Short Take: Fix the Problem

AT&T Wraps Google Cloud Into Its NetBond for Cloud Platform

The agreement was fostered by Google’s April launch of its Partner Interconnect platform.

Worth Reading: Open Optical

Network operators are intrigued by the concept open optical systems, whereby they can assemble an optical network by piecing together parts from various vendors. They are encouraged by concepts like disaggregated transponder boxes for DCI applications, an Open ROADM MSA, and the Telecom Infra Project Voyager white box initiative. While there is undoubtedly increasing interest in the open model, the question is how far can and should this model be pushed. —Jonathan Homa @ECI

The Week in Internet News: The FBI Has Fewer Unopened Encrypted Devices Than Reported

Going dark with encryption: The U.S. FBI, for years now, has complained about its inability to access encrypted information held on the smartphones and other devices owned by criminal suspects. But the agency may have been overstating this so-called “going dark” problem, the Washington Post reported this week. A programming error at the FBI led the agency to report that it has seized about 7,800 mobile devices that it cannot open, but the actual number may be less than 2,000, the story says.

AI as Big Brother: Artificial intelligence is being used to track down criminals by combing through data faster than humans can, reports The Telegraph. The story features AI startup Senzing, an IBM spinoff. Meanwhile, the government of China is increasingly using AI to assist its Great Firewall program, says Internet of Business.

A bad year for security: This year is shaping up to be a terrible year for cybersecurity, due in part to poor Internet of Things security, reports Security Boulevard. In addition to the IoT concerns, 85 percent security executives surveyed worry their countries will experience a crucial infrastructure attack in the next five years.

Banking on blockchain and AI: Banks’ use of blockchain, AI, Continue reading

TecRacer Saves Customers Big Bucks Using ParkMyCloud’s AWS Automation Tool

One customer’s servers now run about 160 hours per month instead of 740 hours per month, saving about $18,000.

We’ve Added a CCIE Security v5 Technology Course to Our Video Library!

Check out our latest edition to the INE Library – CCIE Security v5 Technologies: IKEv1 IPsec VPN. This is the latest installment of our CCIE Security v5 technologies series, and focuses on Internet Key Exchange version 1 (IKEv1), Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) and related topics.

About this Course:

This course is taught by Piotr Kaluzny and is 2 hours and 27 minutes long. This course is part of a thirty video series covering the CCIE Security v5 Blueprint.

What You’ll Learn:

The course starts with a discussion of basic VPN concepts, followed by a detailed overview of the protocols and hands-on demonstrations. This course also serves as an introduction to more advanced VPN technologies, such as DMVPN or GETVPN.

You can view this course by visiting our streaming site or by purchasing the course at ine.com.

Copying and renaming files on Linux

Linux users have for many decades been using simple cp and mv commands to copy and rename files. These commands are some of the first that most of us learned and are used every day by possibly millions of people. But there are other techniques, handy variations, and another command for renaming files that offers some unique options.First, let’s think about why might you want to copy a file. You might need the same file in another location or you might want a copy because you’re going to edit the file and want to be sure you have a handy backup just in case you need to revert to the original file. The obvious way to do that is to use a command like “cp myfile myfile-orig”.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The evolution of storage from on-premise to cloud

Anyone that has kept up with this column knows I tend to focus on one storage architecture more than any other – the hybrid-cloud storage architecture. That’s because I truly believe in its ability to meet the challenges of today’s IT storage – ever-expanding data, multiple sites, a need for flexibility and scale, while simultaneously meeting specific performance demands. For this month’s column, I thought we would take a look at how we got to this point and see if this evolution informs where we might go in the near future.Early days – pre-NAS The very earliest business storage systems were designed for a world long-gone. One in which a business would be expected to manage maybe thousands of files. Even the largest enterprise would have a storage system to support hundreds of concurrent users, no more. These legacy systems had regularly scheduled down time for maintenance, but it was not unusual to not have access for unscheduled reasons.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The evolution of storage from on-premises to cloud

Anyone that has kept up with this column knows I tend to focus on one storage architecture more than any other – the hybrid-cloud storage architecture. That’s because I truly believe in its ability to meet the challenges of today’s IT storage – ever-expanding data, multiple sites, a need for flexibility and scale, while simultaneously meeting specific performance demands. For this month’s column, I thought we would take a look at how we got to this point and see if this evolution informs where we might go in the near future.Early days – pre-NAS The very earliest business storage systems were designed for a world long-gone. One in which a business would be expected to manage maybe thousands of files. Even the largest enterprise would have a storage system to support hundreds of concurrent users, no more. These legacy systems had regularly scheduled down time for maintenance, but it was not unusual to not have access for unscheduled reasons.To read this article in full, please click here

Microservices Management: Securing Endpoints

Building IoT-ready networks must become a priority

The Internet of Things (IoT) era has arrived, and over the next few years, billions of devices will be connected to company networks. How many? ZK Research has forecast that by 2022, there will be 80 billion connected devices. (Note: I am an employee of ZK Research.) ZK Research Given many network managers struggle running today's networks, adding orders of magnitude more devices certainly won’t make life better. Even if it seems IoT may be a few years off, it’s critical that network professionals start prepping their network now.To read this article in full, please click here

Building IoT-ready networks must become a priority

The Internet of Things (IoT) era has arrived, and over the next few years, billions of devices will be connected to company networks. How many? ZK Research has forecast that by 2022, there will be 80 billion connected devices. (Note: I am an employee of ZK Research.) ZK Research Given many network managers struggle running today's networks, adding orders of magnitude more devices certainly won’t make life better. Even if it seems IoT may be a few years off, it’s critical that network professionals start prepping their network now.To read this article in full, please click here

Upcoming Webinars: June 2018 and Beyond

Wow. Where did the spring 2018 go? It’s almost June… and time for a refreshed list of upcoming webinars:

• Christoph Jaggi will run do another free webinar – this time on Ethernet Encryptors– on June 5^th;
• I’ll run an Amazon Web Services Networking workshop in Zurich on June 13^th;
• We had to change the schedule a little bit: the last webinar before the summer break will be an overview of real-life automation wins on June 19^th.

Worth Reading: The value of edge computing

IoT and the much anticipated 5G takeover, as well as several other data-related advances, hinge on greater network efficiencies—that is, speed. Real-time processing and streamlined data pathways are vital to seeing these next-generation technologies take hold. —Bob DeSantis @Data Center Journal

Network Break 186: VPNFilter Malware Spreading; Happy GDPR Day!

Research: BBR Congestion-Based Congestion Control

Congestion control has proven to be one of the hardest problems to solve in packet based networks. The “easy” way to solve this problem is with admission control, but this “easy” solution is actually quit deceptive; creating the algrorithms and centralized control to manage admission control is much more difficult than it seems. This is why many circuit switched networks just use some form of Time Division Multiplexing (TDM), giving each device connected to the network a single “slot,” and filling empty slots with idle frames, ultimately throwing bandwidth away in the name of simpler computation of fairness.

The problem space has, however, attracted a lot of research. In this post, I’ll be looking at one such effort, a research paper published in the October 2016 edition of ACM Queue describing a system called BBR, a congestion-based congestion control system. At the heart of this system is the concept of the bottleneck link, or bottleneck in the path, which is the lowest bandwidth, highest delay, or perhaps the most congested link in the path between two hosts. The authors use the following figure to describe the current operational point of most congestion control systems, and then the optimal point of Continue reading

Worth Reading: What drives IPv6 deployment

It’s been six years since World IPv6 Launch day on the 6th June 2012. In those six years we’ve managed to place ever increasing pressure on the dwindling pools of available IPv4 addresses, but we have still been unable to complete the transition to an all-IPv6 Internet. —Geoff Huston @Potaroo

Advertising Multiple Paths in BGP (BGP-Addpath)

The post Advertising Multiple Paths in BGP (BGP-Addpath) appeared first on Noction.

High School in China Installs Facial Recognition Cameras to Monitor Students’ Attentiveness | The Epoch Times

Software Defined Teaching

On Why I’m Shifting my Career Focus to Software

For the past few months I’ve been involved in a case study project with some colleagues at Cisco where we’ve been researching what the most relevant software skills are that Cisco’s pre-sales engineers could benefit from. We’re all freaking experts at Outlook of course (that’s a joke ) but we were interested in the areas of programming, automation, orchestration, databases, analytics, and so on. The end goal of the project was to identify what those relevant skills are, have a plan to identify the current skillset in the field, do that gap analysis and then put forward recommendations on how to close the gap.

This probably sounds really boring and dry, and I don’t blame you for thinking that, but I actually chose this case study topic from a list of 8 or so. My motivation was largely selfish: I wanted to see first-hand the outcome of this project because I wanted to know how best to align my own training, study, and career in the software arena. I already believed that to stay relevant as my career moves along that software skills would be essential. It was just a question of what type of skills and in which specific areas.

Continue reading