VMware to use MinIO object storage in Kubernetes embrace

Block and File | December 23, 2019

VMware will provision storage to Kubernetes Pods using MinIO open source object storage, Minio told me last week. But first some background. VMware is embracing Kubernetes containers, an alternative, more granular form of server virtualization than its own vSphere virtual machines. VMware is the dominant form of server virtualisation on-premises, and is also available in the cloud with, for example, VMware Cloud Foundation. But cloud-native workloads use containers, not virtual machines and that is a fundamental threat to VMware.

Spotlight

Lenovo is a GOLD sponsor at #VMwareExplore 2023 Singapore! Uma Thana Balasingam and Sumir Bhatia sat down to discuss VMware and Lenovo’s long-standing partnership and their excitement of helping customers transform from the edge to the cloud!


Other News
Virtual Desktop Tools, Virtual Desktop Strategies, Server Virtualization

Netskope Delivers the Next Evolution in Digital Experience Management for SASE with Proactive DEM

PR Newswire | September 01, 2023

Netskope, a leader in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), today announced the launch of Proactive Digital Experience Management (DEM) for SASE, elevating best practice from the current reactive monitoring tools to proactive user experience management. Proactive DEM provides experience management capabilities across the entire SASE architecture, including Netskope Intelligent SSE, Netskope Borderless SD-WAN and Netskope NewEdge global infrastructure. Digital Experience Management technology has become increasingly crucial amid digital business transformation, with organizations seeking to enhance customer experiences and improve employee engagement. With hybrid work and cloud infrastructure now the norm globally, organizations have struggled to ensure consistent and optimized experiences alongside stringent security requirements. Gartner predicts that "by 2026, at least 60% of I&O leaders will use DEM to measure application, services and endpoint performance from the user's viewpoint, up from less than 20% in 2021." However, monitoring applications, services, and networks is only part of a modern DEM experience, and so Netskope Proactive DEM goes beyond observation, providing Machine Learning (ML)-driven functionality to anticipate, and automatically remediate, problems. Sanjay Beri, CEO and co-founder of Netskope commented, "Ensuring a constantly optimized experience is essential for organizations looking to support the best productivity returns for hybrid workers and modern cloud infrastructure, but monitoring alone is not enough. Customers have told us of the challenges they face managing a multi-vendor cloud ecosystem and so we have yet again innovated beyond industry standards, providing experience management that can both monitor and proactively remediate." For issue identification, Netskope Proactive DEM uniquely combines Synthetic Monitoring with Real User monitoring, creating SMART monitoring (Synthetic Monitoring Augmentation for Real Traffic). This enables full end-to-end 'hop-by-hop' visibility of data, and the proactive identification of experience-impacting events. SMART monitoring enables organizations to anticipate potential events that might impact upon network and application experience. While most SASE vendors rely on "gray cloud" infrastructure - built on public cloud - which limits their ability to granularly identify and control any issues, Proactive DEM leverages Netskope NewEdge - the industry's largest private cloud infrastructure - to deliver 360 visibility and control of end-to-end user experience while providing mitigation of issues, including using various self-healing mechanisms, before the user recognizes their experience has degraded. About Netskope Netskope, a global SASE leader, helps organizations apply zero trust principles and AI/ML innovations to protect data and defend against cyber threats. Fast and easy to use, the Netskope platform provides optimized access and real-time security for people, devices, and data anywhere they go. Netskope helps customers reduce risk, accelerate performance, and get unrivaled visibility into any cloud, web, and private application activity. Thousands of customers trust Netskope and its powerful NewEdge network to address evolving threats, new risks, technology shifts, organizational and network changes, and new regulatory requirements.

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Server Virtualization, Virtualized Environments

Plotly Unveils Dash Enterprise 5.1, Empowering Corporate Data App Development in Secure Environments

Newswire | June 30, 2023

Plotly, the industry leader in low-code data app platforms, announces the release of Dash Enterprise 5.1. This latest release brings a host of powerful enhancements, including Virtual Machine (VM) compatibility, enhanced security measures, and performance improvements. With a commitment to providing a unified developer experience, Plotly enables data scientists, analysts, and software developers to effortlessly build, deploy, and scale their applications within enterprise environments. Dash Enterprise 5.1 delivers over 100 feature enhancements across the entire platform, ranging from portal theming to security patches. Platform users will find more flexibility, improved security controls, enhanced scalability, and better performance and reliability, leading to a more seamless experience within their organizational settings. With Dash Enterprise 5.1, developers now have more flexibility to work within their organizational setting with higher security controls and options in place, including: As organizations increasingly rely on data apps to drive their analytics strategies, Dash Enterprise 5.1 provides a comprehensive, all-in-one solution for building, deploying, and scaling data apps within the corporate sphere. With this latest release and the recent SOC 2 compliance designation, Plotly solidifies its position as the leader in secure, low-code data app platforms by delivering a comprehensive feature set and a steadfast commitment to customer success. "Dash Enterprise 5.1 integrates powerful enhancements that facilitate seamless data app development and deployment. By introducing features such as VM compatibility, airgapped support, and access controls, organizations can rely on Dash Enterprise with absolute confidence in the most stringent corporate environments," commented Chris Parmer, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Plotly. About Plotly Plotly offers Dash Enterprise, the premier data app platform for Python that enables organizations to collaboratively develop and deploy apps in a secure, scalable, managed environment. We're also the stewards of the open-source graphing libraries behind our namesake, bringing interactive data visualization to your web browser. With 89,000+ GitHub stars, 12,600,000+ downloads per month of Plotly open-source libraries, and 326,000,000+ total open-source downloads, Dash is the leading low-code platform for AI apps. These Dash apps give a point-and-click interface to models written in Python, vastly expanding the notion of what's possible in a traditional dashboard.

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Virtual Desktop Strategies, Virtual Server Management

Liquidware Announces First SaaS Real-time Remediation Solution at VMware Explore

PR Newswire | August 25, 2023

Liquidware,the leader in digital workspace management, today announced their first SaaS solution, Liquidware CommandCTRL™, is now generally available at this week's VMware Explore event. CommandCTRL is the only SaaS real-time remediation solution that includes a DVR-like function that provides expeditious point-in-time problem solving. The many other features provide business benefits such as reduced time to resolution of incidents that increases productivity and improves user experience. CommandCTRL is a cost effective solution as there is no infrastructure required with minimal training to get up to speed. With the majority of troubleshooting being done in the background while the user is uninterrupted provides improved user sentiment. CommandCTRL has four key differentiators to other solutions on the market today: DVR-like playback functionality- Playback-mode captures 30-days history so admins can see exactly what occurred in the environment at specific dates and times AI integration - with ChatGPT for process identification Protocol mirroring - displays the protocol to the physical machine endpoint Switch - seamlessly switch and navigate between two distinct environments: the local desktop and the cloud-based desktop. "CommandCTRL fills a gap in the market for assisting organizations in expediting incident resolution, the solution is purpose-built to support interactive remediation of remote workspaces," commentedJason Mattox, CTO Liquidware. "While CommandCTRL is a standalone product, we envisage many customers buying it to accompany their Stratusphere™ UX investment." In a recent Gartner® research report* it states, "To address the demands of digital business, IT service desks must reduce the number of simple and repeatable incidents and service requests they process manually." Gartner recommends Infrastructure and Operations leaders focused on IT operations transformation should, "Eliminate the cause of low-value, avoidable issues and requests to focus business productivity teams on high-priority work." CommandCTRL adds another dimension of enterprise management to Liquidware's industry-leading solutions that include ProfileUnity™ user environment management, FlexApp™ application layering and Stratusphere™ UX digital experience monitoring. Other key features include: Real-time metrics data updates every three seconds Real-time remediation actions speed problem identification and resolution Threshold violations are highlighted in real-time mode and inDVR, these highlights alert the admin to end users' problems in seconds Admins have two separate ways to shadow users: Quick Assist and Remote Assist Multi-tenant membership allows partners to be a member of customers' sites to assist with remediation Powershell and Cmd options for creating scripts to automate needed functions Full scripting store organizes custom and external scripts for easy access and implementation. About Liquidware Liquidware is a leader in digital workspace management solutions for Windows desktops. The company's products encompass all facets of management to ensure the ultimate user experience across all workspaces – physical, virtual, DaaS or in the cloud. Enterprises across the globe utilize Liquidware solutions to dramatically decrease time spent managing desktops, while delivering increased security, flexibility, and scalability. Supported platforms include Microsoft physical, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), Windows 365, Citrix Desktops, VMware Horizon, Amazon WorkSpaces, and Dizzion Frame. Liquidware products are available through a global network of partners.

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VPN

Internet Engineering Task Force standardises quantum-safe VPN protocol created by Post-Quantum

Businesswire | July 18, 2023

The world’s efforts to secure digital communications from the threat posed by quantum computers took a significant leap forward today as a new standard for quantum-safe Virtual Private Networks (VPN) was ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The new protocol has already been used by Banque de France and Deutsche Bundesbank to secure payments messages, paving the way for full adoption by the Bank for International Settlements to secure communications between the world’s central banks. ‘Harvest Now Decrypt Later’ (HNDL) attacks currently represent the greatest quantum cybersecurity threat. These attacks see hostile actors steal encrypted data now which can be decrypted once a sufficiently mature quantum computer comes online. The new US Quantum Computing Cybersecurity Preparedness Act states that the HNDL risk presents the highest threat to humankind and stipulates that quantum migration must start now. Deploying a VPN based on new post quantum cryptography is the easiest way to protect data-in-transit from such attacks. The new IETF standard specifies how VPNs can exchange communications securely in the quantum age. The novel approach prioritises interoperability by making it possible for multiple post-quantum and classical encryption algorithms to be incorporated into VPNs. Combining both old and new encryption is essential to ensure no disruption to the functioning of existing IT systems, and to protect data from attack by both classical and quantum computers. This is a particularly important milestone for internet connectivity and security as we are transitioning from an era where the world relied upon just one or two algorithms (RSA and Elliptic Curve), to a situation where different nation states are deploying a wide variety of different post-quantum algorithms. This new IETF standard is the glue that allows parties using different public key encryption algorithms to talk with one another. The new IETF standard was proposed and designed by Post-Quantum, a British cyber security company that’s built a portfolio of market-ready quantum-safe cyber security products. Post-Quantum’s own Hybrid PQ VPN uses the new IETF standard and is already in use by NATO to secure its communications from quantum attack, supporting interoperable communications between NATO members. CJ Tjhai, CTO, Post-Quantum and original author of the new IETF standard said: “I’d like to thank all the technologists that collaborated with us on this IETF standard. Much of the focus has been on NIST’s new post quantum encryption algorithms themselves, but this is insufficient unless you have a protocol that defines how the connectivity is done. The easiest way to prevent Harvest Now Decrypt Later attacks is to deploy a PQ VPN based on the new IETF standard. NIST’s new algorithms are only useful if we have agreed standards for their use and mature products that can accommodate them.” Andersen Cheng, Executive Chairman, Post-Quantum added: “CJ and his collaborators have completed important work that makes it possible for tech companies to build quantum-safe VPNs that communicate to one another. We are entering a period where different countries are now recommending different encryption algorithms, so engineering our communications infrastructure to be interoperable and backward compatible is absolutely crucial. That’s the value our own VPN is bringing to organisations like NATO, a diverse member organisation with a variety of post-quantum algorithms in use. “In the commercial sector, we are pleased that Banque de France and Deutsche Bundesbank have also recently completed their project in transmitting payment messages using our protocol, which will pave the way for the Bank for International Settlements to build a complete chain of trust for central bank applications to counter any HNDL risks they already face today.” José María Lucía Moreno, Lead Partner, EY Wavespace and a Post-Quantum partner added: “Our agreement with Post-Quantum is an important step in helping EY and its clients to become quantum-safe. We’re increasingly consulting with our clients to identify where they use traditional encryption that will need to be upgraded, and to help them prepare for the quantum era. Post-Quantum’s approach is particularly interesting because they have modular software-based products like the VPN, which can be implemented together, or as standalones within existing environments, to offer protection today.” The IETF is the non-profit organisation with responsibility for developing the standards that define how the internet is built and used. Now that the IETF has ratified this work, VPN providers will adapt their protocols to match it, making this a defining standard for the future of cybersecurity as the world transitions from classical to new post-quantum encryption. Ratification represents the culmination of work dating back to 2017 when Post-Quantum took the lead in creating the original proposal for this standard. About Post-Quantum Post-Quantum is upgrading the world to next-generation encryption. Our quantum-safe platform includes modular software for Identity, Transmission and Encryption that protect organisations across their entire digital footprint. Products are interoperable, backward compatible and crypto-agile - ensuring a smooth transition to the next generation of encryption. Post-Quantum works with organisations in defence, critical national infrastructure and financial services, including a multi-year relationship with NATO to ensure its communications are secure against quantum attack.

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