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CIO
How Impactful Is VMware’s New Core-Limited Licensing?
This week, VMware announced new licensing restrictions for vSphere, which I wrote about here. I wanted to get more understanding for how impactful this change would be for existing customers. On today’s ActualTech Media EcoCast, I asked our audience for two pieces of information. The first a… Read More
By Scott D. Lowe -
CIO
VMware’s Licensing Change Redux: Better the Second Time Around
The year was 2011. I was comfortably ensconced in my office at Westminster College watching as VMware brought out a marketing executive to discuss the company’s revolutionary new licensing program. As soon as I saw that it was a marketing person giving the news about a change in licensing, I thoug… Read More
By Scott D. Lowe -
Cloud
Report: Cloud Spend Tops Data Center Spend for First Time in 2019
“Trend” stories have some value, in the same way virtual machine snapshots have some value: they’re helpful, and often quite helpful, as long as you understand their limitations. (And always remember: a snapshot is not a backup!) You know the end-of-year trend articles: “Top Stories of 20… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Kubernetes
Google Anthos: Kubernetes the Easy Way
Kubernetes continues to gain popularity in the industry, and shows no signs of slowing down. This container management platform has essentially won the container wars, and is now the de facto orchestration tool for containers. Kubernetes is popular because managing containers is a serious pain. B… Read More
By Keith Ward -
security
WannaCry Ransomware Hits Hard in 2019
If your organization was pummeled by the WannaCry virus last year, you’re not alone: nearly a quarter of all ransomware attacks were of that variety. And the damage it did was staggering. That’s according to PreciseSecurity.com, which reported that WannaCry was the most common crypto ransomwa… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Podcast
082 – It’s Been 34 Days: Do You Still Have the Boss’s Email?
It’s the nightmare scenario for every admin: the CEO has deleted an email related to a multi-million dollar project, and needs it back. The hitch: he deleted it 34 days ago, and your Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider only provides 30 days’ worth of backups. Uh oh. This is an issue that… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Podcast
081 – A Question of Data Sovereignty
Thanks to regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), organizations are more aware than ever of the need to protect the privacy of customer data. And the GDPR is just the beginning: the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) goes into effect Jan. 1, 2020. The problem is that k… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Podcast
080 – Remove All the Bottlenecks!
Data center storage is evolving constantly, and one of the most crucial areas is in lower latency. Latency, after all, impacts everything in your operations. And cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) demand the lowest latency possible. Delivering th… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Cloud
Challenges to Cloud Computing Resource Planning
Cloud computing has transformed how enterprises think about infrastructure. A decade ago, IT professionals had to make server projections months or years in advance, deciding on the types of servers they’d need. That would in turn be largely determined by the services required for their business n… Read More
By Dan Sullivan -
Cloud
‘The Cloud’ Is No Magic Bullet
There remains a belief among some in IT that moving to “the cloud” will solve all their problems. This is, emphatically, not the case. It’s entirely true that the cloud has massive advantages in terms of things like the ability to scale, to move capital expenditure (CapEx) costs to a more b… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Podcast
079 – Joe’s Cat Pictures Shouldn’t Be on Primary Storage
If you’re like most companies, you’re leaving the wrong data on the wrong storage. Data that isn’t touched often—like Joe’s cat pictures—doesn't need to be stored on expensive primary storage. But moving that data to much less costly secondary storage is a huge challenge: for both admins… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Cloud
5 Big Challenges of Multi-Cloud Management
Cloud computing is ubiquitous. Enterprises are continuing to move to the cloud in record numbers. According to the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud report, 91% use some form of cloud, and 84% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy. It's easy to see why: a multi-cloud architecture, comprised of… Read More
By Laurie Weber -
Podcast
078 – Ditching AWS for Render
You may think of the public cloud as an “easy” button, something that takes the pain out of application development, for example. The reality is that it can make things harder—much harder. That was the experience of Anurag Goel, Founder/CEO of Render, a unified cloud platform for building a… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Podcast
077 – Enterprise Storage-as-a-Service
Enterprise-level, fully-managed Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS): Is it a thing? Should it be a thing? And why would you outsource something as important as storage? Zadara says there are good reasons to do just that, leveraging the power of cloud computing without losing the speed and latency benefits… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Video
Virtual Summit Wrapup: Architecting and Supporting the Pillars of IT in 2020
The next decade is around the corner: 2020 beckons, and with it come a host of challenges and opportunities in the IT space. To help get a handle on what we can expect, ActualTech Media held its largest-ever Virtual Summit on Nov. 8, 2019. In all, 12 vendors presented their vision of the future, and… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Cloud
Untangled: The ActualTech Cloud Solutions Megacast
Although the cloud is rapidly maturing, it’s fair to say that most companies are still trying to figure out their cloud strategy: what workloads to put there, the proper mix of public and private clouds, determining the risks vs. benefits, costs, CapEx vs. OpEx… the list goes on. To add to th… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Podcast
076 – Multi-Cloud Management Fundamentals
The public cloud, contrary to perception, doesn’t make management easier; in most cases, it’s just the opposite, according to Wally McDermid, VP Cloud Business Development for Scality. And when it comes to multi-cloud scenarios, things just get hairier. Wally discusses these difficulties with… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Podcast
075 – The Business of Public Cloud
Perception and use of the major public clouds has undergone a shift as it has become more of a baseline technology for companies. As Kelly Goolsby says, businesses have come to understand that it’s no longer about the “cool” stuff cloud can do for you, but meeting business requirements. Goo… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
Ripcord Unleashes Robots to Transform Your Paper Documents
In recent years, enterprise-class organizations have been increasingly finding that big data analytics is allowing them to capitalize on business insight that’s hidden within their seldom-used data. One factor preventing such processes from being as effective as they could be, however, is the over… Read More
By Brien Posey -
Opinion
How to Defend Against IoT-Based DDoS Attacks
A new variant of Mirai—the botnet that took down the Internet on most of the U.S. east coast in 2016—has now emerged, and it’s growing fast. Termed Echobot, the malware behind the botnet targets more than 26 vulnerabilities to propagate. Most agree that it has the potential to pose an even gre… Read More
By Max Emelianov -
Cloud
SADA Goes All-In on Google Cloud Platform
When it comes to public cloud, there are three leaders, and then all the rest. Those leaders are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). And they’re in that order, as well—AWS at the top, followed by Azure, with GCP in third. If that’s the case, does it… Read More
By Keith Ward