Cisco Enterprise NFV, DNA, IWAN and a bunch of other acronyms

So Cisco had some big announcements today. Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA).  Ohhh, sounds fancy. Let me put on something a little more formal before I get too involved in the post. So what are all these awesome acronyms, you may be wondering? Well basically we start with DNA, which is the overall ecosystem that […]

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NTT Combines SDN & Data Centers for Cloud Offering

IT departments are going crazy with all the disparate cloud apps.

Latest attack against TLS shows the pitfalls of intentionally weakening encryption

For the third time in less than a year, security researchers have found a method to attack encrypted Web communications, a direct result of weaknesses that were mandated two decades ago by the U.S. government.These new attacks show the dangers of deliberately weakening security protocols by introducing backdoors or other access mechanisms like those that law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community are calling for today.The field of cryptography escaped the military domain in the 1970s and reached the general public through the works of pioneers like Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, and ever since, the government has tried to keep it under control and limit its usefulness in one way or another.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The IoT liability jumble

The Internet of Things (IoT) is disrupting just about every industry. But it may get disrupted itself as the nation’s legal and regulatory system slowly catches up with the massive security and privacy risks it creates. Not anytime soon, however. “Work in progress” was the operative phrase at a panel session at this week’s RSA conference titled, “Flaming toasters to crashing cars – the Internet of Things and mass liability.” Most of the problem with establishing legal liability surrounding the IoT is that while its growth is regularly called “explosive,” there is a lot more, and bigger, exploding yet to come. The number of connected things is expected to expand so exponentially that one of the panelists, Jay Brudz, an attorney at Drinker Biddle & Reath, declared that “Internet of Things” is already a “dumb phrase. In years to come, it’s going to be everything but computers with a human interface, so it’s just going to be the Internet,” he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Energy Dept. sets 9 finalists for $2.25M wave energy prize

The US Department of Energy said it has whittled 92 teams down to 9 finalists for its competition that aims to double the current amount of energy captured from ocean waves.Each of the finalists in the Wave Energy Prize and two alternates will now receive seed DOE funding to develop a 1/20th-scale model of their deep water wave energy converter (WEC) devices. The final round of testing will take place this summer at the nation's most advanced wave-making facility—the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Maneuvering and Seakeeping Basin in Carderock, Maryland.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Energy Dept. sets 9 finalists for $2.25M wave energy prize

The US Department of Energy said it has whittled 92 teams down to 9 finalists for its competition that aims to double the current amount of energy captured from ocean waves.Each of the finalists in the Wave Energy Prize and two alternates will now receive seed DOE funding to develop a 1/20th-scale model of their deep water wave energy converter (WEC) devices. The final round of testing will take place this summer at the nation's most advanced wave-making facility—the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Maneuvering and Seakeeping Basin in Carderock, Maryland.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arrest of Facebook exec, now freed, stirs debate in Brazil

The arrest of Diego Dzodan, the vice president of Facebook for Latin America, by Brazilian federal police in Sao Paulo has stirred up controversy in the country.The executive was arrested on Tuesday morning after Facebook, the parent company of WhatsApp, declined to follow the orders of a court in the state of Sergipe to turn over information on application usage by people accused of drug trafficking.After the arrest, the company filed a habeas corpus petition that was reviewed and granted by a judge in the highest state court in Sergipe early Wednesday, leading to Dzodan’s release, according to local media.The police, however, acted appropriately in the case, according to Frederico Meinberg Ceroy, the president of the Brazilian Digital Law Institute. Facebook and WhatsApp, which has no official representation in the country, are the only two large technology companies that do not cooperate with law enforcement in Brazil in such cases, he pointed out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Key database considerations for hybrid cloud

RSA: Geolocation shows just how dead privacy is

A regular refrain within the online security community is that privacy is dead. David Adler’s talk at RSA Tuesday, titled “Where you are is who you are: Legal trends in geolocation privacy and security,” was about one of the major reasons it is so, so dead. To paraphrase Adler, founder of the Adler Law Group, it is not so much that in today’s connected world there is a single, malevolent Big Brother watching you. It’s that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of “little brothers” eagerly watching you so they can sell you stuff more effectively. Collectively, they add up to an increasingly omniscient big brother. “Everything is gathering location data – apps, mobile devices and platforms that you use,” he said. “Often it is being done without your knowledge or consent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Scientists working to create book-sized living, breathing supercomputers

If you want to change the world, it might not occur to you to start by getting drunk. At least that’s how it happened for an idea that led to a tiny biological computer which will reportedly be morphed into a “living, breathing supercomputer” about the size of a book.“We’ve managed to create a very complex network in a very small area,” said McGill University’s Dan Nicolau, Chair of the Department of Bioengineering. “This started as a back of an envelope idea, after too much rum I think, with drawings of what looked like small worms exploring mazes.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Slicing and Dicing Flooding Domains (1)

This week two different folks have asked me about when and where I would split up a flooding domain (IS-IS) or area (OSPF); I figured a question asked twice in one week is worth a blog post, so here we are…

Before I start on the technical reasons, I’m going to say something that might surprise long time readers: there is rarely any technical reason to split a single flooding domain into multiple flooding domains. That said, I’ll go through the technical reasons anyway.

There are really three things to think about when considering how a flooding domain is performing:

• SPF run time
• flooding frequency
• LSDB size

Let’s look at the third issue first, the database size. This is theoretically an issue, but it’s really only an issue if you have a lot of nodes and routes. I can’t ever recall bumping up against this problem, but what if I did? I’d start by taking the transit links out of the database entirely—for instance, by configuring all the interfaces that face actual host devices as passive interfaces (which you should be doing anyway!), and configuring IS-IS to advertise just the passive interfaces. You can pull similar tricks in OSPF. Continue reading

Cisco Extends NFV To The Enterprise

IDG Contributor Network: Microsoft defends PCs, post network penetration

This week at the RSA security conference, Microsoft announced the succinctly named Windows Defender Advanced Threat Detection product. The solutions (which really needs a better or at least shorter name) is focused on helping an organization's IT department detect threats to Windows 10 machines after the perimeter network has been penetrated. This is an important and pragmatic recognition of the fact that despite most solutions focusing on perimeter security, sometimes the outside line gets broken and hackers find a way in.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Engineers Enterprise Genome for Software

 SAN DIEGO – Cisco this week introduced a software-driven architecture designed to extend policy throughout an enterprise wired and wireless network, from branch to edge to core.Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture (DNA) is a blueprint for building an enterprise network with virtualization, automation, analytics, cloud service management and programmability for ease of operation and management. It is delivered through Cisco ONE software licensing on a variety of Cisco platforms, and is anchored by the company’s APIC-Enterprise Module SDN controller, which has been slow to emerge from development and trials.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Acquiring Leaba, Probably to Build More Router ASICs

Leaba's founders could be the main attraction.

Google CSO peers out from the fishbowl to talk security

Google’s Vice President Security and Privacy Engineering Gerhard Eschelbeck spoke yesterday to a packed house at the RSA Security Conference about his professional life. Google operates in a fishbowl because its business model depends on both consumers, enterprise users and privacy regulators trusting it to store vast amounts of data in its data centers. Given this scrutiny and gigantic computing scale makes Google intriguing. It’s a benchmark establishing best security practices.Eschelbeck’s stark mission statement “to protect users’ data” speaks of the alignment of his security group with the company’s cloud services and advertising business model.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Beyond ‘Neutrality’

I have some bad news: the published literature on ‘net neutrality’ fails to grasp the stochastic nature of broadband and its implications. This means that the relationship of traffic management to QoE is universally misunderstood and/or misrepresented. -via circleid

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Apple formally appeals judge’s iPhone unlocking order

Just in case its motion to vacate wasn't enough, Apple late Tuesday filed an appeal of a California judge's order requiring it to help the FBI defeat the password protection on the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino mass shooters.Apple's lawyers filed the appeal "in an abundance of caution," to cover the possibility that an appeal is the most appropriate way to oppose Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym's Feb. 16 order, they said in a court filing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Devops for Networking Forum in Santa Clara

Normally, I would be writing this a few weeks ago, but sometimes the world just takes the luxury of time away from you.  In this case, I couldn’t be happier though as I’m about to part of something that I believe is going to be really really amazing.  This event is really a testimony to Brent Salisbury and John Willis’s commitment to community and their relentless pursuit of trying to evolve the whole industry, bringing along as many of the friends they’ve made along the way as possible. 

Given the speaker list, I don’t believe there’s been any event in recent ( or long term!) memory that has such an amazing list of speakers. The most amazing part is that this event was really put together in the last month!!!! 

If you’re in the bay area, you should definitely be there. If you’re not in the area, you should buy a plane ticket as you might not ever get a chance like this again. 

DevOps Forum for Networking

From the website

previously known as DevOps4Networks is an event started in 2014 by John Willis and Brent Salisbury to begin a discussion on what Devops Continue reading

CCDE – Inter AS L3 VPNs

Introduction

Sometimes a customer needs a L3 VPN between two locations where the same SP is not present. This can be on a national or international basis. It would be possible to buy an Internet circuit and run an overlay such as DMVPN but what if the customer wants to buy a MPLS VPN circuit?

The customer could buy a VPN from SP1 in location1 and a VPN from SP2 in location2. The two SPs would then have to exchange traffic somehow to make the customer circuit end to end. The concept is shown in the following topology.

The customer connects to the PE of each of the SPs. The SPs need to interconnect at some common point, either through a public peering place such as an IX or with an private interconnect at a common location. The routers that connect to each other are called autonomous system border routers (ASBR). There are three main options and a fourth option which combines two of the others.

Inter-AS Option A

Option A is the most simple of the options to interconnect the ASBRs. Each customer VRF requires either a physical interface or more likely a subinterface. Option A has Continue reading