The Confluence of SD-WAN and Microsegmentation

If you had to pick two really hot topics in the networking space right now, you’d be hard-pressed to find two more discussed than SD-WAN and microsegmentation. SD-WAN is the former “king of the hill” in the network engineering. I can remember having more conversations about SD-WAN in the last couple of years than anything else. But as the SD-WAN market has started to consolidate and iterate, a new challenger has arrived. Microsegmentation is the word of the day.

However, I think that SD-WAN and microsegmentation are quickly heading toward a merger of ideas and solutions. There are a lot of commonalities between the two technologies that make a lot of sense running together.

SD-WAN isn’t just about packet switching and routing any longer. That’s because networking people have quickly learned that packet-by-packet processing of traffic is inefficient. All of our older network analysis devices could only see things one IP packet at a time. But the new wave of devices think in terms of flows. They can analyze a stream of packets to figure out what’s going on. And what generates those flows?

Applications.

The key to the new wave of SD-WAN technology isn’t some kind of magic method Continue reading

‘Fiber-in-air’ 5G network research gets funding

Wireless transmission at data rates of around 45gbps could one day be commonplace, some engineers say. “Fiber-in-air” is how the latest variant of 5G infrastructure is being described. To get there, a Britain-funded consortium of chip makers, universities, and others intend to aggressively investigate the exploitation of D-Band. That part of the radio spectrum is at 151-174.8 GHz in millimeter wavelengths (mm-wave) and hasn’t been used before.The researchers intend to do it by riffing on a now roughly 70-year-old gun-like electron-sending device that can trace its roots back through the annals of radio history: The Traveling Wave Tube, or TWT, an electron gun-magnet-combo that was used in the development of television and still brings space images back to Earth.To read this article in full, please click here

Extreme 5G network research gets funding

Wireless transmission at data rates of around 45 gigabits per second could one day be commonplace, some engineers say. “Fiber-in-air” is how the latest variant of 5G infrastructure is being described. To get there, a Britain-funded consortium of chip makers, universities, and others intend to aggressively investigate the exploitation of D-Band. That part of the radio spectrum is at 151-174.8 GHz in millimeter wavelengths (mm-wave) and hasn’t been used before.The researchers intend to do it by riffing on a now roughly 70-year-old gun-like electron-sending device that can trace its roots back through the annals of radio history: The Traveling Wave Tube, or TWT, an electron gun-magnet-combo that was used in the development of television and still brings space images back to Earth.To read this article in full, please click here

Most data center workers happy with their jobs — despite the heavy demands

A survey conducted by Informa Engage and Data Center Knowledge finds data center workers overall are content with their job, so much so they would encourage their children to go into that line of work despite the heavy demands on time and their brain.Overall satisfaction is pretty good, with 72% of respondents generally agreeing with the statement “I love my current job,” while a third strongly agreed. And 75% agreed with the statement, “If my child, niece or nephew asked, I’d recommend getting into IT.”To read this article in full, please click here

Most data center workers happy with their jobs — despite the heavy demands

A survey conducted by Informa Engage and Data Center Knowledge finds data center workers overall are content with their job, so much so they would encourage their children to go into that line of work despite the heavy demands on time and their brain.Overall satisfaction is pretty good, with 72% of respondents generally agreeing with the statement “I love my current job,” while a third strongly agreed. And 75% agreed with the statement, “If my child, niece or nephew asked, I’d recommend getting into IT.”To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Protecting smart cities and smart people

Smart cities require protection. In a smart cities context so does the community and the individual. How do we protect these valuable and lucrative future assets? What is the role of cyber and privacy specialist in this emerging smart eco-system?You would be forgiven for believing the smart cities express has nothing but green traffic lights on its way to its final destination. Conferences are packed with eager smart sellers convincing smart buyers their “smart service” will address all their current and future woes.  Perhaps this is true. We will have cleaner air, improved waste management, and ultimately a more responsive and intuitive society. To many more, the smart revolution will deliver the longest overdue promise of all: a safer community.To read this article in full, please click here

Keeping master green at scale

Keeping master green at scale Ananthanarayanan et al., EuroSys’19

This paper provides a fascinating look at a key part of Uber’s software delivery machine. With a monorepo, and many thousands of engineers concurrently committing changes, keeping the build green, and keeping commit-to-live latencies low, is a major challenge.

This paper introduces a change management system called SubmitQueue that is responsible for continuous integration of changes into the mainline at scale while always keeping the mainline green.

The challenge: build fails at scale

Each individual submitted change will have passed all local tests, but when you put large numbers of concurrent changes together conflicts can still happen. Finding out what’s gone wrong is a tedious and error-prone task often requiring human intervention. Meanwhile, new features are blocked from rolling out.

So the goal is to keep it green:

…the monorepo mainline needs to remain green at all times. A mainline is called green if all build steps (e.g., compilation, unit tests, UI tests) can successfully execute for every commit point in the history. Keeping the mainline green allows developers to (i) instantly release new features from any commit point in the mainline, (ii) roll back to any Continue reading

Come See Pica8 at Dell Technologies World – and Help Save a Real-Life Pika

Having been around the block a time or two, I’ve seen my share of trade show event booth giveaways and all manner of tchotchkes, most of which find their way to a trash can before the visitor gets home. For the upcomingDell Technologies World 2019in Las Vegas, we wanted to do something different – something that would impact the world in a positive way.

So, we’ll be raffling off 100 “adoptions” of real North American pikas, as part of the National Wildlife Federation’s Adopt-a-Pika program.

A pika is a small mammal, closely related to rabbits – and it’s in trouble. As the NWF explains, “Pikas live in high mountain ecosystems that are cool and moist. Higher temperatures can cause the pikas to overheat.”

As global warming brings higher temperatures to the pika’s habitat, it’s creating real problems. Pikas can’t just go find higher ground where it’s cooler – because that higher ground is their natural habitat.

“Without our protection and help, American pikas could be the first species with the distinction of going extinct due to global warming,” the NWF says.


Helping to save the pika

To avoid that distinction, the NWF launched the “Adopt an Continue reading

Day Two Cloud 007: Digital Transformation Is More Than Just Cloud Migration

Pushing your heritage application to the cloud won't digitally transform your company any more that slapping an Autobots symbol on your car makes it a Transformer. On today's Day Two Cloud podcast, guest Martin Ehrnst delves into the nuances of digital transformation in the enterprise.

The post Day Two Cloud 007: Digital Transformation Is More Than Just Cloud Migration appeared first on Packet Pushers.

BrandPost: Clearing up confusion between edge and cloud

Edge computing and cloud computing are sometimes discussed as if they’re mutually exclusive approaches to network infrastructure. While they may function in different ways, utilizing one does not preclude the use of the other.Indeed, Futurum Research found that, among companies that have deployed edge projects, only 15% intend to separate these efforts from their cloud computing initiatives — largely for security or compartmentalization reasons.So then, what’s the difference, and how do edge and cloud work together?Location, location, locationTo read this article in full, please click here

Distributed Firewall on VMware Cloud on AWS

This blog post will provide a deep dive on the distributed firewall (DFW) on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS). Let’s start with the basic concepts of a distributed firewall:

Distributed Firewall Concepts

The distributed firewall is an essential feature of NSX Data Center and essentially provides the ability to wrap virtual machines around a virtual firewall.

The virtual firewall is a stateful Layer 4 (L4) firewall – it’s capable of inspecting the traffic up to the Layer 4 of the OSI model: in simple terms, it means they look at IP addresses (source and destination) and TCP/UDP ports and filter the traffic based upon these criteria.

What’s unique about our firewall is that it has contextual view of the virtual data center – this means our distributed firewall can secure workloads based on VM criteria instead of just source and destination IP addresses.

Traditional firewalling is based on source and destination IPs – constructs that have no business logic or context into applications. Our distributed firewall can secure workloads based on smarter criteria such as the name of the virtual machine or metadata such as tags.

This enables us to build security rules based on business logic (using Continue reading

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