ZERO CLIENT Vs THIN CLIENT

WHILE THE TERM zero client is something of a marketing buzzword, it is a useful way of differentiating options for the devices that are used to access desktops. A zero client is similar to a thin client in its purpose—accessing a desktop in a data center—but requires a lot less configuration.

Zero clients tend to be small and simple devices with a standard set of features that support the majority of users. They also tend to be dedicated to one data center desktop product and remote display protocol. Typically, configuration is simple—a couple of dozen settings at the most, compared to the thousands of settings you see in a desktop operating system. Zero clients load their simple configuration from the network every time they are powered on; the zero clients at a site will all be the same. Zero clients support access to a variety of desktop types, terminal services, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or dedicated rack mount or blade workstations.

The basic premise of zero clients is that the device on the user’s desk doesn’t have any persistent configuration. Instead, it learns how to provide access to the desktop from the network every time it starts up. This gives a lot of operational benefits, since the zero client devices are never unique. This contrasts with a thin client, which may have local applications installed and will hold its configuration on persistent storage in the device.

Thin clients became a mainstream product class shortly after Microsoft introduced Windows terminal Server and Citrix launched MetaFrame, both in 1998. To enter this market, PC manufacturers cut down their desktop hardware platforms. They repurposed their PC management tools, reusing as much technology as possible from existing PC business. This meant that a fairly customized Windows or Linux setup could be oriented toward being a thin client.

Over time optional features for USB redirection, a local Web browser, VOIP integration agents and multi-monitor display support were added. Each additional feature adds configuration and complexity to the thin client. After a few years, thin clients are really small PCs. Some even have PCI or PC Card slots added. These thicker thin clients get quite close to a full PC in terms of capabilities and complexity. Instead of simplifying management, IT administrators now needed to manage the device on the user’s desk as well as in the data center. Zero clients, then, are a return to the simpler devices on user’s desks—with simpler management.

Zero clients are much simpler to manage, configure and update. Zero client firmware images are a few megabytes, compared with the multiple gigabytes that thin client operating systems take up. The update process itself is much quicker and less intrusive on a zero client, possibly occurring every day when the client boots.

Thin clients need to be patched and updated as often as the desktop operating system they carry; since zero clients have no operating system, they need less frequent updates. Zero clients have few knobs and switches to turn—probably fewer than 100 configuration items in total—so they are simple to manage. Often, their bulk management is a couple of text files on a network share. Thin clients have a whole operating system to manage, with tens of thousands of settings necessitating complex management applications, usually on dedicated servers at multiple sites. A zero client is like a toaster. A consumer can take it out of its packaging and make it work. If the consumer is an employee at a remote branch, there are benefits to having that worker be able to deploy a new terminal. Sometimes, thin clients need special builds or customized settings applied to them before they are deployed. This obviously is not ideal for rapid deployment. The ability to rapidly scale can be important when it comes to something like opening a call center to accommodate an advertising campaign or a natural disaster response. Zero clients have lower power consumption. Thin clients have mainstream CPUs and often graphics processing units, but a zero client usually has a low-power CPU (or none at all), which cuts down on power consumption and heat generation.

The simplicity of zero clients also makes for a much smaller attack surface, so placing them in less trusted networks is not so worrying. Also, putting them in physically hostile locations is safe; lower power and usually passive cooling mean that heat, dust and vibration are less likely to cause maintenance problems. Zero clients are all the same. Models are released every couple of years rather than every few months, so your fleet will contain fewer models. That means there’s no need for help desk calls to move a device from one desk to another. Plus the user experience is consistent. Your supplier’s inventory of zero clients will also have fewer models, which should lead to better availability when you need new zero clients.

DATA PRIVACY/PROTECTION

High-profile security failures have made privacy protection a top of-mind issue for many organisations. In several cases, hackers have gained access to online networks and systems, stealing personal customer data such as names, addresses, passwords. The financial costs of these breaches are often significant, ranging from tens of thousands to millions. The damage to a company’s brand and its reputation often costs far more. When we think of cyber risk we tend to think of security breaches, but when we look at it through a privacy lens, the range of risks broadens significantly.

As IT organizations move toward virtualization, cloud computing and IT-as-a-service, data protection will undergo a fundamental shift. The underpinnings of this transformation include a change from one-size-fits-all backup to a data protection offering that matches service levels with application requirements. IT organizations would be wise to bring in outside help to navigate through this transition.

There are several issues that an outside consultant can help manage, including:

ROI: The business justification of data protection as a service – data protection is still viewed as insurance and a quality risk assessment and business impact analysis from an outsider can have a meaningful impact with upper management.

Training and Education: Organizations have an opportunity to re-skill staff and gain increased leverage by developing data protection approaches that free up existing personnel. As discussed, however, new approaches will require new mindsets and existing staff will have to be educated and in some cases re-deployed on other tasks.

Architecture: Data protection is not trivial. Virtualization complicates the process and creates IO storms. Architecting data protection solutions and a services-oriented approach that is efficient and streamlined can be more effectively accomplished with outside help. Don’t be afraid to ask.

Customers want choices and ease of access, which requires them to provide personal information and preferences, businesses want to be able to gather, data mine and share this information efficiently. Certain industries such as financial services and health-care, often draw the most attention in the privacy discussion because of the personal information they possess. However, all industries are affected by privacy and data protection requirements. Confirm the organisation does not have misplaced or invented reliance on third party providers that have access to the organisation's own information or that of its customers. Design and implement robust monitoring and testing of privacy and data protection risks and related controls. Most companies have developed and implemented privacy and data protection programs, yet many of these programs fall short for a variety of reasons, including lack of understanding the risk landscape related to information collections and transmittal, inadequate organisational policies, insufficient training and unverified third party providers, among many others.

The bottom line is data protection is changing from a one-size-fits-all exercise that is viewed as expensive insurance to more of a service-oriented solution that can deliver tangible value to the business by clearly reducing risk at a price that is aligned with business objectives. Understanding data protection in a holistic fashion from backup, recovery, disaster recovery, archiving, and security; and as part of IT-as-a-service is not only good practice, it can be good for your bottom line.

NET NEUTRALITY

What is net neutrality?

Net neutrality is an idea derived from how telephone lines have worked since the beginning of the 20th century. In case of a telephone line, you can dial any number and connect to it. It does not matter if you are calling from operator A to operator B. It doesn't matter if you are calling a restaurant or a drug dealer. The operators neither block the access to a number nor deliberately delay connection to a particular number, unless forced by the law. Most of the countries have rules that ask telecom operators to provide an unfiltered and unrestricted phone service.

When the internet started to take off in 1980s and 1990s, there were no specific rules that asked that internet service providers (ISPs) should follow the same principle. But, mostly because telecom operators were also ISPs, they adhered to the same principle. This principle is known as net neutrality. An ISP does not control the traffic that passes its servers. When a web user connects to a website or web service, he or she gets the same speed. Data rate for Youtube videos and Facebook photos is theoretically same. Users can access any legal website or web service without any interference from an ISP.

How did net neutrality shape the internet?

Net neutrality has shaped the internet in two fundamental ways.

One, web users are free to connect to whatever website or service they want. ISPs do not bother with what kind of content is flowing from their servers. This has allowed the internet to grow into a truly global network and has allowed people to freely express themselves. For example, you can criticize your ISP on a blog post and the ISP will not restrict access to that post for its other subscribers even though the post may harm its business.

But more importantly, net neutrality has enabled a level playing field on the internet. To start a website, you don't need lot of money or connections. Just host your website and you are good to go. If your service is good, it will find favour with web users. Unlike the cable TV where you have to forge alliances with cable connection providers to make sure that your channel reaches viewers, on internet you don't have to talk to ISPs to put your website online. This has led to creation Google, Facebook, Twitter and countless other services. All of these services had very humble beginnings. They started as a basic websites with modest resources. But they succeeded because net neutrality allowed web users to access these websites in an easy and unhindered way.

What will happen if there is no net neutrality? 

If there is no net neutrality, ISPs will have the power (and inclination) to shape internet traffic so that they can derive extra benefit from it. For example, several ISPs believe that they should be allowed to charge companies for services like YouTube and Netflix because these services consume more bandwidth compared to a normal website. Basically, these ISPs want a share in the money that YouTube or Netflix make. 

Without net neutrality, the internet as we know it will not exist. Instead of free access, there could be "package plans" for consumers. For example, if you pay Rs 500, you will only be able to access websites based in India. To access international websites, you may have to pay a more. Or maybe there can be different connection speed for different type of content, depending on how much you are paying for the service and what "add-on package" you have bought. 

Lack of net neutrality, will also spell doom for innovation on the web. It is possible that ISPs will charge web companies to enable faster access to their websites. Those who don't pay may see that their websites will open slowly. This means bigger companies like Google will be able to pay more to make access to Youtube or Google+ faster for web users but a startup that wants to create a different and better video hosting site may not be able to do that. 

Will the concept of net neutrality survive?

Net neutrality is sort of gentlemen's agreement. It has survived so far because few people realized the potential of internet when it took off around 30 years ago. But now when the internet is an integral part of the society and incredibly important, ISPs across the world are trying to get the power to shape and control the traffic. But there are ways to keep net neutrality alive. 

Consumers should demand that ISPs continue their hands-off approach from the internet traffic. If consumers see a violation of net neutrality, they ought to take a proactive approach and register their displeasure with the ISP. They should also reward ISPs that uphold the net neutrality

MOBILE MALWARE

Mobile malware has emerged as a real and significant problem. Addressing it is no longer optional. As with other IT security risks, technology isn’t a silver bullet, but it is a key component of a holistic solution that also incorporates people and process.

A mobile virus is malicious software that targets mobile phones or wireless-enabled PDAs,thereby may causing the collapse of system and loss or leak of confidential information.The insidious objectives of mobile malware range from spying to keylogging, from text messaging to phishing, from unwanted marketing to outright fraud.

Fifty-nine percent of IT and security professionals surveyed by the Ponemon Institute recently said mobile devices are increasing the prevalence of malware infections within their organizations. This is no shock: the extraordinary growth of mobile platforms has madethem an irresistible target. The only surprise would have been if these devices had escaped attack.

Years ago, PC malware exploded when Windows achieved dominance. Something similar

is occurring with mobile. As the mobile marketplace has grown and evolved, the Android platform has become dominant. Worldwide, 70% of new smartphones now run Android, with iOS running a distant second. (Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 platform offers promise, but hasn’t yet achieved significant market penetration.)

The Android platform’s openness has made it attractive to users, device manufacturers,carriers, app developers and to malware creators. That’s where they’re focused..

In BYOD arrangements, mobile devices are often owned by users, who act as defacto administrators. Users typically decide which apps to run, and where to get them.Wider smartphone and tablet usage is often correlated with a loss of organizational control.And that, in turn, can compromise security in multiple ways. This is why some organizations are pursuing choose your own device (CYOD) approaches, where users get to pick their devices from a list the company is prepared to support, will continue to own, and plans to centrally administer. Of course, CYOD isn’t always an option, and many organizations have chosen to accept the tradeoffs associated with full BYOD.

Mobile malware risks

Organizations evaluating mobile malware risks should assess each of the ways it can damage them, including the following.

Productivity losses: Some forms of malware inconvenience users through aggressive advertising, prevent mobile devices from working properly, and increase support costs.

Direct costs: Some forms of malware and potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) have direct costs by utilizing paid mobile services such as SMS, with or without the user’s awareness or understanding.

Security, privacy, and compliance risks: Mobile malware can compromise corporate and customer data, systems, and assets that must be protected—placing the organization at competitive, reputational and legal risk.

Some mobile malware and PUAs merely annoy and frustrate. Yet as a whole, mobile malware and PUAs represent a significant and growing problem.

GREEN COMPUTING

Driven by rising electricity costs, green legislation and corporate social responsibility, green IT is increasingly on many IT professionals’ minds, particularly for the power-hungry data centre. Whatever the reasons, experts say that in the long run, having an energy-efficient data centre helps the environment and also saves businesses money.

Technologies that can help data-centre become green:

Data centre infrastructure management:

Experts rate data centre infrastructure management (Dcim) tools as one of the coolest technologies that can help companies make their infrastructure energy-efficient and green. Until 2009, Dcim had virtually no market penetration, but today it is one of the most significant areas of green computing. Dcim brings together standalone functions such as data centre design, asset discovery, systems management functions, capacity planning and energy management to provide a holistic view of the data centre, ranging from the rack or cabinet level to the cooling infrastructure and energy utilisation. it helps encourage the efficient use of energy, optimise equipment layouts, support virtualisation and consolidation, and improve data centre availability.

Free air cooling

Data centre power use is high on the agenda for most data centre developers. Energy costs have become the largest single element in the data centre’s total cost of ownership (tco) – ranging from 20% to 60% depending on the facility’s business model and as energy prices (and/or taxes) rise, the share of the total cost will only become larger. Free or natural air cooling is the practice of using outside air to cool data-centre facilities rather than running power-hungry mechanical refrigeration or air-conditioning units.

Low-power servers

Data centre operators are looking for more efficient alternatives to the current x86 standard server racks and blades to make their infrastructure sustainable in the long term. On-site wind generation or use of renewable energy.A number of large businesses, including Apple, Facebook and Google, are taking initiatives to power their data centres using wind energy.

Data centre consolidation and virtualisation

Virtualisation and data centre consolidation strategies help enterprises streamline it resources and utilise the untapped processing power of high-power server and storage devices. The combination of virtualisation, low-latency and high-bandwidth network  connectivity and specialised servers has the potential to slash data centre capital costs and improve energy efficiency.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing can help enterprises in their green it efforts, since a computing cloud offers higher CPU utilisation.

Energy-efficient cooling in the data centre

Many data centres are being run against old-style environmental designs, where the approach to cooling is based around ensuring that input cooling air is at such a low temperature that outlet air does not exceed a set temperature in many cases, the aim has been to keep the average volumetric temperature in the data centre around 20°c or lower with some running at between 15°c and 17°c.

The other technologies that can help data centre become green are:

Optimising airflow for maximum cooling

Increasing a data centre’s thermal envelope

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Business Intelligence
In the corporate sector, there is widespread need to use a range of software with different databases. We are generating a lot of data every day from software, web services etc. This data is useless if we are not able to draw insight from it. This is where BI comes into picture. BI can connect to different databases, web services and can collect all the data. On this data, it can do analysis and can provide a lot of insight. It can provide different kinds of reports, dashboards, data visualization, what if analysis etc and can help the management to make decisions which are based on data rather than on plain intuition.

For example in energy sector, a lot of data is collected from different smart devices, DISCOM, meters etc, and by properly analysing this data we can get a lot of insight .We can manage electricity usage better and tap data to realize the risks of theft and loss of energy.

BI Basics
There are a number of companies which provide BI software like SAS, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Pentaho, Jaspersoft. The BI software can be used in any sector and often system integrators or software companies then provide services and produce a sector specific solution for their end clients.

Installation & Security:
Once a sector specific solution has been developed, the solution can be then integrated with any software, website, portal or application. Hence, the software does not really depend on the platform; via web services the solution can be integrated with any platform. Also, user access-based data security can be provided. Hence, a user will be able to view only that data which is relevant to him.

Limitations
The biggest drawback of proprietary software provided by SAS, SAP etc, is in terms of costs. Their license costs go up in crores of rupees. On the other hand, we do have open source BI software like Pentaho and Jaspersoft that are not that expensive. Moreover, often to implement these BI solutions, the end client has to take the services of a software company specializing in the BI software, which is also in a way a limitation in usage.

Cross-Departmental Advantages
A well implemented BI can help a company in areas like predictive analytics, optimising investments and data driven decisions. The BI software can be implemented across all departments. 
A brief summary of its highlights in some departments are:

•  Marketing: helps in growing its topline with features like analyzing campaign returns, promotional yields, and provide solutions to expenditure for profitable ROI, and tracking social-media marketing
• Sales: finding the best path and practices, customer acquisition cost, and improvement in yearly turnover and sales
• Inventory: monitoring and adjusting inventory levels
• Human Resources: tracking and managing employee turnover, attrition rates and recruitment processes

BI solution includes the following business areas:

• Demand Intelligence
• Risk Intelligence
• Asset Intelligence (AI)
• Customer Service Intelligence    

Trends seen in BI Adoption:

• Information Quality
• Master Data Management (MDM)
• Data Governance
• Enterprise Level BI
• Enterprise Level Data Transparency
• Actionable Business Intelligence

DEPLOYING FLASH IN THE ENTERPRISE

Flash technology is changing the way that enterprises approach storage. After years of use in the consumer market, flash has reached a price point and level of maturity at which it is being actively deployed to address the needs of business-critical applications. Hard disk drives (HDDs) have some nagging deficiencies that make provisioning storage for applications with high-performance demands difficult. Because HDDs are capable of performing no more than 300–400 random I/O operations per second (IOPS), a storage system capable of delivering tens of thousands of IOPS requires hundreds of disks—even when the capacity is not needed. Over provisioning disks to achieve performance goals is a significant capital expense and wastes rack space, power, and cooling. High-performance workloads increasingly require 100,000 IOPS or more, further exacerbating the problem. 

Flash is quickly emerging as the preferred way to overcome the nagging performance limitations of hard disk drives. However, because flash comes at a significant price premium, outright replacement of HDDs with flash only makes sense in situations in which capacity requirements are relatively small and performance requirements are high. Deployment approaches—including hybrid storage arrays, server flash, and all-flash arrays—that combine the performance of flash with the capacity of HDDs can be cost effective for a broad range of performance requirements. Some storage companies offers a full range of flash solutions, including server flash, hybrid storage arrays, and all-flash arrays. We’ve done a careful analysis of the cost of each solution at various combinations of performance and capacity to help you understand how to choose the best solutions to address your storage challenges based on your performance needs (IOPS and latency), capacity requirements, working set size (amount of hot data), budget, and data protection objectives.  

The fastest HDDs have access times of 3–4 milliseconds, resulting in latencies much slower than flash-based SSDs, which have latencies measured in microseconds and perform thousands of IOPS per device. HDDs alone may no longer meet the needs of latency-sensitive applications.  Because of clear performance advantages coupled with significantly lower power consumption, flash SSDs and other flash devices are beginning to take the place of high-performance HDDs. However, because SSDs currently cost more than 10 times as much per GB of usable storage, IT teams are still  searching for the best strategies to deploy flash technology to deliver performance where it’s needed while minimizing overall storage costs.

There are a number of options for deploying flash in the data center:

• Hybrid storage solutions combine the performance of flash with the capacity of HDD by targeting hot data to flash using either migration or caching.
• Server flash solutions may provide persistent solid state storage or cache data from HDD storage onto flash devices installed in servers, delivering extremely low latency for data accessed from cache.
• All-flash arrays provide maximum performance and a high level of consistency for business-critical applications.