SDxCentral Weekly News Roundup — April 29, 2016
VMware's head of public cloud efforts is leaving the company.
VMware's head of public cloud efforts is leaving the company.
In this post, I’m going to walk you through the steps to install Ansible 2.x into a Python virtual environment (virtualenv) on OS X. There’s nothing terribly hard or unusual about this process, but I wanted to document it here for folks who might be new to the process (or who might be interested in why using this approach could be beneficial).
I’m stumbled into this process because I had been using Ansible 1.9.x and wanted to upgrade to Ansible 2.x so that I could use some of the new OpenStack-related modules. (These are modules that allow you to manipulate OpenStack-based resources, like instances or networks, using Ansible playbooks, and they were introduced with the release of Ansible 2.x.) The new modules had some additional Python dependencies, and installing these Python dependencies on OS X can be challenging at times (due to System Integrity Protection [SIP]). For example, installing the shade module on my OS X El Capitan system ran afoul of SIP.
The answer is to use Python virtual environments (aka “virtualenvs”). Virtualenvs provide a mechanism whereby you can isolate Python dependencies between different Python-based projects. You create a Python virtualenv, then Continue reading

CloudFlare recently wrote about the group of cyber criminals claiming to be be the "Armada Collective." In that article, we stressed that this group had not followed through on any of the ransom threats they had made. Quite simply, this copycat group of cyber criminals had not actually carried out a single DDoS attack—they were only trying to make easy money through fear by using the name of the original “Armada Collective” group from late 2015.
Since we published that article earlier this week, this copycat group claiming to be "Armada Collective" has stopped sending ransom threats to website owners. Extorting companies proves to be challenging when the group’s email actively encourages target companies to the search for the phrase “Armada Collective” on Google. The first search result for this phrase now returns CloudFlare’s article outing this group as a fraud.

Beginning late Thursday evening (Pacific Standard Time) several CloudFlare customers began to receive threatening emails from a "new" group calling itself the “Lizard Squad”. These emails have a similar modus operandi to the previous ransom emails. This group was threatening DDoS attacks unless a ransom amount was paid to a Bitcoin address before a deadline. Based on discussions Continue reading
It depends on the ratio of physical to virtual in the network.
HPE has all the pieces, but carriers want open source.
Flash storage is maturing, and the latest products are taking on a more general-purpose storage function.