Education Service Center Region 11 Protects Student Data with VMware NSX Data Center

Rory Peacock is the Deputy Executive Director of Technology at Education Service Center Region 11, where he oversees all technology services provided to Region 11 schools.

Region 11 is one of 20 education service centers throughout the State of Texas. In Texas, an education service center manages education programs, delivers technical assistance, and provides professional development to schools within its region. With regards to technology, education service centers assist their schools with hosted services and technical support.

Education Service Center Region 11 serves 70,699 educators and almost 600,000 students across 10 urban and rural counties.

I had the opportunity to talk to Rory about some of his largest technology challenges since he joined Region 11 in 2015.

 

Day Zero

Region 11 is a long-time VMware customer, introducing VMware vSphere in 2009. Since then, Region 11 has virtualized over 95% of their server environment. They’ve also made the move to virtual desktops utilizing VMware Horizon to support their 200 employees.

On the very day in 2016 that a meeting was set with the VMware NSX Data Center team to demo the product, Region 11 was hit with a zero-day attack of ransomware. A legacy system was hit in its demilitarized Continue reading

Cray introduces a multi-CPU supercomputer design

Supercomputer maker Cray announced what it calls its last supercomputer architecture before entering the era of exascale computing. It is code-named “Shasta,” and the Department of Energy, already a regular customer of supercomputing, said it will be the first to deploy it, in 2020.The Shasta architecture is unique in that it will be the first server (unless someone beats Cray to it) to support multiple processor types. Users will be able to deploy a mix of x86, GPU, ARM and FPGA processors in a single system.Up to now, servers either came with x86 or, in a few select cases, ARM processors, with GPUs and FPGAs as add-in cards plugged into PCI Express slots. This will be the first case of fully native onboard processors, and I hardly expect Cray to be alone in using this design.To read this article in full, please click here

Cray introduces a multi-CPU supercomputer design

Supercomputer maker Cray announced what it calls its last supercomputer architecture before entering the era of exascale computing. It is code-named “Shasta,” and the Department of Energy, already a regular customer of supercomputing, said it will be the first to deploy it, in 2020.The Shasta architecture is unique in that it will be the first server (unless someone beats Cray to it) to support multiple processor types. Users will be able to deploy a mix of x86, GPU, ARM and FPGA processors in a single system.Up to now, servers either came with x86 or, in a few select cases, ARM processors, with GPUs and FPGAs as add-in cards plugged into PCI Express slots. This will be the first case of fully native onboard processors, and I hardly expect Cray to be alone in using this design.To read this article in full, please click here

Optical networking breakthrough will run networks 100x faster

Researchers reckon they could speed up the internet a hundredfold with a new technique that twists light beams within fiber optic cable rather than sending them in a straight path.“What we’ve managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth,” Dr. Haoran Ren, of Australia’s RMIT University, said in a press release.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ] The corkscrewing configuration, in development over the last few years and now recently physically miniaturized, uses a technique called orbital angular momentum (OAM).To read this article in full, please click here

Optical networking breakthrough will run networks 100x faster

Researchers reckon they could speed up the internet a hundredfold with a new technique that twists light beams within fiber optic cable rather than sending them in a straight path.“What we’ve managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth,” Dr. Haoran Ren, of Australia’s RMIT University, said in a press release.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ] The corkscrewing configuration, in development over the last few years and now recently physically miniaturized, uses a technique called orbital angular momentum (OAM).To read this article in full, please click here

Optical networking breakthrough will run networks 100x faster

Researchers reckon they could speed up the internet a hundredfold with a new technique that twists light beams within fiber optic cable rather than sending them in a straight path.“What we’ve managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth,” Dr. Haoran Ren, of Australia’s RMIT University, said in a press release.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ] The corkscrewing configuration, in development over the last few years and now recently physically miniaturized, uses a technique called orbital angular momentum (OAM).To read this article in full, please click here

Fiber breakthrough will run networks 100x faster

A kind of twisting of light beams, within a fiber optic cable, rather than the sending of them linearly will let computer systems, and the internet overall, run faster, according to researchers who have just announced new findings. The group reckon they could speed up the internet a hundred-fold using the twisted technique.“What we’ve managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth,” Dr. Haoran Ren, of Australia’s RMIT University, said in a press release.To read this article in full, please click here

Fiber breakthrough will run networks 100x faster

A kind of twisting of light beams, within a fiber optic cable, rather than the sending of them linearly will let computer systems, and the internet overall, run faster, according to researchers who have just announced new findings. The group reckon they could speed up the internet a hundred-fold using the twisted technique.“What we’ve managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth,” Dr. Haoran Ren, of Australia’s RMIT University, said in a press release.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Silver Peak Named a Leader in 2018 Gartner WAN Edge Infrastructure Magic Quadrant

For the past three years, the software-defined WAN or SD-WAN, has been one of the most talked about technology trends. By some estimations there are 60+ vendors, all marketing their products around the concept of SD-WAN, each vying to carve out a piece of this emerging multi-billion-dollar market. While all the discussion and hype around SD-WAN has helped shine the spotlight on the business value enterprises can realize by changing the way they build their wide area networks, it has also led to confusion and in some cases delays of adoption.That is why today’s release of the first ever 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure is such an important milestone for us. Gartner has long been one of the most influential industry analyst firms in the world, providing highly credible perspectives on technology vendors and markets. By listening to thousands of enterprise customers, reviewing each vendor’s solution in detail and analyzing their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision, they have published a comprehensive report to provide their view of the Leaders, Challengers, Niche Players and Visionaries in this rapidly changing market (to get a copy of the WAN Edge Magic Quadrant click here). This new Continue reading

IoT Tales of Horror (Inspired by Real-Life Events)

Happy Halloween! In some parts of the world, people are celebrating this holiday of horror by dressing up as monsters or other frights and watching scary movies. But sometimes these tales can be just a little boring. Pod people? Headless horsemen? Replicant children? Whatever.

I present the real horror stories of Halloween – and every other day of the year. These tales are inspired by real-life events and are guaranteed to give you a chill. (And not just because your smart thermostat is being controlled by a shapeshifting clown who lives in the sewer!)

I(o)T
In the fall of 2018, a group of kids work together to destroy an evil malware, which infects connected toys and preys on the children of their small town.

Inspired by the terrifying vulnerabilities found in everyday connected toys.

Night of the Living Devices
There’s panic across the Internet as connected devices suddenly begin attacking critical Internet infrastructure. The film follows a group of network operators as they frantically work to protect the Internet from these packet spewing, infected devices.

Inspired by the harrowing events of the 2016 Dyn attack.

Rosemary’s Baby Monitor
A young family moves into a house billed as the “smart Continue reading

Broadening The Appeal Of Distributed NVM-Express Storage

NVM-Express has been creating a quiet revolution in servers for several years now, providing a way for flash storage to bypass the traditional storage stack and the limitations of interfaces such as SATA and SAS, and instead pipe data directly into and out of the CPU through the high-speed PCI Express bus. …

Broadening The Appeal Of Distributed NVM-Express Storage was written by Daniel Robinson at .

Network Troubleshooting at Safari Books Online

I am giving my network troubleshooting class over at Safari Books Online on the 6th of December for those who are interested. I consider this a foundational session, covering the time components of an outage, a taxonomy of reactions to outages, the half-split method of searching for the root cause, and how models can help you understand the right questions to ask to narrow a problem down quickly. A lot of this course is based on formal methods of troubleshooting I learned in electronic engineering, adapted for the networking world.

This is one of three webinars I give at Safari Books on a periodic basis; I hope to be adding a fourth in the near future.

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