Linux Magazin highlights “Innovative” Assimilation Suite

Picture of Alan Robertson from the German publication Linux Magazin

Back in November of last year, I presented at the Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMC) – and the talk went really well. Just today I found out we’ve been featured in the German publication Linux Magazin – and they said some very nice things about us in their article about the OSMC. I wrote a bit […]

What Aren’t You Monitoring?

monitoring trends from James Turnbull - image from the great folks at SlideRabbit.com

The three pillars of IT security are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Most of the press coverage is all about confidentiality – at least until we have an airline or two or three have trouble with availability ;-). Of course, availability is also a key dimension of server management with significant operational dimensions. Those of you who know me, know I have a deep expertise in availability. Unsurprisingly, in this post, I’m going to concentrate on availability – and the necessity of monitoring everything, and knowing that you’re monitoring everything.

Scalability from Doing Nothing?

Scalability is the ability to respond gracefully to increased workload. When you have enough of it, life is good. When you have trouble scaling up and your workload goes up, as it inevitably does, life becomes complicated, sometimes miserable. In this blog post I tell you why doing nothing can be the best way to scale…

Living Dangerously With Crypto In the Assimilation Project – Part 3

In this article, we talk in more detail about the Assimilation Project’s reliable UDP protocol, our decision to avoid session keys, factors influencing our initial choice of crypto libraries, and touch on key revocation. So, like before we’re looking forward to your comments on our design choices. Like before, grab your thinking cap, sit down with your crypto buddies and think hard about what we’ve done.

Announcing Assimilation version 0.1.4

We are proud to announce the latest in our series of releases of the Assimilation software which will culminate in an incredibly useful production release. This release is eminently suitable for trials in an environment where the caveats are acceptable. We have quite a few pre-built Ubuntu packages, and a few CentOS/RHEL packages – so go forth, download and subdue the galaxy!

Welcome to Assimilation Systems Limited

I’m Alan Robertson, founder of Assimilation Systems Limited – this is my first blog post about the company. Let’s start this first post with a little history of the project and the company.

I founded the Assimilation Project back in 2010, as a result of thinking about a really big supercomputer (over 2 million cores) I was working with which had a very unusual networking architecture. It was a very cool and odd computer. Along the way, I puzzled over how one could effectively monitor it in the presence of this non-traditional networking topology – without using the built-in monitoring hardware (which would be like cheating). After a while, I realized I knew how to make monitoring on normal computers scale in a way that seemed really interesting. Being a techie at heart, I was really jazzed and decided I had to implement it…