Cumulus Networks 4th-Generation open, modern networking for applications of the future

The dynamics of IT are changing, especially when it comes to the demands on the network. As many have predicted, big data, mobile and the Internet of Things are putting significant and ever-increasing pressure on the network. Most networks and legacy management tools, therefore, are unprepared for the added stress placed on already-fragile infrastructures while the rest of the data center has sped ahead.

As more and more data is created and transferred between resources, the network must be increasingly resilient, dynamic and agile to adjust to application demands accordingly. As data and applications become increasingly distributed, there is an inherent architectural dependence on the interconnect, which enables these resources to work in concert to deliver application workloads. That interconnect, the network, must undergo its own transformation to meet the new needs of a modern network.

Our founders at Cumulus Networks recognized the challenges that were mounting nearly a decade ago and set out to build a more modern network, one that is modeled from the web-scale giants including Google, Amazon, and Facebook to better address applications of the future.

I’m very happy to announce that Cumulus Networks is now enabling customers to meet modern network challenges with our 4th-Generation Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Let’s Encrypt Doubles the Number of Secure Websites

A more secure Internet: Let’s Encrypt, the nonprofit certificate authority, has helped the percentage of websites protected with HTTPS encryption jump from 40 percent in 2016 to 80 percent now, TechXplore notes. The free certificate service has “turned the implementation of HTTPS from a costly, complicated process to an easy step that’s within reach for all websites.” Let’s Encrypt has become the world’s largest certificate authority and provides more HTTPS certificates than all other certificate authorities combined.

The right to the Internet: A new study by Merten Reglitz, a lecturer in global ethics at the University of Birmingham, suggests Internet access should be a human right, Vice reports. Internet access is “highly conducive to a multitude of crucial human interests and rights,” the study says. “Internet access is a uniquely effective way for lobbying and holding accountable global players like global governance institutions and multinational corporations.”

You must include these apps: The Russian government may require PC and smartphone makers to pre-load Russia apps, ZDNet reports. The Russian parliament is debating a bill to require the pre-loaded apps. If the bill passes, the Russian government would publish a list of electronic devices that will need to comply Continue reading

Facts and Fiction: BGP Is a Hot Mess

Every now and then a smart person decides to walk away from their competence zone, and start spreading pointless clickbait opinions like BGP is a hot mess.

Like any other technology, BGP is just a tool with its advantages and limitations. And like any other tool, BGP can be used sloppily… and that’s what’s causing the various problems and shenanigans everyone is talking about.

Just in case you might be interested in facts instead of easy-to-digest fiction:

Formal foundations of serverless computing

Formal foundations of serverless computing Jangda et al., OOPSLA’19

Jangda et al. won a distinguished paper award at OOPSLA this year for their work on ‘Formal foundations of serverless computing.’ Central to the paper is their observation that the serverless execution environment has a number of unique properties (such as warm starting / reuse of execution environments) that can make it harder to build correct applications. They show the conditions under which a serverless function can safely ignore these peculiarities, and thus become much simpler to reason about. They also introduce a composition language based on arrows for function composition.

Things to be aware of when going serverless

The serverless computing abstraction, despite its many advantages, exposes several low-level operational details that make it hard for programmers to write and reason about their code. For example, to reduce latency, serverless platforms try to reuse the same function instance to process multiple requests. However, this behaviour is not transparent and it is easy to write a serverless function that produces incorrect results or leaks confidential data when reused. A related problem is that serverless platforms abruptly terminate function instances when they are idle…

These first problems are related to Continue reading

Digital Realty jumps into interconnection business

Data center provider Digital Realty Trust isn't resting after its massive EMEA push via the acquisition of Interxion. The company unveiled PlatformDIGITAL, an initiative designed to provide interconnections to customers and manage big data. Digital Realty made the announcement at its MarketplaceLIVE conference. At the heart of the PlatformDIGITAL strategy is Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx), which offers "fit-for-purpose" data center designs meant to solve scale, configuation and connectivity issues faced by enterprise colocation customers.To read this article in full, please click here

Digital Realty jumps into interconnection business

Data center provider Digital Realty Trust isn't resting after its massive EMEA push via the acquisition of Interxion. The company unveiled PlatformDIGITAL, an initiative designed to provide interconnections to customers and manage big data. Digital Realty made the announcement at its MarketplaceLIVE conference. At the heart of the PlatformDIGITAL strategy is Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx), which offers "fit-for-purpose" data center designs meant to solve scale, configuation and connectivity issues faced by enterprise colocation customers.To read this article in full, please click here

Digital Reality jumps into interconnection business

Data center provider Digital Realty Trust isn't resting after its massive EMEA push via the acquisition of Interxion. The company unveiled PlatformDIGITAL, an initiative designed to provide interconnections to customers and manage big data. Digital Realty made the announcement at its MarketplaceLIVE conference. At the heart of the PlatformDIGITAL strategy is Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx), which offers "fit-for-purpose" data center designs meant to solve scale, configuation and connectivity issues faced by enterprise colocation customers.To read this article in full, please click here

White-box switches yield initial savings but pose challenges

Despite the clear cost benefits, white-box switches outfitted with independent network operating systems (NOS) solutions have seen only limited adoption in leading enterprise IT shops.  That’s due to the lack of a clear market leader, implementation challenges and concerns about service and support that have steered IT pros toward traditional, branded-box Ethernet switches instead.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] But maturing technology and new support alliances are making white-box switches an attractive alternative for greenfield deployments and for infrastructure that’s being upgraded to give performance boosts to data centers, campuses and branch offices.To read this article in full, please click here

5 disruptive storage technologies for 2020

For decades, storage technology progress was measured primarily in terms of capacity and speed. No longer. In recent times, those steadfast benchmarks have been augmented, and even superseded, by sophisticated new technologies and methodologies that make storage smarter, more flexible and easier to manage.Next year promises to bring even greater disruption to the formerly staid storage market, as IT leaders seek more efficient ways of coping with the data tsunami generated by AI, IoT devices and numerous other sources. Here's a look at the five storage technologies that will create the greatest disruption in 2020, as enterprise adoption gains ground.To read this article in full, please click here

5 disruptive storage technologies for 2020

For decades, storage technology progress was measured primarily in terms of capacity and speed. No longer. In recent times, those steadfast benchmarks have been augmented, and even superseded, by sophisticated new technologies and methodologies that make storage smarter, more flexible and easier to manage.Next year promises to bring even greater disruption to the formerly staid storage market, as IT leaders seek more efficient ways of coping with the data tsunami generated by AI, IoT devices and numerous other sources. Here's a look at the five storage technologies that will create the greatest disruption in 2020, as enterprise adoption gains ground.To read this article in full, please click here

Digital Reality jumps into interconnection business

Data center provider Digital Realty Trust isn't resting after its massive EMEA push via the acquisition of Interxion. The company unveiled PlatformDIGITAL, an initiative designed to provide interconnections to customers and manage big data. Digital Realty made the announcement at its MarketplaceLIVE conference. At the heart of the PlatformDIGITAL strategy is Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx), which offers "fit-for-purpose" data center designs meant to solve scale, configuation and connectivity issues faced by enterprise colocation customers.To read this article in full, please click here

White-box switches yield initial savings but pose challenges

Despite the clear cost benefits, white-box switches outfitted with independent network operating systems (NOS) solutions have seen only limited adoption in leading enterprise IT shops.  That’s due to the lack of a clear market leader, implementation challenges and concerns about service and support that have steered IT pros toward traditional, branded-box Ethernet switches instead.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] But maturing technology and new support alliances are making white-box switches an attractive alternative for greenfield deployments and for infrastructure that’s being upgraded to give performance boosts to data centers, campuses and branch offices.To read this article in full, please click here

The Four Workhorses Of The Data Apocalypse

The days when the X86 processor could do just about every kind of processing in the datacenter are gone. …

The Four Workhorses Of The Data Apocalypse was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Log every request to corporate apps, no code changes required

When a user connects to a corporate network through an enterprise VPN client, this is what the VPN appliance logs:

The administrator of that private network knows the user opened the door at 12:15:05, but, in most cases, has no visibility into what they did next. Once inside that private network, users can reach internal tools, sensitive data, and production environments. Preventing this requires complicated network segmentation, and often server-side application changes. Logging the steps that an individual takes inside that network is even more difficult.

Cloudflare Access does not improve VPN logging; it replaces this model. Cloudflare Access secures internal sites by evaluating every request, not just the initial login, for identity and permission. Instead of a private network, administrators deploy corporate applications behind Cloudflare using our authoritative DNS. Administrators can then integrate their team’s SSO and build user and group-specific rules to control who can reach applications behind the Access Gateway.

When a request is made to a site behind Access, Cloudflare prompts the visitor to login with an identity provider. Access then checks that user’s identity against the configured rules and, if permitted, allows the request to proceed. Access performs these checks on each request a user Continue reading

Dell Technologies CTO: Why AI Needs Empathy

Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices

Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices

Weekly Top Posts: 2019-11-17

1. Headcount: Firings, Hirings, and Retirings — October 2019
2. Analysts Debate SASE’s Merits as Vendors Board Hype Train
3. Google Killed Chronicle, Report Claims
4. AT&T Sounds Alarm on 5G Security
5. Juniper Targets VMware, Data Center Complexity With Contrail Insights

Palo Alto Networks Leaps Into SASE Market

Monitoring for High Performance Networks at 400G scale

IoT in 2020: The awkward teenage years

Much of the hyperbole around the Internet of Things isn’t really hyperbole anymore – the instrumentation of everything from cars to combine harvesters to factories is just a fact of life these days. IoT’s here to stay.Yet despite the explosive growth – one widely cited prediction from Gartner says that the number of enterprise and automotive IoT endpoints will reach 5.8 billion in 2020 – the IoT market’s ability to address its known flaws and complications has progressed at a far more pedestrian pace. That means ongoing security woes and a lack of complete solutions are most of what can be safely predicted for the coming year.To read this article in full, please click here