Posts

Attack of the tools!

As part of my last post that showed who was attacking who around the globe, in this post I will focus on the recent ransomware attacks. I’m pretty sure we’ve all heard in the news of the WannaCry ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WannaCry_ransomware_attack ) and Nyetya ( http://blog.talosintelligence.com/2017/06/worldwide-ransomware-variant.html ) attacks and the devastating effects that this has caused to corporations and people around the globe. For those that don’t know, these would be attackers would try to gain access to your computer system by exploiting a vulnerability in an un-patched Windows operating system. The attackers would then encrypt your system rendering your files useless until you pay the ransom, hence ransomware, for the decryption key. These payments are usually in the form of bitcoin and it is nearly impossible to track who these attackers are and you are never guaranteed to get the decryption key after paying the ransom. So, as part of any data protection strateg...

Who's attacking who?

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These days with the super powers pointing the finger at each other for cyber warfare, I was interested to find out where they do they really originate from? After a bit of Googling there are quite a few websites from security vendors that show real time cyber-attacks occurring across the globe. I was quite surprised to see that it’s not just the super powers but nearly every nation and some are even attacking themselves! So, if you have nothing better to do and want to make your monitor look busy, visit the below sites and bring some popcorn. You might even spot the next ransomware attack!         http://map.norsecorp.com/#/   https://threatmap.checkpoint.com/ThreatPortal/livemap.html

Would you like de-dupe and auto-tiering with that?

What I’ve noticed for a while now is customers will always ask for these features and whilst they are great technologies, I see little relevance for them in today’s SDS environments. Why is that you ask? Well, if you look at auto-tiering this was introduced into storage arrays 10 years ago when SSD’s were really expensive. The SSD’s in the storage array were used to store hot blocks of data and overtime auto-tier those blocks down to magnetic media as the data got colder. In order to keep track of those blocks the storage array will need to consume extra CPU and memory to continuously run algorithms to find out which blocks to move and which blocks not to move…yet. Now that SSD’s are at the cross point of being cost competitive with magnetic media, the notion of auto-tiering will be irrelevant in the very near future if you ask me. One huge benefit of going all SSD is that you don’t have to worry about which type of volume to assign or is their enough performance for the applicati...

Why one Software Defined Storage solution will rule them all!!!

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In my travels across Asia I’ve spoken to many customers to showcase the merits of running their datacenter with software defined storage. If webscalers like Google and Facebook can run their datacenter using commodity x86 servers along with software defined storage, why can’t you? When was the last time you saw 404 in your browser when accessing Google or Facebook? In this blog post I’ll describe why you should consider Dell EMC ScaleIO as the ONLY software defined block storage solution that not only replaces traditional SAN but can also run in hyperconverged environments. No other solution in the market today can run both at the same time in the same cluster for any application at any scale! Software defined storage has been around for a short period of time and yet it has garnered a lot of attention over the years. There are many solutions out there in the market that claim to be the leader and that’s ok. What you need to understand first and foremost is the architecture of how...