VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery Helps Meet Key Recovery Point Objectives at an Affordable Cost
PALO ALTO, Calif., June 10, 2015 – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced the City of Avondale, Ariz., has implemented VMware’s unified platform for the hybrid cloud. By virtualizing the network with VMware NSX™ and adopting VMware vCloud® Air™ Disaster Recovery, the City is better equipped to protect critical services. More than simple backups, Avondale is better prepared to achieve quick recovery from unforeseen incidents that could impact the delivery of municipal services to citizens and businesses such as traffic management, water and wastewater utilities, and emergency response by police officers and firefighters.
The city of Avondale, an innovative community in the Phoenix Metropolitan area, is committed to making sure that critical health, safety, utility, and financial services are always available for its residents. According to the City of Avondale, its municipal government maintains a budget of $180 million with over 500 employees. The 16-person Information Technology (IT) department supports the community by using technology to engage the community and innovate municipal services to keep the city responsive, efficient, and secure.
The City was looking to improve its ability to recover from unforeseen disasters through cloud-based disaster recovery. Given the Continue reading
Adapting Applications And Avoiding Acrobatic Adjustments
A couple of months ago, I was on a panel at TechUnplugged where we talked about scaling systems to large sizes. Here’s a link to the video of that panel:
One of the things that we discussed in that panel was applications. Toward the end of the discussion we got into a bit of a back-and-forth about applications and the systems they run on. I feel like it’s time to develop those ideas a bit more.
The Achilles’ Heel
My comments about legacy applications are pointed. If a company is spending thousands of dollars and multiples hours of time in the engineering team to reconfigure the network or the storage systems to support an old application, my response was simple: go out of business.
It does sound a bit flippant to think that a company making a profit should just close the shutters and walk away. But that’s just the problem that we’re facing in the market today. We’ve spent an inordinate amount of time creating bespoke, custom networks and systems to support applications that were written years, or even decades, ago in alien environments.
We do it every day without thinking. We have to install this specific Java version Continue reading
What happened next: the deprecation of ANY
Almost a year ago, we announced that we were going to stop answering DNS ANY queries. We were prompted by a number of factors:
The lack of legitimate ANY use.
The abundance of malicious ANY use.
The constant use of ANY queries in large DNS amplification DDoS attacks.
Additionally, we were about to launch Universal DNSSEC, and we could foresee the high cost of assembling ANY answers and providing DNSSEC-on-the-fly for those answers, especially when most of the time, those ANY answers were for malicious, illegitimate, clients.
Although we usually make a tremendous effort to maintain backwards compatibility across Internet protocols (recently, for example, continuing to support SHA-1-based SSL certificates), it was clear to us that the DNS ANY query was something that was better removed from the Internet than maintained for general use.
Our proposal at the time was to return an ERROR code to the querier telling them that ANY was not supported, and this sparked a robust discussion in the DNS protocol community. In this blog post, we’ll cover what has happened and what our final plan is.
Just before we published our blog a popular software started using ANY queries, to get all address Continue reading
The Four Element Sword Engagement
Ongoing APT activity against Tibetans, Hong Kong and Taiwanese interests In “The Four Element Sword Engagement (Full Report)”, Arbor ASERT reveals recent ongoing APT activity likely associated with long-running threat campaigns against Tibetans, Hong Kong, Taiwanese interests and human rights workers. We presume the existence of associated malcode, dubbed the Four Element Sword Builder, which […]Concept Data Tower Scrapes The Sky For Efficiency
We talk about architecture all the time when discussing systems, but when it comes to the datacenters that house these machines, the shells are about as exciting as a monstrous warehouse for a massive distribution operation. Considering that data and processing are the most profitable products on the planet these days, maybe this is suitable and fitting, but another way to look at it is that datacenters should not only be marvels of engineering but also inspiring structures like other kinds of buildings.
Every year, the architecture magazine Evolo hosts a skyscraper design competition so that architects can let their …
Concept Data Tower Scrapes The Sky For Efficiency was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Know Your Virtual Workloads: Reads/Writes & Access Patterns
The promise of the virtual data center can quickly be undermined by challenges that crop up in workload behavior.