The FireBlog

Fun with IP v6 and IM

If you want to have a little fun over instant messenger, try sending an IP v6 address to a friend.  We've been testing FireScope's ability to manage IP v6 environments, and one of our engineers was chatting with a developer and sent an IP v6 address over windows messenger.  Unfortunately, messenger translated the numbers and colons into smileys, not so smileys and a few finger gestures.  While not exactly transmitting the information one might expect, it does make for an interesting friday...

IPv6 And The Coming Storm

With a government deadline for IPv6 looming many monitoring, management and security software vendors are trying to move quickly to ensure they will have IPv6 support in their products.  This article from Network World dives deep into the current state of management platforms and their support for IPv6.

FireScope - Operations Made Simple

As the President of FireScope...I feel it is my duty to plug our product.  Not just for the obvious reason,  but also because I believe it really does solve IT operations issues.  Give it try!  Here is a quick summary on our line of FireScope appliances. 

The FireScope IT Operations solution provides clients with a flexible, technology-agnostic solution that significantly improves visibility into current and trending health and security of the enterprise, all in real-time. With FireScope, everyone from C-Level officers to system administrators can track up-to-the-second key performance metrics, security events, spot emerging trends and make faster IT operations decisions. By combining application aggregation, analytics, end-user dashboards and tools for collaboration in one plug-and-play appliance, FireScope can be deployed at a cost that is at least 80% less than other approaches to Business Service Management and IT Operations Management.

New Database Startup Has Big Players and High Hopes

A new startup leads by industry bigwigs called Vertica has developed a new grid-enabled, column-oriented relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs on industry-standard, Linux-based hardware. According to their site "The Vertica Database® provides extremely fast ad hoc SQL query performance, even for very large databases, making it well suited for:

• Data warehousing
• Data marts
• Clickstream analysis
• Fraud detection
• Call detail analysis
• Consumer customer analytics
• Business intelligence
• Other query-intensive applications

The Vertica Database is still in beta testing."  There are a lot of big bets being placed on this venture and should be very interesting.

11.38 petabits per second? Really?

It is true...according to an article on CNET online titled "Inside the Lucasfilm data center", their datacenter has the total capacity of 11.38 petabits per second.  Of course this is theoritical...but impressive none the less.  In the story "Kevin Clark, Lucasfilm's director of IT operations, said, the data center "far exceeds" the computing power of any other production house in the world."  It is a great article with views inside the data center...so get your computing envy on.

MYSQL Offers New Storage Engine Falcon

Although its an Alpha release MYSQL's new storage engine called Falcon will provide a very good alternative for large Web 2.0 applications running on web farms. The article in InfoWorld points out that "the storage engine is geared for high-performance environments while still supporting transactional and logging requirements, according to MySQL."

Quantum attacks worry computer scientists

Quantum computer use state to determine connectivity intervals thereby minimizing the opportunities for threats to occur.  Read about it in this story from Security Focus.  Although quantum computers are still in thier infancy..they possibilities are endless.  These computers have the potential to help us meet some of mankinds greatest technology challenges in medicine, science and business.  So security for these systems will be a high priority.

Linux Kernel Developers Reject GPLv3

In their posting "The Dangers and Problems with GPLv3", 29 Linux Kernel Developers have rejected the newly proposed GPLv3 licensing.  They cite three main issues and have listed numerous others.  They do not think it would benefit those that license their software via the GPL licensing scheme.  There points seem to be valid and although GPLv2 has some issues it is still better than the new v3 proposition.  We need to tread lightly on a licensing scheme v2 that has done so much for the Open Source community.  Any changes should be solely out of neccessity or by broad support for a change by the community itself.