Worth Reading: Waht to consider when Leasing Dark Fiber

Leasing, “lighting” and operating a dark-fiber network is a major undertaking that requires a well-trained technical staff. The next few paragraphs review important factors, especially fiber-optic attributes, to keep in mind when planning to lease dark fiber. —Jabulani Dhliwayo @Data Center Journal

Excess data center heat is no longer a bug — it’s a feature!

Every data center admin knows that dealing with excess heat is one of the biggest, most expensive factors involved in running a modern data center.For decades, engineers have been looking for new ways to mitigate the issue, and now Norway is building a brand-new town designed to turn the problem into an opportunity to lower costs, reduce energy usage, and fight climate change.[ Read also: Data center cooling market set to explode in the coming years | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters ] Hug your servers ... to stay warm According to Fast Company, the town of Lyseparken, now under construction near Bergen, Norway, is being built to use the excess heat generated by a new data center in the heart of the community to keep a nearly 6.5 million square feet of nearby planned business and office space—and eventually up to 5,000 homes—warm. It works like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Excess data center heat is no longer a bug — it’s a feature!

Every data center admin knows that dealing with excess heat is one of the biggest, most expensive factors involved in running a modern data center.For decades, engineers have been looking for new ways to mitigate the issue, and now Norway is building a brand-new town designed to turn the problem into an opportunity to lower costs, reduce energy usage, and fight climate change.[ Read also: Data center cooling market set to explode in the coming years | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters ] Hug your servers ... to stay warm According to Fast Company, the town of Lyseparken, now under construction near Bergen, Norway, is being built to use the excess heat generated by a new data center in the heart of the community to keep a nearly 6.5 million square feet of nearby planned business and office space—and eventually up to 5,000 homes—warm. It works like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Xilinx Unveils xDNN FPGA Architecture for AI Inference

FPGAs might not have carved out a niche in the deep learning training space the way some might have expected but the low power, high frequency needs of AI inference fit the curve of reprogrammable hardware quite well. …

Xilinx Unveils xDNN FPGA Architecture for AI Inference was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .

Arista BGP EVPN – Overview and Concepts

Introduction Traditionally, Data Centers used lots of Layer 2 links that spanned entire racks, rows, cages, floors, for as far as the eye could see. These large L2 domains were not ideal for a data center, due to the slow convergence, unnecessary broadcasts, and difficulty in administering. To optimize the data center network, we needed […]

The post Arista BGP EVPN – Overview and Concepts appeared first on Overlaid.

Lavelle Networks Launches SD-WAN NFV for Microsoft Windows Hosts

The Lavelle Networks SD-WAN software appliance sits within an NFV container in a Microsoft Windows environment for greater control and enhanced network management.

Reaction: Centralization Wins

Warning: in this post, I am going to cross a little into philosophy, governance, and other odd subjects. Here there be dragons. Let me begin by setting the stage:

Decentralized systems will continue to lose to centralized systems until there’s a driver requiring decentralization to deliver a clearly superior consumer experience. Unfortunately, that may not happen for quite some time. —Todd Hoff @High Scalability

And the very helpful diagram which accompanies the quote—

The point Todd Hoff, the author makes, is that five years ago he believed the decentralized model would win, in terms of the way the Internet is structured. However, today he doesn’t believe this; centralization is winning. Two points worth considering before jumping into a more general discussion.

First, the decentralized model is almost always the most efficient in almost every respect. It is the model with the lowest signal-to-noise ratio, and the model with the highest gain. The simplest way to explain this is to note the primary costs in a network is the cost of connectivity, and the primary gain is the amount of support connections provide. The distributed model offers the best balance of these two.

Second, what we are generally talking about here Continue reading

Learn About Social Engineering Techniques with Josue Vargas

Learn in-depth information about social engineering techniques and countermeasures in the course Certified Ethical Hacker: Social Engineering, available as a stand alone download or with your INE.com All Access Pass!

Not Like in Hollywood

When we think of hacking, we often picture a grim fellow opening a laptop, typing really fast and bam! he’s infiltrated the Pentagon. Watching those films when you know one or two things about system and network security is a hilarious experience! If you have been following the Certified Ethical Hacker series, you would know better by now. Hacking is not for the faint-hearted, not just because of the technical difficulty (indeed there are several needed skills to be developed), but because of the resilience needed. I’m talking about the fact that a successful hack comes after many failed attempts in most scenarios.

Because hacking into systems as an outsider is so difficult there’s a key toolkit that every hacker needs to master as much as they master sniffing, session hijacking, application hacking, or any other technical specialty- I’m talking about Social Engineering.

It’s a Dark World

A highly empathetic person might have a hard time with the concept of Social Engineering. It’s pretty Continue reading

BrandPost: Will disruptive healthcare technologies disrupt hospital networks?

Ciena Daniele Loffreda, Senior Advisor, Industry Marketing New innovations stemming from artificial intelligence, machine learning and connected health are changing the way medical professionals treat their patients. Doctors are having to adapt to take advantage of these developments – but has their network adapted to support them?Two newborns are delivered on the same day by the same doctor in the same hospital.  The truth is, the decisions their respective parents are about to make can have an enormous impact on their daughters’ health and quality of life for the next several decades. To read this article in full, please click here

Nokia Scores $583 Million 5G R&D Loan From European Commission

The funds come at a critical time as analysts have noted Europe is lagging behind North America and Asia on 5G deployments.

IDC Predicts the Orchestration Segment of Telecom NFVI to Grow Fastest

For its inaugural telecom NFVI report, IDC says an example of orchestration would be ONAP.

Watch the Experts Session on Encryption from Canberra

Internet Australia and the Internet Society are pleased to invite you to watch the recording of an Experts Session on Encryption on 20 August 2018 at Parliament House, Canberra, Australia.

Encryption technologies enable Internet users to protect the integrity and the confidentiality of their data and communications. From limiting the impact of data breaches, to securing financial transactions, to keeping messages private, encryption is an essential tool for digital security. As a technical foundation for trust on the Internet, encryption promotes commerce, privacy, and user trust, and helps protect data and communications from bad actors.

During the session, international and local experts from across the field discussed the technical aspects of encryption and digital security. They explained how encryption is used to secure communications and data, and explored its role in the Australian digital economy. Experts also discussed the risks associated with attempting to provide exceptional access to encrypted systems.

The post Watch the Experts Session on Encryption from Canberra appeared first on Internet Society.

Will Fujitsu be the first to make an ARM-powered supercomputer?

I’ve long felt Japan has been severely overlooked in recent years due to two “lost decades” and China overshadowing it — and supercomputing is no exception.In 2011, Fujitsu launched the K computer at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. Calling it a computer really is a misnomer, though, as is the case in any supercomputer these days. When I think “computer,” I think of the 3-foot-tall black tower a few feet from me making the room warm. In the case of K, it’s rows and rows of cabinets stuffed with rack-mounted servers in a space the size of a basketball court.With its distributed memory architecture, K had 88,128 eight-core SPARC64 VIIIfx processors in 864 cabinets. Fujitsu was a licensee of Sun Microsystems’ SPARC processor (later Oracle) and did some impressive work on the processor on its own. When it launched in 2011, the K was ranked the world's fastest supercomputer on the TOP500 supercomputer list, at a computation speed of over 8 petaflops. It has since been surpassed by supercomputers from the U.S. and China.To read this article in full, please click here

Will Fujitsu be the first to make an ARM-powered supercomputer?

I’ve long felt Japan has been severely overlooked in recent years due to two “lost decades” and China overshadowing it — and supercomputing is no exception.In 2011, Fujitsu launched the K computer at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. Calling it a computer really is a misnomer, though, as is the case in any supercomputer these days. When I think “computer,” I think of the 3-foot-tall black tower a few feet from me making the room warm. In the case of K, it’s rows and rows of cabinets stuffed with rack-mounted servers in a space the size of a basketball court.With its distributed memory architecture, K had 88,128 eight-core SPARC64 VIIIfx processors in 864 cabinets. Fujitsu was a licensee of Sun Microsystems’ SPARC processor (later Oracle) and did some impressive work on the processor on its own. When it launched in 2011, the K was ranked the world's fastest supercomputer on the TOP500 supercomputer list, at a computation speed of over 8 petaflops. It has since been surpassed by supercomputers from the U.S. and China.To read this article in full, please click here

Auth0 Architecture: Running In Multiple Cloud Providers And Regions

This is article was written by Dirceu Pereira Tiegs, Site Reliability Engineer at Auth0, and originally was originally published in Auth0.

Auth0 provides authentication, authorization, and single sign-on services for apps of any type (mobile, web, native) on any stack. Authentication is critical for the vast majority of apps. We designed Auth0 from the beginning so that it could run anywhere: on our cloud, on your cloud, or even on your own private infrastructure.

In this post, we'll talk more about our public SaaS deployments and provide a brief introduction to the infrastructure behind auth0.com and the strategies we use to keep it up and running with high availability. 

A lot has changed since then in Auth0. These are some of the highlights:

• We went from processing a couple of million logins per month to 1.5+ billion logins per month, serving thousands of customers, including FuboTV, Mozilla, JetPrivilege, and more.

• We implemented new features like custom domains, scaled bcrypt operations, vastly improved user search, and much more.

• The number of services that compose our product in order to scale our organization and handle the increases in traffic went from under Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Analytics are the key to network uptime, but are they enough?

Imagine you are in a crowded ER, and doctors are running from room to room. In the waiting area, patients are checking in via an online portal, and hospital staff are quickly capturing their confidential medical and insurance information on a mobile device. You look down the hall, where admitted patients are receiving treatment through Wi-Fi enabled biomedical devices, and some are even streaming their favorite show on Netflix while they wait. In a hospital, there are hundreds of individuals conducting critical tasks at any given moment, and they rely on thousands of connected devices to get the job done. But, this begs the question: What happens if that network fails?To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Analytics are the key to network uptime, but are they enough?

Imagine you are in a crowded ER, and doctors are running from room to room. In the waiting area, patients are checking in via an online portal, and hospital staff are quickly capturing their confidential medical and insurance information on a mobile device. You look down the hall, where admitted patients are receiving treatment through Wi-Fi enabled biomedical devices, and some are even streaming their favorite show on Netflix while they wait. In a hospital, there are hundreds of individuals conducting critical tasks at any given moment, and they rely on thousands of connected devices to get the job done. But, this begs the question: What happens if that network fails?To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: Chasing Shannon’s Limit

In the 1850s, the first submarine cables carrying telegraphic traffic were laid, initially across the English Channel connecting the United Kingdom to the rest of Western Europe. Later, in the 1860s, cables were laid across the Atlantic Ocean connecting North America to Europe reducing communications time from ten days — the time it took a ship to sail across — to minutes, via telegraphic messaging. —Anup Changaroth @APNIC

IDG Contributor Network: Preparing your network for the hybrid world – 4 imminent IT shifts and the role of NPMD

To the surprise of many not living it every day, a robust, resilient, and reliable network is one of the most important drivers behind success in today’s business world. Organizations must continuously improve their network infrastructure to better meet organizational requirements and offer the experiences their customers expect. Recent changes in the network market mean this continuous improvement needs to go beyond optimizations and extend all the way to re-architecting the network.The forces driving network re-architecture are twofold: new demands on the network, and innovations in network technology and solutions. These new demands on the network stem from enterprise-wide digital transformation initiatives such as cloud, SD-WAN, machine learning and AI, IoT, edge computing, and more. While these new requirements offer a host of business benefits, they’re also introducing disruptive complexity to the network, driving the need to simplify and accelerate the way all IT services are delivered today.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Preparing your network for the hybrid world – 4 imminent IT shifts and the role of NPMD

To the surprise of many not living it every day, a robust, resilient, and reliable network is one of the most important drivers behind success in today’s business world. Organizations must continuously improve their network infrastructure to better meet organizational requirements and offer the experiences their customers expect. Recent changes in the network market mean this continuous improvement needs to go beyond optimizations and extend all the way to re-architecting the network.The forces driving network re-architecture are twofold: new demands on the network, and innovations in network technology and solutions. These new demands on the network stem from enterprise-wide digital transformation initiatives such as cloud, SD-WAN, machine learning and AI, IoT, edge computing, and more. While these new requirements offer a host of business benefits, they’re also introducing disruptive complexity to the network, driving the need to simplify and accelerate the way all IT services are delivered today.To read this article in full, please click here