New: The Datacenter as a Computer: Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines, Third Edition

 

Five years ago when Google published The Datacenter as a Computer: Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines it was a manifesto declaring the world of computing had changed forever. Hop aboard or be left behind at the station. Since then the world has chosen to ride along with Google.

The world is still changing, so Google published a new edition: The Datacenter as a Computer: Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines, Third Edition.

What's different?

The third edition reflects four years of advancements since the previous edition and nearly doubles the number of pictures and figures. New topics range from additional workloads like video streaming, machine learning, and public cloud to specialized silicon accelerators, storage and network building blocks, and a revised discussion of data center power and cooling, and uptime. Further discussions of emerging trends and opportunities ensure that this revised edition will remain an essential resource for educators and professionals working on the next generation of WSCs.

The abstract:

This book describes warehouse-scale computers (WSCs), the computing platforms that power cloud computing and all the great web services we use every day. It discusses how these new systems treat the datacenter itself as one massive computer designed at warehouse scale, with hardware and Continue reading

Sigfox president on building a one-stop shop for IoT cloud communications

Sigfox, the France-based wireless networking company that is trying to push IoT communications technology into the mainstream with its low-power WAN service, provided through partnerships with mobile carriers who weave its technology into their base stations, just celebrated its third year of doing business in North America.In an interview with Network World, Sigfox USA President Christian Olivier was eager to characterize his company as an operator or a carrier for the Internet of Things (IoT), not an infrastructure provider.To read this article in full, please click here

Sigfox president on building a one-stop-shop for IoT cloud communications

Sigfox, the France-based wireless networking company that is trying to push IoT communications technology into the mainstream with its low-power WAN service, provided through partnerships with mobile carriers who weave its technology into their base stations, just celebrated its third year of doing business in North America.In an interview with Network World, Sigfox USA president Christian Olivier was eager to characterize his company as  an operator or a carrier for the IoT, not an infrastructure provider.To read this article in full, please click here

Inspecting Gadgets: Don’t Forget the Asterisk When Buying Smart Devices

As we approach the holiday buying season, excitement is building for all the new IoT gadgets – “smart” everything for the home, fitness/health trackers and a plethora of connected children’s toys. But this excitement should come with a giant asterisk:

* Are these products safe?

We’ve all seen the horror stories – hacked baby monitors, vulnerable door locks, robot vacuums turned into roving surveillance devices and connected toys pulled from shelves.

Clearly these gadgets need further inspection. This week the Internet Society has joined with Consumers International and Mozilla to advocate for a set of five minimum security and privacy standards IoT manufacturers should follow to improve the safety of their products. Mozilla has incorporated these into their evaluation of 70 products in the latest version of Privacy Not Included, their holiday IoT buyer’s guide. More detailed explanations of the guide and evaluation criteria are also available.

These minimum guidelines are great start to improve IoT security and privacy. They are a subset of our IoT Trust Framework, which comprehensively addresses key security, privacy and lifecycle principles that should be incorporated into IoT offerings. Manufacturers can use this list of principles to practice “trust by design,” resellers can Continue reading

Research Brief: Achieving Success in Modern Network Automation

This new Research Brief from AvidThink is aimed at providing enterprises and service providers with a view of the challenges in modern networking, and detailed strategies on how to overcome them by laying the right foundation for network automation. 

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Episode 39 – State Of Exhaustion

We’ve had a lot going on behind the scenes at Network Collective. In this episode we give a little peak behind the curtain at what’s been going on with us and share some of the ways we’re modifying the show in response to how you all are consuming it.

 

Jordan Martin
Host
Eyvonne Sharp
Host
Russ White
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post Episode 39 – State Of Exhaustion appeared first on Network Collective.

Real-time visibility at 400 Gigabits/s

The chart above demonstrates real-time, up to the second, flow monitoring on a 400 gigabit per second link. The chart shows that the traffic is composed of four, roughly equal, 100 gigabit per second flows.

The data was gathered from The International Conference for High PerformanceComputing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC18) being held this week in Dallas. The conference network, SCinet, is described as the fastest and most powerful network in the world.
This year, the SCinet network includes recently announced 400 gigabit switches from Arista networks, see Arista Introduces 400 Gigabit Platforms. Each switch delivers 32 400G ports in a 1U form factor.
NRE-36 University of Southern California network topology for SuperComputing 2018
The switches are part of 400G demonstration network connecting USC, Caltech and StarLight booths. The chart shows traffic on a link connecting the USC and Caltech booths.

Providing the visibility needed to manage large scale high speed networks is a significant challenge. In this example, line rate traffic of 80 million packets per second is being monitored on the 400G port. The maximum packet rate for 64 byte packets on a 400 Gigabit, full duplex, link is approximately 1.2 billion packet per second Continue reading

How to add IoT functions to legacy equipment

Powerful new Internet of Things (IoT) devices promise to revolutionize everything from farm equipment to satellites. But can those benefits also be added to the enormous installed base of existing, legacy, equipment, and infrastructure? After all, much of that stuff has been in place for decades, if not centuries, and still works just fine. Replacing it all would cost untold trillions, so no matter what the possible profits might be, it’s unlikely to fall out of service any time soon.To read this article in full, please click here

U.S. R&E Community Embraces Routing Security

The Internet Society participated in a Routing Security Workshop that was held during the Internet2 Technology Exchange 2018 on 15 October 2018 in Orlando, United States. The research and education networking community has been one of the key targets of the MANRS initiative that is promoting adoption of best practices to reduce threats to the global routing system, and this community workshop followed on from a previous engagement we had with Internet2 and a number of other R&E networks in the US earlier in the year.

Internet2 interconnects R&E institutes across the United States in conjunction with regional and state networks, so we see them as a key partner in raising awareness of the routing security issues, as well as encouraging the adoption of the four MANRS principles. Indeed, one of the aims of MANRS is for network operator communities to take ownership of this process by generating awareness and disseminating best practices, along with making recommendations for improvement. So this workshop was a fantastic step in this direction.

Another positive step was Internet2 formally becoming a MANRS participant shortly before the workshop, follow in the footsteps of ESnet, CAAREN, KanREN, George Washington University, Indiana University, and DePaul University. WiscNet Continue reading

Interview with Juniper Networks Ambassador Nupur Kanoi

In our next Juniper Ambassador interview, I spend time with fellow Juniper Ambassador Nupur Kanoi at the Juniper NXTWORK 2018 conference in Las Vegas. We discuss her life as an Ambassador, her engineering role at Virtela, her upcoming Day One Guide “MPLS Up and Running” scheduled for release next month, and her family life back …

Continue reading "Interview with Juniper Networks Ambassador Nupur Kanoi"

VNFs and Containers: Heptagonal Pegs and Triangle Holes

One of my readers sent me this question:

It would be nice to have a blog post or a webinar describing how to implement container networking in case when: (A) application does not tolerate NAT (telco, e.g. due to SCTP), (B) no DNS / FQDN, is used to find the peer element and (C) bandwidth requirements may be tough.

The only thing I could point him to is the Advanced Docker Networking part of Docker Networking Fundamentals webinar (available with free subscription) where macvlan and ipvlan are described.

Read more ...

Unikernels as processes

Unikernels as processes Williams et al., SoCC’18

Ah, unikernels. Small size, fast booting, tiny attack surface, resource efficient, hard to deploy on existing cloud platforms, and undebuggable in production. There’s no shortage of strong claims on both sides of the fence.

See for example:

In today’s paper choice, Williams et al. give us an intriguing new option in the design space: running unikernels as processes. Yes, that’s initially confusing to get your head around! That means you still have a full-fat OS underneath the process, and you don’t get to take advantage of the strong isolation afforded by VMs. But through a clever use of seccomp, unikernels as processes still have strong isolation as well as increased throughput, reduced startup time, and increased memory density. Most importantly though, with unikernels as processes we can reuse standard infrastructure and tools:

We believe that running unikernels as processes is an important step towards running them in production, because, as processes, they can Continue reading

Cisco links wireless, wired worlds with new Catalyst 9000 switches

Cisco is making it possible to run, manage, automate and secure wired and wireless networks all on top of a single operating system.Key to the company's next step in operational efficiency is a new Catalyst 9000 switch, the 802.11ax-ready 9800 Wireless LAN Controller family which is available in an on-premises chassis or as a software addition that can be run on select Catalyst 9000 switches or a private or public cloud, Cisco said.[ Related: Getting grounded in intent-based networking] High-Efficiency Wireless or 802.11ax promises a fourfold increase in average throughput per user and is designed to handle high-density public environments. But it also will be beneficial in Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, in heavy-usage homes, in apartment buildings and in offices that use bandwidth-hogging applications like videoconferencing.To read this article in full, please click here

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