Grazed from DarkReading. Author: Ericka Chickowski.

As the lines blur between data center and cloud provider facility, very few organizations are keeping up with policies and technology geared to handle the shift to dynamic data centers, reports a new study out by the SANS Institute last week. The report shows that even at the most basic level, planning is scarce: fewer than a third of organizations have a strategy in place to tailor security requirements to the mix of environments they use.

“Security teams need to do a lot of thinking to keep up with the rapid diversification? of enterprise computing into a variety of private, public, cloud and traditional environments,” says Dave Shackleford, SANS analyst and author of the report. “Teams that are ahead of the game have already developed strategies describing how traditional and cloud computing models fit together, typically outlining what data or other assets can go to which type of external provider and what conditions should be placed on providers of different types or security levels.”…

Grazed from GoCertify. Author: Mike Chapple.

Organizations around the world are quickly moving IT services to cloud computing platforms in an attempt to meet a wide range of business needs. From business organizations implementing a user-friendly and cost-effective SaaS platform for e-mail and calendaring to firms chasing wholesale adoption of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), enterprise IT is clearly undergoing a radical transformation.

As services migrate to the cloud, there is high demand for security professionals experienced in adapting existing security controls to cloud environments. How can organizations gauge whether their existing security staff and potential hires have the knowledge required to operate effectively in a cloud-based environment?…

Veeam Software, the innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Modern Data Center, today announced that Veeam Availability Suite v9 will include a new storage capability that dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) of backup storage, lowers hardware costs and radically simplifies backup storage management in complex enterprise environments: the Unlimited Scale-out Backup Repository.

Managing backup storage is an enormous and expensive headache for the enterprise; in no small part because the exponential rate of data growth is outpacing the ability of legacy solutions to manage it efficiently and cost-effectively.

"Both production and protection storage volumes are growing around 40 percent year-over-year, while data protection budgets are growing roughly one-tenth of that," according to Jason Buffington, Senior Data Protection Analyst at ESG. "The irony is that IT is being asked to increase their availability and agility to recover, but aren’t even able to maintain the status quo with legacy approaches to backup, in part due to storage requirements."

While snapshots have long been recognized as the fastest and most efficient way to recover data, virtual machines and applications, the Commvault Data Platform integration with Nutanix XCP helps accelerate the use of snapshots in the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) stack. As a result, the complex lifecycle of snapshot management is now integrated into one seamless framework within the new solution, streamlining service delivery to the business for improved disaster recovery and data access. These new innovations in the Commvault Data Platform address increasing global customer demand for 100 percent software-based HCI to improve overall efficiencies and scale with current hypervisor environments.

Now more than ever, customers are looking for partners to provide efficient and scalable services for data availability and recovery beyond what has been offered through more traditional IT infrastructures. By integrating the speed and convenience of Nutanix-based snapshots, with the automated index and search capabilities of Commvault, enterprise customers can ensure rapid recovery that meets business needs and ongoing continuity.

With over 100 developers from both commercial suppliers and service providers collaborating on the development of an open source, carrier-grade, integrated platform for NFV, the project has issued an update to its first release, Arno, and is hard at work on its second release due early next year.

“We are seeing vibrant collaboration coming from the OPNFV community across many  sectors, which is key to accelerating the open source software development of NFV,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “Our newest Silver members, Freescale and KDDI R&D Labs, which bring additional semiconductor and telecoms expertise to the project, are a welcome addition. We’d also like to congratulate Morgan Richomme of Orange on his appointment to the Board of Directors. His strong network architecture experience is an asset and we are happy to have his guiding input.”

As a child of the 1980s, there are particular songs, such as "Danger Zone," "Shout" and "No Sleep Till Brooklyn," that really take me back to the essence of that time period (RIP mullet). On the flip side, there are also times where current events make me think of ‘80s hits. Take today’s storage market and the myriad of technologies and changes being discussed. Can’t you just hear Public Enemy’s classic "Don’t Believe the Hype" playing in the background? I know I can.

Cumulus Networks, a leading provider of enterprise Open Networking solutions, announced today that it is among the first to receive the “Nutanix Ready – Networking and Security” validation for the Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor. The validation makes it simple for enterprises to add Cumulus Linux network switches to Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure to provide an intelligent software-defined data center.

Nutanix customers can install Cumulus Linux on 31 different networking platforms from seven different hardware switch vendors and multiple CPU architectures. With Cumulus Linux, data center switches can be treated just like servers running a native Linux OS. This gives flexibility at all levels and provides the stability of Linux running in the entire rack.

Perth Radiological Clinic is one business that has already selected Cumulus Networks and Nutanix to improve performance and agility for its overall IT infrastructure. A leader in advanced medical imaging, and with 15 sites throughout Perth, the company needed a solution that allowed it to make every image taken by each of its clinicians available to all authorized viewers via its data center, regardless of their location.

The LeaseWeb Cloud portfolio consists of public cloud as well as Apache CloudStack and VMware-based private cloud solutions. All services have an extensive feature set, including: instant deployment, fully redundant architecture, full flash-based storage, flat flee pricing, intuitive customer portal, and extensive APIs. LeaseWeb Asia Pacific also provides dedicated hosting, CDN and hybrid solutions.

CenturyLink is aggressively working to transform its existing core network into an SDN and NFV-based environment and will virtualize 40 percent of its global IP core network locations by end of 2015 with plans to have full global virtualization coverage in its IP core network and data centers by 2018. The company has already built its NFV platform in 36 network and data center locations in seven countries, with plans to expand into a total of 44 locations by the end of the year. CenturyLink also was one of the first providers to use NFV technology to virtualize security features such as firewalls and a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute video through its Prism^® TV service, providing quicker delivery of these services. In the coming months, CenturyLink will begin deploying a range of virtualized data and voice infrastructure services, including virtualized Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) routers and Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) to enable dynamic delivery of scalable services for customers.