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Category Archives for "Networking"

IDG Contributor Network: What companies need to know about interconnection to succeed at digital business

What is interconnection, and why does it matter?Interconnection is the deployment of IT traffic exchange points that integrate direct, private connections between counterparties. Interconnection is best achieved hosted in carrier-neutral data center campuses, where distributed IT components are collocated. In an age when reams of information race around the world with the click of a finger and massive transactions routinely occur several times faster than the blink of an eye, interconnection powers digital business.Interconnection is much more than successfully connecting Point A to Point B. Telephone wires pulled off that kind of simple connectivity ages ago. Today’s enterprise-grade interconnection has some key characteristics that can help take digital business to the next level:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What companies need to know about interconnection to succeed at digital business

What is interconnection, and why does it matter?Interconnection is the deployment of IT traffic exchange points that integrate direct, private connections between counterparties. Interconnection is best achieved hosted in carrier-neutral data center campuses, where distributed IT components are collocated. In an age when reams of information race around the world with the click of a finger and massive transactions routinely occur several times faster than the blink of an eye, interconnection powers digital business.Interconnection is much more than successfully connecting Point A to Point B. Telephone wires pulled off that kind of simple connectivity ages ago. Today’s enterprise-grade interconnection has some key characteristics that can help take digital business to the next level:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What companies need to know about interconnection to succeed at digital business

What is interconnection, and why does it matter?Interconnection is the deployment of IT traffic exchange points that integrate direct, private connections between counterparties. Interconnection is best achieved hosted in carrier-neutral data center campuses, where distributed IT components are collocated. In an age when reams of information race around the world with the click of a finger and massive transactions routinely occur several times faster than the blink of an eye, interconnection powers digital business.Interconnection is much more than successfully connecting Point A to Point B. Telephone wires pulled off that kind of simple connectivity ages ago. Today’s enterprise-grade interconnection has some key characteristics that can help take digital business to the next level:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Housing developer builds resiliency with DRaaS

When Steve Werner joined Milhaus, the company was gearing up for a growth spurt that took it from roughly 80 employees in 2015 to more than 270 employees today. Upgrading the company’s IT infrastructure was a priority for Werner, who is the first director of technology at the Indianapolis-based company, which designs, builds and manages luxury apartments in urban areas.“They went from a very small business to a pretty good sized business in a short amount of time. But we were still running on small business hardware, with a small business backup plan,” Werner says. The company’s IT gear was running in an old server closet with no air conditioning. “It couldn’t handle all that we were adding to it,” Werner says. “Everything was about to melt down.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Unix’s mysterious && and ||

The Unix shell’s && and || operators provide some very useful functionality, but they can be a bit mysterious, especially considering the number of options for how they are used.The most common use of these Boolean operators is in the construction of multi-conditional tests—when you want two or more conditions to be true (or any in a set of operators to be true) before some command is run. The && serves as a logical AND (requiring all conditions to be true) operation, while the || provides a logical OR (requiring only one to be true).Combining tests In the script below, we’re using && to combine two very simple conditions. We won’t get output unless both conditions are true. This particular script runs through the tests twice, but only to demonstrate the two “flavors” of the brackets that can be used. Note that && doesn’t work inside square brackets unless they’re doubled.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Submarine Cable Basics

Submarine Cable is probably the most important topic for the International traffic. More than 99% of the International traffic , including data, voice and video is carried over Submarine Cables.   But still submarine cables is not very well known topic among the network engineers, especially if you are not working in the Service Provider, […]

The post Submarine Cable Basics appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

IDG Contributor Network: Update on Spectrum: Billing systems scheduled to be merged

Back in May 2016 when Charter officially closed the deal to acquire Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, they took on a monumental task of merging many different systems to make one cohesive customer experience. (As a disclaimer, my company does sell and manage Spectrum Enterprise services.)This deal was worth over $60 billion and effects over 90,000 employees and 25 million customers with significant coverage in 48 states. Among old school telecom pros, the move to snag Tom Rutledge from Cablevision in late 2012 and relocating the headquarters to Tom’s backyard in Connecticut was a sign of big things to come.As it stands today, Spectrum does not have an online payment option for enterprise services that allows you to view your bill or even your bill amount. Bright House did have a platform but it was recently taken down after performing some maintenance, pointing customers to the Spectrum Business billing log in.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 3 leading indicator Software-as-a-Service metrics to understand where your business is heading

We all know the flagship metrics by which Software-as-a-Service businesses are gauged — Customer Acquisition Cost, Customer Lifetime Value, churn and the like. Understanding these metrics is key to measuring the health and value of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business, and if you’re the operator of a SaaS company, you should have a deep understanding of what each of these metrics means, how to measure them for your business and whether your metrics are healthy or indicate potential issues.Every company is different, but a combination of common knowledge and some business-specific reasoning should give you a sense of whether your SaaS metrics jive with where you want your business to head.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BGP FlowSpec on white box switch

BGP FlowSpec is a method of distributing access control lists (ACLs) using the BGP protocol. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation is an important use case for the technology, allowing a targeted network to push filters to their upstream provider to selectively remove the attack traffic.

Unfortunately, FlowSpec is currently only available on high end routing devices and so experimenting with the technology is expensive. Looking for an alternative, Cumulus Linux is an open Linux platform that allows users to install Linux packages and develop their own software.

This article describes a proof of concept implementation of basic FlowSpec functionality using ExaBGP installed on a free Cumulus VX virtual machine.  The same solution can be run on inexpensive commodity white box hardware to deliver terabit traffic filtering in a production network.

First, install latest version of ExaBGP on the Cumulus Linux switch:
curl -L https://github.com/Exa-Networks/exabgp/archive/4.0.0.tar.gz | tar zx
Now define the handler, acl.py, that will convert BGP FlowSpec updates into standard Linux netfilter/iptables entries used by Cumulus Linux to specify hardware ACLs (see Netfilter - ACLs):
#!/usr/bin/python

import json
import re
from os import listdir,remove
from os.path import isfile
from Continue reading

Reflecting On My First Cisco Live! Presentation

Well, I got to tick a big item off my list of goals last week. I successfully delivered a presentation at Cisco Live! in front of a large group of people. It didn’t kill me and I didn’t trip over anything and embarrass myself so no matter what, I have those two points to feel good about :-)

Me starting my presentation
Me starting my presentation

All joking aside, it actually went a whole lot better than that.

I’ve recently realized that I really enjoy teaching. Not in the sense that I want to be a trainer full time or have a job in a classroom, more like I feel that’s a big part of what drives me to write this blog and is why I feel (relatively) comfortable talking in front of people. As long as the subject is something that I feel I can weave some teaching/learning into, I’m comfortable to deliver it. By contrast, I would feel far less comfortable delivering something like a keynote speech or a toast at a wedding.

So along those lines, that was a big goal I set for myself in delivering my Cisco Live! (CLUS) presentation: empower the audience by sharing targeted, high-value knowledge and Continue reading