Apologies for the radio silence. We have been rapidly evolving the Virtual Server Room product over the past several months. The result has been the decision to morph into a service that leverages Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and to roll that service into a new company and organization, CloudScale Networks.
You can find out more at the CloudScale website. In the meantime, neoTactics will continue as an IT-focused consultancy.
Add comment May 7th, 2007
A 4-minute video by David Berlind on ZDnet that explains Amazon’s EC2, including breaking down the costs versus a dedicated hosting provider.
Add comment March 26th, 2007
Yesterday, virt-factory, an internal RedHat project, went public. It is a framework for deploying and managing virtual appliances in a datacenter environment. It’s great to see things heading this direction, one we feel is imminent. This project is brought to you by David Lutterkort who works in RedHat’s emerging technologies group and is also a principle contributor to Puppet, a next generation system configuration system that we are interested in.
Add comment March 16th, 2007
As a proof of concept, we’ve released a new Amazon EC2 ‘AMI’ (ami-34ba5f5d) that uses filesystem encryption (dm-crypt) for the ‘ephemeral store’. This image is available to the general public and we hope you get some good use from it. If you were holding back testing because of concerns around the security of your data, this should alleviate those concerns somewhat. We’re using the default AES-256 encryption of dm-crypt and the bits on disk should be well and good scrambled.
Note that this AMI is not designed to persist the data between reboots as we’re using a random key generated at boot time to do the encrypting. It’s just designed to alleviate concerns around your data possibly being snooped by someone else. And although it looks like Amazon has taken to heart encrypting the bits on disk sometimes it doesn’t hurt to be extra paranoid. ;-)
Add comment February 22nd, 2007
We’ve been incommunicado because we’ve been nosedown working on our upcoming product, the Virtual Server Room (VSR). Expect some fairly interesting announcements early next year. I’ll provide some teaser blog entries here in the next couple of weeks that give some more insight into the VSR.
In the meantime, for those of you who are Mac users, we wanted to point out that VMware has finally released their VMware Fusion BETA to the general public here. Should be fairly interesting to see how it compares to Parallels, which we have been very happy users of.
Have a fantastic holiday!
Add comment December 22nd, 2006