IDG Contributor Network: Can Ansible be the automation platform for the enterprise? Red Hat thinks so

Red Hat presented a vision during today's keynote address at the Red Hat Summit that it believes Ansible can and will be the foundation for enterprise-wide automation. Red Hat, by the way, recently acquired Ansible.Although the vision appears enticing at first glance, the broad statements about unifying the enterprise data center under Ansible really don't ring true.What is Ansible? Ansible describes its technology in the following way:Ansible is the most popular open source automation tool on GitHub today with more than a quarter million downloads per month. With over 2,400 contributors submitting new modules all the time, rest assured that what you are automating is covered in Ansible already, or will be very soon." Ansible was founded to provide a new way to think about managing systems and applications that better fit this new world. Historically, management vendors and home-grown scripting solutions were created to manage stacks of software on servers. In contrast, Ansible was created to orchestrate multi-tier applications across clouds. From configuration to deployment to zero-downtime rolling upgrades, Ansible is a single framework that can fully automate today’s modern enteprise apps. OUR DIFFERENCE Simple, agentless & powerful. Ansible’s simple, YAML-based automation syntax is quick Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Can Ansible be the automation platform for the enterprise? Red Hat thinks so

Red Hat presented a vision during today's keynote address at the Red Hat Summit that it believes Ansible can and will be the foundation for enterprise-wide automation. Red Hat, by the way, recently acquired Ansible.Although the vision appears enticing at first glance, the broad statements about unifying the enterprise data center under Ansible really don't ring true.What is Ansible? Ansible describes its technology in the following way:Ansible is the most popular open source automation tool on GitHub today with more than a quarter million downloads per month. With over 2,400 contributors submitting new modules all the time, rest assured that what you are automating is covered in Ansible already, or will be very soon." Ansible was founded to provide a new way to think about managing systems and applications that better fit this new world. Historically, management vendors and home-grown scripting solutions were created to manage stacks of software on servers. In contrast, Ansible was created to orchestrate multi-tier applications across clouds. From configuration to deployment to zero-downtime rolling upgrades, Ansible is a single framework that can fully automate today’s modern enteprise apps. OUR DIFFERENCE Simple, agentless & powerful. Ansible’s simple, YAML-based automation syntax is quick Continue reading

Whack a Static

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How to size up a new cloud service like low-priced Wasabi

Saving money may be a good enough reason to try a brand-new cloud storage service -- if it can deliver on its promises.That's the equation some enterprises may use when they look at Wasabi Technologies, an object storage startup that says it offers six times the performance of Amazon's S3 service at one-fifth the price. The service is available globally on Wednesday.The company, started by the co-founders of online backup provider Carbonite, says its single pool of capacity can deliver primary, secondary or archive data at a sustained-read speed of 1.3GB per second, versus 191MB per second at Amazon. Its durability is the same, Wasabi says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco drops critical security warning on VPN router, 3 high priority caveats

Cisco today warned user of a critical vulnerability in its CVR100W Wireless-N VPN router execute that could let an attacker issues arbitrary code or cause a denial of service situation.The company also issues three “High” level impact warnings advisories on its IOS XR Software, Teleprescence and Aironet wireless access point products.On the Critical warning, Cisco said a vulnerability in the Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP) implementation in the Cisco CVR100W Wireless-N VPN Router could let an unauthenticated, Layer 2–adjacent attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (DoS).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco drops critical security warning on VPN router, 3 high priority caveats

Cisco today warned user of a critical vulnerability in its CVR100W Wireless-N VPN router execute that could let an attacker issues arbitrary code or cause a denial of service situation.The company also issues three “High” level impact warnings advisories on its IOS XR Software, Teleprescence and Aironet wireless access point products.On the Critical warning, Cisco said a vulnerability in the Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP) implementation in the Cisco CVR100W Wireless-N VPN Router could let an unauthenticated, Layer 2–adjacent attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (DoS).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Red Hat Integrates AWS into OpenShift Container Platform

Red Hat and AWS also plan increased integration between AWS and Kubernetes.

Datadog Adds to its List of Azure Integrations

Think of Azure Storage as the equivalent to AWS S3.

Verizon sells its cloud and managed hosting services to IBM

Verizon shut down its public cloud service in early 2016, and is now unloading its virtual private cloud and managed hosting offerings to IBM.The deal, announced Tuesday, allows IBM to improve its position in cloud computing, a spokesman said by email. Meanwhile, the deal allows Verizon to get out of the cloud infrastructure market dominated by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, allowing it to focus on its managed network, security, and communications services.The companies did not disclose the terms of the sale. The transaction is expected to close later this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Homegrown master-master replication for a NoSQL database

Many of you may have already heard about the high performance of the Tarantool DBMS, about its rich toolset and certain features. Say, it has a really cool on-disk storage engine called Vinyl, and it knows how to work with JSON documents. However, most articles out there tend to overlook one crucial thing: usually, Tarantool is regarded simply as storage, whereas its killer feature is the possibility of writing code inside it, which makes working with your data extremely effective. If you’d like to know how igorcoding and I built a system almost entirely inside Tarantool, read on.

If you’ve ever used the Mail.Ru email service, you probably know that it allows collecting emails from other accounts. If the OAuth protocol is supported, we don’t need to ask a user for third-party service credentials to do that — we can use OAuth tokens instead. Besides, Mail.Ru Group has lots of projects that require authorization via third-party services and need users’ OAuth tokens to work with certain applications. That’s why we decided to build a service for storing and updating tokens.

I guess everybody knows what an OAuth token looks like. To refresh your memory, it’s a structure consisting of 3–4 fields:

Apstra bring intent-based networking to life

What do UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster and intent-based networks have in common? These are all things that people claim to have seen, but no one can really prove it and their existence remains largely a myth.While the good folks over at the X-Files will continue to try and prove the first two, start-up vendor Apstra appears to have licked the third, as its latest operating system release, AOS 1.2 is making vendor-agnostic, intent-based networking a reality. RELATED: SD-WAN: What it is and why you will use it one day You might be asking what exactly intent-based networking is? Think of it as a network where you tell it the “what,” and the “how” is determined by the system. A good example of this is a self-driving car where the driver puts in the destination address, and the car’s system figures out the details. The driver just gives it a command and then gets there. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: A bleak picture of internet trust

The 2017 CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust paints a bleak picture of the current state of trust online. A majority of those surveyed said they are more concerned about their privacy than the year before, with an almost even split between those “much more concerned” and those only “somewhat more concerned”. When asked whether they agree with the statement “overall, I trust the Internet”, only 12% of respondents strongly agreed and a further 43% somewhat agreed. This means only a little more than half agreed that they trust the Internet, and some even expressed some reservation by choosing to respond “somewhat agree”. —The Internet Society

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Google echoes Amazon’s assurance on EU data protection compliance

Google has joined Amazon Web Services in promising customers of its cloud services that it will be compliant with new European Union data protection rules due to take effect next year.Neither company is fully compliant yet, but both have now made public commitments to meet the requirements of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by May 25, 2018, echoing a promise Microsoft made back in February.The GDPR replaces the 1995 Data Protection Directive. Among its biggest changes are requirements that companies:- erase personal data on request unless there is a legitimate reason to retain it; - inform those affected by data breaches, and- design data protection into their products and services from the earliest stage of development.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

33% off Vacu Vin Wine Saver Pump – Deal Alert

The Wine Saver is a vacuum pump that extracts the air from an opened wine bottle and re-seals it using a rubber stopper. The airtight vacuum inhibits the oxidation process that is responsible for the deterioration of wine. The vacuum is created by placing a stopper into the neck of the opened bottle and pumping it until resistance is detectable. The pump incorporates a patented 'click' mechanism that indicates when a sufficient airtight environment has been established. It's discounted 33% on Amazon, so you can get it right now for just $9.43 To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Barracuda protects industrial IoT with network-based firewall

Many industrial IoT systems have open doors that create unintended vulnerabilities. What information could be exposed by open communications protocols? How do hackers identify vulnerable systems? What security resources are available? How do IoT firewalls protect against such threats?TCP Port 502 vulnerabilities Many industrial systems use TCP Port 502, which allows two hosts to establish a connection and exchange streams of data. TCP guarantees delivery of data and that packets will be delivered on port 502 in the same order in which they were sent. This creates the risk of remote attackers to install arbitrary firmware updates via a MODBUS 125 function code to TCP port 502. Scans from services such as Shodan identify systems that have an open TCP port 502 that could be vulnerable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Barracuda protects industrial IoT with network-based firewall

Many industrial IoT systems have open doors that create unintended vulnerabilities. What information could be exposed by open communications protocols? How do hackers identify vulnerable systems? What security resources are available? How do IoT firewalls protect against such threats?TCP Port 502 vulnerabilities Many industrial systems use TCP Port 502, which allows two hosts to establish a connection and exchange streams of data. TCP guarantees delivery of data and that packets will be delivered on port 502 in the same order in which they were sent. This creates the risk of remote attackers to install arbitrary firmware updates via a MODBUS 125 function code to TCP port 502. Scans from services such as Shodan identify systems that have an open TCP port 502 that could be vulnerable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Migrating to the cloud: You want me to lift and shift what?

I recently participated in a webinar, and one of the questions I was asked made me think about a great first topic for this blog: What are the key drivers to keep an application and “lift and shift”?If you’re in a company that has a plan to move to the cloud, you’ve probably been asked what it is going to take to move an existing application to the cloud. In one of my previous roles, our CIO gave us the mandate that we were going to move everything out of one of our expensive data centers to the cloud within two years, so I saw a lot of “lift and shift” requests. But not a single one of those requests resulted in a lift and shift.Let’s review the benefits of running in the cloud and then see if we can characterize the types of applications that will run well in the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Migrating to the cloud: You want me to lift and shift what?

I recently participated in a webinar, and one of the questions I was asked made me think about a great first topic for this blog: What are the key drivers to keep an application and “lift and shift”?If you’re in a company that has a plan to move to the cloud, you’ve probably been asked what it is going to take to move an existing application to the cloud. In one of my previous roles, our CIO gave us the mandate that we were going to move everything out of one of our expensive data centers to the cloud within two years, so I saw a lot of “lift and shift” requests. But not a single one of those requests resulted in a lift and shift.Let’s review the benefits of running in the cloud and then see if we can characterize the types of applications that will run well in the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Micron’s SolidScale system pushes SSDs out to shared storage

SSDs operate the fastest when inside a computer. Micron's new SolidScale storage system uproots SSDs from servers and pushes them into discrete boxes while reducing latency.SolidScale is a top-of-the-rack storage system that will house many SSDs. It will connect to servers, memory, and other computing resources in a data center via gigabit ethernet, and will use the emerging NVMeoF (NVMe over Fabric) 1.0 protocol for data transfers.The new storage system is faster than regular storage arrays, Micron claimed. SolidScale can deliver data more than two times faster than a standard all-flash array.SolidScale is a step in decoupling SSDs from servers and putting them into shared storage in data centers. It also provides a power-efficient way of packing fast storage into tight spaces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Micron’s SolidScale system pushes SSDs out to shared storage

SSDs operate the fastest when inside a computer. Micron's new SolidScale storage system uproots SSDs from servers and pushes them into discrete boxes while reducing latency.SolidScale is a top-of-the-rack storage system that will house many SSDs. It will connect to servers, memory, and other computing resources in a data center via gigabit ethernet, and will use the emerging NVMeoF (NVMe over Fabric) 1.0 protocol for data transfers.The new storage system is faster than regular storage arrays, Micron claimed. SolidScale can deliver data more than two times faster than a standard all-flash array.SolidScale is a step in decoupling SSDs from servers and putting them into shared storage in data centers. It also provides a power-efficient way of packing fast storage into tight spaces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here