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A Carbon Neutral North America

A Carbon Neutral North America

A Carbon Neutral North America
Photo by Karsten Würth (@inf1783) / Unsplash

Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. While working toward our goals, we want to make sure our processes are conducted in a sustainable manner.

In an effort to do so, we’ve reduced Cloudflare’s environmental impact by contracting to purchase regional renewable energy certificates, or “RECs,” to match 100% of the electricity used in our North American data centers as well as our U.S. offices. Cloudflare now has servers in 154 unique cities around the world, with 38 located in North America. Cloudflare has opted to support geographically diverse projects in proximity to our office and data center electricity usage. This renewable energy initiative reduces our electricity-based carbon footprint by 5,561 tons of CO2 which has a positive environmental impact. The impact can be compared to growing 144,132 trees seedlings for 10 years, or taking 1,191 cars off the road for one year.

A Carbon Neutral North America

How does buying a REC help reduce Cloudflare's carbon footprint you may ask? When 1MWh of electricity is produced from a renewable generator, such as a wind turbine, there are two products: the energy, which is delivered to the grid and mixes with other forms of energy, Continue reading

Whatever is vOLT-HA?

Many network engineers find the entire world of telecom to be confusing—especially as papers are peppered with a lot of acronyms. If any part of the networking world is more obsessed with acronyms than any other, the telecom world, where the traditional phone line, subscriber access, and network engineering collide, reigns as the “king of the hill.”

Recently, while looking at some documentation for the CORD project, which stands for Central Office Rearchitected as a Data Center, I ran across an acronym I had not seen before—vOLT-HA. An acronym with a dash in the middle—impressive! But what is, exactly? To get there, we must begin in the beginning, with a PON.

There are two kinds of optical networks in the world, Active Optical Networks (AONs), and Passive Optical Networks (PONs). The primary difference between the two is whether the optical gear used to build the network amplifies (or even electronically rebuilds, or repeats) the optical signal as it passes through. In AONs, optical signals are amplified, while ins PONs, optical signals are not amplified. This means that in a PON, the optical equipment can be said to be passive, in that it does not modify the optical signal in Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: AI Could Reshape the Music Industry, in a Good Way

AI Hits the Right Notes: Artificial intelligence-generated music is reshaping the industry, but that’s not such a bad thing, notes Billboard.com. AI won’t replace the artists we love or end creativity, but it could empower creators with new songwriting and other tools, the story suggests.

Drilling for AI: Oil producers are also turning to AI to help them with several tasks, according to an interview with oil executive Philippe Herve of SparkCongnition, published in Houston’s Chron.com. AI can assist oil producers with predictive maintenance of their expensive field equipment and help them make sense of all the data they collect, he said.

Collateral damage for app ban: Russia has attempted to shut down messaging app Telegram, after the service refused to provide authorities encryption keys to its software. It’s not going so well, however. Russian’s attempts to block the app have inadvertently knocked out a bunch of small business websites in the country, reports the New York Times. Telegram attempted to get around the ban by shifting its service to U.S. Web hosts Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, while repeatedly changing its IP address. In response, Russia shut down huge blocks of subnets instead of trying Continue reading

Network Break 181: Russia Accused Of Infrastructure Attacks; US Targets ZTE

Take a Network Break! The US and British governments have accused Russian state actors of compromising routers and other network infrastructure, the United States forbids American companies from selling components to Chinese telecom firm ZTE, and Huawei rethinks its US strategy.

Cisco releases notes on its 9500 switches and UADP silicon, IBM releases a mainframe that takes the same space as a traditional 19-inch server rack, and VMware shares rise on rumors that Dell won’t reverse-merge with it.

Arista’s share price stumbles, and then recovers; Cisco ditches the Spark brand name; a Cisco security exec says we’re all screwed; and the United States is the leading source of botnet attacks in the world.

Find links to all these stories just after our sponsor message.

Sponsor: InterOptic

InterOptic offers high-performance, high-quality optics at a fraction of the cost. Find out more at InterOptic.com, and if you re attending Interop 2018 in Vegas, stop by the InterOptic booth to learn how they can help you spec the right optics for your network.

Show Links:

Russian State-Sponsored Cyber Actors Targeting Network Infrastructure Devices – US-CERT

Huawei, Failing to Crack U.S. Market, Signals a Change in Tactics – The New York Times

Continue reading

5 key enterprise IoT security recommendations

Not so long ago, the phrase “consumerization of IT” was on everyone’s lips. Whole publications and conferences (remember CITE, for Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise?) were created to chronicle the trend of corporations relying on products and services originally created for consumers — which was often easier to use and of higher quality than its business-oriented competitors.Well, no one talks much about the consumerization of IT anymore… not because the trend went away, but because consumer tech has now permeated every aspect of business technology. Today, it’s just how things work — and if you ask me, that’s a good thing.To read this article in full, please click here

5 key enterprise IoT security recommendations

Not so long ago, the phrase “consumerization of IT” was on everyone’s lips. Whole publications and conferences (remember CITE, for Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise?) were created to chronicle the trend of corporations relying on products and services originally created for consumers — which was often easier to use and of higher quality than its business-oriented competitors.Well, no one talks much about the consumerization of IT anymore… not because the trend went away, but because consumer tech has now permeated every aspect of business technology. Today, it’s just how things work — and if you ask me, that’s a good thing.To read this article in full, please click here

5 key enterprise IoT security recommendations

Not so long ago, the phrase “consumerization of IT” was on everyone’s lips. Whole publications and conferences (remember CITE, for Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise?) were created to chronicle the trend of corporations relying on products and services originally created for consumers — which was often easier to use and of higher quality than its business-oriented competitors.Well, no one talks much about the consumerization of IT anymore… not because the trend went away, but because consumer tech has now permeated every aspect of business technology. Today, it’s just how things work — and if you ask me, that’s a good thing.To read this article in full, please click here

Book Review – How SRE Relates to Devops

Link – https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/how-sre-relates/9781492030645

Quick Read – Few Pages
Other Books which are related to SRE
-> Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

Few Points that I liked

– Quick read , hardly an hour
– Intro on how Devops got introduced
– what needs to be improved – Key Idea “No More Silos”
– stress on non-localization of knowledge, lack of collaboration
– New Job Role called SRE – Site Reliability Engineering
– Operations is a Software problem and Work to minimize Toil are some best examples of productivity and how we should view
– Key Idea – “Automate This Year’s Job Away” and “It’s Better to fix-it over-selves than blame someone else”

Good Read to understand the over picture of SRE Role and some of the
work Discipline Ideas.

-Rakesh