Microsoft Operations Management Suite alerting has moved from preview mode to generally available status.

Google and Rackspace cooperate over creating a new server configuration based on IBM Power9 processors. The design is expected to be shared as part of the Open Compute Project. The hardware set will include 48V Open Compute racks by Google and Facebook collaborative development.

According to IDC quarterly report, EMC’s Data Domain leads in the purpose-built backup appliance market.

New, significantly improved Raspberry Pi 3 has been released this month. Improvements include a quad-core 64-bit ARM processor, an upgraded graphic processor, and a built-in wireless adapter. In order to meet the storage needs Western Digital has issued a new specialized low-profile hard drive called PiDrive.

Seagate has announced the release of so-called “the world’s fastest SSD” with the significant performance differential between it and the next closest competitive device. The new SSD is compatible with the Open Compute Project specification, employs NVMe protocol, and is capable of 10GB/sec of throughput when used in 16-lane PCIe slots, which is 4GB/sec faster than the next fast competing solution.

A new low-cost attack that decrypts sensitive communications in neglectable time has been discovered recently. The attack works against TLS-protected communications using RSA cryptosystem which expose the key through SSLv2, which was retired two decades ago due to vulnerabilities, but still may be supported by some service due to legacy compatibility reasons or misconfigured TLS implementations.  

Hyper-Converged Hyper-V solution using Starwind across two buildings When I first started working for my current employer back in 2013 one of the first projects was to address business continuity concerns. The Brief was very… brief… no details other than “we have another building on the site which is linked by fibre optic, if our current physical servers had a problem we want to be back up and running in under 4 hours”. No guidance on what we should use or how to accomplish this, so off I went in search for solutions.

The hyperconverged infrastructure appliance market (HCIA) is growing fast and hardware competitors are using Dell, HP, SuperMicro and other servers and not Cisco’s UCS hardware. EMC only covers a portion of the market so Cisco should address the rest in order to both preserve its current UCS market share and grow it further.

During 2015 Backblaze data centre has expanded from 39’690 hard drives in 882 Backblaze Storage Pods to 56’224 drives in 1’249 Pods, which makes about 65 Petabytes of additional space.