Tuesday, August 31, 2010

VMworld2010: VMsolutions Whiteboard with Alan Murphy

Peter Silva re-visits F5's Alan Murphy, to go deeper into F5's integration with VMware's VMView and vCloud Director.

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VMworld2010: Interview with Phil de la Motte

Peter Silva talks with F5's Phil de la Motte, Sr. Business Development Manager, about our partnership with VMware, support for VMview, vCloud Director and vSphere along with some cloud trends he's seeing. Poor audio quality but will fix & replace shortly.

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Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, cloud, virtualization, vmware

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VMworld2010: Interview with Alan Murphy

I interview F5's Alan Murphy at VMworld.  The two Technical Marketing Managers talk virtualization, cloud computing and a few others things VMworld related.

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Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, cloud, virtualization, vmware

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VMworld2010: Find F5 Networks

I show how to find the F5 booth (#1131) at Moscone Center during VMworld along with demonstrating some of the giveaways.  Featuring a special guest appearance by Kerry Ok.

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Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, cloud, virtualization, vmware

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Thursday, August 26, 2010

CloudFucius Goes Off…to VMworld

Konfuzius-1770 The collective we (F5 Networks) will be at Moscone Center in San Francisco next week for VMworld 2010.  If you are in town and attending, visit F5’s booth #1131.  We’ll have giveaways, demos, exciting announcements, video interviews and other fun & informative activities all week, in addition to participating in several breakout sessions during the show. 

I’ll be handling a lot of our social media activities during the show, specifically tweeting (or follow F5) and conducting some video interviews of F5 partners and customers.  I’ll also probably grab an F5er or two to talk about our VMware partnership along with some technical folks to capture some interesting whiteboard discussions.  You can catch all the video posts here in my blog, or you can subscribe to F5’s YouTube Channel to be alerted when new content gets posted.  We’ve grown our video content tremendously over the last year with more than 100 videos covering a range of topics: Tech Demos, In 5 Minutes or Less, Interviews, Case Studies, White Board Discussions, Cool Solutions, Product Info, Partner Spotlights, Life at F5 and of course some fun ones with my own brand of humor.

There is no Breakout Session pre-registration this year which will allow you to choose the sessions that are interesting at the moment rather than sticking to a plan you built weeks ago.  Breakout Sessions that might be of interest include (links take you to main VMworld site):

Hope to see you there, here or somewhere in the clouds.

And one from Confucius: Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.

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The CloudFucius Series: Intro, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19

Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, cloud, virtualization, vmware

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Audio White Paper: F5 FirePass Endpoint Security

As SSL VPN technology becomes more mainstream and organizations extend their internal infrastructures to users who are not necessarily employees, Endpoint security has become an increasing concern. Allowing an infected device access onto the network is just as bad as allowing an invalid user to access proprietary internal information. Most people perceive remote access as either trusted or un-trusted. But these days, with so many personal devices connecting to the corporate infrastructure, all hosts should be considered hostile until they prove otherwise.  This White Paper describes how F5 FirePass Endpoint Security prevents infected PCs, hosts, or users from connecting to the network, and much more.  Running Time: 20:59  Read full white paper here.  And click here for more F5 Audio.

 

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twitter: @psilvas

Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, cloud connect, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, intercloud, cloud, context-aware, infrastructure 2.0, automation, web, internet

 

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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

CloudFucius Repeats: Money (Really) Moving to the Cloud

Konfuzius-1770 Ever wish you saved a blog title for that ‘perfect’ eye-catcher?  Well, I do.  Last week I wrote about some cloud surveys talking about how financial institutions are using cloud services titled: CloudFucius’ Money: Trickles to the Cloud.  I get to this week’s weekly entry and Ka-Chow (with apologies to Lightning McQueen) that would have been the perfect title to this entry.  Oh well, as to not be included in the Department of Redundancy Department Hall of Fame, I had to be a little creative with something slightly different.  And for all of you looking at the title and wondering, ‘Did this guy just copy his last blog entry?’  I can assure you, this is all new material so let’s get to it.

Have you seen the news?  Cloud Computing Ranks High on Fujitsu's M&A Shopping List; HP, Dell in Bidding War for Cloud Computing Provider; 6fusion is hiring after raising $3 million; and Nimbula raises $15M to expand cloud service.  I guess we’ve moved slightly past the ‘early adopter’ stage and right into the ‘gimmie more’ stage.  Throughout the CloudFucius series, we’ve tried to investigate the various surveys showing cloud computing movement and hindrances along with learning about areas we were not so knowledgeable.  It’s almost following the same pattern as 26 Short Topics About Security where I filled the entries with stats, surveys, stories, suggestions and as Don MacVittie commented, ‘a link fest’ of articles.  I tried to present multiple sides of the story, especially with surveys virtually contradicting themselves when it comes to cloud computing.  They want it, they are hesitant; looking into it, waiting until it’s mature; cost saver, virtual sprawl; we’ve deployed, what the heck is it

What is intriguing to me, errr CloudFucius, is that I had always thought – both my impression and what analysts have said – that cloud computing will never take over the world but is simply another option for IT with various benefits.  Right now, that’s exactly what it is.  With the announcements above, it sure seems like a lot of providers and investors feel that it’ll be a much larger force within the technology industry.  Almost every technology company, including F5, are providing some sort of services that ‘play’ in the cloud.  Many of us have also been to trade shows where the vendor booth is touting some ‘cloud’ connection and you look at them and go, ‘huh?’  How does that ‘enable’ cloud computing?  ‘Ummm, we use the cloud to do this, that or the other thing.’

How will it all turn out?  Who knows at this point.  Did you expect the level of technology we have today, 10 years ago?  Did you expect RF chips in the underwear you are purchasing?  Did you expect common thieves going to a cloud to steal your info?  Did you think you’d be able to surf the net on an airplane?  Maybe we thought it *might* happen at some point, but we are living it now.  ♫ Meet George Jetson……

And one from Confucius: Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.

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The CloudFucius Series: Intro, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18

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Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, cloud connect, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, intercloud, cloud, context-aware, infrastructure 2.0, automation, web, internet, blog

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Monday, August 23, 2010

Audio WP - Deploying F5 Application Ready Solutions with VMware View 4.0

VMware View is the leading desktop virtualization solution built for delivering desktops as a managed service.  F5 offers a variety of Application Ready Solutions to help organizations maximize the success of VMware View desktop projects. As a VMware partner, F5 has thoroughly tested and documented the benefits of using our Application Delivery Networks with VMware View 4.0. F5 solutions include secure access, single- sign-on, load balancing, and server health monitoring. F5 BIG‑IP® devices optimize the user experience and help ensure maximum performance, availability, and security for VMware View implementations.  Running time: 16:53  Read full white paper here.  And click here for more F5 Audio.

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Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, cloud connect, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, intercloud, cloud, context-aware, infrastructure 2.0, automation, web, internet

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Thursday, August 19, 2010

Audio Tech Brief - Kerberos Constrained Delegation and Protocol Transition in Smart Card PKI Architectures

Using the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to support federation of cross-domain service access in a Smart Card PKI-enabled architecture.  F5 BIG-IP LTM with ACA in Kerberos protocol transition and constrained delegation architectures allows for a more scalable, efficient and secure infrastructure capable of federating access to services across domains and authentication realms, ultimately decreasing the capital and operational expenditures required to keep applications secure, fast, and available.  Running time: 16:20   Read full white paper here.  And click here for more F5 Audio.

 

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twitter: @psilvas

Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, cloud connect, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, intercloud, cloud, context-aware, infrastructure 2.0, automation, web, internet

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Wednesday, August 18, 2010

CloudFucius’ Money: Trickles to the Cloud

Konfuzius-1770 No, I’m not investing some seed money in a cool new company or technology but banks are certainly looking to take advantage of cloud computing services.  At least that’s the message from a recent survey by Bank Systems & Technology and InformationWeek Analytics.  70% of those that expressed interest in cloud computing said that the ‘Ability to meet user demands quickly and achieve scale,’ was the top consideration factor.  Among the financial services applications that are currently being deployed in the cloud, Payment Applications (23%), Core banking applications (22%) and Retail banking applications (21%) topped the list.  Mobile banking applications came in at 19% but another 19% plan to use the cloud for mobile banking and another 32% are currently evaluating the cloud for mobile applications, highest of any financial services apps.  Shows where they think future traffic will be coming from. 
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As with most cloud surveys and the financial industry in general, Security along with Compliance/Audit were the top concerns.  58% said ‘cloud technology does not provide adequate security safeguards’ and one-third noted a concern about the audit trail.  We’ve mentioned here before that the financial industry usually jumps all over new technologies and is an early adopter for many things tech.  No so with Cloud.  38% said that Cloud technology is too new and untested.
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Another interesting factor that is inhibiting cloud adoption is legacy systems.  Most of the current banking applications were written for in-house systems and servers and have not been made ‘cloud-aware’ or ‘cloud-enabled.’  They face a tough choice to either invest now to make those apps ‘cloud-ready’ or wait until cloud vendors have matured and resolved some of the concerns.  Yet another issue is spreading the IT mess, according to Ovum senior analyst Laurent Lachal.  Today, many banking systems are in a secure data center (or several with GSLB) or located in-house.  IT knows which room the data resides rather than somewhere, anywhere out in vapor land.  The problem occurs when another department uses a cloud service without IT’s knowledge and the mess that creates across boundaries.  The integration headache occurs when the same workflow is being done by two different applications.  Cost effectiveness gets negated by inefficiencies.
I started thinking about the future of banking and giving the customer the choice of having their data stored in the cloud or on a dedicated, physical server.  There is not much we could do if our financial institution decided to put sensitive data in the cloud and I’m sure some of it is there already.  But for those many folks who are not comfortable with that (at least for now), I wondered if the ‘dedicated server’ will become the ‘ultra-premium’ service of the future.  It’s kinda far-fetched but go with me on this – maybe, when you open a bank account of the future, you get the choice of having your data in the cloud (get free checking with that, if checks are even still around) or you select a dedicated server for a nominal monthly fee.  The promotion could go something like: ‘In order to provide you with the most cost effective banking solutions, we have two options for your data storage – a secured cloud environment with our trusted cloud provider (free with any account) or a dedicated physical server housed in our data center (for a small monthly fee).  All the security protections and guarantees are built into both options, but we feel that it’s important that you choose and know where we store your data.’  Now, that would be interesting.
And one from Confucius: By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.
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The CloudFucius Series: Intro, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Audio WP - Load Balancing 101: Firewall Sandwiches

There are many advantages to deploying firewalls, in particular, behind Application Delivery Controllers. This white paper will show how you can implement ADCs in a “firewall sandwich” to improve availability, scalability, and manageability across the IT infrastructure.  Running time: 26:56   And click here for more F5 Audio.

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twitter: @psilvas

Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, cloud connect, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, intercloud, cloud, context-aware, infrastructure 2.0, automation, web, internet

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Thursday, August 12, 2010

CloudFucius Counts: Cloud Outages

Konfuzius-1770 Well, maybe CloudFucius doesn’t but a couple websites do.  Matching the same uptime guarantees that you have with your physical infrastructure can be hard to accomplish.  While some companies, mostly smaller enterprises, have put all their systems in the cloud, most deployments are ‘extensions’ of existing infrastructures to provide fault tolerance, disaster recovery and all the other situations where the cloud is advantageous.  We all know that the Internet, in and of itself, can have good days and bad – but we somewhat expect this from time to time.  We understand that there are innumerable events that can drastically effect the internet and most of those are out of our control.  While it may irritate us that we can’t get to our favorite website or work application, we generally move on to the next or wait a few minutes and try again.  However, patience and understanding are usually not the headlines used when describing an IT admin when critical business systems are unavailable.
Uptime can also be a nebulous thing – connection is available but the servers are down; servers up but fiber cut; site available but database/authentication/search or other functionality are unavailable.  We hope that the provider has redundancy and other measures to ensure systems, infrastructure and data centers are available.  We’ve expected this for all the years we’ve put servers in co-lo facilities and hosting data centers and should ask the same ‘availability’ questions of our cloud providers that we’ve demanded from our raised floor vendors. 
Now there are a couple websites where you can check things like cloud outages and cloud security incidents.  CloudFail.net is a site that monitors service updates from the leading cloud vendors and aggregates those feeds into a simple blog format.  It allows you to ‘keep an eye’ on cloud providers and get compiled information regarding outages.  An August 11th entry shows the entire thread of a Google Mail issue, tracking it from the initial 4:10am occurrence to the final resolution alert at 2:48pm.  Cloutage.org is an Open Security Foundation project that documents known and reported incidents with cloud services along with providing current news on cloud security.  They provide a couple charts right from the main page showing the latest Cloud Incidents (outage, dataloss, etc) along with the latest Media Reports surrounding cloud security.  These sites should help cloud prospects along with cloud users stay informed about what happening in the haze.
And one from Confucius: Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.

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The CloudFucius Series: Intro, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

Resources:

Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, cloud connect, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, cloud, context-aware, web, internet

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Wednesday, August 11, 2010

CloudFucius Corners: The Coin Operated Cloud

Konfuzius-1770 A couple weeks ago I made mention of The Coin Operated Cloud in passing and decided to expand on it.  Isn’t that how blogs are supposed to work?  It’s no secret that The Cloud has given many organizations and individuals alike the computing power to host, store, transmit, broadcast and generally enable a huge swath of resources.  (Not sure if I like that sentence structure, but you get the idea).  Small and Medium sized business gain access to pay-as-you-go and Large Enterprises can realize economies of scale.  Cloud Computing also opens the door to just about any individual with a credit card.  That can be good and bad.  Good if you need to provision services in an instant; bad if you’re dropping a corporate entity out there without anyone’s knowledge.  Employees no longer need to submit a ticket to your IT department to toss up a web site or service.

That open access for anyone to deploy services can create a security nightmare.  Ponemon Institute recently reported that ‘more than 50 percent of IT professionals surveyed say their organization isn't aware of all the cloud services employees are using -- and few were evaluated for security before use.’  These sites and/or services might contain sensitive company information yet no one, except for the individual or department, has a clue that it’s out there.  Usually those employees are not looking to break the rules but simply get their job done.  The problem arises when considering things like; how do you maintain compliance, consistency, standardization, change control, management, access control and a whole host of application deployment challenges when it is essentially a rogue site?  Rogue, not in the traditional sense of delivering malware or committing fraud, but a corporate off-shoot of your online presence.  Typically, IT Web Services departments are responsible for and have control over the web facing properties but if they are unaware of these ‘additional’ entities, vulnerabilities, exposure and other risks are impossible to control. 

Kim Boatman, in this article, gives a few pointers on how to get a handle on your cloud computing presence.  She recommends doing a Cloud Inventory to evaluate all cloud activity.  This is not a IT focused survey but a company wide analysis.  IT may have not embraced the cloud but employees may have already.  It’s also important that IT becomes the preferred method to deploy cloud services to gain a better control over security risks.  Create a catalogue for employees to use when they need such deployments.  In addition, examine the cloud providers you currently use to have a clear understanding of the security implications of the blending of data.  There may also be alternatives for the type of content that employees need in the cloud verses IT.  Finally, as with anything IT (or business related), create a policy around cloud computing.  This allows IT and employees alike to understand when/how cloud computing is appropriate.  Sensitive data in the cloud has it’s own challenges and there are laws surrounding the protection of that data.  If it gets lost, it’s the executives not that employee that will ultimately have to answer for it.

And one from Confucius: It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.

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The CloudFucius Series: Intro, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

Resources:

Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, cloud connect, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, cloud, context-aware, web, internet

twitter: @psilvas

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Thursday, August 5, 2010

The Encryption Dance - LIVE

I get the chance to perform my ‘The Encryption Dance’ Live A Capella during the Security and Control Session at the F5 Summit.
The original blog entry with lyrics is here and you can download the mp3 Studio version of ‘The Encryption Dance’ here.  Plus, the original Men Without Hat’s “Safety Dance” can be seen here.
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F5 Summit: Interview with Andy Oehler

I sit down with with Andy Oehler, Product Manager for F5's Secure Access Solutions, to chat about BIG-IP Edge Gateway and BIG-IP Access Policy Manager. From the F5 Summit in Chicago.

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Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, cloud, context-aware, web, internet, DevCentral, BIG-IP, Edge Gateway, 5 Minutes or Less, Pete Silva

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