Avoiding The 9 Common Hazards Of App And Desktop Virtualization

Getting Above the Silos: The Rise of the Logical Data Fabric

Article | April 2, 2020

With so much valuable data potentially available, it can be frustrating for organizations to discover that they can’t easily work with it because it’s stuck in disconnected silos. Limited data access is a problem when organizations need timely, complete views of all relevant data about customers, supply chains, business performance, public health, and more, to make informed decisions. We need only look at the current COVID-19 pandemic to understand the importance of being able to view and share data across silos. One of the hottest topics in data architecture right now is data fabric. The notion of a data fabric is becoming important as organizations put more data in multiple cloud-based storage platforms, which can add to existing on-premises data silo problems. TDWI research finds that disconnected data silos are one of the biggest obstacles organizations face as they try to enable faster data insights. In the industry, “data fabric” is variously called an architecture, a framework – and of course, a fabric. With data fabric, adherents aim to provide a more universal and holistic approach to integrating diverse components of physically distributed data environments. Ideally, a data fabric will use services to integrate the necessary components so that data flows more easily and users and applications do not have to use specialized code to access each data silo.

How to automate the creation multiple routable VLANs on single L2 network using VyOS

Article | February 12, 2020

My personal homelab has a very simple network topology, everything is connected to a single flat network. This has served me well over the years, but sometimes it can prevent me from deploying more complex scenarios. Most recently while working with NSX-T and Project Pacific, I had a need for additional VLANs which my home router does not support. There are a number of software solutions that can be used including the popular pfSense, which I have used before. Over the Winter break, a colleague introduced me to VyOS, which is another popular software firewall and router solution. I had not heard of VyOS before but later realized it was derived from Vyatta, which I had heard of, but development of that solution had stopped and VyOS is now the open source version of that software. Having never played with VyoS before, I thought this might be a good learning opopournity and started to dabble with VyOS over the holiday.

Security that’s Designed for the Modern Data Center

Article | February 26, 2020

The last 12 months have been incredibly exciting for the security business at VMware. Last year at RSA Conference 2019, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger outlined our Intrinsic Security strategy in his keynote presentation, “3 Things the Security Industry Isn’t Talking About”. We also announced the VMware Service-defined Firewall, a stateful Layer 7 data center firewall. As pioneers of micro-segmentation, the Service-defined Firewall extended our leadership in protecting east-west traffic in the data center. Later in the year, we announced two major acquisitions –Avi Networks and Carbon Black. The acquisition of Carbon Black brought to VMware an industry-leading endpoint security platform, and made the entire industry take notice of VMware’s intentions to transform security. With Avi Networks, we acquired a software-defined, elastic, and high-performance load balancer that comes equipped with a full-featured web application firewall (WAF). Maintaining the momentum in building out our security portfolio for the digital enterprise, we announced the VMware NSX Distributed Intrusion Detection and Prevention System which will bring advanced threat controls to the Service-defined Firewall.

IT modernisation series – Rancher Labs: Kubernetes is a catalyst

Article | March 17, 2020

In this series of articles we investigate how organisations are approaching the modernisation, replatforming and migration of legacy applications and related data services. We look at the tools and technologies available encompassing aspects of change management and the use of APIs and containerisation (and more) to make legacy functionality and data available to cloud-native applications. This post is written by Olivier Maes, VP EMEA for Rancher Labs – the company is known for its work in operating-system-level virtualization tools. IT modernisation can be intimidating, but it’s a necessity. Businesses that continue to rely on legacy technologies risk being left behind, while those that embrace digitalisation gain a competitive advantage.