Investing in IT security: Make it save

Is it worth investing in an integrated enterprise security platform? Forrester Consulting has been on the ground in the context of a detailed survey of companies on this issue.

For each investment in a commercial environment a question plays a central role: it pays the like? On the topic of IT security, there is the question of costs and benefits of acquisition, even with an integrated enterprise security platform. But what does that mean for a solution?

One Enterprise Security Platform provides networking, cloud and endpoint security in a common architecture. As an integrated security platform, it ensures transparency and control, allowing organizations to detect and prevent cyber-attacks, during the operation of productive applications is ensured.

Many companies shy away at first glance not inconsiderable investment and rely on their self-compiled over years grown security architecture. Forrester Consulting conducted a study on the economic impact (Total Economic Impact, TEI) recently.

The aim of this study was to clarify the financial implications of a platform-based approach and the potential return on investment (ROI) display. In order to gain a practical assessment, Forrester companies surveyed who use a current enterprise security platform for several years.

Christmas is changeable to stormy

The Christmas shopping fever is heading towards its climax - also in online trading. Silver Peak has identified how this crucial phase of the Christmas shopping effect on the Internet as well as on corporate networks and cloud services.

Silver Peak has analyzed the "Internet Weather" on Black Friday and on Cyber Monday. In the United States - and Silver Peak According meanwhile also in many countries - offer online retailers on these two days of after Thanksgiving products at particularly favorable conditions. Sought to identify the latency (delays in transportation of data packets) of Internet connections of large e-tail companies and providers of cloud-based Software-as-a-service products (SaaS). The results added Silver Peak to data on the packet loss rate in the Internet backbones great American service providers. This information controls at Keynote, a provider of mobile cloud testing and monitoring.
No outliers in latency and packet loss rates

IBM puts billion again in Linux and open source for our own "power" server.

This was announced by the Group on the LinuxCon, Linux Foundation in New Orleans. With the dollar billion to According to an announcement will be financed in the cloud for Linux on Power, among others, a new customer center in Europe as well as a development environment.

The Power Systems Linux center in Montpellier, France, is to make it easier for software developers in the future, new applications for big data , cloud, mobile and social business to develop open technology components with Linux and Power7 processors and provide. The first such center opened IBM in May in Beijing, there are already more in New York City and Austin, Texas.

The Linux on Power Development Cloud is a development environment for the Power Systems cloud. About the free cloud service companies to Linux applications (but which for AIX or System i) build on the Power platform, porting and testing.

Overall, the billions invested in research, design and development should flow and help to support training, information sessions and go-to-market programs for customers, developers, business partners, entrepreneurs, academics and students financially. Goes on to say.

IBM brings HPC concepts into business

IBM has announced the IDF together with Intel a new high-density server system, which houses more than 2,000 computing cores in a standard rack.

The "Next Scale" system recommends "Big Blue" for the currently fastest growing workloads such as analytics, cloud delivery, social media or technical computing. It is based on the currently most powerful Intel Xeon processors (Ivy Bridge E5 with feature sizes of 22 nanometers) and to supercomputer performance permit for each data center. Here is a simple, flexible and open architecture offer many options for processing power, memory, graphics acceleration and coprocessors. The bottom line is to get the maximum performance outcome in the smallest space, and that too with high energy efficiency.

The new Next Scale platform
IBM includes many features that had so far known especially in the HPC environment.

Next Scale brings in a rack
As many three times cores under such a version with conventional 1U servers.

The Compute Modules for Next Scale
The equipped with the current are most powerful Xeon processors (Ivy Bridge E5, 22 nm) from Intel.

Next Scale packs up to 84 x86 based systems with 2016 cores in an EIA 19-inch rack.  I/O cards and top-of-rack switches conform to the industry standard. IBM delivers with a software package that contains inter alia the General Parallel File System, GPFS Storage Server, xCAT and Platform Computing for functions such as scheduling, management and optimization , There are Solution Starter Kits for among other Ansys, MPI-BLAST or OpenStack. With "SmartCloud Entry" IBM also offers a software product, with the overall platforms and product lines a private cloud with heterogeneous hypervisors should be implemented quickly and cost effectively in a single system.

Big Data: Store data properly

How to save content to exist forever? And as can be accessed at any time and without delay it? Wide Area Storage is a promising approach.
The comprehensive analysis of data in some parts of the company long has been a reality. Internet-based marketing systems record "auto-magically" masses of information about potential customers and their preferences. Flashable digital movie cameras can be discharged within a night and used again and are so light years away from the days when every single picture was burned on an extremely expensive medium.

Not enough: then they had to be processed and edited manually with incomparably more effort. Companies generate, store and analyze increasingly HD video rather than text, which brings a hundred fold higher level of accuracy of data per user and per product itself. So for example, detect when the American racing series NASCAR 18 HD cameras the action on the racetrack, allow direct data access, search and analysis.

What is Big Data?
Only 14 percent of people know what the word "Big Data! is meant as the Bitkom has found. Expert Advisor: Carlo Velten sums up the phenomenon together in five theses.

Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 at the Test

The third release of Hyper-V hypervisor introduced in 2008 Mach, Microsoft lost ground against the archrival VMware vSphere and its package. The current version of Hyper-V Windows Server 2012 makes the cloud platform.

Since time immemorial, the release cycles of Hyper-V are the Windows versions bound, so that innovations and rarely come in spurts. With Windows Server 2012, the Microsoft explicitly positioned as a comprehensive platform for private cloud, wins the hypervisor important: He is the driving force behind the virtualization of servers and desktops based on Windows.

Hyper-V 2012
• Hyper-V is a BareMetal hypervisor.
• The Hyper-V Switch extends the networking capabilities of the hypervisor.
• The new file format offers VHDX considerably more disk space for each virtual hard disk
• Hyper-V can delegate storing data to compatible storage systems.
• The sconfig command line is used as setup and configuration tool.
• Hyper-V is installed as a server role through Server Manager

To be against the powerful competition, most notably VMware, say, Microsoft has invested in the expansion of the art and the deeper integration of Hyper-V with the operating system, infrastructure and management solutions. In all important segments Hyper-V has been heavily drilled. It offers about improved live migration features, better scaling, and greater flexibility in networking with network virtualization techniques, advanced storage features as well as a package of new features that will greatly simplify the use in cloud environments.

SDN is revolutionizing the data center

Is Software-Defined Networking (SDN) become the next empty words? No, because SDN continues the evolution of cloud computing continues, makes networking flexible and can be integrated with existing hardware.

Hype or not SDN is the next logical step after virtualization, which has grown up enough for everyday use, especially by VMware end of the nineties. Hypervisors like Citrix Xen,
Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere (ESXi) or KVM are grown up and for some time powerful tools. What the SDN now adds is true flexibility.
SDN meets Cloud

Cloud Computing , probably one of the most discussed topics of the recent past is, depending on the approach and the application scenario either the technology of the future or a marketing hype with numerous uncertainties. Undeniably, the evolution leads to the Cloud Computing, The Cloud is the flexible infrastructure for all other technologies. No more, no less. So the data center is no longer numerous pizza boxes in the racks, but rather virtual pizza boxes on a host server.

Monitor Hyper-V with free tools

For monitoring of Hyper-V virtual servers exist a number of free freeware tools. We looked at some interesting free solutions for Hyper-V monitoring closely.
Those who cannot rely on costly and complex solutions such as Microsoft System Center to monitor Hyper-V hosts or wants, will take place on the market a number of free software tools. We have undergone a small selection of a closer look.

Many of the tools described below will also work with Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2008 R2, but we have tested the versions of Windows Server 2012 R2.

Free Tools for Microsoft's Hyper-V

In addition to the well-known tool Veeam One can Hyper-V with SolarWinds Free VM monitor and ManageEngine Free HyperV server Monitor monitor. SolarWinds has, incidentally, in addition to a support of Hyper-V, a version for VMware on. Below we address some of the tools in more detail.

But you can also use the Performance Monitor in Windows Server 2012 R2, which is one of the standard tools of Windows Server. To perform a permanent long-term measurement, you need to create a data collector set. To do this click with the right mouse button on the data collector for makes custom setting. With New Data Collector Set, such a record is created. While creating the possibility to read a template. You can use the tool PAL received. After installation, you choose the File tab at the threshold file title, select Microsoft Hyper-V R2 SP1 and click Export to Perfmon templateFile. This template will also work with Windows Server 2012 R2. The document you are reading a wizard for creating new data collector sets.

New Oracle Engineered System for application virtualization

Oracle today announced the Virtual Compute Appliance on a new integrated system can virtually practically any (x86) workloads with the user.

The Virtual Compute Appliance is the latest addition to the family of so-called Engineered Systems, which Oracle demonstrate its expertise in the integration of software and hardware and wants to sell its customers an advantage. It should , according to an announcement enable fast and repeatable installations of full-stack infrastructure. The wire-once system comes completely pre-configured. Production workloads should be possible to set up with little effort on a software-defined configuration - IBM has its similar concept Pure Systems for quite some time in the market.

The Virtual Compute Appliance, Oracle is built around an InfiniBand fabric around. Connection to existing Ethernet and Fiber Channel networks, the system finds more than pooled interconnect modules that can use any virtual machine transparently. The system has to start no single point of failure, virtualized applications can at a hardware or software errors automatically.

Select Microsoft server licenses correctly

How will Microsoft server products licensed correct This clarifies the following contribution, taking into account the different rules, styles and approaches to licensing Microsoft servers.

For many products, Microsoft provides the conventional Server licensing with associated user or computer licenses on. There is must be licensed not only individual servers, but also their processors, sometimes the cores, as in SQL Server 2014. In the Standard Edition, you can, for example, buy a server license and for each user a user license (CAL) (see also Microsoft Client Access Licenses - when and which licenses are required). You also have the option to license on a per processor core.

What is ultimately cheaper, you have to calculate with a license specialist. You must license at least four cores per processor; CALs are no longer necessary in this case. The Business Intelligence edition of SQL Server 2014, you can turn to license only after the CAL model. The Enterprise Edition of the new server version only offers the possibility to license by processor cores; you must license at least four cores. That is, you need a license for each core and must purchase four licenses. This also applies if you are installing the product on a single-processor server and only two cores, even if this may be a relatively improbable constellation.