Monitoring and Visibility for the Hybrid Cloud

Upcoming Webinars and Events: October 2018

The fast pace of webinars continues in October 2018:

• Rachel Traylor will talk about graph theory and its relevance to reliable network design on October 8^th;
• The Amazon Web Services Networking webinar will start on October 11^th. The second session is planned for October 25^th;
• On October 16^th we’ll have the third session of VMware NSX technical deep dive (unless I manage to finish on time later today… not likely).

There are no on-site events planned until early December:

• We’ll run another on-site workshop in Zurich on December 5^th . This time we’ll focus on using VXLAN and EVPN to build multi-site fabrics;
• I’ll talk about making SDN better with IPv6 on December 6^th.

You can attend all upcoming webinars with an ipSpace.net webinar subscription. Online courses and on-site events require separate registration.

AWS ABCs — EC2 Internet Connectivity

So, you've created a compute instance (ie, a virtual machine) on Amazon EC2. Next question: does the instance require access to and/or from the Internet?

Protip: just because you created the instance in the public cloud, i.e. the cloud that you get to over the Internet, it doesn't mean that your instances all need to sit on the Internet. They can have direct inbound and outbound Internet access, no Internet access, or something in between (which I'll explain).

The basic building block for networking on AWS is the VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). Within a VPC, you define your IP space, gateways, ACLs, DHCP options, and more. Gateways will be the focus of this article.

T-Mobile Preps for Sprint Merger by Hiring CenturyLink’s Sunit Patel

Patel oversaw CenturyLink’s integration with Level 3 Communications and has experience with many large acquisitions.

Reference Guide Update: Deploying NSX Data Center on an ACI Underlay

NSX Data Center is now the de facto SDN standard for the Private Cloud. Reference guides for NSX Data Center are proven to reduce complexity in managing the physical switch infrastructure. This increases the infrastructures stability and requires a minimal set of system and service configuration to bring up the fabric. Organizations utilize NSX Data Center for a diverse set of use cases including security, a diverse application framework deployment platform, and application continuity across private and hybrid clouds.  With reference designs for any underlay, NSX Data Center is fulfilling its promise to be a platform over any infrastructure. NSX Data Center provides the cornerstone for the Virtual Cloud Network.

Overview of NSX Data Center with ACI Underlay

Ever since publishing our original design guide Deploying NSX with Cisco ACI as an Underlay, there has been an avalanche of interest in building out a more simplified Cisco infrastructure with ACI as the underlay. Most of the requests are for more detail when constructing the ACI underlay. The high-level design guidance in the original NSX reference design for ACI discussed the minimum ACI constructs necessary for an NSX Data Center deployment. These ideals have not changed.  The original paper called Continue reading

Digital Realty Buys Ascenty for $1.8B, Battles Equinix for Cloud, Interconnection Deals

Digital Realty already has data centers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. This expands its data center footprint to Latin American — a region primed for growth.

The Future Is Dispensable Servers

For a server to be truly dispensable, it should be able to be shut down at will or fail without any noticeable end-user impact.

Will Operators Use Alternative Backhaul Technologies to Deliver on 5G?

WiFi, fixed access, and satellites are promising technologies that operators should consider as viable alternatives to fiber or microwave for 5G backhaul.

Intel makes a play for high-speed fiber networking for data centers

Intel is revamping its strategy around the data center by going beyond the Xeon chip and into silicon photonics transceivers. The company announced Monday at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) that samples of its silicon photonics transceivers targeting 5G wireless infrastructure and data centers are available now, with production set to start in the first quarter of 2019.The company notes that global data center IP traffic is increasing significantly. In 2016, global data center IP traffic was 6.8 zettabytes, and that will triple by 2021 because of all this data generated by humans and the Internet of Things (IoT).The choke point becomes copper wire, the standard for Ethernet connectivity. Copper wire can only effectively transmit about eight to 10 meters, said Eoin McConnell, director of marketing for the connectivity group in Intel’s data center group. Fiber optics can go as far as 10 kilometers.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel makes a play for high-speed fiber networking for data centers

Intel is revamping its strategy around the data center by going beyond the Xeon chip and into silicon photonics transceivers. The company announced Monday at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) that samples of its silicon photonics transceivers targeting 5G wireless infrastructure and data centers are available now, with production set to start in the first quarter of 2019.The company notes that global data center IP traffic is increasing significantly. In 2016, global data center IP traffic was 6.8 zettabytes, and that will triple by 2021 because of all this data generated by humans and the Internet of Things (IoT).The choke point becomes copper wire, the standard for Ethernet connectivity. Copper wire can only effectively transmit about eight to 10 meters, said Eoin McConnell, director of marketing for the connectivity group in Intel’s data center group. Fiber optics can go as far as 10 kilometers.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel makes a play for high-speed fiber networking for data centers

Intel is revamping its strategy around the data center by going beyond the Xeon chip and into silicon photonics transceivers. The company announced Monday at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) that samples of its silicon photonics transceivers targeting 5G wireless infrastructure and data centers are available now, with production set to start in the first quarter of 2019.The company notes that global data center IP traffic is increasing significantly. In 2016, global data center IP traffic was 6.8 zettabytes, and that will triple by 2021 because of all this data generated by humans and the Internet of Things (IoT).The choke point becomes copper wire, the standard for Ethernet connectivity. Copper wire can only effectively transmit about eight to 10 meters, said Eoin McConnell, director of marketing for the connectivity group in Intel’s data center group. Fiber optics can go as far as 10 kilometers.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft Azure IoT Plans Now Support Digital Twins

The integration allows users to manage the digital model using event-driven and serverless methods that can then be transferred to the physical environment.

Worth Reading: eVPN Behind the Curtain

Is EVPN magic? Well, like Arthur C Clarke said, any considerable leap in technology is indistinguishable from magic. On that premise, moving from a traditional layer 2 environment to VXLAN driven by EVPN has much of that same hocus pocus feeling. —Rama Darbha and Eric Pulvino @Cumulus

Microsoft Lures SAP, Adobe Into Open Data Initiative

The initiative supports the movement of transactional, operational, customer, or IoT data between the data lake and a customer’s operations.

IDC Predicts Telecom VNF Market to Grow at a Compound Annual Rate of 45.4%

Worldwide revenue for the telco VNF market in 2017 stood at only $2.5 billion.

Intel Says Silicon Photonics Transceivers Will Be a 5G Fronthaul Savior

Originally developed for the data center, silicon photonics can pump lots of data from the tower to the baseband unit or central office.

SolarWinds Seeks $500 Million IPO

The planned IPO comes three years private equity firms Thoma Bravo and Silver Lake took the IT management company private for $4.5 billion.

BGP Security: A Gentle Reminder that Networking is Business

At NANOG on the Road (NotR) in September of 2018, I participated in a panel on BGP security—specifically the deployment of Route Origin Authentication (ROA), with some hints and overtones of path validation by carrying signatures in BGP updates (BGPsec). This is an area I have been working in for… 20 years? … at this point, so I have seen the argument develop across these years many times, and in many ways. What always strikes me about this discussion, whenever and wherever it is aired, is the clash between business realities and the desire for “someone to do something about routing security in the DFZ, already!” What also strikes me about these conversations it the number of times very fundamental concepts end up being explained to folks who are “new to the problem.”

Part of the problem here is Continue reading

We’ve Added New 2018 Dates To Our Bootcamp Calendar

Dell IPO Back on the Table

Dell plans to interview several banks this week to discuss underwriting an IPO, according to media reports.