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Secure Bare Metal Servers with VMware NSX Data Center

Securing workloads across an entire environment is the fundamental goal of a policy. But workloads come in a variety of form factors: virtual machines, containers, and bare metal servers. In order to protect every workload, experts recommend isolating workloads wherever possible — avoiding dependency on the host operating system and its firewall. Relying on the host firewall creates the dependency of a host to defend itself.

Securing virtual workloads is a task best handled by the hypervisor. Offering security via inspection of traffic on the virtual network interfaces of the virtual workload achieves the security you want. It also delivers isolation for security enforcement. Workloads to secure bare metal servers come in many form factors and a variety of means to achieve policy enforcement.

Bare Metal Servers Still Serve A Purpose

Bare metal servers remain in use for a variety of reasons. Securing these servers remains a necessary task in today’s virtualized data center. Reasons we still use bare metal servers:

• There may be no way to virtualize various operating systems, like AIX and Solaris.
• Device-specific systems, such as medical equipment, or systems specific to other virtual markets may not yet have been virtualized. In some cases they may not Continue reading

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How Has COVID-19 Impacted Last Mile Networks?

If your household is anything like mine, your Internet connection has experienced a significant increase in usage over these last several months. We’re streaming more and more media each day, and we’re on seemingly endless hours of videoconferences for work and for school. While all of that streaming media consumes downstream capacity, those videoconferences can generate a significant amount of upstream traffic. I’m fortunate enough to have fiber-based broadband connectivity that can easily handle this traffic, but I know others aren’t as lucky. They’re stuck with copper-based connections or satellite links that struggle to deliver streaming media or video calls with any sort of viewable quality.

Across this spectrum of “last mile” Internet connections, I looked at the impact from both a provider and user perspective. What kind of traffic growth have last mile network providers experienced? What steps have these providers taken to ensure they have sufficient capacity? And most importantly for end users, how has increased traffic impacted last mile connection speeds?

The network connections from customer- and subscriber-facing Internet service providers are often referred to as last mile networks. These are Internet services delivered over a notional distance – the “last mile” – to subscriber premises, such Continue reading

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Segregated Routing

For any network that provides routing services to customers it is important to segregate them in different virtual topologies that don’t interfere with each other.

Network Virtualization

This post is not about NFV, but it is important to understand …

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Why Would You Need VXLAN Transport?

It’s amazing how sometimes people fond of sharing their opinions and buzzwords on various social media can’t answer simple questions. Today’s blog post is based on a true story… a “senior network architect” fully engaged in a recent hype cycle couldn’t answer a simple question:

Why exactly would you need VXLAN and EVPN?

We could spend a day (or a week) discussing the nuances of that simple question, but all I have at the moment is a single web page, so here we go…

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SASE helps healthcare company pivot to support remote workers

Security and performance concerns made it challenging for TrialCard to enable its employees to work from home when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.Customer service agents use a voice-over-IP phone and thin-client computer, both of which were designed to work in an on-premises office environment. "They need those systems to do their day-to-day job," says Ryan Van Dynhoven, director of infrastructure at TrialCard, a Morrisville, N.C.-based company that helps pharmaceutical manufacturers connect with patients, including providing patient support and clinical trial services. READ MORE: Enterprises look to SASE to bolster security for remote workersTo read this article in full, please click here

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Healthcare company pivots quickly to support remote workers

Security and performance concerns made it challenging for TrialCard to enable its employees to work from home when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.Customer service agents use a voice-over-IP phone and thin-client computer, both of which were designed to work in an on-premises office environment. "They need those systems to do their day-to-day job," says Ryan Van Dynhoven, director of infrastructure at TrialCard, a Morrisville, N.C.-based company that helps pharmaceutical manufacturers connect with patients, including providing patient support and clinical trial services. READ MORE: Enterprises look to SASE to bolster security for remote workersTo read this article in full, please click here

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The GPU Database Evolves Into An Analytics Platform

As the name of this publication suggests, we are system thinkers and we like to watch the evolution of a collection of tools into a platform. …

The GPU Database Evolves Into An Analytics Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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Fujitsu delivers exascale supercomputer that you can soon buy

Fujitsu has delivered all the components needed for a supercomputer in Japan that is expected to break the exaFLOP barrier when it comes online next year, and that delivery means that the same class of hardware will be available soon for enterprise customers.The supercomputer, called Fugaku, is being assembled and brought online now at the RIKEN Center for  Computational Science. The installation of the 400-plus-rack machine started in December 2019, and full operation is scheduled for fiscal  2021, according according to a Fujitsu spokesman.10 of the world's fastest supercomputers All told, Fugaku will have a total of 158,976 processors, each with 48 cores at 2.2 GHz. Already the partially deployed supercomputer’s performance is half an exaFLOP of 64-bit double precision floating point performance and looks to be the first to get to a full exaFLOP. Intel says  its supercomputer Aurora being built for the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago will be delivered by 2021, and it will break the exaFLOP barrier, too.To read this article in full, please click here

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Calico Egress Gateway: Universal Firewall Integration for Kubernetes

New applications and workloads are constantly being added to Kubernetes clusters. Those same apps need to securely communicate with resources outside the cluster behind a firewall or other control point. Firewalls require a consistent IP, but routable IPs are a limited resource that can be quickly depleted if applied to every service.

With the Calico Egress Gateway, a new feature in Calico Enterprise 3.0, existing firewalls and control points can now be used to securely manage access to infrastructure and services outside of the cluster. In addition, IT teams are now able to identify an application/workload in a Kubernetes namespace via the source IP.

As organizations progress on their Kubernetes journey from pilot to production, they begin migrating existing applications into the cluster, which has merged with the greater IT environment. For the platform teams involved, this creates challenges because these apps will need to communicate to services outside of the cluster.

1. The Platform team will need to enable Kubernetes connectivity to infrastructure and services behind a firewall (or other third-party enforcement point such as a proxy, a DLP solution, or a monitoring solution like a SIEM.)
2. The firewall will require a consistent IP to enable Continue reading

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Daily Roundup: Cisco Licks Wounds

Wound-licking Cisco targeted the next cloud computing wave; Nokia cried foul on rivals' 800G...

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Public Cloud connectivity done wrong

If your idea for interconnection and migration to the private cloud involves using NSX and L2VPN so that you can “stretch the vlan” between your NSX private farm and the one into the Cloud you are doing it wrong.

No matter if you are using VXLAN as a transport or any other technology, if your plan involves layer 2 extension you are doing it wrong.

Not every application should be migrated to the public cloud, and most definitely you should not migrate something that relies on a layer 2 adjacency to work.

If layer 2 extension is a way to allow ip mobility, then again, it’s just a lazy design. There are better ways to provide same-subnet IP mobility that doesn’t require layer 2 (see LISP or BGP-EVPN Type 5 routing for example).

Even if it works on Power Point or on a small demo, you really should NOT.

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Automation Services Catalog: A Deep Dive into What’s New in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform introduces automation services catalog, a new hosted service for Red Hat Ansible customers to extend their automation in a controlled way to the various end users who need it. This is a deep dive into the capabilities and features of the offering.

 

Users

The automation services catalog is designed to be a familiar experience, providing an easy and intuitive user interface for ordering products (automation resources). 

Products to Order

The idea is that those using the automation services catalog may not know that what they are ordering is actually Ansible Automation. For example, a product could be a business function, like ordering a new OpenShift project or onboarding a user to a new platform.

Ordering a product will present the user with options to facilitate the order. This could be provisioning the datacenter or applying permissions for a Kubernetes project. Upon submitting the order, the user can see the progress in their order queue. Users can search for past orders and see those currently in progress indicated by statuses including: Order, Failed, Approval Pending and Completed. Orders that are pending approval can be compared with ordering a product from a website and seeing Continue reading

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The Hedge Podcast 037: Stephane Bortzmeyer and DNS Privacy

In this episode of the Hedge, Stephane Bortzmeyer joins Alvaro Retana and Russ White to discuss draft-ietf-dprive-rfc7626-bis, which “describes the privacy issues associated with the use of the DNS by Internet users.” Not many network engineers think about the privacy implications of DNS, a important part of the infrastructure we all rely on to make the Internet work.

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Red Hat Beams Quarkus Into Its Runtimes Middleware

Quarkus is a Kubernetes native Java framework that allows the programming language to be more...

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Cisco Licks Wounds, Targets Next Cloud Computing Wave

“It’s not a secret that we did not do as well as we wanted to in the first phase of the web...

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Fortinet Fortifies Hyrdo One’s SD-WAN Offering

The Toronto-based telecom claims the service will provide customers with tools to support both...

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Net One Systems Taps Juniper’s Contrail Enterprise Multicloud

The network integrator needed a services management platform that would allow it to configure...

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Shortening the developer commute with Docker and Microsoft Azure

Do you remember the first time you used Docker? I do. It was about six years ago and like many folks at the time it looked like this:

docker run -it redis

I was not using Redis at the time but it seemed like a complicated enough piece of software to put this new technology through its paces. A quick Docker image pull and it was up and running. It seemed like magic. Shortly after that first Docker command I found my way to Docker Compose. At this point I knew how to run Redis and the docs had an example Python Flask application. How hard could it be to put the two together?

version: '3'
services:
  web:
    build: .
    ports:
      - "5000:5000"
  redis:
    image: “redis”

I understood immediately how Docker could help me shorten my developer “commute.” All the time I spent doing something else just to get to the work I wanted to be doing. It was awesome! 

As time passed, unfortunately my commute started to get longer again. Maybe I needed to collaborate with a colleague or get more resources then I had locally. Ok, I can run Docker in the cloud, let me see how Continue reading

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There’s No Duty of Care without Strong Encryption

On 15 May, the Telegraph reported that The Five Eyes intelligence alliance planned to meet to explore legal options to block plans to implement end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger. According to the UK-based newspaper, the discussions between the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand would focus on how the “duty of care,” a basic concept found in tort law, could be stretched to force online platforms to remove or refrain from implementing end-to-end encryption. (A duty of care is the legal responsibility of a person or organization to avoid any behaviors or omissions that could reasonably be foreseen to cause harm to others.)

If this is true, this is an attempt to justify their calls for encryption backdoors.

It’s easy to predict what such a strategy might look like – the playbook is familiar. In this case, if duty of care becomes the rationale for banning end-to-end encryption, it could be used as a framework to ban future deployments. Additionally, similar to other legislation, including the Online Harms, there will be an argument that social media companies have a special duty of care to protect vulnerable groups. This is nothing more Continue reading

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Day Two Cloud 050: Nerding Out On GitHub Actions With Chris Wahl

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast gets into the nerdy details of how an infrastructure professional can use GitHub Actions. Actions lets you chain together steps or instructions and trigger them to run as a workflow. Our guest and guide to GitHub Actions is Chris Wahl.