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The Pirate Bay: First Ever Working Redundant Array of Inexpensive Clouds?

It’s really interesting to see that the Pirate Bay just found a new reason to get rid of its physical servers in exchange for moving to the cloud. Sure, lots of companies have made the move from physical servers to virtual servers to cloud, but it’s ironic that The Pirate Bay is inadvertently leading the charge towards more resilient cloud computing. The new architecture of The Pirate Bay is a highly variable cloud environment that looks more like an ambient cloud, or at least a distributed cloud, than a centralized cloud. The history of the cloud has taught us that things on the fringe... read more

Software Defined Networking Redefined: VMware Buys Nicira, Oracle Buys Xsigo

First VMware buys Nicira, then Oracle buys Xsigo. What an exciting couple weeks it’s been. These major acquisitions are completely mucking with the established order of the networking and security industries. It’s about time. Network virtualization has been going on for about 8 years, but it’s been mostly behind the scenes and unless you were in a small group of companies, you could have easily missed it until the rise of network virtualization, OpenFlow, and Software Defined Networking in the last couple years. I have been involved with that small group of companies since the start. Here’s... read more

Super Fast Flash Storage: One More Step Making the Cloud into a Mainframe

Check out this new release from Greylock Partners, which calls Pure Storage “one of the most exciting enterprise companies in the Greylock Portfolio.” Pure Storage makes a flash based storage array. Greylock is a solid VC – I’ve pitched them on startup ideas a few times over the years. I’m the first to admit that storage arrays might be the most boring part of cloud infrastructure, aside from layer 1 signaling mechanisms maybe. Nonetheless, I’m excited to see this launch. The reason is that I/O for storage is becoming a limiting factor in some cloud infrastructure.... read more

What Are the True Dangers of the Cloud?

We often hear that security and privacy concerns are the main inhibitors to cloud adoption.  But what are the true threats?  Is the cloud really more dangerous than your on-site data center?  I would say that virtualization and cloud computing aren’t inherently more dangerous, but they have unique infrastructure that must be addressed when creating a security foundation.  There are similar attacks across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures—data-stealing malware, web threats, spam, phishing, bots, etc. So many companies are tempted to deploy their security for dedicated physical... read more

Agentless Security Gets an “A” on Its Report Card

In my last blog post, I discussed some of the benefits of agentless security for virtual and private cloud servers. Today at VMworld, Harish Agastya, Director of Data Center Security at Trend Micro, conducted a presentation on Agentless Security for VMware Environments (listed on the Trend Micro VMworld page). Trend Micro released agentless antivirus in Deep Security at last year’s VMworld and has seen impressive results over the last year.  With such success, today Trend Micro announced an extension of its agentless security with new agentless file integrity monitoring (FIM) in Deep Security... read more

Ambient Cloud News: Skype protocol has been reverse engineered

This is pretty cool. I gave a talk last week at the Glue Conference in Denver about how ambient clouds ( http://cloud.trendmicro.com/good-clouds-evil-clouds-why-microsoft-has… )work and even used Skype as an example of a massive-scale ambient cloud. This case raises some very important new questions around ambient clouds. For instance, if you create an ambient cloud, one that you control using your own protocol, but where you have no control over when an endpoint may join it, what are the legal implications if someone else uses your protocol? In an open source world, slapping a lawsuit on... read more

Did Amazon’s aggressive algorithms prevent customer data loss?

How difficult is it to run a public cloud service? As all of us know, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage on 21-Apr-2011 and that lasted for almost 4 days. Quite a lot of companies were affected and you can find the list here. The Internet was flooded with articles speculating what went wrong, whether cloud computing is viable in the long run, how Amazon services did not function as advertised, how the applications should be built, etc. While most offered their opinion in broad strokes such as “use multiple regions/clouds”, “use built-in redundancy”, “don’t use public clouds”,... read more

Should the Amazon Web Services EC2 outage impact cloud adoption?

Last Thursday, April 21, 2011 Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) had an outage that impacted multiple Availability Zones. Thursday morning, Amazon issued a status update indicating that the outage was based on problems with replication mirroring: “This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it’s difficult to create new... read more

The Small Business Journey to the Cloud is Actually a Round Trip

The Small Business Journey to the Cloud is Actually a Round Trip      By Greg Boyle, Trend Micro Global Product Marketing Manager Many small businesses are still uncertain about cloud computing. They wonder if it can help with their profitability without being extremely risky. Let’s start by defining cloud computing in small business terms. There are two commonly agreed upon types of cloud computing: 1) software-as-a-service and 2) infrastructure-as-a-service. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is cloud computing where the software you would normally install on your computers in the office is instead... read more

Scalability Testing In The Cloud

Not long ago, we set out on a mission to perform a full scalability test on one of our products (Trend Micro Deep Security). After some quick, back-of-the-napkin calculations we discovered that we needed somewhere in the order of 35 Dell 710′s with virtualization to complete our test. Finding that many available servers is a tall order for any company, and buying that many servers for a month long test was completely out of the question (try asking your managers for 35 servers and see how pale they go!). Naturally we turned to the cloud to help us out. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was a good... read more

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