Q&A with Devo: COVID-19 Is Changing the Cloud Conversation

How do companies manage the security implications of working from home, in a country where remote work has generally been frowned on? Devo, a data analytics and security platform with headquarters in Madrid, helps companies get visibility into their networks — something that has become even more critical as more companies rely on virtual private network (VPNs) to security connect team members working from home.  We spoke with Devo, and carloyuen from 

When All You Have Are Stretched VLANs…

Let’s agree for a millisecond that you can’t find any other way to migrate your workload into a public cloud than to move the existing VMs one-by-one without renumbering them. Doing a clumsy cloud migration like this will get you the headaches and the cloud bill you deserve, but that’s a different story. Today we’ll talk about being clumsy the right and the wrong way.

There are two ways of solving today’s challenge:

Alkira Claims Multi-Cloud Cure, $30M in Funding

Founded by brothers Atif Khan and Amir Khan, former Viptela CEO, Alkira Cloud Services Exchange...

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5G, Edge (Mostly) Unencumbered by Pandemic

Capex spending on 5G network deployments will decline 10% globally this year, but those activities...

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IBM extends z15 mainframe family, intensifies Linux security

IBM continued to reshape the mainframe with an eye toward further integrating it within hybrid clouds and securing Linux-based workloads.On the hardware side, IBM rolled out two entry-level, 19” single-frame, air-cooled platforms, the  z15 Model T02 and LinuxONE III Model LT2. The new machines are extensions of the IBM z15 family that Big Blue rolled out in September of last year. To read this article in full, please click here

How to dispose of IT hardware without hurting the environment

Many enterprises don’t think much about where their obsolete IT gear winds up, but it’s possible to be green-minded, not bust the budget, and even benefit a little from proper disposal. Here is how.Go back to where you bought The first option to consider is returning the equipment the vendor or reseller you bought it from, says Susan Middleton, research director, financing strategies at IDC. “Every year we ask customers, ‘How do you handle end-of-lease?’ Overwhelmingly, they return to vendor or partner who are better equipped to handle recycling,” she says.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Vendors often give a fair-market buyout for the devices that can go toward new products, Middleton says. “The big players like IBM and HPE do a great job because they can clean them up and resell them, and the facilities to do that are pretty big,” she says.To read this article in full, please click here

Introducing the Calico eBPF Dataplane

eBPF is a hot topic right now; most of the infrastructure-focused conferences and events have included talks on eBPF over the past year, which is creating a lot of interest in the technology.

You might be wondering what eBPF is. eBPF stands for “extended Berkeley Packet Filter” which is a feature in modern Linux kernels that allows you to write mini-programs that are attached to low-level hooks in the Linux kernel, that execute based on certain events (e.g. filtering network traffic). While Calico is primarily focused on networking and security use cases, eBPF is a broad technology that applies to many other use cases as well.

We’ve always been tracking eBPF and it’s potential to enhance Calico, however, most users have not been ready for it. Improving on Calico’s already excellent dataplane using eBPF requires the latest Linux kernels, that are not always available to our enterprise customers that require a vendor-supported Linux distribution to run in production. Nevertheless, we decided to add an eBPF dataplane to support those users that are able to use the latest Linux kernels, as well as provide a future-proofed path for those who will wait until their vendor-supported Linux distributions will support the Continue reading

Daily Roundup: Cisco Links Rakuten Mobile

Cisco paved Rakuten's virtual roaming road; VMware bolstered its hybrid cloud with Kubernetes...

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Omdia SD-WAN Report: Fuel to VMware, Cisco Fire?

VMware continues to lead the worldwide SD-WAN market by revenue, followed by Cisco and Fortinet,...

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Arm Joins O-RAN Alliance in 5G Infrastructure Push

Joining the alliance will speed Arm's mission to develop open, interoperable, and cloud-native...

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The Network Impact of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic

With so many countries in lockdown and so many people working (and learning) from home, online usage has risen significantly but so far, the internet is holding up well. Internet traffic is generally to 25% to 30% higher than usual, and what we do online is also changing. Internet usage often increases goes up in a typical month; for Akamai that’s usually 3% growth, in the last month it’s been 30%. In March 2019 their peak traffic was 82Tbps; this March it was 167Tbps and the sustained daily traffic rate is higher than last year’s peak for March. Internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London saw 10-20% increases in traffic around March 9th, which the exchange in Milan had a 40% increase the day Italy was quarantined. Disturbingly, attacks are up too: Akamai Cloudflare tracks varies by city; it’s only up 11% in Berlin and 22% in London between early January and late March (and 17% up for the UK as whole), but it’s grown by 40% in New York and 48% in San Francisco and Silicon Continue reading

Cisco Paves Rakuten’s Virtual Roaming Road

That road uses a signaling interface to allow 4G LTE customers to continue data sessions between...

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AMD Chips Give Clouds, Data Centers EPYC Power

IBM Cloud, Microsoft, Dell Technologies, HPE, VMware, Nutanix, Lenovo, and Supermicro platforms...

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Over 300 ISPs Now Improving Routing Security with MANRS

Today, we’re proud to announce another milestone: the number of network operators that commit to the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) has surpassed 300.

The current number of network operator program participants stands at 322. These Internet Service Providers (ISPs) joined the initiative by showing their conformance with the actions to improve the resilience and security of the Internet’s routing infrastructure.

Launched in 2014 with a group of nine operators, the number of MANRS participants reached 100 in 2018 and has risen rapidly in the last two years, with 156 joining in 2019 alone, and 45 so far in 2020.

This includes operators in more than 60 countries across all continents; with Brazil leading the way with nearly 70 MANRS participants, followed by the US with nearly 50.

According to BGPStream, the number of reported routing incidents was on the decrease from 2017 to 2019 (see chart below), while the number of MANRS participants grew in the period. While this does not mean one caused the other, a correlation between the two can be observed.

The MANRS community has grown rapidly through its other programs, too. In 2018, the initiative expanded to include Internet Exchange Providers (IXPs), which Continue reading

VMware Tanzu Gains Features, Availability

The updates include application and infrastructure additions designed to ease operations in a...

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VMware Boosts Hybrid-Cloud Visibility, Management

Some of the new features include better public cloud cost comparisons via integration with...

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Cisco $2.5B Financing Initiative Targets COVID-19 Impact

The Business Resiliency Program aims to provide organizations economically impacted by the pandemic...

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Comparing HTTP/3 vs. HTTP/2 Performance

We announced support for HTTP/3, the successor to HTTP/2 during Cloudflare’s birthday week last year. Our goal is and has always been to help build a better Internet. Collaborating on standards is a big part of that, and we're very fortunate to do that here.

Even though HTTP/3 is still in draft status, we've seen a lot of interest from our users. So far, over 113,000 zones have activated HTTP/3 and, if you are using an experimental browser those zones can be accessed using the new protocol! It's been great seeing so many people enable HTTP/3: having real websites accessible through HTTP/3 means browsers have more diverse properties to test against.

When we launched support for HTTP/3, we did so in partnership with Google, who simultaneously launched experimental support in Google Chrome. Since then, we've seen more browsers add experimental support: Firefox to their nightly builds, other Chromium-based browsers such as Opera and Microsoft Edge through the underlying Chrome browser engine, and Safari via their technology preview. We closely follow these developments and partner wherever we can help; having a large network with many sites that have HTTP/3 enabled gives browser implementers an excellent testbed against which to Continue reading

Response: Next-Hop and VTEP Reachability in EVPN Networks

Jeff Tantsura published a great response to my Can We Trust BGP Next Hops blog post on LinkedIn, and I asked him for permission to save it in a more permanent form. Here it is (slightly edited)…

I’d like to bring back EVPN context. The discussion is more nuanced, the common non-arguable logic here - reachability != functionality.

Daily Roundup: VMware Patches Critical Bug

VMware patched a critical bug; Ericsson scored a 5G win with Nex-Tech Wireless deal; and...

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