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Category Archives for "Networking"

Heavy Networking 463: Under The Hood Of 400G Ethernet With Cisco (Sponsored)

400G Ethernet switches will ship by the end of 2019. We get under the hood of the fastest-ever version of Ethernet to find out how it works, the challenges of building the gear, differences between QSFP-DD and OSFP optics, and more. Our guests are Ray Nering and Lane Wigley of Cisco, the sponsor for today's podcast.

The post Heavy Networking 463: Under The Hood Of 400G Ethernet With Cisco (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Conference Packing – The Little Things

It seems like conference season never really ends. Between RSA, Cisco Live, Black Hat, and VMworld, I’m always running around to something. I enjoy being able to meet new people and talk to companies at these events but I also find that a little bit of planning ahead helps immensely.

There’s always a lot of discussion from people about what to pack for a conference. There have been some great posts written about it, like this one from Bob McCouch in 2014. He definitely covers all the important stuff that people would want to know, such as comfortable shoes and a bag big enough to carry extra things just in case you come back with enough fidget spinners to sink an aircraft carrier.

However, I’ve found in recent years that the difference between just surviving a conference and really being prepared involves a few extra items I never thought I’d need to bring back when I first started doing this in 2006. Maybe it’s the Scoutmaster in me, but being prepared has gone from being a suggestion to a necessity. And here are a few of those little necessities that I have found I can’t live without.

First? Aid.

I’ve Continue reading

Xilinx closes SolarFlare purchase, promises high-performance networking

Network acceleration appears to be all the rage these days, what with Nvidia acquiring Mellanox, the advent of High Bandwidth Memory 2E targeting networking chips, and now Xilinx closing of its acquisition of low-latency network provider SolarFlare.SolarFlare makes a high-speed network interface card (NIC) using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to build SmartNICs sold under the X2 brand. These PCI Express network interface cards run network, storage, and compute acceleration, offloading that work from the CPU. SolarFlare also develops application acceleration software to fully utilize the cards.To read this article in full, please click here

Connection Restored

I was embarrassed to realize recently that it’s been well over two years since my last blog post. Life has a way of getting away from you, I suppose. But I’ve decided to try and reboot the blog, and hopefully get back to writing regularly. Let me kick things off my sharing what I’ve been up to recently.

Goodbye, DigitalOcean!

After nearly five years working at DigitalOcean, I made the difficult decision to part ways with the company. In my time there, I was fortunate to work with an amazing team, and witness the truly amazing evolution of a startup company from niche player to major cloud provider. Most of all, I’m thankful to DigitalOcean for the opportunity my role provided in extending from traditional network engineering into development and automation. I’ll miss working with my DO team, but I’m excited to see where the future will take them.

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Securing BGP on the host with the RPKI

An increasingly popular design for a data-center network is BGP on the host: each host ships with a BGP daemon to advertise the IPs it handles and receives the routes to its fellow servers. Compared to a L2-based design, it is very scalable, resilient, cross-vendor and safe to operate.1 Take a look at “L3 routing to the hypervisor with BGP” for a usage example.

Spine-leaf fabric two spine routers, six leaf routers and nine
physical hosts. All links have a BGP session established over them.
Some of the servers have a speech balloon expliciting the IP prefix
they want to handle.
BGP on the host with a spine-leaf IP fabric. A BGP session is established over each link and each host advertises its own IP prefixes.

While routing on the host eliminates the security problems related to Ethernet networks, a server may announce any IP prefix. In the above picture, two of them are announcing 2001:db8:cc::/64. This could be a legit use of anycast or a prefix hijack. BGP offers several solutions to improve this aspect and one of them is to leverage the features around the RPKI infrastructure.

Short introduction to the RPKI

On the Internet, BGP is mostly relying on trust. This contributes to various incidents due to operator errors, like the one that affected Cloudflare a few months ago, or to malicious attackers, like the hijack of Amazon Continue reading

IBM fuses its software with Red Hat’s to launch hybrid-cloud juggernaut

IBM has wasted no time aligning its own software with its newly acquired Red Hat technoloogy,saying its portfolio would be transformed to work cloud natively and augmented to run on Red Hat’s OpenShift platform.IBM in July finalized its $34 billion purchase of Red Hat and says it will use the Linux powerhouse's open-source know-how and Linux expertise to grow larger scale hybrid-cloud customer projects and to create a web of partnerships to simplify carrying them out.To read this article in full, please click here

Dynatrace Scores $544M IPO, Cloudflare to Follow Suit

Dynatrace raised $544 million in its initial public offering (IPO) today, selling 35.6 million...

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BiB 081: 128 Technology Rethinks The WAN Router

128 Technology takes an interesting approach to WAN routing. In this Brief Briefing Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray skim the surface of 128 Technology's approach, which includes stateful sessions, NAT, and encryption--but no tunneling. We also touch on use cases including SD-WAN and security. We also provide links to Networking Field Day videos that have much more detail.

BiB 081: 128 Technology Rethinks The WAN Router

128 Technology takes an interesting approach to WAN routing. In this Brief Briefing Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray skim the surface of 128 Technology's approach, which includes stateful sessions, NAT, and encryption--but no tunneling. We also touch on use cases including SD-WAN and security. We also provide links to Networking Field Day videos that have much more detail.

The post BiB 081: 128 Technology Rethinks The WAN Router appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Self-organizing micro robots may soon swarm the industrial IoT

Miniscule robots that can jump and crawl could soon be added to the industrial internet of things’ arsenal. The devices, a kind of printed circuit board with leg-like appendages, wouldn’t need wide networks to function but would self-organize and communicate efficiently, mainly with one another.Breakthrough inventions announced recently make the likelihood of these ant-like helpers a real possibility.[ Also see: What is edge computing? and How edge networking and IoT will reshape data centers ] Vibration-powered micro robots The first invention is the ability to harness vibration from ultrasound and other sources, such as piezoelectric actuators, to get micro robots to respond to commands. The piezoelectric effect is when some kinds of materials generate an electrical charge in response to mechanical stresses.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco pays $8.6M to settle security-software whistleblower lawsuit

Cisco has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle claims it sold video security software that had a vulnerability that could have opened federal, state and local government agencies to hackers.Under terms of the settlement Cisco will pay $2.6 million to the federal government and up to $6 million to 15 states, certain cities and other entities that purchased the product. The states that settled with Cisco are California, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Massachusetts and Virginia.RELATED: A conversation with a white hat hacker According to Cisco, the software, which was sold between 2008 and 2014 was created by Broadware, a company Cisco bought in 2007 for its surveillance video technology and ultimately named it Video Surveillance Manager.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco pays $8.6M to settle security-software whistleblower lawsuit

Cisco has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle claims it sold video security software that had a vulnerability that could have opened federal, state and local government agencies to hackers.Under terms of the settlement Cisco will pay $2.6 million to the federal government and up to $6 million to 15 states, certain cities and other entities that purchased the product. The states that settled with Cisco are California, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Massachusetts and Virginia.RELATED: A conversation with a white hat hacker According to Cisco, the software, which was sold between 2008 and 2014 was created by Broadware, a company Cisco bought in 2007 for its surveillance video technology and ultimately named it Video Surveillance Manager.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco Pays $8.6M in First-Ever Security Software Whistleblower Payout

It’s essentially pocket change for the vendor — Cisco CEO Chuck Robbin’s house sold for...

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IBM Packs Red Hat OpenShift Into Cloud Paks

The Cloud Paks allow IBM software to run across major public cloud providers like Amazon Web...

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Lanner and GTT Leverage uCPE to Bolster SD-WAN Performance

Both companies announced new SD-WAN capabilities leveraging universal customer premises...

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© SDxCentral, LLC. Use of this feed is limited to personal, non-commercial use and is governed by SDxCentral's Terms of Use (https://www.sdxcentral.com/legal/terms-of-service/). Publishing this feed for public or commercial use and/or misrepresentation by a third party is prohibited.

Cisco assesses the top enterprise SD-WAN technology drivers

Cisco this week celebrated the second anniversary of its purchase of SD-WAN vendor Viptela and reiterated its expectation that 2019 will see the technology change enterprise networks in major ways.In a blog outlining trends in the SD-WAN world, Anand Oswal, Cisco senior vice president, engineering, in the company’s Enterprise Networking Business described how SD-WAN technology has changed the network for one of its customers,  test and measurement systems vendor National Instruments. To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco assesses the top enterprise SD-WAN technology drivers

Cisco this week celebrated the second anniversary of its purchase of SD-WAN vendor Viptela and reiterated its expectation that 2019 will see the technology change enterprise networks in major ways.In a blog outlining trends in the SD-WAN world, Anand Oswal, Cisco senior vice president, engineering, in the company’s Enterprise Networking Business described how SD-WAN technology has changed the network for one of its customers,  test and measurement systems vendor National Instruments. To read this article in full, please click here

How to enable serverless computing in Kubernetes

In the first two articles in this series about using serverless on an open source platform, I described how to get started with serverless platforms and how to write functions in popular languages and build components using containers on Apache OpenWhisk.

Here in the third article, I’ll walk you through enabling serverless in your Kubernetes environment. Kubernetes is the most popular platform to manage serverless workloads and microservice application containers and uses a finely grained deployment model to process workloads more quickly and easily.

Keep in mind that serverless not only helps you reduce infrastructure management while utilizing a consumption model for actual service use but also provides many capabilities of what the cloud platform serves. There are many serverless or FaaS (Function as a Service) platforms, but Kuberenetes is the first-class citizen for building a serverless platform because there are more than 13 serverless or FaaS open source projects based on Kubernetes.

However, Kubernetes won’t allow you to build, serve, and manage app containers for your serverless workloads in a native way. For example, if you want to build a CI/CD pipeline on Kubernetes to build, test, and deploy cloud-native apps from source code, you need to use your Continue reading

Extend CI/CD with CR for Continuous App Resilience

This is a guest post written by Govind Rangasamy, CEO and Founder, Appranix.

The radical shift towards DevOps and the continuous everything movement have changed how organizations develop and deploy software. As the consolidation and standardization of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes and tools occur in the enterprise, a standardized DevOps model helps organizations deliver faster software functionality at a large scale. However, newer cyber threats, evolving regulatory requirements, and the need to protect brand reputation are putting tremendous pressure on IT leaders to effectively protect their customer and business-critical data.

Conceptually, DevOps pipeline approach makes a lot of sense, however, in practice, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Ops teams optimize systems for service reliability and robustness at the cost of delivering new features. The need for software reliability inherently decreases Continuous Delivery (CD) throughput. This conundrum is the biggest challenge for any organization adopting DevOps practices at a large scale today. By integrating and extending CI/CD with Continuous Resilience (CR) to provide protection against multitudes of software reliability disruptions, DevOps teams can confidently deploy new software and not affect resiliency of the systems. In other words, Continuous Resilience is the radical new enabler that gives confidence for Continue reading