi-cloud involves using only a single copy of the data across cloud platforms, no duplicates, no migration.

Image Provided by Faction, Inc.Faction believes that going multi-cloud need not be fraught with these many challenges. Faction Cloud Control Volumes offers a way around them. It’s a cloud-adjacent storage platform that stores data centrally so that enterprises can extract value out of their data in an affordable and intelligent manner.

“Our method is to present the same copy of data from the same back-end storage systems into all the clouds at the same time, over the network. The focus we have is to make that network fabric super high-speed and low latency to make it feel like it’s in every cloud natively,” informed Wallace.

Faction Cloud Control VolumesCloud Control Volumes is set up on a high- performing proprietary network called Faction Internetwork eXchange or FIX via which it connects to public clouds like AWS, Azure and Oracle Cloud.

CCV offers users the ability to pick a cloud from get go via the Faction Portal. They can choose the required throughput, attach it to the chosen cloud service, and get started. Administrators can flexibly share bandwidth between providers, and add and delete connections as required. “You can reallocate, and you don’t even have to know ahead of time,” said Wallace.

Image Provided by Faction, Inc.There’s no limit to the number of Virtual Private Clouds you can share that bandwidth across. While hyperscalers limit sharing bandwidth to only a handful of VPCs, Faction’s network architecture allows for a lot more flexibility in terms of scalability and sharing.

“We’re actually abstracting the clouds away,” Wallace pointed out. “But what if you want to use the unique things across every cloud?” This especially makes sense for data-intensive workloads in genomics and AI to “steal intelligence from that PaaS layer to actually use what’s unique across each cloud.”

Faction eliminates the inescapable complexity in multi-cloud while preserving the unique strengths of each provider. By reducing the number of copies of data down to one and centralizing it to be accessible via a high-throughput connectivity, it removes all silos and puts everything together on a single plane.

With Faction, you don’t need to pay egress fees when moving data out from one provider to the next. But that is not the only way it saves organizations money. When working with multiple cloud providers, users have the choice to spin up capacity in the platform that offers the best economics without the hassles of data migration.

There is also a second piece that CCV addresses. “Our product automatically takes care of data gravity, connectivity, synchronization and egress charges,” Wallace said. “But we’re also seeing a lot of growing use cases that’re sharing or collaborating across enterprises. A lot of these enterprises are multi-cloud either by choice or by circumstance. For them, being able to have teams share data across clouds becomes a challenge.”

Faction has a data-first approach with which it delivers multi-cloud capabilities on an unified plane. Faction creates a single centralized copy of data that sitting in its native storage can be accessed any time, via any cloud. This setup, devoid of any data siloes, makes it easy for any number of teams to collaborate.

There are three performance tiers of storage to choose from – Ultra High, General Purpose and Archive which are designed to ensure that performance is finely matched to the requirements of the workloads, and users have tight control over the cost.

Faction has a REST API that all portal functions run through. It automates network provisioning making it possible for organizations to seamlessly switch between providers. Other functions include network monitoring and ticket access.

In ConclusionThere are two sets of use cases that Faction’s Cloud Control Volumes best serves – one that requires lots of data sharing across cloud for data-intensive applications like ML, Financial Analytics, Life Sciences and Genomics and such, and the other that is looking to unlock breakthrough economics in multi-cloud. For both, it brings the best of public cloud. By preserving the specialties of every cloud in question, and rendering them on a common abstraction plane that levels the differences, it enables easy tracking and controlling of data from a single plane. The high bandwidth, low latency infrastructure that it operates on makes sure that application performance never suffers.

To learn more about Cloud Control Volumes, head over to Faction’s website. For more interesting stories like this, keep reading here at Gestaltit.com.

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The Python Web Conference is back. After 2022’s mega event, it’s returned in full blast. 2023 marks the 5th anniversary of PWC, and great things are expected to happen this year.

Five day long, the Python Web Conference 2023 will have over 50 live talks, and 400 guests from more than 40 countries will be in attendance.

It is 100% virtual. You can tune in live from your home, a coffee shop or wherever in the world you are, no need to get on a plane or drive to a venue. It will be hosted on LoudSwarm. So, just grab a chair and make yourself comfortable in front of a screen.

A Little on Python Web ConferencePWC began in 2019 as an initiative to bring developers together on a platform to hold discourses on current topics on tech. Over the years, the event garnered a lot of attention from developers, and the list of guests and sponsors grew considerably.

Hosted every year and attended by developers from mid to advanced level from the world over, PWC is believed to be the biggest web conference on Python. Where other events scaled back because of the pandemic-time constraints, the Python Web Conference only got bigger and better, garnering more participants and sponsors each year.

Tracks and TalksEach year, the conference focuses on a set of hot topics around which several sessions are offered. Industry experts from all over the world conduct these sessions which range from informational to educational.

This year, the topics chosen are some of tech’s most burning themes. The list begins with AI/ML and Big Data and goes on to include Cloud Native, Containers, CI/CD, Microservices, Security and Serverless.

Daily schedules include open interactive sessions where guests can get together and have group discussions on the topics. There are live talk sessions if you up for some tech wisdom from renowned industry pundits.

Fun After-Event ProgramsThe fun starts with end-of-day socials where guests gather and mingle, and try their hand at activities like origami. Imagine being in a room where there are only peers with like interests communicating their passions and sharing their stories.

These concluding events are just as fun and socially invigorating as the sessions are rich and educational. They’re a great way to meet new people, make connections, find opportunities and feel inspired.

Sponsors and PartnersLike each year, this year too, the sponsor list is swarming with familiar names from the tech world. Django, EuroPython Society, IndyAWS, Women & Hi Tech, Women Who Code to name a few. The event is covered by a wide panel of media partners among whom Gestalt IT is one.

Python Web Conference 2023 is brought to you by Six Feet Up. The event is set to kick off in March from 13th to 17th between 9am and 3pm ET. Tune in for a series of entertaining, immersive and hard-hitting sessions on some of the industry’s hottest themes.

For those who are interested, a full event schedule is available on the Python Web Conf website. If you are looking to buy tickets, get a 15% off on us. Use the code featured in the image above to redeem the discount. Gestalt IT is also giving away complimentary tickets for two lucky winners. To claim it today, follow us on Twitter.

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Google Cloud is one of the top three cloud providers in the industry. Although it was the last to enter the scene, it has caught up really quickly with the other two top contenders, AWS and Microsoft Azure. With AWS unshaken in the number 1 position, the race is tight between GC and Azure. For years GC has been aiming for the second position, and now its efforts may be paying off.

According to an estimate put together by Google staff, GC is closing in on Azure. Based on a leaked Microsoft document that was internally analyzed, and looking at the current market stats, Google employees have reason to believe that Google Cloud is much closer to being second in the leading position than analysts estimate.

A Brief HistoryAbout fifteen years back, Google entered the then emerging cloud market in baby steps, following AWS. It came up with a developer tool which later went on to become the Google Cloud Platform that we know today. In 2008, two years after AWS was launched, Google released App Engine, a serverless app development and hosting platform, in preview. The release was targeted at a limited set of audience. The first 10,000 people could test-ride it on a first-come, first-serve basis. Using a 500 MB storage capacity, 200M megacycles of CPU and 10 GB bandwidth per day, developers could run their applications on App Engine.

With App Engine, the goal was to provide a ready-to-use, no-maintenance, scalable platform for web applications. After three years, in 2011, App Engine was taken down from preview mode and released as a commercial product. Over the years, Google added scores of new services under the GCP banner making it a hyperscale cloud infrastructure.

What Customers Say They Love about the Google Cloud PlatformGoogle Cloud’s rise to the hyperscaler status is backed by some very positive reviews from the customers. The Google Cloud Platform is trusted by some of the industry’s biggest entities. Its overwhelming domination in domestic and overseas markets owes to not one but a series of factors.

Google has a golden reputation. Its network infrastructure is gargantuan, spanning some 35 regions, 106 availability zones and 176 edge locations. Among its customers, GCP has the reputation of being easy to use and reliable. GC runs on the same infrastructure that powers some of Google’s most widely used products like Google Search and YouTube. A global network that is continually expanding, it offers high-bandwidth connectivity, low latency, built-in redundancy and layered security. Customers can granularly design their storage on GCP, enjoy a quick and easy set up, and fuss-free management from a single console.

A big factor contributing to Google Cloud’s control over large stakes in the cloud markets is its open ecosystem. Instead of getting customers locked in with one vendor, Google Cloud lets its customers choose their solutions from other vendors as well. Google has the history being a front runner in open source, and now it leads the way in open cloud ecosystems and interoperability. Open cloud gives customers greater autonomy and control over the infrastructure and their assets by letting them deploy GC services in edge locations, on premises and in other public clouds.

Another big reason is security. Google maintains high standards of security which hyperscalers are known to do, thus helping organizations stay compliant and secure on its infrastructure. All security solutions engineered at Google are available to customers on Google Cloud Platform. GCP provides a zero-trust environment and a rich set of compliance and security controls for workloads. GCP’s suite of security tools and processes is focused on detection of potential threats and prevention of breaches. Google’s involvement with military projects requiring top Impact Level support in the past and more recently, puts a seal on its claimed security standards.

Support available on the Google Cloud Platform is wide-ranging and one of the most loved features. Under the Customer Care umbrella, there are basic and paid support services. The basic service that involves support for billing and payments is free and included within the subscription, and available in multiple regions and languages. Paid packages come in three flavors – Standard, Enhanced and Premium, and include unlimited technical support, quick response times and customer-centric services.

Customer-Centric PrivacyGoogle has a distinct perspective when it comes to security and privacy. Among many of the things it focuses on, privacy-centric customer interaction is a chief one. This mindset echoes through all its security and privacy policies that fundamentally prioritize protection and privacy of customers’ data.

This is because Google caters to industries like hospitality where Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is rife, and therefore requires additional security. Google’s security policies and advisories for these customers are specifically designed to elevate awareness of cyber threats. Through encryption, Google secures PII at rest, in transit and while processing. Google Cloud is also dedicated to building out GDPR compliant customer data platforms that also conform to other data protection laws to ensure that its customers are able to offer their clients a personalized, customer-first experience.

A DoD ContractThis past December, Google landed a lucrative multi-billion dollar cloud-computing contract with Pentagon. The contract awarded jointly to Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle may amount to a colossal figure of $9 billion.

The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract was designed by the Department of Defense in 2021 as an effort to rely on multiple cloud vendors to leverage the best of cloud capabilities for tactical and national security missions.

But working with DoD is not a first for Google. The tech giant has formerly been associated with one of Pentagon’s military projects, but this time, its a cloud computing project involving an indefinite delivery of service for the length of the contract.

Growth in Recent YearsThe Google Cloud unit has grown rapidly driving growth for the mothership. We’ve seen that play out especially over the past five years. Since 2019, Google Cloud’s headcount has doubled, and recorded year-over-year revenue showed a growth of 47% when GC reported its operating profit in 2021.

However, Google, like the other two cloud giants, does not report revenue income from its Google Cloud Platform in dollar figures, which makes it hard to ascertain how it is doing compared to its rivals.

As for the tally Google’s employees came up with, analysts are pretty divided on it. Some have dismissed it, while others are still inspecting with a closer eye. But the fact remains that Google Cloud stands shoulder to shoulder in what is considered one of the most high-stakes battles in the tech industry. Well-capitalized and with its size of infrastructure, Google has never had problem attracting customers or snagging the most profitable deals, and that record holds with its cloud business. Seeing the business it has amassed and the sizable YOY sales growth, the theory that Google Cloud may be catching up in time with the other two top-tier providers is not debatable.

If you are looking for more, head over to the Tech Field Day website where you will find lots of interesting technical presentations by Google Cloud from the recent Cloud Field Day event.

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Cloud Field Day15 is returning to Silicon Valley September 21-23. It is our opportunity to look at the next generation of IT, from the enterprise to the public cloud and everything in the stack.

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This exclusive Cloud Field Day event with NetApp serves as a deep dive into the reality of the multicloud today with a special focus on NetApp's multicloud file services.

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We‘d like to introduce our newest delegates to the Tech Field Day community: Eric Stewart! Eric is a Network Engineer and team lead at the University of South Florida.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha talked with StorPool CEO and Co-founder Boyan Ivanov and Chief of Product and Co-founder Boyan Krosnov, and Product Lead Alex Ivanov about StorPool Storage v20's new enhancements.

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We‘d like to introduce one of our newest delegates to the Tech Field Day community: Charles Uneze! Charles is technical writer and university student.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha sits with Verge.io CEO Yan Ness and SVP of Sales Chris Lehman to talk about how Verge-OS aims to simplify IT.

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In this episode of Checksum, Stephen dives into what is really happening with Intel's Optane technology and what the next step is.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha sits down with Shaun O'Meara and Mike Ward of Mirantis to talk about how Lens Pro helps navigate Kubernetes easily.

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We‘d like to welcome our newest delegate to the Tech Field Day community: Jay Stewart! Jay is a Network Engineer at Energy Sciences Network. He will be attending Networking Field Day: Service Provider 2 as a delegate and took a few minutes to tell us a little about himself.

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In this exclusive article, Sulagna Saha discusses how important it is to empower the women in the field of technology and enterprise IT.

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