Take a Network Break! The US and British governments have accused Russian state actors of compromising routers and other network infrastructure, the United States forbids American companies from selling components to Chinese telecom firm ZTE, and Huawei rethinks its US strategy.

Cisco releases notes on its 9500 switches and UADP silicon, IBM releases a mainframe that takes the same space as a traditional 19-inch server rack, and VMware shares rise on rumors that Dell won’t reverse-merge with it.

Arista’s share price stumbles, and then recovers; Cisco ditches the Spark brand name; a Cisco security exec says we’re all screwed; and the United States is the leading source of botnet attacks in the world.

Find links to all these stories just after our sponsor message.

Sponsor: InterOptic

InterOptic offers high-performance, high-quality optics at a fraction of the cost. Find out more at InterOptic.com, and if you re attending Interop 2018 in Vegas, stop by the InterOptic booth to learn how they can help you spec the right optics for your network.

Show Links:

Russian State-Sponsored Cyber Actors Targeting Network Infrastructure Devices – US-CERT

Huawei, Failing to Crack U.S. Market, Signals a Change in Tactics – The New York Times

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Take a Network Break! Cisco puts its Tetration workload protection product into the cloud by announcing a SaaS version, and attackers target Cisco’s Smart Install feature on the IOS and IOS XE operating systems.

Juniper aims to entice service providers by integrating telemetry, AppFormix, and its NorthStar WAN SDN controller for improved remediation, HPE acquires a cloud consultancy, and Riverbed CEO and cofounder Jerry Kennelly retires.

Cradlepoint partners with Webroot for secure SD-WAN, an activist investor target MicroFocus to go private, and cryptomining attacks increasingly target the enterprise.

Last but not least, Gartner predicts explosive cloud growth, and IDC says lines of business will outspend IT departments on technology.

Sponsor: ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes gives you performance visibility from every user to every app over any network, both internal and external, so you can smoothly migrate to the cloud, transform your WAN, troubleshoot faster and deliver exceptional user experiences. Sign up for a free account at thousandeyes.com/packetpushers and choose a free ThousandEyes t-shirt.

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Cisco Tetration Now Available As A Cloud Service And Virtual Appliance – Packet Pushers

Cyber-Espionage Groups Are Increasingly Leveraging Routers in Their Attacks – Bleeping Computer

Attackers Exploit Cisco Switch Issue as Vendor Warns of Yet Continue reading

Take a Network Break! Edge computing is the new hotness for traditional IT vendors as Microsoft and HPE, via its Aruba business unit, target edge computing infrastructure and software for new growth.

Meanwhile, Intel sells embedded software developer Wind River to a private equity firm, and we review the potential financial impact to legacy networking vendors as AT&T plans a massive whitebox rollout.

HCI revenues skyrocket in 2017; Delta, Sears, and Sacks Fifth Avenue get hacked; and Panera Bread picks a security fight with the wrong person.

We’ve got links to all the stories we cover just after our sponsor messages.

Sponsor: InterOptic

InterOptic offers high-performance, high-quality optics at a fraction of the cost. Find out more at InterOptic.com, and if you re attending Interop 2018 in Vegas, stop by the InterOptic booth to learn how they can help you spec the right optics for your network.

Coffee Talk: Kentik

Stay tuned after the news for a Coffee Talk conversation with sponsor Kentik. Kentik makes a big data platform to provide actionable insight from network data. Our guest is co-founder and CEO Avi Freedman, and we talk about how to use network data for fun and packets!

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Take a Network Break! Cisco announced that it would allow third-party OSs to run on Nexus 9200 and 9300 switches, and let customers run NX-OS on other hardware. The company is also making its IOS-XR router OS available for “curated” third-party hardware.

AT&T announces a plan to deploy 60,000 whitebox routers as part of its 5G rollout, and its dNOS open network OS moves to the Linux Foundation. Juniper’s OpenContrail also joins the Linux Foundation and gets renamed Tungsten Fabric.

The P4 network programming language becomes an official project of the Open Networking Foundation, HPE buys Cape Networks for WLAN performance monitoring, Microsoft reorganizes the company, and Arista announces new 25 and 100GbE switches.

Get links with more details to all these stories after our sponsor message.

Sponsor: Couchdrop

Send files to the cloud quickly and easily with Couchdrop, a cloud-based service that uses the Secure Copy Protocol to transfer files. Couchdrop integrates with Dropbox, GoogleDrive, Amazon S3 buckets and more. Head to Couchdrop.io to get details, and get two months free with a one-year subscription.

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An Architectural Approach to Flexible Consumption for Service Providers with IOS XR – Cisco

Enabling IOS-XR on Third-Party Network Hardware Continue reading

BGP is good for keeping the Internet connected. And that s about it. BGP isn t good at optimizing the path between two endpoints, as it s more about optimizing service provider costs than traffic performance.

Therefore, there are products on the market that optimize your traffic flows across the Internet despite default BGP behavior. Some of these products actually manipulate BGP, which will be the focus of our sponsored show today. Our sponsor Expereo is here to discuss their XCA and XCA Edge products with us.

Joining us from Expereo are Francois Devienne, VP of Networks; and Sander Barens, VP of Commercial Development.

Expereo is a managed service provider. We discuss how the company optimizes BGP to get the best out of the Internet, and explore Expereo’s XCA and XCA Edge products.

Show Links:

Expereo

Expereo XCA Edge

Take a Network Break! In this week’s show, Dell EMC rolls out new branch hardware to run VNFs, the Sonic switch OS gets its turn in the open networking spotlight, and Innovium announces sampling of its Teralynx programmable ASIC.

The IEEE ratifies a standard for 25Gbps over single-mode fiber, Dropbox embraces security researchers, and Micro Focus suffers a massive drop in value.

Cryptojacking roars onto the threat scene, and Orbitz reports that attackers may have breached a legacy site, exposing up to 880,000 customers.

Get links to all these stories after our sponsor message.

Sponsor: ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes gives you performance visibility from every user to every app over any network, both internal and external, so you can migrate to the cloud, transform your WAN, troubleshoot faster and deliver exceptional user experiences. Sign up for a free account at thousandeyes.com/packetpushers and choose a free ThousandEyes t-shirt!

Show Links:

Dell EMC Takes on Cisco, Launches Open uCPE for SD-WAN – SDX Central

Dell EMC Takes Open Networking to the Edge for Next-Generation Access – Dell EMC

Innovium announces OCP SAI and open-source SONiC solution to accelerate TERALYNX market adoption – Innovium

Apstra Demonstrates Open Networking SONiC over Mellanox at OCP Summit Continue reading

On today’s show we explore whitebox switching in the enterprise with our sponsor Pica8.

Pica8 makes a network OS for data centers and enterprises, which customers can run on a variety of third-party switches including Dell, HPE, and Edgecore.

Our guests are  James Liao, CEO and co-founder of Pica8; and Sharad Ahlawat, VP of Technology.

We get details about Pica8’s switch OS, called PicOS, and find out how Pica8 differentiates itself from other OSs.

We also talk about how SDN has to change to be useful, such as targeting specific use cases. We look at the state of the whitebox market, the role of open source, and why Pica8 is shifting its focus to enterprise customers.

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Pica8.com

Pica8 on Twitter

Pica8 on LinkedIn

Pica8 on Facebook