What is an SSD? How solid state drives work

That whirring you hear when you boot your computer or when it wakes from sleep mode is the sound of your hard drive’s magnetic disks beginning to spin. Conceptually not dissimilar to a record player, a hard disk drive (HDD) is an electromechanical device with an actuator arm that positions itself over spinning disks, called platters, in order to read or write information.While record players top out at 78 rpm, today’s enterprise-grade HDDs can spin at 15,000 rpm. Even at that speed, however, there are unavoidable delays associated with heads finding the spot on the drive that contains the data being requested. And sometimes a drive may need to read from multiple locations in order to complete a command, multiplying wait times.To read this article in full, please click here

What is an SSD? How solid state drives work

That whirring you hear when you boot your computer or when it wakes from sleep mode is the sound of your hard drive’s magnetic disks beginning to spin. Conceptually not dissimilar to a record player, a hard disk drive (HDD) is an electromechanical device with an actuator arm that positions itself over spinning disks, called platters, in order to read or write information.While record players top out at 78 rpm, today’s enterprise-grade HDDs can spin at 15,000 rpm. Even at that speed, however, there are unavoidable delays associated with heads finding the spot on the drive that contains the data being requested. And sometimes a drive may need to read from multiple locations in order to complete a command, multiplying wait times.To read this article in full, please click here

Using Virtual Labs When Developing Network Automation Solutions

One of the fundamentals I always emphasize in introductory parts of my network automation workshops and online courses is the fact that we’re about to develop software that will control the most-mission-critical part of IT infrastructure, and should therefore use software development methodologies like version control, testing…

However, there’s a “small” glitch. While it’s perfectly possible to test most software in some virtual environment you can spin up on-the-fly using Vagrant, Docker, Jenkins, Travis, or some other CI/CD tool, testing a network automation solution requires access to network devices.

RapidChain: scaling blockchain via full sharding

RapidChain: scaling blockchain via full sharding Zamani et al., CCS’18

RapidChain is a sharding-based public blockchain protocol along the lines of OmniLedger that we looked at earlier in the year. RapidChain is resilient to Byzantine faults from up to 1/3 of its participants, requires no trusted setup, and can achieve more than 7,300 tx/sec with an expected confirmation latency of roughly 8.7 seconds in a network of 4,000 nodes with a time-to-failure of more than 4,500 years. Those are pretty interesting numbers!

(Enlarge)

RapidChain partitions the set of nodes into multiple smaller groups of nodes called committees that operate in parallel on disjoint blocks of transactions and maintain disjoint ledgers.

With nodes, each committee is of size where is a security parameter typically set around 20. E.g. with 1,000 nodes we’ll have around 17 committees of 60 nodes each. To make all these work we’ll need a number of different parts:

• A way to bootstrap the initial system
• A way of forming (and re-forming) committees, and allowing nodes to join and leave
• A way of reaching consensus within a committee (shard)
• A way of verifying transactions which cross-shards

Bootstrapping

The initial set of participants start Continue reading

Packet and Wasabi Take On Amazon, Provide Cloud Compute and Storage

“Nobody gets to keep a lock on cloud computing,” Wasabi CEO David Friend said. “As much as Amazon would like to, it’s going to be a multi-cloud world.”

Podcast: The Future of Network Architectures and the Self-Driving Network™

Enterprise network architectures are being reshaped using tenets popularized by the major cloud properties. This podcast explores this evolution and looks at the ways that real-time streaming telemetry, machine learning, and artificial intelligence affect how networks are designed and operated.

Comcast Leads Trellis, an Open Source Data Center Switching Fabric

In working with the ONF, Comcast is breaking with a long cable tradition of not sharing technology and innovation ideas with competitors.

Facebook, Google, and Uber Join Open Source Compliance Project OpenChain

The Linux Foundation project OpenChain is developing an overarching standard for creating a quality compliance program that companies can apply across the supply chain.

Big Switch Brings Big Monitoring Fabric to AWS

The company has a similar product for Microsoft Azure that is slated to enter beta next year. Google Cloud is on the roadmap for future support.

BiB 066: Why Cloud Visibility Matters

Complex cloud applications need decent visualizations to help infrastructure engineers understand what's going on. For cloud visibility, Kentik absorbs AWS & GCP flow logs, with Azure support coming. Kubernetes & Istio are also data providers to Kentik. Using the Kubernetes API, Kentik correlates pod IPs to pod names and cluster namespaces. With that information, Kentik can visualize pod to pod and service to service traffic flows within a Kubernetes cluster.

The post BiB 066: Why Cloud Visibility Matters appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Edge-chips could render some networks unnecessary

Hardware processing should replace a device’s dependency on networks, some scientists say. Making machines more efficient, saving power and resilience are behind the reasoning.“Devices like drones depend on a constant Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi stops, the drone crashes,” an article about researchers at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, says.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ] But if you make a device independent of any linking, it could become more resilient, the researchers say. Plus, the more processing work one can do on the machine the more energy you’ll save because you won’t have to come up with power to communicate.To read this article in full, please click here

Edge-chips could render some networks unnecessary

Hardware processing should replace a device’s dependency on networks, some scientists say. Making machines more efficient, saving power and resilience are behind the reasoning.“Devices like drones depend on a constant Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi stops, the drone crashes,” an article about researchers at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, says.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ] But if you make a device independent of any linking, it could become more resilient, the researchers say. Plus, the more processing work one can do on the machine the more energy you’ll save because you won’t have to come up with power to communicate.To read this article in full, please click here

Edge-chips could render some networks unnecessary

Hardware processing should replace a device’s dependency on networks, some scientists say. Making machines more efficient, saving power and resilience are behind the reasoning.“Devices like drones depend on a constant Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi stops, the drone crashes,” an article about researchers at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, says.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ] But if you make a device independent of any linking, it could become more resilient, the researchers say. Plus, the more processing work one can do on the machine the more energy you’ll save because you won’t have to come up with power to communicate.To read this article in full, please click here

Edge-chips could render some networks useless

Hardware processing should replace a device’s dependency on networks, some scientists say. Making machines more efficient, saving power and resilience are behind the reasoning.“Devices like drones depend on a constant Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi stops, the drone crashes,” an article about researchers at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, says.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ] But if you make a device independent of any linking, it could become more resilient, the researchers say. Plus, the more processing work one can do on the machine the more energy you’ll save because you won’t have to come up with power to communicate.To read this article in full, please click here

Edge-chips could render some networks useless

Hardware processing should replace a device’s dependency on networks, some scientists say. Making machines more efficient, saving power and resilience are behind the reasoning.“Devices like drones depend on a constant Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi stops, the drone crashes,” an article about researchers at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, says.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ] But if you make a device independent of any linking, it could become more resilient, the researchers say. Plus, the more processing work one can do on the machine the more energy you’ll save because you won’t have to come up with power to communicate.To read this article in full, please click here

Edge-chips could render some networks useless

Hardware processing should replace a device’s dependency on networks, some scientists say. Making machines more efficient, saving power, and resilience is behind the reasoning.“Devices like drones depend on a constant Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi stops, the drone crashes,” an article about researchers at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, says.But if you make a device independent of any linking, it could become more resilient, the researchers say. Plus, the more processing work one can do at the source — in other words on the machine — the more energy you’ll save because you won’t have to come up with power to communicate.To read this article in full, please click here

Jason Donenfeld Honored with the ISRG’s Radiant Award

Earlier this week Jason Donenfeld received the Radiant Award from the Internet Security Research Group. Jason is an accomplished engineer and a creative thinker, which makes his work clean, simple, and takes it a step beyond – most notably in WireGuard, an open-source secure VPN tunnel.

We are proud to have enabled this award. Let me explain why.

At the Internet Society we care a great deal about the technologies that help to establish trust between people around the globe, while those people may have never interacted before.

One of the groups we proudly partner with is the Internet Security Research Group, the non-profit behind the Let’s Encrypt initiative. In the 4 years since Let’s Encrypt was launched, it has changed the landscape of web traffic encryption. Whereas in 2014 around 30% of pages loaded by Firefox where loaded over a secure channel, that number has increased to over 75% by now. I believe that rise in secure web traffic is in large part the result of the work by Let’s Encrypt.

Before 2014 it was somewhat costly to get a web certificate, a critical piece of authentication material that is the basis of establishing global trust. Both Continue reading

PQ 160: Inside ArcOS®: The Internet-Scale, Carrier-Grade Network OS (Sponsored)

On today's Priority Queue we dive into ArcOS®, a new network OS designed for whitebox routing and switching from our sponsor Arrcus. We examine how the OS was designed, how it differentiates itself from competitors, and explore key use cases.

The post PQ 160: Inside ArcOS®: The Internet-Scale, Carrier-Grade Network OS (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

BT Excludes Huawei From Its 5G Core, Huawei’s CFO Is Arrested in Canada

Huawei's' chief financial officer who is also the daughter of the founder of Huawei, was arrested in Canada at the request of the United States. The reason for the arrest has not been disclosed.

The Rising Costs of Cybersecurity Are Driving IT Modernization

Regardless of size cybersecurity has become a massive source of frustration for organizations all sizes. A greater percentage of IT spending is now being consumed by cybersecurity products and services.