Supermicro moves production from China

Server maker Supermicro, based in Fremont, California, is reportedly moving production out of China over customer concerns that the Chinese government had secretly inserted chips for spying into its motherboards.The claims were made by Bloomberg late last year in a story that cited more than 100 sources in government and private industry, including Apple and Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, Apple CEO Tim Cook and AWS CEO Andy Jassy denied the claims and called for Bloomberg to retract the article. And a few months later, the third-party investigations firm Nardello & Co examined the claims and cleared Supermicro of any surreptitious activity.To read this article in full, please click here

Supermicro moves production from China

Server maker Supermicro, based in Fremont, California, is reportedly moving production out of China over customer concerns that the Chinese government had secretly inserted chips for spying into its motherboards.The claims were made by Bloomberg late last year in a story that cited more than 100 sources in government and private industry, including Apple and Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, Apple CEO Tim Cook and AWS CEO Andy Jassy denied the claims and called for Bloomberg to retract the article. And a few months later, the third-party investigations firm Nardello & Co examined the claims and cleared Supermicro of any surreptitious activity.To read this article in full, please click here

Introducing The Internet Society Accessibility Special Interest Group

An ordinary day on 9th April 2019 was turned in to an extraordinary one, as our efforts bore fruit and we finally succeeded in chartering the Internet Society Special Interest Group on Accessibility. The Internet Society Accessibility Special Interest Group or ISOC Accessibility SIG/ISOC A11y SIG is intended to serve persons with disabilities to ensure the Internet and digital domain is for everyone.

Over 1.3 billion people worldwide – about 15% of the world’s population – experience some form of disability. The Accessibility SIG, with a people-centric approach, is aimed at providing interested participants a platform to discuss the Internet-related accessibility issues faced by the people with disabilities and to try to find the solutions to those issues. It also aims to provide a collective voice to a community that the UN calls the world’s largest minority.

The SIG also represents a journey for all of us who are members and who are dedicated to creating equal access to the Internet for everyone regardless of disability. The journey at the Internet Society started with the establishment of the ISOC Disability and Special Needs Chapter in 2002. Along the way, many dedicated and tireless workers, like the late Cynthia Waddell Continue reading

Weekend Reads 051019

If you can’t address your customers and the people interacting with your network face to face, at least know where they are — anywhere in the world, anytime you want to. —Jonathan Zhang

In August 2018, Opensource.com posted a poll with seven options asking readers: What was the most important moment in the history of Linux? —Alan Formy-Duval

Stanford University’s “Silicon Genesis” is a collection of over 100 oral histories and interviews with the people who created Silicon Valley’s semiconductor industry. —David Cassel

Today’s enterprises make use of applications and services that live on-premises, in public clouds and even in edge data centers. IT has entered the multicloud era and connecting the modern enterprise isn’t easy. —aganesan

I don’t have a lot of good news for you. The truth is there’s nothing we can do to protect our data from being stolen by cybercriminals and others. —Bruce Schneier

Open source code is vital to software development at most organizations, but that doesn’t mean that enterprises have figured out how to use open source without inadvertently introducing vulnerabilities into their code. —Curtis Franklin, Jr

World Password Day is a day in which companies around the world post blogs with advice, Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For May 10th, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

 

Deep-sky mosaic, created from nearly 7,500 individual exposures, provides a wide portrait of the distant universe, containing 265,000 galaxies that stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time to just 500 million years after the big bang. (hubblesite)

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? I'd greatly appreciate your support on Patreon. I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 for people who need to understand the cloud. And who doesn't these days? On Amazon it has 45 mostly 5 star reviews (107 on Goodreads). They'll learn a lot and hold you in awe.

 

Number Stuff:

  • 36%: of the world touches a Facebook app every month, 2 years over a life time
  • $84.4: average yearly Facebook ad revenue per user in North America
  • 1%: performers raked in 60% of all concert-ticket revenue world-wide in 2017—more than double their share in 1982
  • ...

Quotable Stuff:

  • @mjpt777: APIs to IO need to be asynchronous and support batching otherwise the latency of calls dominate throughput and latency profile under burst conditions. Languages need to evolve to better support asynchronous interfaces and have state machine support, not try to paper over Continue reading

IT And The Exception Mentality

If you work in IT, you probably have a lot in common with other IT people. You work long hours. You have the attitude that every problem can be fixed. You understand technology well enough to know how processes and systems work. It’s fairly common in our line of work because the best IT people tend to think logically and want to solve issues. But there’s something else that I see a lot in IT people. We tend to focus on the exceptions to the rules.

Odd Thing Out

A perfectly good example of this is automation. We’ve slowly been building toward a future when software and scripting does the menial work of network administration and engineering. We’ve invested dollars and hours into making interfaces into systems that allow us to repeat tasks over and over again without intervention. We see it in other areas, like paperwork processing and auto manufacturing. There are those in IT, especially in networking, that resist that change.

If you pin them down on it, sometimes the answers are cut and dried. Loss of job, immaturity of software, and even unfamiliarity with programming are common replies. However, I’ve also heard a more common response growing Continue reading

Feedback: Data Center Interconnects

Got this feedback from a networking engineer watching the Data Center Interconnects webinar:

This webinar is an excellent overview regarding current DCI design challenges. I would highly recommend to watch it for anyone working in the networking and datacenter space. Sober networkers should watch it thoughtfully at least two times. L2 DCI fans should watch it once in a month, until reaching a solid grasp.

If only life would be as easy as that ;) Most people prefer to be blissfully ignorant of the infrastructure supporting their business, while at the same time pretending they know an awful lot about other people's jobs (see also: Dunning-Kruger effect)

Distributed consensus revised – Part III

Distributed consensus revised (part III) Howard, PhD thesis

With all the ground work laid, the second half of the thesis progressively generalises the Paxos algorithm: weakening the quorum intersection requirements; reusing intersections to allow decisions to be reached with fewer participants; weakening the value selection rules; and sharing phases to take best advantage of the generalisation.

The result of this thesis is a family of approaches to achieving distributed consensus, which generalise over the most popular existing algorithms such as Paxos and Fast Paxos.

Quorum intersection revised

Classic Paxos requires all quorums to intersect, but this turns out to be a stronger condition than is actually required to guarantee safety and progress.

Our first finding is that it is only necessary for phase one quorums and phase two quorums to intersect. There is no need to require that phase one quorums intersect with each other nor that phase two quorums intersect with each other.

This finding (‘revision A’) was also discussed in the Flexible Paxos paper that we’ve covered in a previous edition of The Morning Paper. So long as one quorum member is around to carry the learnings from phase one into phase two, we’re good (the thesis itself Continue reading

Kernel of Truth season 2 episode 7: Certifications

Subscribe to Kernel of Truth on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Cast Box and Sticher!

Click here for our previous episode.

In a recent podcast, we talked with our friend Angelo Luciani from Nutanix about the value of being part of a community and what that can mean for your career. We continue along that train of thought in this podcast but pivot over to the topic industry certifications. Host Brian talks again to Nick Mitchell and Eric Pulvino, two of our consultants who’ve not only taken certifications throughout their career but worked on and helped to create our open networking certification. Listen as they discuss the value of them, if any, what works for certifications and what doesn’t, who should be taking certifications and more!

As Brian mentions in the podcast, we have a social game going on for 2019 where you can win some fun prizes. Part of the game includes some flash give-aways of free CCOMP certification exam registration and more!  Head over to our EPIC Year Game page to learn more or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Guest Bios

Brian O’Sullivan: Brian currently heads Product Management for Cumulus Linux. For 15 or so Continue reading

Cisco adds AMP to SD-WAN for ISR/ASR routers

Cisco has added support for Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) to its million-plus ISR/ASR edge routers, in an effort to reinforce branch and core network malware protection at across the SD-WAN.Cisco last year added its Viptela SD-WAN technology to the IOS XE version 16.9.1 software that runs its core ISR/ASR routers such as the ISR models 1000, 4000 and ASR 5000, in use by organizations worldwide. Cisco bought Viptela in 2017.  More 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? The release of Cisco IOS XE offered an instant upgrade path for creating cloud-controlled SD-WAN fabrics to connect distributed offices, people, devices and applications operating on the installed base, Cisco said. At the time Cisco said that Cisco SD-WAN on edge routers builds a secure virtual IP fabric by combining routing, segmentation, security, policy and orchestration.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco adds AMP to SD-WAN for ISR/ASR routers

Cisco has added support for Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) to its million-plus ISR/ASR edge routers, in an effort to reinforce branch and core network malware protection at across the SD-WAN.Cisco last year added its Viptela SD-WAN technology to the IOS XE version 16.9.1 software that runs its core ISR/ASR routers such as the ISR models 1000, 4000 and ASR 5000, in use by organizations worldwide. Cisco bought Viptela in 2017.  More 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? The release of Cisco IOS XE offered an instant upgrade path for creating cloud-controlled SD-WAN fabrics to connect distributed offices, people, devices and applications operating on the installed base, Cisco said. At the time Cisco said that Cisco SD-WAN on edge routers builds a secure virtual IP fabric by combining routing, segmentation, security, policy and orchestration.To read this article in full, please click here

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