Network Automation: Lego Bricks and Death Stars

One of the challenges traditional networking engineers face when starting their network automation journey is the “build or buy” decision: should I use a plethora of small open-source or commercial tools and components and build my own solution, or should I buy a humongous platform from a reassuringly-expensive $vendor.

Most of us were used to buying platforms ranging from CiscoWorks to HP OpenView (oops, Business Technology Optimization Software) or now Cisco’s NSO, so it’s natural that we’re trying to map this confusing new world into old patterns, leading to interesting discussions like the one I had during one of my workshops:

Today Unlock An 80% Discount on Amazon Dash Buttons, Just $0.99 With Our Code – Deal Alert

Today and tomorrow only (11/9 & 11/10), Amazon Prime members (or those with a free trial: here you go) get Amazon Dash buttons for $0.99 instead of $4.99 when you use our code IDGDASH at checkout. Limit 3 buttons on the deal. And Amazon pays you a $4.99 credit after your first button push, so you sort of make money on this deal, don't you. Amazon Dash is a simple Wi-Fi connected gadget that lets you order your favorite things with just the push of a button. Keep it by your washing machine, your pet food, or in the bathroom closet. When you notice you're running low, just press the button and Amazon ships it right out. Each button gets tied to a specific product from Amazon's library of over 200 brands, in categories such as (click each category to see samples) household supplies, beverage & grocery, health & personal care, beauty products, pets, kids & baby, and more. Visit Amazon now, select up to 3 buttons and use IDGDASH to sink the price from $4.99/button to just $0.99. (Access this deal on Amazon)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft is working on tools to help people use cloud-based FPGAs

Earlier this year, Microsoft made a splash at its Ignite conference for IT professionals when it announced that it has been racking cards of programmable chips together with servers in its cloud data centers. The chips, called field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), can be reconfigured after being deployed to optimize them for particular applications such as networking and machine learning. Now, Microsoft is investing in tools that would allow customers to program the FPGAs, said Scott Guthrie, the executive vice president in charge of Microsoft's cloud and enterprise division, during a talk at the Structure conference in San Francisco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook and AT&T herald a new day of open networking

Modular and open-source are now the watchwords for network infrastructure, whether you’re delivering internet connections or VR cat videos.On Tuesday at the Structure 2016 conference in San Francisco, Facebook announced its most powerful modular data-center switch yet, and AT&T gave an update on its huge migration from dedicated servers to a software-based architecture.Once the same kind of hardware can do different things in a network, everyone gets more freedom to accomplish what needs to get done.That’s true for Facebook, which built on its own switch innovations and software stack in the new Backpack switch, and for AT&T, which says enterprises can now order and turn on services in 90 seconds instead of 90 days. Agility is also the key selling point for cloud companies like Google, which hopes its customers can ignore hardware altogether in a few years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook and AT&T herald a new day of open networking

Modular and open-source are now the watchwords for network infrastructure, whether you’re delivering internet connections or VR cat videos.On Tuesday at the Structure 2016 conference in San Francisco, Facebook announced its most powerful modular data-center switch yet, and AT&T gave an update on its huge migration from dedicated servers to a software-based architecture.Once the same kind of hardware can do different things in a network, everyone gets more freedom to accomplish what needs to get done.That’s true for Facebook, which built on its own switch innovations and software stack in the new Backpack switch, and for AT&T, which says enterprises can now order and turn on services in 90 seconds instead of 90 days. Agility is also the key selling point for cloud companies like Google, which hopes its customers can ignore hardware altogether in a few years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft patches 68 vulnerabilities, two actively exploited ones

Microsoft has patched 68 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Edge, Internet Explorer and SQL Server, two of which have already been exploited by attackers and three that have been publicly disclosed.The patches are covered in 14 security bulletins, one dedicated to Adobe Flash Player which is upgraded through Windows Update in Windows 10 and 8.1. Six of the bulletins are rated critical and eight are rated important.Administrators should prioritize the Windows patches in the MS16-135 bulletin, because they address a zero-day vulnerability that's already being exploited by a group of attackers known in the security industry as Fancy Bear, APT28 or Strontium.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft patches 68 vulnerabilities, two actively exploited ones

Microsoft has patched 68 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Edge, Internet Explorer and SQL Server, two of which have already been exploited by attackers and three that have been publicly disclosed.The patches are covered in 14 security bulletins, one dedicated to Adobe Flash Player which is upgraded through Windows Update in Windows 10 and 8.1. Six of the bulletins are rated critical and eight are rated important.Administrators should prioritize the Windows patches in the MS16-135 bulletin, because they address a zero-day vulnerability that's already being exploited by a group of attackers known in the security industry as Fancy Bear, APT28 or Strontium.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook Intros Backpack, an Open 100G Modular Switch

If there's a place you gotta go ... Backpack probably won't be much help.

BrandPost: Converging all communications over IP

With the changing rules of business and the competitive environment, businesses need a high performance network today – and for tomorrow. Many, though, are still operating separate voice and data networks that limit flexibility and inhibit agility.Carriers such as AT&T have long digitized voice traffic over their long-haul networks. On the AT&T network, the volume of data traffic exceeded voice traffic in 2000 as the Internet transformation took hold and businesses increasingly looked to data networks to handle voice, video, telepresence and other sophisticated applications such as virtual white boards.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft fixes Windows flaw that Google divulged

Microsoft today patched a Windows vulnerability that was disclosed just over a week ago by researchers from Alphabet Inc.'s Google.In one of several security updates -- 14 to be exact -- Microsoft fixed the bug in the Windows kernel drivers that Google security engineers had revealed on Oct. 31, 10 days after notifying Microsoft of the vulnerability.Microsoft credited Neel Mehta and Billy Leonard of Google's Threat Analysis Group for reporting the flaw. Last week, the two said that because the vulnerability was being actively exploited, a disclose-within-seven-days policy applied.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft fixes Windows flaw that Google divulged

Microsoft today patched a Windows vulnerability that was disclosed just over a week ago by researchers from Alphabet Inc.'s Google.In one of several security updates -- 14 to be exact -- Microsoft fixed the bug in the Windows kernel drivers that Google security engineers had revealed on Oct. 31, 10 days after notifying Microsoft of the vulnerability.Microsoft credited Neel Mehta and Billy Leonard of Google's Threat Analysis Group for reporting the flaw. Last week, the two said that because the vulnerability was being actively exploited, a disclose-within-seven-days policy applied.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Competing hackers dampen the power of Mirai botnets

The malware behind last month's massive distributed denial-of-service attack in the U.S. appears to be losing its potency. Ironically, hackers are to blame for diluting its power.  The malware known as Mirai -- which is now available on the internet -- has become a bit too popular in the hacking community, according to security firm Flashpoint.Competing hackers have all been trying to take advantage of Mirai to launch new DDoS attacks. To do so, that means infecting the poorly secured internet-connected devices, such as surveillance cameras, baby monitors, and DVRs, that the malware was designed to exploit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Competing hackers dampen the power of Mirai botnets

The malware behind last month's massive distributed denial-of-service attack in the U.S. appears to be losing its potency. Ironically, hackers are to blame for diluting its power.  The malware known as Mirai -- which is now available on the internet -- has become a bit too popular in the hacking community, according to security firm Flashpoint.Competing hackers have all been trying to take advantage of Mirai to launch new DDoS attacks. To do so, that means infecting the poorly secured internet-connected devices, such as surveillance cameras, baby monitors, and DVRs, that the malware was designed to exploit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google: Cloud won’t require customers to worry about infrastructure

Google infrastructure czar Urs Hölzle is focused on a cloud future where customers don't think about the infrastructure underlying all of the workloads they're running.In his view, one of the key advantages of the cloud is that customers can get the benefits of new hardware without having to completely rework their software."So that means you can have a million customers who move to that new hardware platform, not knowing they did," he said Tuesday at the Structure Conference in San Francisco. "Which means that you can really insert this new technology in a much faster cycle than you could if you did the same thing on-premises."That means companies can get quick, seamless improvements to performance, as opposed to an on-premises deployment. When operating their own data centers, companies must take the time to evaluate new hardware, and take the time to roll it out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Google quietly crosses a privacy line

When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.” And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and its other login accounts. But this summer, Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand – literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits “may be” combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools. —Propublica

The post Worth Reading: Google quietly crosses a privacy line appeared first on 'net work.

26% off Western Digital 2TB My Passport Ultra Portable External Hard Drive – Deal Alert

If you're looking for a ton of portable storage at a rock bottom price, you may want to consider this deal currently available on Amazon. Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars from nearly 6,200 people (read reviews), this Western Digital external hard drive features fast USB 3.0 connectivity, is compatible with both PC and Mac, has optional 256-bit AES hardware encryption, automatic cloud backup, and comes with a 3-year warranty. List price is $119.99 but with the current 26% discount you can buy it now for $89 (See it on Amazon). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs reach the cloud via IBM and Nimbix

Google, Amazon, and Facebook can magically recognize images and voices, thanks to superfast servers equipped with GPUs in their mega data centers.But not all companies can afford that level of resources for deep learning, so they turn to cloud services, where servers in remote data centers do the heavy lifting.Microsoft has made such cloud services trendy with Azure and is one of the few companies offering remote servers with GPUs, which excel in machine-learning tasks. But Azure uses older Nvidia GPUs, and it now has competition from Nimbix, which offers a cloud service with faster GPUs based on the Nvidia's latest Pascal architecture.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung embroiled in South Korean political scandal

South Korean investigators on Tuesday raided the offices of Samsung Electronics, as part of a probe into alleged political corruption at the highest levels of that country’s government.The administration of President Park Guen-hye – who is South Korea’s first female president, and the daughter of former President Park Chung-hee – has been rocked by allegations of influence peddling centered on a mysterious figure said to have influenced policy decisions in exchange for cash.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Samsung apologizes for the exploding Note7 with a full-page ad | Phenomenal Note7 Phablet Flame-out Timeline +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook Debuts ‘Backpack’ Switch Platform

Nov 2016 Patch Tuesday: Microsoft released 14 security updates, 6 rated critical

In addition to releasing 14 security updates on Election Day Patch Tuesday, six of which are rated critical, the Microsoft Security Response Center responded to requests for better access to security update information; Microsoft’s solution was to release a preview of its new Security Update Guide, “a single destination for security vulnerability information.”MSRC added, “Instead of publishing bulletins to describe related vulnerabilities, the new portal lets our customers view and search security vulnerability information in a single online database.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here