Dynamic Data Center through Cisco-Netapp-VmWare collaboration

New Secure Multi-tenancy Meets Virtualization and Enterprise Cloud
Security Requirements

Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture is an end-to-end, validated design
architecture that isolates IT resources for enhanced security in shared
virtual and enterprise cloud environments. The design architecture helps
enterprise customers, systems integrators and service providers develop
internal and external cloud services that isolate clients, business units,
departments or security zones for enhanced security across the computing,
networking, storage and management layers of a unified infrastructure. The
Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture provides details about
implementing and configuring the architecture, as well as best practices
for building and managing best-in-class solutions from Cisco, NetApp and
VMware. This validated design architecture significantly increases business
agility by helping IT administrators to establish the appropriate quality
of service for each resource layer and to deliver consistent service
performance levels for the applications in each layer.

The Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture is based on Cisco Nexus® Series Switches and the Cisco® Unified Computing System, NetApp FAS storage with MultiStore®, and VMware vSphere and vShield™ Zones. The design reference architecture has been jointly tested and validated as a Cisco Validated Design so customers can quickly assess their needs and deploy integrated solutions from Cisco, NetApp and VMware that meet the stringent requirements of their dynamic data centers. The Cisco Validated Design Guide can be viewed at www.netapp.com/us/cisco-vmware/.

"Virtualization of the network, server and storage infrastructure is
radically reshaping today's data center," said Paul Maritz, president and
CEO, VMware. "The dynamic data center built on VMware® vSphere™, along
with Cisco and NetApp® technologies, will provide the foundation for both
private and public clouds and the ability to move data and applications
between these clouds. A shared virtual infrastructure requires that
resources for different tenants are isolated while delivering on promised
service levels. We have integrated our technology with Cisco and NetApp not
only to accelerate our customers' journey through their data center
transition, but also to deliver an outstanding customer experience."

See http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0580403.htm

Gartner acquires Burton group

Gartner, Inc. which acquired AMR Research recently for $64 million, announced that, on December 30, 2009, it acquired Burton Group, Inc. for approximately $56 million in cash.

Gene Hall, Gartner's chief executive officer, said, "Gartner has traditionally focused on providing strategic insight to CIOs and senior IT executives, while Burton Group has built a leading niche providing practical, how-to advice to front-line IT professionals. Thus, Burton Group is a great strategic fit for Gartner and should enable us to offer a more complete solution to every level and functional expert within an IT organization. By leveraging our scale and worldwide distribution capabilities, we expect to significantly grow Burton Group’s business over time."

Jamie Lewis, Burton Group’s chief executive officer, commented, “I am very excited about the opportunities for accelerated growth that Burton Group should have as part of Gartner. By combining our technical depth with Gartner’s global presence and distribution capabilities, we can reach a much broader set of clients with the most complete set of IT research and advisory services available.”

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1272013

Best practices for exception handling in Java

Exception handling is an often ignored area in enterprise software design. It comes out more as an after thought rather than being an integral part of initial design.
I've seen cases where

• logs are polluted with too many exceptions leading to delay in performing root cause analysis
• root cause exceptions get eaten up when thrown to upper level stacks and only a generic exception is logged
• sufficient exception details aren't recorded with the default log levels

Maybe customers should include exception handling use cases, and how well and quickly products allow root cause analysis as part of their POCs. This would lead to vendors spending resources in improving this area of their software.

Also, checkout this excellent article on "Exception management and error tracking in J2EE".

Connecting cloud apps to desktop apps using OAUTH and SAML

Enterprise Single Sign On (ESSO) solutions provide SSO for desktop apps such as Outlook by providing the storing the username/password securely and passing it to the desktop app when required.
Now, if the desktop app (such as Outlook) needs to go out to the cloud to fetch data, and the cloud app if federation enabled, then can such federation be extended to the desktop app?

Google has already solved it using OAuth for Installed Applications. The article doesn’t explicitly call out SAML, but if you have enabled SAML on your Google Apps deployment, it gets used instead.

Also, see Pat Patterson's blog entry on this topic.

Testing SAML polices

There are many testing tools (including one bundled with Oracle Fusion Middleware Control) that allow creating WS-Security username token and inserts it into the request message. But, if the service accepts a SAML token, then such tools don't come in handy. One has to develop a client application and apply SAML client policy to add SAML token to the message.

But, there's one free tool that can come in handy for such situations. It's Vordel SOAPbox.
Checkout this blog entry from Mark O' Neill for details, and give the tool a try.

Gartner's John Pescatore on 2010 Security Threats and Trends

See what Gartner's John Pescatore has to say about emerging security threats and trends in 2010.

There are two very new challenges. What we're seeing happening right now is certainly the threats have changed, but also business processes and the demands put on the IT organization and the information security organization are changing at the same time. At the same time that threats are getting more targeted, the business, even government agencies, are demanding that users be allowed to use home PC's, their own smart phones, iPhones and the like, being allowed to work from home, being allowed to use social networks, use consumer grade things like Google apps and Skype and the like.
So at the same time that the threats are getting more focused, IT is being forced to relinquish some control over the hardware and software and services that users use to get the business done and touch privacy related information and critical business processes. So dealing with those two challenges simultaneously, we're targeted deeper threats and having to give up some levels of control. That, I believe, is the major challenge facing security programs today.

I think 2010 into 2011 will be the start where we start to see vulnerabilities found in all these virtualization and Smart Grid technologies and other forms of wireless, and inevitability new technologies new vulnerabilities, and the attackers leap on those very, very quickly. So I think that is probably some of the new things we will see.

For more details visit full article at http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/articles.php?art_id=1926&pg=4

Tutorial: Creating Oracle prebundled machine images for the cloud

Here's an excellent tutorial by Kiran C. Nair on how to create a custom VM image prebundled with Oracle Weblogic Server 11g and Oracle Database XE, and utilities to run at user-defined runlevels. The created images are not restricted to AWS but are fully compatible with any cloud that uses Xen as the hypervisor layer (for example, Eucalyptus Open Cloud).

The prebundled applications and utilities may be customized according to user preferences or demands.

Kiran C. Nair specializes in JEE, client-server architecture, and performance lifecycle analysis at SETLabs, the research wing of Infosys Technologies Ltd.