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IDG Contributor Network: Does your network have a trade imbalance?

Network traffic, by nature, is often unbalanced. For example, a client that requests a video on demand may receive ten times more bandwidth than it sends for that service. Likewise, most web applications are very one-sided, with the bulk of the traffic being from server to client. The opposite is true for many backup applications, where the bulk of the traffic originates at the client and terminates at the server.The United States is like your network – suffering from a trade imbalance. For every packet we ship to a foreign network, we are receiving four or five in return. Just as there are barriers to trade, we apply barriers to our inbound traffic. The barrier for most of us is the actual size of our Internet service interface. Packets queue up and drop at our carrier’s equipment prior to even being seen by our equipment. If you purchase a 50Meg download speed, any packets that arrive at a faster rate (even for a sub-second of time) will be dropped without prejudice. This is a barrier, restriction and tariff on your services that limit your business. The only solution – buy more bandwidth!To read this article in full, please Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Does your network have a trade imbalance?

Network traffic, by nature, is often unbalanced. For example, a client that requests a video on demand may receive ten times more bandwidth than it sends for that service. Likewise, most web applications are very one-sided, with the bulk of the traffic being from server to client. The opposite is true for many backup applications, where the bulk of the traffic originates at the client and terminates at the server.The United States is like your network – suffering from a trade imbalance. For every packet we ship to a foreign network, we are receiving four or five in return. Just as there are barriers to trade, we apply barriers to our inbound traffic. The barrier for most of us is the actual size of our Internet service interface. Packets queue up and drop at our carrier’s equipment prior to even being seen by our equipment. If you purchase a 50Meg download speed, any packets that arrive at a faster rate (even for a sub-second of time) will be dropped without prejudice. This is a barrier, restriction and tariff on your services that limit your business. The only solution – buy more bandwidth!To read this article in full, please Continue reading

At VMworld, Get An Inside Look at a Modern Bank. Learn How Wells Fargo and Other Top Brands Reduce Risk While Fostering Innovation.

This blog was co-authored by Jared Ruckle and Jonathan Morin.

 

VMworld is one of the seminal weeks in enterprise IT. You gather with your peers to learn and discuss the challenges of the day. And what are those challenges? Three stand out:

  1. Rising consumer expectations. Your customers expect to interact with your brand on their terms. Self-service, mobility, and speed are table stakes. If you don’t deliver a responsive and engaging user experience, you’re irrelevant.
  2. Increased competition from startups and incumbents. Your competitors aren’t only your peers in the FORTUNE 500. Startups all over the world are looking to take your market share.
  3. Constantly evolving security threats from every direction. Speaking of table stakes: security. In an era where attacks can be launched for pennies – by anyone, from anywhere – you have take a different approach to InfoSec. You need to move faster. Speed and velocity aren’t just for development teams. It’s a crucial for a modern InfoSec mindset too.

 

Sound familiar? It should if you’re an IT leader. No matter where you are on your journey to get better at software, it’s always fun to learn from others. We want to highlight a few sessions Continue reading

Research: Facebook’s Edge Fabric

The Internet has changed dramatically over the last ten years; more than 70% of the traffic over the Internet is now served by ten Autonomous Systems (AS’), causing the physical topology of the Internet to be reshaped into more of a hub-and-spoke design, rather than the more familiar scale-free design (I discussed this in a post over at CircleID in the recent past, and others have discussed this as well). While this reshaping might be seen as a success in delivering video content to most Internet users by shortening the delivery route between the server and the user, the authors of the paper in review today argue this is not enough.

Brandon Schlinker, Hyojeong Kim, Timothy Cui, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Italo Cunha, James Quinn, Saif Hasan, Petr Lapukhov, and Hongyi Zeng. 2017. Engineering Egress with Edge Fabric: Steering Oceans of Content to the World. In Proceedings of the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM ’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 418-431. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3098822.3098853

Why is this not enough? The authors point to two problems in the routing protocol tying the Internet together: BGP. First, they state that BGP is not Continue reading

Microsoft, Salesforce plan to open source major enterprise software products

Microsoft and Salesforce have separately announced plans to release some key software products as open source for anyone to use in their data centers.Microsoft plans to release its Open Network Emulator (ONE), a simulator of its entire Azure network infrastructure that it uses as a way to find and troubleshoot problems before they cause network outages. The announcement was made by Victor Bahl, a distinguished scientist with Microsoft Research, on a Microsoft podcast.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft, Salesforce plan to open source major enterprise software products

Microsoft and Salesforce have separately announced plans to release some key software products as open source for anyone to use in their data centers.Microsoft plans to release its Open Network Emulator (ONE), a simulator of its entire Azure network infrastructure that it uses as a way to find and troubleshoot problems before they cause network outages. The announcement was made by Victor Bahl, a distinguished scientist with Microsoft Research, on a Microsoft podcast.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft, Salesforce plan to open source major enterprise software products

Microsoft and Salesforce have separately announced plans to release some key software products as open source for anyone to use in their data centers.Microsoft plans to release its Open Network Emulator (ONE), a simulator of its entire Azure network infrastructure that it uses as a way to find and troubleshoot problems before they cause network outages. The announcement was made by Victor Bahl, a distinguished scientist with Microsoft Research, on a Microsoft podcast.To read this article in full, please click here

Announcing the Online Trust Audit & Honor Roll Methodology for 2018

The Online Trust Alliance (OTA) is an Internet Society initiative that aims to enhance online trust, user empowerment, and innovation through convening multistakeholder initiatives and developing and promoting best practices, ethical privacy practices, and data stewardship. One of OTA’s major activities is the Online Trust Audit & Honor Roll, which promotes responsible online privacy and data security practices and recognizes leaders in the public and private sectors who have embraced them. This morning, we released the methodology we’ll use for this year’s audit.

The report will analyze more than 1,000 websites on consumer protection, site security, and responsible privacy practices. Based on a composite weighted analysis, sites that score 80 percent or better overall, without failing in any one category, will be recognized in the Honor Roll.

Building largely on past criteria, this year’s updates include GDPR compliance and other security and privacy standards and practices, as well as adding a healthcare sector. From the press release:

Key changes to this year’s Audit include:

  • Consumer Protection (email authentication, domain security and anti-phishing technologies) – more granular assessment of Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) support, and increased weight for use of opportunistic Transport Layer Security (TLS), which Continue reading

Private LTE, using new spectrum, approaching ‘market readiness’

Deploying private internet of things LTE networks using open-access, about-to-be-released, shared spectrum is getting closer to the starting gate, according to the CBRS Alliance, which has just announced the inception of eight global test labs for its OnGo equipment certifications. Enterprises will be able to use their own, in-building, dedicated equipment for the cellular-like systems on new frequencies.As a sign “of market readiness, OnGo access points from several member companies have already started the testing process,” CBRS Alliance says in the release on its website. OnGo is CBRS Alliance’s moniker for the mobile broadband-like CBRS LTE shared-spectrum equipment.To read this article in full, please click here

AfPIF 2018 Day Two: Connecting Cape Town to Cairo

Africa’s dream of Cape Town to Cairo fiber connectivity has moved closer, with Liquid Telecom announcing that it has made considerable progress is signing agreements with regulatory authorities and partners within the route.

Liquid Telecom has an ambitious plan of reducing latencies in connectivity between Cape Town and Cairo. Currently, traffic is routed through Europe, with latencies of 209ms, and it will be reduced to 97ms.

In his keynote speech at the Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF), Ben Roberts, Liquid CTO, said that the project will be implemented through existing Liquid infrastructure within different countries, partnership with existing infrastructure providers, and regulators. The project is expected to be done by 2020 and to eventually connect East and West Africa.

Liquid is expecting the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement, signed and ratified recently, to drive city-to-city interconnectivity, as more countries look for ways to trade with each other and eventually exchange Internet traffic. The goal to increase intra-Africa broadband traffic.

Roberts projects the infrastructure currently being set up will be highly used by the youth, who have grown up online – through education, social media, and gaming applications. The Internet of Things is expected to grow; currently most Continue reading

Analysts: SD-WAN 5-year annual growth rate tops 40%

Whether users are looking to stabilize cloud-connected resources, better manage remote networks or simply upgrade a timeworn wide area environment, software-defined-WAN (SD-WAN) technologies are what’s on the purchasing menu.The proof lies in the fact that this segment of the networking market will hit $4.5 billion and grow at a 40.4% compound annual growth rate from 2017 to 2022. In 2017 alone, SD-WAN infrastructure revenues increased 83.3% in 2017 to reach $833 million, according to IDC's recent SD-WAN Infrastructure Forecast.  [ Click here to find out more about SD-WAN and why you’ll use it one day and learn about WANs and where they’re headed. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] A related report from researchers at the Dell’Oro Group predicts revenue from SD-WAN software components, including controller and virtual network functions, will grow almost twice as fast as the hardware components.  Over the next five years, SD-WAN software revenue will grow at a 41% compounded annual growth rate, compared to 21% for hardware.To read this article in full, please click here