HyTrust Precludes Dooms Day for Virtualization Users

The newly introduced HyTrust Appliance Version 3.0 is reminiscent of the 1964 movie, "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." In that Cold War classic, a demented Air Force colonel, Jack D. Ripper (played by Sterling Hayden), sends a wing of B-52s to bomb a Russian ICBM complex, and refuses to share the recall code with his executive officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (one of three roles played by Peter Sellers). Skipping ahead, even though the recall code call is eventually ferreted out, the world is annihilated in a nuclear holocaust triggered by a "Dooms Day Device." Believe it or not, this is a very funny movie.

In order to avoid disasters of a less serious, but still highly important nature, HyTrust Appliance Version 3.0 employs another Air Force-inspired idea based on the "two-person rule," which HyTrust founder and president Eric Chiu describes thusly: "According to U.S. Air Force Instruction (AFI) 91-104, the two-person rule was designed to prevent the accidental or malicious launch of nuclear weapons by a single individual."

Chiu cites the relevance of the Air Force regulation by noting that HyTrust's new Secondary Approval feature mandates that designated approvers authorize high-impact operations prior to users with administrative privileges being able to execute actions that can impact the business or even bring down the entire datacenter. He also says that VMware and other virtualization platforms do not provide adequate control, "including viable methods of requiring additional levels of approval for actions that can result in negative consequences."

Other features associated with the new appliance include advancements for secure multi-tenant private clouds, labels for VMs and other virtual resources for greater policy enforcement and security, and ease of use, plus availability, performance and scalability enhancements.

Available now, HyTrust Appliance 3.0 is licensed at $750 per CPU for each ESX or ESXi host. In addition, the free, full-featured HyTrust Appliance Enterprise Edition, which supports up to three hosts, is downloadable from www.hytrust.com/freetrial.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/15/2012 at 12:48 PM