Kernel of Truth season 3 episode 2: OCP Summit 2020

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Early March is a busy time here at Cumulus Networks and part of the reason is the Open Compute Project Summit. Kernel of Truth hosts Brian O’Sullivan and Roopa Prabhu are joined by Scott Emery, project lead at OCP. First thing the group covers— what is OCP? The conversation continues into what’s happening in the OCP community, what you can expect at the conference and more.

Guest Bios

Brian O’Sullivan: Brian currently heads Product Management for Cumulus Linux. For 15 or so years he’s held software Product Management positions at Juniper Networks as well as other smaller companies. Once he saw the change that was happening in the networking space, he decided to join Cumulus Networks to be a part of the open networking innovation. When not working, Brian is a voracious reader and has held a variety of jobs, including bartending in three countries and working as an extra in a German soap opera. You can find him on Twitter at @bosullivan00.

Roopa Prabhu: Roopa is Director of Engineering, Linux software at Cumulus Networks. At Cumulus Continue reading

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Essential People in a Wedding Professionals Networking Group

If you are a professional that provides services for weddings as a main part of your business, then becoming part of a wedding professionals networking group can help you increase your business and keep you updated on the latest wedding trends. Here is a look at some of the essential people in a wedding professionals networking group.

7 Wedding Professionals Networking Group Members

Wedding Planners 

Wedding planners are the most essential people in a wedding professionals networking group. In many cases, it is the wedding planner that finds the venue, hires the band or DJ, the cake maker, and the photographers – or at least recommends people in these professionals to the engaged couple. So you definitely want to include wedding planners in your networking group.

Bridal Shop Owners or Wedding Dress Makers

Another essential person in a wedding professionals networking group is the person who runs a bridal shop or makes wedding gowns and bridesmaid dresses, since these professionals work closely with the bride and often are asked to suggest other wedding vendors.

DJs and Wedding Bands

Almost all weddings have some type of music, so you are going to want to include DJs or wedding bands as Continue reading

CenturyLink CSO Decries Abundant, Niche Security Services

For secure data backup, here’s how to do the 3-2-1 rule right

As the number of places where we store data increases, the basic concept of what is referred to as the 3-2-1 rule often gets forgotten. This is a problem, because the 3-2-1 rule is easily one of the most foundational concepts for designing data protection. It's important to understand why the rule was created, and how it's currently being interpreted in an increasingly tapeless world.What is the 3-2-1 rule for backup? The 3-2-1 rule says there should be at least three copies or versions of data stored on two different pieces of media, one of which is off-site. Let's take a look at each of the three elements and what it addresses.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] 3 copies or versions: Having at least three different versions of your data over different periods of time ensures that you can recover from accidents that affect multiple versions. Any good backup system will have many more than three copies. 2 different media: You should not have both copies of your data on the same media. Consider, for example, Apple's Time Machine. You can fool it using Disc Utility to split your hard drive into Continue reading

Red Hat OpenStack Update Angles Toward Cloud-Native Future

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The Birth Of The Distributed Cloud

There is a seismic shift that is about to reshape enterprise IT. …

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Computational Storage Winds Its Way Towards The Mainstream

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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

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

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

Intro to Automation Webhooks for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

If your organization has adopted DevOps culture, you're probably practicing some form of Infrastructures-as-Code (IaC) to manage and provision servers, storage, applications and networking using human-readable, and machine-consumable definitions and automation tools such as Ansible. It's also likely that Git is an essential in your DevOps toolchain, not only for the development of applications and services, but also in managing your infrastructure definitions.

With the release of Red Hat Ansible Tower v3.6, part of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, we introduced Automation Webhooks that helps enable easier and more intuitive Git-centric workflows natively. 

In this post we'll explore how you can make use of Automation Webhooks, but first let's look at IaC for some context and how this feature can be used to your organization's benefit.

Understanding Infrastructures-as-Code

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is managing and provisioning computing resources through human-readable machine-consumable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. It is considered one of the essential practices of DevOps along with continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), observability and others in order to automate development and operations processes and create a faster release cycle with higher quality. Treating infrastructure like it is code and subjecting 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).