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Category Archives for "Networking"

How to avoid the network-as-a-service shell game

I can’t tell you how many times one of my clients or contacts has complained about the difficulties associated with getting network-budget approval. If I’d never met a CFO in person, the description these people gave me would have led me to expect something like a troll or a zombie, bent on eating projects and maybe people, too. Do we wear garlic when we visit the CFO, or maybe do a chant before the meeting, or might there be a more practical approach?CFOs aren’t just trying to mess up a good technology project (at least most of the time), they’re trying to validate two basic financial rules that govern technology procurements.  Rule One is that any project must advance a company’s financial position and not hurt it. That seems logical, but it’s often difficult to assess just what the return on investment (ROI) of any project is.  Rule Two is that you don’t want to buy equipment that you’ll have to replace before it’s been fully depreciated. The useful life of something should be at least as long as the financial life as set by tax laws.To read this article in full, please click here

Tech Bytes: Auto Dealer Takes Network Control With Fortinet (Sponsored)

Frustrated by poor service from an MSP, the IT team at White Family auto dealers needed a more efficient way to connect locations while ensuring high performance and strong security to meet regulatory requirements. The company chose Fortinet for its network and security equipment. Fortinet is our sponsor, and we talk with Shane Williams, Director of IT; and Paul Provorse, System Administrator about going all-in with Fortinet to run their own show.

The post Tech Bytes: Auto Dealer Takes Network Control With Fortinet (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Tech Bytes: Auto Dealer Takes Network Control With Fortinet (Sponsored)

Frustrated by poor service from an MSP, the IT team at White Family auto dealers needed a more efficient way to connect locations while ensuring high performance and strong security to meet regulatory requirements. The company chose Fortinet for its network and security equipment. Fortinet is our sponsor, and we talk with Shane Williams, Director of IT; and Paul Provorse, System Administrator about going all-in with Fortinet to run their own show.

Tracking Internet Shutdowns

Internet shutdowns harm societies, economies, and the global Internet infrastructure – that’s why we’re tracking disruptions on the Internet Society Pulse platform. There are thousands of disruptions to Internet access every day all over the world, but not all of them are the result of deliberate shutdowns. Lengthy outages are usually the result of technical errors, routing misconfigurations, or infrastructure failures. […]

The post Tracking Internet Shutdowns appeared first on Internet Society.

The Effectiveness of AS Path Prepending (1)

Just about everyone prepends AS’ to shift inbound traffic from one provider to another—but does this really work? First, a short review on prepending, and then a look at some recent research in this area.

What is prepending meant to do?

Looking at this network diagram, the idea is for AS6500 (each router is in its own AS) to steer traffic through AS65001, rather than AS65002, for 100::/64. The most common method to trying to accomplish this is AS65000 can prepend its own AS number on the AS Path Multiple times. Increasing the length of the AS Path will, in theory, cause a route to be less preferred.

In this case, suppose AS65000 prepends its own AS number on the AS Path once before advertising the route towards AS65001, and not towards AS65002. Assuming there is no link between AS65001 and AS65002, what would we expect to happen? What we would expect is AS65001 will receive one route towards 100::/64 with an AS Path of 2 and use this route. AS65002 will, likewise, receive one route towards 100::/64 with an AS Path of 1 and use this route.

AS65003, however, will receive two routes towards 100::/64, one with an AS Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Many U.S. Residents Support Community Broadband

From the community: A new poll from Morning Consult finds that more than half of U.S. residents trust local governments to provide broadband services, and just 14 percent believe local governments should be prohibited from providing broadband. Currently, 18 states limit or outright prohibit local governments from providing their own broadband. In those states, “these […]

The post The Week in Internet News: Many U.S. Residents Support Community Broadband appeared first on Internet Society.

Nvidia competitor Graphcore preps US initiative

A UK-based AI-chip startup is making its first moves into North American to take on Nvidia on its home turf in the enterprise with new channel and reseller partners.Founded in 2016, Graphcore makes what it calls Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) and shipped its first product—the Colossus GC2 “massively parallel, mixed-precision floating point processor”—in 2018. In July 2020, it released its second-generation processor called GC200, but news of that was drowned out by all the disruption caused by COVID-19.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" In addition to chips, the company sells cards and racks. The IPU-M2000 is a 1U blade built around four Colossus GC200 IPU processors, capable of one petaFlop of AI compute. The IPU-POD64 is designed for large-scale deployments and offers the ability to run very large models across as many as 64 IPU processors in parallel.To read this article in full, please click here

10 features of Windows Admin Center to streamline server administration

A lot of the value built into Windows Admin Center has to do with it being a remote-management tool that can have a lot of upside in a modern IT shop, including implementing best practices by not logging directly into servers, bringing flexibility to the management architecture, and performing admin tasks from high-DPI or touchscreen devices.Considered a complement to System Center, Admin Center is a free app, downloadable here, that runs in a browser and can manage Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows 10, Azure Stack HCI through Windows Admin Center Gateway, software installed on Windows Server or domain-joined Windows 10.To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia competitor Graphcore preps US initiative

A UK-based AI-chip startup is making its first moves into North American to take on Nvidia on its home turf in the enterprise with new channel and reseller partners.Founded in 2016, Graphcore makes what it calls Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) and shipped its first product—the Colossus GC2 “massively parallel, mixed-precision floating point processor”—in 2018. In July 2020, it released its second-generation processor called GC200, but news of that was drowned out by all the disruption caused by COVID-19.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" In addition to chips, the company sells cards and racks. The IPU-M2000 is a 1U blade built around four Colossus GC200 IPU processors, capable of one petaFlop of AI compute. The IPU-POD64 is designed for large-scale deployments and offers the ability to run very large models across as many as 64 IPU processors in parallel.To read this article in full, please click here

10 features of Windows Admin Center to streamline server administration

A lot of the value built into Windows Admin Center has to do with it being a remote-management tool that can have a lot of upside in a modern IT shop, including implementing best practices by not logging directly into servers, bringing flexibility to the management architecture, and performing admin tasks from high-DPI or touchscreen devices.Considered a complement to System Center, Admin Center is a free app, downloadable here, that runs in a browser and can manage Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows 10, Azure Stack HCI through Windows Admin Center Gateway, software installed on Windows Server or domain-joined Windows 10.To read this article in full, please click here