Zynga’s data center troubles prove cloud computing isn’t a game

Last week, embattled game maker Zynga announced $100 million in spending reductions. The hundreds of layoffs rightly garnered most of the headlines, but there was another important development as well – the company also said that it was abandoning the data centers on which it reportedly just spent $100 million to build. Zynga will return its infrastructure to the cloud.It seems that after being a big Amazon Web Services customer for several years (running a reported 80% of its computing load), in 2012 the company made a "dramatic shift" from the public cloud to its own network, called zCloud. At the time, Allan Leinwand, Zynga's CTO for infrastructure, told PC World that AWS was like a four-door sedan, and that, "we love four-door sedans, but it's a car that's used for a lot of things – doing the shopping, moving the kids. I like to think of zCloud as the sports car built for the Le Mans of social gaming. It's tuned for the track." (Of course, the company still ran some workloads on AWS using a hybrid cloud model.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Disrupt NY: Meet the next generation of tech companies

11 up-and-coming tech companiesLast week, TechCrunch held its annual Disrupt NY event, where hopeful tech companies gather to explain their ideas, show off their products and try to attract allies, funding and attention.I attended on Monday, May 4th, the first day of the three-day event, and talked to some of the companies exhibiting in Startup Alley, a large, packed room in which several rows of hopefuls showed off their ideas to a loud and lively crowd.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Presentation & Video: Quo Vadis, SDN?

From the automation perspective, the RIPE conference is a dream come true – 30 seconds after you upload your presentation, it appears on the RIPE web site, it’s automatically updated on the podium computer, and the video recording of your talk is published before you even manage to get off the podium – so you can already watch my “SDN - 4 years later (aka Quo Vadis, SDN?)” presentation if you missed it yesterday.

Watch the presentation

The best way to protect passwords may be creating fake ones

Password managers are a great way to supply random, unique passwords to a high number of websites. But most still have an Achilles’ heel: Usually, a single master password unlocks the entire vault.But a group of researchers has developed a type of password manager that creates decoy password vaults if a wrong master password is supplied.A paper on the experimental software, called NoCrack, will be presented on May 19 at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Jose, California.NoCrack is intended to make it much more time-consuming and difficult for attackers to figure out if they’ve hit pay dirt.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The best way to protect passwords may be creating fake ones

Password managers are a great way to supply random, unique passwords to a high number of websites. But most still have an Achilles’ heel: Usually, a single master password unlocks the entire vault.But a group of researchers has developed a type of password manager that creates decoy password vaults if a wrong master password is supplied.A paper on the experimental software, called NoCrack, will be presented on May 19 at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Jose, California.+ MORE: Beware ticking IoT security time bomb +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dial Peer Redundancy

The implementation of redundancy in any technology is of paramount importance, whether you’re studying to achieve a CCIE certification or designing a network for a client. So it goes without saying that this is a concept with which you should become intimately familiar.

In this blog, we’ll turn our focus specifically to redundancy in IOS dial-peers. Of course, dial-peers come in two different flavors: POTS and VoIP. POTS dial-peers deal exclusively with PSTN connectivity while VoIP dial-peers can be used for several purposes, as long as the communication takes place over IP.

Let’s take the example of a call routed inbound from the PSTN, destined toward the HQ CUCM cluster using the H.323 protocol. The configuration on the gateway appears as shown below.

Dial-Peer-Redundancy01

As you can see, we are accepting calls inbound from the PSTN using dial-peer voice 1 pots and translating the incoming called number to a 4-digit DN. From there, we have two separate dial-peers with the ability to send the call to the HQ CUCM cluster. As you know, the dial-peer with the lowest preference (default 0) is chosen as the first routing option. If for some reason, that option is unavailable, the next possible dial-peer Continue reading

Google’s self-driving cars of tomorrow face the mean streets of today

Google says its self-driving cars can make driving safer because they pay better attention to the road than humans do—though there have been dings along the way.While smartphones and other in-car distractions can fatally hinder a driver’s concentration, “a self-driving car has people beat on this dimension of road safety,” says Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving car program. With 360-degree visibility, the newest sensors in Google’s fleet can keep track of other vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians to a distance of nearly two football fields, he wrote in a post on Medium on Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

For containers, security is problem #1

I get it. I really do. Containers let data-center and cloud administrators put two to three times more server instances on a given server than they can with virtual machines. That means fewer servers, which means less power usage, which equals -- Ka-ching! -- less spending on your IT budget. What's not to like?MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 12 Free Cloud Storage options Well, ahem, you see there's this little, tiny problem. It’s unclear just how secure containers are, and there is certainly not much agreement on how to secure them or who will take that on.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Super-fast Wi-Fi coming to a public hotspot near you

Wireless hotspots that can deliver hundreds of megabits per second in real-world bandwidth will become more common as operators increase their investments in Wi-Fi networks.Not much has been announced, but a range of fixed, cable and mobile operators have already started or are planning upgrades to 802.11ac, the fastest Wi-Fi technology yet, according to market research company IHS. By this time next year a noticeable number of hotspots will use it, said research director Richard Webb, who is currently conducting a survey to pinpoint operator plans.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: How to use public Wi-Fi hotspots safely Overall operator spending on Wi-Fi networks in 2015 is expected to increase by 88 percent year-on-year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Planning your Windows Server 2003 migration: Tips and resources

Many companies not making the migration off of Windows Server 2003 before support ends in July cite cost as the reason; either they can't afford it or they haven't got the budget this year but will later in the year or next year. If you are in such a scenario, you should still begin preparing for the eventual move and not wait until you have the money to begin planning. That way you can hit the ground running when the funds are there. Endpoint security company Bit9 recommends several steps in the process:Don't do it alone: A smooth transition to a new platform will require full buy-in and agreement from any and all impacted stakeholders. That means not just the IT department, but the business units impacted and the budgeting finance team.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Beware the ticking Internet of Things security time bomb

IBM’s Andy Thurai didn’t quite put the words into former RSA CTO Deepak Taneja’s mouth, but did prompt him by asking at the start of a TIE Startup Con panel in Cambridge, Mass., earlier this month whether Internet of Things security is a “time bomb ready to explode.”Taneja responded that technology is advancing at a rate that’s outstripping enterprises’ ability to secure internal and cloud resources, and then along comes IoT in the form of all sorts of networked sensors and gadgets. “Organizations aren’t spending that much on security. It’s increasing, but it’s not enough and IoT only makes it worse,’ he said. “So it is a time bomb. “To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Check Point SmartLog – Recommended

Trigger warning for Check Point haters: I’m about to say nice things about Check Point.

Continuing the recent theme of Check Point-related posts, I’d like to give Check Point credit for once. SmartLog is what I always wanted from Tracker/Log Viewer, and they’re not even charging me extra for it. Shocking, I know.

Traditional Log Analysis

15-20 years ago, Check Point was well ahead of the competition when it came to viewing firewall logs. “Log Viewer” or “SmartView Tracker,”[1] let you filter logs by source, destination, service, etc., and quickly see what was happening. The GUI worked well enough, and junior admins could learn it quickly.

Most other firewalls only had syslog. That meant that your analysis tools were limited to grep and awk. Powerful yes, but a bit of a learning curve. There was also the problem of ‘saving’ a search – you’d end up hunting through your shell history, trying to recreate that 15-stage piped work of art. Splunk wasn’t around then.

Times Change

Tracker has several issues:

  • Log files are ‘flat’ files. It is a proprietary binary format, but it’s still flat, with no indexing. The format is very structured, but searches are slow when the files get large.
  • Searches Continue reading

IBM cloud will reach back into tape for low-cost storage

In the new world of cloud storage, there’s still room for old standbys like tape. IBM says combining them can save enterprises money.At its Edge conference in Las Vegas this week, the company will preview an archiving architecture that can span all tiers of storage from server-based flash cache to tape, moving data to the best and most cost-effective tier at any time based on enterprise policies.Enterprises are accumulating growing volumes of data, including new types such as surveillance video that may never be used on a regular basis but need to be stored for a long time. At the same time, new big-data analytics tools are making old and little-used data useful for gleaning new insights into business and government. IBM is going after customers in health care, social media, oil and gas, government and other sectors that want to get to all of their data no matter where it’s stored.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

After trying its own data center, Zynga retreats to the cloud

In a surprising move, game maker Zynga tried to do its own data center thing, then went back to the cloud, reports the Wall Street Journal.Was it a game of chicken, to see who would bleed first between Zynga and Amazon? Or was it a venture where, as the WSJ cites, you discover that your groove doesn't involve adding expertise in a field where lowering your costs may not pay off? Sorry to sound cryptic. Let me explain.The capex of running a data center can be gruesome. Even with way-cool software-defined routing, eco-cooling, and plentiful cheap connectivity, they're still expensive. The payback is going to come in decades, one can only hope. In the old days, organizations would install a bunker of a data center, often deep in the sub-basements of a building, designing all for the long term, and sinking cooling and initial infrastructure costs that would include some wild-haired expansion factor over the perceived life of the building.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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