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Category Archives for "Networking"

Announcing Some Exciting Updates to Our Data Center, Routing & Switching, and Collaboration Materials!

CCIE Candidates! We’re excited to announce a few updates to our CCIE Data Center, R&S, and Collaboration product portfolios!

Data Center:

1) Our Volume 1 WB (and DSG) has been overhauled. Jason now has all labs that can be done on our Technology Racks covered in this book. It’s very thorough and covers everything you’ll see on the lab from a technology basis.

2) Our Volume 2 WB (and DSG) has had a MAJOR overhaul. Quite a few updates, changes and we’re happy that all 5 labs are very up-to-date. This workbook consists of 5 Mock Labs that must be done on our Full-Scale Mock Lab Racks – which have been booked solid for several months.

3) We have just finished the addition of 5 more Full-Scale Mock Lab racks! First, they’ve cost us a fortune, but our commitment to you is to have the resources you need to prepare for your lab. There are timeslots ready and open NOW if you need time on these Full-Scale Mock Lab racks.

Routing & Switching:

1) JP has finalized an updated R&S V5 Volume 1 WB (and DSG), and it’s posted and available now.

2) We anticipate having our R&S V5 Continue reading

PlexxiPulse—Join Our Webinar Series

Thanks to hyperconvergence and virtualization, storage and compute have rapidly evolved over the last decade. Conversely, network architectures have remained virtually unchanged. Here at Plexxi, we believe it’s networking’s turn to innovate through consolidation and convergence. On August 27 from 2:00-3:30 p.m. EST, we’ll be hosting a webinar on how the network can finally keep pace with storage and compute. We’ll take thirty minutes to discuss application centric networking, convergence and how to optimize networks for east/west traffic. You can register here, we hope you can make it.

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Enjoy!

Tech.co: What Converged Infrastructure Means for Today’s Businesses
By Rick Delgado
Many organizations are currently undergoing a significant shift in how they operate, particular when it comes to IT departments. The idea is to slowly but surely move away from the traditional data center technologies that have been in use for years. With the traditional data center, operations have gotten quite complex and require expert IT personnel to keep up with the ever increasing workload. The complicated infrastructure and large teams simply weren’t compatible with business goals in many ways, which Continue reading

NASA touts real technologies highlighted in imminent ‘The Martian’ flick

The upcoming movie about a NASA astronaut left for dead on Mars in the 2030s features a number of technologies NASA says are currently under development.NASA said the book and the movie, “The Martian,” merges fictional and factual chronicles about Mars, building upon the work NASA and others have done exploring Mars and moving it into a future where NASA astronauts are regularly traveling to the red planet to live and explore.+More on Network World: 15 reasons why Mars is one hot, hot, hot planet+Indeed, as Matt Damon, who plays the central character Mark Watney in the movie says: “I have to make water and grow food on a planet where nothing grows” to basically stretch a couple months worth of food and supplies into four years becomes a modern day MacGyver in a spacesuit and uses some amazing technologies to try to survive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA touts real technologies highlighted in imminent ‘The Martian’ flick

The upcoming movie about a NASA astronaut left for dead on Mars in the 2030s features a number of technologies NASA says are currently under development.NASA said the book and the movie, “The Martian,” merges fictional and factual chronicles about Mars, building upon the work NASA and others have done exploring Mars and moving it into a future where NASA astronauts are regularly traveling to the red planet to live and explore.+More on Network World: 15 reasons why Mars is one hot, hot, hot planet+Indeed, as Matt Damon, who plays the central character Mark Watney in the movie says: “I have to make water and grow food on a planet where nothing grows” to basically stretch a couple months worth of food and supplies into four years becomes a modern day MacGyver in a spacesuit and uses some amazing technologies to try to survive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Quantum computing breakthrough renews concerns of cybersecurity apocalypse

The term "cryptopocalypse" was probably first coined at the Black Hat USA information security convention in 2013.A talk presented by four security and technology experts at the show explored cryptographic weaknesses and attempted to answer the hypothetical question: "What happens the day after RSA is broken?"RSA is a widely used public-key cryptosystem used in digital signatures.The answer, they determined then, was: "almost total failure of trust in the Internet," for one thing. The reason? Almost everything we do on the Internet is in some way protected by cryptography.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Civilization

One of the most dangerous errors instilled into us by nineteenth-century progressive optimism is the idea that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost.
C.S. Lewis, Rehabilitations

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The post Civilization appeared first on 'net work.

Plenty of fish, and exploits too, on dating website

Recent visitors to Plenty of Fish (pof.com), an online dating website with over 3 million daily active users, had their browsers redirected to exploits that installed malware. The attack was launched through a malicious advertisement that was distributed through a third-party ad network, researchers from security firm Malwarebytes said in a blog post Thursday. The malicious ad pointed to the Nuclear exploit kit, a Web-based attack tool that exploits known vulnerabilities in browsers and popular browser plug-ins like Flash Player, Java, Adobe Reader and Silverlight.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why corporate security pros should care about the Ashley Madison breach

Corporate security executives should have a professional interest in the Ashley Madison breach because publicly posted data about its customers represents a fertile field for spear phishers trying to attack business networks. Anyone whose name and contact information appears in the 9.7GB stolen names contact information will likely be susceptible to opening emails purportedly from Ashley Madison, divorce lawyers and private investigators, says Tom Kellerman, chief cybersecurity officer for Trend Micro. + ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Hackers release full data dump from Ashley Madison, extramarital dating site +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mother Nature teaches Google a lesson

Four successive lightning strikes on a local utility grid in Europe caused a data loss at Google's Belgium data center. For Google, a company with a self-described "appetite for accuracy" in its data center operations, admitting an unrecoverable data loss as small as 0.000001% -- as it did -- likely came with a little bit of pain.The lightning strikes occurred Aug. 13 and the resulting storage system problems weren't fully resolved for five days. Google's post mortem found room for improvement in both hardware upgrades and in the engineering response to the problem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

China group attacks India with Word exploit, then uses Microsoft’s WMI

A hacking group suspected of operating from China has had success stealing information from mostly Indian targets, often pertaining to border disputes and trade issues, according to FireEye. The gang specializes in sending targeted phishing emails to victims in the hope of gaining wider access to their networks, a practice known as spear phishing, said Bryce Boland, CTO for Asia-Pacific at the security firm. FireEye hasn’t give a name to the group, but has watched it since 2011, Boland said. The company has gathered data on the group based on attacks attempted against its customers. Analysis of Internet infrastructure used by the group, including command-and-control servers, have given insight into the scope of its operations, Boland said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Latest Ashley Madison data dump reveals emails, source code for websites

The woes of AshleyMadison.com’s owners continued Thursday, with a second large release of internal data that security experts suspect is authentic. An 18.5 GB file was released on file-sharing networks by a group called the Impact Team. The same group claimed responsibility for the initial breach last month of the website, which caters to those seeking extramarital affairs. Because of the large file size, IDG News Service wasn’t able to take a look at the data. But David Kennedy, founder and CEO of the Ohio-based security company TrustedSec, said it appears to be legitimate. His company had taken a brief look at the data. It contains what purports to be email from Avid Life Media’s CEO, Noel Biderman, as well as other employees.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker for NetOps

I have been spending this week in Silicon Valley at Network Field Day 10. One of the announcements struck a chord with me, as this year has marked some significant career changes for me: specifically an uptake in involvement with containers and software development.

My good friend Brent Salisbury once wrote about the idea of using Golang for Network Operations tooling. While I’ve continued (and will continue) to build my Python skillset, I’ve also been getting more and more experience with Golang and with some of the great software projects created by it, such as Docker, and Kubernetes.

Fundamentally, the concept of application of containers is not that new, and admittedly, network engineers have not been required to think of them. I mean network operations is only now getting accustomed to delivering network services in form factors like virtual machines. It’s important to remember that solutions like Docker have provided application developers with an consistent format for packaging what they produce. In network operations, we can take advantage of this same tooling - instead of asking our network vendors to make sure Python is installed on our switches, we need them only to support Docker.

“Docker is in the Network! Continue reading

Docker for NetOps

I have been spending this week in Silicon Valley at Network Field Day 10. One of the announcements struck a chord with me, as this year has marked some significant career changes for me: specifically an uptake in involvement with containers and software development.

My good friend Brent Salisbury once wrote about the idea of using Golang for Network Operations tooling. While I’ve continued (and will continue) to build my Python skillset, I’ve also been getting more and more experience with Golang and with some of the great software projects created by it, such as Docker, and Kubernetes.

Brent has also more recently written about using Docker to build network tools, and I’d like to use this post to say I agree with this sentiment. Network Operations can really do more with container technology to accelerate what has traditionally been a pretty stagnant silo.

Fundamentally, the concept of application of containers is not that new, and admittedly, network engineers have not been required to think of them. I mean network operations is only now getting accustomed to delivering network services in form factors like virtual machines. It’s important to remember that solutions like Docker have provided application developers with Continue reading