Customizing your network

Open networking is based on open standards, interoperability, and open source software such as Linux. One of the things that has made Linux so ubiquitous is the unparalleled control it offers to users in terms of customization and building intelligence into the network. Much of this advantage comes in the form of the automation and orchestration possible with Linux-based networking.

First adopted by hobbyists, widespread use of Linux in production environments only started to take off in the mid-1990s in the supercomputing field, where organizations such as NASA started to replace their overly expensive hardware with clusters of inexpensive commodity computers running Linux. Today, Linux systems are used throughout computing.

Linux can be found in servers, clouds, and network equipment. Linux is ubiquitous in the embedded systems space, and is the operating system upon which virtually all modern supercomputers are built. Even Microsoft (which once derided Linux as “a cancer”) now champions Linux, building its own Linux distributions for its Azure cloud networking and making it possible to run Linux on top of Windows.

Linux offers organizations numerous ways to automate devices and workloads. This includes task scheduling, scripting, automation, and policy management. Because Linux is used widely in so Continue reading

Improving Internet Trust: Ironing out the Details

We all can make some pretty rash decisions under stress. I once burned a hole through my undershirt instead of ironing my button-down shirt because I was so nervous before a presentation.

The Internet has its challenges and sometimes can seem like a scary place. In the 2019 survey, the CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust, 62% of respondents who said they distrust the Internet cited a lack of Internet security as a reason why.

When it comes to facing challenges on the Internet, everyone, from average Internet users to government officials, tends to act the same way I do before presentations – frantically and with questionable results.

In pursuit of security, some governments are making decisions that could harm the Internet as we know it. They’ve taken actions that could weaken digital security, have the potential to fracture the Internet, and some have even shut the Internet down in their country. Like burning a hole through an undershirt and having to wear a wrinkled button-down shirt to a presentation, these actions do little, and make things worse.

The survey results highlighted in our report, “The State of User Privacy and Trust Online,” tell a Continue reading

VMware Adds Load Balancer, Analytics Engine to NSX

Rackspace Targets Hybrid-Cloud Adoption With New Services

How to build a startup evaluation toolkit

In the first installment of our startup evaluation guide, we cover five essential tools you need to ensure you are heading in the right direction.

Qualcomm Links WiFi 6 to 5G in New Products

How “Fresh” is That Privacy Statement?

One of the best practices we advocate and measure in our Online Trust Audit is that privacy statements should have a date stamp visible at the top of the page. This is an issue of transparency and lets readers know when the statement was last updated. Combined with another advocated best practice – access to prior versions of the privacy statement, which unfortunately is offered by only 3% of sites – readers get a sense of what changed between versions and when those changes happened.

For the first time this year, we captured the actual date stamps of more than 1,000 privacy statements across the audited sectors, and though we made some high level comments in the Audit, we thought it would be insightful to show another layer of detail. One of the reasons we captured specific dates was the fact that many privacy statements were updated in the months prior to (or shortly after) May 25, 2018, when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in the European Union.

The graph below shows the date stamps from most to least recent (ending with those that have no date stamp) across the audited sectors. The green bars represent Continue reading

Microsoft’s Albert Greenberg, Fellow Networking Wizards Unite at Future:Net

VMware fortifies its hybrid-cloud portfolio with management, automation, AWS and Dell offerings

SAN FRANCISCO—VMware has uncorked a variety of software products and services aimed at letting customers more quickly and securely build and manage hybrid-cloud environments.More apps will be built and deployed in the next five years than in the last 40 to support workloads including analytics and connecting IoT devices, said Kip Colbert, vice president and cloud CTO for VMware, and that will require more expansive hybrid-cloud platform.RELATED: How Notre Dame is going all in with Amazon’s cloud VMware used its VMworld customer event here to expand its cloud role to Dell/EMC and broadened its role with Amazon Web Services (AWS). VMware's Cloud portfolio, its underlying hybrid-cloud platform, already supports Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud services, plus more than 60 VMware Cloud Verified partners. More than 70 million workloads run on VMware. Of these, 10 million are in the cloud, Colbert said.To read this article in full, please click here

Avi Networks — Same Team, Same Mission, New Home

Avi Networks is now part of VMware and our product is now called VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer. You can read about it here in our press release from VMworld.

But our story is far from over.

The acquisition marked VMware’s official entry into the ADC (Application Delivery Controller) space. The Avi team, which remains intact, is at the helm of delivering the world’s leading software-defined load balancing solution for VMware — both as a standalone platform for on-prem and multi-cloud environments and as an integrated VMware NSX solution.

We originally founded Avi Networks because we believed that the traditional ADC industry had failed its customers. Hardware and virtual appliances are rigid, cumbersome, and offer little automation or application insight. As enterprises re-architect applications as microservices, re-define the data center through software, and re-build infrastructure as hybrid and multi-cloud environments, ADC appliances work against the goals of modernizing enterprises.

This belief is shared by hundreds of the world’s largest companies that have decided to replace load balancing appliances with the Avi solution. VMware also believed this, which is why we are a part of the company today.

Avi re-imagined the ADC as a distributed Continue reading

NSX-T 2.5 – A New Marker on the Innovation Timeline

NSX-T has seen great success in the market for multi-platform network and security use-cases, including automation, multi-cloud adoption, and containers as customers move through the digital transformation initiative. NSX-T is the industry’s only network and security platform delivering a wide range of L2-L7 services, built from the ground up for workloads running on all types of infrastructure – virtual machines, containers, physical servers and both private and public clouds.

This year, we are hyper-focused on innovation, and in bringing transformative capabilities to market through NSX-T, which is the foundation for both our VMware NSX Data Center and NSX Cloud offerings. This release of NSX-T further strengthens our intrinsic security capabilities architected directly into networks and public and private cloud workloads that applications and data live on, reducing the attack surface. This version also keeps up the accelerated pace of innovation we are delivering on for scalability, cloud-native support, and operational simplicity which can accelerate customers’ adoption of a Virtual Cloud Network architecture.

Key Focus Areas in NSX-T 2.5

Launching NSX Intelligence – A Native, Distributed Analytics Engine

Analytics-based policy recommendation and compliance, streamlined security operations

NSX Intelligence is a distributed analytics engine that provides continuous data-center wide visibility Continue reading

Juniper SRX Cluster Failover Tuning

If you check Juniper configuration guide for SRX firewall clustering, there will be a default example of redundancy-group weight values which are fine if you have one Uplink towards outside and multiple inside interfaces on that firewall. set chassis cluster redundancy-group 0 node 0 priority 100 set chassis cluster redundancy-group 0 node 1 priority 1 set chassis cluster redundancy-group 1 node 0 priority 100 set chassis cluster redundancy-group 1 node 1 priority 1 set chassis cluster redundancy-group 1 interface-monitor ge-0/0/5 weight 255 set chassis cluster redundancy-group 1 interface-monitor ge-0/0/4 weight 255 set chassis cluster redundancy-group 1 interface-monitor ge-5/0/5 weight 255

The post Juniper SRX Cluster Failover Tuning appeared first on How Does Internet Work.

NETCONF and RESTCONF Overview

Andrea Dainese decided to describe a series of mechanisms and protocols you can use in network automation. He started with Zero-Touch Provisioning and continued with screen scraping. Next one on his list: NETCONF and RESTCONF

VMware plan elevates Kubernetes to star enterprise status

San Francisco – VMware has announced an initiative that will help make it easier for current vSphere customers to build and manage Kubernetes containers as the platform evolves.The company, at its VMworld customer event, announced VMware Tanzu which is made up of myriad new and existing VMware technologies to create a portfolio of products and services aimed at  enterprises looking to more quickly build software in Kubernetes containers.Learn how to make hybrid cloud work VMware believes that Kubernetes has emerged as the infrastructure layer to accommodate a diversity of applications. VMware says that from 2018 to 2023 – with new tools/platforms, more developers, agile methods, and lots of code reuse – 500 million new logical apps will be created serving the needs of many application types and spanning all types of environments.  To read this article in full, please click here

VMware CEO Sets Lofty Open Source Goals

Mellanox Reveals SmartNICs With 200 Gb/s Connectivity

Apstra, VMware NSX Drive Consistent Policies Across Clouds, Data Centers

Mellanox introduces SmartNICs to eliminate network load on CPUs

If you were wondering what prompted Nvidia to shell out nearly $7 billion for Mellanox Technologies, here’s your answer: The networking hardware provider has introduced a pair of processors for offloading network workloads from the CPU.ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 are cloud SmartNICs and I/O Processing Unit (IPU) solutions, respectively, designed to take the work of network processing off the CPU, freeing it to do its processing job.[ Learn more about SDN: Find out where SDN is going and learn the difference between SDN and NFV. | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters. ] The company promises up to 200Gbit/sec throughput with ConnectX and BlueField. It said the market for 25Gbit and faster Ethernet was 31% of the total market last year and will grow to 61% next year. With the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), a lot of data needs to be moved around and Ethernet needs to get a lot faster.To read this article in full, please click here

How to rename a group of files on Linux

For decades, Linux users have been renaming files with the mv command. It’s easy, and the command does just what you expect. Yet sometimes you need to rename a large group of files. When that is the case, the rename command can make the task a lot easier. It just requires a little finesse with regular expressions. [ Two-Minute Linux Tips: Learn how to master a host of Linux commands in these 2-minute video tutorials ] Unlike the mv command, rename isn’t going to allow you to simply specify the old and new names. Instead, it uses a regular expression like those you'd use with Perl. In the example below, the "s" specifies that we're substituting the second string (old) for the first, thus changing this.new to this.old.To read this article in full, please click here

AT&T CEO Donovan Departs After Paving SDN Foundation