IPv6 generated with EUI-64 has a strange bit inside

How Does Internet Work - We know what is networking

What is universal/local bit in IPv6 EUI-64 address? One of my readers contacted me with an interesting question in comments of “IPv6 – SLAAC EUI-64 Address Format” article. The question was: “How come that the ipv6 address after the prefix is 21C:C4FF:FECF:4ED0 if the mac address is 00-1C-C4-CF-4E-D0?” Of course, we all know from the previous article that EUI-64 process is taking the interface MAC address (if that is an Ethernet interface) and it creates 64 bits Interface ID with it by shimming additional FFFE (16bits in hex) in between the MAC address bits. The reader was confused with an

IPv6 generated with EUI-64 has a strange bit inside

IDG Contributor Network: Enabling reconfigurable computing with field-programmable gate arrays

In my last column, I wrote about how the standard computing platform is being reimagined by reconfigurable computing and how hyper-scale cloud companies are leading the way with the use of SmartNICs and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Now, let’s look at why FPGAs are so powerful in this context, the major challenge of working with FPGAs, and how vendors and companies are addressing the challenge.Why FPGAs? What is it about FPGAs that makes them so different and yet so powerful compared to CPUs? One of the main reasons is that they are completely reconfigurable. Unlike ASICs, such as CPUs, the logic in the FPGA is not static but can be rearranged to support whatever workload you want to support. With an ASIC, you need to commit to a certain feature set up front, as this cannot be changed once the chip is produced. With an FPGA, you need to commit to the capabilities that the FPGA will provide with respect to available logic gates and Look-Up Tables (or LUTs), which are the tables that define how logic gates are combined to support a given function. But, what the FPGA does is entirely up to the FPGA solution developer Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Enabling reconfigurable computing with field-programmable gate arrays

In my last column, I wrote about how the standard computing platform is being reimagined by reconfigurable computing and how hyper-scale cloud companies are leading the way with the use of SmartNICs and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Now, let’s look at why FPGAs are so powerful in this context, the major challenge of working with FPGAs, and how vendors and companies are addressing the challenge.Why FPGAs? What is it about FPGAs that makes them so different and yet so powerful compared to CPUs? One of the main reasons is that they are completely reconfigurable. Unlike ASICs, such as CPUs, the logic in the FPGA is not static but can be rearranged to support whatever workload you want to support. With an ASIC, you need to commit to a certain feature set up front, as this cannot be changed once the chip is produced. With an FPGA, you need to commit to the capabilities that the FPGA will provide with respect to available logic gates and Look-Up Tables (or LUTs), which are the tables that define how logic gates are combined to support a given function. But, what the FPGA does is entirely up to the FPGA solution developer Continue reading

Worth Reading: An observatory for path transparency measurement

Though the end-to-end principle and the four-layer TCP/IP architecture suggest that what happens above the IPv4 or IPv6 header isn’t any of the network’s business, the widespread deployment of firewalls, network address translators, proxies, and other middleboxes at layers four and seven mean that, in practice, TCP usually works, UDP usually works, and for everything else, your mileage may vary. —Brian Trammell @ APNIC

Extreme completes Brocade acquisition, finishing a remarkable turnaround story

Extreme Networks today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Brocade’s data center switching, routing and analytics business, completing one of the most remarkable and unlikely turnaround stories in tech history.In the technology industry, rising from the ashes is very rare. Once a vendor, no matter how big, starts to slide, it generally has a bad outcome. Consider all the giants in networking alone that went from 800-pound gorillas to a puff of smoke seemingly overnight. Names including Lucent, Nortel, 3Com, Cabletron, Marconi and Fore Systems, once seemingly mighty powers that could never be toppled, are now all gone. Some vendors have avoided that fate by going private to revamp the company without the pressure of meeting Wall Street expectations every quarter. Recent examples of this are Polycom, Riverbed, Dell and Solar Winds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Extreme completes Brocade acquisition, finishing a remarkable turnaround story

Extreme Networks today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Brocade’s data center switching, routing and analytics business, completing one of the most remarkable and unlikely turnaround stories in tech history.In the technology industry, rising from the ashes is very rare. Once a vendor, no matter how big, starts to slide, it generally has a bad outcome. Consider all the giants in networking alone that went from 800-pound gorillas to a puff of smoke seemingly overnight. Names including Lucent, Nortel, 3Com, Cabletron, Marconi and Fore Systems, once seemingly mighty powers that could never be toppled, are now all gone. Some vendors have avoided that fate by going private to revamp the company without the pressure of meeting Wall Street expectations every quarter. Recent examples of this are Polycom, Riverbed, Dell and Solar Winds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Internet of things definitions: A handy guide to essential IoT terms

There’s an often-impenetrable alphabet soup of protocols, standards and technologies around the Internet of Things. Here’s our attempt to wipe away some of the fog, in the hopes of making the language of IoT just a little bit clearer.6LoWPAN – Possibly the most tortured acronym of even this distinguished group, 6LoWPAN is “IPv6 over low-power personal area networks.” Sheesh. The idea is to placate people that say it’s not really the “Internet” of Things without Internet protocol, so it’s essentially the IPv6 version of Zigbee and Z-wave.AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) – AMQP is an open source standard that allows disparate applications to talk to each other across any network and from any device. AMQP is a part of numerous commercial middleware integration offerings, including Microsoft’s Windows Azure Service Bus, VMware’s RabbitMQ, and IBM’s MQlight. It was initially developed by the financial sector for fast M2M communication, but has begun to be used in IoT projects.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Should IT operations be event-driven or data-driven?

An overview of events The essence of IT Operations Management for the last 30 years (ever since the advent of distributed systems in the mid 1980’s) has been to understand what is “normal” and what is “abnormal” and to then alert on the anomalies. Events are anomalies.Now events come from an incredible variety of sources. Every element of the entire stack (disks, storage arrays, network devices, servers, load balancers, firewalls, systems software, middleware and services and applications) are capable of sending events.Events tend to come in two broad forms. Hard faults and alarms related to failures in the environment (this disk drive has failed, this port on this switch has failed, this database server is down), and alerts that come from violations of thresholds set by humans on various monitoring systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Should IT operations be event-driven or data-driven?

An overview of events The essence of IT Operations Management for the last 30 years (ever since the advent of distributed systems in the mid 1980’s) has been to understand what is “normal” and what is “abnormal” and to then alert on the anomalies. Events are anomalies.Now events come from an incredible variety of sources. Every element of the entire stack (disks, storage arrays, network devices, servers, load balancers, firewalls, systems software, middleware and services and applications) are capable of sending events.Events tend to come in two broad forms. Hard faults and alarms related to failures in the environment (this disk drive has failed, this port on this switch has failed, this database server is down), and alerts that come from violations of thresholds set by humans on various monitoring systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

53% off InnoGear LED Solar Motion Sensor Outdoor Security Light, 4-Pack – Deal Alert

InnoGear's 24 LED solar light can automatically light up your home, yard, garage, driveway, patio, deck, or any other area that gets sun during the day. The motion sensor will be triggered when someone or something enters its 16 feet range with a 90 degree angle, for an increased sense of security around your home. These lights are waterproof and made of a durable ABS material. Right now a pack of 4 lights is discounted 53% down to just $27.99. See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Brooks Brothers Trades MPLS for SD-WAN in 278 Stores

Retailer says SD-WAN costs are about one-third the price of MPLS.

Study: Apps move rapidly to the cloud, data not so much

While the public cloud continues to grow at the expense of on-premises data centers, not everything that moves to the cloud stays there. Some data comes back, for a variety of reasons. And while apps are moving to the cloud at a rapid clip, data is not.That’s the findings of a recent report by 451 Research commissioned by Schneider Electric, entitled “Customer Insight: Future-Proofing Your Colocation Business.” It finds, for example, that global operational square footage hosting cloud infrastructure will grow at a 16 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2017 to 2020, while the amount of on-premises enterprise data center capacity will drop four percentage points, from 77 to 73 percent in the same time period.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Workloads are moving to the cloud, but also moving back on premises

While the public cloud continues to grow at the expense of on-premises data centers, not everything that moves to the cloud stays there. Some data comes back, for a variety of reasons. And while apps are moving to the cloud at a rapid clip, data is not.That’s the findings of a recent report by 451 Research commissioned by Schneider Electric, entitled “Customer Insight: Future-Proofing Your Colocation Business.” It finds, for example, that global operational square footage hosting cloud infrastructure will grow at a 16 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2017 to 2020, while the amount of on-premises enterprise data center capacity will drop four percentage points, from 77 to 73 percent in the same time period.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Workloads are moving to the cloud, but also moving back on premises

While the public cloud continues to grow at the expense of on-premises data centers, not everything that moves to the cloud stays there. Some data comes back, for a variety of reasons. And while apps are moving to the cloud at a rapid clip, data is not.That’s the findings of a recent report by 451 Research commissioned by Schneider Electric, entitled “Customer Insight: Future-Proofing Your Colocation Business.” It finds, for example, that global operational square footage hosting cloud infrastructure will grow at a 16 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2017 to 2020, while the amount of on-premises enterprise data center capacity will drop four percentage points, from 77 to 73 percent in the same time period.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Study: Apps move rapidly to the cloud, data not so much

While the public cloud continues to grow at the expense of on-premises data centers, not everything that moves to the cloud stays there. Some data comes back, for a variety of reasons. And while apps are moving to the cloud at a rapid clip, data is not.That’s the findings of a recent report by 451 Research commissioned by Schneider Electric, entitled “Customer Insight: Future-Proofing Your Colocation Business.” It finds, for example, that global operational square footage hosting cloud infrastructure will grow at a 16 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2017 to 2020, while the amount of on-premises enterprise data center capacity will drop four percentage points, from 77 to 73 percent in the same time period.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Behold the secure directional network connectivity of SuperWAN

Imagine you are Clark Kent, CIO of a large organization in Metropolis, and current trends in network disaggregation continue. As such, you must now provide connectivity to three Azure data centers for Office 365; 20 AWS sites located all over the world for a host of outsourced IT applications; four corporate data centers (older applications); 10 Equinix data centers for outsourced private use; direct access to 25 additional cloud service offerings for security reasons, including UC services, Salesforce.com and Concur, to your 500 branch sites; and 30,000 telecommuting employees.Look up in the sky! It’s a WAN! No, it’s a SD-WAN! No, it’s... SuperWAN!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is Your Network Optimized for WiFi Calling?

IDG Contributor Network: Behold the secure directional network connectivity of SuperWAN

Imagine you are Clark Kent, CIO of a large organization in Metropolis, and current trends in network disaggregation continue. As such, you must now provide connectivity to three Azure data centers for Office 365; 20 AWS sites located all over the world for a host of outsourced IT applications; four corporate data centers (older applications); 10 Equinix data centers for outsourced private use; direct access to 25 additional cloud service offerings for security reasons, including UC services, Salesforce.com and Concur, to your 500 branch sites; and 30,000 telecommuting employees.Look up in the sky! It’s a WAN! No, it’s a SD-WAN! No, it’s... SuperWAN!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is Your Network Optimized for WiFi Calling?

Lab Requirements for Ansible for Networking Engineers Online Course

One of the undergraduate students attending my Ansible for Networking Engineers online course got to the point where he wanted to start hands-on work and sent me a list of questions:

Do I have to buy a VIRL license to use your Ansible course materials? Or is VIRL in any Github repository? Is there a way to use your files in a free Tool like GNS3?

Let’s go through them one by one: