Author Archive: Brian Chee
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Sep 14th, 2009 | Brian Chee
Are you angry about all the botnets and wish you could fight back? Well you can’t run an attack against them but you certainly can do something to help shut them down. As part of the security infrastructure at the University of Hawaii (ISSM) I was invited to participate in this new program by the nice folks at the local FBI office. It was certainly worth my time since this gave information technology professionals an opportunity to share their experiences, and to get definitive information on just what they can do to help.
It was October 2005 when Oliver Rist, Paul Venezia and I ran a pretty big Identity Management Shootout in my Hawaii lab for InfoWorld Magazine. Wayne Rash and I also ran a Security Event Manager shootout in September of the same year.The gist is that the industry was showing a whole heck of a lot of interest in how identity related to security events and that security events need to be cross correlated across multiple platforms and woven throughout the enterprise.
I’ve been attending Interop now since 1992 and working as a volunteer since 1995. While the proverbial crystal ball has sometimes been cloudy, Interop has consistently given me glimpses of the things to come. Most of the time it’s been in little tidbits that a CEO has accidentally let slip, or a widget in a booth being talked about by the development engineer.
I recently wrote about how twitter isn’t just for people anymore and how you can add a twitter feed by modifying a Kill-a-Watt meter, well little did I realize just how big a movement remote power monitoring has become. You really need to look at what the community at pachube has done.
We’ve been hearing about how Twitter might be used or has been used to launch attacks on unsuspecting internet communities, but I’m just hearing that old argument on how tool XXX can be used to hurt person YYY…. geez…. I happen to really like Twitter, and other than some of my friends getting WAY too carried away with telling the world about their entire life, its become a self defense mechanism for me to keep in touch with my friends, even with a schedule as maddening as mine. Anyway to the point, Twitter and other social networking tools may very well be the killer app of this decade, especially when you see things like this from ThinkGeek.
So while the VMWare boys have certainly addressed the issue of migrating from a physical server (one OS hogging the entire piece of hardware) what about those of us that have some legacy VM’s from the Microsoft world? So far the answer has been too bad, but now the folks from Paragon Software have created an addon for their version 9 of Drive Backup Pro and will bake it into version 10 when it’s released. So the answer is to bring up your legacy VM’s (remember Virtual Server R2 is still free) and run the P2V migration tool.
With hotel WiFi getting both more expensive and more congested I’ve personally started carrying my own instant hotspot with me. What has changed is that the 3G carriers have finally also caught on and are finally providing carrier supported devices. Here are a few from folks like: Sprint and Clearwire and some 3rd party solutions by WalkingHotSpot, Cradle Point and AutoNETmobile.
I had the fortune of meeting with a young CEO at the Interop Las Vegas show a couple years back talking about how his “data mashup tool” was going to change the world. The key concept is that not everyone needs or wants the heavyweights of the middleware world like jBoss or CORBA (etc, etc) with variations on the theme abounding. The gist is that there are tons of applications out there that don’t quite do what you want, and you need something inbetween your various applications that can squish/slice/dice the data to fit each side.
I’ve been listening to the folks from VMWare talk about virtual workstation pools and have had an instant flashback to presentations done by ClearCube and their blade workstations. The gist is that ClearCube was one of the first folks that I heard about that could divvy up those blade workstations to an unequal number remote users. So for instance, in a medical clinic with say 10 exam rooms, a nurses/reception desk and a doctor’s office you really only have perhaps 5-6 people working in those 12 spaces. So instead of buying 12 workstations, you buy say six, and have the connections to those physical blade workstations wander around as the nurses and doctor move through the different exam rooms. Yes, I know about Citrix and Terminal Server now, but Clear Cube was the first one that I had heard of that virtualized the access to physical blades so that I didn’t sacrifice performance for CPU hungry apps.
So as I’ve been diving ever deeper into the virtual world I’m realizing it’s the storage cost that’s the barrier to adoption rather than the servers. The reality is that production quality storage systems are expensive for a reason. (management, reliability, migration, interoperability, etc) However, how does one get across the training bridge from simple VM Hosts to a Virtual environment with a Storage Area Network (SAN)? The answer is open source, and the flavor I’m playing with right now is OpenFiler and I’ve installed it on a Dell PowerEdge 2800 server that I had lying around the lab.
My overall goal has been to retire all my older inefficient servers and slowly migrate over to higher efficiency blade servers. The downside has been the huge bite in my budget that a fiber channel or iSCSI SAN is going to put me back. Why a SAN and not just use my internal disk drives? Easy, VM mobility and how a VM can move from a shared blade to a dedicated blade to multiple blades that are load balanced. This kind of juggling act only comes from the VM’s being stored on a SAN (of some sort) that can be readily accessed by all the computers in the cluster.
