Thursday 11 March 2010
Addressing the desire to simplify and standardize the data center, Dell today unveiled additions to its efficient enterprise portfolio at the VMworld ‘09 conference. Dell announced new desktop, networking, and virtualization management partnerships that can allow businesses to reduce the cost and time associated with the deployment and ongoing management of desktop and data center virtual environments.
“The growing desire for increased enterprise efficiency, combined with the rapid evolution and adoption of virtualized, standards-based architectures is changing the way enterprise technology is built and deployed,” said Praveen Asthana, vice president of Dell Enterprise Storage and Networking, in his presentation at VMworld 09. “The future of enterprise computing does not lie in a proprietary, monolithic stack. Businesses are looking to drive efficiency and innovation and products from Dell help drive these gains while avoiding vendor lock in. The next-generation datacenter – or the Efficient Datacenter – will be standards-based from the compute to the networking fabric, fully virtualized and cloud enabled, and highly automated.”
Adhering to the philosophy of open, pragmatic and end-to-end, Dell’s datacenter approach is designed to enable choice in IT deployment, management and automation so that businesses can focus on their core competencies. This occurs in part due to Dell’s philosophy of designing business ready configurations which are engineered, architected and pre-built product offerings designed to work together and accelerate deployments. When coupled with Dell’s approach and perspective on enterprise computing – from the desktop to the datacenter and out to the cloud – the company is uniquely positioned to help business drive efficiency in the datacenter.
The News
Together with key partners, Dell is building a unified datacenter environment that is built on standards, highly virtualized and easy to manage:
* Today Dell expanded its OEM relationship with Brocade. Specifically, the two companies intend to:
o Develop a dynamic infrastructure and optimization solution enabled by virtualization to allow customers to deploy and manage an efficient data center. Increasingly, customers need applications deployed rapidly to meet their performance requirements, with secure and reliable access to their mission-critical data.
o Deliver integrated toolsets to manage application delivery and deployment as business services on highly reliable compute, network and storage infrastructure. The Brocade and Dell solution will help provide capital and operational expense savings by deploying server and storage virtualization more broadly across the data center.
* Dell is simplifying the deployment and management of virtual environments by delivering an OEM version of Scalent’s V/OE, an open infrastructure management solution.
o Dell customers can avoid many of the common, repetitive IT tasks associated with deploying and managing virtual environments. The Scalent architecture is consistent with Dell’s approach in that it does not lock-in customer to a specific technology, putting the control of IT infrastructure back into the hands of businesses.
o The Dell and Scalent solution is open and flexible, creating a more efficient way to manage virtual and physical infrastructures and create a foundation for cloud computing.
Dell is also helping customers drive efficiency and effectiveness in distributed computing environments through desktop virtualization. Dell’s Flexible Computing strategy uses client-server (network based) computing and virtualization technologies to improve manageability, data security, compliance and disaster recovery.
* Dell today announced that it has expanded its Flexible Computing portfolio by incorporating VMware VIEW into its Virtual Remote Desktop solution. Now IT managers can run virtual desktops in the datacenter, while giving end users a single view of all their applications and data in a familiar, personalized environment on any device at any location.
According to the survey, 44 per cent of bank executives see the lack of data security as a significant barrier to the adoption of cloud computing. Furthermore, only 15 per cent of respondents are currently running cloud applications. The survey showed that 80 per cent of respondents could not name a leader of cloud computing in the banking sector. Respondents commonly described cloud computing as ‘commodity’ computing resources accessible over the Internet at lower cost, with both business and technology executives consistent in their views. Nearly half of the banking executives see cloud computing as means to cut infrastructure costs, while over a third thought it would give more cost flexibility. However, a further one third of executives admitted they simply didn’t know enough about the potential risks.
Commenting on the survey, Koen Van den Brande, group strategy and marketing director at Temenos, said: “We recognise that cloud computing is an important emerging trend and wanted to gauge customer opinion. In their responses, banks appear to remain sceptical today. This is an interesting finding and is broadly in line with other reports on the cloud computing subject. This finding would seem to infer that it is likely that adoption may be slow in banking until some of the critical issues are resolved. Nonetheless, Temenos continues to advance its thinking in this area and will closely monitor customer demand to ensure our software delivery options are well aligned with the market.”
Public Cloud
Public cloud or external cloud describes cloud computing in the traditional mainstream sense, whereby resources are dynamically provisioned on a fine-grained, self-service basis over the Internet, via web applications/web services, from an off-site third-party provider who shares resources and bills on a fine-grained utility computing basis.
Hybrid cloud
A hybrid cloud environment consisting of multiple internal and/or external providers “will be typical for most enterprises”.
Private cloud
Private cloud and internal cloud are neologisms that some vendors have recently used to describe offerings that emulate cloud computing on private networks. These (typically virtualisation automation) products claim to “deliver some benefits of cloud computing without the pitfalls”, capitalising on data security, corporate governance, and reliability concerns. They have been criticised on the basis that users “still have to buy, build, and manage them” and as such do not benefit from lower up-front capital costs and less hands-on management, essentially ” the economic model that makes cloud computing such an intriguing concept”.
As of Sunday, it’s been revealed that thousands of electronic devices containing sensitive and historically important data are missing from the nation’s most important public repository. While IT tends to have a knee-jerk reaction in favor of traditional data centers, the situation at the National Archives shows the sense of false security they impart.
What is clear is that if the most important archival system in the country can’t protect its data centers, it’s likely that the enterprise is going to have problems too. The similarities between enterprise data management and the agency run deep. With facilities in 20 states, the National Archives deal with the entire spectrum of nightmare situations when it comes to data security. What if, instead of a chaotic jumble of devices and data centers, the Archives simply put everything in the cloud? True, it would be vulnerable in many ways. But they’d be different ways than what plagues them now. It’s hard to steal the server holding someone’s social security number when you have no real idea where it is.
At this point, it might be ludicrous for anyone to put their most sensitve data in the cloud as a security measure. But the dire straits at the National Archives should stand as a warning for those who think traditional data security measures are without vulnerability.
I believe that cloud computing will revolutionize the way enterprises obtain business and IT services and change the kind of payback they get from their IT investments,” said Rich Marcello, president, Unisys Systems and Technology. “Our clients tell us that they see great value in moving enterprise applications and data to the cloud. However they have lacked the comprehensive security to make them confident in doing so.” Underpinning this strategy is Unisys Stealth security solution, a data protection technology initially designed for government applications and now available to commercial clients. The Unisys Stealth technology cloaks data through multiple levels of authentication and encryption, bit-splitting data into multiple packets so it moves invisibly across networks and protects data in the Unisys secure cloud.
Using Unisys services and technologies, organizations can create a private cloud within their data centers, a public cloud through secure Unisys-managed cloud solutions, or a hybrid cloud solution combining the best of both private and Unisys-managed cloud services. The Unisys cloud computing strategy enables clients to choose the type of data center computing services that best meet their business objectives, from self-managed, automated IT infrastructures to Unisys-managed cloud services. This allows clients to reap the economic benefits of cloud services more quickly.
- Cloud Transformation Services, a portfolio of advisory and implementation services that help clients assess potential cloud computing options and determine which option best suits their needs or financial objectives.
Unisys also is planning a Stealth solution for data security on storage area networks (SAN) by providing the same cloaking capability for “data at rest” in a virtualized storage environment. Integrated with the new Unisys Secure Cloud Solution, the Unisys Stealth technology enables encrypted “data in motion” to remain invisible as it traverses the infrastructure until it is reassembled upon delivery to authorized users. As client needs or data security requirements dictate, the Unisys Secure Cloud Solution can balance workloads across a global network of Unisys data centers, which are certified to key international standards such as ISO/IEC 27001:2005 for security, ISO/IEC 20000 for service management and the SAS 70 Type II auditing standard.
The new services include Secure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), for provisioning physical and virtual servers that both scale out and scale up; Secure Platform as a Service (PaaS), which provides a Java software stack, with .NET support planned, to make it easier for clients to move their applications to the cloud without making changes; My Secure Application as a Service (AaaS), for automatic provisioning of IT resources to support applications with multi-tier architectures; and Secure Software as a Service (SaaS), which provides access to hosted applications. Unisys plans a “cloud-in-a-box” solution as a comprehensive IT infrastructure package, enabling quick and cost-effective implementation of a private cloud. This solution will include virtualization capabilities, automation of ITIL best practices for service management, and Unisys Converged Remote Infrastructure Management capabilities, with Unisys Stealth solution as an option for extreme security.
Life could suddenly get more complicated for organisations looking at small scale or piecemeal outsourcing. Perhaps it is time to put on the thinking caps. It never crossed my mind either- and, I bet yours. eanwhile, returning to yesterday’s obsession. Not all ministers and government departments are quite as brazen as Phil Woolas at the Home Office on data security. When Crispin Blunt MP asked the Secretary of State for Health how many breaches of information security there have been at his Department and its agencies in the last five years, he got a fuller, if nontheless distorted answer to that given by Phil Woolas.
Information on personal security data breaches are published on an annual basis in the Department’s annual resource accounts as required under the mandatory requirements of the Data Handling Report published on 25 June 2008. There were no reportable breaches for either of the Department’s two executive agencies—the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and NHS Purchasing and Supply Agency (PASA). The Department and its agencies report all significant personal data security breaches to the Cabinet Office and the Information Commissioner (IC). The Department reported on the above personal data breach in its 2007-08 annual resource account, which can be found at www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/DH_089421
Additionally, all significant control weaknesses including other significant security breaches are included in the Statement of Internal Control which is published within the annual resource accounts.Some information, but not quite the whole truth is it? I haven’t asked, but I imagine Crispin Blunt wanted an idea of the state of data security across the NHS, not just what was going on in Whitehall head office.Given that the NHS is taking serious measures to improve its data security and that NHS leaders want to be seen to be doing the right thing, why not come clean? Why not give a reasonably full account of what has gone wrong and use that as a platform to promote the good practice that is being instituted?
