Intel, AMD both claim server speed records

It is so nice to see a return of competition in the CPU space. For too long it had been a one-horse race, with Intel on its own and AMD willing to settle for good enough. Revitalized with the Zen architecture, AMD is taking it to Intel once again, and you are the winner.Both sides are proclaiming massive performance records, although in both cases they come with an asterisk next to them.Intel's announcement In Intel’s case, it announced 95 new performance world records for its Intel Xeon Scalable processors using the most up-to-date benchmarks on hardware for major OEMs, including Dell, HPE, ASUS, and Super Micro, running SPECInt and SPECFP benchmarks as well as SAP HANA, ranging from single-socket systems up to eight-socket systems.To read this article in full, please click here

Reboot Plugin for Linux in Ansible 2.7

Ansible-2-7-Feature-Spotlight

Rebooting Linux systems with Ansible has always been possible, but was often tricky and error-prone. In Ansible 2.7, I am happy to say that rebooting Linux hosts with Ansible is now easier and can be done with a single task using the newly minted reboot plugin.

Some History

The win_reboot module was written by Matt Davis and included with Ansible 2.1. Rebooting Windows hosts is a much more common occurrence than rebooting Linux hosts. Necessity is the mother of invention, so it made sense that win_reboot appeared before the equivalent for Linux. And while less than elegant, it is possible to reboot Linux hosts using shell and wait_for or wait_for_connection[1].

Rebooting Linux systems with Ansible never felt right to me — much too error prone and finicky. It finally bugged me enough that I refactored win_reboot into reboot so Linux hosts could join the reboot party with their Windows counterparts.

Development Story

When I set out to make the reboot plugin[2], the goal was to create a common class that win_reboot (and potentially others) could easily subclass to override specific parts of the reboot process. I was also working in reverse, deconstructing win_reboot into a new Continue reading

Juniper CEO Rahim talks network, security and multicloud trends

Juniper CEO Rami Rahim is shepherding a number of key transitions for the company. Juniper made a big bet on 400G Ethernet this summer, detailing how it plans to transition its wide-area network, data center and enterprise portfolio to 400G Ethernet. And earlier this year, Juniper released its Contrail Enterprise Multicloud software, an SDN controller that is the central component of its multicloud, intent-based networking strategy. Ahead of its NXTWORK annual customer and partner summit next week, Rahim talked with Network World’s Michael Cooney about trends and directions for the networking vendor, as Rahim aims to position Juniper more strongly against chief competitors such as Cisco, Arista, HPE, and Huawei.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper CEO Rahim talks network, security and multicloud trends

Juniper CEO Rami Rahim is shepherding a number of key transitions for the company. Juniper made a big bet on 400G Ethernet this summer, detailing how it plans to transition its wide-area network, data center and enterprise portfolio to 400G Ethernet. And earlier this year, Juniper released its Contrail Enterprise Multicloud software, an SDN controller that is the central component of its multicloud, intent-based networking strategy. Ahead of its NXTWORK annual customer and partner summit next week, Rahim talked with Network World’s Michael Cooney about trends and directions for the networking vendor, as Rahim aims to position Juniper more strongly against chief competitors such as Cisco, Arista, HPE, and Huawei.To read this article in full, please click here

The Why of Security

Security is a field of questions. We find ourselves asking
all kinds of them all the time. Who is trying to get into my network? What are
they using? How can I stop them? But I feel that the most important question is
the one we ask the least. And the answer to that question provides the
motivation to really fix problems as well as conserving the effort necessary to
do so.

The Why’s Old Sage

If you’re someone with kids, imagine a conversation like
this one for a moment:

Your child runs into the kitchen with a lit torch in their hands and asks “Hey, where do we keep the gasoline?”

Now, some of you are probably laughing. And some of you are
probably imagining all kinds of crazy going on here. But I’m sure that most of
you probably started asking a lot of questions like:

  • – Why does my child have a lit torch in the house?
  • – Why do they want to know where the gasoline is?
  • – Why do they want to put these two things together?
  • – Why am I not stopping this right now?

Usually, the rest of the Five Ws follow Continue reading

Interested in Microsoft Azure? Tune into James Rudley’s Newest Course

Get ready to explore the different methods of automating technical and business challenges with Azure in James Rudley’s new course; Automation With Microsoft Azure.

In this course you will learn a range of azure features including:

  • Azure Automation
  • Functions
  • Logic Apps
  • ARM Templates
  • Update Management
  • Azure PowerShell

Ready to master Azure? You can buy this course in streaming or downloadable format here.

Weekend Reads ‭188A6‬

The security skills gap is real, and it is a problem. But what if you could replace the most basic security jobs with an AI? According to Gunter Ollmann @CircleID, this is possible today. The next question you might want to ask is this: if AI’s replace all the entry level positions, then how are we going to train up senior level engineers? Remember that every hiring manager wants someone with ten years of experience on a product that has only been out for two years…

US customers pay some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world, and broadband availability is sketchy at best for millions of Americans. But instead of tackling that problem head on, the FCC is increasingly looking the other way, relying on ISP data that paints an inaccurately rosy picture of Americans’ internet access. And as long as regulators are relying on a false picture of US broadband access, actually solving the problem may be impossible. —Karl Bode @The Verge

American businesses are in for a rude awakening. Sweeping new privacy regulations, such as the EU’s landmark GDPR law and California’s Consumer Privacy Act, along with the ongoing SEC probe of Facebook’s data Continue reading

The Presence of Community Networks in Latin America and the Caribbean

The community of Latin America and the Caribbean has maintained an incessant activity in community networks topics, particularly during September. This work has been reflected in various spaces, highlighting the Latin American Summit of Community Networks that took place in Argentina.

A Work with History

Interest in community networks in the Latin American and Caribbean region is not recent. At least since 2015, the operators of these networks have worked together, exchanging experiences and best practices. Part of the result of this collaboration is found in the documents of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity (DC3). It is worth mentioning that the creation of the Internet Society’s Special Interest Group on Community Networks (SIG CN) was announced during the closing ceremony of the IGF 2017 meeting.

The effort has been reflected in various spaces. This year, several operators of these networks were invited to participate in the Fifth Annual Latin America Spectrum Management Conference, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from September 5 to 7. On the last day of the Conference, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) conducted a capacity building workshop on spectrum and community networks.

The Latin American Summit

In addition to their participation in Continue reading

Technology Short Take 105

Welcome to Technology Short Take #105! Here’s another collection of articles and blog posts about some of the common technologies that modern IT professionals will typically encounter. I hope that something I’ve included here proves to be useful for you.

Networking

Servers/Hardware

Security

The future of networking: Open source networking is the ‘new norm’

If you weren’t in Amsterdam last week, you missed an extremely exciting conference – the Open Networking Summit Europe 2018. This Linux Foundation event drew more than 700 networking, development and operations leaders and enterprise users from open source service providers, cloud companies, and more.Chief among the conference themes was the idea that open source networking is the "new norm," with lots of vendors attesting to how this theme is playing out in the IT industry. Dan Kohn who leads the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation cites cost savings, improved resilience and higher development velocity for both bug fixes and the rolling out of new features for this change. Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking at The Linux Foundation used the term "open-sourcification" in his keynote.To read this article in full, please click here

The future of networking: Open source networking is the ‘new norm’

If you weren’t in Amsterdam last week, you missed an extremely exciting conference – the Open Networking Summit Europe 2018. This Linux Foundation event drew more than 700 networking, development and operations leaders and enterprise users from open source service providers, cloud companies, and more.Chief among the conference themes was the idea that open source networking is the "new norm," with lots of vendors attesting to how this theme is playing out in the IT industry. Dan Kohn who leads the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation cites cost savings, improved resilience and higher development velocity for both bug fixes and the rolling out of new features for this change. Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking at The Linux Foundation used the term "open-sourcification" in his keynote.To read this article in full, please click here

The future of networking: Open networking is the ‘new norm’

If you weren’t in Amsterdam last week, you missed an extremely exciting conference – the Open Networking Summit Europe 2018. This Linux Foundation event drew more than 700 networking, development and operations leaders and enterprise users from open source service providers, cloud companies, and more.Chief among the conference themes was the idea that open networking is the "new norm," with lots of vendors attesting to how this theme is playing out in the IT industry. The conference drew both business and technical leaders focused on networking beyond software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) with deep technical tracks and opportunities for attendees to learn from peers across the industry.To read this article in full, please click here

The future of networking: Open networking is the ‘new norm’

If you weren’t in Amsterdam last week, you missed an extremely exciting conference – the Open Networking Summit Europe 2018. This Linux Foundation event drew more than 700 networking, development and operations leaders and enterprise users from open source service providers, cloud companies, and more.Chief among the conference themes was the idea that open networking is the "new norm," with lots of vendors attesting to how this theme is playing out in the IT industry. The conference drew both business and technical leaders focused on networking beyond software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) with deep technical tracks and opportunities for attendees to learn from peers across the industry.To read this article in full, please click here

I know you’ll be back: interpretable new user clustering and churn prediction on a mobile social application

I know you’ll be back: interpretable new user clustering and churn prediction on a mobile social application Yang et al., KDD’18

Churn rates (how fast users abandon your app / service) are really important in modelling a business. If the churn rate is too high, it’s hard to maintain growth. Since acquiring new customers is also typically much more expensive than expanding in existing accounts, churn hits you twice over. So it’s really important to understand what causes users to churn in your business, and ideally to be able to predict users likely to churn so that you can intervene. This paper describes ClusChurn, the churn prediction system deployed at Snapchat.

It has been argued for decades that acquiring new users is often more expensive than keeping old ones. Surprisingly, however, user retention and its core component, churn prediction, have received much less attention from the research community… While this paper focuses on the Snapchat data as a comprehensive example, the techniques developed here can be readily leveraged for other online platforms, where users interact with the platform functions as well as other users.

The central idea in ClusChurn is to cluster users into clusters that are meaningful Continue reading

NSX Cloud 2.3 – Support for AWS, Free Visibility into Public Cloud Workloads & more!

We are very excited about the following key NSX Cloud features which are shipping as part of the latest NSX release – NSX 2.3

 

Support for AWS:

NSX 2.3 now extends support for native AWS workloads. This is a big step towards VMware’s pursuit for a truly Hybrid Cloud NSX Solution. NSX customers can now simplify and scale operations across a growing number of accounts, subscriptions, virtual networks, availability zones and regions in AWS, Azure and private cloud. Furthermore, this opens the doors for adding more networking platform capabilities such as service insertion, etc.  Look out for more information on this in our future blogs.

 

Free Visibility into Public Cloud Workloads:

If you have an NSX-T based Datacenter deployed within your on-premise environment, it only takes one additional VM to extend your visibility to include all your Public Cloud workloads. Here is how you go about it: In the NSX-T download page, under the Product Downloads section, you will see the link to download “NSX Manager / NSX Cloud Service Manager / NSX Policy Manager”. This is the NSX Unified Appliance which can be configured as an NSX Manager, or NSX Cloud Service Continue reading

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