Data Center Post

Why Businesses Need Data Center Services

2012-05-24T05:04:00.000-07:00

- Pooja Chopra, spokesperson for Spectranet (www.spectranet.in), says:

It has been reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that the majority of SMEs never recover from catastrophic data loss.

In a recent research International Data Center reported that 58 percent of the companies are doing just a local back-up.

Local backups are good and beneficial considering the first step of protection they provide. These are very effective against initial errors such as manual intervention with data, software or hardware failures but these fail when it comes to protection against theft, disaster or multiple software/hardware failure due to voltage.

Seeing the day-to-day growing dependence, it may not be exaggerating that businesses thrive on data and Internet. Yet, it is surprising to see that how businesses are taking risks without thinking much to invest in a data protection plan. Enterprises need to understand that unlike physical assets such as buildings and equipments which can be resurrected quickly through insurance, data loss is practically incurable. It is the most determining factor for the existence of a business. Hence, the need of the hour is to think about enterprise data security plan.

Data security plan, in order to be completely fortified, should meet the three ‘C’s of safe and reliable data center:

Comprehensive: The data plan for enterprises should be universal and unique to fight the threats and challenges ahead. One data plan should be able to work against all the odds such as manual errors, application failures, natural and man-made disasters such as fire, theft, floods etc.

Convenience: It should be plug-n-play for your business and IT department. The maintenance of the servers and security of data should be the worry of data center services providers and not yours. Without changing much into your existing IT architecture, they should be able to provide you the necessary or expanded bandwidth whenever necessary without nudging you for constant care.

Costs: This is the most crucial part. The data center services should fit into your budget. Your vendor should not be increasing the amount of the package or bandwidth costs on monthly basis. The SLA and contract should be with a focus on your business and computing needs.

So, to overcome the challenge of data protection, data center backups are the best method to retain your data and ensure its well being. The data center services providers are offering increasing bandwidth and ubiquity at any location. The data center is remotely monitored. Human involvement is limited to IT engineers and expert maintenance team. The geographical location of data centers also minimizes the risk of earthquake, floods and other natural calamities. They are often situated at low risk zones.

Most of companies and enterprises are opting for the data center solutions after imbibing the role of data in the growth of their ventures. India clearly emerges as the winner seeing the advancements in technology and cost effective trends in data center realms. Providers like Spectranet offer tier- 3 infrastructure set up to equip the companies against any data threat. In the times of disasters, data center India provides quick recovery progress and help business continuity by retrieving the data in the shortest turnaround time.

Solutions That Improve Your Network And Are Energy Efficient—It’s Not A Dream

2012-05-23T05:24:00.000-07:00

- Mark Alrutz, director of technical sales, services and training for CommScope (www.commscope.com), says:

Expanding service offerings are important for MSOs because they must evolve their networks to keep up with the competition. While they do that, they are also investigating ways to reduce power and fossil fuel consumption, greenhouse emissions and operating costs. Not only do they need the right solutions to maximize and improve their network’s technology, but also reduce their energy costs and improve network efficiency.

MSOs now have several options to reduce their energy cost, and they can accomplish that partnering with CommScope to implement the right solution for their specific needs. We’ve demonstrated how our energy conservation and alternative energy solutions can help operators:

§ provide reliable backup power using “green” technology

§ improve reliability and reduce energy consumption by reducing active electronics in the network

§ reduce energy consumption in the headend and hut locations

§ lower overall operating expenditures

By deploying a hydrogen fuel cell power solution, operators can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption at hub sites. Unlike diesel generators that emit greenhouse gases, the only by-products of hydrogen fuel cells are heat and water. The Society of Cable Telecommunication Engineers installed a hydrogen fuel cell at its corporate headquarters in Pennsylvania in June 2011. It was called into service when the building lost power during Hurricane Irene last summer, keeping its network online and functioning until power was restored.

Installations of free-air cooling solutions in the wireless industry have shown a reduction of approximately 25 percent (estimated $2,000 annually per site in energy savings) in overall power consumption in a variety of climates. By deploying a proper free-air cooling system for a shelter, operators can choose fan configurations and define filter specifications that meet their desired standard for air quality.

By adopting the OneBase InSite® Connect solution, operators now have the visibility and flexibility to more effectively control a number of operational parameters. This simple change to a company’s day-to-day operations can also save money on truck rolls and fuel costs, reduce carbon dioxide emissions and improve security at unmanned locations.

Not only is an all-digital, carrier grade wideband edge QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) vital to supporting additional advanced and next-generation services over HFC networks, but thisinnovative technology is also designed to lower power consumption in headend/hub environments through consolidation of equipment (requires less power for equipment and for HVAC). By deploying the award-winning Universal Wideband Edge QAM solution, this technology’s increased density provides cable operators with the ability to reduce capital and operating expenses by significantly lowering the price per QAM. With a low 0.5 watt per QAM power consumption, operators can now benefit from a dramatic reduction in power and cooling costs.

BrightPath® Optical Solutions (BOS™) provides operators with the ability to FTTx solution that meets their needs of today while providing a migration path to the technology of tomorrow. It also helps reduce power consumption in the outside plant by eliminating or reducing active components. BOS customers can cost effectively continue to deliver competitive high bandwidth services and fully leverage all of their existing infrastructures, while saving approximately $1,000 per mile, per year, on energy costs using an RFoG network.

By deploying an Intelligent Addressable Tap Solution, operators have the ability to remotely control taps from the system office, headend or technical center. The ability to remotely control individual tap ports yields maximum benefits to operators in vacation areas, campus environments, MDUs and other high churn areas. This flexibility allows operators to reduce truck rolls, thus reducing fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Are you ready to deploy energy conservation and management solutions?

Quantifying Reputation Loss From a Breach

2012-05-22T04:57:00.002-07:00

- Lori MacVittie, senior technical marketing manager at F5 Networks (www.f5.com), says:

It’s really easy to quantify some of the costs associated with a security breach. Number of customers impacted times the cost of a first class stamp plus the cost of a sheet of paper plus the cost of ink divided by … you get the picture. Some of the costs are easier than others to calculate. Some of them are not, and others appear downright impossible.

One of the “costs” often cited but rarely quantified is the cost to an organization’s reputation. How does one calculate that?

Well, if folks sat down with the business people more often (the ones that live on the other side of the Meyer-Briggs Mountain) we’d find it’s not really as difficult to calculate as one might think. While IT folks analyze flows and packet traces, business folks analyze market trends and impacts – such as those arising from poor customer service.

And if a breach of security isn’t interpreted by the general populace as “poor customer service” then I’m not sure what is. While traditionally customer service is how one treats the customer, increasingly that’s expanding to include how one treats the customer’s data. And that means security.

This question “how much does it really cost” is one Jeremiah Grossman asks fairly directly in a recent blog, “Indirect Hard Losses”:

As stated by InformationWeek regarding a Ponemon Institute study on the Cost of a Data Breach, “Customers, it seems, lose faith in organizations that can't keep data safe and take their business elsewhere.” The next logical question is how much?

Jeremiah goes on to focus on revenue lost from web transactions after a breach and that’s certainly part of the calculation, but what about those losses that might have been but now will never be? How can we measure not only the loss of revenue (meaning a decrease in first-order customers) but the potential loss of revenue? That’s harder, but just as important as it more accurately represents the “reputation loss” often mentioned in passing but never assigned a concrete value (at least not publicly, some industries discretely share such data with trusted members of the same industry, but seeing these numbers in the wild? Good luck!)

HERE COMES the ALMOST SCIENCE

20% of the businesses that lost data lost customers as a direct result. The impacts were most severe for companies with more than 100 employees. Almost half of them lost sales.

Rubicon Survey

One of the first things we have to calculate is influence, as that directly impacts reputation. It is the ability of even a single customer to influence a given number of others (negatively or positively) that makes up reputation. It’s word of mouth, what people say about you, after all.

If we turn to studies that focus more on marketing and sales and businessy things, we can find a lot of this data. It’s a well-studied area.

One study ¹indicates that the reach of a single dissatisfied customer will tell approximately 8-16 people. Each of those people has a circle of influence of about 250, with 25 of those being within an organization's primary target audience. Of all those told 2% (1 in 50) will defect or avoid an organization upon hearing of the victim's dissatisfaction.

So for every angry customer, the reputation impact is a loss of anywhere from 40-80 customers, existing and future. So much for thinking 100 records stolen in a breach is small potatoes, eh? Thousands of existing and potential customers loss is nothing to sneeze at.

Now, here’s where it gets a little harder, because you’re going to have to talk to the businessy folks to get some values to attach to those losses. See, there’s two numbers you need yet: customer lifetime value (CLV) and the cost to replace a customer (which is higher than the cost of acquire a customer, but don’t ask me why, I’m not a businessy folk).

Customer values are highly dependent upon industry. For example, based on 2010 FDIC data, the industry average annual customer value for a banking customer is $209². Facebook’s annual revenue per user (ARPU) is estimated at $2.00³. Estimates claim Google makes $9.85 annually off each Android user⁴. And Zynga’s ARPU is estimated at $3.96 (based on a reported $0.33 monthly per user revenue)⁵. This is why you actually have to talk to the businessy guys, they know what these values are and you’ll need them to plug in to the influence calculation to come up with a at-least-it’s-closer-than-guessing value. You also need to ask what the average customer lifetime is, so you can calculate the loss from dissatisfied and defecting customers.

Then you just need to start plugging in the numbers. Remember, too, that it’s a model; an estimate. It’s not a perfect valuation system, but it should give you some kind of idea of what the reputational impact from a breach would be, which is more than most folks have today.

Even if you can’t obtain the cost to replace value, try the model without it. Try a small breach, just for fun, say of 100 records. Let’s use $4.00 as an annual customer value and a lifetime of ten years as an example.

Affected Customer Loss: 100 * ($4 *10) = $4000

Influenced Customer Loss: 100 * (40) = 4000 * 40 = $160,000

Total Reputation Cost: $164,000

Adding in the cost to replace can only make this larger and serves very little purpose except to show that even what many consider a relatively small breach (in terms of records lost) can be costly.

WHY is THIS VALUABLE?

The reason this is valuable is two-fold. First, it serves as the basis for a very logical and highly motivating business case for security solutions designed to prevent breaches. The problem with much of security is it’s intangible and incalculable. It is harder to put monetary value to risk than it is to put monetary value on solutions. Thus, the ability to perform a cost-benefit analysis that is based in part on “reputation loss” is difficult for security professionals and IT in general. The business needs to be able to justify investments, and to do that they need hard-numbers that they can balance against.

It is the security professionals who so often are called upon to explain the “risk” of a breach and loss of data to the business. By providing them tangible data based on accepted business metrics and behavior offers them a more concrete view of the costs – in money – of a breach. That gives IT the leverage, the justification, for investing in solutions such as web application firewalls and vulnerability scanning services that are designed to detect and ultimately prevent such breaches from occurring.

It gives infosec some firm ground upon which stand and talk in terms the business understands: dollar signs.

The Data Center Network: to Fabric or not to Fabric?

2012-05-18T04:50:00.000-07:00

- Cliff Grossner, Ph.D. director of strategic marketing, Alcatel-Lucent (http://www.alcatel-lucent.com), says:

Many Choices, Lot of Risk

2012 has been labeled the year of the data center fabric. However, it’s still early in the standardization and deployment of data center fabrics, and enterprises are faced with a large number of choices that can spell the difference between failure and success. Hype aside, only early adopters have deployed real fabrics to date.

A properly architected data center fabric has the potential to bring the performance, scalability and elasticity to the data center required by today’s virtualized applications and when connecting to Cloud services. Choosing wisely when deploying a real data center fabric can unleash the, as yet, untapped potential from existing investments in server visualization platforms.

The marketplace is abundant with solutions offering vastly different and sometimes confusing alternatives. Choices in selecting a fabric include the technology used to virtualize the network enabling any to any server connectivity, technology for automating virtual machine (VM) mobility, technology for implementing virtual switching (vSwitch), and technology for convergence of storage traffic onto the IP network.

Help With Some Tough Questions

There are many competing technology options to be investigated for network virtualization, vSwitch and storage convergence. Many new standards are emerging to help. Some suggestions for consideration are as follows:

Network Virtualization with Shortest Path Bridging IEEE 802.1aq (SBP) a newly ratified standard that also has undergone a multi-vendor interoperability test in Q4 of 2011. SPB has distinct advantages of being scalable from the very small to the very large, being compatible with protocols already in use in the service provider Cloud and being able to provide the ability to easily shuffle resources within a single data center site or between data center sites to optimize resource utilization and ensure quality application delivery. In effect, using SPB enables creating a cloud-like elastic environment for the enterprise.

Virtual Switching delivered by the top of rack switch rather than on the server leveraging the Virtual Edge Port Aggregation IEEE 802.1Qbg (VEPA) standard, providing a single point of control, management and security significantly reducing management complexity. This approach is also hypervisor agnostic allowing freedom to choose which hypervisor to use or even more than one hypervisor in the same data center.

Storage Convergence enabled with Data Center Bridging IEEE 802.1Qbb, IEEE 802.1Qau and IEEE 802.1Qaz (DCB) standard. Providing DCB enables a choice for the customer concerning storage convergence as to which technology they use (iSCSI, FCoE, or FC) and a choice of “if and when” they wish to push forward with a single network for data and storage.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Award Winning Mesh: Provide Choice, Reduce Risk

Alcatel-Lucent’s strategy with its data center switching solution, or fabric, is to take a very practical approach. This means that the customer has the choice to set their strategy in the data center and not be locked in by technology choices, such as in choosing when and if to converge their IP and storage network. In addition, Alcatel-Lucent’s solution provides the scalability and associated linear cost model to allow a pay as you grow approach for the customer and also avoids the need for a high risk forklift approach.

Alcatel-Lucent’s vision for the data center is application fluency where the network infrastructure is capable of optimizing resources to ensure the best possible user experience and reduce complexity for the IT team. To improve end-user productivity, an application fluent network also features automatic controls for adjusting application delivery based upon profiles, policies and context. Application Fluent Networks also deliver streamlined operations through automated provisioning and low power consumption.

An application fluent data center network essentially transforms an enterprise data center into a multi-site private cloud: a single, seamless, highly elastic cloud-type environment. This gives the flexibility to reconfigure data center resources quickly and easily. Alcatel-Lucent’s data application fluent center network solution can be easily integrated with Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand carrier cloud solution, creating a hybrid cloud model where employees can access a wide array of data and applications anywhere and on any device.

The Alcatel-Lucent Mesh is based upon standardized technology as follows:

Network vitalization with SPB
Virtual switching with VEPA
Storage convergence with DCB

A Prudent Approach

Given the current state of the technology and the market when it comes to selecting and deploying a fabric in the data center, it is best to be risk adverse. Selecting to deploy a fabric that can scale from the small to the large, both in architecture and cost model, will allow your organization to become familiar with the technology and transform the data center in a controlled fashion. This can potentially be done by rolling out a fabric with the migration to 10GigE servers without requiring a forklift of existing infrastructure.

Network Hardening Using Gigabit Ethernet Wireless Solutions

2012-05-17T05:08:00.002-07:00

Joe Schraml, VP of marketing with BridgeWave Communications (www.bridgewave.com), says:

IT managers have a tremendous responsibility to ensure continuous network performance for today’s enterprise data centers. The consequences from network down time can have significant financial impact, impeding business processes and organizational productivity. Mission-critical applications such as medical informatics, financial transactions, network storage, and SaaS that support day-to-day business operations require a resilient, hardened network infrastructure. The only way to accomplish this is to create a diverse, redundant path to existing fiber connections, ensuring an always available network. But in today’s cost-conscious business environment, how can IT managers meet this critical network requirement without exhausting their budgets?

The preferred choice for a network contingency plan is fiber, an expensive but very reliable option costing up to and beyond $5,000/month to lease gigabit Ethernet service. Should the fiber be cut, resiliency is lost if the redundant fiber strands are located in the same riser or trench as the main fiber pairs, leading to the need for route diversity. Alternative methods for network connectivity include satellite, free space optics, and wireless broadband services using lower frequency microwave or high capacity millimeter wave systems. Free space optics and satellite serve their purpose, however, there are limitations including atmospheric disturbances, a greater chance of interference and security breach within the network path, and the limitations of these technologies to provide both the speed and capacity necessary to deliver the same carrier-grade performance expected in a data center environment.

Wireless broadband solutions, specifically millimeter wave (60 – 80 GHz) systems, have proven to be a suitable alternative to leasing fiber, providing the same carrier-grade network performance at a fraction of the cost. Advanced security options, including 256-bit AES data encryption, along with a very narrow antenna beam width –inherent in the higher frequencies–provide a ‘virtual pipe’ that offers the highest level of security in network transmission. In the event the existing fiber connection fails, the full-rate, full-duplex wireless gigabit Ethernet solution continues optimal network performance, transmitting bandwidth-intensive applications without network interruption. To the end user experience, there is no difference in speed and latency between a fiber connection and one established using gigabit Ethernet millimeter wave radios.

Packaged in a small form factor, the integrated all-outdoor unit is lightweight and easy to install, eliminating the need for both special equipment and radio engineering personnel. Deployment can be accomplished in a matter of days, opposed to the weeks and months dealing with permits and construction delays needed to implement fiber. Additionally, the high capacity wireless solutions eliminate the monthly recurring costs associated with leasing fiber services, allowing for ROI (return on investment) in a short period of time, typically measured in months.

When a contingency plan is needed to harden an existing data center network, there is no more resilient, reliable, and cost-effective alternative to fiber than 60-80 GHz gigabit Ethernet wireless solutions.

Big Data Needs Big Security

2012-05-16T08:38:00.001-07:00

- David Canellos, president and CEO of PerspecSys (www.perspecsys.com):

“Big data” is currently one of the hottest topics in IT, technology and business. At its core, big data encompasses the idea that massive amounts of business data, if harnessed effectively and efficiently, can be mined to deliver critical business insights that can transform a business. A new class of companies, such as Zynga, is fuelling this ‘data boom’ by making it easier than ever for enterprises to perform analytics on massive stores of data. The data can include interactions with customers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., as well as interactions from call centers and e-mail, and notes from traditional sales representatives. All vertical industries can potentially benefit from analytics on this type of data. (For example, McKinsey & Co. estimated that retail chains can use analytics to increase their margins by 60 percent.)

Big data’s potential should be of particular interest to organizations going through a cloud transition. Why? Because efforts to virtualize, centralize and standardize inevitably lead to data aggregation. And while the data can be harnessed to deliver tremendous business value, data aggregation comes with a security downside.

It goes without saying that centralized, extremely large volumes of data carry significant security risk, primarily because hackers love to focus on them. I cannot think of a more appealing target for a cybercriminal who wants to infiltrate your organization’s core information assets.

Are your Cloud Service Providers’ security standards up to the same level as your own? Enterprises have made tremendous investments over the past 10 years to ensure they have a hardened infrastructure and a set of policies to protect sensitive data stored and processed internally. Now they are scratching their heads thinking about how they can get that same security for their assets stored and transported via the cloud. Our advice? Look for ways that let you leverage the cloud, but keep your sensitive data close to home. Big Data in the Cloud – Sensitive Data at Home . . . that is a recipe for success.

Why is Data Center Cleaning Relevant for current Data Center Standards?

2012-05-15T05:09:00.001-07:00

Q&A with Jason Roth, owner of SET3 (Sterile Environment Technologies, Inc. – www.set3.com):

Why is Data Center Cleaning Relevant for current Data Center Standards?

Since there are static, particulate, network signals and heat sources in the Data Center that can cause disastrous catastrophic loss of uptime to companies, cause fires and Indoor Air Pollution - there are several standards that help keep these environments safe including: ASHRAE, Federal Stan 209e, ISO, NFPA, RFI, HFI and IEST Standards [each one of those link to their respective websites].

Most equipment manufacturers have included standards for microscopic particle limits as well. Many of the warranty returns and faulty products have been linked to contamination at microscopic levels in the data centers where the equipment was installed or housed. Risk of loss and reputation has forced server manufacturers to confirm compliance of air particle, surface particle and static standards before they will install or warranty equipment within a facility.

Chart I: Equipment Manufacturers Statements on Contamination

IBM INSTALLATION MANUAL Publication GC22-7072-1	"If your site is unusually dirty or has a chemical odor, you should be concerned. Dirt and corrosive gases can cause corrosion and possible equipment damage. The building floor should be sealed to prevent dusting of concrete."
AMDAHL PHYSICAL PLANNING MANUAL Publication MM-108334-010	"Environmental conditions for the room environment must be maintained within the acceptable limits to prevent adverse impact on performance and reliability. Electronic equipment is sensitive to air contaminants such as ferrous metal slivers, dirt fibers, and concrete particulate from unsealed concrete. Cement should be sealed to prevent the generation of particles."
UNISYS INSTALLATION MANUAL Publication MA5227	"The quantity of dust in the air must no exceed 0.39 gram/1000m 3[0.03grain/1000ft3] maximum. The specifications for dust pollutants as per United states Federal Standard 209b.The primary floor must be poured concrete that has been sealed to provide dust and humidity control."
MMEMOREX ENGINEERING SPECIFICATIONS Publication 9885-4920	"In order to assure reliability operation of the HDA and its filter system, the size and type of airborne particles must be controlled. The computer room should meet or exceed Federal Standard 209E.The subfloor area must be cleaned and sealed prior to equipment installation"

In a data center, what needs to be cleaned (Internal components, cases, equipment, floors, etc.)?

Although there are many benchmark levels and consistent building specs followed by most data centers – every datacenters has unique operations, equipment and personnel circumstances. Some centers have human operators in the room all the time everyday, while others have almost no human traffic - whereas a portion of centers have equipment that emits high amount of belt debris or hydrocarbons and others do not. Every surface should be cleaned in a maintenance schedule that works for the type of surface and frequency of particle recontamination. In a data center the typical surfaces cleaned on a regular basis are:

· Exterior of the equipment (servers, computers, screens, silos, etc)

· Cabinets and racks

· ceiling plenum (including all elements from conduit to wires)

· Top of Floors

· Stringer / pedestal system

· Interior of computers, servers, tape libraries, etc (occasional)

The main concern in determining what to clean and the frequency of cleaning your data center is your air system and human operations as a data center. SET3 tests 8 data points on every full service clean including air particle counts, surface contamination and more according to ISO Standard 14644-1 through 9, WHO a& ASHRAE to help you confirm a tailored schedule to fit your operations.

Can readers perform some or all cleaning tasks themselves?

In house janitorial services for normal office buildings are usually supplied by a contractor or in-house employees that are typically not trained for this type of cleaning / decontamination work. Common janitorial cleaning chemicals, equipment and wax may make the data center look great now - but they will create chemical and physical transformations at microscopic levels causing corrosion, rust, static, overheating and hundreds of other problems leading to eventual downtime.

Since there are static, particulate, network signals and heat sources in the Data Center that can cause disastrous catastrophic loss of uptime to companies, cause fires, Indoor Air Pollution and more - there are several standards that help keep these environments safe including: ASHRAE, Federal Stan 209e, ISO, NFPA, RFI, HFI and IEST Standards. Keeping up with the latest training, standards, protocol, benchmarks and equipment is no easy task, and I definitely don't recommend trying to manage that kind of a program in-house in most circumstances.

SET3 crews have been expertly trained and certified on how to measure unseen particles to clean, on different types of chemical's influences on charged/uncharged ESD surfaces and understand the science of decontamination - and our technicians have the tools to remove these influences safely. If a janitor cannot understand the science of the unseen, cannot test for accuracy of particle/static removal, doesn't understand static energy dynamics or how equipment and power in a data center works - they are missing the very basics of what is needed to clean your environment. There are hundreds of factors that a Data Center Cleaning Technician must be trained in - or they can cause downtime.

In what instances is professional cleaning a necessity?

Every commercial building needs professional cleaning services - however, any controlled environment needs controlled environment specialists - not just a professional cleaner. The science used to clean in a data center is unique and cannot be replaced with common janitorial cleaning.

How does a customer get started in terms of finding the right data center cleaning service and then actually initiating the cleaning process?

There are several things that differentiate data center cleaners from common janitorial - so if you are looking for a company to clean your data center you would need to focus on the points a janitor wouldn't know when interviewing. Many janitorial companies claim to do data center cleaning - so it is common that you will have to weed through some unqualified vendors.

A few questions that may help this process:

1. Are you trained to certify air class cleanliness according to ISO 14644 and provide us a certificate at the end of the job?

2. Can you confirm static pressure and provide velocity testing if needed while cleaning?

3. Is your equipment certified for ISO class 8 (or better) environments?

These questions only represent an extremely small portion of the basic ability a data center cleaning company should have - but these questions cannot typically be answered and described by a common professional janitor. Weeding out the unqualified vendors is the most important step, as they can unknowingly cause downtime and degradation to your data center.

The next step is to have a solid MOP (Method of Procedures) for your data center cleaning. The MOP should include standards that must be followed - that way the company is contractually obligated to follow proper methodology or not to participate.

Also, it is always important to get references from reputable companies that have experienced the services from the data center cleaning company you are considering. Any reputable data center cleaning company will be able to provide a list of contacts you can call - not just past letters of commendation.

In essence, what all goes into cleaning a data center? Can you provide a brief overview of the process?

Cleaning data centers means facilitating uptime through particle, static and residue removal at microscopic levels. Subfloor cleaning, access floor surface cleaning, server and cabinet rack cleaning,construction phase cleaning, ceiling and wall cleaning, and interior electronics decontamination are a few of our popular support services.

Proper Cleaning for Sensitive Surfaces

SET3 cleans and maintains all types of data center surfaces – including equipment, cable trays, ceilings, walls, floors, subfloors and more. From ESD conductive floors to raised floor tiles, our crews are experienced in using the proper cleaning methods, chemicals and equipment to properly care for all of your sensitive surfaces in the data center using certified GREEN equipment.

SET3 technicians are trained to work in live Data Center environments, safely. Data center cleaning requires removing gross contamination (5 microns) as well as unseen particles (.5 microns), which could harm sensitive server, network and data storage equipment. That’s what we do, and we’re one of the best in the world at it.

Identifying Contaminates

SET3 technicians are trained according to ISO 14644, ASHRAE TC9, World Health Organization, and the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies to help test & identify sources of contaminates during our cleaning services in your data center, ISP, Network, control Room or other critical environment. If indications of source contamination are in a high risk category, SET3 managers can provide options for laboratory testing to confirm specific contamination identification and provide current contamination levels to help you decide if remediation is necessary. SET3 is committed to providing you with the information you need to run a safe low-risk Data Center.

Maintenance Programs

Our comprehensive Full Service Clean (FSC) is a complete deep cleaning that removes particles from surfaces and the air at .3 microns – as required by ISO 14644. This service is typically done once a quarter to once per year depending on the condition of the facility and filtration and amount of traffic in and out. Our Maintenance Programs are daily weekly or monthly cleanings provided according to ISO 14644 to keep dust, static and particle levels under control following best practices according to industry standards. We provide maximum accountability and up-time for your facility. Our clients stand by us year after year due to our flexible scheduling, no surprise up-charges, and highly-trained local crews.

How often should a data center be cleaned? Are there rules of thumb for equipment, floors, etc.?

Some Data Centers reduce risk by having day-to-day, weekly or monthly dust maintenance program with our DataCneter Cleaning Technicians – while others set up a maintenance program on a quarterly, semi-annual or yearly basis. Among typical data centers with low foot traffic and up to code with the latest equipment, air and building technologies – a good baseline is as follows:

Minimum Frequency Recommendations for newer low traffic data centers:

Type	Description	Quarterly	2 X per year	Annually
Subfloor Plenum Cleaning	Cleaning, inspection of source of contaminates / building structure and air quality testing		X
Top of Access Floors	ULPA and anti-static cleaning leaning of the top of conductive access floor tiles	X
VCT Strip and non-conductive Coating (if applicable)	Removing the ESD Coating using antistatic HEPA filtered equipment and chemicals and recoating with a fresh ESD protection Layer			X
Ceiling Plenum	Cleaning the plenum in the ceiling between the drop ceiling tiles and the roof			X
Equipment / Cabinet Exterior Cleaning	Cleaning of the Exterior of the equipment / equipment cabinets	X
Interior Server / Equipment Cleaning	Ionized antistatic cleaning of the interior of servers			X

There are other surfaces in a data center that may need cleaning also. this list is a basic schedule (rule of thumb).

What are the costs associated with data center cleaning?

The data center cleaning should be a turn key cost based on an agreed scope before the job. The customer should take into account that they will need to bypass the fire suppression system and provide an on-site contact during the service. For some data centers, these two things can sometimes mean internal costs. For example, the bypass system is sometimes regulated by an outside fire protection firm, and they may charge for a visit to bypass the system.

When Big Data Meets Cloud Meets Infrastructure

2012-05-14T04:51:00.001-07:00

- Lori MacVittie, senior technical marketing manager at F5 Networks (www.f5.com), says:

In the past, almost all context was able to be deduced from the transport (connection) and application layer. The application delivery tier couldn’t necessarily “reach out” and take advantage of the vast amount of data “out there” that provides more insight into the conversation being initiated by a user. Much of this data falls into the realm of “big data” – untold amounts of information collected by this site and that site that offer valuable nuggets of information about any given interaction.

"Because of its expanded computing power and capacity, cloud can store information about user preferences, which can enable product or service customization. The context-driven variability provided via cloud allows businesses to offer users personal experiences that adapt to subtle changes in user-defined context, allowing for a more user-centric experience."

-- “The power of cloud”, IBM Global Business Services

All this big data is a gold mine – but only if you can take advantage of it. For infrastructure and specifically application delivery systems that means somehow being able to access data relevant to an individual user from a variety of sources and applying some operational logic to determine, say, level of access or permission to interact with a service.

It’s collaboration. It’s integration. It’s an ecosystem.

It’s enabling context-aware networking in a new way. It’s really about being able to consume big data via an API that’s relevant to the task at hand. If you’re trying to determine if a request is coming from a legitimate user or a node in a known botnet, you can do that. If you want to understand what the current security posture of your public-facing web applications might be, you can do that. If you want to verify that your application delivery controller is configured optimally and is up to date with the latest software, you can do that.

What’s more important, however, is perhaps that such a system is a foundation for integrating services that reside in the cloud where petabytes of pertinent data has already been collected, analyzed, and categorized for consumption. Reputation, health, location. These are characteristics that barely scratch the surface of the kind of information that is available through services today that can dramatically improve the operational posture of the entire data center.

Imagine, too, if you could centralize the acquisition of that data and feed it to every application without substantially modifying the application? What if you could build an architecture that enables collaboration between the application delivery tier and application infrastructure in a service-focused way? One that enables every application to enquire as to the location or reputation or personal preferences of a user – stored “out there, in the cloud” – and use that information to make decisions about what components or data the application includes? Knowing a user prefers Apple or Microsoft products, for example, would allow an application to tailor data or integrate ads or other functionality specifically targeted for that user, that fits the user’s preferences. This user-centric data is out there, waiting to be used to enable a more personal experience. An application delivery tier-based architecture in which such data is aggregated and shared to all applications shortens the development life-cycle for such personally-tailored application features and ensures consistency across the entire application portfolio.

It is these kinds of capabilities that drive the integration of big data with infrastructure. First as a means to provide better control and flexibility in real-time over access to corporate resources by employees and consumers alike, and with an eye toward future capabilities that focus on collaboration inside the data center better enabling a more personal, tailored experience for all users.

It’s a common refrain across the industry that network infrastructure needs to be smarter, make more intelligent decisions, and leverage available information to do it. But actually integrating that data in a way that makes it possible for organizations to actually codify operational logic is something that’s rarely seen.

Until now.

Back to Data Center Basics: Load balancing Virtualized Applications

2012-05-11T05:51:00.002-07:00

- Lori MacVittie, senior technical marketing manager at F5 Networks (www.f5.com), says:

The introduction of virtualization and cloud computing to data centers has been heralded as “transformational” and “disruptive” and “game changing.” From an operational IT perspective, that’s absolutely true.

But like transformational innovation in other industries, such disruption is often not in how the core solution is leveraged or used, but how it impacts operations and the broader ecosystem, rather than the individual tasked with using the solution. The transformation of the auto-industry, for example, toward alternative fuel-sourced vehicles is disruptive and changes much about the industry. But it doesn’t change the way you drive a car; it still works on the same principles and the skills you’ve learned driving gas powered cars are still applicable to alternative fuel-source cars.

What changes for the operator – just as within IT - is there may be new concerns with which you must contend.

Load balancing virtualized applications is in this category. While the core principles you’ve always applied to load balancing applications still applies, there are a few additional concerns that arise from the use of virtualization that you’re going to have to take into consideration.

LOAD BALANCING 101 REFRESH

Let’s remember quickly how load balancing traditional applications works, shall we?

The load balancing service presents to the end-user a single endpoint, i.e. “the application”. Users communicate exclusively with that endpoint. The load balancing service communicates with a pool of resources comprised of one or more application instances. It is by adding instances to the pool that an application is able to scale horizontally to meet demand.

In the most common traditional load balancing environment, each application instance is hosted on a single, physical server. The availability of the “application” is maintained by insuring there are always enough instances (nodes) available to compensate for any failures that might occur at the physical server, operating system, platform, or application layers.

Load balancing services also allow for the designation of “back up” nodes. Each node in a pool may have a back up node that is only activated in the event of a failure. This is used primarily for high-availability purposes to ensure continuous application availability rather than for scaling purposes.

Now, when we replace the physical servers with virtual servers, we have pretty much the same system. There still exists a pool of resources that comprise “the application”, the load balancing service still mediates for the end-user, and there are still enough application instances in the pool to compensate for failure, thus ensuring availability of “the application.”

However, there are some new potential sources of failure that must be addressed that impact the topology – the physical placement – of the application instances in the pool.

TWO RULES for LOAD BALANCING VIRTUALIZED APPLICATIONS

One of the most important changes coming from virtualization that must be addressed is fault isolation. Assume for a moment that we took all four physical nodes and consolidated them on a single, physical virtualized platform.

In theory, nothing changes. The load balancing service views a “node” as a unique combination of IP address and TCP port, and whether that’s hosted on a virtual platform or a physical server is irrelevant to the load balancing service. The load balancing algorithms still work the same way, nodes are selected as directed by configured policies, backup nodes are still used to ensure continuous availability, and nothing about the way in which load balancing works changes.

But it’s very relevant to operations because this type of server-consolidated deployment model introduces higher unrecoverable failure scenarios and it will directly impact the performance (in a bad way) of “the application.”

There are a couple operational axioms at work here:

1. Shared infrastructure (network, compute, storage) means shared risk.

2. As load increases, performance decreases.

Let’s say “Node 1” fails. In both the physical and virtual deployments, the load is simply shifted to the remaining active nodes. No problem.

But what if the network connectivity between the load balancing service and “Node 1” fails? In a physical deployment, no problem – each node has its own physical connection and is unlikely to impact the other nodes. But what about the virtual deployment? Each node has its own virtual network connection, certainly, but does it have its own physical network connection or is it shared? If it’s a shared physical connection and it fails, then all nodes will fail – leaving “the application” unavailable.

Load Balancing Virtualized Applications Rule #1: Team and Trunk.

Physical network redundancy is a must. Modern server platforms are generally enabled with at least 2 if not 4 GBE connections, use them.

So now you’ve got your network topology designed to ensure that a physical failure will not take out every application instance on the server. Next you need to consider how the application instances are isolated and deployed to ensure that a failure at the hypervisor layer does not disrupt all application instances.

Consider that there are two possible reasons you are implementing load balancing: scalability and availability. In the former, you’re trying to ensure supply meets demand. In the latter, you’re trying to mitigate potential failure in a way to ensure “the application” is always available, regardless of failure. If there is a failure at the hypervisor layer, all instances relying on that hypervisor will be impacted (and not in a good way). Regardless of why you’re implementing load balancing, the result of such a failure is the same, instances are unavailable. Similarly, if the physical device on which virtualized applications are deployed fails, every instance on that device will be down.

In both cases, if all your virtual eggs are in one basket and there’s a failure at the hypervisor layer, you’re in trouble.

Load Balancing Virtualized Applications Rule #2: Divide and Conquer.

Application instance redundancy is a must. Never put all your application instances on a single virtualized or physical platform. Spread them across at least two, to isolate potential failures in the virtualization layer or at the physical server layer.

Node backups should always be located on physically separate devices. Load balancing services are adept at discerning failure but they are not necessarily able to determine the source. A failure to communicate with an application instance could be caused by a bad cable, a failed port, an unresponsive network stack, or an application error. The load balancing service knows the application instance is down, but not necessarily why it’s down. If it’s a crashed instance, then failing over to a back up instance on the same server is probably going to work out fine. But if the root cause is a failed port or bad cable, failing over to a backup instance on the same server isn’t going to help – because it is down too.

It is imperative to ensure availability that there are always at least two of everything – and that means physical devices, as well. Never put all your eggs in one basket – at any layer.

THE PERFORMANCE IMPACT

Aside from general availability issues, there is also the very real possibility that where you deploy virtualized application instances will impact performance of “the application.” Remember that even though you can designate CPU and memory on a per application instance, they still ultimately shared I/O – both storage and network. That means even if you use rate limiting technologies to try to manage bandwidth consumption as a means to reduce congestion or latency, ultimately you’re impacting performance. If you don’t use rate limiting or other bandwidth-focused solutions to manage the shared network resource, you run the risk of congestion and increasing latency on the wire.

Similarly, shared storage is even more problematic because when you trace I/O down through the system, you end up at a single, shared I/O controller that is going to have some serious limitations on it. I/O intense application instances deployed on the same physical device are going to cause contention in the underlying system, which is going to negatively impact performance.

Again, divide and conquer. Disperse such instances across two (or more) physical servers. The number of servers will depend on the overall scale of the application and the resource consumption rate. Load balancing will be able to assist in maintaining performance across instances if you take advantage of a response-time aware algorithm such as fastest response time (the assumption is that response time correlates directly to load and in most cases, this is true). This keeps any given instance from becoming overwhelmed.

Ultimately, what this means is that you have to be a little more aware of physical deployment location for application instances than you did with pure physical deployments. Consolidation is a great way to reduce operational and capital expenditures, but it also means consolidating risk.

LOCATION MATTERS

This is a particularly tough nut to crack especially when combined with the desire to implement auto-scaling operations in a more cloud-like environment. The idea that you can leverage “whatever idle resources” you can find to scale out applications on-demand is powerful, but it’s also potentially fraught with risk if you’re unable to control placement at all. While the possibility that every instance would end up deployed on a single server or even a select handful of servers is minimal, there is the possibility that multiple instances could be deployed in a way that means a single server failure could eliminate a sizeable number of application instances, resulting in an unacceptable degradation of performance or even downtime for some percentage of users.

In the end, location really does matter when it comes to load balancing virtualized applications. Where they are deployed and in what groupings becomes a critical factor for maintaining performance and availability. The tendency to increase VM density is high, but that tendency can lead to highly disruptive situations in the event of a failed component. Be aware that cost savings from mass-consolidation and “high efficiency” through increasing VM density metrics may look good now, but may not look so good through the lens of hindsight.

Data Center Equipment: Getting Rid of Decommissioned Gear

2012-05-10T05:20:00.000-07:00

– Terry Fockler, Silicon Valley Engineering/Solutions (terryfockler@sbcglobal.net), says:

One of the most over-looked issues for any data center manager going through a refresh or upgrade (and the last thing they tend to consider), is what to do with the decommissioned equipment. Equipment typically sits in a closet until someone gets tired of tripping over it.

But recovering that gear and moving it quickly can be a reality (with the right vendor). The longer it sits, the more it loses value, so repurposing and tracking is very important along with data mitigation. The last thing a data center manager wants or needs is to expose data to the public and improperly disposing of gear - this can come back to haunt anyone. The chain of custody is very critical to the security of data and the safety of the corporate environment. The EPA is constantly evolving the rules on disposition and tracking of decommissioned/used data center equipment, and they are seriously increasing the penalties.

If you have an upcoming upgrade or refresh, recovery should be an up-front issue: How do we dispose of the decommissioned gear; How can we maximize the return? How will this impact our taxes and depreciation schedules, and how do we avoid EPA and federal negative issues and requirements? In the secondary market, timing is critical to maximize your return, the secondary market is extremely fluid and volatile.

The date mitigation and chain of custody are two areas that can cause major headaches, not only in the immediate future, but also have long lasting potential dangers. That equipment may change hands and ownership several times.

Choose your vendor carefully and you will rest in knowing your data is erased and you have maximized your return, and that your company name will not also end up in a land fill somewhere.

A Coordinated, Balanced Design in Today’s Data Center

2012-05-09T05:10:00.000-07:00

Q&A with Mark Svenkeson, principal and partner of Hypertect (http://www.hypertect.com/):

DCP: Why is a coordinated, balanced design useful in today’s enterprise data centers? Why should data center and IT managers care about it? How can they benefit from it?

Svenkeson: The reliability of any item or design is determined largely by the least reliable aspect. Your data center operations need to be supported by mechanical and electrical systems which have equivalence in their capabilities. A well-coordinated design will ensure that all aspects of your mechanical and electrical support systems have equivalent reliability, eliminating often overlooked vulnerabilities. Most importantly, it helps protect against the human tunnel vision factor of pushing one portion of the system past the capabilities of the other, which often occurs when excess capacity is available on the electrical side.

DCP: Where should a coordinated, balanced design rank in terms of overall priority in the data center?

Svenkeson: A balanced approach to support system design and implementation should rank #1 in priority, because it is directly related to reliability. As data centers grow and densities increase, appropriately scaling the system as a whole is critical to managing that growth effectively.

DCP: What are the biggest challenges for data center and IT managers when it comes to implementing a balanced, coordinated design?

Svenkeson: Modern support systems for critical facilities require detailed knowledge and understanding of the individual components and overall system. The tendency may be to replace or upgrade individual components of the support system on an as-needed basis without analyzing the overall effect.

DCP: How can data center and IT managers overcome those challenges?

Svenkeson: Retain independent engineering expertise to assist in understanding the complex issues involved.

DCP: What advice can you give to IT and data center managers that have a plethora of similar solutions to choose from?

Svenkeson: Do not rely on equipment suppliers for solutions without the support of independent engineering expertise. The solutions offered are limited by their manufacturing capabilities, and their recommendations are limited to their available product line.

Hypertect, inc. has provided independent review analysis and design of critical processing facilities since 1988; call us to discuss your concerns.

Disaster Recovery for Remote Sites and the Data Center

2012-05-08T04:54:00.001-07:00

Q&A with Casey Burns, product marketing manager of virtual solutions with Quantum (www.quantum.com):

DCP: Why is DXi V1000 useful in today's enterprise data centers? Why should data center and IT managers care about it? How can they benefit from it?

Burns: The DXi V1000 is useful for any sized organization that is lacking a disaster recovery solution at their main location or at their remote locations. Enterprise class data center managers can appreciate the DXi V1000’s flexible deployment model. The DXi V1000 is a virtual appliance that works with an existing VMware environment, retaining all of the features and functionality that customers have come to expect from DXi-Series hardware appliances. If a customer has a number of remote sites where they are currently utilizing an aging tape drive or maybe some old disk array with insufficient capacity or functionality, the DXi V1000 would be a great solution. Customers clearly recognize the value of deduplication. With normal deduplication rates a single virtual instance of the DXi V1000 can store upwards of 40TB, providing very long retention periods and fast local restores of the data. All DXi’s have replication capabilities, so it’s possible to replicate the data from a DXi V1000 at a remote location to a physical DXi, or another instance of the DXi V1000 at the data center. This turns out to be a very viable disaster recovery solution, which can be an overlooked value of deduplication.

DCP: Where should DXi V1000 rank in terms of overall priority in the data center?

Burns: For those customers seeking disaster recovery for their remote sites or data center, the DXi V1000 could easily rank in the top 5. The inherent value of utilizing the existing investment in infrastructure (servers, networking, WAN connections, backup applications, etc) to deploy a virtual appliance deduplication solution allows customers to make very quick, yet smart, decisions on using the DXi V1000. At $2250 per TB with built in replication, encryption and deduplication in a small (4GB vRAM) virtual appliance, this can be a very compelling story for data center managers, allowing them to move disaster recovery of their remote sites and data center up the priority list. Customers already have virtual environments deployed. Why not use those resources to establish a disaster recovery solution?

For data center customers who are also in an acquisition mode, the DXi V1000 could be a great fit as well. Perhaps a company has a data center with a physical DXi appliance that has high-capacity scale, like the DXi8500 with up to 320TB. Imagine that company acquires a smaller company that isn’t tied into their IT infrastructure yet. That company could easily deploy a DXi V1000 at the new location and start replication immediately to the DXi8500 in the data center and bring that site into the parent company’s policies and procedures quickly and easily.

DCP: What are the biggest challenges for data center and IT managers when it comes to DXi V1000?

Burns: IT managers should keep in mind that performance for DXi V1000 is largely determined by the virtual environment it is deployed in. We have seen really good performance from our own testing and from our own customers, around 1TB/hr ingest (we still use the same inline variable length deduplication process as our physical appliances), and we have best practice guides available to help tune virtual environments for optimal performance. This is not so much a characteristic of the solution itself, but rather a challenge of being a virtual appliance and being bound to external factors that are somewhat driven by physical appliances. The features and functionality are the primary selling factors for DXi V1000.

DCP: How can data center and IT managers overcome those challenges?

Burns: As I mentioned, there are not many challenges, really the performance which is negated by the value and uniqueness of the DXi V1000, and we can address this challenge with the best practice guide available from Quantum to help tune the solution and optimize performance in a virtual environment.

DCP: What advice can you give to IT and data center managers that have a plethora of similar solutions to choose from?

Burns: Customers should be looking into solutions that can provide them with scale and deployment options for their data center, remote offices and any other offices they may consume, and also how can the partner help them protect data today and tomorrow, use of the cloud and protect both physical and virtual data sets in a single solution. Quantum has been advancing deduplication for over six years now. We provide customers with options for physical appliances and now offer a virtual appliance in DXi V1000. The DXi Series can protect both physical and virtual data sets, and provides a cloud connected architecture, whether that be private, public or a hybrid cloud approach. There are a number of deduplication options for customers to choose from, but only Quantum holds the patent for variable length deduplication, proven to be the most disk efficient process available. DXi offers an unmatched breadth of scalability, going from 1TB to 320TB in a single software platform.

###

Casey Burns is Quantum’s Product Marketing Manager, Virtual Solutions. Casey has extensive experience and knowledge in the storage industry, and a professional focus in the areas of data deduplication and virtualization.

First Government-Certified Cloud Data Protection Technology

2012-05-07T05:04:00.001-07:00

- Pravin Kothari, Founder and CEO, CipherCloud (http://www.ciphercloud.com), says:

Instituted as a federal government standard in 2002, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the security benchmark for the encryption of electronic data and a mandatory requirement for many federal and global agencies. AES is the first publicly accessible and open cipher approved by the National Security Agency (NSA) for top secret information. Earlier this month CipherCloud's implementation of the AES encryption algorithm was certified by NIST, making our cloud data protection gateway the industry's first and only FIPS-certified solution.

We're the only company that offers format and operations preserving encryption solutions for cloud services like salesforce.com to have received the FIPS 197 accreditation. Reaching this certification achievement speaks to our mission to provide the industry's most secure encryption solutions for our customers who are concerned about security, privacy, and compliance of their sensitive data in the cloud. Enterprises and government organizations that require greater assurance to protect their sensitive data can now rely on a highly credible third-party proven solution.

CipherCloud's technology provides a single gateway as a platform to secure sensitive customer data across multiple public and private cloud applications, such as Salesforce, Chatter and Amazon Web Services, without impacting functionality or performance. The solution uses comprehensive security controls including strong encryption, tokenization, activity monitoring, and malware detection to address organizations' data privacy, residency, security, and compliance concerns, and to accelerate cloud adoption.

The HTTP 2.0 War has Just Begun

2012-05-04T05:17:00.000-07:00

- Lori MacVittie, senior technical marketing manager at F5 Networks (www.f5.com), says:

RFC 1945 – “Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0” – was published in May 1996. In June of 1999, RFC 2616 – “Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1” was published. In the ensuing 13 years there has been no substantial changes to the HTTP standard. None. Nada. Zilch.

Even as the size and number of objects has ballooned over that time, and the overall composition of web pages grown increasingly complex, still there’s been no substantial efforts to improve upon the now entrenched HTTP standard. Even as sites struggled to maintain availability and performance in the face of exploding usage growth – fueled by mobile device proliferation, increasingly affordable access enabling everything from plants to cows to users to “get online” – HTTP 1.1 remained the standard for web-everything, despite the growing fact that it simply wasn’t the most optimal means of connecting users with the resources they expect and increasingly, demand.

AJAX and Web 2.0 gave us better interactive models that alleviated some of the pain associated with performance problems, but as that model took hold and video became the medium du jour even its advantages have become unable to produce the acceptable results.

And then Google introduced SPDY. The first shot in the HTTP 2.0 war. Now Microsoft has fired back with “Speed+Mobility” and the battle appears about to be fully engaged.

Although SPDY has been out and about for some time, it only recently made it to the status of “Internet-Draft” in the RFC system, being officially published in Feb 2012. Along comes March 2012, and Microsoft has (sort of) countered with Speed+Mobility.

What will be interesting as the battle progresses is to see which other organizations and vendors will side with which version (if not both). Invariably other organizations will want to be able to claim to have been co-authors of whichever standard becomes, well, the standard but choosing sides so early in a war is hardly appropriate, especially when the technical details are still (as of this writing) missing from Microsoft’s proposal.

RIP-REPLACE versus UPGRADE

It’s also not clear how Speed + Mobility will “retain as much compatibility as possible with the existing Web infrastructure” – a noble and laudable sentiment, to be sure – while still adopting most of the core concepts including in SPDY:

HTTP Speed+Mobility RFC

It [the session layer] would maintain the integrity of the layered architecture.

It would use an upgrade mechanism similar to that of WebSockets.

This would enable compatibility with existing proxies and

connection models, without creating a mandatory dependency on TLS.

[Same as SPDY] The protocol would define two types of frames: data

and control.

[Same as SPDY] The session layer would enable negotiation of

multiple simultaneous streams for HTTP requests with minimal

overhead.

[Same as SPDY] The session layer would allow for prioritizing

delivery of content to ensure highest value traffic is delivered

first.

There’s not much in the Speed + Mobility RFC on which to base a technical impact assessment on infrastructure (existing proxies and other HTTP mediating devices like load balancers) but what Microsoft appears to be saying is that it wants to leverage the concepts introduced by Google with SPDY (acknowledging their performance and ultimately scaling benefits) without leaving the familiar world of HTTP. That’s actually important, assuming it can be done, because SPDY requires significant changes to existing infrastructure – network and server – in order to operate, and it is not inherently interoperable with HTTP.

Despite this, SPDY interest and inquiries are beginning to become more frequent, which means it’s getting the attention it deserves. Being the only kid on the block to really address the performance issues inherent with HTTP (especially with respect to mobile devices) that’s no surprise as the investment in new solutions to support SPDY would ostensibly see a return in the form of scalability on the server side by requiring fewer server resources to support as many if not more users.

But SPDY isn’t so far along (see previous note) as to be a clear front runner. It’s still too new despite interest to have garnered widespread support or mindshare, and despite Google’s ubiquitous status as a household term for search, it isn’t necessarily synonymous with web standards. Chrome may be gaining on IE, but in the minds of most users, IE is still synonymous with web browsing. It also has a serious advantage over Google in its relationship with the enterprise and IT, and in its more intimate understanding of data center infrastructure, as is evident from its blog on the introduction of its proposal:

We think that rapid adoption of HTTP 2.0 is important. To make that happen, HTTP 2.0 needs to retain as much compatibility as possible with the existing Web infrastructure. Awareness of HTTP is built into nearly every switch, router, proxy, Load balancer, and security system in use today. If the new protocol is “HTTP” in name only, upgrading all of this infrastructure would take too long. By building on existing web standards, the community can set HTTP 2.0 up for rapid adoption throughout the web.

-- Speed and Mobility: An Approach for HTTP 2.0 to Make Mobile Apps and the Web Faster

Google, while not necessarily openly hostile to the enterprise or infrastructure vendors who’d need to support SPDY, certainly appears indifferent to the impact of a rip-and-replace protocol model.

That’s not to say Google’s approach isn’t feasible or desirable. Indeed, in some cases a “rip-and-replace” strategy is the only way to clean out the cobwebs that otherwise seem to hang onto technology for years after they’ve been superceded and superceded again. Think COBOL, which in some industries is still under active development, augmented by a hundred other technologies designed to workaround the reality that it’s an aged, outdated technology that for various reasons we are unable to simply walk away from.

TAKE a SIDE ALREADY, WILL YOU?!

Nope. Not gonna take a side yet – if ever. Personal preferences aside (which it’s hard to have at this point without more technical details from Microsoft) the decision whether an organization eventually wants to go with SPDY or Speed+Mobility will not at all impact negatively mediating devices. In fact, the existence of both would not negatively impact such devices because of their strategic location in the network. The existence of all three – SPDY, S+M, HTTP – would actually not negatively impact these devices as long as they were able to support all three, which seems more likely than simply choosing a side.

There will be a need to support both – and likely all three (do I hear a fourth?) – protocols moving forward. Regardless of who wins this particular war and comes out crowned HTTP 2.0 champion, there will still be a need to implement support across infrastructure vendors. There will be a transitory period during which browsers and servers and infrastructure all must “get up to speed” (ha!) and will do so at different rates, making the need for intermediating devices critical. Just as is the case with the migration from IPv4 to IPv6, intermediating application delivery solutions provide the means by which organizations with substantial infrastructure investments to maintain the value of those investments while moving forward to support emerging standards.

Being able to translate, for example, between SPDY and HTTP today would be a significant boon for organizations, as it requires no changes to what is likely an extensive application and server infrastructure. Similarly, assuming a pilot of Speed+Mobility, if the application delivery tier can support it, it can mediate – translate – and provide an opportunity to support users via either standard without radically disrupting the application server infrastructure. A full-proxy based application delivery infrastructure is full of advantages, after all.

I like SPDY. I like it’s approach and I actually admire Google’s chutzpah in diverging from HTTP as a solution, recognizing perhaps the inherent tendency to be more concerned with backwards compatibility than with improving upon the model. But I like what Microsoft is saying from an enterprise perspective because honestly, replacing an entire infrastructure architecture to support one protocol out of many is not an appealing option, no matter the benefits.

Both approaches have merit, and the bigger story is that an overhaul of HTTP is necessary - and long overdue.

2012-05-03T05:31:00.001-07:00

- Jon Alcorn, business development with American Eagle Systems (www.americaneaglesys.com), says:

All data center environments, from the 100 square foot telco room to the 500,000 square foot raised floor research lab, require specialized cleaning. If a janitorial firm is being used to service these critical areas, they may be potentially doing more harm than good by using products that create chemical and physical transformations at microscopic levels causing corrosion, rust, static, overheating and hundreds of other problems that can lead to downtime.

It is imperative that the proper cleaning methods, chemicals and equipment are being utilized to properly care for all of the sensitive surfaces in the datacenter. An experienced data center cleaning partner will offer numerous programs, including such services as sub-floor cleaning, concrete sealing, access floor cleaning, vinyl floor anti-static waxing, belt debris remediation, interior electronics detail cleaning, and post construction cleans.

Why Clean Your Datacenter?

Reduce electrostatic discharge, which can cause dust fires and serious damage to servers and other network and storage equipment.
Promote a more efficient use of critical hardware intake and ventilation systems
Reduce downtime risk due to particle buildup on circuit boards, servers and all other air cooled equipment
Minimize the opportunity for dust to agglomerate inside disk drives to avoid read/write errors and head crashes
Improve the indoor air quality of the data center and promote employee health

Budget constraints are always an issue, but the cost of preventative maintenance is a more acceptable cost than that of system downtime. Detecting and preventing environmental threats to a data center is made even easier when your cleaning provider offers extensive environmental reporting. A report would include information on air particle monitoring, sub-floor plenum, ferrous metal tests, microbial tests, black light subfloor contaminant testing, vapor barrier inspection, temperature and humidity tests, airflow quality, inspection of equipment, and access floor surface static-dissipative quality tests.

All sites are different, and cleaning programs can be performed daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly. Data center managers may also want the area cleaned during off hours, and so your cleaning partner should be available to work at any time, any day of the week and be able to provide references upon request.

Data centers and clean rooms have unique dynamics and operations that are not found elsewhere in normal commercial building applications. By ensuring that only trained cleaning specialists are maintaining these critical environments, and by adopting a pro-active cleaning program, data center managers can ensure they are meeting the Federal and ISO standards for data center cleanliness.

Deep Packet Inspection vs. Deep Content Inspection The Future of Network Security

2012-05-02T05:09:00.000-07:00

- Dr. Hongwen Zhang, CEO of Wedge Networks (www.wedgenetworks.com), says:

Network traffic in data centers is growing in volume and complexity; traditional network filtering technologies are unable to keep up with malicious malware sneaking onto the network. Currently, one in every 14 downloads are infected with malicious content that may cause reputational and customer relationship management challenges. According to PwC’s 2012 Global State of Information Security Survey, only 43 percent of security experts believe that their information security strategy is adequate. When malicious content and non-compliant data pass through a network undetected, data centers experience setbacks from information leakage and possible IT infrastructure damage.

With the proliferation of mobile data usage, social media and cloud computing, a new portfolio of security threats have emerged, requiring a different approach to advance current security practices. Traditional inspection technologies that secure data center networks at the packet level, such as packet filtering and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), have limited efficiency and are unable to scale to provide clean and safe usage of the evolving Internet.

Out With the Old: Deep Packet Inspection

Today, Deep Packet Inspection is the most widely adopted solution for monitoring and managing network packet data. DPI matches the IP packet sequences against a library of offending patterns. To be successful, DPI systems must match the packet information to patterns at wire speed, posing two main limitations:

· Malware that is often embedded in large application payloads may slip through a system undetected. This is because a DPI system is only capable of holding a limited amount of packets at a time for pattern matching. The amount of IP packets required to transmit an application payload often surpass the number of packets that a DPI system can inspect at any given moment, creating a hole for malware to slip onto the network.

· A DPI system obtains packet data and matches it against known malware threats, however the number of unique signatures available for the system to match against is restricted.

Data centers fail to achieve optimal network security as a result of the limitations of DPI. The growing number of unsupported application types with nested, zipped or archived files, exploit DPI limitations and can slip through security systems that are not qualified to handle them.

In With the New: Deep Content Inspection

A new approach to data inspection is needed that incorporates thorough analysis to address the undetected and emerging threats, Deep Content Inspection (DCI) is an advanced form of network filtering that functions as a fully transparent device at a comprehensive level. DCI examines the entire object and detects any malicious or non-compliant intent, instead of solely checking the body or header of data packets circling through a network. DCI reconstructs, decompresses and/or decodes network traffic packets into their constituting application level objects, often referred to as the MIME objects.

The predominant DCI standard implements full content-based review in real time to understand the intent of data-in-motion. This method transcends the DPI approach of simply matching packet sequences against known patterns and allows DCI to gain a wider inspection scope. This new method of network inspection offers an increased level of security by performing reputation searches and behaviour analyses on structured or packed data. DCI finds and assesses signatures that cross packet boundaries by keeping track of content across multiple packets.

By transitioning away from traditional packet inspection and concentrating on the content and intent of data, DCI provides a comprehensive method of filtering for attacks and malicious content. This approach secures data centers, enterprises, government organizations, service providers and carrier networks against today’s evolving threats.

About the Author:

Dr. Hongwen Zhang is president and CEO of Wedge Networks, a leading provider of remediation-based Deep Content Inspection for high-performance, network-based Web security. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Calgary; a MSc in Computer Engineering from the Institute of Computer Technology - Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing, PRC), and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Fudan University (Shanghai, PRC). With more than two decades of high tech leadership experience, Dr. Zhang is a co-inventor and holder of several patents in the area of computing and networking.

Secure and Resilient Virtual Computing Platform for Sensitive Cloud Deployments

2012-05-01T06:29:00.000-07:00

Frank Huerta, CEO of TransLattice (www.translattice.com) says:

LynuxWorks, Inc., TransLattice and Fritz Technologies Corporation have combined their technologies and expertise to create a new platform for building cloud deployments in sensitive environments. The resulting S.E.C.U.R.E. (Secure, Enterprise, Cross-Domain, Unified, Resilient Environment) platform solution provides an ideal environment for situations requiring secure hosting of applications, geographic redundancy of applications and data, and secure cross-domain transfer of information.

The S.E.C.U.R.E. solution consolidates multiple applications onto virtual machines (VMs) on a single server platform while:

Maintaining complete domain separation in the virtualization solution
Reducing cost through hardware consolidation
Deploying market-standard operating systems including Windows and Red Hat Linux
Achieving high security standards for military deployments
Improving resilience with a lattice approach to application and data distribution

The TransLattice technology, TransLattice Application Platform (TAP), fully distributes both the application and its data across multiple VMs and system platforms within a secure domain, ensuring non-stop operations, even in the case of the loss of one or more components of the computing “lattice.” This means that mission-critical applications and data are fully distributed and the loss of an individual system (node) or multiple nodes does not endanger the continued efficient operation of the application.

“Customers today are looking to move their applications and data into the cloud, while maintaining the security of sensitive data,” said Frank Huerta, CEO and co-founder at TransLattice. “We are very confident that the S.E.C.U.R.E. platform will help meet the needs of our customers. By working closely with LynuxWorks and Fritz Technologies, we have been able to leverage both the technologies and expertise that provide a great

environment for our TAP solution.”

Enhancing SCOM Exchange Monitoring

2012-04-30T08:37:00.002-07:00

Jean-Francois Piot, vice-president of Microsoft Global Market at GSX Solutions (www.gsx.com), says:

The need for enhanced SCOM Exchange monitoring

While SCOM for Exchange is seen as a robust monitoring tool that provides a wide range of server level statistics, many SCOM environments could benefit from more advanced user and service level monitoring and reports.

GSX Monitor and Analyzer aims to fill that gap with a powerful application performance monitoring solution that enables IT administrators and managers to proactively maintain their enterprise collaboration environment from a single user interface. Its robust executive dashboard and reporting tool highlight key trends and performance metrics, enabling you to prioritize and act on emerging issues before they impact users.

How GSX compliments SCOM
GSX compliments SCOM for Exchange in terms of simplicity, relevancy, end user performance, and reporting.

Simplicity
GSX Monitor and Analyzer can be installed and configured in less than an hour. It requires no agent on your servers, and thresholds can be configured in a matter of minutes. In-place upgrades are made via the GSX Monitor station.

Relevancy
GSX Monitor only sends alerts on issues that impact your users or service. This helps you to keep a step ahead of any issues since you don’t need to sift through hundreds of nuisance alerts to find what’s important. You can then correlate these alerts with any SCOM notifications to help quickly resolve the issues.

End user performance
GSX Monitor and Analyzer ensure performance from a user perspective. It is one thing for a server to be up and running, it is another matter entirely for the service to be performing as the user expects. GSX Monitor alerts you to user impacts and GSX Analyzer helps you with capacity planning and measuring performance against any set SLA. The focus is always on what’s most important: your users’ experience and the services you provide.

Reporting
GSX Monitor gives you access to all current statistics and graphs of recent performance. GSX Analyzer lets you view historical statistics, trend your growth, and even forecast the future. This allows you to pinpoint any negative trends, stay a step ahead of performance issues, and plan for capacity growth. What’s more, you can view a dynamic snapshot of SLA performance, set a performance indicator’s SLA, and then select the number of KPIs that are critical to achieving your SLA. If performance isn’t meeting the SLA, you can quickly determine which server is impacting it and how. For example, if server availability is supposed to be 99.9% but you see that you’re only at 98%, you can quickly locate the offending server with only 80% availability and continuous RAM utilization of 99%. To meet the SLA, you can then add more RAM or remove the server from your environment.

A comprehensive solution
To conclude, GSX Monitor and Analyze provides the comprehensive reporting and analysis you need to help fill the gaps in your SCOM Exchange environment and deliver the performance that your users expect. Together, SCOM, GSX Monitor, and GSX Analyzer provide a comprehensive solution to your Exchange monitoring, analysis and troubleshooting needs.

Safeguarding in a Mobile Digital World

2012-04-27T04:50:00.002-07:00

- Aferdita Muriqi, founder and CEO of ADEV (www.adev.us ; www.conxfer.com), says:

In the digital world today, safeguarding ones privacy and enabling and streamlining secure information on a trusted mobile network is the key to social society.

I founded ADEV Inc, which operates ADEV LAB & STUDIO (@adevLab). I, along with my team, have developed the new app, ConXFer.

We have all struggled with the unsecured and invasive slow process of a mobile rep taking our phone and waiting longer than we like for our contacts to be transferred from one device to another. What are they doing with our devices? Is the information stored in the device secure? ConXfer is a patent pending wireless, mobile to mobile secure contacts transfer application. It simplifies the process of securely transferring a user’s contacts and mobile business cards from one device to another using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

ADEV Inc. is a mobile application development company. ADEV LAB & STUDIO designs and develops custom mobile products, mobile websites, SEO product landing pages and blog sites to drive branding and awareness. Our services range from initial concept, design, development, testing, product delivery and video production focused on innovative mobile applications and promotional solutions.

We at AEDV have the capability to not only build our own apps, but can build an app for commercial or individual development use through a licensing model of encryption and coding. Aspects of the code can be integrated into other apps so businesses or individuals can customize existing apps by using a licensing technology from our own apps in order to bolster our global initiative to manage content on a trusted mobile network for secure content exchange.

I strongly believe in the huge growth in the mobile app sector and users who interact via a mobile device need to be in full control of their own information. At ADEV Inc. we believe the user’s information must remain safe at all times.

About ADEV Inc.

ADEV Inc. is a mobile application development company. ADEV LAB & STUDIO designs and develops custom mobile products, mobile websites, SEO product landing pages and blog sites to drive branding and awareness. ADEV LAB & STUDIO services range from initial concept, design, development, testing, product delivery and video production focused on innovative mobile applications and promotional solutions. The company recently developed its newest app, ConXfer.

Web: www.adev.us

www.conxfer.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/adevinc

www.facebook.com/conxfer

Implementing A Data Center Cleaning Program

2012-04-26T05:01:00.000-07:00

Hector Gallardo, senior account manager at Plenum Cleaning Services (www.plenumcleaning.com), says:

Implementing a data center cleaning program on a quarterly, bi-annual or annual basis as preventative maintenance is as essential as preventative maintenance on hardware and equipment. There are countless types and amounts of contaminants that can hinder the operating efficiencies of the hardware and equipment as well as the high pressure laminate access floor within a data center and often times can result in hardware malfunction and costly system downtime. In addition, improper maintenance on high pressure laminate access floors as well as vinyl composition tile floors with in a data center will result in costly damage and premature aging.

Decontaminating a data center in accordance with ISO Standard 14644 (Class 100,000 .05 micron particles per cubic foot of atmosphere) has the following benefits:

1) Elimination of harmful contaminants and debris that can clog the cooling airways on hardware and equipment that can result in hardware malfunction or thermal shutdown

2) Elimination of dust, pollen, mold, bacteria and airborne particles with a size of 0.12 microns or larger resulting in improved air quality and density

3) Reduced static electricity in the data center

4) Improved hardware and equipment operating efficiencies

5) It prolongs the life of the high pressure laminate floor, vinyl composition tile floor, hardware and equipment

6) It improves aesthetics

Data center and IT managers should care about the data center cleaning because they can reduce or eliminate potential costly downtime associated with thermal shutdown or system malfunction due to dust and debris in the cooling airways, exhaust fans and circuit boards as well as static electricity.

Data center cleaning should rank high on the priority list because it’s an essential preventative maintenance function that can eliminate potential system malfunction and costly downtime as well as increase the performance and lifetime of the high pressure laminate floor and equipment. A professional data center cleaning company is an extra set of eyes that will inspect the data center, especially the plenum as they provide the service and report any potential hazards such as heavy rust, bare wires, uncovered electrical junction boxes, frayed cables, zinc whiskers, etc.

The biggest challenges for data center and IT managers in regards to data center cleaning include:

1) Differentiating between janitorial services and data center services

2) Justifying the costs

3) Locating an experienced professional data center cleaning company

4) Understanding the benefits of properly maintaining the data center by performing scheduled preventative maintenance cleaning services

The data center and IT managers can overcome these challenges by consulting an experienced professional data center cleaning company that can answer their questions, provide them a cleaning demonstration and customize a cleaning schedule to meet their business and budgetary needs.

The best advice that I would give a data center and IT managers that have a plethora of similar solutions to choose from would be to:

1) Ask and check for customer references

2) Ask for a cleaning demonstration (hardware, equipment, access floor, plenum, cable trays, etc.)

3) Ask for a Scope of Work

4) Ensure that the data center cleaning company is not using un-trained temporary employees

5) Ask for a customer satisfaction guarantee

6) Ask as many questions as you feel necessary

Additional Information

There is a significant difference in janitorial cleaning and data center cleaning that includes the type of equipment, materials, cleaning technique and insurance. As a result, the pricing is significantly different because of the amount of labor hours involved as well as the cost of the equipment, materials and insurance. In order to mitigate risk, professional data center cleaning companies should not introduce liquid or machines that require liquid to operate in to the data center.

Raised Floor Labeling Ideas to Improve Uptime

2012-04-25T04:55:00.000-07:00

- Ken Koty, sales engineer for PDU Cables (www.pducables.com) and former data center facilities manager for Thomsen Reuters, says:
Labeling, a worthy obsession
I’ve had people call me obsessive compulsive, anal retentive and other not so flattering names in my data center career, but when it came to managing a mission critical facility and ensuring continuous uptime, being a little controlling is a good thing.

One of my more obsessive traits involved labeling.

Most of you are aware of the importance of having labeled power whips in a raised floor environment. But there are many other things in a data center raised floor area that should also be labeled. Proper labeling can prove very helpful when trying to locate infrastructure under the raised floor in a hurry.

Let me share with you some of the areas where labeling really provides big benefits, yet very few data centers actually implement.

Smoke Detectors

If you have smoke detectors under your raised floor I highly recommend adding some type of label on the raised floor panel right above it. There is any number of ways to mark the panel; we used a template to router a big red X with the detector number on it. A large floor plan layout is put at all the exit doors with the location of each detector on it. That way if a detector was in alarm, we knew its exact location, and finding the right floor panel to pull was much easier once it was labeled.

CRAC/CRAH Water Supply and Return Valves

Labeling your water supply and return valves to the CRAC/CRAH units can be a real time saver in the event of a water leak. Every second can mean gallons of water under your raised floor, which can shut down your data center in a heartbeat. We used a template to router a big blue V on each floor panel with a water value under it. Each valve had a brass tag indicating which A/C unit it fed and whether it was a supply or return valve.

Electrical Junction Boxes

If you have any type of electrical junction boxes under your floor, you will want to be able to locate them and also make sure no one puts any servers over them. We used a template to router a big blue E on each floor panel with an electrical junction box under it.

Using Multiple Colored Floor Panels

Using a different colored floor panel to create an egress route or pathway to the exit doors was a great safety measure in the event of an emergency. It can get pretty overwhelming when you find yourself in the middle of a large data center if a fire alarm goes off. We referred to it as “follow the yellow brick road” to safety. We also would use different colored tile around our PDU’s and CRAC/CRAH units to let everyone know there was a code clearance requirement around certain electrical equipment. Nothing could be left or stored on any colored floor panels.

These are just a few of the ways we manipulated and labeled our raised floor panels to ensure that if an emergency presented itself, we were prepared to deal with the problem as quickly as possible. For us a little obsessive compulsive behavior paid off in 12 consecutive years of continuous uptime.

Cloud-Based Identity Management and Authentication for Any Size Business

2012-04-24T03:00:00.000-07:00

Scott Goldman, CEO of TextPower (www.textpower.com), says:

Web site security is critically important to enterprises, financial institutions and e-commerce sites. But until recently the only way to secure web sites has been through a standard user ID and password combined with a "security token." This token is most commonly a separate device that generates a random number which must be entered into a blank field on the web page after the host approves the ID and password as authentic. But these company's token systems have been compromised and, moreover, users resist having to carry yet another device with them. They are living proof of the security industry's truism, "In the battle of security vs. convenience, convenience always wins."

Cell phones have already replaced calculators, cameras, navigation systems and boarding passes. As experts in the field of wireless communications we asked ourselves how to use these ubiquitous devices to replace these nearly-ancient "tokens" and make the process even more convenient. We did it by turning the cell phone security model upside down. Our multi-award winning and patent-pending TextKey™ solution is cloud-based and thus easier to implement and less expensive to deploy than other systems. Businesses of any size that must protect their web sites and VPNs from intrusion now have a solution that equals - or betters - the solution that Fortune 500 companies are using.

Most importantly, though, TextKey™ is more secure than other solutions. Unlike other systems that leave an unprotected data entry field open for hacking during the authentication process, TextKey™ generates a one-time password (OTP) which is displayed in plain view following the successful entry of an ID and password. That OTP must then be sent via a standard text message (SMS) to our authentication cloud from the cell phone preregistered as the device associated with that ID and password. Any type of cell phone will work - smartphones or "apps" are not required. TextKey™ uses the unique device identifier (UDID), the "fingerprint" of that cell phone, to confirm the authenticity of the code.

Only the correct OTP sent from the correct phone receives an authentication from TextKey™. If the correct code is sent from any other phone, including a phone that has been "spoofed" to emulate the mobile number of the authentic user, access is denied. In the event that someone attempts to violate the authentication process by sending the TextKey™ from a phone that is not preregistered as associated with that ID and password the TextKey™ system captures the phone number of the attempted hacker, making it possible to assist the authorities in tracking the attempted violator.

It's essential for any growing business to seek a solution that's affordable and scalable. TextKey™ offers a highly secure, inexpensive security solution that is scalable from 10 users to 10 million users, requires no hardware or software at the host's server and can be implemented in under a day. All data needs protection. Now all companies can have it.

Data Protection Survey Analysis

2012-04-23T04:58:00.001-07:00

Click here to download the full report.

A Unified View of the Data Center

2012-04-20T04:57:00.001-07:00

- Christophe Bertrand, senior director of corporate & product marketing at Hitachi Data Systems (http://www.hds.com), says:

Data center administrators are facing a myriad of challenges when it comes to managing the explosive growth of data coming into and moving across organizations today. Data capacity, applications and virtual servers are all growing at exponential rates and IT departments are struggling to store and manage all of that digital content, while keeping operational expenses in check. Furthermore, the threat of failing to meet data- or content-based service level objectives (SLO) for customers could result in financial and legal penalties for an organization.

This means IT administrators are bogged down and forced to deal with housekeeping tasks, to reign in all that data, reducing their productivity and taking their focus away from higher level activities that could advance the business, ensure compliance, or deliver new, value added services and applications to employees.

Dissecting the Data Problem

IDC is predicting the biggest challenge for IT administrators will come from the type of data expected to grow the most – unstructured data, which will come into organizations over internet protocols as files or objects. These collections or “stores” of unstructured data will grow into hundreds and thousands of petabytes and billions of objects, requiring larger file systems and scalable block storage systems. However, these systems will not be enough. The growth of unstructured data will require the integration and management of file, block and object data. This convergence will translate into greater storage efficiencies by eliminating three major costs:

· backup for data protection;

· extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) for data analysi;s; and,

· managing silos of file, block and object data.

Plotting a Solution Among the Myriad of Options

To address this, many in the storage industry are putting a renewed focus on unified storage. While the idea of unified storage is not a new one, the market requirements and customer challenges have intensified since the first wave of unified storage products entered the market. What remains to be seen is how effective the unified storage offerings of today will be at addressing the increasingly more stringent SLA/SLO requirements of enterprise customers.

In many ways, traditional unified storage is a bit of a “Jack of all trades…master of none”, and typically targeted at the lower tiers of the market. Most unified storage products today tend to be strong in one data type (either block or file) and weak in another. Many mid-market and enterprise users today need less complex and more unified infrastructures. What customers are really looking for is a “no compromise” approach to unified storage with equal block and file performance, scalability and reliability – with a single management framework. This approach to unified storage will help businesses of all sizes effectively address the many challenges related to managing data, including handling its growth, managing costs, simplifying complexity and meeting service level objectives.

The needs of the end user must come first. One of the top concerns of CIOs and IT administrators when discussing unified storage is they want the ability to have a unified view of their data center assets. This starts with the management of those assets. A truly unified approach allows IT to view and manage block, file and objects, all from a single place. This goes beyond unifying the management of assets within a particular product suite or stack of products, but across an entire suite of disparate solutions. By focusing on unified management, customers can manage and deploy their storage in a single solution, access block, file and object views, receive a unified dashboard, and access reporting tools across their infrastructure.

End users typically buy unified storage as a way to overcome the complexity of their infrastructure. However, while most unified platforms can theoretically handle large capacities of data, in reality scale creates tradeoffs: performance degradation, inability to protect the data effectively, inability to handle large files systems. Balanced scalability is critical, not just capacity scalability.

Organizations today want to simplify their acquisition models and gain new levels of flexibility when it comes to their storage solutions. What’s important to keep in mind when thinking about unified storage is whether or not the product is supported by a single management software platform for all data types, and how well the product integrates with the rest of the vendor’s portfolio. Is it part of a shared management framework, or another silo that adds to complexity?

The world has changed and re-examining what and where unified platforms fit is key. At the end of the day, unified storage products should be designed to eliminate silos, not cause more complexity and inefficiencies in the data center.

Bringing Content Closer to the Consumer: Event Proxy Cache Technology

2012-04-19T04:50:00.001-07:00

- Steve Wilson, director of systems engineering at SuperLumin Networks (www.superlumin.com), says:

A slow Web browsing experience is frustrating, to say the least. Trade shows and other corporate events are all too often case studies in network congestion. The networks and their Internet links are temporary constructs not often up to the load of hundreds or thousands of attendees using laptops and tablet devices at the same time. Even if the initial network performance is good, usage quickly ramps up as the event gets underway. That’s when the trouble begins. As usage ramps up, users will inevitably experience slow Internet browsing, unreliable network connections, and sluggish load times.

While Web performance has quickly become critical to everyday business productivity, new event acceleration technology is helping to improve network speed and enhance the attendee experience at trade shows—evident in a recent case study showcasing the 2012 Digital Marketing Summit.

With almost 5,000 attendees expected at the 2012 Adobe Digital Marketing Summit, network planners faced quite a challenge. Their main concern was to sustain high-quality Internet performance, even though the event featured an agenda full of video seminars to stream, programs to download, and most attendees would be using tablets and laptops to stay in touch with operations back home.

To provide efficient Internet access to the thousands of attendees, network planners elected to make use of event proxy cache technology. During the Summit, event proxy cache technology alleviated bandwidth congestion by capturing downloaded content and storing it locally—keeping the conference and other content “cached” on the event network. Subsequent requests for all those video seminars and online programs were served to conference participants from the event proxy cache. The results were spectacular.

During the Summit, the maximum number of unique users was 4,752, with a peak of 2,289 concurrent users on the final day. The event proxy service provided bandwidth savings of 215GB, contributing to the exceptional Web browsing and online experience at the Summit.

A fast, reliable event network provides the opportunity to enhance attendees’ overall event experience—enhancing productivity for staff, attendees and guests. By utilizing event proxy cache technology to support the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit, network operations were significantly enhanced to the benefit of all conference participants. Attendees enjoyed an excellent online experience and the actual Internet connection never became the limiting factor for network performance. When did YOU last enjoy your online experience at a large trade show or corporate event?

*This graph shows the Internet content accessed by conference participants during a twelve-hour period. The yellow and green area together (above the axis) represents the local bandwidth consumed by actual user HTTP requests. The orange area (below the axis) represents the actual internet bandwidth used to fetch content from origin Web servers. The green area shows the Internet bandwidth that was saved—this traffic represents the HTTP traffic served to users directly from the event proxy cache. By utilizing the proxy service, the average bandwidth savings during the twelve-hour period was 40 percent, with the maximum bandwidth savings of 84 percent.

About SuperLumin

SuperLumin Networks is a subsidiary company of STRATACACHE. SuperLumin Networks provides caching, content acceleration, and application acceleration solutions to enterprises across the globe. SuperLumin products represent state-of-the-art, award-winning technology that is flexible, manageable and affordable.

For more information on SuperLumin Networks, visit www.superlumin.com or follow us on Twitter @SuperLumin.