As Thomas LaRock wrote about earlier, 70% of enterprises use private clouds, including those with public-facing websites, pointing out the implicit challenge these companies face in securing their networks against DDoS attacks. Broadcom is innovating in this space with their Trident5-X12 chip featuring the NetGNT engine, which offers real-time traffic analysis and anomaly detection to bolster network security measures. However, despite the advancement in hardware-based security solutions, the onus remains on customers to develop and train the neural network models needed to identify and categorize threats—a task that requires specialized skills.
Multi-Cloud: Because Life Isn’t Painful Enough
Thomas LaRock’s LinkedIn Pulse article wittily addresses the complexities of multi-cloud management and introduces Dell’s APEX Cloud Platform with APEX Block Storage, focusing on how it can ease the burdens of handling high-performance workloads across different cloud providers, despite the potentially higher costs associated with enterprise-level storage solutions and multi-cloud management tools like APEX Navigator.
Behold, the SQL Processing Unit (SPU)
The NeuroBlade SPU is a groundbreaking piece of hardware designed to plug directly into servers, offering a 30x improvement in processing analytical queries, which Thomas LaRock thinks could be a game-changer for data-intensive companies. As generative AI and Large Language Models democratize data access, NeuroBlade comes at a critical juncture, addressing the impending surge in data processing demands with minimal impact on current infrastructure and methods. With the potential to massively reduce hardware needs and carbon footprint, this innovative solution is poised to be a coveted asset, not just for individual enterprises but also potentially for major cloud service providers as they navigate the explosion of data in the coming years.
Use This One Weird Trick to Build Your Own Private Cloud
Tracing the evolution of corporate infrastructure, Thomas LaRock spotlights how mainframes gave way to servers, which in turn embraced the transformational shifts to virtualization, then public clouds, and now the emergence of microservices and containers—yet through each phase, the underlying data centers and servers remained indispensable. Despite the allure of public cloud, private clouds persist, driven by factors like security, data sovereignty, performance, and the cost of potential repatriation, which keeps companies from going all-in on cloud solutions. Addressing the complexities of building private clouds, SoftIron unveils their HybridCloud offering—an “in-a-box” private data center solution that affirms its scalability, ease of integration with Azure and AWS, and potential as a maneuver away from challenging licensing models.
Stop Paying for Resources You Aren’t Using
In this LinkedIn Pulse article, Thomas LaRock advises against over-provisioning cloud resources, comparing it to a rule from a basketball camp: “Take all you can eat. But eat all that you take.” He highlights the common practice of requesting more resources than necessary, leading to wasted resources and higher costs. LaRock introduces Platform9’s Elastic Machine Pool (EMP) as a tool to identify and optimize inefficient Kubernetes deployments, potentially reducing costs by up to 50%. He suggests that managing cloud resources is more of an art than a science and recommends tools like EMP for effective cost optimization, particularly in Kubernetes deployments.
Thomas LaRock
My career and life experiences are best described as follows: I take things that are hard and make them simple for others to understand.
