Sunday Reading — September 15, 2019

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Enterprise Te.ch

4 min readSep 15, 2019

Ransomware Insurance: Mercury Insurance announced last week that it is now offering cyber-security insurance with an annual premium of $30 for a coverage limit of $25,000 and $41 for a coverage limit of $50,000. While interesting on the surface, this may make those insured new targets for attack. From The Register:

Brett Callow of antivirus biz Emsisoft opined that while “ransomware attacks against home users have been in steady decline” because businesses are more lucrative targets, “if policies such as this become popular, it could change that dynamic.”
“In the past, threats actors would’ve had a near-zero chance of getting a $50k ransom from a home user to unlock their collection of cat memes, but an insured victim could be willing and able to pay,” warned Callow. “And, of course, home users likely make for softer targets than businesses, making them an even more attractive target.”

Boring infrastructure: Kubernetes co-founder and VP of R&D at VMware Craig McLuckie wants to make infrastructure boring. From TechCrunch:

“We still have a lot of work to do as an industry to make the infrastructure technology fade into the background and bring forwards the technologies that developers interface with, that enable them to develop the code that drives the business, etc. […] Let’s make that infrastructure technology really, really boring.”

Rise of NVMe: Not surprisingly, storage performance continues to evolve to keep up with application (and developer) expectations. From The Register:

According to IDC’s storage research vice president Eric Burgener it won’t be long before NVMe-based all-flash boxes take over and cannibalize the SAS-based all-flash array market. The reason? Growth in workloads that demand the performance offered by NVMe — think customer interactions, applications such as AI inference and advanced analytics, and devops where teams depend on fast iterations. Each of these demand high bandwidth and low latency.

NVMe over Fibre Channel (NVMe-oF) is quickly becoming the standard for low-latency applications:

With NVMe-oF, you can reduce latency and increase throughput all the way from the software stack through to the storage array via the data fabric. It “makes sense for enterprises to understand what this technology can do for them so that they can integrate it into their own environments most cost-effectively,” according to Burgener.

NetApp: How to Reduce Network Latency with Cached Data

In large organization, data is created across multiple sites, from corporate headquarters to branch offices across geographically disparate locations. And those organizations may want to use that data in different ways.

A global high-tech manufacturing company generating IOT data in the cloud may want to leverage the same data for machine learning on-premises
Developers testing applications in remote locations require code and tools to be placed at or close to where the software is being tested.
Media rendering companies, such as Weta Digital, are looking for quicker ways to cache texture files to render 3-D models and bring movies like Avatar to market faster.

But if the data is created and stored in storage silos, how can a globally distributed organization make the best use of all its data? Read more…