Big Switch targets shadow IT, hybrid cloud growth with fortified software family

Big Switch has rolled a variety of new software packages aimed at simplifying customer networks and helping them manage on-premises and hybrid-cloud data-center growth.The products include a version of its Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) for Amazon Web Services virtual private cloud  (VPC) management, adding support for Global VPCs (G-VPCs), and a cloud-based version of its Multi-Cloud Director (MCD).  VPCs provide the on-demand access to a pool of shared cloud-computing resources.[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] Big Switch’s flagship BCF software lets customers manage physical switches as a single fabric that includes security, automation, orchestration and analytics. BCF can run on a variety of certified switches from Dell EMC, HPE and others. In addition, BCF Controller natively supports integration with various Cloud Management Platforms such as VMware (vSphere, NSX Manager, vSAN) and OpenStack. BCF also supports container orchestrators such as Kubernetes, all via a single interface. To read this article in full, please click here

Best practices: MLAG backup IP

Recently there was a conversation in the Cumulus community (details in the debriefing below) about the best way to build a redundant backup IP link for multi-chassis link aggregation (MLAG). Like all good consulting-led blogs, we have a healthy dose of pragmatism that goes with our recommendations and this technology is no different. But if you’re looking for the short answer, let’s just say: it depends.

The MLAG backup IP feature goes by many names in the industry. In Cisco-land you might call this the “peer keepalive link,” in Arista-ville you might call this the “peer-address heartbeat” and in Dell VLTs it is known as the “backup destination.” No matter what you call it, the functionality offered is nearly the same.

What does it do?

Before we get into the meat of the recommendation, let’s talk about what the backup IP is designed to do. The backup IP link provides an additional value for MLAG to monitor, so a switch knows if its peer is reachable. Most implementations use this backup IP link solely as a heartbeat, meaning that it is not used to synchronize MAC addresses between the two MLAG peers. This is also the case with Cumulus Continue reading

The Sky is Not Falling For Ekahau

Ekahau Hat (photo courtesy of Sam Clements)

You may have noticed quite a few high profile departures from Ekahau recently. A lot of very visible community members, concluding Joel Crane (@PotatoFi), Jerry Olla (@JOlla), and Jussi Kiviniemi (@JussiKiviniemi) have all decided to move on. This has generated quite a bit of discussion among the members of the wireless community as to what this really means for the company and the product that is so beloved by so many wireless engineers and architects.

Putting the people aside for a moment, I want to talk about the Ekahau product line specifically. There was an undercurrent of worry in the community about what would happen to Ekahau Site Survey (ESS) and other tools in the absence of the people we’ve seen working on them for so long. I think this tweet from Drew Lentz (@WirelessNerd) best exemplifies that perspective:

Intel Reveals AI Accelerator Chips for Deep Learning in Data Centers

VMware Buying Spree Continues With Intrinsic

Microsoft, Intel, and Red Hat Back Confidential Computing

Closing the Shutters on EtherealMind 

I've been publishing on Etherealmind for more than ten years and its been quite a journey. I've changed and its time move on.

The post Closing the Shutters on EtherealMind  appeared first on EtherealMind.

MEF Unveils Long-Awaited SD-WAN Standard

How to avoid using RDP in Windows

Several new vulnerability disclosures in Windows Remote Desktop Protocol suggest it’s time to stop using it. Here’s how.

Brief History of VMware NSX

I spent a lot of time during this summer figuring out the details of NSX-T, resulting in significantly updated and expanded VMware NSX Technical Deep Dive material… but before going into those details let’s do a brief walk down the memory lane ;)

You might remember a startup called Nicira that was acquired by VMware in mid-2012… supposedly resulting in the ever-continuing spat between Cisco and VMware (and maybe even triggering the creation of Cisco ACI).

Real-world backup woes and how to fix them

Data backup and restoration can be somewhat of a black-box effort. You often don’t know whether you fully nailed it until disaster strikes, and there is always room for improvement, especially as cloud and hybrid options grow. We asked four network professionals to share what made them realize they should do more to bolster their organization’s backup and recovery processes, and how they made that happen. Here are their stories.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Real-world backup woes and how to fix them

Data backup and restoration can be somewhat of a black-box effort. You often don’t know whether you fully nailed it until disaster strikes, and there is always room for improvement, especially as cloud and hybrid options grow. We asked four network professionals to share what made them realize they should do more to bolster their organization’s backup and recovery processes, and how they made that happen. Here are their stories.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

VMware Cloud on AWS: NSX and Avi Networks Load Balancing and Security

Authors and Contributors

I want to thank both Bhushan Pai, and Matt Karnowski, who joined VMware from the Avi Networks acquisition, for helping with the Avi Networks setup in my VMware Cloud on AWS lab and helping with some of the details in this blog.

Humair Ahmed, Sr. Technical Product Manager, VMware NSBU
Bhushan Pai, Sr. Technical Product Manager, VMware NSBU
Matt Karnowski , Product Line Manager, VMware NSBU

With the recent acquisition of Avi Networks, a complete VMware solution leveraging advanced load balancing and Application Delivery Controller (ADC) capabilities can be leveraged. In addition to load balancing, these capabilities include global server load balancing, web application firewall (WAF) and advanced analytics and monitoring.

In this blog, we walk through an example of how the Avi Networks load balancer can be leveraged within a VMware Cloud on AWS software-defined data center (SDDC).

Continue reading

Linux Foundation Powers Up on IBM’s OpenPOWER

Breakthroughs bring a quantum Internet closer

Breakthroughs in the manipulation of light are making it more likely that we will, in due course, be seeing a significantly faster and more secure Internet. Adoption of optical circuits in chips, for example, to be driven by quantum technologies could be just around the corner.Physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), have just announced a dramatic leap forward in the methods used to accurately place light sources in atom-thin layers. That fine positioning has been one block in the movement towards quantum chips.To read this article in full, please click here

AfPIF 2019 Kicks Off in Balaclava, Mauritius

The tenth meeting of Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) kicked off in Balaclava, Mauritius, with participants celebrating the achievements and looking forward to further collaboration.

Andrew Sullivan, the President and CEO of the Internet Society, opened by highlighting the importance of the meeting, which helps create a community that supports the growth of the Internet in Africa, identifies challenges, and ensures that understanding spreads.

In his speech, he noted that traffic exchanged inside Africa has expanded enormously as a result of the work done by AfPIF over the years. One of AfPIF goals is to increase the level of local content exchanged locally to 80% by 2020.

Sullivan, who has extensive experience working with international Internet bodies, emphasized the need for a robust community in Africa, led by Af-IX, that will continue working together to ensure that the Internet is built in Africa, according to the needs of Africans and the African network experience.

The annual meeting, brings together chief technology officers, peering coordinators and business development managers from the African region, Internet service providers and operators, telecommunications policymakers and regulators, content providers, Internet exchange point (IXP) operators, infrastructure providers, data center managers, National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), Continue reading

FCC Issues Scathing Report on 37-Hour CenturyLink Outage

A guided tour of Linux file system types

While it may not be obvious to the casual user, Linux file systems have evolved significantly over the last decade or so to make them more resistant to corruption and performance problems.Most Linux systems today use a file system type called ext4. The “ext” part stands for “extended” and the 4 indicates that this is the 4th generation of this file system type. Features added over time include the ability to provide increasingly larger file systems (currently as large as 1,000,000 TiB) and much larger files (up to 16 TiB), more resistance to system crashes and less fragmentation (scattering single files as chunks in multiple locations) which improves performance.To read this article in full, please click here

The Tale of the Mysterious Traceroute

If you follow me on Twitter ( https://twitter.com/danieldibswe), you know I have been doing a lot of SD-WAN lately and I recently built my own lab. In this lab, I wanted to try a feature known as service chaining. What is service chaining? It’s a method of sending traffic through one or more services, such as a firewall, before the traffic takes the “normal” path towards its destination.

Before we dive deeper in, let me show the topology in use:

When I tested this feature, the data plane was working perfectly but my traceroute looked very strange. The traceroute was also not finishing.

root@B1-S1:/# traceroute 10.1.2.10
traceroute to 10.1.2.10 (10.1.2.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  10.1.1.1 (10.1.1.1)  6.951 ms  36.355 ms  39.604 ms
 2  10.1.0.2 (10.1.0.2)  11.775 ms  15.047 ms  15.535 ms
 3  10.0.0.18 (10.0.0.18)  28.540 ms  28.538 ms  28.532 ms
 4  10.1.2.10 (10.1.2.10)  41.748 ms  41.746 ms  41.736  Continue reading

Cybersecurity Tech Accord Adopts Bug Disclosure Policies