Security and Technology

Cisco video on RISC migration to UCS featuring my work at the University of Colorado is released.

klard — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:40:08 +0000

Cisco has released the video that we did featuring my work at the University of Colorado and it can be found here. I am extremely proud of what I was able to accomplish given the circumstances.

Keith Lard

Cisco case study

klard — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 23:49:24 +0000

Cisco has released a case study based on our experience wih the ucs implementation at the University and it can be found here.

Pursuing new opportunities

klard — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:45:56 +0000

I am excited as I cut ties from CU and venture out into the consulting world. Hopefully I will find untapped demand for innovative ideas.

I am pleased that after years of seemingly wasted effort I was finaly able to integrate some basic security into the architecture implemented at CU during the UCS migration.

Cisco UCS Dashboard – running in VirtualBox

klard — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 19:28:51 +0000

I had a little trouble running the Cisco UCS Dashboard VM on my MAC under VirtualBox. Here are the steps I took to get it working:

Download the 3 files for UCS Dashboard

Unzip the package and the vmdk

Download vmware-vdiskmanager
vmware-vdiskmanager -r UCS_Dashboard_v09a-disk1.vmdk -t 0 final.vmdk

Download QEMU for MAC
/Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert final.vmdk raw-file.bin

Now to convert the raw file to a VirtualBox image, run the following:
/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxManage convertdd raw-file.bin UCS_Dashboard.vdi

Create a new Virtual Machine in VirtualBox and select the .vdi as the disk.

The virtual machine had a kernel panic when I booted it so I shut it down, removed the SATA disk, created a new lsilogic SCSI controller and added the vdi to it. That solved the small bump there. The machine is now up and I am searching around for the login credentials. Guess I will ping some colleagues at Cisco and get that data.

My Production Network Drawing – Cisco UCS and Nexus

klard — Mon, 23 May 2011 21:45:33 +0000

Enhancing Security by Reducing Complexity

klard — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 21:55:52 +0000

IT systems and infrastructure have experienced a rapid change in complexity as a result of consolidating multimedia communication through one network (Internet Protocol convergence), moving from mainframes to client/server and implementation of web services. This has had a drastic effect on higher education IT resources. It has created a greater dependency on IT services as well as a disconnect between these innovations and the ability of the IT security professional to understand the entire stack well enough to secure it. The university’s continued funding of antiquated infrastructure and systems has resulted in unnecessary expenses and hidden costs as it relates to security and efficiency. Reducing university system and infrastructure complexity by consolidating configuration, migration, management and maintenance of the hardware stack allows the organization to decrease the number of devices requiring setup, configuration and management while allowing for funding flexibility and realizing cost reductions. Further, system management efficiency allows the IT administrative and security professional to focus on more than just application configuration management strategies and user authorization potentially resulting in increased security. Implementation of virtualization through the Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) coupled with Oracle’s RAC (Real Application Clusters), VMware’s enterprise software and SAN technology resulted in complexity and cost reductions. While specific security, efficiency and capacity goals were met, virtualization brought about new security issues.
Read the paper here: Security

Hardware consolidation and Cisco UCS

klard — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 23:42:29 +0000

Cabling is reduced dramatically

We are working on a hardware consolidation effort that will allow us to shrink our datacenter footprint from 3500 sq feet to 200 sq feet. We will be reducing our ethernet cable plant from 1200 cables to fewer than 100. We will also be reducing our power consumption from 120 KW to 15 KW.