August 22, 2013

CIO considerations for SMAC fusion
The disruptive trends of social, mobile, analytics and cloud, often termed “SMAC” or the “Nexus of Forces”, are well-recognized as essential elements of next generation IT applications. They represent a desirable, future end-state for IT applications and architectures due to their characteristics of collaborative functionality, ubiquitous access, and intelligent insights, all delivered via a flexible and scalable delivery model.


Better data center planning tactics from the Open Compute Project
One ambitious area under development, Data Center Technology, considers those physical layers that tend to be taken for granted in data center planning and operations, including mechanical and electrical specifications. Project members defined an approach to data center cooling that could apply to a wide range of data centers with similar environmental conditions.


Culture wasn’t built in a day
Building a shared culture and sense of common purpose can take many years, said Steve Holliday, chief executive of National Grid, the utilities giant. “In an organisation like ours, it takes a long time,” he said. “The culture didn’t grow up overnight.” That doesn’t mean to say it’s impossible to change an organisational culture, he said. “We’ve been shifting the culture here quite considerably in the past five or six years — with some success.


Tame the Tiger in Your Network
Managing a large estate of specialised security devices from many different manufacturers is a sure fire way of multiplying the number of active security policies. In contrast, deploying a suite of complementary systems from the same vendor reduces operating costs by enabling easier and more responsive management with less policies, higher performance and better overall security.


Testing the Partition Tolerance of PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB and Riak
Partitions can occur in production networks for a variety of reasons: GC pressure, NIC failure, switch firmware bugs, misconfiguration, congestion, or backhoes, to name a few. Given that partitions occur, the CAP theorem restricts the maximally achievable guarantees of distributed systems. When messages are dropped, "consistent" (CP) systems preserve linearizability by rejecting some requests on some nodes.


Windows Server 2012 R2 kicks Hyper-V up another notch
One of the more interesting new features is the ability to choose the VM generation: Gen 1 or Gen 2. Gen 1 is the same as what you've known in previous Hyper-V versions. Gen 2 brings with it the ability to have secure boot, to boot from a SCSI virtual hard disk or DVD, and to PXE-boot using a standard network adapter, as well as UEFI firmware support.


Oracle survey examines evolving CFO role, cooperation with CIOs
This does not necessarily mean that CFOs need in-depth technical knowledge or be able to manage technology on a day-to-day basis. For Ms. Washington of Gilead, it is the application of technology that matters. “Thinking about how to leverage technology is certainly vital,” she explains. “But more importantly, I need to focus on implementing effective business processes because, as we grow, it is my job is to ensure that we continue to do so profitably.”


Poison Ivy, used in RSA SecurID attack, still popular
Poison Ivy is a remote access trojan (RAT) that was released eight years ago but is still favored by some hackers, FireEye wrote in a new report released Wednesday. It has a familiar Windows interface, is easy to use and can log keystrokes, steal files and passwords. Since Poison Ivy is still so widely used that FireEye said it is harder for security analysts to link its use to a specific hacking group.


How Technology Complicates, Benefits Innovation
Innovation is a crowded space where it’s difficult for a person or business to come up with something unique and yet, valuable. Nevertheless, innovation is the talk of the town. It’s hard to find an article without the word in it and impossible to find a company not looking to be part of the conversation. The problem is, the term is often glorified and misused. And, innovation itself is suffering because its friend, technology, made things a bit harder.


Buying server hardware for a scalable virtual infrastructure
Organizations may opt to purchase small numbers of new, powerful servers -- in a scale-upstrategy -- that allows a few servers to handle large workloads while consuming less energy. Alternatively, they can choose a scale-out approach that uses large numbers of less-powerful commodity machines, which allow for clustering and redundancy, and this architecture may be less expensive up front.



Quote for the day:

"If you want to know where your heart is, look where your mind goes when it wanders" -- Bernard Byer

No comments:

Post a Comment