(Jody Gilbert, TechRepublic) What areas should you focus on over the next year? This survey-based list highlights the 10 most sought-after IT skills.

At the end of last year, the Global Knowledge/TechRepublic 2010 Salary Survey asked, “What skill set will your company be looking to add in 2010?”. The skills listed by respondents include a mix of perennial favorites and cutting edge technologies. Here’s the complete list:

1. Project management
2. Security - It’s a never-ending game of cat and mouse for security professionals, and 2009 proved to be another fun-filled year. According to Symantec’s Security and Storage Trends to Watch report, the number of spam messages containing malware increased ninefold, to represent more than 2% of emails.
3. Network administration - Networking administration skills never lose their luster.
4. Virtualization — Cloud - With the cloud computing space now taking shape, it’s difficult for enterprises to find pros with substantial relevant experience.[...]

Read more by following the "full article" link.

(Steven Andrés, PC World) Whether your business is a big fish or a small-fry home office, you can get hacked just the same, and the stakes are higher than a few canceled credit cards. Here are a few tips to protect your users and your networks - steps that even enterprise-class security specialists may slip up on.

Steps for small businesses and enterprise-class security specialists:

1. Know Who Might Be Targeted - and How and Why
2. Don't Take the Bait
3. Use Unique Email Addresses to Keep Password Reset Emails at Bay
4. Don't click on anything in email
5. Patch Early, Patch Often
6. Don't Let Bob Stop You From Running a Secure Network
7. The P of P2P Is Personal, Not Business
8. Nail Down Your Network

Read more by following the "full article" link.

(Ellen Messmer, Network World) Is moving to virtualization  and cloud computing making network security easier or harder? When some 2,100 top IT and security managers in 27 countries were asked, the response revealed a profound lack of consensus, showing how divided attitudes are within the enterprise.

The "2010 State of Enterprise Security Survey - Global Data" report shows that about one-third believe virtualization and cloud computing make security "harder," while one-third said it was "more or less the same," and the remainder said it was "easier." [...]

The survey showed that the median annual budget for enterprise security in 2010 is $600,000, an 11% increase over 2009, with yet another 11% increase anticipated in 2011.[...]In fact, 40% of the respondents indicated their organizations were currently using applications in the cloud in some way -- yet 40% said it would be more difficult to prevent or react to data loss under their firm's cloud-computing strategy.[...]

(Scott Lowe , TechRepublic) Energy usage in the data center has become a prime target in efforts to reduce the carbon footprint or overall energy usage for organizations. There are numerous ways that you can accomplish this green goal.

Server consolidation projects are being undertaken in many organizations for a variety of reasons. These kinds of projects generally have a number of aims, including:

• Replacing older hardware with new equipment.
• Achieving better overall utilization of equipment in the data center.
• Lowering total costs related to purchasing equipment.

Consider this: Today’s multicore, multiprocessor systems are a far cry from yesterday’s single-core behemoths. Modern servers accomplish their workload goals using less power than their older counterparts, even when running at full bore. Further, consider the usage pattern: These days, migrating those old, single application servers to virtual machines running in a virtual machine on new hardware is far from uncommon. The result: A load that would have required 10, 20, and even 30 servers can now be affectively run on just two or three machines in many cases. With a ton of hypervisor solutions available out there and with many of them being free, virtualization is the quickest way to achieve server consolidation goals.

In many cases, even a one-for-one replacement of old hardware with new can reduce overall energy consumption. However, by combining the workload from so many servers onto a single unit, a massive energy savings can be realized.

Obviously, it’s not quite as simple as throwing in a new server, moving a bunch of workloads, and heading home for the weekend. In order to adequately support so many workloads on a single virtual host, significant storage space is often necessary. But even with the added power requirements of the SAN, most large server consolidation projects still realize major power savings.

(Scott Lowe, TechRepublic) With companies doing everything possible to conserve cash, conserving power has quickly become an important part of the IT portfolio. No longer is physical server sprawl an option; in terms of both hardware acquisition costs and ongoing energy and cooling costs, the “throw hardware at the problem” crowd is being replaced by people that attempt to virtualize everything and do everything possible to keep that energy bill low.

The right storage solution in the data center works directly toward the green goal, particularly when the storage solution sports the right feature set. Allow me to explain.

The disk shelves themselves
Shared storage itself in the form of a SAN can help organizations reduce their carbon footprint by using less electricity. Consider this: Historically, before the days of virtualization, organizations often purchased physical servers that were built for long-term use. As such, that initial server configuration was more than likely to be overkill for the originally intended solution. That over-engineering generally included the number of disks housed in the server. After all, even though a server was being purchased for a specific task, who knew exactly what would be required in the future?

The result: In general, physical x86-based servers were horribly underutilized, both from a storage and processing perspective. Even though the server wasn’t running at full capacity, it still required power to run all of the processors originally specified as well as the disk spindles originally included with the unit.

(Carol Sliwa, Features Writer, SearchStorage) Storage performance measurement (SPM) has always been a difficult proposition for IT organizations, and the job has become even more challenging now that virtual servers are so popular.

Take RiskMetrics Group Inc., for example. The New York City-based financial services firm has 30 VMware Inc. ESX Servers spread across six locations, including data centers in the U.S. and Switzerland. Each ESX Server typically runs 10 to 15 virtual machines (VMs).

Many of those virtual machines were formerly physical machines that ran on local disk, so they were of no concern to the storage team. Now the staff needs to not only ensure the VMs perform in the same way they would if they were physical servers, but plan for their potential exponential growth.

"The physical host is easy to analyze, and when a problem surfaces in a physical server environment, it's usually on the host or the storage," said Ed Delgado, storage architect at RiskMetrics. But virtual server environments mean the storage team can't depend only on the performance numbers on the host or the storage. That's because of the amount of other virtual machines on the same datastore.

"Has one VM gone haywire with writes and is it now throttling the other 14 VMs on that datastore? How do you know the other 14 VMs aren't doing the same thing?" wrote Delgado in an email. "On a physical host you can check the read and write MB/sec of a host and trust that number, but on VMware you basically have to add the numbers from the 15 VMs to see how you're actually performing."

(Julius Neudorfer, TechTarget) Data center energy efficiency is the hot topic of the day. IT operators are working to quantify and improve the efficiency of their data centers, and that means improving server energy efficiency as well. Of course we all want the fastest, most powerful servers for our data center. Although energy efficiency (green!) is the buzzword, it seems that historically we think about energy usage only when our power or cooling systems are maxed out and need to be upgraded.

In the rush to optimize, virtualize and consolidate in the name of making computing-related operations more effective and efficient (and, of course, green), we've heard many server manufacturers profess that their products provide the most computing power for the least energy. Only recently have server manufacturers begun to discuss or disclose the efficiency of their servers. Currently there are no real standards for overall server energy efficiency.

There are several key components that impact the total energy consumed by a typical server: 
- Power supply
- Fans
- CPU
- Memory
- Hard drives
- I/O cards and ports
- Other motherboard components - supporting chip sets

These components exist in both conventional servers and blade servers, but in the case of blade servers, some items - such as power supplies, fans and I/O ports - are shared on a common chassis, while the CPU and other related motherboard items are located on the individual blades. Depending on the design of the blade server, the hard drives can be located on either the chassis or the blades.

In addition to the components listed above, OS and virtualization software impacts the overall usable computing throughput of the hardware platform.

(Jack Wallen, TechRepublic) The iptables tool is a magnificent means of securing a Linux box. But it can be rather overwhelming. Even after you gain a solid understanding of the command structure and know what to lock down and how to lock it down, iptables can be confusing. But the nice thing about iptables is that it’s fairly universal in its protection. So having a few iptables rules to put together into a script can make this job much easier.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at 10 such commands. Some of these rules will be more server oriented, whereas some will be more desktop oriented.[...]

1: iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -syn -j DROP
This is a desktop-centric rule that will do two things: First it will allow you to actually work normally on your desktop. All network traffic going out of your machine will be allowed out, but all TCP/IP traffic coming into your machine will simply be dropped. This makes for a solid Linux desktop that does not need any incoming traffic. What if you want to allow specific networking traffic in — for example, ssh for remote management? To do this, you’ll need to add an iptables rule for the service and make sure that service rule is run before rule to drop all incoming traffic.

2: iptables -A INPUT -p tcp –syn –destination-port 22 -j ACCEPT
Let’s build on our first command. To allow traffic to reach port 22 (secure shell), you will add this line. Understand that this line will allow any incoming traffic into port 22. This is not the most secure setup alone. To make it more secure, you’ll want to limit which machines can actually connect to port 22 on the machine. Fortunately, you can do this with iptables as well. If you know the IP address of the source machine, you can add the -s SOURCE_ADDRESS option (Where SOURCE_ADDRESS is the actual address of the source machine) before the –destination-port portion of the line.

(TechTepublic Blogs) End users aren’t the only ones whose misguided actions can bring a smooth-running network to a screeching halt. IT pros make their share of mistakes, too — from sliding on DR planning to stalling on repairs to ignoring the need for logs and documentation. 

[...] Let’s take a look at some of the most common dumb things IT pros do that can mess up their networks — and how you can avoid making such mistakes yourself.

#1: Don’t have a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plan
It’s not that backing up is hard to do. The problem is that it sometimes gets lost in the shuffle, because most network administrators are overloaded already, and backups are something that seem like a waste of time and effort–until you need them. [...]

#2: Ignore warning signs
That UPS has been showing signs of giving up the ghost for weeks. Or the mail server is suddenly having to be rebooted several times per day. Users are complaining that their Web connectivity mysteriously drops for a few minutes and then comes back. But things are still working, sort of, so you put off investigating the problem until the day you come into work and network is down.