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Category Archives for "Networking"

History of Networking: Policy with Joel Halpern

Policy at Internet scale is a little understood, and difficult (potentially impossible) to solve problem. Joel Halpern joins the History of Networking over at the Network Collective to talk about the history of policy in the Internet at large, and networked systems in general.

BrandPost: How to accelerate multi-cloud migration

As we begin 2018, enterprises continue to accelerate their migration of workloads to public cloud service providers (AWS, Azure and Google), often as part of an overall digital transformation (DT) and cloud-first IT strategy. This is not surprising as IDC predicts that by the end of this year, nearly 80% of workloads will be processed in cloud data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

What is NAS and how do NAS servers excel at corralling unstructured data?

Network-attached storage (NAS) is a category of file-level storage that’s connected to a network and enables data access and file sharing across a heterogeneous client and server environment.“Ideally, NAS is platform- and OS-independent, appears to any application as another server, can be brought online without shutting down the network and requires no changes to other enterprise servers,” says research firm Gartner in its definition of NAS. BE SURE NOT TO MISS: What do users really think of all-flash arrays? What is hyperconvergence? Hyperconvergence gathers speed in 2018 Micro-modular data centers set to multiply NAS history: the evolution of network-attached storage NAS evolved from file servers used in the 1980s to provide access to files for network clients. NAS devices typically consist of bundled hardware and software with a built-in operating system, and they typically use industry-standard network protocols such as SMB and NFS for remote file service and data sharing and TCP/IP for data transfer. In an enterprise setting, NAS can allow IT teams to streamline data storage and retrieval while consolidating their server and storage infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here

We now offer live, on-site Google Cloud Architect training!



 

We’re excited to announce the release of our newest bootcamp: The Google Cloud Architect Exam Bootcamp. Currently the only course of it’s kind on the market, this bootcamp focuses specifically on what candidates need to know to pass the GCP Cloud Architect Exam. Like our other bootcamps, this class is taught live, on-site by an expert INE Instructor and will feature 5 days of intensive, hands-on, real world exercises, practice exams, and in-depth case study discussions. Attendees will also be provided access to a complete series of GCP based cloud labs.

The goal of our GCP Cloud Architect Exam Bootcamp is to equip students with a foundation-level knowledge of Google Cloud Platform to pass the exam. The primary focus of the class is core concepts and topics found on the GCP Cloud Architect written exam.

This bootcamp is currently only offered in May and August of 2018, at our NC location, but more dates and locations will likely be added in the future.

Who Should Take it?

Our Written Exam Bootcamp is for anyone who is beginning their GCP Cloud Architect certification journey, but already has at least basic knowledge of cloud computing. We strongly recommend at least 1 Continue reading

Episode 22 – Securing BGP

In part 3 of our deep dive into BGP operations, Nick Russo and Russ White join us again on Network Collective to talk about securing BGP. In this episode we cover topics like authentication, advertisement filtering, best practices, origin security, path security, and remotely triggered black holes.

 


 

We would like to thank Cumulus Networks for sponsoring this episode of Network Collective. Cumulus is offering you, our listeners, a completely free O’Reilly ebook on the topic of BGP in the data center. You can get your copy of this excellent technical resource here: http://cumulusnetworks.com/networkcollectivebgp

 


 

Show Notes:

  • Authentication
    1. Classic MD5
    2. Enhanced Authentication extensions (EA). Supported by IOS XR and allows for SHA1 as well, along with key-chain rotations. Doesn’t appear commonly used
    3. GTSM, and how it can be better than the previous option in some cases
  • Basic prefix filtering:
    1. From your customers: allow any number of their own AS prepended
    2. From the Internet: block bogons (RFC1918, class D/E, etc)
    3. To your peers: only your local space (ie, your customers)
    4. From your peers: only routes originating from their AS (any # of prepends)
  • BCP38
    1. Techniques for spoofing prevention
    2. Describe with a simple snail mail analogy
    3. Usually uRPF strict Continue reading

Private data centers still alive and kicking

Earlier this month, Cisco updated its Global Cloud Index (GCI), giving rise to a number of news stories that were filled with doom and gloom for corporate IT departments. (Note: Cisco is a client of ZK Research.)For example, one of the articles stated that based on the GCI, cloud computing would virtually replace traditional data centers within three years. While it's true public clouds are growing, private clouds are also increasing. It's a multi-cloud era, as Cisco's Kip Compton writes.To read this article in full, please click here

Private data centers still alive and kicking

Earlier this month, Cisco updated its Global Cloud Index (GCI), giving rise to a number of news stories that were filled with doom and gloom for corporate IT departments. (Note: Cisco is a client of ZK Research.)For example, one of the articles stated that based on the GCI, cloud computing would virtually replace traditional data centers within three years. While it's true public clouds are growing, private clouds are also increasing. It's a multi-cloud era, as Cisco's Kip Compton writes.To read this article in full, please click here

Ready for Take-Off with Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, and vSphere

A complex and diverse world

Singapore. Etihad. Wow. I always found it impressive when airlines were able to build a business and a brand without a significant domestic customer base to start off from. They instead focus on the global market, which is much more challenging. There is a competitive landscape of many players. There is the complexity of interconnecting a world of disparate lands and diverse customer cultures and preferences. An impressive feat.

The world of networking is becoming quite similar. From private, hybrid, and public cloud models, to increased use of SaaS, to the way SaaS and other apps are built using microservices architectures and containers, the landscape of islands to connect in an inherently secure and automated fashion is increasingly diverse and complex.

An app built to demonstrate this diversity

If the airline to networking analogy is lost on you, or you think it’s too much of a stretch, let me pull up the second reason I used planes in my symbolism. My brilliant colleague Yves Fauser built an app to demonstrate how NSX is connecting and securing this variety of new app frameworks, and it happens to be a “plane spotter” app. You may have already Continue reading

FIRST/TF-CSIRT: The Changing Face of Cybersecurity

The Internet Society was recently approved as a Liaison Member of TF-CSIRT, the European Forum for Computer Security Incident Response Teams, and therefore took the opportunity to participate in the FIRST/TF-CSIRT Symposium that was held 5-7 February 2018 in Hamburg, Germany.

The Internet Society continues to support organisations and activities concerned with maintaining the safety, stability and security of the Internet, and our colleague Kevin Meynell is already known within the TF-CSIRT community having run the forum between 2008 and 2012 and overseen its transition from a grouping of primarily academic CSIRTs to a wider industry body encompassing more than 160 National, Government, Military and Commercial CSIRTs, as well as those in academia.

TF-CSIRT meets three times per year, but starting in 2008 the first meeting of the year has always been held jointly with FIRST, the global Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams. This provides an opportunity for the European CSIRTs to meet with their counterparts around the world to exchange information, and develop the networks of trust that are critical to effective cooperation in handling cyber incidents when they occur, but also in development of early warning and prevention techniques.

And a number of the presentations had particular Continue reading

The Anatomy of a Cisco Spark Bot

I spent a long time creating my first Spark bot, Zpark. The first commit was in August and the first release was posted in January. So, six months elapsed time. It’s also over-engineered. I mean, all it does is post messages back and forth between a back-end system and some Spark spaces and I ended up with something so complex that I had to draw a damn block diagram in the user guide to give people a fighting chance at comprehending how it works.

Its internals could’ve been much simpler. But that was part of the point of creating the bot: examining the proper architecture for a scalable application, learning about new technologies for building my own API, learning about message brokers, pulling my hair out over git’s eccentricities and ultimately, having enough material to write this blog post.

In this post I’m going to break down the different functional components of Zpark, discuss what each does, and why–or not–that component is necessary. If I can achieve one goal, it will be to retire to a tropical island ASAP. If I can achieve a second goal, it will be to give aspiring bot creaters (like yourself, presumably) a strong Continue reading

SD-WAN helps radiology firm cut costs, scale bandwidth

Zwanger-Pesiri Radiology's journey from MPLS to SD-WAN networking began last spring when Joseph Funaro sat down to review carrier contracts that were up for renewal and realized that he could not only save his company money, but also improve network resiliency and his users' application experience.With 24 outpatient radiology clinics throughout the greater New York metro area requesting or transmitting a terabyte of imaging records a day and requiring access to more than 1.2 petabytes of stored patient data, Zwanger-Pesiri, the largest outpatient medical imaging center in the country by volume, depends on its WAN to provide timely, effective patient service.To read this article in full, please click here