Announcements

VPLS is proud to announce the launch of services at our new PHX1 – Phoenix, AZ data center! The data center is designed to meet Tier 3 standards and can be configured to be fully Tier 4 compliant for each individual suite. The unique 20 rack suite design allows for complete isolation of tenants with a maximum of 11.25 kW critical load per cabinet. Phoenix’s low risk to natural disasters makes it an ideal location for enterprises to store their critical backup data there. VPLS’s services out of Phoenix include  Managed Enterprise Cloud Backup and Offsite Data Backups powered by Veeam Cloud Connect. VPLS will expand services such as Nimble Storage Replication and Managed Enterprise Cloud towards the end of the year.

VPLS Inc. has earned recognition on The Channel Company’s 2015 CRN Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500 on the Hosting 100 list.  The MSP 500 recognizes companies in Northern America whose approach to delivering managed services is one innovative step ahead enabling their customers to improve operational efficiencies and utilizing technology to achieve greater competitive advantage.

Background Information

GHOST is a ‘buffer overflow’ bug affecting the gethostbyname() and gethostbyname2() function calls in the glibc library. This vulnerability allows a remote attacker that is able to make an application call to either of these functions to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the user running the application.

Impact

The gethostbyname() function calls are used for DNS resolving, which is a very common event. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must trigger a buffer overflow by supplying an invalid hostname argument to an application that performs a DNS resolution.

The GHOST vulnerability can be exploited on Linux systems that use versions of the GNU C Library prior to glibc-2.18. That is, systems that use an unpatched version of glibc from versions 2.2 to 2.17are at risk. Many Linux distributions including, but not limited to, the following are potentially vulnerable to GHOST and should be patched:

• CentOS 6 & 7
• Debian 7
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 & 7
• Ubuntu 10.04 & 12.04
• End of Life Linux Distributions

Resolution

Check version of GLIBC installed –

rpm -q glibc

yum update glibc

reboot

More details: https://access.redhat.com/articles/1332213

 

By now you may have heard of the latest vulnerability that effects over 500 million devices around the world!! Not only are web servers effected by things like your security cameras, Android devices and even Mac OSX! Here’s a super detailed explanation from Troy Hunt:

http://www.troyhunt.com/2014/09/everything-you-need-to-know-about.html

Additional information from Trend Micro:

A brand new vulnerability has been disclosed that will have widespread impacts.  The vulnerability, known as Shellshock, is found in Bash, the dominant shell for Unix and Linux (default), and can also be found in Mac OS X, some Windows server deployments, and even Android. It enables remote code injection of arbitrary commands without authentication, which can then allow malicious code execution that could be used to take over an operating system, access confidential data, or set the stage for future attacks.

NIST rates this a 10 (out of 10) on the severity score, based on the fact that it is 1) widespread and common, 2) easy to execute an attack (low complexity) and 3) no authentication required when exploiting Bash via CGI scripts. Unlike the recent Heartbleed vulnerability, this is even more prevalent and easily accessed, making it a much bigger risk to organizations.

Who is affected? Any organization or user that has bash enabled on a server, desktop, or device is affected by this vulnerability. This includes the over 500 million web servers on the Internet today. As well, end-users’ accessing web sites or services being run on affected servers are vulnerable to their personal and business information falling into the wrong hands.

What can customers do? This is a critical vulnerability and should be addressed and patched as soon as possible. One big challenge is that there will be many patches that will have to be both produced and then distributed (ex: each Linux distro that uses bash will need to deliver a patch), making it very difficult to address quickly. The second is that many devices that could be compromised based on running Linux (ex: routers, medical devices) will not be easily patched.

Trend Micro has two key recommendations for organizations: Assess your environment and if you have a vulnerable version of bash present, you should patch your system(s) as soon as possible. Ensure you have an up-to-date IPS in place to protect your vulnerable systems until you have a chance to fully patch. If you do not have an IPS in place, consider leveraging a service-based offering to get up and running quickly.

Specific Advice for Different Use Cases: If you’re an end-user, watch for patches for your Mac, your Android phone, and other devices you may have. Leverage leading solutions like Trend Micro free tool for Mac that can tell you when you if you are on a vulnerable site so that you don’t put information at risk. If you have end users that you are responsible for (as an organization), implement patches as they come available for vulnerable endpoints. In parallel, you could leverage Interscan Web Security as a Service to notify end users when they access vulnerable sites. If you’re running LINUX systems, consider leveraging an IPS like Deep Security to help virtually patch until patch is available. If you’re running LINUX/APACHE webservers using BASH scripts, consider retooling your scripts to use something other than BASH until a patch is available. Until you have a patch applied, leverage an IPS like Deep Security to help virtually patch. If you’re the customer of a hosted service, get in touch with them to find out if they’re vulnerable and find out their remediation plans if they are. In order to quickly put a fix in place for servers and applications that you are running on that service, consider leveraging an IPS like Deep Security to help virtually patch.

 

VPLS Solutions to Expand Sales of Nimble Products With Innovative Offering

Orange, CA – (Marketwired – May 21, 2014) – VPLS Solutions, a premier reseller of Nimble Storage solutions, today announced it has launched a Replication-As-A-Service offering based on Nimble’s storage platform. Nimble Storage is a leading provider of flash-optimized hybrid storage solutions with built-in data protection capabilities, including replication.

Nimble Storage has developed a flash storage solution engineered to address the industry’s most pressing storage issues: delivering better performance and capacity at a reasonable price; providing integrated protection with rapid back up and recovery; and, reining in storage complexity. The company’s products are based on its patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL™) hybrid storage architecture that leverages fast read performance of flash and the cost-effective capacity of hard disk drives. Nimble combines this flash-optimized architecture with Nimble InfoSight, a cloud based management service that delivers predictive support and operational simplicity through deep data analytics.

VPLS Solutions has had tremendous success selling Nimble Storage to customers nationwide. By investing in redundant Nimble Storage arrays and deploying them in VPLS’s Tier 3+ data centers in El Segundo, CA and Sacramento, CA, VPLS Solutions is offering Nimble Storage replication services for a low monthly fee. This provides clients with a much needed disaster recovery option, without the capital investment required to build out a new data center.

“Nimble Storage offers the most innovative storage solution on the market,” said John Minnix, Co-Founder of VPLS Solutions. “By leveraging VPLS’s world class data centers and storage expertise, we are allowing customers to fully realize the replication capabilities included with Nimble’s storage arrays. A simple pricing model where customers pay a low monthly fee per Gig of storage used makes this a great choice for Nimble customers globally.”

“With Nimble’s comprehensive storage solutions, features like replication are included with the products at no additional cost to our customers. VPLS Solutions’ innovative replication service allows end users to fully realize the advantages Nimble’s products have to offer,” said Kristin Carnes, Director of Channel Sales at Nimble Storage.

VPLS Solutions, LLC is a premier technology solutions provider and systems integrator, and the solutions provider arm of the VPLS Group of Companies. VPLS Solutions owns and manages a large, private, carrier-grade network and operates five geographically diverse U.S. data centers, as well as data centers in Bangkok and Singapore. VPLS Solutions’ 15+ years of carrier heritage make us the perfect partner for your public, private or hybrid cloud needs, and your most complex network and data center challenges. VPLS Solutions – Building, Connecting & Securing the World’s Best Networks.

Please contact us at www.vplssolutions.com or [email protected].

A few months back in the Summer of 2011, we pondered opening a new data center to cater to our growing number of customers in the Central and Eastern regions of the USA and Europe. With so many things going on this project got moved further back until finally everything came together in October. As our engineers prepped the servers and network equipment we sat there wondering what if we decided to take a road trip across the USA? At first I wasn’t excited about spending over 3 days in a car driving from coast to coast when we could just fly 6-7 hours especially with JetBlue’s DirectTV service, it would be super quick from LGB –> IAD.

As the departure date approached we changed our minds and decided to make this once in a life time journey to the East! Our team consisted of 5 people, Ted, Taka, Michael, Vince and myself. The journey began from our office in Orange, CA and the following route was proposed:

The trip would be over 3300 miles with the goal of seeing as much of the USA as possible in a single journey. We ended up taking the following route because of 3 major reasons:

• stop by Las Vegas, NV first!
• see the Colorado Rockies before a storm hits
• I-70 is better then taking the I-40 as the road becomes a standard highway in many parts

The journey we planned and followed looked like this covering over 2800 miles and taking over 60 hours of non stop driving.

We left Orange,CA at 12:00 midnight Sunday October 30th and made it to Las Vegas around 3:00AM. A few guys decided to play some cards at the M Resort to test their luck. We eventually made it out of Las Vegas and into St George, Utah where our road trip on I-70 really began. We ventured through Zion National Park and Dixie National Forest. The pictures below can’t describe the natural beauty or Utah’s canyons and forests.

Since we’re a big Brocade / Foundry Networks shop we thought this was rather funny!

We eventually made it to Vail, Colorado then Denver at around 9:30PM local time. We decided to visit Denver Bronco’s Mile Stadium after their crushing lost to the Detroit Lions. (Go 49ers!)

Tasty billboard.

While looking for places to eat we decided to consult Adam Richman and his popular show Man vs Food. Duffy’s Cherry Cricket came highly recommended for their world famous burgers and brew and it did not disappoint! Make sure you try the Green Chili and add an egg / green chile to your Cricket Burger!

After hours of driving through the night we passed through the entire state of Kansas ending up in Kansas City, MO. We stopped by the famous Midway Travel Plaza where the reality show is filmed. A couple hours later we ended up in St. Louis, MO and visited the famous Arc, gateway to the West, or in our case the East.

Since Man vs Food didn’t disappoint in Colorado we tried our luck again visiting Pappy’s Smokehouse. They ran out of chicken and beef so we ended up with ribs, pulled pork, turkey and a Fritto Pie. The meats were all dry but the Fritto Pie was awesome. Overall we weren’t too impressed with Pappy’s but then again they were about to close early for Halloween.

 

After leaving St Louis we headed to Indianapolis, IN and ate a late dinner at a surprising place called The Ball & Biscuit. We tried almost everything on the menu from crab cakes to a 1-lbs meatball, grilled cheese, gumbo and hot dogs. EVERYTHING was amazing!

Night time rolled around again and we were about 800 miles from our destination. Heavy fog slowed us down while crossing though Indiana and Ohio into West Virginia. We went through Morgantown, PA for a bit then back through the hills of West Virginia into Virginia. At 12:30 in the afternoon and over 60+ hours in the car we finally arrived at our new datacenter in Ashburn, Virginia!

Check back on our road trip back home!!

Just weeks after VMWorld 2011, our team of engineers have finished upgrading our Cloud infrastructure to support the lastest vSphere 5 by VMware. Krypt is excited to bring our customers the latest in cutting edge technology from the industry leaders. All this translates into more features, larger and faster servers, and more reliability for your Krypt Cloud servers and Private Cloud infrastructure.

Some important features for vSphere 5 include:

VMware vSphere 5 Features and BenefitsEnhancements and new features in VMware vSphere 5 will deliver better application performance and availability for all business-critical applications and introduce advanced automation capabilities to free IT from manual processes and be more responsive to the needs of the business, including:

• 4X larger VMs scale to support any application. With VMware vSphere 5, VMware will make it easier for customers to achieve 100 percent virtualization.  VMware vSphere 5 will be capable of running virtual machines (VMs) that are four times more powerful than VMware vSphere 4, supporting up to 1 terabyte of memory and up to 32 virtual CPUs.  These VMs will be able to process in excess of 1 million I/O operations per second, which will far surpass current  requirements of even the most resource-intensive applications.  For example, VMware vSphere 5 will be able to support a database that processes more than two billion transactions per day.
• Updates to vSphere High Availability (HA) offer the best protection against unplanned downtime. VMware vSphere 5 will feature a new HA architecture that is not only easier to set up (customers can get their applications set up with HA in minutes), but is more scalable and offers superior availability guarantees.
• Intelligent Policy Management: three new automation advancements will deliver cloud agility. VMware vSphere 5 will introduce three new features that automate datacenter resource management to help IT respond to the business faster while reducing operating expenses.  These features will deliver intelligent policy management: a “set it and forget it” approach to datacenter resource management. Customers will define the policy and establish the operating parameters, and VMware vSphere 5 will do the rest.  VMware vSphere 5 intelligent policy management features will include:
  • Auto-Deploy will enable IT to automatically deploy servers “on the fly” and will be able to reduce the time it takes to deploy a datacenter with 40 servers from 20 hours to 10 minutes. Once the servers are up and running, Auto-Deploy will also automate the patching process, making it possible to instantly apply patches to many servers at once.
  • Profile-Driven Storage will reduce the number of steps required to select storage resources by grouping storage according to user-defined policies (i.e. gold, silver, bronze). During the provisioning process, customers will simply click to specify which level of service the VM requires, and VMware vSphere will automatically use the storage resources that best align with that level of service.
  • Storage DRS will extend the automated load balancing capabilities VMware first introduced in 2006 with Distributed Resource Scheduler™ to include storage characteristics. Once a customer has set the storage policy of a VM, Storage DRS will automatically manage the placement and balancing of the VM across storage resources.
    By automating the ongoing resource allocations, Storage DRS will eliminate the need for IT to monitor or intervene, while ensuring the VM maintains the service level defined by its policy

Cited From: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/press-kit/vmw-vsphere-cloud-infrastructure.pdf

 

Come visit a different version of Krypt.com now in full Chinese! Our programmers and linguists have been busy at work translating our site manually instead of using Google to rush out the site.

http://cn.krypt.com

Here’s a preview:

Stay tuned for more languages to come as well as country specific offerings.

VPLS Inc has finalized our trademark request for Krypt.com and intellectual property rights to “Krypt” in China and Thailand.

From all of us at VPLS and our companies Krypt.com and Hidefservers.com we wish you a joyful and prosperous New Year. May the new year bring you all much continued success in life and business.

Thank You,

VPLS