The Total Economic Impact of Red Hat Ansible Tower

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The Total Economic Impact of Red Hat Ansible Tower is a Red Hat commissioned Forrester Consulting study published in June 2018. This study demonstrates the cost savings and business benefits enabled by Ansible. Let’s dive into the what Ansible Tower enables, the efficiencies gained, the acceleration of revenue recognition, and other tangible benefits.

Faster Revenue Recognition

Revenue recognition is a critical aspect of business operations. Quickening the pace of revenue recognition is something every organization has their eye on. Forrester’s TEI of Ansible Tower observed a company cutting delivery lead times by 66%. Imagine the pace of feature deployment an organization experiences when cutting lead times from days to hours!

System reconfiguration times fell as well. Automating changes due to new bugs or policy changes across systems helps mitigate the costly impact of reconfiguration. This company found that the total time savings of being able to reconfigure a fleet of systems through Ansible automation reduced staff hours by 94% for this type of work.

The TEI also measured the security and compliance gains of Ansible Tower. Ansible Tower reduced staff hours spent patching systems by 80%. This also meant that patching systems could occur more often. This helped reduce the Continue reading

Proactive Ops for Container Orchestration Environments: Monitoring and Logging Strategies with Docker Enterprise

Over the last decade, the popularity of microservices and highly-scalable systems has increased, leading to an overall increase in the complexity of applications that are now distributed heavily across the network with many moving pieces and potential failure modes.

This architectural evolution has changed the monitoring requirements and led to a need for scalable and insightful tooling and practices to enable us to better identify, debug and resolve issues in our systems before they impact the business and our end users (internal and/or external).

I recently gave a talk at DockerCon SF 18 discussing functionality in Docker Enterprise that enables operators to more easily monitor their container platform environment, along with some key metrics and best practices to triage and remediate issues before they cause downtime.

You can watch the full talk here:

 

Monitoring Methodologies

One of the most well-known early monitoring techniques was the USE method from Brendan Gregg at Netflix. USE specified that for every resource we should be monitoring utilization (time spent servicing work), saturation (the degree to which a resource had work it couldn’t service) and errors (number of error events). This model worked well for more hardware / node centric metrics but network-based Continue reading

Intel continues to optimize its products around AI

Normally, this is the time of year when Intel would hold its Intel Developer Forum conference, which would be replete with new product announcements. But with the demise of the show last year, the company instead held an all-day event that it live-streamed over the web.The company’s Data Centric Innovation Summit was the backdrop for a series of processor and memory announcements aimed at the data center and artificial intelligence, in particular. Even though Intel is without a leader, it still has considerable momentum. Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group, did the heavy lifting.News about Cascade Lake, the rebranded Xeon server chip First is news around the Xeon Scalable processor, the rebranded Xeon server chip. The next-generation chip, codenamed “Cascade Lake,” will feature a memory controller for Intel’s new Intel Optane DC persistent memory and an embedded AI accelerator that the company claims will speed up deep learning inference workloads by eleven-fold compared with current-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel continues to optimize its products around AI

Normally, this is the time of year when Intel would hold its Intel Developer Forum conference, which would be replete with new product announcements. But with the demise of the show last year, the company instead held an all-day event that it live-streamed over the web.The company’s Data Centric Innovation Summit was the backdrop for a series of processor and memory announcements aimed at the data center and artificial intelligence, in particular. Even though Intel is without a leader, it still has considerable momentum. Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group, did the heavy lifting.News about Cascade Lake, the rebranded Xeon server chip First is news around the Xeon Scalable processor, the rebranded Xeon server chip. The next-generation chip, codenamed “Cascade Lake,” will feature a memory controller for Intel’s new Intel Optane DC persistent memory and an embedded AI accelerator that the company claims will speed up deep learning inference workloads by eleven-fold compared with current-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.To read this article in full, please click here

Improving Gender Rights Online: Perspectives from the Global South

The Internet has helped to empower communities of across the globe. However, existing gender disparities, discrimination, and inequalities, especially faced by women living in the Global South, including the least developed countries, has had a  considerable impact on the digital gender divide, leading to the digital exclusion of women.

A study “Views & Perspectives on Gender Rights Online, for the Global South”, was undertaken by Amrita Choudhury, CCAOI & Asia Pacific lead for the Internet’s Society SIG Women and Nadira AL Araj, ISOC Palestine and MENA Civil Society activist, to identify the main challenges towards improving the gender access and rights online, especially in the Global South; highlight the best practices which nations or regions have adopted to overcome those challenges; and suggest policy areas which need reforms.

In addition to relying on secondary sources, the opinions of 19 experts from 15 countries and responses of 162 people from 54 countries were sought. The findings were further discussed and validated through a workshop at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2017 “Redefining Rights for a Gender Inclusive Connected Future (WS 102) and then compiled into a report.

The top challenges identified across the Global South hampering the creation Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Evolution of IT departments to support IoT and digital transformation

You can’t spell IoT without IT, but that doesn’t mean IT departments are big fans of Internet of Things deployments. In fact, we’ve observed that IoT tends to exacerbate some of the challenges that IT departments face within their organizations.Understanding and anticipating IT’s primary areas of concern can help IoT deployments succeed.Lines are blurring Traditionally, the IT department has operated in a vacuum. The focus of IT departments has been in internal support, network management and managing enterprise applications. IoT deployments have been the traditional focus of operations teams that typically deploy point solutions to solve a business issue.To read this article in full, please click here

Updated: First Set of Building Next-Generation Data Centers Self-Study Materials

When I started the Building Next-Generation Data Centers online course, I didn’t have the automated infrastructure to support it, so I had to go with the next best solution: a reasonably-flexible Content Management System, and Mediawiki turned out to be a pretty good option.

In the meantime, we developed a full-blown course support system, included guided self-paced study (available with most ipSpace.net online course), and progress tracking. It was time to migrate the data center material into the same format.

Read more ...

Measuring ECDSA in DNSSEC – A Final Report

Four years ago we started looking at the level of support for ECDSA in DNSSEC. At the time we concluded that ECDSA was just not supported broadly enough to be usable. Four years later, let's see if we can provide an updated answer to the question of the viability of ECDSA.

NSX Sessions to geek out at VMworld 2018

VMworld 2018 is around the corner and we have an exciting lineup of over 80+ breakout sessions, customer deployment stories and Hands-on Labs for you from the VMware NSX family!

For the tech nerds interested in deep-dives and deployment strategies, we have a list of recommended “geek” NSX VMworld 2018 sessions to choose from in various focus areas.

 

Security:

Deep Dive into NSX Data Center Security for Clouds, Containers, and More [SAI1527BU]
Speakers: Ganapathi Bhatt
This technical session will focus on key security features and use cases for VMware NSX-T Data Center in a multi-hypervisor, heterogeneous workload environment (VMs, containers, bare metal), the architecture and implementation of NSX-T distributed firewalls and edge firewalls, and the grouping/policy model for NSX-T Data Center. You will also find out how VMware NSX Data Center extends a uniform security policy model to VMware NSX Cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS environments.

Securing Horizon and Citrix End-User Computing with NSX Data Center [SAI1851BU]
Speakers: Geoff Wilmington
Organizations deploying virtual desktop infrastructures are tasked with designing for security, networking, and network services for this infrastructure. This can be a complex design process and include multiple products to meet the requirements. When coupling VMware NSX Data Continue reading

Instructor Spotlight: Keith Bogart

Keith Bogart is one of INE’s most esteemed and experienced instructors. Keith has been with INE for 4 years designing and instructing videos and bootcamps, as well as hosting live web-series, designing workbooks, and contributing to our IEOC Forum and INE Blog. Keith has a CCNA in Routing and Switching, CCIE in Dial-ISP, CWNA and is currently working towards his CCNA Security certification.

Before he was with INE, Keith worked as a service representative, technical assistance engineer and network consulting engineer at Cisco Systems. After 17 years at Cisco and a short time with a small start-up, Keith brought his talents to INE and became our #1 CCNA Routing & Switching instructor.


So what has Keith been up to?

On a typical day you can find Keith in our North Carolina office working on his latest project – a new CCNA Security Bootcamp. This bootcamp is still in its early stages of design, however, according to Keith, it’s shaping up to be a 5-day Bootcamp that will be offered online at least twice in the first half of 2019.

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