Free - Book from Microsoft - Network Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Pretty Decent
Two Chapters - 94 Pages with good intro to Microsoft's version of SDN.


Download Links:

PDF - http://aka.ms/683068pdf

EPUB - http://aka.ms/683068epub

Kindle - http://aka.ms/683068mobi

Virtual CISO at no cost .(I am not kidding)

  CISO "in residence" program in Howard County, Maryland.

According to the article:- 

The program, known as HOCO CISO, is currently providing "virtual" CISOs that offer security guidance to member companies of the Howard Tech Council (HTC) that do not have their own CSO or CPO. All organizations have to do is submit a request for counsel from the program, and one of the virtual CISOs on call will contact them to discuss a strategic security approach.

The Howard Tech Council has an affinity group known as HACKIT (Howard County Affinity for Cyber Knowledge and Intelligence Technologies/Talks), and the leaders of the group serve as the virtual CISOs that provide consultations.

"Every one of our virtual CISOs works on a volunteer basis," said Taule. "The intent here is to provide this guidance at essentially no cost. It's all part of our mission to give back."

In terms of the type of consultations that organizations will receive from the virtual CISOs, the advice is intended to help stroke that perfect balance between strong protection and optimizing security spending. The advice is the key here, not specific security services; if a company is looking to have some pen testing done, for service.

The links below has more information:

http://www.csoonline.com/article/750179/hoco-ciso-program-breaking-ground-with-virtual-cisos

Vmware - Launches Virtual SAN (vSAN)

Makes sense, Virtual System , Virtual Disk, Virtual Switch and now Virtual SAN

They are on the way to their software defined data center (SDDC) strategy.

SNIPPETS from the Article:-

For users of vSphere, the software pools together internal storage, either hard drives or solid state drives (SSDs), on x86 servers, which then can be used to store VDs. VMware has designed the software so it offers resiliency against server crashes. It also is capable of high throughput.

The company boasts that the vSAN across a 32 node cluster is capable of 2 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) on a read-only workload, and 640,000 IOPS with a workload of mixed reads and writes.

Overall, adding vSAN to a server adds 10 percent or less overhead to the CPU's, according to the company. Storage can be aggregated in pools as large as 4.4 petabytes, spread out across 32 nodes.

The links below has more information:

http://www.cio.com/article/749614/VMware_Launches_Virtual_SAN_Software?source=rss_staff_management