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Wednesday, November 9th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 3:47p | Nutanix to Add Network Visualization to Its Hyperconvergence Platform Vienna, Austria seemed like a peaceful, calming, re-invigorating place for anyone to be, in the wee hours of the morning following Election Day in the U.S. At what may as well be the opposite end of the Earth Wednesday morning, at its .NEXT Europe company conference, hyperconvergence platform provider Nutanix announced — perhaps unsurprisingly, but certainly quite importantly — that it will add network virtualization and visualization to its stack. The move puts Nutanix in a better competitive stance, particularly against VMware, which is banking the future of its virtualization platform on the pervasiveness of its NSX network virtualization system, which aims to do for networks what ESX and hypervisors did for workloads. And for anyone who still sees Nutanix as without a hardware partner to back it up, the company demonstrated its enhancements to its Acropolis hypervisor-driven platform (AHV) on Cisco’s B200 M4 model of UCS blade servers [pictured above]. It’s scheduled to say and show more during a simultaneous .NEXT On-Tour event today in Boston. In a company blog post published early Wednesday morning, Nutanix product marketing director Prabu Rambadran explained the problems being faced by network administrators today, and how he expects AHV to address them. Network traffic between virtual machines, he said, typically flows through virtual switches, then next to physical network interface cards, and finally to top-of-rack switches before finding its VM destination. That’s supposing traffic takes the direct route. In microservices environments, orchestrators often employ network overlays to create virtual address spaces that map on top of more complex network routes. While containerized applications, run on Docker, rkt, or OpenShift platforms, perceive relatively simple network mapping structures, network admins are faced with what some describe as “hairballs.” “Every time a VM is added, deleted or modified,” Rambadran wrote, “the right VLANs should be configured on the physical switch, as well as for the host so that the VMs can communicate with each other. Oftentimes VLAN misconfigurations or port failures can be the primary reasons why applications are down, or have connectivity issues. Isolating and fixing these issues can drain precious IT time because users do not get a complete view of how applications are connected to the underlying infrastructure.” Rambadran went on to say that today’s announced enhancements “solve exactly this,” though he wrote “network virtualization,” not “visualization.” On the one hand, it’s a typo; but if you think about it, it’s not exactly wrong. The visualization component, he said, will eventually give network admins and operators a direct view of what the virtualization component will be orchestrating: a new layer of microsegmentation. Used correctly (which Nutanix is clearly doing), the term refers to a logical distribution of resources in the network that is completely abstracted from physical resources. In a hyperconverged system, virtual “nodes” are apportioned for compute, storage, memory (which Nutanix treats as “virtualization space”), and now networking resources. These nodes are then migrated to the most logical and convenient locations for the purposes of the workloads being run within them, in a sort of live SDN four-ring circus. This means that resources that fulfill the roles that virtual servers play in the previous generation of virtualization, can now be cordoned off and managed using policy and access control. “As an example,” wrote Rambadran, “IT can set policies to forward all database queries from Web to go through a firewall service before hitting the DB tier. This sequencing will be defined and automated from within Nutanix Prism, giving IT administrators centralized control and visibility beyond just the virtual machines.” Network visualization, along with a revised set of networking APIs for microsegmentation and security, will be delivered as part of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, set for release in January. Nutanix’ move comes a little more than two months following its dual acquisition of storage acceleration firm PernixData and runbook automation software maker Calm.io. No word yet as to how their respective services are being folded into the Nutanix suite. |
| 4:46p | Tech Fears the Unknown With a President Trump (Bloomberg) — The 2016 presidential race was a powerful illustration of the influence that internet services have to shape the national political conversation. Yet in the end, many of the people involved in technology didn’t get what they wanted: a Hillary Clinton presidency. Instead, Donald Trump pulled off a stunning upset to become the 45th U.S. president. As votes were tallied Tuesday night, the mood among prominent figures in Silicon Valley turned grim. “this feels like the worst thing to happen in my life. i assume we’ll get through it, but it sure doesn’t feel that way right now,” Sam Altman, president of startup incubator Y Combinator, tweeted. At an election watch party hosted by Brigade, a voter-movement startup in San Francisco, dozens of people left before the election was called, many in tears. Those who stayed seemed more intoxicated than upset. “Is this what it felt like when people first realized hitler could actually take power?” tweeted Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus. Shervin Pishevar, the co-founder of Hyperloop One, suggested that California secede. Trump’s victory is the final twist in a surreal race that had drawn the technology hub into an increasingly assertive political role. His most vocal critics weren’t talking about their businesses—their worries were more existential—but his presidency would leave the U.S. tech industry in an uncomfortably uncertain position. Total contributions to the Clinton campaign from the internet industry came in at 114 times the level they did for Trump, according to statistics compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a strongly worded rebuke to Trump’s views on immigration at the company’s developers conference in April, although he never called him out by name. Later, Dustin Moskovitz, who made his fortune as a Facebook co-founder, pledged $20 million to Democratic groups opposing Trump. Other high-profile figures in Silicon Valley such as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Reid Hoffman, chairman of LinkedIn, also took unusually public anti-Trump stances. The notable exception was Peter Thiel, the billionaire PayPal backer and the valley’s resident contrarian. “Congratulations to President-elect Donald Trump,” Thiel said in a statement to Business Insider. “He has an awesomely difficult task, since it is long past time for us to face up to our country’s problems. We’re going to need all hands on deck.” As voting took place on Tuesday, people within the industry were feeling relatively confident, and were privately discussing what the early days of a Clinton presidency would look like. Given the harsh turn the discussion on trade had taken on the campaign trail, strategists were preparing to push President Barack Obama to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement before he left office. Clinton had said she planned to advocate for sweeping immigration reform in the early days of her presidency. If nothing else, Clinton was a known quantity. In June, she published a detailed agenda for her approach to technology policy. The 7,000-word document laid out plans for targeted tax credits, pledged to carry on Obama’s policies towards net neutrality, and a national commission on digital security and encryption. It was met with wide approval from an industry that thrived during the Obama years. Those attempting to divine Trump’s stance still don’t have such an easy guide. They’ve had to learn what they can from a series of offhand remarks. On one of the most contentious issues, encryption, he has brushed aside calls for a balanced approach. In February, he attacked Apple for refusing to help the FBI unlock the cellphone of one of the suspects in the San Bernadino shootings. “Who do they think they are? No, we have to open it,” he said in an interview on Fox & Friends. Trump has also called for shutting down the web, and once jokingly asked Russia to carry out cyberattacks against the U.S. to find emails related to Clinton’s private server. After perhaps the most contentious presidential campaign in modern history, Silicon Valley is anxious to hear a more coherent policy vision. |
| 10:41p | Microsoft to Build Out, Probably Upgrade, Boydton Data Center In the fifth expansion to its data centers there in six years, Microsoft will invest another $251.6 million to expand its data center facility in Boydton, Virginia, located in Mecklenburg County on the state’s south border between Richmond and Raleigh, North Carolina. This according to announcement from Gov. Terry McAuliffe, just hours after the former Democratic National Committee chair absorbed the news of his party’s stunning losses in the national election. “Microsoft has now invested nearly $2 billion in its Mecklenburg facility and created over 250 jobs since 2010,” stated Gov. McAuliffe, in a statement released Wednesday afternoon. Microsoft’s move comes just weeks after unveiling “Generation 5” of its modular data center design, at its cloud farm in Quincy, Washington, about a hundred miles east of corporate headquarters. This design blueprint replaces the compact IT-Pre-Assembled Container (IT-PAC) design pattern, on which the Boydton data center was originally built. Although Microsoft has yet to confirm this news publicly (governors often get to reveal the news first), it would appear that Microsoft has a plan under way to replace IT-PAC with Gen-5, with Boydton being next on the company’s agenda. IT-PAC was an ambitious project which first began in Boydton in 2010, comprised of lightweight steel sheds containing pre-constructed compute and power units. At first, they looked like camper trailers, or changing rooms for movie stars on location. Three years later, the system looked somewhat more modernized, like efficient, lopsided building blocks back-to-back in several rows. Open air contributed to the cooling apparatus of IT-PAC, appearing to rely on the environment itself to help out with maintenance and upkeep. That air was pumped in through a damp film, cooling it along the way, and reducing water consumption to a small fraction of traditional data centers. The company began rolling out IT-PAC in Quincy after having drawn complaints from state officials, both for its tremendous power draw and its reliance upon diesel generators for supplemental power. According to a 2012 New York Times report, prior to IT-PAC’s rollout, Microsoft had been granted enough permits by the Washington State Ecology Dept. to produce one-third the wattage of a nuclear power plant. But “Generation 5” moves servers out of the shed and back onto the slab. It does borrow many of the cooling lessons learned from IT-PAC, but reportedly using a design that doesn’t require the use of potable water. IT-PAC did have the benefit of being upgradeable and expandable in modular ways. It was that program that permitted Microsoft to re-invest in Virginia repeatedly, beginning with the initial $499 million expansion, followed by $150 million in 2011, $348 million in 2013, $346.7 million in 2014, and $402.4 million in 2015, according to the Governor’s office. At press time, Microsoft had not responded to Data Center Knowledge’s request for information, though we will update you when it does. |
| 10:58p | Webcams Recalled in Cyber-attack Aftermath, NIST Announces CyberSeek Tool
By The VAR Guy A little over two weeks ago, a new type of attack was unleashed on the interwebs. Hackers breached hundreds of thousands of webcams and other devices across the globe with the intent to overload U.S.-based internet infrastructure provider Dyn, one of the most popular in the country. The attackers succeeded in flooding Dyn with so much traffic that it sputtered and faltered, causing major service interruptions to major websites including PayPal, Amazon, Spotify and Twitter. In a statement on the morning of the attack, Dyn officially told the world that it had it suffered a global distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on its DNS infrastructure. Hackers had overwhelmed Dyn’s servers with useless data and repeated load requests, preventing useful data, such as Twitter IP addresses, from getting through. To put it simply, they took out chunks of the internet. “The purpose of this attack is to overload the service in any way possible and make it stop working or be unreachable,” said Adam Surak, site reliability engineer at Algolia.com to Business Insider at the time of the attacks. “In this case it was not Twitter or Github that got overloaded, those services work totally fine, but a service allowing you to reach them got overloaded.” As part of the aftermath of the breaches, it was announced by Chinese manufacturer Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology that approximately 10,000 targeted surveillance cameras sold in the United States will be recalled – specifically “all the circuit boards and components made by Hangzhou Xiongmai that go into webcams,” according to a reporton the BBC. In an article by Reuters, Liu Yuexin, Xiongmai’s marketing director, stated that the first focus of the company will be to recall surveillance cameras made in 2014 that monitor rooms or shops for personal use. At this point, it’s not apparent which exact products or components the recall impacts, but experts have a few guesses. According to Business Insider, some of the company’s older products don’t require users to change the default password, making them “inherently susceptible to being hacked.” The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is working with major communications service providers to develop a new set of “strategic principles” for securing internet-connected devices. The company may take further steps to beef up security by migrating to safer operating systems and adding further encryption, claims Fortune. Experts and authorities have yet to identify the culprits of the attack, but the Director of U.S. National Intelligence, James Clapper, has ruled out foreign government involvement. Other intelligence and expert analyses points to the same conclusion. “The evidence that we have strongly suggests it is amateur, attention-motivated hackers,” said Allison Nixon, director of security research at Flashpoint. As we mentioned in last week’s article covering the incident, the attack illustrates an opportunity for the channel to make a strong case to customers for building in the proper protection into their systems. As more and more of the world becomes connected and the Internet of Things grows and grows, there are valuable upsell opportunities to provide security services for your customers. Now more than ever, it is vital to educate them on these types of attacks and safeguard their systems. In other news this week, the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced on Tuesday the availability of CyberSeek™, a free, interactive online tool available to anyone interested in the nation’s cybersecurity workforce: job seekers, employers, policy makers and those in the education and training communities. CompTIA and partner Burning Glass created CyberSeek and a companion Career Pathway under a grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce. The interactive heat map displays supply and demand information on the cybersecurity workforce at the national, state and city levels. The career pathway details various scenarios on how a cybersecurity career may progress, from entry level to mid level to advanced positions. Using Kansas City as an example, CyberSeek shows that in the past year there were 2,134 job openings and 6,829 employed workers. Those numbers represent a higher-than-average cybersecurity workforce supply compared to the rest of the country, but a lower concentration of cybersecurity job demand when stacked up against the national average. That’s where the CyberSeek tool comes in. For employers seeking to move or expand operations, the CyberSeek “heat” map can help find locations with a large base of cybersecurity employees, and job seekers can hunt for job openings by the size of a metropolitan area. The interactive map is accompanied by the Career Pathway, a component that features valuable information on careers in cybersecurity, such as job titles, salaries, online job openings, in-demand skills, education and certifications. “This interactive tool will assist its users—students, employees, employers, policy makers, training providers and guidance counselors—to explore opportunities they may have never considered,” said Rodney Petersen, director of the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE), which funded development of the tool. “It can also help us to meet NICE’s goal of fostering a larger workforce to narrow the cybersecurity employment gap.” Nice to know that there’s a tool out there helping connect qualified cybersecurity professionals with the ready and waiting and much needed positions out there. With a shortage of these types of professionals and the growing need and demand for them, this tool could be a game-changer. To finish up the week, we take a look at findings from a recently-released survey conducted by Accenture Plc. According to the survey of 2,000 security officers representing large enterprises worldwide, as reported by Bloomberg, “approximately one-third of targeted attempts to breach corporations’ cyber defenses succeed but three-quarters of executives remain unaccountably confident in their security strategies.” Wait, what? This scarily high failure rate in successfully warding off and defending against attacks has a lot to do with the “sheer volume” of them, states the report, titled Building Confidence: Facing the Cybersecurity Conundrum. “On average, an organization will face more than a hundred focused and targeted breach attempts every year, and respondents say one in three of these will result in a successful security breach,” the report’s authors write. “That’s two to three effective attacks per month.” Yikes. According to a forecast earlier this year by Omar Abbosh, Accenture’s chief strategy officer, businesses spend an absurd amount of money each year in this area – an estimated $84 billion to defend against data theft that costs them about $2 trillion. TRILLION. The report also states that if current trends continue, this number could rise to $90 trillion a year by 2030. In the face of such staggering predictions, companies, even big ones, clearly cannot afford to turn a blind eye or be uninformed any longer. It’s time for a massive perception overhaul. “To survive in this contradictory and increasingly risky landscape, organizations need to reboot their approaches to cybersecurity,” state the authors of the report. “Ultimately, many remain unsure of their ability to manage the internal threats with the greatest cybersecurity impact even as they continue to prioritize external initiatives that produce the lowest return on investment.” The report authors emphasize that there is still way too much emphasis on just compliance. How many times have experts in the field harped on holistic, all-around solutions? “Just as adhering to generally accepted accounting principles does not ensure protection against financial fraud, cybersecurity compliance alone will not protect a company from successful incursions.” Time for this to sink in, folks. The consequences are too costly. This article was originally published here by The VAR Guy. |
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