How InterSystems Builds an Enterprise Database at Scale with Docker Enterprise

We sat down recently with InterSystems, our partner and customer, to talk about how they deliver an enterprise database at scale to their customers. InterSystems’s software powers mission-critical applications at hospitals, banks, government agencies and other organizations.

We spoke with Joe Carroll, Product Specialist, and Todd Winey, Director of Partner Programs at InterSystems about how containerization and Docker are helping transform their business.

Here’s what they told us. You can also catch the highlights in this 2 minute video:

On InterSystems and Enterprise Databases…

Joe Carroll: InterSystems is a 41 year old database and data platform company. We’ve been in data storage for a very long time and our customers tend to be traditional enterprises — healthcare, finance, shipping and logistics as well as government agencies. Anywhere that there’s mission critical data we tend to be around. Our customers have really important systems that impact people’s lives, and the mission critical nature of that data characterizes who our customers are and who we are.

On Digital Transformation in Established Industries…

Todd Winey: Many of those organizations and industries have been traditionally seen as laggards in terms of their technology adoption in the past, so the speed with which they’re moving Continue reading

PRACE Supercomputing Resource Awards Spread The HPC Gospel

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) has selected five new small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to receive access to supercomputers and HPC expertise under its SHAPE initiative. …

PRACE Supercomputing Resource Awards Spread The HPC Gospel was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.

Announcing Joseph Hall as SVP for a Strong Internet

I’m excited to announce that Joseph Lorenzo Hall will join us as our Senior Vice President for a Strong Internet. He will start in October and be based in our Reston, VA, office.

Many of you may know Joe from his work at the Center for Democracy and Technology, where he has been Chief Technologist for about six years. He has a unique ability to put together policy and technical issues, particularly but not only with respect to security. He’s the Vice-Chair of the Board of the California Voter Foundation and a Board member of the Verified Voting Foundation. He went to school at UC Berkeley and received his PhD in Information Systems from there in 2008. A former astrophysicist, he has been working on a monograph about sand clocks, which you may know by the term “hourglass”. I am not kidding even a little when I say you should ask about it, because you will be fascinated. He brings additional strength to our already great group of people who work to make the Internet stronger.

The post Announcing Joseph Hall as SVP for a Strong Internet appeared first on Internet Society.

IDG Contributor Network: A Virtual WAN: Moving closer to the enterprise

Microsoft has introduced a new virtual WAN as a competitive differentiator and is getting enough tracking that AWS and Google may follow. At present, Microsoft is the only company to offer a virtual WAN of this kind. This made me curious to discover the highs and lows of this technology. So I sat down with Sorell Slaymaker, Principal Consulting Analyst at TechVision Research to discuss. The following is a summary of our discussion.But before we proceed, let’s gain some understanding of the cloud connectivity.Cloud connectivity has evolved over time. When the cloud was introduced about a decade ago, let’s say, if you were an enterprise, you would connect to what's known as a cloud service provider (CSP). However, over the last 10 years, many providers like Equinix have started to offer carrier-neutral collocations. Now, there is the opportunity to meet a variety of cloud companies in a carrier-neutral colocation. On the other hand, there are certain limitations as well as cloud connectivity.To read this article in full, please click here

Disaster Recovery Test Faking: Another Use Case for Stretched VLANs

The March 2019 Packet Pushers Virtual Design Clinic had to deal with an interesting question:

Our server team is nervous about full-scale DR testing. So they have asked us to stretch L2 between sites. Is this a good idea?

The design clinic participants were a bit more diplomatic (watch the video) than my TL&DR answer which would be: **** NO!

Let’s step back and try to understand what’s really going on:

SD-WAN Named Most Disruptive Network Tech of 2019

AT&T’s Fuetsch Touts Trellis Deployed in Tier-1 Network

BrandPost: 8 Key Considerations When Selecting a Managed SD-WAN Service Provider

Software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) technology can bring myriad benefits to companies of nearly any size or stripe, but as discussed in a previous post, it can be complex to deploy. For many IT teams, the solution means opting for a managed SD-WAN service. But this may lead to another issue: how to assess providers.After conversations with CenturyLink executive Michael Lawson, General Manager of SD-WAN Solution Architecture for CenturyLink– I’ve come up with eight considerations when assessing SD-WAN managed service providers.To read this article in full, please click here

Oracle Co-CEO Mark Hurd Takes Medical Leave of Absence

BrandPost: SD-WAN: Does Your IT Team Have What It Takes?

An earlier three-part series of blog posts examined a series of questions to ask to determine whether your company may be a good candidate to implement Software-Defined Wide-area Network (SD-WAN) technology. What the series did not cover was whether you’ve got the personnel in-house that it takes to architect and implement an SD-WAN and manage it for the long-term. That requires assessing a different series of questions. While SD-WAN has been talked about for years, it is still a relatively young technology that has not yet seen widespread implementation, notes Michael Lawson, General Manager of SD-WAN Solution Architecture for CenturyLink. “There’s still a lot of learning going on,” he says.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco adds speed, smarts to MDS storage networking family

Looking to support ever-increasing workloads, Cisco has pumped up the speed and intelligence of its storage area networking family.The company addressed the need for increased speed by saying it would add support for 64Gbps ready SAN fabric across its 9700 line of MDS storage directors.The MDS family includes the 18-slot 9718, the 10-slot 9710 and the six-slot 9706. More about backup and recovery: Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference How to pick an off-site data-backup method Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet? The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space The main idea here is that customers can upgrade to the new fabric module and upgrade their software to add speed and capacity for high-speed fabrics without having to rip-and-replace any of the directors, according to Adarsh Viswanathan, Cisco product manager, data center switching. A 64Gbps line card for all three chassis will be available in the future, Cisco said.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco adds speed, smarts to MDS storage networking family

Looking to support ever-increasing workloads, Cisco has pumped up the speed and intelligence of its storage area networking family.The company addressed the need for increased speed by saying it would add support for 64Gbps ready SAN fabric across its 9700 line of MDS storage directors.The MDS family includes the 18-slot 9718, the 10-slot 9710 and the six-slot 9706. More about backup and recovery: Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference How to pick an off-site data-backup method Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet? The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space The main idea here is that customers can upgrade to the new fabric module and upgrade their software to add speed and capacity for high-speed fabrics without having to rip-and-replace any of the directors, according to Adarsh Viswanathan, Cisco product manager, data center switching. A 64Gbps line card for all three chassis will be available in the future, Cisco said.To read this article in full, please click here

Google Cloud Dataproc Gains Kubernetes Overlord

On-Chip Optical Links Are One Step Closer To Reality

Ayar Labs looks like it is just about ready to put its optical I/O chiplet technology into commercial datacenter products.  …

On-Chip Optical Links Are One Step Closer To Reality was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.

BrandPost: 5 Ways SD-WAN Promote Business Agility

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with coining the adage “change is the only constant in life” –  a saying that certainly applies to enterprises in 2019. With change as a given, it’s crucial for businesses to be agile and flexible in order to keep up.Employing software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) technology is one way to promote business agility. SD-WANs abstract the network control layer from the underlying forwarding plane and physical transport. Users can employ most any wide-area network service – leased lines, MPLS, broadband wireless, Internet – and still apply policy-based control and other SD-WAN features.To read this article in full, please click here

To secure industrial IoT, use segmentation instead of firewalls

The internet of things (IoT) has been top of mind for network and security professionals for the better part of the past five years. This has been particularly true for the area of industrial IoT (IIoT). Connected industrial devices are nothing new, but most IT people aren’t familiar with them because they have been managed by operational technology (OT) teams. More and more, though, business leaders want to bring OT and IT together to drive better insights from the combined data set.While there are many advantages to merging IT and OT and having IIoT fall under IT ownership, it has a profound impact on the cybersecurity team because it introduces several new security threats. Each connected endpoint, if breached, creates a backdoor into the other systems.To read this article in full, please click here

To secure industrial IoT, use segmentation instead of firewalls

The internet of things (IoT) has been top of mind for network and security professionals for the better part of the past five years. This has been particularly true for the area of industrial IoT (IIoT). Connected industrial devices are nothing new, but most IT people aren’t familiar with them because they have been managed by operational technology (OT) teams. More and more, though, business leaders want to bring OT and IT together to drive better insights from the combined data set.While there are many advantages to merging IT and OT and having IIoT fall under IT ownership, it has a profound impact on the cybersecurity team because it introduces several new security threats. Each connected endpoint, if breached, creates a backdoor into the other systems.To read this article in full, please click here

Dell EMC’s PowerMax is Now All NVM-Express, Persistent Storage

When Dell EMC more than a year ago introduced the PowerMax storage array as the successor to the company’s all-flash VMAX offerings, the company touted the system’s readiness to leverage the NVM-Express (NVMe) protocol and, more importantly, its ability to serve as a gateway to NVMe-over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) and storage-class memory (SCM), both of which would address the growing demand for better performance and latency. …

Dell EMC’s PowerMax is Now All NVM-Express, Persistent Storage was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

How open standards help with defense in depth

If you ask an ordinary person about information security, they’ll probably talk to you about endpoints. Most people are aware of virus scanners for notebooks or PCs, and may have encountered some kind of mobile device management on a work-provided phone. These endpoint solutions naturally come to mind if someone mentions cyber security. However, this is backward from the way that infosec professionals think about the issue.

Someone who works in infosec will tell you that the endpoint should be the absolute last line of defense. If a virus scanner finds malware on your work notebook, the malware should have had to defeat a long list of other security precautions in order to get that far. This layered approach to security is known as defense in depth.

The term “defense in depth” originally was applied to military strategy. It described the practice of trying to slow an enemy down, disperse their attack, and cause casualties; rather than trying to stop their attack at a single, heavily fortified point. The enemy might breach the first layer of defenses, but would find additional layers beyond. While they struggled to advance, they could be surrounded and then counter-attacked.

Infosec in Depth

The information Continue reading

AT&T Trumpets SDN Milestone, Reiterates Virtualization Goal