Author

Lorenzo Bedin

Lorenzo graduated in Telecommunication Engineering and works as freelance IT consultant, after a period of training as systems analyst. Currently he provides hardware solutions, virtualized infrastructures and websites.

After a false start of the long awaited FreeNAS 10, the iXsystems development team a few weeks ago released the latest stable release of the operating system for NAS solutions.

We’ve extensively covered FreeNAS in previous issues by analyzing structure, functioning and advantages. We expect a high level of stability and reliability from such an operating system, yet we waited for almost a year the revolutionary release 10, code named Corral.

FreeNAS 10 “Corral”: something went wrong
The two main news would have been a new graphical interface and native support to multi-platform virtual machines.
However the release of Corral didn’t go as expected: after being available for 48 on the official FreeNAS website, it mysteriously disappeared and replaced by the previous 9.10 version. For some weeks nobody had a clue of what was going on, as it was still downloadable from the official repository; then it appeared in the Tech Preview section. A communicate was released on the FreeNAS forum on the 12th of April stating the motivations of the retirement of the release.

Read more FreeNAS 11: the new features and some talks about Corral

In this article we will deal with mobile devices -smartphones and tables- by analyzing Cortado Corporate Server, a commercial product that helps MSP and IT professionals to manage the integration between personal and business devices, be it pure BYOD or situations where the company provides employees and collaborators with devices.

Overview and characteristics
This kind of software is commonly referred to as EMM, or Enterprise Mobility Management, and offers some common features: centralized management of mobile devices (MDM, or Mobile Device Management), management of installed applications, (MAM – Mobile Application Management) and management of on-board data and during the transmission. In addition to these three main characteristics, there are other useful features like secure access and sharing of files and, in the specific case of Cortado, printing straight from the device.

1 cortado profiles

Read more Cortado MDM

In this article we have selected some of the new features available in Windows Server 2016 with the aim of analysing them and evaluating their impact in a real world scenario.

As we’ve mentioned in the previous issue, this new release is conceived as an improvement of the previous versions, rather than a brand new system. Ne features can be grouped into three ares: Virtualization and Containers, Security and Storage.

Virtualization

The main news in terms of Hyper-V is nested virtualization. With the new Windows Server 2016, Hyper-V hosts can be virtualized (ie a VM with Hyper-V running on it): this approach is often used in testing environments and situations where one wants to create multi-tenant environments without costs related to physical hardware. Now VMs’ hardware hot-add (disks, network cards, controllers, etc..) is supported: this operation was previously available upon powering off machines and restarting them with a subsequent downtime.

hot add

A new feature that is introduced with this version is the Host Guardian role, which we discussed in the previous issue. Host Guardian allows to regulate granularly levels and access permissions of Hyper-V administrators on virtual machines running on an host or cluster. Server 2016 also steps towards the Linux world: one of the main problems when creating a Linux VM was the lack of drivers certified for Secure Boot in Windows, which would lead to a “Failed Secure Boot Verification” error when starting the virtual machine; it could be solved by disabling the Secure Boot feature. This new release of Windows Server fixes the problem including such drivers.

Read more Windows Server 2016: a new features test

CentreStack is a managed server for the creation of an object storage platform that can be deployed between the walls and in Managed Service Provider mode to be offered as a service to clients.

The product of the american Gladinet is a system halfway between classic file servers for companies and off-premises Cloud storage platforms usually used in SaaS/PaaS mode (think of Dropbox, Onedrive, etc..). By taking the best from both worlds, CentreStack can leverage the internal IT infrastructure (servers, storage, etc..) to offer a file sharing service also suitable for BYOD purposes in a Cloud mode. Management indeed is completely Web based with a dashboard from where you can control and act on all aspects of the platform, be it multi-tenant and multi-node as well.

CS web login evo

Structure and requirements

CentreStack is composed by three main parts, or nodes: Web Front Node, Worker Node and Database Node. Nodes can be deployed as physical hosts or as separate virtual machines, or in an all-in-one mode on a single host (a solution which is particularly suitable for small dimensions scenarios or testing purposes) where all components are installed at once. In some situations Web Front and Worker nodes can be condensed on a single machine.

CS db select 2

Read more CentreStack: the object storage platform by Gladinet

The second edition of the Security Barcamp organized by Trend Micro proves to be a very interesting meeting about IT related topics, both on a worldwide and on a more Italian-focused scale.

TM logo newtag stack 4c

Rik Ferguson, Trend Micro Vice-President, was the special guest of the event and, in an extended speech, he spoke about the three main threats in the IT field of the moment and which will be in the future.
The most important threat is ransomware for sure. The phenomenon boomed in 2015 and experienced a 400% growth in terms of attack typologies and available families during the following year. The new trend is to refine and improve the attacking techniques with a particular focus on selected business targets (whose data have an important value and can justify the payment of the ransom) and social engineering, which is at the basis of these attacks.

Read more Trend Micro and the threats of cyber espionage: actual and future trends

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  • BYOD: your devices for your firm

    The quick evolution of informatics and technologies, together with the crisis that mined financial mines, has brought to a tendency inversion: users that prefer to work with their own devices as they’re often more advanced and modern than those the companies would provide. Read More
  • A switch for datacenters: Quanta LB4M

    You don’t always have to invest thousands of euros to build an enterprise-level networking: here’s our test of the Quanta LB4M switch Read More
  • Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

    GURU advisor will be at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 22nd to 25th 2016!

    MWC is one of the biggest conventions about the worldwide mobile market, we'll be present for the whole event and we'll keep you posted with news and previews from the congress.

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