IDG Contributor Network: Drinking lead contaminated water? Better check your sensor

President Ronald Reagan once advised “trust, but verify” about nuclear disarmament. The same could be said about some official information on public health and safety issues. Remember Flint, Michigan?LeeAnne Walters is a mother of four in Flint, Michigan. She was alarmed when her entire family started losing clumps of hair and her twins kept breaking out in rashes, reported Mother Jones. The family was suffering from the effects of lead in Flint’s water supply. Frustrated with the city’s response, Walters contacted a manager at the EPA which helped unleash a chain of investigations into the crisis.To read this article in full, please click here

Will the end of net neutrality crush the Internet of Things?

It was hardly a surprise, but this week Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai made it all but official: He announced a plan to scrap Obama-era net neutrality rules.Since Republicans hold a 3-2 edge at the FCC, Pai’s plan is virtually certain to pass — despite lobbying efforts and court challenges from just about every internet constituency apart from big internet service providers (ISPs). "The Restoring Internet Freedom Order," as it’s cynically called, will very likely upend the current rules classifying internet service as a public utility and prohibiting carriers from slowing or blocking certain types of traffic.To read this article in full, please click here

Releasing AddThis on Cloudflare Apps: Making Disciplined Product Design Decisions

This is a guest post by Emily Schwartz, Product Manager for the AddThis team at Oracle. With a background in digital media that has spanned across NPR, WaPo Labs, Trove, and others, Emily cares deeply about helping publishers leverage data and technology for success.

The Process of Paring Down

When our team learned about the opportunity to build an AddThis app on Cloudflare Apps, I was ready to pounce. Building for distribution platforms is a core part of our business and product strategy, and I knew AddThis could bring a lot to the table for Cloudflare users. With a media background in my pocket, I understand the necessity of making content easily and quickly distributable -- and I wanted to get our tools in front of new users so we could learn more about the critical needs of publishers, merchants, and website owners.

The decision to build was the easy part. What to build was the challenging part.

With time and resources tight, I knew building an app that offered our full suite of website tools wouldn’t be immediately feasible—or even make sense. Share buttons, follow buttons, related posts, list building, link promotion, and tip jar are all Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How to better manage mixed data center environments

According to Gartner, more than $1 trillion in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to cloud over the next five years. Many research firms point to hybrid cloud as a fastest-growing segment, including MarketsandMarkets, which predicts that demand will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 27 percent through 2019, outpacing the IT market overall.There’s no question that cloud technologies have improved time to market, lowered operational and capital expenditures, and provided organizations with the ability to dynamically adjust provisioning to meet changing needs globally. And yet, as many businesses shift from on-premise, private clouds to public or hybrid models, a myriad of technical questions and business concerns come into play as compute, network and storage resources are further virtualized.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How to better manage mixed data center environments

According to Gartner, more than $1 trillion in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to cloud over the next five years. Many research firms point to hybrid cloud as a fastest-growing segment, including MarketsandMarkets, which predicts that demand will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 27 percent through 2019, outpacing the IT market overall.There’s no question that cloud technologies have improved time to market, lowered operational and capital expenditures, and provided organizations with the ability to dynamically adjust provisioning to meet changing needs globally. And yet, as many businesses shift from on-premise, private clouds to public or hybrid models, a myriad of technical questions and business concerns come into play as compute, network and storage resources are further virtualized.To read this article in full, please click here

How IT Pros Can Prepare For Cyber Monday Madness

Let’s Pretend We Run Distributed Storage over a Thick Yellow Cable

One of my friends wanted to design a nice-and-easy layer-3 leaf-and-spine fabric for a new data center, and got blindsided by a hyperconverged vendor. Here’s what he wrote:

We wanted to have a spine/leaf L3 topology for an NSX deployment but can’t do that because the Nutanix servers require L2 between their nodes so they can be in the same cluster.

I wanted to check his claims, but Nutanix doesn’t publish their documentation (I would consider that a red flag), so I’m assuming he’s right until someone proves otherwise (note: whitepaper is not a proof of anything ;).

Route Filtering Technique: IP Prefix Lists

Securing Native Cloud Workloads with VMware NSX Cloud Blog Series – Part 1: Getting Started

Introduction As businesses evaluate their applications in the constantly evolving world of IT, new strategies are emerging for delivery. These strategies include keeping applications on-premises or moving them to one or more public cloud providers. These public clouds come with their own networking and security constructs and policy management. This results in a new set of... Read more →

Securing Native Cloud Workloads with VMware NSX Cloud Blog Series – Part 1: Getting Started

Introduction

As businesses evaluate their applications in the constantly evolving world of IT, new strategies are emerging for delivery. These strategies include keeping applications on-premises or moving them to one or more public cloud providers.

These public clouds come with their own networking and security constructs and policy management. This results in a new set of technology siloes that increases expense, complexity and risk:

This blog series will discuss the challenges of providing consistent networking and security policies for native cloud workloads, the value of VMware NSX Cloud, and walk through the process of securing and connecting applications running natively in the public cloud.

VMware NSX Cloud

VMware’s strategy is to enable businesses to create and deliver applications. To support new delivery strategies, VMware NSX Cloud provides consistent networking and security for native applications running in multiple public and private clouds. Utilizing a single management console and a common application programming interface, VMware NSX Cloud offers numerous benefits:

• Unified Micro-Segmentation Security Policies – VMware NSX Cloud provides control over East-West traffic between native workloads running in public clouds. Security policies are defined once and applied to native workloads. These policies are supported in multiple AWS accounts, regions, and VPCs. Policies are Continue reading

Meg Whitman Will Leave HPE in February

Antonio Neri will replace Whitman as CEO.

The loss of net neutrality: Say goodbye to a free and open internet

Update May 17, 2018 Following the U.S. Senate’s 52-47 vote to reinstate net neutrality rules, U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) announced the House of Representatives will attempt to also force a vote on the issue under the Congressional Review Act (CRA).“I have introduced a companion CRA in the House,” Doyle said during a press conference yesterday, “but I’m also going to begin a discharge petition, which we will have open for signature tomorrow morning. And I urge every member who supports a free and open internet to join me and sign this petition, so we can bring this legislation to the floor.”To force a vote in the House, the petition needs 218 signatures. The Democrats hold only 193 seats there, so they need 25 Republicans to switch sides.To read this article in full, please click here

Terminology Tuesday Presents: Microservices

Microservices is the philosophy of designing software programs by breaking what used to be a singular function or command into multiple components, known as services.  The ultimate goal is to reduce complexity and increase speed (basically the goal of anything nowadays).

Think of Thanksgiving.  A traditional approach would have the same person cook the entire meal.  And likely even do all the dishes.  Think of a world instead where you can assign different individuals (and ovens!) for cooking the turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing and anything else that may grace your table.

Microservices delivers on this dream but also takes the principle to the next level.  Not just breaking up the request (multi-course dinner) into multiple services (turkey, salad, not burning the garlic bread) but making them really really minute.

“Services” that used to be inherently linear can now happen concurrently.  To go back to our Thanksgiving example, you could have the potatoes peeled at the same time they’re being mashed.  If we were able to avoid running into one another (part of the magic of software over families in kitchens) everything would become very efficient.

Want Continue reading

BrandPost: SD-WAN Vision vs. Acquisition

The migration of applications to the cloud is motivating enterprises to rethink how they architect their WANs, and this in turn has created the SD-WAN market category. The recent acquisition of VeloCloud by VMware, and of Viptela by Cisco earlier in the year, represent attempts by two of the bigger players in IT to stake a claim in this fast-growing new market.While it’s convenient to place products into categories, there are many approaches to SD-WAN, each focused on a different use case or customer base. It was not unexpected to see Cisco go for Viptela. Of all the SD-WAN solutions, Viptela is arguably the one that most closely emulates a traditional router, including conventional device-by-device CLI-based configuration, with a limited amount of central orchestration. It certainly represents the least disruptive approach for Cisco, and gives them an angle to extend the life of the old Swiss army knife known as the ISR.To read this article in full, please click here

How to handle the vanishing radio spectrum: Share frequencies

With the billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices projected to come on-stream over the next few years, questions are arising as to just where the bandwidth and radio channels are going to come from to make it all work.The sensors need to send their likely increasingly voluminous data back to networks wirelessly to be processed.RELATED: 8 tips for building a cost-effective IoT sensor network But there’s a finite amount of radio spectrum available, and much of it is already allocated to incumbent primary users, such as public safety agencies. Other spectrum is dedicated to mobile network operators who have licensed chunks of it. Some is leftover in the millimeter frequencies, which is thus far pretty much untested in the real world — it’s going to be used for 5G in the future.To read this article in full, please click here

How to handle the vanishing radio spectrum: Share frequencies

With the billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices projected to come on-stream over the next few years, questions are arising as to just where the bandwidth and radio channels are going to come from to make it all work.The sensors need to send their likely increasingly voluminous data back to networks wirelessly to be processed.RELATED: 8 tips for building a cost-effective IoT sensor network But there’s a finite amount of radio spectrum available, and much of it is already allocated to incumbent primary users, such as public safety agencies. Other spectrum is dedicated to mobile network operators who have licensed chunks of it. Some is leftover in the millimeter frequencies, which is thus far pretty much untested in the real world — it’s going to be used for 5G in the future.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: Intel moves into 5G

The Intel XMM 8000-series of 5G-capable modems will bring the next generation of wireless connectivity to PCs, smartphones and infrastructure devices with a target consumer-product launch in mid-2019. Intel INTC, -2.23% also updated plans for a new 4G LTE modem that will offer speeds as high as 1.6 gigabits per second, a substantial upgrade from current connectivity options on smartphones (peaking at 1.0 gigabits per second), again with a 2019 target release. — Ryan Shrout @ Market Watch

Talari Hires New CEO, Moves to 100% Channel Model

The new CEO has experience with selling companies.

Kubernetes to Power AT&T’s Next-Gen Integrated Cloud

OpenStack will remain at the core of AIC, but Kubernetes will become the operational template.

Palo Alto Takes Share From Cisco, Check Point, Sees Revenue Grow 27% in Fiscal 1Q

The company added 2,500 new customers in the quarter.