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Category Archives for "Networking"

Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia: Cloudflare’s 152nd and 153rd cities

Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia: Cloudflare's 152nd and 153rd cities
Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia: Cloudflare's 152nd and 153rd cities

Virginia has a very important place in Internet history, as well as the history of Cloudflare’s network.

Northern Virginia, in the area around Ashburn VA, has for a long time been core to Internet infrastructure. In the early 1990’s, MAE-East (Metropolitan-Area-Exchange East) , an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) was established. MAE-East and West were some of the earliest IXPs. Internet Exchange Points are crucial interconnection points for ISPs and other Internet Networks to interconnect and exchange traffic. Eco-systems have grown around these through new data center offerings and new Internet platforms. Like many pieces of the Internet, MAE-East had a humble beginning, though not many humble beginnings grew to handle around 50% of Internet traffic exchange.

Cloudflare’s second Data Center, and one that still plays a critical component in our Global Network was Ashburn, Virginia. Similarly across many organizations, the Northern Virginia area has become a Data Center mecca. Many of the largest Clouds have a substantial amount of their footprint in Northern Virginia. Although MAE-East no longer exists, other Internet Exchange Points have come and grown in its place.

Cloudflare’s network has grown beyond what was traditional Interconnection points, like Ashburn/Northern VA, to a new Edge of the Continue reading

Dell EMC puts big data as a service on premises

To get up and running on a self-service, big-data analytics platform efficiently, many data-center and network managers these days would likely think about using a cloud service. But not so fast – there is some debate about whether the public cloud is the way to go for certain big-data analytics.For some big-data applications, the public cloud may be more expensive in the long run, and because of latency issues, slower than on-site private cloud solutions. In addition, having data storage reside on premises often makes sense due to regulatory and security considerations. [ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] With all this in mind, Dell EMC has teamed up with BlueData, the provider of a container-based software platform for AI and big-data workloads, to offer Ready Solutions for Big Data, a big data as a service (BDaaS) package for on-premises data centers. The offering brings together Dell EMC servers, storage, networking and services along with BlueData software, all optimized for big-data analytics. To read this article in full, please click here

Dell EMC puts big data as a service on premises

To get up and running on a self-service, big-data analytics platform efficiently, many data-center and network managers these days would likely think about using a cloud service. But not so fast – there is some debate about whether the public cloud is the way to go for certain big-data analytics.For some big-data applications, the public cloud may be more expensive in the long run, and because of latency issues, slower than on-site private cloud solutions. In addition, having data storage reside on premises often makes sense due to regulatory and security considerations. [ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] With all this in mind, Dell EMC has teamed up with BlueData, the provider of a container-based software platform for AI and big-data workloads, to offer Ready Solutions for Big Data, a big data as a service (BDaaS) package for on-premises data centers. The offering brings together Dell EMC servers, storage, networking and services along with BlueData software, all optimized for big-data analytics. To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Network engineers are from Mars, application engineers are from Venus

Application and network engineers see the world differently. Unfortunately, these differences often result in resentment, with each party keeping score. Recently, application engineers have encroached on networking in a much bigger way. Sadly, if technical history repeats itself, we will revisit many of the long-ago problems again as application engineers rediscover the wisdom held by networking engineers.There are many areas of network engineering and application engineering where there is no overlap or contention. However, the number of overlapping areas is increasing as the roles of network and application engineers expand and evolve.Application engineers will try to do anything they can with code. I’ve spoken to many network engineers who struggle to support multi-cast. When I ask them why they are using multi-cast, they nearly always say, “the application engineers chose it, because it's in the Unix Network Programming book.” The Berkley Socket programming interface permits using multi-cast. The application engineers then provide lost packet recovery techniques to deliver files and real-time media using unicast and multicast. The Berkeley Socket does not easily support VLANs. Thus VLANs have always been the sole property of the network engineer. Linux kernel network programming capabilities in recent years become much more Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Network engineers are from Mars, application engineers are from Venus

Application and network engineers see the world differently. Unfortunately, these differences often result in resentment, with each party keeping score. Recently, application engineers have encroached on networking in a much bigger way. Sadly, if technical history repeats itself, we will revisit many of the long-ago problems again as application engineers rediscover the wisdom held by networking engineers.There are many areas of network engineering and application engineering where there is no overlap or contention. However, the number of overlapping areas is increasing as the roles of network and application engineers expand and evolve.Application engineers will try to do anything they can with code. I’ve spoken to many network engineers who struggle to support multi-cast. When I ask them why they are using multi-cast, they nearly always say, “the application engineers chose it, because it's in the Unix Network Programming book.” The Berkley Socket programming interface permits using multi-cast. The application engineers then provide lost packet recovery techniques to deliver files and real-time media using unicast and multicast. The Berkeley Socket does not easily support VLANs. Thus VLANs have always been the sole property of the network engineer. Linux kernel network programming capabilities in recent years become much more Continue reading

History Of Networking – Mike Sullenberger – DMVPN

In this History of Networking episode, Mike Sullenberger joins Network Collective to talk about the history of DMVPN.
Mike Sullenberger
Guest
Russ White
Host
Eyvonne Sharp
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – Mike Sullenberger – DMVPN appeared first on Network Collective.

Alternatives to Nmap: from simple to advanced network scanning

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Nmap, the open-source network mapping tool that became the standard used by many IT professionals, but that can be a bit much if you only need to do general network maintenance and are intimidated by its command-line interface.There are alternatives – not many – that range in technical sophistication from tools with GUIs that can ease you into performing the essentials of network maintenance to more advanced software that is similar to Nmap itself.[ Also see reviews of Icinga, Observium, Nagios and Zabbix network-monitoring software.] Like Nmap, all these network tools are free.To read this article in full, please click here

Alternatives to Nmap: from simple to advanced network scanning

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Nmap, the open-source network mapping tool that became the standard used by many IT professionals, but that can be a bit much if you only need to do general network maintenance and are intimidated by its command-line interface.There are alternatives – not many – that range in technical sophistication from tools with GUIs that can ease you into performing the essentials of network maintenance to more advanced software that is similar to Nmap itself.[ Also see reviews of Icinga, Observium, Nagios and Zabbix network-monitoring software.] Like Nmap, all these network tools are free.To read this article in full, please click here

Adjusting System State with Infrastructure as Code

This is the second blog post in “thinking out loud while preparing Network Infrastructure as Code presentation for the network automation course” series. If you stumbled upon it, you might want to start here.

An anonymous commenter to my previous blog post on the topic hit the crux of the infrastructure-as-code challenge when he wrote: “It's hard to do a declarative approach with Ansible and the nice network vendor APIs.” Let’s see what he was trying to tell us.

Read more ...

IDG Contributor Network: Are you seeing what I’m seeing?

Enterprises are investing in their networks at an accelerating rate. As legacy IT on-premises infrastructure gives way to hybrid cloud and virtualized environments, and an escalating data tsunami drives data center expansions, increasing investments of time and money are raising the stakes ever higher. Unfortunately, end users’ expectations for service are growing as well, piling additional demands onto network operators and engineers who are already wrestling with network migration challenges.Yet despite the fact that the enterprise networking environment is rapidly changing, IT support teams are still using the same network performance metrics to monitor their networks and evaluate whether or not service delivery is up to par. The problem is that they’re using a one-dimensional tool to measure a subjective experience that tool was not designed to even understand, much less aid in troubleshooting.  It’s kind of like trying to tighten a screw with a hammer.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Are you seeing what I’m seeing?

Enterprises are investing in their networks at an accelerating rate. As legacy IT on-premises infrastructure gives way to hybrid cloud and virtualized environments, and an escalating data tsunami drives data center expansions, increasing investments of time and money are raising the stakes ever higher. Unfortunately, end users’ expectations for service are growing as well, piling additional demands onto network operators and engineers who are already wrestling with network migration challenges.Yet despite the fact that the enterprise networking environment is rapidly changing, IT support teams are still using the same network performance metrics to monitor their networks and evaluate whether or not service delivery is up to par. The problem is that they’re using a one-dimensional tool to measure a subjective experience that tool was not designed to even understand, much less aid in troubleshooting.  It’s kind of like trying to tighten a screw with a hammer.To read this article in full, please click here

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