A Brief DNS HistoryDNS is the internet’s backbone, the ‘network before the network’. Originally designed to solve the problem of knowing how to route email between disparate internet hosts, DNS is now a 35-year old connection protocolat the heart of every network. However, there are inherent shortcomings. First, DNS is naïve – built for an internet without trust requirements as its designers could not have foreseen today’s threats. DNS was built to simply answer questions to establish a connection, and it’s good at that – but that also leaves it susceptible. For example, the support for recursive DNS requests, which query other servers repeatedly, are vulnerable to fake requests from a spoofed IP address leading to Amplifier attacks. DNS caches can be poisoned by viruses, causing domain lookups to go to the wrong IP address. And yet, DNS is an integral part of every email, every web access, and every internet transaction.To read this article in full, please click here
A new report released by a Georgia Tech-based working group said that the future of smart city technology will be contingent on businesses and city governments understanding the finer points of IoT technology and the way it affects business models and the lives of citizens. The report analyzes, among other things, the risks and potential rewards of various types of public IoT, from an ethical, technological and practical perspective.One key point researchers made is that IoT deployed in public spaces – in collaboration between city governments, private enterprise and citizens themselves – has a diverse group of stakeholders to answer to. Citizens require transparency and rigorous security and privacy protections, in order to be assured that they can use the technology safely and have a clear understanding of the way their information can be used by the system.To read this article in full, please click here
As IoT movement pervades every facet of our lives, the pace of innovation in this field continues to grow. We are seeing novel uses of this technology that are very cool – we are also seeing a lot of implementations that are downright silly! However, most if not all, of these are very impactful. As we have seen in the past with agriculture or healthcare, IoT is moving fast and is here to stay. However, this being a classic case of trying to run before we’ve learned how to walk, IoT device developers often leave out the core component of any connected service in today’s world – security.To read this article in full, please click here
Ciena
Byline: Helen XenosSenior Director, Portfolio Marketing
There is a new term that is increasingly cropping up in networking conversations: densification. Ciena’s Helen Xenos explains what this is and how it is elevating the end user experience.The term “network densification” is being used more often in relation to wireless network deployments, and more recently, “fiber densification” has become a hot a topic of discussion. So, what exactly is densification? To read this article in full, please click here
The rm command easily makes files disappear from our file listings, but what does it actually do and how can we ensure that files are unlikely to be recoverable?A little background
To understand what happens when you remove a file from a Linux system with rm, first think about inodes -- those intriguing data structures that keep track of all of a file's attributes -- often called "metadata" -- that describe the file. This includes its name, its owner and group, what permissions have been established and where the file's contents can be found on the disk.Next, think about Linux directories. While they take the appearance and character of folders (i.e., merely containers for holding files) they are actually files themselves -- files that include no more than the names and inode numbers of the files they "contain". So, what we get is a convenient way to think about directories and files in the same way you might think about the folders and paperwork in your file cabinets (if any of you still have one of those).To read this article in full, please click here
The fifth floor of the cafeteria at Cato’s Israeli office transformed last Thursday morning into a celebration of innovation, coding, and food. Our 2018 Hackathon was kicking off with a sumptuous breakfast buffet decorating the tables, and flags of the 10 project teams dotting the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto southern Tel Aviv.Hackathons are usually meant for folks who know something about, well, hacking code. But the dynamic duo who conceived and ran the event – Eyal, our director of product management, and Jordana, Cato’s human resources manager – poked, prodded, and dare I say implored, every employee to join the festivities – and I do mean everyone. The call to sign up for Cato’s Hackathon wasn’t just limited those who could program in C but even employees who could spell with a C – all were encouraged to sign up. Thankfully singing in C wasn't a requirement.To read this article in full, please click here
HPE and Rackspace are building on their alliance from last November, when they first introduced an OpenStack-based pay-per-use system designed to compete with public cloud providers.The two now offer pay as you go to Rackspace’s VMware and Kubernetes private cloud services. Rackspace launched its Kubernetes private cloud managed service just last month. The initial pay-as-you-go system was for standard server-side apps. This new feature adds Kubernetes container management as an option.Rackspace has deployed HPE’s new GreenLake Flex Capacity service to provide the pay-as-you-go pricing model. GreenLake is one of many programs by enterprise hardware vendors to provide on-demand pricing to companies looking to rein in data center costs.To read this article in full, please click here
Today’s networking challenges Network operators know it all too well: Streaming video, cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the evolution to 5G are putting massive pressure on today’s networks, requiring capacity increases by orders of magnitude and the ability to respond to even greater unpredictability in traffic patterns.The optical network sits at the heart of communications, interconnecting people, data centers, and an increasing number of devices across any distance, from across the street to across the ocean. Yet, for all the critical functions and agility they need to provide to meet today’s web-scale demands, most networks are weighed down with manual processes and hardware inflexibility.To read this article in full, please click here
I assume that by now you’ve heard the news that Intel CEO Brian Krzanich has stepped down for reportedly violating the company's strict policy against having relationships with employees. As CFO Bob Swan takes the reigns, the question of who will replace Krzanich is front and center.Several analysts I’ve spoken to even before this happened said they think Intel needs to look to the outside for its next CEO. In its 50-year history, the company has had only six CEOs, all of them insiders. Intel has a reputation as a tough place to work; nobody treads water at Intel. In the volatile Silicon Valley, I found Intel was a place where people either came and went fast or hung around forever. If you are cut out for its culture, expect to be promoted up the food chain rather quickly.To read this article in full, please click here
Up until the advent of Software as a Service (SaaS), almost every business-critical application ran inside an enterprise’s own data center. The company had complete control over the performance of the application and could use technologies such as MPLS and techniques like WAN optimization to ensure that users across the enterprise always had a good experience with the application.That’s no longer the case now that SaaS has become the de facto delivery model for core business applications today. In effect, the cloud is the new data center, and the internet is the new LAN. The most business-critical network between the end user and the application is not the corporate LAN but the public internet, which itself is a big collection of networks. When the internet is what sits between the end user and the SaaS application, the company depending on that application may no longer have good performance, reliability, and control.To read this article in full, please click here
There are quite a few control sequences available on Linux systems— many I use routinely, and some I've only just recently discovered— and they can be surprisingly useful. In today's post, we're going to run through a series of them and take a look at what they do and how they might be useful.To start, unless you're brand spanking new to the command line, you are undoubtedly familiar with the ctrl-c sequence that is used to terminate a running command. In print, this same sequence might be expressed as ^c or control-c and sometimes the "c" will be capitalized, but the expression always means "hold the control key and press the key specified — with no shift key or hyphen involved.To read this article in full, please click here
A free supply of already-cooled deep-sea water is among the benefits to locating pre-packaged data centers underwater, believes Microsoft, which recently announced the successful launch of a submarine-like data center off the coast of the Orkney Islands in Scotland.The shipping-container-sized, self-contained server room, called Project Natick, submerged earlier this month on a rock shelf 117 feet below the water’s surface also has the benefit of potentially taking advantage of bargain-basement real estate near population centers — there’s no rent in open sea.“Project Natick is an out-of-the-box idea to accommodate exponential growth in demand for cloud computing infrastructure near population centers,” John Roach writes on Microsoft’s website.To read this article in full, please click here
Last month there were rumors that Qualcomm was looking to exit the data center business and abandon the Centriq processor, an ARM-based 48-core chip designed to take on Intel in the enterprise server market. The news seemed surprising, given Qualcomm had put years of work into the chip and had only just launched it a few months earlier.Now Bloomberg adds further fuel to the fire with a report that the company is preparing to lay off almost 280 employees, and most of them are in the data center group. Bloomberg got wind of the layoffs due to filings with the state governments in North Carolina and California, which require advanced notice of significant layoffs.To read this article in full, please click here
Earlier this year, fellow industry analyst Lee Doyle wrote a blog post on the software-defined branch (SD-Branch) market hitting $3 billion by 2022. Doyle defines the SD-Branch as having SD-WAN, routing, network security, and LAN/Wi-Fi functions all in one platform with integrated, centralized management. An SD-Branch can be thought of as the next step after SD-WAN, as the latter transforms the transport and the former focuses on things in the branch, such as optimizing user experience and improving security.I don’t often critique other analysts work, as their opinion is theirs and not everyone agrees. However, in this case, I don't think “all in one platform” should be a requirement. The integrated and centralized management hits the nail on the head, but the software should act as a management overlay, so even though the infrastructure isn’t a “single box,” it’s managed like it.To read this article in full, please click here
With its new GreenLake Hybrid Cloud offering, HPE's message to the enterprise is simple: Your cloud, your way.HPE is adding Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services capabilities to its GreenLake pay-per-use offerings, providing a turnkey, managed service to deploy public and on-premises clouds.[ Check out What is hybrid cloud computing and learn what you need to know about multi-cloud. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
The company debuted the new HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud service Tuesday at its Discover conference in Las Vegas, saying that it can manage enterprise workloads in public and private clouds using automation and remote services, eliminating the need for new skilled staff to oversee and manage cloud implementations.To read this article in full, please click here
Agility and speed are of paramount importance for most organizations as they try to innovate and differentiate themselves from the competition. The need for flexibility and rapid scalability is driving more and more companies into the cloud, as traditional data centers are no longer proving to be competitive, agile or robust enough.It should come as no surprise that Cisco predicts 94 percent of workloads and compute instances will be processed by cloud data centers by 2021. But deciding when to take the leap, weighing the costs and risks, and developing a successful strategy is easier said than done. Let’s take a closer look at why companies are ditching those data centers and how they can make the transition as smooth as possible.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco took a step toward improving its mobile application family by saying it intended to buy privately held mobile firm July Systems for an undisclosed price.July Systems, founded in 2001, features its flagship product, Proximity MX, that offers what Cisco calls “an enterprise-grade location platform” with features such as instant customer activation, data-driven behavioral insights, contextual rules engine and APIs.The platform works with multiple location technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Beacons or GPS to sense the user’s device with or without an app installed. Proximity MX can engage the user with SMS, E-mail or push notifications or trigger a notification to the business user or system via API, SMS or E-mail, July says. To read this article in full, please click here
Normally venture funding stories don’t get much play here, but when a company scores $250 million, for a grand total of $410 million raised, one has to wonder what all the hoopla is about. Especially given some of the spectacular flameouts we’ve seen over the years.But Cohesity isn’t vapor; it’s shipping a product that it claims helps solve a problem that has plagued enterprises forever: data siloing.Founded in 2013 and led by Nutanix co-founder Mohit Aron, Cohesity just racked up a $250 million investment led by SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund, which includes funding from Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, and Sequoia Capital. Those are some big names, to say the least.To read this article in full, please click here
The effort around data center reduction has been to draw down everything, from hardware to facilities. Rackspace has an interesting new twist, though: Put your hardware in our data centers.The company announced a new data center colocation business this week, offering space, power, and network connectivity to customers who provide their own hardware. The facilities are in 10 locations around the world.It’s not a bad idea. The servers are the cheapest expense compared to facility costs, such as the physical building, power, and cooling.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency and how Windows Server 2019 embraces hyperconverged data centers. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
'Lift and shift' to the cloud
The new business, dubbed Rackspace Colocation, is positioned as a way for enterprises to kick off their cloud journey by getting out of their self-managed data center to lower their expenses as they move to the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here
The age of sensor data is more important than how fast it takes that information to travel around Internet- and Location-of-Things environments, say some experts. Scientists are, in fact, rethinking the network because of it.“It’s not enough to transmit data quickly. That data also needs to be fresh,” says MIT in a news release.The university has been working on better ways to ensure that sensors, which distribute readings for analysis, provide the most salient stuff. It’s not easy because you can’t just send everything at the same time (an obvious solution) — there isn't enough bandwidth.To read this article in full, please click here