Data Center

The Bandwidth Bank

This is a topic that we have discussed on several occasions over the last decade, but it now seems as though things are slowly moving forward. A new company, Intabank, has set up a service whereby its enterprise customers can pool bandwidth that the intermediate company can then use to sell to other customers; enabling organisations to monetise their network connectivity assets.

Don’t Overlook the Network When Migrating to the Cloud

The success or failure of public cloud services can be measured by whether they deliver high levels of performance, security and reliability that are on par with, or better than, those available within enterprise-owned data centers... IDC forecasts that public cloud IT spending will increase from $40 billion in 2012 to $100 billion in 2016. To provide the performance, security and reliability needed, cloud providers are moving quickly to build a virtualized multi-data center service architecture, or a "data center without walls."

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Industry Soon to Be Largest Source of Co2 Emissions

Although on the production side the tar sands are one of the biggest sources of CO2 emissions, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) industry, globally is the fastest growing and soon will be the largest source of CO2 emissions on the consumption side of the equation. ICT emissions are produced indirectly from the coal generated electricity that is used to power all of our devices. Currently it is estimated that ICT consumes around 10% all electrical power growing at about 6-10% per year.

The Spamhaus Distributed Denial of Service - How Big a Deal Was It?

If you haven't been reading the news of late, venerable anti-spam service Spamhaus has been the target of a sustained, record-setting Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack over the past couple of weeks... Of course, bad guys are always mad at Spamhaus, and so they had a pretty robust set-up to begin with, but whoever was behind this attack was able to muster some huge resources, heretofore never seen in intensity, and it had some impact, on the Spamhaus website, and to a limited degree, on the behind-the-scenes services that Spamhaus uses to distribute their data to their customers.

Cloud Security Hinges on IP Addressing

In the first part of this trilogy, I discussed the importance of automatically provisioned second generation DNS in connection with Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC). In the second post, I talked about IP addressing, private enterprise networks, and how DHCP does not meet the requirements of multitenant Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud environments. I will now wrap up this trilogy by putting these two thesis into real-life context.

FISMA Failings: Could EPA’s IT Defense Deficiencies Silence the Agency?

The possibility of unauthorized access to EPA information raises an array of concerns since EPA-held data includes various types of Confidential Business Information, scientific research data, environmental databases, agency plans for responding to "incidents of national significance" and other security-related matters, and environmental monitoring data used in regulatory enforcement actions.

Do Agencies Already Have the Authority to Issue Critical Infrastructure Protection Regulations?

The President and Congress are deliberating how best to ensure appropriate cybersecurity protection for private sector critical infrastructure. Legislative action and Executive Order are both under consideration. It is possible, however, that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) already has sufficient statutory authority to enact new cybersecurity regulations through the normal notice-and-comment rulemaking process.

Tracking Outages

The idea of tracking data outages spawned from an early discussion on the outages forum including feedback from an outages survey about having a status page for (un)planned outages as a central resource. The purpose of such effort is to have a wider focus that one could view as opposed to having to check dozens of provider status pages. There were many ideas put forth but nothing really panned out and things kinda fell on the back burner.

Cloud Redundancy: How Amazon Should Repair Credibility

I'm curiously puzzled, but not entirely surprised, how a company such as Amazon (NASDAQ: GS) allowed its servers to be interrupted for any length of time due to severe storm damage in northern Virginia this past weekend. Companies using cloud servers are both expectant and dependent on being able to pull information from cloud sources to operate their businesses without interruption. After all, IT professionals have been preaching the security and reliability of the cloud for quite some time to manage large data off-site. Steps for Amazon to repair credibility should be transparent and swift.

Why CDNs Are Critical to Future of R&E Networks, Big Data and the Internet

Netflix has announced that they are deploying their own Content Delivery Network (CDN) for delivery of their video streams to Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) around the world. More importantly they are making the hardware and software design of their CDN servers freely available. That means any network can deploy Netflix CDN boxes deep into their network to significantly reduce traffic volumes and improve performance for users.