The software-defined movement in enterprise IT seems exhausting at times. Are we saturated in solutions? There certainly are a burgeoning number of companies across a number of areas. But one area without much in the way of a solution is the cloud managed data center. This is where ZeroStack comes in.
Stratoscale is making a play at a private cloud. They have an interesting pitch. They realize most customers, even when they can’t for compliance purposes, really want to use Amazon. There’s a reason it dominates not just public imagination, but the market. So they’re offering a solution to offer the equivalent of a private AWS region.
The idea of the public cloud seems simple enough. It provides resources on demand, you pay for what you use, and don’t have to worry about maintaining your private infrastructure. But Tim Crawford points out in this piece the key to understanding the true cost of the cloud for people looking to migrate. If you’re not taking into account the cost of changing behavior, you’re missing the whole point.
Intel put out a product that could possibly change how I view smart appliances. Their Compute Card is viewed as the successor to the Intel Compute Stick, but with a more specific mission. The Compute Stick was designed to be a low-end way to quickly turn a monitor into an all-in-one PC. It lacked for connectivity, having only HDMI and a single USB port. The Compute Card is more ambitious, and Andrew Cunningham outlines what we know about it so far.
Quorum is making an argument that creating a secure private cloud for disaster recovery is the way forward for a lot of organizations. They come at this from an interesting background. The company originally built for use on ships for the U.S. Navy, which by necessity by their isolation, cannot exactly afford a lot of downtime for disaster recovery. Since 2010, they’ve offered a commercial product. They recently released version 4.0 of onQ, their backup solution and sole product focus.
There are no shortage of tools for monitoring and analyzing network behavior from behind the access point. But as Drew Lentz points out, this ignores half of the network. While great pains are taken to build and maintain wireless infrastructure, network engineers need to be able to see how users are experiencing it. In order do understand how end-users are experiencing a wireless network, you must become one of them.
This is part two of a long term review of the MacBook Pro Touch Bar. In this installment, I think I may have found the first killer app for the interface. It’s a little app called TouchSwitcher.
Just ahead of CES, Lenovo announced that they are refreshing their Thinkpad line. Ordinarily, a common refresh with slightly faster processors or a little more RAM isn’t much to get excited or upset about. But in the press release, Lenovo let slip a major announcement. These machines will be based on Intel’s Kaby Lake platform, but much more importantly, will use Intel’s Optane, which is their 3D XPoint NVRAM implementation.
Welcome to the first Gestalt IT Server News for 2017. Here are some of the stories on tap.
– The Gestalt IT 2017 Predictions!
– We take a visit to a digital server graveyard
– Plus, why Red Hat makes more money on Docker than Docker
James Green reviews how the application level segmentation from Aporeto’s Trireme project can help you deal with security in the post-cloud world.
