Brandon Butler - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google Kevlar-wraps its trans-Pacific fiber cables to protect from shark attacks (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by Brandon Butler on Thursday August 14, 2014 @09:42AM

Brandon Butler writes: As an ode to Shark Week: Sharks have been known to show an appetite for fiber cables underwater, and last week a Google official said to prevent sharks from wreaking havoc on the company's trans-Pacific fiber lines, it wraps them in Kevlar. It's believed that the emission of electrical currents from the fiber piping is mistaken by sharks occasionally as prey.

Submission + - Gartner: Internet of Things has reached hype peak (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Brandon Butler on Wednesday August 13, 2014 @02:03PM

Brandon Butler writes: In the annual battle of the buzzwords, the Internet of Things has won. Each year the research firm Gartner puts out a Hype Cycle of emerging technologies, a sort of report card for various trends and buzzwords. This year, IoT tops the list. On another note, somewhat surprising is that Gartner says the "cloud computing" is not just hype anymore, but becoming a mainstream technology.

Submission + - OpenStack: The open source cloud that vendors love and users are ignoring (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Brandon Butler on Monday May 19, 2014 @02:27PM

Brandon Butler writes: OpenStack has no shortage of corporate backers. Rackspace, Red Hat, IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco and many others have hopped on board. But many wonder, after four years, shouldn't there be more end users by this point?

Submission + - Anonymous's latest target: Boston Children's Hospital (networkworld.com) 3

Submitted by Brandon Butler on Friday April 25, 2014 @10:11AM

Brandon Butler writes: Supporters of the faceless collective known as Anonymous have taken up the cause of a young girl, after the State of Massachusetts removed her from her parents earlier this year. However, the methods used to show support may have unintended consequences, which could impact patient care.

On Thursday, the Boston Children's Hospital confirmed that they were subjected to multiple DDoS attacks over the Easter holiday. Said attacks, which have continued throughout the week, aim to take the hospital's website offline. Similar attacks, including website defacement, have also targeted the Wayside Youth and Family Support Network. Both organizations are at the heart of a sensitive topic, child welfare and the rights of a parent.

Submission + - Will cloud services be traded just like stocks and bonds one day? (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by Brandon Butler on Thursday October 10, 2013 @11:44AM

Brandon Butler writes: Today, cloud computing resources are bought and sold in a fairly straightforward process: A company needs extra compute capacity, for example, so they contract with a provider who spins up virtual machines for a certain amount of time.

But what will that process look like in, say, 2020? If efforts by a handful of companies come to fruition, there could be a lot more wheeling and dealing that goes on behind the scenes. An idea is being floated to package cloud computing resources into blocks that can be bought and sold on a commodity futures trading market. It would be similar to how financial instruments like stocks, bonds and agricultural products like corn and wheat are traded on exchanges by investors.

Blocks of cloud computing resources — for example a month’s worth of virtual machines, or a year’s worth of cloud storage — would be packaged by service providers and sold on a market. In the exchange, investors and traders could buy up these blocks and resell them to end users, or other investors, potentially turning a profit if the value of the resource increases.

Submission + - Why Netflix is one of the most important cloud computing companies (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Brandon Butler on Thursday July 25, 2013 @09:27AM

Brandon Butler writes: Netflix, yes the video rental company Netflix, is changing the cloud game. During the past two years the company has pulled back the curtains through its Netflix OSS program to provide a behind-the-scenes look into how it runs one of the largest deployments of Amazon Web Services cloud-based resources. In doing so, the company is creating tools that can be used by both entire business-size scale cloud deployments and even smaller test environments. The Simian Army, for example randomly kills off VMs or entire availability zones in Amazon's cloud to test fault tolerance, Asgard is a cloud resource dashboard and Lipstick on (Apache) Pig, is a data visualization tool for the Hadoop program; there are dozens of others that help deploy, manage and monitor the tens of thousands of VM instances the company company can be running at any single time. Netflix is also creating a cadre of developers who are experts in managing cloud deployments, and already its former employees are popping up at other companies to bring their expertise on how to run a large-scale cloud resources. Meanwhile, Netflix does this all in AWS’s cloud, which raises some questions of how good of a job it’s actually doing when it can be massively impacted by cloud outages, such as the one on Christmas Eve last year that brought down Netflix's services but, interestingly, not Amazon’s own video streaming system, which is a competitor to the company.

Submission + - Can Red Hat do for OpenStack what it did for Linux? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Brandon Butler on Monday June 17, 2013 @11:32AM

Brandon Butler writes: Red Hat made its first $1 billion commercializing Linux. Now, it hopes to make even more doing the same for OpenStack.

Red Hat executives say OpenStack – the open source cloud computing platform – is just like Linux. The code just needs to be massaged into a commercially-hardened package before enterprises will really use it. But just because Red Hat successfully commercialized Linux does not guarantee its OpenStack effort will go as well.

Proponents say businesses will trust Red Hat as an OpenStack distrbution company because of its work in the Linux world. But others say building a private cloud takes a lot more than just throwing some code on top of a RHEL OS.

Submission + - Amazon.com suffers outage: Nearly $5M down the drain? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

Brandon Butler

on Thursday January 31, 2013 @05:58PM

Brandon Butler writes: "Amazon.com, the multi-billion online retail website, experienced an outage of unknown proportions on Thursday afternoon.

Rumblings of an Amazon.com outage began popping up on Twitter at about 2:40 PM ET. Multiple attempts to access the site around 3:15 PM ET on Thursday were met with the message: "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable." By 3:30 PM ET the site appeared to be back online for at least some users.

How big of a deal is an hour-long Amazon outage? Amazon.com's latest earnings report showed that the company makes about $10.8 billion per quarter, or about $118 million per day and $4.9 million per hour."

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