Boston Medical Center Secures Electronic Patient Records with VMware NSX
Boston City Hospital and Boston University Medical Center Hospital merged in 1996 to form Boston Medical Center (BMC). This 497-bed teaching hospital in the South End of Boston provides primary and critical care to a diverse population and houses the largest Level 1 trauma center in New England.
As a 24-hour hub for surgeries and life-sustaining medical care, BMC relies heavily on technology to support all operations, from appointment scheduling to vital health monitoring and imaging systems. Boston Medical Center has standardized on vSphere as a virtualization platform for its data centers. With their server infrastructure almost 90% virtualized, BMC uses VMware vCloud Suite, Site Recovery Manager, vRealize Operations Manager, and has recently added NSX to better secure its Epic Electronic Medical Records platform.
In 2015, BMC implemented the Dell DRIVE system, including VMware, to consolidate and digitize medical records storage and delivery on Epic. While the Epic records must be constantly accessible to health care providers, who require immediate access to essential patient information throughout the hospital system, those same records must also be protected from intrusion or misuse. According to David Bass, SDDC Engineer at Boston Medical Center, “The type of data that Continue reading
PPPoE High Availability Design – Incorporating Multiple Access Concentrators/BRAS
Background:
One of the most widely used protocols for authentication of user connections is PPPoE (or Point-to-Point over Ethernet). Traditionally, PPPoE was used in DSL deployments but became one of the most adopted forms of customer device authentication in many networks. Often used with a AAA system such as RADIUS, the ability to authenticate, authorize and account for customer connections made the use of PPPoE so appealing.
The protocol itself resides at the data link layer (OSI Layer 2) and provides control mechanisms between the connection endpoints. Within this process lies several other moving parts, if you would like to read more you can visit this wiki page which explains PPPoE rather well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-to-Point_Protocol_over_Ethernet ). For the purpose of this article though, I will be sticking to a very specific problem that arises; how to build redundancy when using PPPoE.
PPPoE is a layer 2 connection protocol widely used in service provider networks. Connections initiated from a client terminate on what is known as a BRAS (Broadband Remote Authentication Server), or Access Concentrator (AC) from herein. The function of the AC is to negotiate the link parameters between itself and the client and Continue reading
Cumulus Taps Kubernetes With Latest Version Of NetQ
Cumulus Networks' fabric monitoring tool NetQ now supports Kubernetes to give administrators and engineers more visibility into container networks.Now You Can Setup Centrify, OneLogin, Ping and Other Identity Providers with Cloudflare Access
We use Cloudflare Access to secure our own internal tools instead of a VPN. As someone that does a lot of work on the train, I can attest this is awesome (though I might be biased). You can see it in action below. Instead of having to connect to a VPN to reach our internal jira, we just login with our Google account and we are good to go:
Before today, you could setup Access if you used GSuite, Okta or Azure AD to manage your employee accounts. Today we would like to announce support for two more Identity Providers with Cloudflare Access: Centrify and OneLogin.
We launched Cloudflare Access earlier this year and have been overwhelmed by the response from our customers and community. Customers tell us they love the simplicity of setting up Access to secure applications and integrate with their existing identity provider solution. Access helps customers implement a holistic solution for both corporate and remote employees without having to use a VPN.
If you are using Centrify or OneLogin as your identity provider you can now easily integrate them with Cloudflare Access and have your team members login with their accounts to securely reach your internal Continue reading
Huawei Names Vendor Partners for Its Three-Layered SD-WAN
Huawei is working with several third-party vendors to enhance its SD-WAN. These include Riverbed Technology, F5, and HPE.
Kubernetes Injected into Yahoo Japan’s OpenStack Infrastructure
The open source Gimbal platform was developed with Heptio to avoid having to rip out OpenStack and legacy backend systems.
Nutanix Teams Up With Data Center Company Cyxtera for On-Demand HCI
The service allows customers to provision dedicated HCI nodes without buying their own infrastructure.
5G Brazil Project Focuses on Global Collaboration
The group is working on several different projects focused on spectrum, 5G standards, regulations, and infrastructure.
Southern Theatres Cleans Up Messy Network With Mosaic NetworX SD-WAN
Before deploying SD-WAN, the company was using “a spaghetti mess” of handcrafted tunnels with combinations of Sonicwall firewalls, third party tunnels, and Cisco ASA firewalls. The result was “awful and unreliable” connections.
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.
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
Response: Why is the kernel community replacing iptables with BPF? — Cilium
Because iptables was never meant to do what it does
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
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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
Networking Gets Entangled in Geo-Political Feuds
ZTE might look to judicial remedies after the U.S. ban; Huawei lays off its Washington, D.C. liason; and Twitter bans ads from Kaspersky Labs.