High performance computing: Do you need it?

In today's data-driven world, high performance computing (HPC) is emerging as the go-to platform for enterprises looking to gain deep insights into areas as diverse as genomics, computational chemistry, financial risk modeling and seismic imaging. Initially embraced by research scientists who needed to perform complex mathematical calculations, HPC is now gaining the attention of a wider number of enterprises spanning an array of fields."Environments that thrive on the collection, analysis and distribution of data – and depend on reliable systems to support streamlined workflow with immense computational power – need HPC," says Dale Brantly, director of systems engineering at Panasas, an HPC data-storage-systems provider.To read this article in full, please click here

Fast Friday Thoughts – Networking Field Day 21

This week has been completely full at Networking Field Day 21 with lots of great presentations. As usual, I wanted to throw out some quick thoughts that fit more with some observations and also to set up some topics for deeper discussion at a later time.

• SD-WAN isn’t just a thing for branches. It’s an application-focused solution now. We’ve moved past the technical reasons for implementation and finally moved the needle on “getting rid of MPLS” and instead realized that the quality of service and other aspects of the software allow us to do more. That’s especially true for cloud initiatives. If you can guarantee QoS through your SD-WAN setup you’re already light years ahead of where we’ve been already.
• Automation isn’t just figuring out how to make hardware and software do things really fast. It’s also about helping humans understand which things need to be done fast and automatically and which things don’t. For all the amazing stuff that you can do with scripting and orchestration there are still tasks that should be done manually. And there are plenty of people problems in the process. Really smart companies that want to solve these issues should stop focusing on using Continue reading

Mavenir’s O-RAN Push Swells Into Stockholm

Network Operators in Latin America and the Caribbean Take Steps to Strengthen Routing Security

2019 has been a very good year for the Internet in Latin America and the Caribbean. In May, during the 31st meeting of LACNIC, several operators pledged to take steps to make routing security, and the Internet itself, stronger. They joined the MANRS initiative, which includes four simple and concrete steps to improve the Internet’s security and reliability. In August, NIC Mexico convened the second meeting of network operators in the country, during which routing security stood out as one of the main issues on the agenda.

The Internet Society also made progress on collaboration with National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and higher education institutions. During the TICAL 2019 meeting, we offered a workshop on MANRS in collaboration with RedClara, LACNIC, the University of Guadalajara, ANUIES, and the Autonomous University of Yucatán. This workshop was part of a series of virtual sessions started in April, which ended on October 2 during the ANUIES-TIC meeting with a long-term practical workshop.

As we head to the final stretch of the year, the 32nd meeting of LACNIC will be a new opportunity to work with network operators to improve the security of the Internet. From Panama we will advise anyone interested in Continue reading

Visit the VMware NSX Team at SpringOne Platform 2019

Come see VMware and the NSX team at SpringOne Platform in Austin, TX from October 7-11 in booth T1!

Why Attend SpringOne Platform?

SpringOne Platform is Pivotal’s annual conference for developers, IT operators and leaders, platform managers, and anyone else that wants to be part of one of the most vibrant software development communities in the world. Developers use Spring to build and run millions of mission-critical applications that organizations rely on every day. It enables developers to build software quickly, securely, and globally with modern distributed platform technologies like Kubernetes and Pivotal Application Service (PAS).

Realize the Value of DevOps with NSX and Pivotal

But this is a blog about networking, right? So why are we so excited to talk about SpringOne Platform, and why are we asking you to come have a chat with us? The answer gets at the heart of how VMware and Pivotal are enabling customers to realize the value of cloud-native apps and DevOps practices.

VMware’s NSX family of products gives developers and operators a continuous cloud networking fabric, built in software, that not only exists in the data center but also extends to public clouds and to the edge. Using a software-defined Continue reading

Heavy Networking 475: Anticipating 5G’s Impact On Enterprise Wi-Fi

On today's Heavy Networking podcast, Greg and Ethan engage in a thought experiment: Will 5G and private LTE allow enterprises to get rid of their own wireless networks and shift much of that responsibility on telcos and just let them do it? They explore this idea from the telco and enterprise perspectives.

The post Heavy Networking 475: Anticipating 5G’s Impact On Enterprise Wi-Fi appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 4th, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

 

SpaceX ready to penetrate space with their super heavy rocket. (announcement)

Do you like this sort of Stuff? I'd greatly appreciate your support on Patreon. And I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 for all who want to understand the cloud. On Amazon it has 57 mostly 5 star reviews (135 on Goodreads). Please recommendint it. They'll love you even more.

Number Stuff: 

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

Equinix Pays $175M, Moves Into Mexico Data Center Market

Weekly Wrap: AT&T Lobs White Box Router Design at OCP

Understanding BGP Labeled Unicast

We’ve talked in previous posts on how we can use LDP and RSVP as label distribution protocols. Without LDP and RSVP – we wouldn’t be able to easily create LSPs which means we’d have to do it manually as we did in my first post on MPLS. That being said – the discussion around MPLS label distribution usually focuses around these two protocols, but you might (or might not depending on how long you’ve been in networking) be surprised to learn that we can also use BGP to advertise labels. That is – we can build end to end LSPs without the use of LDP or RSVP. Using BGP for label distribution comes with it’s own set of requirements (and associated oddities) so in this post we’ll talk through the use case.

Advertising labels through BGP is something that we’ve seen before. Specifically, we saw it in the MPLS VPN use case where PE routers advertise a VPN label so that the remote PE knows what VRF/VPN the traffic belongs in. In that use case, we did a BGP peering with the inet-vpn address family. To do BGP labeled unicast (commonly called BGP-LU) we do a BGP peering with the Continue reading

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Redundant BGP Connectivity on a Single ISP Connection

A while ago Johannes Weber tweeted about an interesting challenge:

We want to advertise our AS and PI space over a single ISP connection. How would a setup look like with 2 Cisco routers, using them for hardware redundancy? Is this possible with only 1 neighboring to the ISP?

Hmm, so you have one cable and two router ports that you want to connect to that cable. There’s something wrong with this picture ;)

Detecting and characterizing lateral phishing at scale

Detecting and characterizing lateral phishing at scale Ho et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019

This is an investigation into the phenomenon of lateral phishing attacks. A lateral phishing attack is one where a compromised account within an organisation is used to send out further phishing emails (typically to other employees within the same organisation). So ‘alice at example.com’ might receive a phishing email that has genuinely been sent by ‘bob at example.com’, and thus is more likely to trust it.

In recent years, work from both industry and academia has pointed to the emergence and growth of lateral phishing attacks: a new form of phishing that targets a diverse range of organizations and has already incurred billions of dollars in financial harm…. This attack proves particularly insidious because the attacker automatically benefits from the implicit trust in the hijacked account: trust from both human recipients and conventional email protection systems.

A dataset of 113 million emails…

The study is conducted in conjunction with Barracuda Networks, who obtained customer permission to use email data from the Office 365 employee mailboxes of 92 different organisations. 69 of these organisations were selected through random sampling across all organisations, and 23 Continue reading

Dish Network’s 5G Plans Set for Market ‘Inflection Point’

Headcount: Firings, Hirings, and Retirings — September 2019

Accelerating Compute By Cramming It Into DRAM Memory

Perhaps the biggest task that processor and system designers have to wrestle with these days is how to keep heavily cored and massively threaded processors fed with data. …

Accelerating Compute By Cramming It Into DRAM Memory was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Segment Routing (SR) And Traffic Engineering (TE): Part Two

Adtran Somersaults Into SD-WAN Market

IDG Contributor Network: Secure Access Service Edge (SASE): A reflection of our times

There’s a buzz in the industry about a new type of product that promises to change the way we secure and network our organizations. It is called the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). It was first mentioned by Gartner, Inc. in its hype cycle for networking. Since then Barracuda highlighted SASE in a recent PR update and Zscaler also discussed it in their earnings call. Most recently, Cato Networks announced that it was mentioned by Gartner as a “sample vendor” in the hype cycle.To read this article in full, please click here

The “Easy Button” for SDN Control of Physical and Virtual Data Center Networks