Cisco CEO Robbins: Wait til you see what’s in our innovation pipeline

It’s been a little over a year since Chuck Robbins took the reins at Cisco from the venerated John Chambers. In that time, the face and pace of the IT realm has transformed -- from Dell buying EMC and HP splitting up to the swift rise of IoT and harsh impact of security challenges. Robbins has embraced this rapid change and, he says in this wide-ranging interview, moved the company forward with relentless speed to address everything from hyperconvergence to application-centric infrastructures. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Industry First Micro-segmentation Cybersecurity Benchmark Released

The VMware NSX Micro-segmentation Cybersecurity Benchmark report has been released! As previewed in part six of the Micro-segmentation Defined – NSX Securing Anywhere blog series , independent cyber risk management advisor and assessor Coalfire was sponsored by VMware to create an industry first Micro-segmentation Cybersecurity Benchmark report. Coalfire conducted an audit of the VMware NSX micro-segmentation capabilities to develop this benchmark report detailing the efficacy of NSX as a security platform through a detailed “micro-audit” process, testing NSX against simulated zero-day threats.

Testing included five different network design patterns, and demonstrated how NSX micro-segmentation can provide stateful, distributed,  policy-based protection in environments regardless of network topology. Topologies included –

• Flat L2 network segments
• L2 and L3 networks with centralized virtual or physical routers, representative of typical data center rack implementations built on hybrid physical and network virtualization platform / distributed virtual switch (dVS)
• Networks with connection to other physical servers
• Overlay-based networks using the Distributed Firewalls (DFW) and Distributed Logical Routers (DLR)
• Physical VLAN and overlay-based networks using service insertion technologies running on dedicated VMs (in our case, Palo Alto Networks NextGen FW with Panorama)

Coalfire’s examination and testing of VMware NSX technology utilized simulated exploits that depict likely malware and Continue reading

Russia has previously tried to influence US elections, says spy chief

Russia has tried to influence U.S. elections since the 1960s during the Cold War, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said Tuesday.It's not clear whether the interference, which has a long history, aims to influence the outcome of the election or tries to sow seeds of doubt about the sanctity of the process, Clapper said in an interview to The Washington Post.The remarks are the closest the U.S. spy chief has come to suggesting that Russia could be involved in recent hacks of Democratic party organizations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Russia has previously tried to influence US elections, says spy chief

Russia has tried to influence U.S. elections since the 1960s during the Cold War, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said Tuesday. It's not clear whether the interference, which has a long history, aims to influence the outcome of the election or tries to sow seeds of doubt about the sanctity of the process, Clapper said in an interview to The Washington Post. The remarks are the closest the U.S. spy chief has come to suggesting that Russia could be involved in recent hacks of Democratic party organizations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WAN Impairment/WAN Emulator with WAN Bridge

Playing in the lab and want to impair a link with delay or loss?      I use WAN Bridge – its simple and free.

So say I’m testing an SD-WAN brownout/impairment avoidance solution in my lab.  For example, Cisco’s IWAN.  I’m going to need something to impair links with delay or loss.  I like WAN Bridge.  Why?  Because its simple, easy, and free.

There has been one thing I’ve struggled with in the past year about.  Every time I needed an impairment point this burned up 2 NICs on my UCS equipment.  Why? Cause I couldn’t seem to figure out how to load one NIC on a UCS as a trunk port with multiple VLANs on it and have multiple WAN bridges with just 1 trunk on a switch.

So that meant, for a recent CPOC that I was doing, if I really wanted 6 impairment points (red circles in diagram below) I was going to need to eat up 12 NICs on my UCS.

There had to be a better way…..

My friend, David Prall, was convinced it “should” work. I was equally convinced that I had tried it before and Continue reading

Larry Ellison says Amazon is ’20 years behind’ Oracle

Larry Ellison continued his assault on Amazon during his second keynote address at Oracle OpenWorld on Tuesday."Amazon Web Services are simply not optimized for the Oracle Database. I'll go further than that: Amazon Web Services aren't optimized for their own databases either, as you will see," he said, while showing off a set of benchmarks that showed Oracle Database performing several times faster on Oracle's cloud than it does on Amazon's cloud. "It doesn't get better, it gets worse."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

14% off iHome iPL23 White Clock Radio with Lightning Dock, Support for iPhone 7/7+ – Deal Alert

iHome's iPL23 is compatible with iPhones 5, 6 and 7 (including Plus models), features premium speakers, a Lightning charging dock, FM radio, and alarm clock in one compact device. This handy radio clock charges Lightning-capable iPhone and iPod devices, while letting you wake or sleep to your favorite songs, podcasts, audio books or FM radio station. Gradual wake/sleep function slowly increases or decreases volume as you drift off, or come to. A USB port allows for simultaneous charging of your iPad or Apple Watch as well. The iPL23 in white has been discounted 14% from $69.95 to $59.95. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

D-Wave will ship a 2,000-qubit quantum computer next year

Forget PCs and servers: D-Wave Systems is looking into the future with its quantum computer, up to 1,000 times faster than an earlier model.The company will start shipping a quantum computer with 2,000 qubits, twice the size of its current 1,000-qubit D-Wave 2X. The D-Wave 2X is considered one of the most advanced computers in the world today.The 2,000-qubit quantum computer will be 500 to 1000 times faster than its predecessor, said Jeremy Hilton, senior vice president of systems at D-Wave.An even larger quantum computer based on a whole new processor design will come out two to three years after that, Hilton said.Today's PCs and servers could ultimately be replaced by a quantum computer, which has been researched for decades. Beyond D-Wave, companies like IBM are also building quantum computers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Receive alerts when your data is leaked with this tool

If you’re worried that your data might end up in the hands of a hacker, one site is offering a free service that can give you a head’s up.Baltimore-based Terbium Labs has come up with a product called Matchlight, which crawls the dark recesses of the internet, looking for stolen data that’s circulating on the black market.On Tuesday, Terbium Labs opened the product to the public. That means any user can sign up to have five of their personal records monitored for free.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Receive alerts when your data is leaked with this tool

If you’re worried that your data might end up in the hands of a hacker, one site is offering a free service that can give you a head’s up.Baltimore-based Terbium Labs has come up with a product called Matchlight, which crawls the dark recesses of the internet, looking for stolen data that’s circulating on the black market.On Tuesday, Terbium Labs opened the product to the public. That means any user can sign up to have five of their personal records monitored for free.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

There are just 28 internet domains on North Korea’s DNS

The internet in North Korea is an unsurprisingly small and circumscribed place – there are just 28 TLDs on the entirety of the country’s .kp domain, compared to almost 335 million globally.A misconfiguration early Tuesday morning allowed outsiders to get a rare look into the hermit kingdom’s vestigial online infrastructure, which is connected to the broader internet via China. It was detected by the TLDR Project, an automated, ongoing effort to track all global zone transfer requests among DNS providers, and log them to GitHub.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Why this hospital is moving to Amazon’s cloud + Be careful not to fall for these ransomware situationsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Black Friday 2016 tech ads will be leaking before you know it

Black Friday 2016 is still about 2 months away, but the first ad leaks touting bargains on everything from the latest iPhones to tablets, TVs and PCs could surface by the end of next month. Look for Amazon to once again push the definition of Black Friday, with sales starting at the beginning of November (hey, they've already had Prime Day).FROM THE ARCHIVES: 40+ jaw dropping Black Friday 2015 tech dealsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: laptop killing USB stick

For just a few bucks, you can pick up a USB stick that destroys almost anything that it’s plugged into. Laptops, PCs, televisions, photo booths — you name it. Once a proof-of-concept, the pocket-sized USB stick now fits in any security tester’s repertoire of tools and hacks, says the Hong Kong-based company that developed it. It works like this: when the USB Kill stick is plugged in, it rapidly charges its capacitors from the USB power supply, and then discharges — all in the matter of seconds. —ZDNet

The post Worth Reading: laptop killing USB stick appeared first on 'net work.

Apple delivers free macOS Sierra upgrade

Apple today released Sierra, 2016's edition of the Mac's operating system. Sierra is the first under the "macOS" label Apple introduced in June when it retired the older "OS X" and synchronized the Mac's moniker with other operating systems from the Cupertino, Calif. company, like the iPhone's iOS and the Apple TV's tvOS. Also known as macOS 10.12, Sierra's launch followed the first "golden master," or GM build, by two weeks. Sierra was available Tuesday for free download from the Mac App Store. Although the upgrade was not immediately visible on the front page of the e-mart, a search using sierra quickly located the 4.8GB installation file.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle’s infrastructure business focuses on bare metal to go after AWS

Larry Ellison made a splash this week when he said that Oracle would give Amazon a run for its money in the cloud. Then, the company outlined the pillar of the tech titan's infrastructure offering: beefy, bare-metal servers running in the cloud. That's right: Oracle is going after a market that's full of virtualized workloads with servers that clock in with a whopping 36 physical CPU cores, according to Vice President of Engineering Don Johnson. Rather than starting from the low end of the infrastructure market and working its way up, Oracle is starting at the top and working its way down. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ericsson Shifts Strategy to CTO Ewaldsson, North America to Quereshi

Rima Quereshi will handle Ericsson's partnership with Cisco.

Cloud Migration Is Making Performance Monitoring Crucial

More than half of surveyed respondents are actively looking at APM and NPM systems.

IDG Contributor Network: Data breaches: This time it’s more personal

Summer 2016 was not a good time for data breaches.First, news broke that the Democratic National Committee was hacked, leading to the resignation of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and driving a wedge between Democratic Party members.Later, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) announced that Russian hackers had illegally accessed its Anti-Doping Administration and Management System (ADAMS) database, leaking confidential medical information for U.S. athletes, including Simone Biles and Serena Williams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Data breaches: This time it’s more personal

Summer 2016 was not a good time for data breaches.First, news broke that the Democratic National Committee was hacked, leading to the resignation of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and driving a wedge between Democratic Party members.Later, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) announced that Russian hackers had illegally accessed its Anti-Doping Administration and Management System (ADAMS) database, leaking confidential medical information for U.S. athletes, including Simone Biles and Serena Williams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can I2RS Keep Up? (I2RS Performance)

What about I2RS performance?

The first post in this series provides a basic overview of I2RS; there I used a simple diagram to illustrate how I2RS interacts with the RIB—

One question that comes to mind when looking at a data flow like this (or rather should come to mind!) is what kind of performance this setup will provide. Before diving into the answer to this question, though, perhaps it’s important to ask a different question—what kind of performance do you really need? There are (at least) two distinct performance profiles in routing—the time it takes to initially start up a routing peer, and the time it takes to converge on a single topology and/or route change. In reality, this second profile can be further broken down into multiple profiles (with or without an equal cost path, with or without a loop free alternate, etc.), but for our purposes I’ll just deal with the two broad categories here.

If your first instinct is to say that initial convergence time doesn’t matter, go back and review the recent Delta Airlines outage carefully. If you are still not convinced initial convergence time matters, go back and reread what you can Continue reading