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Category Archives for "Networking"

Pure Storage debuts denser blade-based flash storage system

Flash-based storage vendor Pure Storage is targeting companies using disk-based mass storage market with a new model of blade server, dubbed FlashBlade E, that provides lower price points for petabyte-scale systems thanks to a tweak to the company’s FlashBlade architecture.Pure Storage’s existing FlashBlade S system is designed for performance – each blade in the 5U chassis of the system has built-in compute and networking, which are interconnected and combined into a single namespace for ease of use. (Multiple chassis can be connected together and will work similarly via an external fabric module, or XFM.)That’s great for high-performance computing (HPC) and other applications that need particularly high performance, but Pure Storage wants to bring its all-flash approach to the world of unstructured storage, where spinning discs are still widely used.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM’s mainframe operating system upgrade will embrace AI

IBM said this week it will soon roll out an AI-infused, hybrid-cloud oriented version of its z/OS mainframe operating system.Expected in the third quarter, z/OS 3.1 will  support technologies intended to enable deployment of AI workloads co-located with z/OS applications, IBM said in a customer preview letter.The new OS will work best with the newest version of the Big Iron, the z16, but it will support z14 models and above, IBM says.The z16 includes an AI accelerator built onto its core Telum processor that can do 300 billion deep-learning inferences per day with one millisecond latency and includes what IBM calls a quantum-safe system to protect organizations from anticipated quantum-based security threats.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM’s mainframe operating system upgrade will embrace AI

IBM said this week it will soon roll out an AI-infused, hybrid-cloud oriented version of its z/OS mainframe operating system.Expected in the third quarter, z/OS 3.1 will  support technologies intended to enable deployment of AI workloads co-located with z/OS applications, IBM said in a customer preview letter.The new OS will work best with the newest version of the Big Iron, the z16, but it will support z14 models and above, IBM says.The z16 includes an AI accelerator built onto its core Telum processor that can do 300 billion deep-learning inferences per day with one millisecond latency and includes what IBM calls a quantum-safe system to protect organizations from anticipated quantum-based security threats.To read this article in full, please click here

Day Two Cloud 184: Think Multiplatform, Not Multicloud

Today on Day Two Cloud we put on our thinking caps about platforms, cloud, and multicloud. The last ten years or so has been a push for "cloud-first," but any wholesale approach to "X-first" (cloud, edge, digital, etc.) is problematic. We discuss why. We also explore strategies for CTOs, IT managers, and engineers on how to grapple with cloud strategy, implementation, and operation.

The post Day Two Cloud 184: Think Multiplatform, Not Multicloud appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Day Two Cloud 184: Think Multiplatform, Not Multicloud

Today on Day Two Cloud we put on our thinking caps about platforms, cloud, and multicloud. The last ten years or so has been a push for "cloud-first," but any wholesale approach to "X-first" (cloud, edge, digital, etc.) is problematic. We discuss why. We also explore strategies for CTOs, IT managers, and engineers on how to grapple with cloud strategy, implementation, and operation.

The Arrival of AI Networking at Petascale

The AI industry has taken us by storm, bringing supercomputers, algorithms, data processing and training methods into the mainstream. The rapid ramp of large language inference models combined with Open AI's ChatGPT has captured the interest and imagination of people worldwide. Generative AI applications promise benefits to just about every industry. New types of AI applications are expected to improve productivity on a wide range of tasks, be it marketing image creation for ads, video games or customer support. These generative large language models with over 100 billion parameters are advancing the power of AI applications and deployments. Furthermore, Moore's law is pushing silicon geometries of TPU/GPU processors that connect 100 to 400 to 800 gigabits of network throughput with parallel processing and bandwidth capacity to match.

HS041 Intelligent Network Automation With BackBox – Sponsored

We talk a lot about automation and orchestration and how they can change your network strategy and smooth network workflows. But not everybody wants to sit around writing code and building test labs. Greg and Johna talk with Josh Stephens and Chanoch Marmorstein from sponsor BackBox about its network automation software, how it fits into a network operations strategy, and how BackBox focuses on the network engineer.

The post HS041 Intelligent Network Automation With BackBox – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers.

HS041 Intelligent Network Automation With BackBox – Sponsored

We talk a lot about automation and orchestration and how they can change your network strategy and smooth network workflows. But not everybody wants to sit around writing code and building test labs. Greg and Johna talk with Josh Stephens and Chanoch Marmorstein from sponsor BackBox about its network automation software, how it fits into a network operations strategy, and how BackBox focuses on the network engineer.

Network simulators for high-school teachers

Educators in secondary schools, who teach students aged 14 to 18, have unique needs for a network simulator. Most would require a simulator or emulator that offers a web interface so students can access it from a web browser running on a Chromebook or iPad. Ideally, the simulator should enable educators to demonstrate fundamental networking topics without requiring students to spend too much time learning to use the tool or to configure virtual network appliances in the tool.

Most of the projects listed below animate the basic functions of a communications network in a way that is easier for young students to understand. While they may not be interesting to a networking professional, these network simulators solve problems that educators may have.

Free and open-source simulators

The following set of network simulators is free and open source. The first two projects, CS4G and ENS, are available via a web browser. The last open-source project, Filius, is a standalone application that must be installed on a student’s computer.

CS4G Network Simulator

CS4G Netsim is a Web-based network simulator for teaching hacking to high-schoolers. It demonstrates some basic security issues that Internet users should be aware of.

The source code Continue reading

Feedback: Microsoft Azure Networking

Numerous networking engineers found my cloud webinars (AWS, Azure) useful when preparing for a cloud migration project. Here’s what one of them wrote:

We are beginning to migrate some of our offerings to Microsoft Azure and I need to get up to speed with Azure products. I found this webinar very informative, and Ivan explained the concepts in a clear manner and easy to follow along. I would recommend watching these webinars and then read Microsoft documentation to get a thorough understanding.

Want to have some hands-on work sprinkled on top of that? You’ll find deployment examples in the Networking in Public Clouds GitHub repository.

Ask JJX: What About the KeePass Vulnerability?

In the midst of LastPass’s repeated barrage of breaches, a pretty serious vulnerability was found in another common password manager — KeePass. This slid under most of our radars, including mine. Professor Cyber Naught of the Mastodons suggested I comment on the situation. I’m so glad he brought this up, because it highlights several critical […]

The post Ask JJX: What About the KeePass Vulnerability? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Nvidia plans to make its system that powers ChatGPT available in the cloud

Nvidia recently announced fourth-quarter earnings, and all things considered, they weren’t that bad. They beat expectations even though sales were down. There was no panic on the conference call, no layoffs.But amid all the talk about earnings and projections for 2023, CEO Jensen Huang dropped a surprise bombshell onto the earnings call with the announcement of DGX Cloud. It’s a deal to make its DGX systems available through multiple cloud providers, rather than installing the the necessary hardware on premises.Nvidia sells GPU-based compute systems called DGX Pods. The same processors, networking, and Nvidia’s comprehensive AI Enterprise software stack from the Pods will be available through your browser, rather than sinking six or seven figures into hardware for your data center.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco simplifies cloud-management licensing

Looking to simplify the way enterprises buy its software, Cisco has streamlined the licensing scheme for its Intersight cloud-operations management platform.The SaaS-delivered Intersight package manages a variety of systems from Kubernetes containers to applications, servers, and hyperconverged environments from a single location.Cisco said this week it was moving from a four-tiered licensing menu to one with two tiers named Essentials and Advantage.Under Essentials, Cisco provides full lifecycle operations with proactive support and service for use cases including managing server profiles/policies, managing firmware updates, and proactive health monitoring and security advisories, Mahesh Natarajan, senior director of product management with Cisco’s Compute group, wrote in a blog. To read this article in full, please click here

What’s new in Calico Enterprise 3.16: Egress gateway on AKS, Service Graph optimizations, and more!

We are excited to announce the early preview of Calico Enterprise 3.16. This latest release extends the active security platform’s support for egress access controls, improves the usability of network-based threat defense features, and scales visualization of Kubernetes workloads to 100s of namespaces. Let’s go through some of the highlights of this release.

Egress gateways for Microsoft Azure and AKS

Egress gateways allow you to identify the source of traffic at the namespace or pod level when it leaves a Kubernetes cluster to communicate to external resources. This makes it highly beneficial for security teams to apply access controls to specific traffic instead of opening up a larger set of IP addresses. Calico Enterprise 3.16 has added egress gateway support for Microsoft Azure and AKS in addition to our support for AWS and EKS. Check out our documentation, Configure egress gateways, Azure, to learn more.

Operator-managed deployments of egress gateways

Calico Enterprise now includes operator-managed deployments of egress gateways. This reduces operational overhead and eliminates additional steps required during software upgrades. With the Tigera Operator, egress gateways will always be automatically upgraded.

UI for workload-based web application firewalls (WAF)

Calico Enterprise’s unique workload-centric web application Continue reading

How Rust and Wasm power Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1

How Rust and Wasm power Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1
How Rust and Wasm power Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1

On April 1, 2018, Cloudflare announced the 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver. Over the years, we added the debug page for troubleshooting, global cache purge, 0 TTL for zones on Cloudflare, Upstream TLS, and 1.1.1.1 for families to the platform. In this post, we would like to share some behind the scenes details and changes.

When the project started, Knot Resolver was chosen as the DNS resolver. We started building a whole system on top of it, so that it could fit Cloudflare's use case. Having a battle tested DNS recursive resolver, as well as a DNSSEC validator, was fantastic because we could spend our energy elsewhere, instead of worrying about the DNS protocol implementation.

Knot Resolver is quite flexible in terms of its Lua-based plugin system. It allowed us to quickly extend the core functionality to support various product features, like DoH/DoT, logging, BPF-based attack mitigation, cache sharing, and iteration logic override. As the traffic grew, we reached certain limitations.

Lessons we learned

Before going any deeper, let’s first have a bird’s-eye view of a simplified Cloudflare data center setup, which could help us understand what we are going to talk Continue reading

How Secure Is Your API Gateway?

Quick, how many APIs does your organization use? We’re talking for internal products, for external services and even for infrastructure management such as Amazon’s S3 object storage or Kubernetes. If you don’t know the answer, you are hardly alone. In survey after survey, CIOs and CISOs admit they don’t have an accurate catalog of all their APIs. Yet statistics shared by Mark O’Neill, chief of research for software engineering at Gartner, in 2022: 98% of organizations use or are planning to use internal APIs, up from 88% in 2019 94% of organizations use or are planning to use public APIs provided by third parties, up from 52% in 2019 90% of organizations use or are planning to use private APIs provided by partners, up from 68% in 2019 80% of organizations provide or are planning to provide publicly exposed APIs, up from 46% in 2019 API Gateways Remain Critical Infrastructure Components To deal with this rapid growth and the management and security challenges it creates, CIOs,

Alternatives to IBGP within Multihomed Sites

Two weeks ago I explained why you might want to run IBGP between CE-routers on a multihomed site. One of the blog readers didn’t like my ideas:

In such a small deployment I assume that both ISPs offer transit, so that both CEs would get a default route from their upstream.

In this case I would not iBGP the CEs together but have HSRP running on the two CEs and track the uplink (interface and/of BGP session) to determine the active gateway.

Let’s see what could possibly go wrong with that design.