Mirantis Collects Kontena Kubernetes Cast-Offs

Nokia Bolsters Cloud-Native Software

Infovista’s José Duarte Outlines 5G Deployment Strategy

Why Google Trusts Intel’s Security Strategy

Mellanox ConnectX-6 SmartNIC Arrives, BlueField-2 on the Way

BrandPost: Why Hard Drives Are Stayin’ Alive

It goes without saying that data growth is at an all-time high, but IDC’s data forecast provides much-needed perspective. The market research company predicts that by 2023, over 100 zettabytes of data will be created per year, and that approximately 60% of the stored data will be at the core/edge data center1. At the same time, Applied Materials predicts that over 90% of total data will be created by machines2 with new workloads driven by everything from smart video cameras and IoT sensors to autonomous vehicles and hyper-connected smart cities, and more.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: C&S Takes Stock in Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN Edge Platform

Keeping up to date on inventory, stocking, and data needs at thousands of grocery stores in North America is no easy task. That’s why C&S Wholesale Grocers decided it needed a major upgrade of its network using SD-WAN technology from Silver Peak to provide efficient, reliable, and secure communications among its data centers and warehouses. Founded in 1918, C&S is the largest grocery wholesaler in the United States. C&S recently embarked on a major network upgrade focused on implementing SD-WAN technology. The company selected the Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect™ SD-WAN edge platform to enable more efficient and cost effective wide-area-networking (WAN) to support a variety of applications. To read this article in full, please click here

An EPYC trip to Rome: AMD is Cloudflare’s 10th-generation Edge server CPU

More than 1 billion unique IP addresses pass through the Cloudflare Network each day, serving on average 11 million HTTP requests per second and operating within 100ms of 95% of the Internet-connected population globally. Our network spans 200 cities in more than 90 countries, and our engineering teams have built an extremely fast and reliable infrastructure.

We’re extremely proud of our work and are determined to help make the Internet a better and more secure place. Cloudflare engineers who are involved with hardware get down to servers and their components to understand and select the best hardware to maximize the performance of our stack.

Our software stack is compute intensive and is very much CPU bound, driving our engineers to work continuously at optimizing Cloudflare’s performance and reliability at all layers of our stack. With the server, a straightforward solution for increasing computing power is to have more CPU cores. The more cores we can include in a server, the more output we can expect. This is important for us since the diversity of our products and customers has grown over time with increasing demand that requires our servers to do more. To help us drive compute performance, we needed Continue reading

Security that’s Designed for the Modern Data Center

The last 12 months have been incredibly exciting for the security business at VMware. Last year at RSA Conference 2019, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger outlined our Intrinsic Security strategy in his keynote presentation, “3 Things the Security Industry Isn’t Talking About”. We also announced the VMware Service-defined Firewall, a stateful Layer 7 data center firewall. As pioneers of micro-segmentation, the Service-defined Firewall extended our leadership in protecting east-west traffic in the data center.

Later in the year, we announced two major acquisitions –Avi Networks and Carbon Black. The acquisition of Carbon Black brought to VMware an industry-leading endpoint security platform, and made the entire industry take notice of VMware’s intentions to transform security. With Avi Networks, we acquired a software-defined, elastic, and high-performance load balancer that comes equipped with a full-featured web application firewall (WAF). Maintaining the momentum in building out our security portfolio for the digital enterprise, we announced the VMware NSX Distributed Intrusion Detection and Prevention System which will bring advanced threat controls to the Service-defined Firewall.

At RSA Conference 2020, we are introducing VMware Advanced Security for Cloud Foundation, a modern data center security solution for today’s private and public clouds. This solution will include VMware Carbon Continue reading

Pragmatic EVPN Designs

While running the Using VXLAN And EVPN To Build Active-Active Data Centers workshop in early December 2019 I got the usual set of questions about using BGP as the underlay routing protocol in EVPN fabrics, and the various convoluted designs like IBGP-over-EBGP or EBGP-between-loopbacks over directly-connected-EBGP that some vendors love so much.

I got a question along the same lines from one of the readers of my latest EPVN rant who described how convoluted it is to implement the design he’d like to use with the gear he has (I won’t name any vendor because hazardous chemical substances get mentioned when I do).

Pragmatic EVPN Designs

While running the Using VXLAN And EVPN To Build Active-Active Data Centers workshop in early December 2019 I got the usual set of questions about using BGP as the underlay routing protocol in EVPN fabrics, and the various convoluted designs like IBGP-over-EBGP or EBGP-between-loopbacks over directly-connected-EBGP that some vendors love so much.

I got a question along the same lines from one of the readers of my latest EPVN rant who described how convoluted it is to implement the design he’d like to use with the gear he has (I won’t name any vendor because hazardous chemical substances get mentioned when I do).

Cisco goes to the cloud with broad enterprise security service

Cisco has unveiled a cloud-based security platform it says will go a long way in helping customers protect their far-flung networked resources.Cisco describes the new SecureX service as offering  an open, cloud-native system that will let customers detect and remediate threats across Cisco and third-party products from a single interface. IT security teams can then automate and orchestrate security management across enterprise cloud, network and applications and end points.Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum “Until now, security has largely been piecemeal with companies introducing new point products into their environments to address every new threat category that arises,” wrote Gee Rittenhouse senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Security Business Group in a blog about SecureX.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper bolsters wireless security; fights against encrypted malicious threats

Juniper is filling out its enterprise security portfolio this week by integrating support for its Mist wireless customers and adding the capability for customers to gain better visibility and control over encrypted traffic threats.With the new additions, Juniper is looking to buttress its ability to let users secure all traffic traversing the enterprise network via campus, WAN or data center. The moves are part of Juniper's grand Connected Security platform that includes a variety of security products including its next-generation firewalls that promise to protect networked resources across infrastructure and endpoints.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco goes to the cloud with broad enterprise security service

Cisco has unveiled a cloud-based security platform it says will go a long way in helping customers protect their far-flung networked resources.Cisco describes the new SecureX service as offering  an open, cloud-native system that will let customers detect and remediate threats across Cisco and third-party products from a single interface. IT security teams can then automate and orchestrate security management across enterprise cloud, network and applications and end points.Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum “Until now, security has largely been piecemeal with companies introducing new point products into their environments to address every new threat category that arises,” wrote Gee Rittenhouse senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Security Business Group in a blog about SecureX.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper bolsters wireless security; fights against encrypted malicious threats

Juniper is filling out its enterprise security portfolio this week by integrating support for its Mist wireless customers and adding the capability for customers to gain better visibility and control over encrypted traffic threats.With the new additions, Juniper is looking to buttress its ability to let users secure all traffic traversing the enterprise network via campus, WAN or data center. The moves are part of Juniper's grand Connected Security platform that includes a variety of security products including its next-generation firewalls that promise to protect networked resources across infrastructure and endpoints.To read this article in full, please click here

Fortinet Forges FortiAI Security Service

Train to become a skilled Python coder for just $50

Python is one of the most widely used coding languages in the world. And, good news, it isn’t very difficult to learn — especially for those experienced using other platforms. If you want an introduction to the language, but would rather avoid a traditional college education, then give The Complete 2020 Python Programming Certification Bundle a try.To read this article in full, please click here

Daily Roundup: Cisco SecureX All-In on Cloud Native

Seamless remote work with Cloudflare Access

The novel coronavirus is actively changing how organizations work in real-time. According to Fortune, the virus has led to the “world’s largest work-from-home experiment.” As the epidemic crosses borders, employees are staying home and putting new stress on how companies manage remote work.

This is only accelerating an existing trend, however. Remote work has gained real traction in the last decade and Gartner projects that it will only continue. However, teams which are moving to a distributed model tend to do so slowly. When those timelines are accelerated, IT and security administrators need to be able to help their workforce respond without disrupting their team members.

Cloudflare Access can help teams migrate to a model that makes it seamless for users to work from any location, or any device, without the need for lengthy migrations or onboarding sessions. Cloudflare Access can be deployed in less than one hour and bring SaaS-like convenience and speed to the self-hosted applications that previously lived behind a VPN.

Leaving the castle-and-moat

When users share a physical space, working on a private network is easy. Users do not need clunky VPN clients to connect to the resources they need. Team members physically sit close Continue reading

Topology matters: how port-per-workload management strategies no longer hold up

In the beginning, there were switches. And connected to these switches were servers, routers and other pieces of gear. These devices ran one application, or at a stretch, multiple applications on the same operating system and thus IP stack. It was very much one-server-per-port; the SQL Server was always on port 0/8, and shutting down port 0/8 would affect only that machine.

This is no longer true, as network engineers well know. Physical hardware no longer dictates what, where, and how servers and other workloads exist. Cloud computing, multi-tenant virtual infrastructures and dynamically reallocated virtual resources mean that one port can cover 20 or 200 servers. Conversely, link aggregation and other forms of port density protocols mean that one server can have fault-tolerant aggregated links across one, five or 50 ports.

A new way of looking at switching—as a logical, rather than physical, topology—is required. In this view, switches aren’t so much pieces of the network architecture themselves, but simply ports that can be used to set up much more complex logical links. This article will focus on two main concepts: routing protocols (to allow better utilization of underutilized switching links) and switching protocols such as STP (those used to Continue reading