BIB 56: Corporate Scar Tissue with Chris Swan

I got together to Chris Swan @cpswan to record a two beer networking. Through my own staggering incompetence the video hasn’t turned out but the audio is just fine. Chris a leader in service practice and the conversation talks about how organisational scar tissue. He recently attended the European IDC CIO summit in Lisbon which […]

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Technologies that Didn’t: The OSI Protocol Stack

The Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model is the most often taught model of data transmission—although it is not all that useful in terms of describing how modern networks work. What many engineers who have come into network engineering more recently do not know is there was an entire protocol suite that went with the OSI model. Each of the layers within the OSI model, in fact, had multiple protocols specified to fill the functions of that layer. For instance, X.25, while older than the OSI model, was adopted into the OSI suite to provide point-to-point connectivity over some specific kinds of physical circuits. Moving up the stack a little, there were several protocols that provided much the same service as the widely used Internet Protocol (IP). @ECI

Prioritizing Indigenous Connectivity in North America

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly technology evolves. In 2007, the iPhone was released and dramatically transformed the way we communicate. Then, less than three years later, the first iPad hit consumer shelves and revolutionized personal computing. Now, Internet service providers around the world are racing to deploy the infrastructure needed to fuel our transition into smart cities of increasingly connected homes and driverless cars.

While some major U.S. cities are set to get home access to 5G broadband speeds as soon as this month, there are still many people living in rural and remote Indigenous communities across North America that struggle to open an email.

It’s time to get our priorities straight. The Internet is a powerful tool transforming virtually every aspect of our lives. But we can’t move forward if anyone is left behind. Indigenous voices must count in our digital future.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) recently made an important step in the right direction when it released details of its $750 million Broadband Fund to improve connectivity in underserved and remote regions of Canada.

The fund makes an important commitment to ensure applicants consult with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis and Continue reading

Graceful upgrades in Go

Graceful upgrades in Go

The idea behind graceful upgrades is to swap out the configuration and code of a process while it is running, without anyone noticing it. If this sounds error prone, dangerous, undesirable and in general a bad idea – I’m with you. However, sometimes you really need them. Usually this happens in an environment where there is no load balancing layer. We have these at Cloudflare, which led to us investigating and implementing various solutions to this problem.

Graceful upgrades in Go
Dingle Dangle! by Grant C. (CC-BY 2.0)

Coincidentally, implementing graceful upgrades involves some fun low-level systems programming, which is probably why there are already a bajillion options out there. Read on to learn what trade-offs there are, and why you should really really use the Go library we are about to open source. For the impatient, the code is on github  and you can read the documentation on godoc.

The basics

So what does it mean for a process to perform a graceful upgrade? Let’s use a web server as an example: we want to be able to fire HTTP requests at it, and never see an error because a graceful upgrade is happening.

We know that HTTP uses TCP under the Continue reading

BrandPost: Goals and Key Features of 802.11ax

As WLAN access point and device vendors work toward product launches at the end of 2018, we will publish a series of blogs covering all aspects of 802.11ax technology. This first one introduces the motivation and main features of 802.11ax.Download our 802.11ax technical white paper.How to Improve Today’s Wi-Fi?When deciding how to improve Wi-Fi beyond the current release, 802.11ac, the IEEE and Wi-Fi Alliance surveyed Wi-Fi deployments and behavior in order to identify obstacles to wider use and causes of dissatisfaction among user communities. The conclusion was to focus more on performance under “typical” field conditions, a departure from previous upgrades that advanced peak data rates under “excellent” field conditions. With 802.11ax, peak performance and average and worst-case performance under real-world conditions will see improvements.To read this article in full, please click here

Is there a white-box server in your data center’s future?

The stagnant server market has heated up over the last few years, due in no small part to the advent of “white box” server vendors grabbing an increasing share of the cloud business.Enterprises have been reluctant to follow the lead of hyperscale data center vendors to off-brand server competitors, largely because of a lack of enterprise-grade service and maintenance options. But the economics are compelling. More data center stories: Efficient container use in data centers Data center staff are aging faster than the equipment How cloud providers' data-migration appliances stack up Why NVMe? Users weigh benefits of NVMe-accelerated flash storage “White box” is a reference to the off-brand PCs built by independent PC vendors, which used to dot the landscape and appeal to buyers who built their own PCs with a plain beige tower and no vendor label on the box. In the server market, “white box” refers to vendors that are not the big three: Dell EMC, HP Enterprise and Lenovo.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper advances network automation community, skillsets

Juniper is positioning the company to be an evangelist for network automation by announcing applications, tools, labs and libraries that it says will hasten adoption the technology for businesses and network professionals.The inherent role of automation is to reduce the daily toil of repetitive tasks that lead to mistakes. It also provides guardrails to ensure service-level agreement guarantees. SLAs and reliability are not left to caffeine-powered individual heroics, but are achieved through well-trained automation heroes, also known as network reliability engineers (NRE), wrote Juniper's CTO and vice president, Bikash Koley, in a blog about the announcement. To read this article in full, please click here

Is there a white-box server in your data center’s future?

The stagnant server market has heated up over the last few years, due in no small part to the advent of “white box” server vendors grabbing an increasing share of the cloud business.Enterprises have been reluctant to follow the lead of hyperscale data center vendors to off-brand server competitors, largely because of a lack of enterprise-grade service and maintenance options. But the economics are compelling. More data center stories: Efficient container use in data centers Data center staff are aging faster than the equipment How cloud providers' data-migration appliances stack up Why NVMe? Users weigh benefits of NVMe-accelerated flash storage “White box” is a reference to the off-brand PCs built by independent PC vendors, which used to dot the landscape and appeal to buyers who built their own PCs with a plain beige tower and no vendor label on the box. In the server market, “white box” refers to vendors that are not the big three: Dell EMC, HP Enterprise and Lenovo.To read this article in full, please click here

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