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Productivity

Our Own Private Cloud

Posted On December 12, 2019 at 2:46 pm by Web Admin / Comments Off on Our Own Private Cloud

There are many different organizations moving their infrastructure and application to different cloud vendor. Once the platform is being built on 1 cloud vendor, it is difficult to move to another environment. In recent years, many business owners found that the cost on using cloud platform is more expensive than hosting their own infrastructure with the price increment but also the expensive database / big data storage charged by cloud vendors by the growing data volume. In order to maintain the scalability and flexibility, it is possible to host a private cloud environment free from "vendor lock-in". Moreover, it is very important to apply their own security policy easily at the private cloud and with serious security concerns on the public cloud or any other cloud services connecting to the Internet. This project is not only preparing our own private cloud environment for different applications but also a proof-of-concept for a data science consulting company. For building the platform, there are a number of physical servers leading different roles including control, compute, block storage and object storage nodes. Let’s see the architecture diagram as below.

Figure 1: Open Stack – Architecture for the Private Cloud in Archsolution Limited For hardware, they are basically listed below:

	Node	No of nodes	Configuration
1	Control	1	1Intel Xeon 2.2Ghz 10C20T, 64G Ram, 2 256G SSD
2	Compute	2	1Intel Xeon 2.2Ghz 10C20T, 256G Ram, 2 512G SSD
3	Block Storage	1	1Intel Xeon 2.2Ghz 10C20T, 32G Ram, 2 128G SSD 4* 1Tb SSD
4	Object Storage	2	1Intel Xeon 2.2Ghz 10C20T, 32G Ram, 2 128G SSD 6* 1Tb SSD

We are using our stock of Supermicro and ASRock mainboards with Team-group SSD. For system memory, we are using ECC registered memory with Mircon chipset. Also, the raid cards are all LSI (Broadcom) 9200-8i and 9200-16i with both battery module and the hardware key for the SATA SSD drives. We don’t take SAS disk drive due to the cost concerns. You can contact us to order any of these items. However, the SATA SSD is suggested to use either top-end models of Intel or Crucial for production environment. If you are going to invest SAS SSD, it is recommended to take Seagate Nytro series with many different choices for the disk size. This is the first time for all machine running on top of SSD storage. Also, this successful example is being replicated to a Data Science consulting company. We are helping them to deploy the solution at their lab and provide training to support their daily operations.

Figure 2: Open Stack architecture – for a data science consulting company The data science consulting company is aimed to build their own private cloud with open source technology for research and training purposes. There are some vital R&D projects like IoT and AI running in this platform. If it is required to have HADR, it is just needed to duplicate 1 set to another data center with the synchronization to maintain the information stored at near real-time basis. For the management of Open Stack cloud, we use chef and compass to maintain the daily operation for the private cloud. With the continuous development of Open Stack framework and improvement in different Linux distro, Open Stack is now a reliable and scalable platform without any software investment like VMWare / Citrix / Microsoft, etc. Thus, this is a promising solution for enterprise with HADR features and live deployment of VMs. All-in-all, the private cloud solution should be a good answer for the public cloud security concerns and also the flexibility & scalability within a corporate environment.

Information Security

Open Source Firewall Real Examples

Posted On November 25, 2019 at 12:21 pm by Web Admin / Comments Off on Open Source Firewall Real Examples

There are many people arguing that it is only possible to go for Enterprise firewall. However, there are non-profit making organization or small businesses not able to afford top-end products like Checkpoint, WatchGuard, etc. Most of the open source firewall operating systems are developed for more than 1 decade and using by millions of individual and organization. Our professional service team is delivering both Open Source and Enterprise firewall or UTM gateway solutions. In this article, we would like to share some of the real applications of Open Source firewall with happy users for at least 3 years. First of all, we would like to introduce a case for a primary school with around 100 devices connecting to the network and the internet. This catholic school is not able to afford an Enterprise class UTM gateway and consequent annual maintenance fee. They are using the IPCOP as a static firewall with additional add-ins to protect their web, email and even student database server. Their solution was deployed in 2014 and there is no single case of failure by virus, malware and ransomware. (Remarks: they are using an Enterprise Anti-virus endpoint in education discount together with the IPCOP firewall)

Another case is the computer lab owned by a Data Science consulting company – Smart Data Institute Limited located in Hong Kong. They are using 2 nodes installed OPNSense as a cluster in front of their own private cloud and their workstations in the lab. However, Sensei is a plugin for firewalls which complement them with features like Application Filtering, Advanced Network Visibility and Cloud Application Control. (Note: their production network is using another Enterprise firewall – contact us for details) Apart from IPCop and OPNsense, there are still many different open source firewall solutions available in the market. pfSense and OPNsense are those options able to meet Enterprise class demand. IPfire is the one easiest to use and maintain, which is fit for SOHO and small organization without dedicated internal IT resources. However, there is no perfect security solutions to protect everything. In order to maintain better Information Security, it is important to apply corresponding security policies, such as Computer Security Policy, Data Retention Policy, etc. It is important to review the related policies and the latest technologies in order to balance the productivity and security. Should you have any question, you can contact us to arrange a free consultation session for seeking the tailored solution for your organization.

Productivity

Saving Money by Freeware (Small Business Tips)

Posted On October 12, 2019 at 7:51 pm by Web Admin / Comments Off on Saving Money by Freeware (Small Business Tips)

For software costs, it is really a burden for small business. There are a number of alternatives to buying expensive big brand software. We would like to share our software cost saving experiences as a small business in Hong Kong. It is important to maintain the productivity but with lower costs. Operating Systems Linux In many years ago, Linux is really difficult to use and not possible for general users to touch it directly. Currently, Linux is being well developed over the last decade with more matured graphical interface from legacy X Windows to GNOME and KDE. For general public, the user experience is now similar to take a Windows or Mac machine. It would take 1 / 2 months to learn but it is not rocket science. My suggestion is taking open source and free-of-charge Linux like Ubuntu as desktop Operating System (OS). For server, there are lots of Linux distro available and depending on the usage. CentOS is one of my favorite for website, database clusters ,etc. Word Processing and Spreadsheet OpenOffice and LibreOffice Microsoft Office is still dominating the market selling at the price of more than US$200 for each business user. Open Office was being chosen in my company for cost-cutting about 2 years ago. Recently, we have moved another similar open source with better user-interface – LibreOffice. LibreOffice is now a very hot office suite available in Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Productivity Photo Editing Tools GIMP is the most complete photo editing open source tool. For beginners, it is quite difficult but it provides functions as powerful as Adobe Photoshop. I am also using this tool for my website. Project Management Tool Nowadays, project management becomes more important across different industry. A free project management tool could help the project managers to assign and manage tasks without buying the expensive Microsoft Project. We are using ProjectLibre as the primary project management tool. Programming Tools There are lots of programming languages available. For the programming IDE, it is suggested to use Eclipse to do Java, C++, Ruby on Rails, etc. If you are a data scientist like me, one of the best tool is RStudio (community version) for R and Anaconda with Jupyter Notebook for Python development. Meanwhile, there are 2 great editor including Notepad++ and Atom. Diagramming and Vector Graphics Tool Visio is too extensive for most of the individuals and small businesses. My choice is yEd with its concise interface and graphics collection. ERP There are many different open source ERP and we would like to suggest simple one only – WebERP and FrontAccounting. FrontAccounting is one of most easiest and fit for small business. WebERP is suitable for small to medium size businesses with more complex operation flows. POS There is a simple web POS system Open Source POS. We are using it at our office for a small number of retail transactions. CRM There are a number of open source CRM but only basic features are available for free version. However, there are 2 of them being recommended – Zoho (free for team<5 people) and EspoCRM (basic features). Backup Tools We are using UrBackup as the primary backup solution for our own workstations. It is an open source server-client backup solution allowing backup of Windows system image and files backup with both full-backup and incremental backup available. To conclude, there are lots of freeware and open source available in the market to improve productivity. For cost saving, another alternative way is to use cloud services like IaaS, SaaS, etc. to alleviate the initial costs. However, if you would like to know more about software tools, you can reach our professional service team at the “contact us” session and raising your questions at the contact form. Samuel Sum Vice President, Archsolution Limited