(This post provides a continuation to Matt Kozloski’s post about Nexus 9000 Automation. In his post, Matt provides a primer on Nexus 9000 and shows some example code using PowerShell to access the REST API on the Nexus 9000.) We already know that the Nexus 9000 is an awesome switch, before we even get to the goodness of its programmability features. For example, the Cisco Nexus 9372PX performs non-blocking 10G line rate switching, has 6x 40GbE uplinks, and it sports a rich set enterprise functions you would expect from a Cisco Nexus switch, such as L2 switching, L3 routing, VXLAN, VPC, and Fabric Extenders to name a few. In this exercise we are going to query the switch for some information remotely using Python.

Cisco has long been known as the digital Fort Knox of the network security world. Their breadth of products offers an all-encompassing path to internet security, and includes a multitude of security fronts.

The popularity of the Cloud is unquestionable, with the majority of U.S. businesses using cloud computing. But, with this increased usage, cloud-based Disaster Recovery (DR) has become even more crucial.

Keeping up with the whirlwind pace of the technology industry is difficult, to say the least. To help you spot the big trends in IT and cloud computing for 2016 and keep up with data security needs, we've put together a list of what we expect to see this year.

Network automation is right up there with automated server provisioning, to accelerate the development and advancement of applications and services. A common example, might be: “There’s a problem in production and I need to clone my production environment to a bubble test environment for rapid testing and resolution.”

It happens all the time – for all the right reasons, one of our customers is interested in VDI until they see the price. Sticker-shock doesn’t begin to describe the experience one goes through, when looking into traditional VDI for the first time. Many organizations, large and small, understand the operational overhead (i.e. cost) of managing desktops, seeing VDI as a way to both streamline operations and deliver a consistent end-user experience.

There’s a new old buzzword surfacing in the storage space: “Erasure Coding”. Sounds pretty fancy! Believe it or not, most of you are using some form of erasure coding (EC) in your data centers today. The concept generally describes the math behind data availability and redundancy (think: RAID). What we are seeing now, is traditional RAID exposing significant limitations with both large, slow drives and super-fast SSDs. RAID also doesn’t generally describe data locality for availability purposes. Before we get into advanced erasure coding, let’s talk about what RAID-5 and RAID-6 really are.

There is a fairly serious bug, in vSphere 6.0, which can make backup data corrupt and prevent you from restoring data. This issue is specifically targeted at those (most) who use CBT (change block tracking) to take efficient image-based backups of their environment. If you need any assistance with applying or testing these patches and/or the integrity of your backups, please give your account representative a call. You can also contact us here. The VMware KB for this article is here: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2136854