Thursday, November 10th, 2016

Time	Event
1:17p	Alibaba’s U.S. Growth Ambitions at Risk After Trump Victory (Bloomberg) — Chinese internet companies face a new reality after Donald Trump’s surprise victory as U.S. president-elect — and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has the most to lose. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to upend global trade, saying that China is “ killing us” on trade policy and proposing tariffs on Chinese goods of as much as 45 percent. If implemented, his ideas could lead to “devastating” results, from global trade wars to higher costs of living, and “spell the end of globalization,” according to Darrell West, a vice president at the Brookings Institution. “He was very critical of Chinese trade agreements and has threatened to rip them up,” West said. “If he did that, the consequences for Chinese companies would be enormous.” Read more:  China’s Kingsoft Aims to Take on Alibaba in Cloud Computing Alibaba’s Cloud Arm Set for Centerstage as E-Commerce Plateaus AMD Reaches Deal With Alibaba to Use Chips in Cloud Service Of China’s web giants — including Baidu Inc., Alibaba and Tencent Holdings Ltd. — Trump’s trade policies, if implemented, are likely to pose the biggest threat to e-commerce operator Alibaba. While Baidu and Tencent focus on the domestic Chinese market, Alibaba has a significant part of its business tied to trade in the U.S. Higher tariffs on Chinese goods would depress demand for its AliExpress site, where Chinese retailers sell to U.S. consumers. Ensuing trade disputes could hurt sales on its Tmall platform, in which U.S. and international brands sell to Chinese consumers. “Given the direct and indirect risks, the election probably has the greatest impact on Alibaba more than any Chinese internet business,” said Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc. “If there are disruptions in trade, it would impact the willingness and likelihood of U.S. brands and retailers to take an active part on Tmall.” Alibaba Vice Chairman Joseph Tsai urged the president-elect to really focus on relations with China, a vast market for American goods that could create U.S. jobs as its economy grows. Tsai, a lieutenant to Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma and one of the country’s more prominent business leaders, urged Trump not to adopt an isolationalist doctrine, particularly with the world’s No. 2 economy. “The relationship between China and the U.S. will define our century,” Tsai told reporters in Shenzhen on Thursday as the company prepared to launch its annual 24-hour Singles’ Day online shopathon. “If you don’t have Chinese consumers being engaged and buying American products, and Chinese investors can’t invest in the U.S. and create more American jobs, then you’d be in trouble.” International Gateway Alibaba’s management has said that its primary short-term focus isn’t consumers in the U.S., and that it is trying to gain share in developing markets first. Trump’s presidency will probably solidify Alibaba’s decision to target U.S. consumers in the longer-term, according to Luria. See also: Trump’s China wall will hurt U.S. firms: Gadfly Yet Trump’s policies could upset Alibaba’s plan to act as the gateway for international retailers to reach Chinese consumers. If new policies caused China to retaliate and raise tariffs on U.S. goods, that could hurt Alibaba’s Tmall sales in China, Luria said. “A positive relationship between the U.S. and China is important for the world,” an Alibaba representative said in a statement. “We believe Alibaba is doing our part by enabling U.S. businesses — large and small –- to access the China market, creating American jobs and economic opportunity.” Investors were already skeptical of Alibaba’s growth prospects, as China’s largest e-commerce company faces a slowing domestic economy. Trump’s imminent presidency only compounds those fears. The company’s stock fell 3.2 percent in New York on Wednesday to $96.67. The Chinese economy could fall into a deeper recession if Trump enacted trade sanctions, hurting the domestic consumer demand that Alibaba relies on. If China and the U.S. don’t work together, “it’s going to be a disaster,” Chairman Ma said in an interview with CNNMoney on Wednesday. The billionaire said he is hopeful that Trump won’t carry through with the threats he made during the campaign. Foreign Workers Trump’s presidency also may limit the ability of companies like Alibaba to bring talent from China to work in the U.S., according to West. Trump advocated for stricter limits on immigration during his campaign — it’s unlikely that he would expand the H-1B visa program, which is aimed at foreign workers with specialized skills. Some firms in America may see the citizenship of its potential hires as a more important consideration than other qualifications if it becomes difficult to ensure that foreign workers will be welcome. The big question for technology companies and investors is how many of Trump’s words he will put into action, West said. “I think everyone is rethinking their strategy because no one is sure what a Trump presidency will look like.” (Comment on this)
2:00p	Monitoring Helps Both IT and Businesses Scale Simon Taylor is President of Comtrade Software. More than a quarter of executives plan to pursue aggressive growth for their companies over the next five years, according to a recent survey conducted by PwC. From choosing the right executives to lead a company to new frontiers, to determining whether product-market fit is sustainable at scale, there are hundreds of decisions to be made when growing a business that can weigh on the minds of founders, executives, investors and board members. These choices can make or break the future of the company, and deserve focus, attention and a high level of consideration. However, key stakeholders frequently overlook one challenge in particular that is critical to successfully scaling a business: If the IT department is not able to scale as nimbly as other core business groups, it leaves the entire organization vulnerable to hindered growth. Imagine that you own a T-shirt company and you want to bring on a large customer that will triple the number of orders placed online. However, your servers don’t have the capacity to handle the traffic spikes – so even if you have the inventory, manpower and desire to grow, you’re stuck at a certain size because of your limiting IT infrastructure. As a result, many enterprises grow their IT environments quickly and haphazardly, increasing both the size and complexity of their infrastructure. A relatively simple infrastructure can quickly grow into a massive ecosystem involving legacy systems, hybrid solutions and virtual machines in a short period of time. Because of this complexity, business critical functions are now at risk of becoming slow-performing or unresponsive, making day-to-day execution difficult for end users – which can include both customers and employees. Without visibility into how an IT environment is being built, or what has resulted from years of unplanned and undocumented scaling and how those changes affect end-user experience, companies are setting themselves up for problems down the road. Infrastructure Monitoring: Enterprise Platform or Point Solution? Monitoring solutions can help companies sort through their complicated infrastructures and enable IT teams to proactively resolve issues before the end-user is disrupted. Monitoring tools are a critical component of any IT infrastructure today but how can a company ensure that its monitoring solution can provide holistic insights at the speed necessary to keep pace with company growth? Using an enterprise monitoring framework with a single interface, such as Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), makes monitoring large environments and distributed systems easier to execute and manage than using point solutions for each component of the data center. Most third-party monitoring tools don’t scale at all due to their monolithic nature and piecing together a comprehensive monitoring picture using disparate reports from point solutions can create visibility gaps. Further, training on various solutions can extend the learning curve for administrators as they train and learn the different platforms. Finally, point solutions and third party tools often create unnecessary redundancy, as several processes are needed to collect, organize and display monitoring data, whereas native plug-ins that work in concert with an interface like Microsoft SCOM can provide data from all areas of the stack in one comprehensive report. Through this holistic reporting, enterprise monitoring frameworks help IT experts have a quick and detailed view of their complex infrastructure before a server or mission critical app experiences issues. Using Monitoring Tools to Stop Hackers in Their Tracks As businesses grow, they become targets for hackers. Beyond ensuring peak performance and mitigating latency issues, end-to-end monitoring solutions can help organizations prevent against and more effectively handle cyberattacks. Businesses require centralized monitoring as they scale in order to better collect critical security information – even across multiple devices with configured application security components – to capture a complete picture of everything that will help application admins mitigate threats. For example, if an app is compromised, monitoring solutions will alert IT teams with details about exactly what kind of attack the application has come under. Admins can then fix the problem before it impacts application delivery performance and affects the end user, or exposes the company’s proprietary information to hackers. Scalability, resiliency and high availability is as important in a growing company’s IT infrastructure as it is in any other aspect of the business. Business leaders need to pay close attention to infrastructure monitoring to ensure that the IT environment is ready to support an organization’s evolving needs without compromising system performance or security. Ensuring that the IT infrastructure is ready to scale alongside the rest of the business will be an enormous factor in determining the ultimate success or failure of the business down the road. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.   (Comment on this)
10:06p	New Relic Extends Its APM Methods to Monitor Infrastructure As applications take their place from virtual machines as the center of the virtualization and cloud space, the tools that monitor application performance are inevitably evolving into infrastructure monitoring tools as well.  That means, as hyperscale architectures become more the norm in data centers, the way customers manage workloads on data center platforms will look a lot more like application performance managers. This week, APM maker New Relic took the next steps in that direction, in a move that surprised no one following this space.  In a release scheduled for November 16, New Relic’s Digital Intelligence Platform (one screen from which is shown above, and yes, it actually did name the thing “DIP”) promises to extend visibility of the performance of data center workloads to what it describes as “the full stack.” “We’ve put a lot of investment into adding a new product to our portfolio,” said Greg Unrein, New Relic’s vice president for performance analytics, in an interview with Data Center Knowledge, “in a way that naturally complements the data we’ve been collecting, and the problems we’ve been solving for customers with their end user performance monitoring and their application monitoring.  New Relic Infrastructure adds to that, allowing you to see deeply what’s going on with the infrastructure that those applications are running on.” Metrics System At issue is the validity of the metrics, especially when they’re cast in the presumed perspective of an end user.  Supposedly, if anyone is disappointed by poor performance, it’s the customer at the far end of the scale.  New Relic — and Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and others in the APM space — have all shifted their marketing approaches to a kind of “customer-centric” theme. But of course, users of mobile apps and Web sites are not supposed to experience infrastructure, any more than users of electricity experience the power grid (except if they jam a finger or two in a light socket).  If New Relic’s aim is truly to report on the status of data center infrastructure the way the customer sees it, then what happens if the customer sees nothing?  Put another way, is anyone sure we’re using the right metrics to measure data center performance? Unrein told a story of one client that publishes online media, some of whose demand tends to spike when shows first become available, or when their popularity trends up on social media.  The client needs to be able to determine when to pre-scale availability of that programming, to meet anticipated demands.  The criteria important to this client, at this time, would involve a kind of ratio between the assessed resource usage requirements of the program, and the operating status of the servers hosting the feed for that program. A simple APM could tell you how well a live program is streaming, but that’s only while it’s happening, and the underlying resources have already been provisioned.  Unrein said this client needed a way to put assessed performance data to use, prior to adapting the virtual infrastructure to suit demand. Part of what Unrein implied was this:  If we’re capable of measuring performance from the customer’s perspective, and we know from experience what parts of that performance are creditable to the design of the application, then by deduction the other factors must be functions of the infrastructure.  Simple logic, in his opinion, reveals what the right metrics should be at the right times. Read Alert As with other APM platforms, New Relic’s DIP operates through the use of agents injected into running software workloads.  In the case of new containerized (Docker) workloads, this means injecting container images with agent code as they’re being built, and before they’re deployed. The lingua franca of these agents are New Relic Alerts, which are events that trigger some level of notification.  That notification can be set to take place in pre-determined conditions, defined as rules. Nate Heinrich, New Relic’s senior product manager for Alerts, admitted that with respect to its expanded platform, when a rule relates to a performance factor perceived by the customer, the meaning of “customer” has also been expanded. “A customer can be an internal customer — someone consuming your service — or it can be an end user,” said Heinrich.  “Those measurements, and how they change over time, can have rules applied to them.  When they’re triggered, they can send events and Web hooks out to controlling systems, so you can automate some changes — whether it be auto-scaling or other types of configuration management changes to accommodate the event that occurred.” DIP into DCIM? Here is where the new platform must distinguish itself from a typical APM, which notifies operators of some kind of performance event by way of a visual dashboard — for instance, turning a gold happy face red and sad when page load times become slow.  If you’re going to be monitoring infrastructure, the results of that monitoring need to be applicable to the tools that manage the infrastructure. Enabling an automated incident response may be a work in progress for DIP.  Heinrich said the company is experimenting with new ways to “surface” this information for DevOps — for example, opening up its NRDB data store to pattern recognition and other AI methods.  But these experiments are all internal, for the time being. “Having that data in NRDB will allow customers to leverage being able to group, slice, and dice their incident lifecycle information in any way they want,” he said, “and be able to compare that with interesting events that occur.” So DIP is not an infrastructure lifecycle manager, at least not yet, but it could soon become the nerve center for one.  However, New Relic told us it doesn’t intent to enter the DCIM space directly any time soon. “There are many systems that do the orchestration, provisioning, and management of the application’s lifecycle from an infrastructure perspective,” explained New Relic’s Greg Unrein.  “We don’t care to be in that business, specifically.  We want to provide the data that is needed to make good decisions — automated or not — about how that system is behaving, from that end user and application performance perspective.” New Relic has scheduled a live webinar on the subject of its latest addition, entitled “New Relic Infrastructure 101,” for Friday, Nov. 18, at 11 am PST (2 pm EST). Registration is required. (Comment on this)
10:45p	China Tightens Its Digital Grip By The VAR Guy What a week to be reporting on security news. It’s hard to believe the world kept spinning while one event held the entire country’s captive attention and caused the world to collectively hold its breath. One of the biggest issues facing Donald Trump and the country in the next administration is cybersecurity. As threats continue to mount and become more advanced and attacks continue to slam both small and large companies like waves relentlessly breaking over rocks, the weight of the future of security will rest heavily on the leader of the free world. It will be interesting to see how that plays out over the course of the next four years. But more on that later. China on Monday passed a rigorous new cybersecurity law that makes it legal for the Chinese government to demand and obtain technical information from high-tech equipment makers and software developers. The justification? National security. Preventing cybercrime. Thwarting terrorism. Prohibiting activity aimed at “overthrowing the socialist system.” You know, that sort of thing. According to The Wall Street Journal, the new law is intended to tighten and “centralize” state control over information flows. Understandably, this has foreign companies worried about their operations in China. U.S. tech firms, for example, aren’t too thrilled at the prospect of having to give up their code or other intellectual property. “The new cyber-security law tightens the authorities’ repressive grip on the internet,” said Patrick Poon, a China researcher for Amnesty International, in a statement. “It goes further than ever before in codifying abusive practices, with a near total disregard for the rights to freedom of expression and privacy.” Further, human rights groups aren’t too pleased either, reports The New York Times. “The already heavily censored internet in China needs more freedom, not less,” one Chinese human rights activist, Sophie Richardson, wrote in a statement. “Despite widespread international concern from corporations and rights advocates for more than a year, Chinese authorities pressed ahead with this restrictive law without making meaningful changes.” Back in August of this year, an association of business groups warned that the proposed law might be in violation of Beijing’s World Trade Organization commitments. According to CNBC, these groups have surfaced that Beijing is seemingly using these regulations to try and nudge foreign competitors out of the ring, blocking them from promising industries. “We believe this is a step backwards for innovation in China that won’t do much to improve security,” said James Zimmerman, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, in a statement. He said it will “create barriers to trade and innovation.” The law’s demands regarding national security reviews and data sharing will “unnecessarily weaken security and potentially expose personal information,” continued Zimmerman. He said some measures “seem to emphasize protectionism rather than security.” China adamantly denies these claims, and has actively attempted to quell any doubts or concerns regarding hampering foreign vendors. ”Any company that wants to come in, as long as they obey Chinese laws, serve the interests Chinese consumers, we welcome them to come in, and to prosper together,” said Zhao Zeliang, director-general of the cybersecurity bureau of the Cyberspace Administration of China. Experts and spokespeople involved with or in favor of the law stress that as long as everyone plays fair, there shouldn’t be any problems. Sounds simple enough, right? Right? Next up, “SOMEONE is learning how to take down the internet.” This rather sinister statement is actually the title of a recent blog post written by noted cyber-security expert Bruce Schneier. In keeping with the ominous message, not long after the blog post was written, the Dynamic Network Services (Dyn) was disrupted by the DDoS attack that inundated and incapacitated popular sites like Netflix, Twitter and PayPal. The attack was just one in a string of similar incidences. Not long before that, Brian Krebs, an American journalist who reports on internet criminals, was the victim of one of the largest DDoS attacks ever recorded. The server where he hosts his blog became the target of one of the largest DDoS attacks on record. Krebs’ site was flooded with an amount of data equal to almost half a percent of the internet’s entire capacity.  Perhaps one of the most disturbing things about these recent attacks was their clever accuracy. It’s as if the attackers “were looking for the exact point of failure,” Mr. Schneier wrote in his blog post. All of these attacks utilized the same software called Mirai, which hunts the internet for webcams, digital recorders and home routers with easy passwords (for those of you with the password”12345” or “password”) or factory-set passwords. Once located, the software can flood those devices with requests and make them do its bidding. This is what happened with the attack on Dyn, causing XiongMai Technologies, one of the biggest webcam technology makers in the world, to recall some of its products and beef up security with software updates. Experts suspect the culprits of the attacks are either Chinese or Russian. There was some speculation that a DDoS attack may rear its ugly head surrounding the election. It’s a scary thought, thinking of an “internet takedown” during one of the most important events in history. This “takedown” could have meant several things – an attack could have struck the online media, both for individuals and the government which, during one of the most tense events, would have incited chaos. That whisper of the election being “rigged” would not have been just speculation.   This segues nicely into our last topic on what experts were worried could happen during the election. Thankfully, nothing did happen (at least, as far as well know) but according to an article by The New York Times, here are a few things that cybersecurity experts were fretting over and preparing for during the event.  Interfering With Voter Registration Rolls The cause for concern here was the ability of hackers to find vulnerabilities in central voter registration databases, exploit them, and cause chaos on Election Day. Voter databases are not treated as “critical infrastructure” by the federal government due to the fact that very few people pause to consider that a foreign hacker could mess with things just enough to cause doubt and chaos. “We’ve thought in terms of structures,” Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, said recently. “Data is taking on a much larger value in and of itself.” But he noted that “it’s the states’ responsibility.” Manipulating the Count Reported to News Organizations This one is obvious, and isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. During the election Tuesday night, news networks and organizations were constantly giving “unofficial” results so they can call and report on the races in swing states. If hackers could potentially sabotage such “data in motion,” they could alter the first call, even if unofficial. If there was even a hint of numbers manipulation, cries of foul play would be heard ‘round the world.   Tinkering with Voting Machines This was unlikely, but not impossible. Any wireless connection is potentially vulnerable. Election experts feared that these vulnerabilities could be exploited – while it’s true that most voting machines aren’t connected to the internet while voting is happening, they are often connected before Election Day in order to conduct necessary updates. Any such vulnerability, particularly with regard to the machines that store and count such valuable information, could be a target for information manipulation.  Even though none of these scenarios played out (again, at least as far as we know), it’s worth thinking about what this presidential election might mean to the solution provider channel. In a climate of so much unrest and uncertainly, business could take a hit, negatively impacting channel folks and service providers. Not to mention the issue of cybersecurity being brought to the forefront in a way it never has before. The new administration has a long road ahead of it in terms of addressing and working to fix the issues associated with security, and it’s going to be a bit of a wild ride for the channel as well. Fasten your seatbelt, everyone…  This article was published originally here on The VAR Guy. (Comment on this)
10:53p	Microsoft Azure Deepens Kubernetes Support Microsoft Azure has extended its support for Kubernetes and the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System to provide either as container orchestration options, along with Docker Swarm. The set of updates, announced this week at KubeCon, includes a preview release of Kubernetes 1.4 on Azure Container Service (ACS), support for DC/OS version 1.8.4, and the release of the ACS Engine source code. Microsoft Azure director of compute Corey Sanders said in a blog post that Azure is the first public cloud provider to support all three leading container orchestration tools. Kubernetes has been supported by Azure infrastructure since 2014, but it is now deeper and native. A functional Kubernetes cluster integrated with other Azure resources can now be created from the Azure portal or Azure’s new python-based command line tool. The new version of DC/OS includes flexible virtual networking capabilities, job scheduling, and Marathon-based container orchestration from the user interface, and a number of tools have been added to the DC/OS Universe app store. The ACS Engine source code has also been released to GitHub to encourage modification and customization. “We are seeing organizations of every size move their container-based solutions from dev/test environments to production in the cloud, especially as they discover the business agility opportunities containers make possible. In addition to delivering more choice and flexibility on ACS, we’re also enabling more streamlined agile development and container management through new updates,” wrote Sanders. One streamlining initiative is the Docker Registry v2 compatible Azure Container Registry, which will be available in preview next week, allowing Docker-formatted images for different types of container deployments. At the same time Microsoft will release a continuous integration and deployment tool for multicontainer Linux applications using Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and the related open source code. The post also says Microsoft will “invest heavily” in development and CI/CD tools for container workloads. A blog post by Microsoft partner architect Brendan Burns includes a video demonstrating Kubernetes on Azure Container Service. As service providers gear up for enterprise adoption of containers, OnApp launched Container Servers supporting Docker or Kubernetes as a beta feature in its version 5.1 last month. This article first appeared here at The Whir. (Comment on this)

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