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Category Archives for "Networking"

The Sun sets on Solaris and Sparc

After years of struggle and fading recognition, it seems the end is finally here for Solaris and Sparc, the Unix operating system and RISC processor designed and championed by Sun Microsystems and inherited by Oracle in 2010.In a move that will win it no PR points, Oracle sent out recorded telephone messages to employees who were let go on the Friday before the Labor Day weekend. Yes, firing by voice mail. Classy.The exact number is being debated, but talk on one message board puts it at 2,500. That’s both Solaris and Sparc engineers. The workers affected are primarily in the Santa Clara area, in a former Sun office not even a mile from Intel’s headquarters, but they are in three other states and India as well. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Connecting the car

It’s an interesting paradox: the more connected the car, the less connected the driver.As a gearhead, that frightens me. I’ve always gravitated toward muscle cars, both new and old, because I like to feel connected to the car. I like the feeling of being pushed back in the seat when I press the long, skinny pedal. I love the experience of going through the gears and the throaty roar of a finely-tuned V8, like the one in my “TrackPack” optioned Mustang GT.But as a techie, I also appreciate connected and autonomous cars – so long as they don’t look like inflated characters from classic video game, Dig Dug.You Googlers know exactly what I mean!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple Watch / Red Sox cheating scandal points toward larger issues

Newsflash: Someone just found a viable use case for the Apple Watch. Too bad it turned out to be cheating at baseball!Wearable technology such as fitness trackers and smart watches have long been seen as aids for athletes to improve their performance and help them win. And that’s great. But now that the Boston Red Sox have been caught red handed using Apple Watches to communicate and transfer signs stolen from the Yankees, it seems there may also be an unanticipated dark side to the Internet of Things (IoT) in sports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Troubleshooting connectivity problems in leaf and spine fabrics

Introducing data center fabric, the next-generation Facebook data center network describes the benefits of moving to a leaf and spine network architecture. The diagram shows how the leaf and spine architecture creates many paths between each pair of hosts. Multiple paths increase available bandwidth and resilience against the loss of a link or a switch. While most networks don't have the scale requirements of Facebook, smaller scale leaf and spine designs deliver high bandwidth, low latency, networking to support cloud workloads (e.g. vSphere, OpenStack, Docker, Hadoop, etc.).

Unlike traditional hierarchical network designs, where a small number of links can be monitored to provide visibility, a leaf and spine network has no special links or switches where running CLI commands or attaching a probe would provide visibility. Even if it were possible to attach probes, the effective bandwidth of a leaf and spine network can be as high as a Petabit/second, well beyond the capabilities of current generation monitoring tools.

Fortunately, industry standard sFlow monitoring technology is built into the commodity switch hardware used to build leaf and spine networks. Enabling sFlow telemetry on all the switches in the network provides centralized, real-time, visibility into network traffic.
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Intent-Based Network Automation with Ansible

The latest in all the networking buzz these days is Intent-Based Networking (IBN). There are varying definitions of what IBN is and is not. Does IBN mean you need to deploy networking solely from business policy, does IBN mean you must be streaming telemetry from every network device in real-time, is it a combination of both? Is it automation?

This article isn’t meant to define IBN, rather, it’s meant to provide a broader, yet more practical perspective on automation and intent.

Intent isn’t New

One could argue that intent-based systems have been around for years, especially when managing servers. Why not look at DevOps tools like CFEngine, Chef, and Puppet (being three of the first)? They focused on desired state–their goal was to get managed systems into a technical desired state.

If something is in its desired state, doesn’t that mean it’s in its intended state?

These tools did this eliminating the need to know the specific Linux server commands to configure the device–you simply defined your desired state with a declarative approach to systems management, e.g. ensure Bob is configured on the system without worrying about the command to add Bob. One major difference was those tools used Continue reading

Intent-Based Network Automation with Ansible

The latest in all the networking buzz these days is Intent-Based Networking (IBN). There are varying definitions of what IBN is and is not. Does IBN mean you need to deploy networking solely from business policy, does IBN mean you must be streaming telemetry from every network device in real-time, is it a combination of both? Is it automation?

This article isn’t meant to define IBN, rather, it’s meant to provide a broader, yet more practical perspective on automation and intent.

Intent isn’t New

One could argue that intent-based systems have been around for years, especially when managing servers. Why not look at DevOps tools like CFEngine, Chef, and Puppet (being three of the first)? They focused on desired state–their goal was to get managed systems into a technical desired state.

If something is in its desired state, doesn’t that mean it’s in its intended state?

These tools did this eliminating the need to know the specific Linux server commands to configure the device–you simply defined your desired state with a declarative approach to systems management, e.g. ensure Bob is configured on the system without worrying about the command to add Bob. One major difference was those tools used Continue reading

Survey: Enterprise IoT faces skills shortage, security challenges

A survey of technology decision-makers at mid- to large-scale enterprises found that IoT adoption is coming to the vast majority of businesses within the next two years, but many of those businesses aren’t yet ready to cope with the change.A major part of the problem is a perceived skills gap. Of the 500 IoT-involved technology pros surveyed, just 20% said that they “had all the skills they needed” to successfully implement their organization’s planned IoT projects.The other four out of five respondents to the survey conducted by Vanson Bourne and backed by UK-based satellite communications company Inmarsat said that they had some degree of need for additional IoT skills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Breaking the Internet: Swapping Backhoes for BGP

The term “break[ing] the Internet” has taken hold over the last few years – it sounds significant, and given the role that the Internet has come to play in our daily lives, even a little scary. A Google search for “break the Internet” returns 14.6 million results, while “broke the Internet” returns just under a half million results.

Interestingly, Google Trends shows a spike in searches for the term in November 2014 (arguably representing its entry into mainstream usage), coincident with Kim Kardashian’s appearance in Paper Magazine, and on the magazine’s Web site. (Warning: NSFW) To that end, Time Magazine says “But in the context of viral media content, ‘breaking the Internet’ means engineering one story to dominate Facebook and Twitter at the expense of more newsworthy things.” Presumably in celebration of those efforts, there’s even now a “Break the Internet” Webby Award.

“Breaking the Internet” in this context represents, at best, the failure of a website to do sufficient capacity planning, such as using a content delivery network (CDN) to help improve the scalability and performance of the Web site in the face of increased traffic from a flash crowd from the viral Continue reading