Worth Reading: Raw sockets in IPv6

As part of a measurement experiment, we wanted an implementation of an IPv6 UDP server and a TCP server that generated fragmented IPv6 packets. However, as an added condition, we wanted the application to directly control the packet fragmentation function. The conventional standard socket interface masks any visibility to the underlying packet transactions, and therefore cannot be used for this experiment. —Geoff Huston @Potaroo

IDG Contributor Network: How consumer demand is driving development of the Internet of Things

Few industries are as impacted by consumer demand as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the plethora of sectors reliant on in; when consumers demand a new gadget or a new service, an innovative startup springs up seemingly overnight to meet those demands. Similarly, few consumer goods are as customizable or responsive to changing user preferences as the gadgets and software that make up the commercial IoT. So how can savvy IoT enthusiast rely on consumer demand to better the IoT businesses?One can’t find success in the field of IT or within the IoT in general without understanding how crucial consumer demand is to the industry as a whole. More than anything else, this demand is driving the extraordinarily rapid development of the IoT, which could reach a dizzying 50 billion connections by 2020, according to Brookings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

QCT Open Data Center Technology Poised to Help Telcos ‘Win 5G Battles’

SAN JOSE, California — Quanta Cloud Technology’s (QCT) latest data center technology brings the benefits of disaggregation and composable infrastructure to cloud service providers and telco service providers, said Mike Yang, president of QCT at today’s Q.synergy 2017 event. The Rackgo R portfolio is based on the Intel Rack Scale Design (RSD) software framework, which... Read more →

Devaluing Data Exposures

I had a great time this week recording the first episode of a new series with my co-worker Rich Stroffolino. The Gestalt IT Rundown is hopefully the start of some fun news stories with a hint of snark and humor thrown in.

One of the things I discussed in this episode was my belief that no data is truly secure any more. Thanks to recent attacks like WannaCry and Bad Rabbit and the rise of other state-sponsored hacking and malware attacks, I’m totally behind the idea that soon everyone will know everything about me and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it.

Just Pick Up The Phone

Personal data is important. Some pieces of personal data are sacrificed for the greater good. Anyone who is in IT or works in an area where they deal with spam emails and robocalls has probably paused for a moment before putting contact information down on a form. I have an old Hotmail address I use to catch spam if I’m relative certain that something looks shady. I give out my home phone number freely because I never answer it. These pieces of personal data have been sacrificed in order to provide me Continue reading

IoT market keeps growing, with no end in sight

With all the hype it’s getting, you might think the Internet of Things (IoT) simply couldn’t gain any more momentum. Well, think again, because new market research and a wave of global IoT investments from sovereign nations and top-name companies keeps on accelerating the IoT momentum.Growth, growth and more growth First off, IHS Markit has published a new ebook in which it predicts serious growth for IoT: “The number of connected IoT devices worldwide will jump 12 percent on average annually, from nearly 27 billion in 2017 to 125 billion in 2030.”According to the ebook, titled “The Internet of Things: a movement, not a market,” (pdf) that growth “is impacting virtually all stages of industry and nearly all market areas — from raw materials to production to distribution and even the consumption of final goods.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware NSX/Kubernetes and F5 – A Cloud Native App Integration

Introduction

When Bob Dylan wrote back in the 60’s “times they are a-changin” it’s very possible he knew how true that would be today.  Last week, we saw a few things announced in the container technology space during the DockerCon event in Copenhagen – but one thing that I believe came as a surprise to many was Docker’s announcement to begin including Kubernetes in Docker Enterprise edition sometime in early 2018.  This doesn’t concede or mark the death of Docker’s own scheduling and orchestration platform, Docker Swarm, but it does underscore what we’ve heard from many of our customers for quite some time now – almost every IT organization that is using/evaluating containers has jumped on the Kubernetes bandwagon.  In fact, many of you are probably already familiar with the integration supported today with NSX-T 2.0 and Kubernetes from the post that Yves did earlier in the year…

In the past few years, we’ve heard a lot about this idea of digital transformation and what it means for today’s enterprise.  Typically, a part of this transformation is something called infrastructure modernization, and this happens because most IT environments today have some hurdles that need to Continue reading

VMware NSX/Kubernetes and F5 – A Cloud Native App Integration

Introduction When Bob Dylan wrote back in the 60’s “times they are a-changin” it’s very possible he knew how true that would be today.  Last week, we saw a few things announced in the container technology space during the DockerCon event in Copenhagen – but one thing that I believe came as a surprise to... Read more →

IDG Contributor Network: Don’t keep squandering one of your greatest storage assets: metadata

Storage has long been one of the biggest line items on the IT budget. Rightly so, given that data is valuable asset and the lifeblood of every business today. Critical applications consume data as quickly as they get it, and many companies are also using their data to find new insights that help them develop novel products and strategies.Regardless of how hot a file is when it is created, in time, its use cools. As a business matures, more and more cool, cold and even frigid data continues to pile up. With analytics now offering new insights on old data, however, no one wants to delete old files or send them to offline archival storage. This means buying more and more capacity is a given, just as death and taxes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Don’t keep squandering one of your greatest storage assets: metadata

Storage has long been one of the biggest line items on the IT budget. Rightly so, given that data is valuable asset and the lifeblood of every business today. Critical applications consume data as quickly as they get it, and many companies are also using their data to find new insights that help them develop novel products and strategies.Regardless of how hot a file is when it is created, in time, its use cools. As a business matures, more and more cool, cold and even frigid data continues to pile up. With analytics now offering new insights on old data, however, no one wants to delete old files or send them to offline archival storage. This means buying more and more capacity is a given, just as death and taxes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Service Provider MPLS : Inter-AS MPLS Options

Today I am going to talk about the Inter-AS MPLS or you can say that Inter-provider MPLS option. So in this case i am taking the example on the Cisco devices. To maintain the continuity of MPLS VPN services across multiple service providers, mainly for customers who span world wide on different service providers, IETF described 3 types of options. These options are 

• Option A
• Option B 
• Option C

 Inter-AS or Inter-Provider MPLS VPN solutions, while Cisco implemented three options (1, 2 and 3) with Cisco IOS (these options are also known in Cisco documents as 10A, 10B and 10C).

Lets start with all these option one by one. The first option is called as VRF to VRF connection between two different AS border routers and the explanation is as below.

Option A: VRF-to-VRF connections at the AS (Autonomous System) border routers

In this procedure, a PE router in one AS attaches directly to a PE router in another. The two PE routers will be attached by multiple sub-interfaces, at least one for each of the VPNs whose routes need to be passed from AS to AS. 

Fig 1.1- Inter-AS option A

Each PE will treat the other Continue reading

Ethernet History on Software Gone Wild

During Cisco Live Berlin 2017 Peter Jones (chair of several IEEE task forces) and myself went on a journey through 40 years of Ethernet history (and Token Bus and a few other choice technologies).

The sound quality is what you could expect from something recorded on a show floor with pigeons flying around, but I hope you’ll still enjoy our chat.

WPA2 and Infineon

The recent bug in WPA2 has a worst case outcome that is the same as using a wifi without a password: People can sniff, maybe inject… it’s not great but you connect to open wifi at Starbucks anyway, and you’re fine with that because you visit sites with HTTPS and SSH. Eventually your client will get a fix too, so the whole thing is pretty “meh”.

But there’s a reason I call it “WPA2 bug” and I call the recent issue with Infineon key generation “the Infineon disaster”. It’s much bigger. It seems like the whole of Estonia needs to re-issue ID cards, and several years worth of PC-, smartcard-, Yubikey, and other production have been generating bad keys. And these keys will stick around.

From now until forever when you generate, use, or accept RSA keys you have to check for these weak keys. I assume OpenSSH will if it hasn’t already.

But then what? It’s not like servers can just reject these keys, or it’ll lock people out. And it’s not clear that an adversary even has your public key for SSH. And you can’t crack the key if you don’t have the public half. Maybe a Continue reading

Elliott Management Acquires Gigamon for $1.6B

The private-equity firm will purchase Gigamon at a premium of 21 percent.

SendGrid Re-Architects Its IT Infrastructure to Work with AWS

It needed to tease apart state versus compute.

IBM cranks up flash storage for greater capacity and speed

All-flash storage has become increasingly popular in data centers as a means of much faster data access than traditional hard disk, but its growth has been impeded by cost and storage density. There was too much of the former and too little of the latter.Every memory, storage and server vendor is working full out to address that issue, and it has turned into quite an arms race, which benefits the customer. So much so that Gartner predicts that within the next 12 months, solid-state arrays will improve in performance by a factor of 10 while doubling in density and cost-effectiveness.Also on Network World: After virtualization and cloud, what’s left on premises? IBM has just made its contribution to that growth. It has announced advances in flash storage that it claims will provide a three-fold increase in density in the same physical space for its FlashSystem 900 flash arrays, while reducing data capacity costs by 60 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Reimagining IT networks with reconfigurable computing solutions

reimagine /riːɪˈmadʒɪn/To reinterpret something imaginatively – in other words, in a creative and innovative way The word “reimagine” is one of those words loved by marketing people and often loathed by engineers. But, in the context of this column, I think it is appropriate. The word “reimagine” should be close to every engineer’s heart, as it is at the essence of what we all love: solving problems in a creative and innovative way.Over the last decade or two, we have witnessed a great deal of creativity and innovation in how we build networks and deliver communication services. We have witnessed the rise of Ethernet and IP and how these two protocols laid the foundation for a common networking paradigm that we take for granted today. We have witnessed the rise of the IP-based internet and how every imaginable service has been dramatically affected. We have witnessed the rise of cloud computing and how this has, in a sense, completed the disruption that the introduction of the internet first promised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Reimagining IT networks with reconfigurable computing solutions

reimagine /riːɪˈmadʒɪn/To reinterpret something imaginatively – in other words, in a creative and innovative way The word “reimagine” is one of those words loved by marketing people and often loathed by engineers. But, in the context of this column, I think it is appropriate. The word “reimagine” should be close to every engineer’s heart, as it is at the essence of what we all love: solving problems in a creative and innovative way.Over the last decade or two, we have witnessed a great deal of creativity and innovation in how we build networks and deliver communication services. We have witnessed the rise of Ethernet and IP and how these two protocols laid the foundation for a common networking paradigm that we take for granted today. We have witnessed the rise of the IP-based internet and how every imaginable service has been dramatically affected. We have witnessed the rise of cloud computing and how this has, in a sense, completed the disruption that the introduction of the internet first promised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Reimagining IT networks with reconfigurable computing solutions

reimagine /riːɪˈmadʒɪn/To reinterpret something imaginatively – in other words, in a creative and innovative way The word “reimagine” is one of those words loved by marketing people and often loathed by engineers. But, in the context of this column, I think it is appropriate. The word “reimagine” should be close to every engineer’s heart, as it is at the essence of what we all love: solving problems in a creative and innovative way.Over the last decade or two, we have witnessed a great deal of creativity and innovation in how we build networks and deliver communication services. We have witnessed the rise of Ethernet and IP and how these two protocols laid the foundation for a common networking paradigm that we take for granted today. We have witnessed the rise of the IP-based internet and how every imaginable service has been dramatically affected. We have witnessed the rise of cloud computing and how this has, in a sense, completed the disruption that the introduction of the internet first promised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using Google Cloud Platform to Analyze Cloudflare Logs

We’re excited to announce that we now offer deep insights into your domain’s web traffic, working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). While Cloudflare Enterprise customers always have had access to their logs, they previously had to rely on their own tools to process them, adding extra complexity and cost.

Cloudflare logs provide real time insight into traffic, malicious activity, attack incidents, and infrastructure health checks. The output is used to help customers adjust their settings, manage costs and resources, and plan for expansion.

Working with Google, we created an end-to-end solution that allows customers to retrieve Cloudflare access logs, store and process data in a simple way. GCP components such as Google Storage, Cloud Function, BigQuery and Data Studio come together to make this possible.

One of the biggest challenges of data analysis is to store and process large volume of data within a short time period while avoiding high costs. GCP Storage and BigQuery easily address these challenges.

Cloudflare customers can decide if they wish to obtain and process data from Cloudflare access logs on demand or on a regular basis. The full solution is described in this Knowledge Base article. Initial setup takes no more than 30 minutes Continue reading

Nokia’s Q3 Hindered By Problems in its Mobile Networks Business Unit

CEO Rajeev Suri said 'high workload' contributed the problems.