Blog

Jun 17 2017

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Starting November 7th, 2016, HPE announced that they were partnering with Arista Networks for all datacenter networking opportunities moving forward. Arista’s been making a lot of waves in the industry recently, so as strategic HPE partners, we are very excited about the technology that Arista brings. Arista’s networking portfolio uses Fedora Linux at the core. Useful tools like grep, cat, zcat, tcpdump, awk and more are ready to go from boot. Administrators can choose to work in the bash shell if they are familiar with Linux or work in the more conventional Arista CLI. Because of the Linux architecture, common networking protocols like STP, OSPF, BGP all run as individual processes and can be isolated if problems pop up. VXLAN, MLAG...

May 08 2017

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It can be difficult these days to keep up with all the new product releases and offerings that churn through the technological landscape. It seems that as soon as one technology matures, another technology rises up to take its place. Some of these tech trends don’t make it much further than product marketing, but some actually stick and begin to be widely accepted as practice. From my perspective, the technologies that don’t persist are ones that don’t solve a “real” problem – sure, there might be marginal benefits to the platform, but not enough to change buying behaviors. The trends that stick are the ones that actually solve a big underlying issue, opening up greater efficiency and productivity. Server virtualization is...

Apr 08 2017

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You have most likely heard about Veeam and its growing success in the backup market for years. Its intuitive interface paired with abundant features, competitive pricing and simplified licensing model have set it apart from many of its competitors. It continues to remain a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and a fast growth favorite with IDC in 2016. I don’t think many people question the fact that when it comes to virtualized server backup and replication, Veeam is the holy grail. Physical server support has been missing since the beginning and has finally been introduced. For a while I think Veeam believed the market hype that datacenters were on the fast track to being 100% virtualized. I personally don’t know...

Mar 15 2017

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Let's face it: IT budgets are tight for every business, everywhere. As tight as finances are, today’s advanced infrastructure components are driving more value by eliminating legacy complexity that slows innovation and adds cost. All-flash storage arrays, like the HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7450, powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, are helping to drive this efficiency overhaul. Once hailed as too expensive for the average IT budget, today's all-flash storage arrays can cost about as much as spinning disk1 yet deliver up to 20PB of mission critical scale. How can you leverage all-flash to make the most of your IT budget? Speed Data for Application Reliability Mission-critical applications like virtualization, cloud, and IT-as-a-service, demand rapid and reliable data access. All-flash storage solutions like the HPE 3PAR...

Mar 08 2017

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Edge Solutions had the opportunity to attend the Aruba Atmosphere conference this year in Nashville. There’s a lot of exciting stuff on the horizon with Aruba! Of particular note was the new version of their controller-based wireless system, ArubaOS. ArubaOS 8 is a major shift in design and it introduces a lot of new features as a result—from sheer improvements in scalability and virtualization capabilities to new seamless failover and in-service upgrades. ArubaOS 8 moves from custom-built hardware to a more conventional x86 platform, which opens up a lot of possibilities for the system. First, the conventional master controller role has changed to the new Mobility Master. The Mobility Master controls the entire WLAN and it can be virtualized, making deployment...

Feb 08 2017

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Data center sprawl can cost your business in more ways than you think. Not only does it drain your budget with high operating expenses, it also takes up valuable floor space that could be used for revenue-generating initiatives. If you don’t think your business is falling prey to the ravages of data center sprawl, consider this: Gartner estimates that 2016 will be the year that hyper converged integrated systems increase 79% and reach $2 billion in IT spend. Why the surge in adoption? Hyper converged systems consolidate the data center for a broad range of efficiencies essential for today's high-paced, high-demand business environment. Staff efficiency Traditional servers need manual provisioning that can take valuable days out of the work week and require an...

Jan 29 2017

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Are you frustrated by constantly having to change your wireless pre-shared keys when an employee leaves or when someone unwittingly leaks the password? Are you tired of seeing unauthorized users popping up on your internal wireless networks? Are you looking to implement stronger encryption to protect your sensitive data as it travels across the air? Good news – you can do all of this by utilizing Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) over the 802.1x framework and moving to an WPA2-Enterprise environment. This technology is widely supported by most networking manufacturers, but there are a lot of options out there to choose from. We’ve touched on this tech briefly in a post about role based access control (RBAC), but I wanted to take...

Jan 18 2017

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Digital transformation was the running theme in 2016 as companies focused on innovation. The trade-off for this attention to innovation was a lack of attention on security, and we saw continued breaches to large entities. As a result of this non-stop assault on companies’ evolving security postures, we see the following as big trends in 2017 for security: A focused, proactive approach Software-defined everything Increased cloud acceptance   Proactive Approach to Security Security professionals are adjusting their security posture to adopt the general premise of a safeguard adopted by pro cycling. When cheating scandals ravaged the international pro cycling community, they decided they needed new technology to prevent it. The solution—the biological passport—defines a baseline for a variety of biological variables in each...

Nov 17 2016

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There are a variety of ways to protect your information while using Amazon Web Services (AWS) but how you approach data protection is dependent on your specific environment. Below, we explore a few use cases and touch on different ways to protect data. One noteworthy takeaway from the use cases below is that data protection should factor in your initial designs, not as an add-on after the fact. AWS EC2 / Cloud Computing There are multiple approaches to using AWS to run software on EC2 instances, including Amazon’s recommendation, using Third Party Backup Software and a combination of the two: Approach #1: Amazon’s Recommendation: First off, there is no “backup software” in AWS. Your data is protected through a combination of tools and...

Apr 21 2016

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There is a renewed interest in the concept of microservices due to many documented successes – it is becoming the default style for building enterprise applications. Many have found microservices analogous with service-oriented architecture (SOA)—and although there are subtle differences—they are both architectural patterns and styles where computer software application integration is enabled by service interfaces. The microservice architectural style is a method to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with language-agnostic APIs. These services are built around business capabilities, and are independently deployable via automation. There is a minimum of centralized management for these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage...