The Multicloud We Need, But Not the One We Deserve

Large organizations are married to the VMware suite of products. We can quibble about numbers for adoption of Hyper-V and KVM, but VMware dominates the enterprise virtualization market, just as Kubernetes is the unquestioned champion of containers.

Virtual Machines (VMs) are a mature technology, created and refined before large-scale adoption of public cloud services. Cloud-native workloads are often designed for containers, and containerized workloads are designed to fail. You can tear one down on one cloud, and reinstantiate it on another. Near-instant reinastantiation is the defense against downtime.

VMs take a different approach. A VM is meant to keep existing for long periods of time, despite migrations and outages. Failure is to be avoided as much as possible. This presents a problem as more organizations pursue a multi-cloud IT strategy.

The key technology for highly available VMs is vMotion: the ability to move a VM from one node in a cluster to another with no downtime. However, as data centers themselves become increasingly virtualized, using cloud computing services such as Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and Amazon EC2, there’s a growing requirement to be able to move VMs between cloud infrastructures. This is not a supported feature of vMotion.

Routed Continue reading

Interview with Joe Onisick

With this blog, I try to inspire and mentor. One person I have a lot of respect for is Joe Onisick. I had the pleasure of interviewing Joe. Joe has really transformed himself and everything about him lately and I thought it would be nice to give you readers some more insight to his journey. Here is Joe’s story:

Q: Hi Joe, welcome to the blog! Please give the readers a short introduction of yourself.

A: I’m a technology executive who’s been in the field for 23 years, with the exception of a five-year break to serve as a US Marine. I started in network/email administration and have spent most of my career in the data center space on all aspects of delivering data center resources, up to IaaS and private-cloud.

Q: Many people probably know you best from your time at Cisco, working for the Insieme BU, responsible for coming up with ACI. What was your time at Cisco like? How were you as a person at that time?

A: I joined a startup called Insieme Networks that was in the early stages of developing what became Cisco ACI and Nexus 9000. When the product was ready to launch, Continue reading

Cisco spreads AI across Webex meetings

Cisco Webex has rolled out a package of AI-based features that brings together recently acquired technologies it says will make business meetings more efficient and intuitive.The Webex conferencing tool enhancements, which include faster meeting startup, a better way to know the people attending a meeting and facial-recognition improvements will help customers more effectively collaborate from any location, the company said. Read about SD-WAN How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier How to pick an off-site data-backup method SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it What are the options for security SD-WAN? Cisco bought Webex in 2007 for about $3.2 billion with an eye toward competing more effectively with Microsoft and other collaboration software vendors. Today Webex conferencing tools are used by over 130 million customers a month, Cisco says.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco spreads AI across Webex meetings

Cisco Webex has rolled out a package of AI-based features that brings together recently acquired technologies it says will make business meetings more efficient and intuitive.The Webex conferencing tool enhancements, which include faster meeting startup, a better way to know the people attending a meeting and facial-recognition improvements will help customers more effectively collaborate from any location, the company said. Read about SD-WAN How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier How to pick an off-site data-backup method SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it What are the options for security SD-WAN? Cisco bought Webex in 2007 for about $3.2 billion with an eye toward competing more effectively with Microsoft and other collaboration software vendors. Today Webex conferencing tools are used by over 130 million customers a month, Cisco says.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Software-defined perimeter: Identity-centric enforced network perimeter

With the introduction of cloud, BYOD, IoT and virtual offices scattered around the globe, the traditional architectures not only hold us back in terms of productivity but also create security flaws that leave gaps for compromise.The network and security architectures that are commonly deployed today are not fit for today's digital world. They were designed for another time, a time of the past. This could sound daunting...and it indeed is.What we had in the past? Traditionally, we have had a static network and security perimeter with clear network and security demarcation points. In terms of security, the perimeter-based approach never worked. It did, however, create a multi-billion-dollar industry. But the fact is, it neither did, not will it provide competent security.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Deploying highly secure, easy to deploy and cost-effective Micro Data Centers

Industry trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and content distribution networks (CDNs) are driving the need for edge computing. That’s because these solutions often require low latency, high bandwidth, greater reliability, and strong security.It’s a tall order meant for Micro Data Centers (MDCs) to fulfill. An MDC is a self-contained data center architecture that offers complete IT infrastructure within a stand-alone, secure enclosure.MDCs offer a number of key advantages beyond today’s server rooms and traditional data centers. First, because they’re distributed closer to bandwidth-intensive content, MDCs can significantly reduce latency and lower costs. Secondly, it’s easy and cost-effective to add data center capacity to them anywhere and anytime it is needed – in both IT room and non-climate-controlled environments. And because MDC IT equipment is pre-installed before shipment in a self-contained and secure enclosure, it can provide physical security and protection of critical business applications.To read this article in full, please click here

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Test Driving transmission for multi-site file sync

As the industry moves towards more distributed deployment of services, syncing files across multiple location is a problem that often needs to be solved. In the world of file synching there are two algorithms that are outstanding. One being rsync which is a very efficient tool for synching files. It works great when you have … Continue reading Test Driving transmission for multi-site file sync

DoE plans world’s fastest supercomputer

The U.S. Department of Energy says it is working on a supercomputer that will break the target of exaFLOP computation – a quintillion (1018)  floating-point computations per second – in order to handle high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.Being built in conjunction with Intel and Cray Computing,  the Aurora supercomputer will  cost more than half a billion dollars and be turned over to Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago in 2021, according to a statement by the DoE. [Click here to see the current top 10 fastest supercomputers.]To read this article in full, please click here

DoE plans world’s fastest supercomputer

The U.S. Department of Energy says it is working on a supercomputer that will break the target of exaFLOP computation – a quintillion (1018)  floating-point computations per second – in order to handle high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.Being built in conjunction with Intel and Cray Computing,  the Aurora supercomputer will  cost more than half a billion dollars and be turned over to Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago in 2021, according to a statement by the DoE. [Click here to see the current top 10 fastest supercomputers.]To read this article in full, please click here

Concluding the IETF Rough Guide, Long Live the IETF Blog

For many years we have produced a series of blog posts as a Rough Guide to each upcoming IETF meeting usually in the week prior to the meeting. The Rough Guides were intended to provide a snapshot of IETF activity of interest to the Internet Society because of programmatic activity that we were engaged in. They were also an opportunity to highlight the activities sponsored directly by the Internet Society that were happening adjacent to the upcoming IETF meeting.

Rough Guides were intended to help guide a non-specialist but technically minded audience to the hot topics and debates of interest at each upcoming IETF meeting with pointers to the agenda and remote participation possibilties. Originally intended to help spur meeting attendance by those interested in the key topics, they became a way to highlight important discussions taking place and ways to get involved in person or remotely.

As we are now less than a week away from the IETF 104 meeting in Prague it seemed like the right time to share an update regarding our plans for writing about IETF activity. We have decided to discontinue producing the Rough Guides. Instead, we will be helping to supply relevant, high-quality content Continue reading

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