#BareMetalBlog Knowing what to test is half the battle. Knowing how it was tested the other. Knowing what that means is the third. That’s some testing, real clear numbers. In most countries, top speed is no longer the thing that auto manufacturer... Read more

#BareMetalBlog #F5 Test results provided by vendors and “independent testing labs” often test for things that just don’t matter in the datacenter. Know what you’re getting. When working in medicine, you don’t glance over a patient, then ask them... Read more

#SDN Programmability on its own is not enough, a strong community is required to drive the future of network capabilities One of the lesser mentioned benefits of an OpenFlow SDN as articulated by ONF is the ability to "customize the... Read more

Now things are starting to get interesting… Nearly everyone has played musical chairs – as a child if not as an adult with a child. When that music stops there's a desperate scrambling to pair up with a chair lest you end up sitting on the... Read more

When an army is configuring defenses, it is not merely the placement of troops and equipment that must be considered, but the likely avenues of attack, directions the attack could develop if it is successful, the terrain around the avenues of... Read more

There are quite a few pundits out there that would like to convince you that a purely virtual infrastructure is the wave of the future. Most of them have a bias to drive them to this conclusion, and they’re hoping you’ll overlook it. Others just... Read more

IT Brand Pulse carries a series of reports based upon surveys conducted amongst IT professionals that attempt to ferret out the impression that those working in IT have of the various vendors in any given market space. Their free sample of such ... Read more

New survey shows firewalls falling to application and network DDoS with alarming frequency… With the increasing frequency of successful DDoS attacks there has come a few studies focusing on organizational security posture – readiness, awareness,... Read more

One of the ways in which traditional architectures and deployment models is actually superior (yes, I said superior) to cloud computing is in provisioning.  Before you label me a cloud heretic, let me explain. In traditional... Read more

What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. Some apps you just can’t reach … in the cloud. Доброе утро! What? You don’t speak Russian? Not even “baby” Russian? French? Spanish? Indonesian? Korean? Chinese? If you’ve traveled you’ve... Read more

In the networking side of the world, vendors often seek to differentiate their solutions not just based on features and functionality, but on form-factor, as well. Using a descriptor to impart an understanding of the deployment form-factor of ... Read more

Most people don’t start thinking they need a “load balancer” until they need a second server. But even if you’ve only got one server a “load balancer” can help with availability, with performance, and make the transition later on to a multiple... Read more

load balancing intermediaries have long used the terms “virtual server” and “virtual IP address”. With the widespread adoption of virtualization these terms have become even more confusing to the uninitiated. Here’s how load balancing and... Read more

How to leverage a “private virtual cloud” such as Amazon VPC with your own dynamic infrastructure A couple of blog posts on Amazon’s recent announcement of its VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) have made much of the fact that the resources... Read more

For some companies there’s never been a quantifiable financial impact from attacks. Cloud may change that. One of the frustrations with information security is that it’s always difficult – if not impossible – to quantify risk. Without the... Read more

How to optimize compute resources in a heterogeneous environment using weight/ratio-based load balancing Unless you’re starting from scratch your data center is full of physical servers of various and sundry sizes, colors, shapes, and compute... Read more

YSlow is a plug-in for Firefox that is integrated with the Firebug web development tool.  The plug-in evaluates a web page and provides a score based on 13 criteria. Make Fewer HTTP Requests Use a Content Delivery Network Add an... Read more

Lori and are on the sharing wavelengths today (well, except for ideas on remote vs. local software testing, but we can’t always agree on everything, right?  ;) ).  She hit the app side, so here’s a take on the virtual platform side. I... Read more

When an application is deployed into a high-availability production environment there are a number of interesting infrastructure related things need to happen. The application delivery controller (ADC) needs to be configured, DNS entries updated,... Read more

Having a site unavailable is probably worse than having a slow loading page.  Outages can occur for multiple reasons such as an overloaded back end server, an upgrade that didn't go as planned, or a power outage at the data centre. ... Read more

Sometimes IT folks are tasked with coming up with the justification for purchasing technology. It's not an enjoyable task, and considering the incredible difficulty in trying to pin dollar values on soft factors like increased pro... Read more

No one likes to hear that they need to rewrite or re-architect an application because it doesn't scale. I'm sure no one at Twitter thought that they'd need to be overhauling their architecture because it gained p... Read more

You walked past me again today without stopping. I remember when you used to stop and admire my glowing red ball every day. But that was back when I was brand new and you thought I was the center of your data center. I heard you talking to some... Read more

Greg Ferro over at My Etherealmind has a, for lack of a better word, interesting entry in his Network Dictionary on the term "Application Delivery Controller." He says:Application Delivery Controller (ADC) - Historically known as a “load... Read more

An application delivery controller (ADC) essentially acts a reverse proxy. That means that client requests interact with the ADC, and the ADC interacts with web and application servers on the client's behalf. This mediation offers t... Read more