Blog: The Advisor

Ninety percent of all the data in the world was created in the past two-three years, according to SINTEF independent research. 

It seems like the news of late has been heavy with acquisition activity - Cisco bought Metacloud, SAP bought Concur, HP bought Eucalyptus' cloud computing software, etc.  As of last week, activity has shifted to break up mode for several companies. In Silicon Valley, it seems that breaking up is easy to do.

Here are a few interesting articles from last week - including Gartner 2015 tech trends,cloud security, DCIM tools, and the APAC network roundup. Gartner lays out its top 10 tech trends for 2015 The Internet of things, and everything that's part of its universe, including smart machines, pervasive analytics, and 3D printing, are on Gartner's annual list of strategic technologies for the year ahead. The list, presented today by Garner analyst David Cearley at the firm's annual Symposium/ITxpo, is focused on merging the real world with the virtual one, what that means for analytics and the type of IT that has to emerge to deal with it.

While the IT organizations of many companies pride themselves on having 99.999% uptime, there always comes a time when the very systems they depend on are suddenly unavailable.

As health care providers look to move their data storage to the Cloud, the importance of maintaining protection over that data grows.

Just in case you missed it - here's a quick look at a few top industry news articles from last week: Recap of StrataCore Blog Posts: Internet Shellshocked Today: Bash Vulnerability a Webwide Problem A vulnerability reported in the GNU Borne Again Shell (Bash) has been exploited and used to take over Web servers as part of botnet. This newly discovered security hole has been dubbed “Shellshock” and is similar to the Heartbleed bug that appeared last spring in that it allows anyone with knowledge of the vulnerability to exploit a large number of Web servers.

Facebook's data center in North Carolina has been producing about 5,000 jobs throughout the state. The social media giant has also been involved with the local communities awarding local non-profits and organizations $450,000 and PANGAEA internet for kids to have Wi-Fi to help with school work in their homes.

The drought crisis in California’s Monterey County has prompted officials and entrepreneurs to consider building a desalination plant that draws from the Monterey Submarine Canyon, one of the largest marine canyons on the U.S. Pacific coastline. 

VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, are used by companies to grant their employees access to corporate networks from their personal devices. VPNs provide an extra layer of security to such networks but in the past have been difficult for users to configure. Today VPN clients are often built right into operating systems and are available for most computers, phones and tablets. This article gives instructions on configuring VPNs for several frequently used operating systems.

VMware recently announced two initiatives intended to promote its datacenter virtualization leadership. The first is compatibility with the Open Source Cloud framework OpenStack, and the second is a new partnership with hardware providers to build an easy-to-use, scalable, datacenter-in-a-box. Both are expected to be available soon and will enhance the functionality of the virtualization giant’s already powerful set of software tools.

Web Real-Time Communications or WebRTC is a communications service that supports real time communication, as well as instant messaging, voice, and other data communication. WebRTC enhances business communications without extra software and could be used for voice calls as well. WebRTC is said to be in its beginning stages, but is meant to expand to bigger and better things in the future.

Building and maintaining a network is a large complicated undertaking with many interlocking and moving parts. This article describes the four major components of a network - the address space, how it is subnetted and divided up, how routing is done between all the disparate networks, and how DNS works to map IP addresses to domain names.