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Category Archives for "Networking"

ENOG 14 in Minsk

The 14th Eurasia Network Operator’s Group (ENOG 14) that was held on 9-10 October 2017 in Minsk, Belarus featured 234 participants from the host country, the Commonwealth of Independent States and Eastern Europe who came together to discuss operational issues and share expertise about evolving the Internet in the region. This was the second event of the year and was supported by the Internet Society, the RIPE NCC and hoster.by, with participation from our Deploy360 colleague Jan Žorž.

The first morning featured a couple of useful tutorials – one in Russian on DNSSEC operations that was led by Philipp Kulin and Dremuchij Les, and the other on Best Practices in IPv6 BGP led by Nathalie Trenaman and Massimiliano Stucchi (RIPE NCC).

The opening trio of talks focused on network security, starting with a general overview of how to operate a secure network from Ignas Bagdonas (Equinix). Kirill Malevanov (Selectel) then offered up his experiences of IPv4 prefix hijacking whereby network traffic is erroneously routed due to incorrect BGP announcements that are advertised either accidentally or deliberately. Alexander Azimov (Qrator Labs) followed-up with an overview of BGPsec that has recently been published as a RFC standard, and which aims to provide cryptographic verification Continue reading

Scotty Isn’t DevOps

I was listening to the most recent episode of our Gestalt IT On-Presmise IT Roundtable where Stephen Foskett mentioned one of our first episodes where we discussed whether or not DevOps was a disaster, or as I put it a “dumpster fire”. Take a listen here:

Around 13 minutes in, I have an exchange with Nigel Poulton where I mention that the ultimate operations guy is Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott of the USS Enterprise. Nigel countered that Scotty was the epitome of the DevOps mentality because his crazy ideas are what kept the Enterprise going. In this post, I hope to show that not only was Scott not a DevOps person, he should be considered the antithesis of DevOps.

Engineering As Operations

In the fictional biography of Mr. Scott, all he ever wanted to do was be an engineer. He begrudging took promotions but found ways to get back to the engine room on the Enterprise. He liked working starships. He hated building them. His time working on the transwarp drive of the USS Excelsior proved that in the third Star Trek film.

Scotty wasn’t developing new ideas to implement on the Enterprise. He didn’t spend his time figuring out Continue reading

25% off Dyson V6 Motor Head Cord-free Vacuum – Deal Alert

The powerful, portable and wire-free Dyson V6 Motorhead vacuum is currently discounted by a generous $100 on Amazon, where it averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 1,000 reviewers. The Dyson V6 Motorhead cordless vacuum has an overall cleaning performance that beats most full-size corded vacuums -- without the hassle of a cord. Compared to the upright market, the Dyson V6 Motorhead vacuum has one of the highest geometric average pickup performances, dust loaded, when hard floor, creviced hard floor, and carpet results are combined. Its Direct-drive cleaner head provides 75% more power on carpets than the Dyson V6 vacuum. The V6 Motorhead's typical list price has been reduced 25%, or $100, so you can pick it up for $299. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Helping to make LuaJIT faster

Helping to make LuaJIT faster

This is a guest post by Laurence Tratt, who is a programmer and Reader in Software Development in the Department of Informatics at King's College London where he leads the Software Development Team. He is also an EPSRC Fellow.

Programming language Virtual Machines (VMs) are familiar beasts: we use them to run apps on our phone, code inside our browsers, and programs on our servers. Traditional VMs are useful and widely used: nearly every working programmer is familiar with one or more of the “standard” Lua, Python, or Ruby VMs. However, such VMs are simplistic, containing only an interpreter (a simple implementation of a language). These often can’t run our programs as fast as we need; and, even when they can, they often waste huge amounts of server CPU time. We sometimes forget that servers consume a large, and growing, chunk of the world’s electricity output: slow language implementations are, quite literally, changing the world, and not in a good way.

More advanced VMs come with Just-In-Time (JIT) compilers (well known examples include LuaJIT, HotSpot (aka “the JVM”), PyPy, and V8). Such VMs observe a program’s run-time behaviour and use that to compile frequently executed parts of the program Continue reading

Another DMVPN Routing Question

One of my readers sent me an interesting DMVPN routing question. He has a design with a single DMVPN tunnel with two hubs (a primary and a backup hub), running BGP between hubs and spokes and IBGP session between hubs over a dedicated inter-hub link (he doesn’t want the hub-to-hub traffic to go over DMVPN).

Here's (approximately) what he's trying to do:

Read more ...

GE CIO: Machines will tell humans what to do, not the other way around

General Electric outfitted 650 British Petroleum (BP) oil rigs with sensors and software that report operational data to a central GE platform that analyzes it to optimize how the rigs run – making them 2 to 4% more efficient than before. General Electric Jim Fowler, CIO, General Electric  GE CIO Jim Fowler credits most of the improvement not with workers, but with machines. “Machines are telling people what to do more than people are telling machines what to do,” Fowler said at a meeting of the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) this week in New York. The sensors and accompanying software platform helped create incremental improvements in production and avoidance of downtime. He calls it the merging of information technology and operational technology to create value.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GE CIO: Machines will tell humans what to do, not the other way around

General Electric outfitted 650 British Petroleum (BP) oil rigs with sensors and software that report operational data to a central GE platform that analyzes it to optimize how the rigs run – making them 2 to 4% more efficient than before. General Electric Jim Fowler, CIO, General Electric  GE CIO Jim Fowler credits most of the improvement not with workers, but with machines. “Machines are telling people what to do more than people are telling machines what to do,” Fowler said at a meeting of the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) this week in New York. The sensors and accompanying software platform helped create incremental improvements in production and avoidance of downtime. He calls it the merging of information technology and operational technology to create value.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco AI-driven services help close widening IT skills gap

The drive to digital transformation is causing the world to move faster than ever. And it seems businesses are experiencing a huge case of “fear of missing out” (FOMO) and adopting new technologies at a dizzying pace.A few years ago, only a few companies had invested in the Internet of Things (IoT), software-defined networking (SDN), cloud services and DevOps. Today, they’re rapidly becoming the norm, and it’s difficult, if not impossible, for IT to maintain the current environment.Doing things manually no longer works. An experienced engineer used to be able to look at router logs, TCP dumps or other data and figure out what was going on and find the source of a problem. But now, so much data is being generated from so many sources that even the best engineers can’t keep up and know the network like they used to. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco AI-driven services help close widening IT skills gap

The drive to digital transformation is causing the world to move faster than ever. And it seems businesses are experiencing a huge case of “fear of missing out” (FOMO) and adopting new technologies at a dizzying pace.A few years ago, only a few companies had invested in the Internet of Things (IoT), software-defined networking (SDN), cloud services and DevOps. Today, they’re rapidly becoming the norm, and it’s difficult, if not impossible, for IT to maintain the current environment.Doing things manually no longer works. An experienced engineer used to be able to look at router logs, TCP dumps or other data and figure out what was going on and find the source of a problem. But now, so much data is being generated from so many sources that even the best engineers can’t keep up and know the network like they used to. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Huawei Q&A: Paving a Trusted Way for Cloud-based Transformation

Paving a Trusted Way for Cloud-based Transformation Q&A Thanks to all who joined us for the Huawei 2017 Infrastructure Security Report Webinar: Paving a Trusted Way for Cloud-based Transformation. During the webinar, Huawei discussed a fresh approach when it comes to your cloud journey that is characterized by the transition to cloud computing, mobile Internet, Big Data, and virtual networks. After the webinar, we... Read more →

5 Reasons to buy NetQ

It’s becoming clear that web-scale networking is the future of networking, and companies need the technology in order to remain competitive against cloud giants like Amazon. So, how do organizations looking to move on from traditional networking start to get their feet wet and bring web-scale efficiencies like automation and scalability to their operations?

That’s where NetQ steps in to save the day. NetQ is a telemetry-based fabric validation system that enables organizations to deploy & operate data center networks with the speed and agility of web-scale giants. Where network configuration used to be slow, require manual intervention, and cause network downtime, NetQ automates configuration and ensures that your network is behaving as intended. It’s preventative, proactive, and diagnostic, and should be the next product you incorporate into your data center.

Here are the top five benefits of NetQ:

  1. Save money and reduce downtime: Having a traditional, non automated system means that whenever there’s far more room for manual error. This leads to increased downtime, which costs businesses a lot of money. In fact, hourly downtime can cost up to $1 million or even $5 million! NetQ, however, is a preventative system that validates network behavior on a per-pod Continue reading