Abbreviated Dialing

Use the Abbreviated Dialing (AD) feature to reduce the number of digits that you must dial to place a call. Instead of dialing the entire number, you dial a short code to access the number. The system then dials the stored number automatically. You can also assign abbreviated dialing buttons to telephones, so that you press a single button to dial frequently called numbers. Abbreviated Dialing is sometimes called speed dialing. Read more...

In June 2008, Microsoft officially announced that it planned to discontinue support for its popular but aging Windows XP operating system by April 2014.

To many system administrators' chagrin, the move will galvanize many organizations to begin migrating to newer operating systems, such as Windows 7 or the much anticipated and soon-to-be-released Windows 8. Unfortunately, during this process, legacy XP systems will become increasingly vulnerable to zero-day attacks and other security threats. The sudden absence of support for XP leaves a void that will likely be filled by a slew of old and/or soon-to-be-discovered vulnerabilities and subsequently give rise to a new crop of security exploits that specifically target these legacy systems, which are now devoid of security updates or support.

After a recent FortiGuard Labs malware database query where our threat research team looked at the same day of each year for the last 13 years, the team analyzed the number of vulnerabilities the systems captured and concluded that older operating systems typically have more exploit activity due to the fact that myriad exploit kits and existing malicious code have had ample time to mature and circulate. It's also harder today to get a working rootkit for Windows 7 than Windows XP thanks to Microsoft technology such as PatchGuard, which protects the kernel of an operating system from being unduly modified.

An August 2012 snapshot of reported attacks from the start of this year shows that a massive number of attacks are based on exploits discovered many years ago. FortiGuard reports 47 million instances of attacks based on exploits discovered in 2004 alone!

In a prior post, we explored an article by Paul Venezia over at InfoWorld who has a great article entitled When Virtualization Becomes Your Worst Enemy. His overall thesis can be summarized as virtualization can go from being your best friend to your worst enemy when problems start occurring within your IT infrastructure. The reason is that the physical server consolidation (more virtual machines running on fewer physical machines) means that if a single physical server fails, you have a much wider impact. When virtualization becomes your enemy, technology, such as backup, becomes your best friend.

So, as I note at the close of the prior post, if virtualization can become your enemy in this situation, and backup is your friend, how do you make sure that you can rely on your friend? The key attributes you're looking for in your "friend" (i.e., backup) here are flexibility and heterogeneity.

What do I mean by flexibility and heterogeneity? What always concerns me in backup is how flexible a solution is. For example, I've heard passionate arguments about whether HOS (Host Operating System) or GOS (Guest Operating System) backup is superior. Of course, if you're Veeam or vRanger you're going to argue HOS is superior because that's all you support; if you're AppAssure or any other Windows-only vendor you're going to argue that GOS is better because that's all you've got. If all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.

The truth is that the best solution often depends on the specifics of the customer's environment. Typically HOS-level backup works wonderfully; however, GOS-level backup lets you protect VM-attached NASs, physical RDMs, granular inclusion/exclusion of data, granular replication, protection of free (unlicensed) VMware ESXi (VMware purposely doesn't allow HOS-level protection of free ESXi), and the like. There can be performance differences between the two as well - however, beware of sweeping performance or overhead claims by vendors that don't support both.

Another major reason I like flexibility and heterogeneity is that I've run into situations where there are defects in HOS-level API sets that can be solved with GOS-level APIs, or vice versa. This is relatively rare - but I've found that when it comes to data protection, paranoia is a healthy attitude. How about you? Have any thoughts on HOS- versus GOS-level backup or flexibility and heterogeneity in general?

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