Tech

What is it? The L1TF (L1 Terminal Fault) vulnerability has been identified as another Intel based speculative execution side channel vulnerability, similar to the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities which made headlines earlier this year. It is currently only identified as a theoretical vulnerability with no proof of its malicious use in the wild. How is […]

This information pack is intended to provide an overview of the recent documented exploitation of modern CPU (mis)features. It is not designed to be a comprehensive document on the fine details of the exploits and specific platforms. Where possible, links will be provided to full documentation and disclosure. This document is a description of the […]

If you asked anyone the basic question “How long should I keep my backups (or backup tapes) for?”, the most common answer in Australia would be “7 years”. But they could never tell you why.It is one of those urban myths where, on the face of it, 7 years might sound like a reasonable retention […]

Animal Logic makes the visual effects that go into films like Matrix 1 and 2, The Lego film, and Great Gatsby. In this video case study, their head of IT, Alex Timbs, explains why they selected a prefab data centre from our partners at Schneider Electric. This video will be relevant to you, if you […]

I don’t know about you, but when I was working as an infrastructure systems administrator my life was ruled by a list. A list of to-do’s to get the environment to a secure and happy place. There would be weeks where my list got smaller as I got things crossed off it. But mostly, weeks […]

Many years ago, before most backup products had backup-to-disk options, vendors launched Disk-based appliances, known as Virtual Tape Libraries, as a backup target. These enhanced the backup and restore experiences over tape. Over time these appliances were enhanced to provide deduplication in the box. This supplemented the lack of such features in some backup solutions. […]

On the 8th of December, 2015 VMware released a patch to ESXi 5.5 to address the POODLE vulnerability in SSLv3. Their patch disables SSLv3 on the host altogether and only allows the more secure TLS cipher to be used instead. The patch is called ESXi550-201512101-SG and is titled “Updates esx-base” in Update Manager and could […]

With VMware’s newest release of vSphere come some great new features but also some big changes in its architecture. This might make the upgrade process for your environment require some careful planning. Scalability: Cluster size up to 64 hosts (32 previously). Each host can run up to 1024 VMs, have 480 logical CPU’s and 12TB […]

Let’s face it, this topic has been in the back of everyone’s thinking for quite some time, yet few organisations of scale can achieve it. Tape has been around since the 1950s when pioneered by IBM to be a low-cost offline, and portable storage medium. In the last 65 years it has seen significant transformation […]

Getting the most from your investment in CommVault is key as you data store grows and changes over time. Like all good vendors, CommVault is adding new functionality but also providing new ways in which you can purchase their product. This article walks you through the various license models and provides an outline of some […]

The reason for this post is that I often come across CommVault environments that have hosts which have not been decommissioned correctly. This results in the unnecessary consumption of both licensing and storage space/media. It seems that the correct way to decommission servers from Simpana isn’t something that gets highlighted enough during CommVault training. This also […]

Malware is becoming an increasingly more common threat in our digital world, no longer are virus writers exploiting vulnerabilities in operating system code but they have instead discovered a much easier attack vector. Simply convincing users to run their malicious software through social engineering. This is the ‘decryption instructions’ you get from CryptLocker. Pay up […]