IDG Contributor Network: Are you seeing what I’m seeing?

Enterprises are investing in their networks at an accelerating rate. As legacy IT on-premises infrastructure gives way to hybrid cloud and virtualized environments, and an escalating data tsunami drives data center expansions, increasing investments of time and money are raising the stakes ever higher. Unfortunately, end users’ expectations for service are growing as well, piling additional demands onto network operators and engineers who are already wrestling with network migration challenges.Yet despite the fact that the enterprise networking environment is rapidly changing, IT support teams are still using the same network performance metrics to monitor their networks and evaluate whether or not service delivery is up to par. The problem is that they’re using a one-dimensional tool to measure a subjective experience that tool was not designed to even understand, much less aid in troubleshooting.  It’s kind of like trying to tighten a screw with a hammer.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Are you seeing what I’m seeing?

Enterprises are investing in their networks at an accelerating rate. As legacy IT on-premises infrastructure gives way to hybrid cloud and virtualized environments, and an escalating data tsunami drives data center expansions, increasing investments of time and money are raising the stakes ever higher. Unfortunately, end users’ expectations for service are growing as well, piling additional demands onto network operators and engineers who are already wrestling with network migration challenges.Yet despite the fact that the enterprise networking environment is rapidly changing, IT support teams are still using the same network performance metrics to monitor their networks and evaluate whether or not service delivery is up to par. The problem is that they’re using a one-dimensional tool to measure a subjective experience that tool was not designed to even understand, much less aid in troubleshooting.  It’s kind of like trying to tighten a screw with a hammer.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: DevOps and Blame

The three pillars of DevOps are flow, feedback, and continuous improvement. How can an organization or a team improve if its members are focused on finding someone to blame? For a DevOps culture to succeed, blame must be eliminated. —Dawn Parzych @opensource.com

Vapor IO secures new funding for major U.S. rollout

Vapor IO, the edge computing specialist that builds mini data centers for deployment at locations such as cell phone towers, has secured Series C financing, which the company says will help accelerate the deployment of its Kinetic Edge Platform as a national network for edge colocation.Vapor IO has been all about developing a model for a distributed network of edge colocation sites, with micro modular data centers in containers about the size of a shipping container. The company had been working with Crown Castle, the nation’s largest provider of shared wireless infrastructure, on an edge collaboration project under the name Project Volutus.Vapor IO has now acquired the assets of Project Volutus from Crown Castle and will offer it under the brand name The Kinetic Edge. It uses both wired and wireless connections to create a low-latency network of its colocation sites, allowing cloud providers, wireless carriers and web-scale companies to deliver cloud-based edge computing applications via its data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

Vapor IO secures new funding for major U.S. rollout

Vapor IO, the edge computing specialist that builds mini data centers for deployment at locations such as cell phone towers, has secured Series C financing, which the company says will help accelerate the deployment of its Kinetic Edge Platform as a national network for edge colocation.Vapor IO has been all about developing a model for a distributed network of edge colocation sites, with micro modular data centers in containers about the size of a shipping container. The company had been working with Crown Castle, the nation’s largest provider of shared wireless infrastructure, on an edge collaboration project under the name Project Volutus.Vapor IO has now acquired the assets of Project Volutus from Crown Castle and will offer it under the brand name The Kinetic Edge. It uses both wired and wireless connections to create a low-latency network of its colocation sites, allowing cloud providers, wireless carriers and web-scale companies to deliver cloud-based edge computing applications via its data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

AT&T’s Airship Plans Gain Altitude, Seek Maturity

For Airship, the most pressing issue is minimizing the impact on network operations during more frequent update cycles.

Research Brief: Cutting through the SD-WAN Confusion: A Handy Guide for Enterprises

SDxCentral's latest research brief is aimed at providing enterprises contemplating purchasing SD-WAN solutions with a concrete five-step process and a set of core considerations critical to success.

Packet Closes $25M Series B, Builds Edge Network

Thao Nyugen works for Packet as director of hardware platforms. Coming from Facebook, he led the development and deployment of over 1 million Open Compute Project servers in the last eight years.

How Identity Awareness Will Transform SD-WAN Routing

Traditional routing fails to differentiate between application and user requirements. SD-WAN is changing that with identity awareness.

MPLS Traffic Engineering Part 3

Verizon to Open 5G Labs to Test Applications for Different Vertical Markets

The four new labs, alongside its existing lab in New York City, will rely on local partnerships to test and refine new 5G use cases.

Virtual Cloud Network Deep Dive: Join us in Minneapolis and the Bay Area!

Business moves fast in today’s digital landscape. Applications, services, and data are becoming more distributed, while threats are becoming more sophisticated. From data centers and the cloud to branches and the edge, IT teams are responsible for more environments than ever before, and the complexity is only increasing.

If your IT organization is under pressure to stay productive, increase agility, and help the business innovate, you know that expectations are high. You’re on the hook to:

• Expand your software fluency and vendor agnostic knowledge for complex, interdependent infrastructures
• Deliver a seamless and secure cross-cloud networking strategy
• Keep up with continually changing applications and rapid development lifecycles
• Identify every threat across environments, no matter how many alerts there are

Traditional, hardware-based approaches to networking and security can’t help you do all that. They’re inflexible and slow-moving; they require time-consuming manual intervention; they can’t connect and protect all the apps your business needs. That’s why it’s time to reinvent the network…in software.

Build Your Foundation for a Virtual Cloud Network

Our digital, app-centric world can be daunting, but a programmable network was built to meet these changing demands and evolve right along with them. VMware NSX® delivers the foundation for a Continue reading

Fishing For Insight Into The Ocean Economy With HPC And AI

Historically and traditionally, academic supercomputing centers have been very open about the architecture and setup of their HPC systems, and it makes sense if you think about it. …

Fishing For Insight Into The Ocean Economy With HPC And AI was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Intel Buys NetSpeed to Boost Specialized SoCs

NetSpeed’s technology helps architects optimize system-on-chip performance before manufacturing the chips.

Ericsson Scores $3.5 Billion Deal with T-Mobile for 5G Gear

This is T-Mobile's second 5G equipment deal in two months. Ericsson is a long-time partner to T-Mobile and supplied some of the operator's LTE network equipment.

Cisco introduces its first server built for AI and ML workloads

Cisco has introduced its first Unified Compute System (UCS) server designed specifically to handle artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads. The Cisco UCS C480 ML is designed specifically for data scientists to perform AI and ML at every stage of the lifecycle.It’s not like Cisco whipped up all kinds of special sauce for this server; it’s just a lot of very high-end components. The UCS C480 ML M5 rack server is a 4U device with the latest Intel Xeon processors and 8 Nvidia Tesla V100-32G GPUs with NVLink interconnects.The top-of-the-line configuration features two Xeon processors, up to 128GB of DDR4 RAM, 24 SATA hard drives or SSDs, six NVMe SSD drives, and four x100G Virtual Interface Cards (VICs). The UCS C480 ML M5 is designed to work with Cisco's various servers and HyperFlex systems with GPUs.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: Kubernetes as the Universal Scheduler

Kubernetes is emerging as one of the best resource schedulers of our times. The powerful scheduler, which is also simple and extensible enables us to solve many problems that existed in traditional distributed systems. —Janakiram MSV @The New Stack

Join the Beta for Docker Engine 18.09

A few weeks back, we announced changes to extend the maintenance lifecycle for Docker Engine – Community (CE). As part of these changes, we’re having a beta testing period to deliver a higher-quality engine to the market.

We’d like to invite our community members to now participate in this beta testing by installing the beta package, kicking the tires, and submitting issues.

Docker Engine – Community version 18.09 adds these new features:

• Built on containerd – Docker Engine’s new architecture is based on containerd 1.2 and fully supported through the Kubernetes containerd integration.
• BuildKit is now generally available – Access improved build performance (see slides 22-26) and scalability with the optional BuildKit integration. BuildKit remains opt-in with an environment variable, e.g.

        $ DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build .

You can also set the feature option in /etc/docker/daemon.json to enable BuildKit by default:

 {"features":{"buildkit": true}}

• Support for SSH connections to the docker host – The client can now connect to a remote docker daemon via SSH, e.g.

        $ docker -H ssh://[email protected]

Install Instructions:

Only install the beta package on a new system without previous versions of docker-ce installed.

$ curl -fsSL test.docker.com  Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Logistics and delivery – Embracing the IoT before it was ‘IoT’

Some people love to use the expression “before it was cool”. In hindsight, it can be applied to almost anything that gains acclaim. According to this Reddit thread, for example, Facebook was already cool when it was still known simply as “The Facebook” way back in 2004. My point: the “before it was cool” expression is really about when something’s value or significance is recognized very early on, and this can certainly be applied to many of the technological advancements we see today. Connecting devices, or instrumenting machinery with some form of connectivity, to capture data and provide control, was a used in many industries, before the term ‘Internet of Things’ or ‘IoT’ became cool and all pervasive.To read this article in full, please click here

AT&T’s 5G Edge Plans Are Based on Collaboration

A robust edge deployment will be necessary for the carrier to deploy immersive services that will differentiate its 5G network from its current 4G LTE deployment.