Posted in Industry, Opinion, Transactions

Massive SQL Injection, Is your credit card data secured with your vendors?

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Nicholas O'Neil

In a recent 0 day release, Ars Technica announced a Massive SQL injection attack where numbers up to 700K of URLs have been compromised thus far.  The massive scale attack has injected code that is found on a number of product pages including Apple’s iTunes Store, RSS Feeds and possibly was the vector of attack in recent news for GoGrid Hosting Services security compromise.

In the recent news from the hosting standpoint, GoGrid received notification that an unauthorized third party may have viewed account information including payment card data. While actions have been taken to protect customers although we are not sure the damage which was done law enforcement authorities have seized the billing equipment at GoGrid and are proceeding with an ongoing criminal investigation to continue and assess the damages and precautions for next steps going forward.  Full story on GoGrid Security breach can be found on Cloudsecurity.org here.

SQL injections follow a pattern that has been consistency with filename ur.php and a style of injection with an ever changing domain name for the host.

Keep in mind that SQL Injections are not just targeting MSSQL and Windows systems, MySQL.com the website Oracle was hacked using a SQL injection, a little embarrassing for a database vendor as mentioned on Ars Technica.
Read the full story of the SQL Injection here.

PCI Compliant hosting validates the infrastructure for safekeeping of all financial transactions and records,  Logicworks released the first Complaint Cloud, capable of scaling the technology without compromise of security.  Logicworks’ Compliant Cloud also provides a sophisticated amount of security measures to comply with the regulations for not only PCI but SAS70, HIPAA and FISMA. www.logicworks.net

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Posted in Opinion, Storage, Transactions

Gmail and cloud computing data integrity

Posted on February 28, 2011 by admin

Chances are everyone has a Gmail account today, whether they use it or not the popularity
of Gmail has gone from invitation only 10 years ago to free open registration and use today. Popularity basis of Gmail is ranked next to that of Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com and Aol.com email addresses by my own research study.  In addition, Gmail users also count for every Android device as one of these accounts is required to activate on the mobile.

How much value is put into mail availability?  In addition that includes not only messages but contacts, tasks, conversations and all of the other social media channels available through the major players.  Some users never delete anything their Mailbox is something along the lines of a database and it has archives of every conversation.

The reality how would one take the total loss of all contents from their Gmail account, such a terrifying thought just happened over the weekend and although the impact was 500,000 users in actuality based on an Engadget.com report this is only about 0.29% of all Google Gmail users.  That is very impressive number of users although considering it is a free service.  Lucky for me I was not affected by this catastrophic loss of data however I couldn’t stress the importance of backups.  Setup a carbon copy forwarder for all of your messages, I personally dupe mine between @Hotmail and @Gmail this way I have redundancy and a free widely used web service available from anywhere on the internet.

The idea here is that your email is in the cloud and your information is highly available, fast and accessible from anywhere but that’s only as long as you have a backup copy of it. Gmail is a free service and while their engineers are working on recovery for all of its users, cloud computing service are only as resilient as what the end-user has signed up to become and the price to pay for complete data availability.

Loss of data is no fun and it can be a disaster if the backups are not in place considering the medium that is effected such data loss can turn a company or end user upside down. These fallouts are not new to us although generally speaking we aren’t worried about it unless it happens to us.

Just last month in early January of this year, Hotmail.com lost all email for 17,355 customers and while it took about 3 days to get customers mailboxes back not all of them were able to be recovered says the report on InfoWorld here.

Does this change your thoughts when it comes to cloud computing and will you start backing up your information today?

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Posted in Datacenters, Industry, Opinion, Virtualization

Benchmarking the Cloud

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Nicholas O'Neil

A positive experience with cloud computing starts with the choice of the best vendor.  There are a variety of options in the industry competing to win your business. GatheringClouds is powered by Logicworks, a hosting and cloud computing company based in New York with facilities around the country. Logicworks’ cloud product is called infiniCloud and starts at six cents per RAM hour.  They also have managed services and dedicated servers in case we need them.

CloudHarmony is a great site that provides reporting on the performance of various clouds.  We used CloudHarmony to benchmark Logicwork’s infiniCloud service against some of their competitors:

infiniCloud ranked #1 on their latency test, which means that they have the fatest connection to the Internet of all the clouds we tested (also included were Amazon, Rackspace, & VoxCLOUD).  They got a 100% on the availability report with no incidents of downtime reported.

infiniCloud also ranked #1 on the Cloud Speedtest for Downlink Throughput with
4.91Mb/s average over 66 tests.  Second place in the Speedtest was Amazon with 4.26Mb/s.

We thought CloudHarmony was a great resource and would recommend it as a valuable tool in choosing the right cloud.  So far it seems to validate our choice of infiniCloud!

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Posted in Linux, Microsoft, Open Source, Software

Netcraft releases February 2011 Web Server Survey

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Nicholas O'Neil

Are more people using Apache?
With 9.6M new hostnames  there is a 1% point increase in the market share this year from a survey of 284,842,077 site responses.

Reports from Netcraft sourced here are shown indicating that a significant contribution to Apache increases were seen the most at AmeriNOC (4.6M) and Softlayer (1.3M) and while Microsoft and Google both lost hostnames and market share these months there are thoughts on this sudden increase in Apache gains are generating traction from the CMS suites, Drupal, WordPress, Joomla w/ Apache.

Developer January 2011 Percent February 2011 Percent Change
Apache 58,623,115 57.57% 59,595,889 57.35% -0.21
Microsoft 17,070,240 16.76% 16,359,585 15.74% -1.02
Google 12,115,707 11.90% 11,946,570 11.50% -0.40
nginx 8,376,958 8.23% 8,688,338 8.36% 0.14
lighttpd 527,225 0.52% 598,339 0.58% 0.06

We find that the decissions when it comes to hosting are primarily up to the developers and their support for the applications.  While there is no greater of the 2 the open source presence is showing its gains and adaption to CMS suites.   The media industry has been speaking out through the CMS platforms and what better place to start than an infiniCloud, with no contracts, no setup fee you can select your community template, whether it be Windows or Linux and start servicing your projects today.  Sign up here @ infiniCloud.

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Posted in Hardware, Open Source, Servers, Software, Storage, Virtualization

Cloud and thin clients, the past is future

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Nicholas O'Neil

Cloud – repurpose your old machine with Jolicloud 1.1, download.

Recycle any computer with a useable lightweight web operating system.
For those that are waiting to try out Google chrome OS, this is the product available.

While there are no real benefits in replacing your Win7 or MacOS this is a great operating system available to show the direction we are moving.   Away from the heavy operating systems loaded with features that may or may not be needed.

Imagine logging onto your computer by authenticating through Facebook Connect, or Google Gmail (chrome) and then every document you save being stored in the cloud.  Turn off your computer, turn on another computer, and restart right where you left off.

I have about a dozen machines and all too often I’m digging up legacy files stuffed in a folder or on a hard disk that I never remembered to relocate.   The closest I got was enabling desktop redirection and my documents redirection on a domain controller, but even that had its level of fault… I had to be within that network.

So Jolicloud 1.1 has HTML5, is this push in the direction away from what Apple is trying to bring us? The interface itself looks very iPad/Android’ish.  Well super simple and highly effective almost like what the ‘Start’ menu button was to us for over a decade.  For anyone wanting Google chrome OS, see if you can get your hands on a CR-48 laptop apply to the Pilot-Program or check on Ebay.

Such features of cloud computing are ever changing, it has been 2 years and the expanding of cloud movement from what started with vmware and other virtual platforms to a broader scale of devices now reaching the end user more than ever.   Logicworks recently launched an infiniCloud service that appeals to the public cloud with hybrid growth capabiility it has allowed the provisioning high performing westmere based vms into an easy to afford solution and with no contracts or commitment requirements.   With this its now possible for new projects to come up, spin the wheels and then pause or re-provision for new application projects all at the click of a button.

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Posted in Datacenters, Hardware, Storage

Storage – Which is more reliable?

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Nicholas O'Neil

In a recent article published today over at Datacenterknowledge.com analysts approached the question: Which storage drives are the most reliable, SSD (Solid-State-Drive) or Hard Drives (SATA/SAS) although there are more choices than SATA/SAS current industry is widely using what we have mentioned.

In the article there is reference of retailer offering both drives having published a return data last month and the results in were that some of the 1 TB HDs (Hard Drives) are more reliable than that of some SSDs.

So the question is why do hard drives fail?

HDs have two failure components: mechanical and electrical
Hard Drives are mechanical and over time moving parts wear, platters start to wobble, lubricants dry and the start to lose precision.

SSDs replace the platters and bearings, motors with flask, no moving parts but they still don’t replace the electrical components.  In regards the electrical refers to the flash chips and if they were all the same we could calculate their reliability.

In a recent article written by Google, Inc. it is estimated that over 90% of all new information produced in the world is being stored on magnetic media, most of it on hard disks.

We have grown to accept hard drive failures as an understanding that machines eventually break whether it is before or after a given time we learn to rely on redundancy to tolerate the loss of equipment, not risking the loss of data.

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Posted in Events

Request Timed Out… Tumblr Offline

Posted on December 6, 2010 by Nicholas O'Neil

A micro blogging platform that allows users to post and share text, images, videos, links to their tumblelog.  Founded in 2007 the New York based company today says that for more than 18 hours now it is “incredibly sorry for the inconvenience”, there is no clear timeline for when Tumblr will return.


As noted on Gigaom.com this is their longest outage in the company’s history and fans are grumbling about the downtime which also means competitors are trying to take advantage of the sites outage.
The only statement available is that which is listed on their homepage, talking about an issue in our of their database clusters.
The site has had rapid rate of growth according to recent estimates from monthly 2 million to more than 6 million monthly visitors.  

Squarespace, a blog host that competes with Tumblr and WordPress and closed a funding round of $38 million earlier this year, tried to capitalize on the Tumblr downtime by posting an offer on Twitter on Monday, saying: “Enter code TUMBL at checkout & credit good for one free month of our standard plan will be applied to your account” (the platform’s standard plan is $12 a month).

Who is accountable and responsible for getting things back up and running, the managed hosting
company that operates and maintains services for Tumblr?  Perhaps nothing is harder to manage than the database infrastructure in a complex hosting solution. The database is the center of the today’s dynamic Internet applications, and is a common point of dependency for availability and performance.
High-availability database configurations are a common requirement of the majority of Logicworks clients, and one of our distinguishing core competencies.

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Posted in Datacenters, Industry, Virtualization

infiniCloud is Enterprise, Performance and Affordability.

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Nicholas O'Neil

Logicworks infiniCloud is Enterprise service, performance with affordability. InfiniCloud simplifies the barriers to cloud adoption, allowing enterprises to move over to the cloud so they can better handle mission-critical applications. The public cloud hosting service is unique in that it places particular emphasis on providing a real infrastructure for real applications, offers a full suite of managed services, and is equipped with an efficient migration path.

While some cloud services operate on large pools of commodity servers, InfiniCloud was built with high-performance hardware including Xeon Westmere processors, 40 Gbps storage networking, and the option for SATA or 15K SAS RAID 10 disk arrays.

Logicworks infiniCloud is a valuable tool in a hybrid model through its capabilities and its network. An example, hosting a front-end or read-only Web presence on infiniCloud, with applications and databases running on managed dedicated servers. the complexity and sophistication of these relatively new capabilities will translate into enterprise services.

The infiniCloud beta will run through the end of the year, followed by a full public release in January.

Read more @ Web Host Industry Review or visit Logicworks today.

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