You simply can’t take advantage of all that SD-WAN has to offer without giving branch offices local Internet access and you can’t give them local Internet access without securing them. SD-WAN for all its strengths does not provide robust edge security. Yes, data is encrypted in transit. And, yes, some SD-WAN appliances come with basic stateful firewalling capabilities. But with attacks coming at layer-7, branches require a next-generation firewall (NGFW) and updated IPS/IDS capabilities to protect locations — not a basic firewall. For all intents and purposes, branch SD-WAN needs layer-7 security, which is why you see so many SD-WAN vendors striking partnerships with security vendors or some building security into their appliances.To read this article in full, please click here
Cavium this week announced general availability of ThunderX2, its second-generation 64-bit, ARM-based system-on-a-chip (SoC) line of server processors. And it’s coming with some big-name endorsements.The first generation, ThunderX, had a more muted launch two years ago. No one wanted to get on Intel’s bad side, it seemed, and Intel was viewing ARM, not AMD, as its biggest threat. Fast forward two years, and Cavium has endorsements from HPE, Cray, and Atos, as well as HPC users such as Sandia National Labs and the U.K.’s GW4 Isambard project.Cavium announced ThunderX2 almost two years ago. It’s not an upgrade to ThunderX; it’s a whole new chip. It acquired a line of ARM server processors code-named Vulcan from Broadcom after the company was acquired by Avago and decided to shed its data center effort.To read this article in full, please click here
Scott Pruitt, EPA Administrator’s assertion that “global warming might be beneficial” may be reassuring to some, but others living close to the coast prefer the safety of an early warning when they might be flooded from rising sea levels.Predicting floods from storm surges, rain, hurricanes and tides over miles of coastline is hard. How do your monitor water levels over such a broad area? How can floods be predicted with these data streams? How can thousands of people be alerted? The Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) is pioneering an innovative approach that combines IoT sensors, advanced mapping and Alexa.To read this article in full, please click here
There are many compelling reasons to migrate applications and workloads to the cloud, from scalability to easy maintenance, but moving data is never without risk. When IT systems or applications go down it can prove incredibly costly for businesses. A single hour of downtime costs over $100,000 according to 98% of organizations surveyed by ITIC.Mistakes are easy to make in the rush to compete. There’s a lot that can go wrong, particularly if you don’t plan properly.“Through 2022, at least 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault,” says Jay Heiser, research vice president at Gartner.To read this article in full, please click here
The networking industry is being disrupted. There is an explosion in network demand, driven by ultra-mobile users who want the ability to access the cloud and consume high-definition content, video, and applications when and where they choose. This network disruption will only continue in the future with the adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G—both of which require billions of devices to interact with machines, users, and the cloud to drive consumer and business interactions.As a result, network providers must prepare for an industry transformation that will create new opportunities. We sat down with Ciena’s Rebecca Prudhomme, VP of Portfolio Marketing, to address what network providers need to do to seize these opportunities. To read this article in full, please click here
For more than 25 years structured cabling systems for voice and data applications have been standardized as 4-pair, balanced UTP, ScTP or Sc/FTP cable that now supports up to 40 Gb/s on 30 meters of category 8. The driving force has been requirements for ever more bandwidth to meet a variety of customer needs.Suddenly, interest in building automation, “smart” systems and the “Internet of Things” (IoT) is changing the scope of the next generation of cabling systems. Sensors for lighting, HVAC, occupancy, access control and other smart systems require very little bandwidth compared to typical data applications. A sensor transmits just a few bytes of data when polled by a controller or triggered by an external event. To read this article in full, please click here
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Getting grounded in IoT networking and security
The internet of things already consists of nearly triple the number of devices as there are people in the world, and as more and more of these devices creep into enterprise networks it’s important to understand their requirements and how they differ from other IT gear.To read this article in full, please click here
Over the years, we have embraced new technologies to find improved ways to build systems. As a result, today's infrastructures have undergone significant evolution. To keep pace with the arrival of new technologies, legacy is often combined with the new, but they do not always mesh well. Such fusion between ultra-modern and conventional has created drag in the overall solution, thereby, spawning tension between past and future in how things are secured.The multi-tenant shared infrastructure of the cloud, container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, and new architectures like microservices and serverless, while technically remarkable, increase complexity. Complexity is the number one enemy of security. Therefore, to be effectively aligned with adoption of these technologies, a new approach to security is required that does not depend on shifting infrastructure as the control point.To read this article in full, please click here
The Linux kernel is modular — composed of modules that work together but are largely independent of each other. New functionality can be added when a kernel module is loaded, but there are times when you might need to block functionality because modules interfere with each other or leave a system vulnerable. When that is the case, you can restrict what modules the kernel is able to use by blacklisting the troublemakers. This blocks them from being loaded.Listing Kernel modules
You can list kernel modules with the lsmod command. For a taste of what you’re likely to see, the lsmod command below shows us the top of the lsmod command output on a sample system.To read this article in full, please click here
Research conducted by market research firm IHS Markit found that 74 percent of firms surveyed had SD-WAN lab trials in 2017, and many of them plan to move into production this year.The report, titled “The WAN Strategies North America” (pdf, registration required), found security is the number one network concern by a wide margin and the top reason to invest in new infrastructure, as companies must fend off the constant threat of cyber attacks.There are other reasons, as well, such as traffic growth, company expansion, adoption of the Internet of things (IoT), the need for greater control over the WAN, and the need to put WAN costs on a sustainable path.To read this article in full, please click here
HPE is rolling out the next generation of its Nimble Storage platform, overhauled to better meet the ever-increasing performance demands on data-center workloads, including real-time web analytics, business intelligence, and mission-critical enterprise resource applications.The new HPE Nimble Storage All Flash arrays as well as Nimble Adaptive Flash arrays for hybrid implementations (mixing solid state drives and hard disk drives, for example), are generally available from May 7 and have both been engineered to support NVMe (non-volatile memory express), an extremely fast communications protocol and controller designed to move data to and from SSDs via the PCIe bus standard. NVMe SSDs are expected to offer two orders of magnitude speed improvement over prior SSDs.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco this week took big steps toward helping customers deploy, monitor and manage on-premises and public-cloud production-ready Kubernetes-based container applications.Kubernetes, originally designed by Google, is an open-source-based system for developing and orchestrating containerized applications. Containers can be deployed across multiple server hosts and Kubernetes orchestration lets customers build application services that span multiple containers, schedule those containers across a cluster, scale those containers and manage the container health. [ 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. ]
Because the technology is still relatively new, Cisco says organizations are still challenged to efficiently and confidently utilize Kubernetes as they modernize legacy applications and develop new cloud applications.To read this article in full, please click here
With any new network monitoring and management software, the first step is to assess your existing inventory. Do this by allowing the software to discover all your devices. Your new software may alert you to things you didn’t know you had. Network monitoring and management tooling may be smart enough to propose ways to improve your system: it might suggest new configurations or highlight bottlenecks. Your last step is to let the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps flow and inform you about day-to-day network usage.One blessing of the OSI model is that it has enabled innovation at the individual layers. These layers are abstracted from one another, which prevents accidentally injecting dependencies into other layers. The curse of the OSI model is that it has socially separated the people who work at the individual layers from one another—someone working at one layer may never think of someone else working at a different layer. It’s a recurring problem in network monitoring and management, in general.To read this article in full, please click here
A job listing on Intel’s official webpage for a senior CPU micro-architect and designer to build a revolutionary microprocessor core has fueled speculation that the company is finally going to redesign its Core-branded CPU architecture after more than 12 years.Intel introduced the Core architecture in 2006, and that was an iteration of the P6 microarchitecture first introduced with the Pentium Pro in 1995. So, in some ways, Intel in 2018 is running on a 1995 design. Even though its tick/tock model called for a new microarchitecture every other year, the new architecture was, in fact, just a tweak of the old one and not a clean sheet design.The job is based in the Intel's Hillsboro, Oregon, facility, where all of the major development work is done. It initially said “join the Ocean Cove team to deliver Intel’s next-generation core design in Hillsboro, Oregon.” That entry has since been removed from the posting.To read this article in full, please click here
Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference, grabs fewer headlines than it used to in ages past – the reveal of Google Glass was one for the record books, even the biggest Google detractor would have to admit. But Google's still planning to make some waves this year, particularly with what seems likely to be a full roll-out of Android Things 1.0, the variant Android OS designed for IoT.The idea behind Things is to provide a unified, one-size-fits-all software option for the developers of constrained devices like smart displays, kiosks and digital signage, among others. Device makers won’t be allowed to modify parts of Android Things’ code, specifically the parts that ensure Google can flash updates to all devices running the software at any time.To read this article in full, please click here
A startup funded by Cisco and featuring some big-name talent has come out of stealth mode with the promise of unifying data stored across multiple distributed data centers.RStor is led by Giovanni Coglitore, the former head of the hardware team at Facebook and before that CTO at Rackspace. The company also features C-level talent who were veterans of EMC’s technology venture capital arm, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, VMware, Dropbox, Yahoo, and Samsung.[ 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. ]
Bouyed by $45 million in venture capital money from Cisco, the company has announced RStor, a “hyper-distributed multicloud platform” that enables organizations to aggregate and automate compute resources from private data centers, public cloud providers, and trusted supercomputing centers across its networking fabric.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprise networks certainly aren’t new. They’ve been around for decades and have historically been considered a tactical resource or even a commodity that most business leaders didn’t give a second thought to or really even understand.It’s my belief, though, that the network should be considered a strategic resource that can create competitive differentiation. In fact, for as long as I’ve been analyst, it’s been my thesis that compute changes have continually driven network evolution and have made it more and more important.The network is now a strategic business asset
As the industry has gone from mainframes to minicomputers to client-server to the cloud era, a couple of things have happened. The first is that the cost of computing has continued to fall through the floor. When I started my career, just a few megabytes of storage could cost thousands of dollars. Today, I can buy terabytes of cloud-based storage for just a few dollars per month.To read this article in full, please click here
Open source network-monitoring tools continue to gain in popularity, and Observium came up on our radar as an enterprise-grade offering. Deployed worldwide by large organizations like eBay, PayPal, Twitter and the US Department of Energy, Observium is capable of handling tens of thousands of devices. The client list is impressive, but our test reveals what’s really under the hood.Observium runs on Linux but can monitor Windows and many other device types. The vendor recommends running Observium on Ubuntu/Debian, but it will also work on distros such as Red Hat/CentOS.[ Don’t miss customer reviews of top remote access tools and see the most powerful IoT companies . | Get daily insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
Since Apache and MySQL are prerequisites for Observium, your server needs to meet the hardware requirements to run them. In our test, a quad-core processor with 2GB of RAM and adequate storage provided enough horsepower to run our medium-size test environment.To read this article in full, please click here
Rackspace’s latest project is called Private Cloud Everywhere and is a collaboration with VMware to offer what it calls Private Cloud as a Service (PCaaS), making on-demand provisioning of virtualized servers available at most colocation facilities and data centers.PCaaS basically means provisioning data center hardware the same way you would on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, but instead of using the cloud providers, you use your own hardware, use Rackspace data centers, or set it up in a third-party colocation facility.Because customers have the option of deploying a private cloud wherever they want physically, it can help with data sovereignty requirements, such as rules in Europe that restrict data inside national borders.To read this article in full, please click here
If the numbers weren’t so clear, I’m not sure I’d have believed it was possible. After all, an enormous business that earned $17.46 billion in 2017 and grew approximately 45 percent is bound to slow down, right? Simply maintaining that insane level of growth would be virtually impossible, right?But somehow, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is actually boosting its growth. After expanding by 42 percent in the third quarter of 2017, AWS increased that number to 45 percent in the fourth quarter … and then did it again, growing 49 percent in the first quarter of calendar 2018.To read this article in full, please click here