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Category Archives for "Networking"

Helping to make LuaJIT faster

Helping to make LuaJIT faster

This is a guest post by Laurence Tratt, who is a programmer and Reader in Software Development in the Department of Informatics at King's College London where he leads the Software Development Team. He is also an EPSRC Fellow.

Programming language Virtual Machines (VMs) are familiar beasts: we use them to run apps on our phone, code inside our browsers, and programs on our servers. Traditional VMs are useful and widely used: nearly every working programmer is familiar with one or more of the “standard” Lua, Python, or Ruby VMs. However, such VMs are simplistic, containing only an interpreter (a simple implementation of a language). These often can’t run our programs as fast as we need; and, even when they can, they often waste huge amounts of server CPU time. We sometimes forget that servers consume a large, and growing, chunk of the world’s electricity output: slow language implementations are, quite literally, changing the world, and not in a good way.

More advanced VMs come with Just-In-Time (JIT) compilers (well known examples include LuaJIT, HotSpot (aka “the JVM”), PyPy, and V8). Such VMs observe a program’s run-time behaviour and use that to compile frequently executed parts of the program Continue reading

Another DMVPN Routing Question

One of my readers sent me an interesting DMVPN routing question. He has a design with a single DMVPN tunnel with two hubs (a primary and a backup hub), running BGP between hubs and spokes and IBGP session between hubs over a dedicated inter-hub link (he doesn’t want the hub-to-hub traffic to go over DMVPN).

Here's (approximately) what he's trying to do:

Read more ...

GE CIO: Machines will tell humans what to do, not the other way around

General Electric outfitted 650 British Petroleum (BP) oil rigs with sensors and software that report operational data to a central GE platform that analyzes it to optimize how the rigs run – making them 2 to 4% more efficient than before. General Electric Jim Fowler, CIO, General Electric  GE CIO Jim Fowler credits most of the improvement not with workers, but with machines. “Machines are telling people what to do more than people are telling machines what to do,” Fowler said at a meeting of the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) this week in New York. The sensors and accompanying software platform helped create incremental improvements in production and avoidance of downtime. He calls it the merging of information technology and operational technology to create value.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GE CIO: Machines will tell humans what to do, not the other way around

General Electric outfitted 650 British Petroleum (BP) oil rigs with sensors and software that report operational data to a central GE platform that analyzes it to optimize how the rigs run – making them 2 to 4% more efficient than before. General Electric Jim Fowler, CIO, General Electric  GE CIO Jim Fowler credits most of the improvement not with workers, but with machines. “Machines are telling people what to do more than people are telling machines what to do,” Fowler said at a meeting of the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) this week in New York. The sensors and accompanying software platform helped create incremental improvements in production and avoidance of downtime. He calls it the merging of information technology and operational technology to create value.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco AI-driven services help close widening IT skills gap

The drive to digital transformation is causing the world to move faster than ever. And it seems businesses are experiencing a huge case of “fear of missing out” (FOMO) and adopting new technologies at a dizzying pace.A few years ago, only a few companies had invested in the Internet of Things (IoT), software-defined networking (SDN), cloud services and DevOps. Today, they’re rapidly becoming the norm, and it’s difficult, if not impossible, for IT to maintain the current environment.Doing things manually no longer works. An experienced engineer used to be able to look at router logs, TCP dumps or other data and figure out what was going on and find the source of a problem. But now, so much data is being generated from so many sources that even the best engineers can’t keep up and know the network like they used to. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco AI-driven services help close widening IT skills gap

The drive to digital transformation is causing the world to move faster than ever. And it seems businesses are experiencing a huge case of “fear of missing out” (FOMO) and adopting new technologies at a dizzying pace.A few years ago, only a few companies had invested in the Internet of Things (IoT), software-defined networking (SDN), cloud services and DevOps. Today, they’re rapidly becoming the norm, and it’s difficult, if not impossible, for IT to maintain the current environment.Doing things manually no longer works. An experienced engineer used to be able to look at router logs, TCP dumps or other data and figure out what was going on and find the source of a problem. But now, so much data is being generated from so many sources that even the best engineers can’t keep up and know the network like they used to. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Huawei Q&A: Paving a Trusted Way for Cloud-based Transformation

Paving a Trusted Way for Cloud-based Transformation Q&A Thanks to all who joined us for the Huawei 2017 Infrastructure Security Report Webinar: Paving a Trusted Way for Cloud-based Transformation. During the webinar, Huawei discussed a fresh approach when it comes to your cloud journey that is characterized by the transition to cloud computing, mobile Internet, Big Data, and virtual networks. After the webinar, we... Read more →

5 Reasons to buy NetQ

It’s becoming clear that web-scale networking is the future of networking, and companies need the technology in order to remain competitive against cloud giants like Amazon. So, how do organizations looking to move on from traditional networking start to get their feet wet and bring web-scale efficiencies like automation and scalability to their operations?

That’s where NetQ steps in to save the day. NetQ is a telemetry-based fabric validation system that enables organizations to deploy & operate data center networks with the speed and agility of web-scale giants. Where network configuration used to be slow, require manual intervention, and cause network downtime, NetQ automates configuration and ensures that your network is behaving as intended. It’s preventative, proactive, and diagnostic, and should be the next product you incorporate into your data center.

Here are the top five benefits of NetQ:

  1. Save money and reduce downtime: Having a traditional, non automated system means that whenever there’s far more room for manual error. This leads to increased downtime, which costs businesses a lot of money. In fact, hourly downtime can cost up to $1 million or even $5 million! NetQ, however, is a preventative system that validates network behavior on a per-pod Continue reading

First self-powered data center opens

What does it take to open the world’s first self-powered data center? For Aruba S.p.A., it involved three elements: Flowing river water Photovoltaic solar panels Always cold, pumped-to-the-surface underground water as the principal cooling source Aruba’s newest data center, named the Global Cloud Data Center (IT3) is located near Milan, Italy, and claims to be 100 percent green. The 49-acre ANSI/TIA-942 Rating 4 standard facility (at 200,000 square meters) opened earlier this month.Also on Network World: Space-radiated cooling cuts power use 21% Low-impact credentials at the site come largely because the data center has its own dedicated hydroelectric plant. The facility is located on the banks of the River Brembo, an Aruba representative told me. Electricity is generated from the running river water through the operation of turbines. That power is stored and then injected into the national grid infrastructure. Electricity is supposedly guaranteed for the campus by the national grid in exchange for the input.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

First self-powered data center opens

What does it take to open the world’s first self-powered data center? For Aruba S.p.A., it involved three elements: Flowing river water Photovoltaic solar panels Always cold, pumped-to-the-surface underground water as the principal cooling source Aruba’s newest data center, named the Global Cloud Data Center (IT3) is located near Milan, Italy, and claims to be 100 percent green. The 49-acre ANSI/TIA-942 Rating 4 standard facility (at 200,000 square meters) opened earlier this month.Also on Network World: Space-radiated cooling cuts power use 21% Low-impact credentials at the site come largely because the data center has its own dedicated hydroelectric plant. The facility is located on the banks of the River Brembo, an Aruba representative told me. Electricity is generated from the running river water through the operation of turbines. That power is stored and then injected into the national grid infrastructure. Electricity is supposedly guaranteed for the campus by the national grid in exchange for the input.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What Does “Internet Availability” Really Mean?

The Oracle Dyn team behind this blog have frequently covered ‘network availability’ in our blog posts and Twitter updates, and it has become a common topic of discussion after natural disasters (like hurricanes), man-made problems (including fiber cuts), and political instability (such as the Arab Spring protests). But what does it really mean for the Internet to be “available”? Since the Internet is defined as a network of networks, there are various levels of availability that need to be considered. How does the (un)availability of various networks impact an end user’s experience, and their ability to access the content or applications that they are interested in? How can this availability be measured and monitored?

Deriving Insight From BGP Data

Many Tweets from @DynResearch feature graphs similar to this one, which was included in a September 20 post that noted “Internet connectivity in #PuertoRico hangs by a thread due to effects of #HurricaneMaria.”

There are two graphs shown — “Unstable Networks” and “Number of Available Networks”, and the underlying source of information for those graphs is noted to be BGP Data. The Internet analysis team at Oracle Dyn collects routing information in over 700 locations around the world, giving us Continue reading