IDG Contributor Network: Data hoarding is not a viable strategy anymore

For years it has been normal practice for organizations to store as much data as they can. More economical storage options combined with the hype around big data encouraged data hoarding, with the idea that value would be extracted at some point in the future.With advances in data analysis many companies are now successfully mining their data for useful business insights, but the sheer volume of data being produced and the need to prepare it for analysis are prime reasons to reconsider your strategy. To balance cost and value it’s important to look beyond data hoarding and to find ways of processing and reducing the data you’re collecting.To read this article in full, please click here

Episode 32 – Networking In Harsh Environments

Networking is hard enough when deploying it into typical environments like campuses and datacenters, but what happens when you’re tasked with doing networking in areas that were never meant to support technology? In this episode of Network Collective, Scott Morris and Jeremy Austin join us to share their experience with networking in harsh environments.


 

We would like to thank Cumulus Networks for sponsoring this episode of Network Collective. Cumulus is bringing S.O.U.L. back to the network. Simple. Open. Untethered. Linux. For more information about how you can bring S.O.U.L. to your network, head on over to https://cumulusnetworks.com/networkcollectivehassoul. There you can find out how Cumulus Networks can help you build a datacenter as efficient and as flexible as the worlds largest data centers and try Cumulus technology absolutely free.

 


Scott Morris
Guest
Jeremy Austin
Guest

Jordan Martin
Host
Eyvonne Sharp
Host
Russ White
Host


Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post Episode 32 – Networking In Harsh Environments appeared first on Network Collective.

IDG Contributor Network: Why blockchain is the missing link to IoT transformations

Mention blockchain in the watercooler chat, and odds are that it evokes notions of cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, and covert financial transactions. But in the enterprise world, blockchain is much more than an ultra-secure, digital financial ledger or another “over-hyped” new technology.When combined with the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain drives new value propositions and new business models, while addressing transparency, complexity and even some security challenges surrounding data transactions. In many ways, blockchain is the “missing link” that enables IoT deployments to achieve their full potentialBlockchain 101 Before diving into this subject in more detail, let’s begin with the definitions. In a basic sense, blockchain is a decentralized ledger that allows multiple parties to records transactions between them efficiently, securely and permanently. Once recorded, it is impossible to manipulate information within the blockchain. Thus, blockchain becomes a single source of truth for the transactions without a need for a third-party validation and verification. Easy enough, right?To read this article in full, please click here

I Can Has Privacy: A Special Guest Post from LOL Cat

In honor of International Cat Day, the Internet Society is sharing the journal of Internet Hall of Mane recipient, LOL Cat. LOL Cat first achieved fame with her humorous memes written in “kitty pawtois.” A graduate of Stanfur Universekitty, her work has earned her the Purritzer Prize and many other hon-roars.

Cattain’s Log, Day 1
Sunday night patrol. The dusty creature on the wall has not moved for days. This is my vow: I will bide my time and someday I shall pounce.

Day 8
My human taunts me with the shiny red dot.

Day 13
Bathroom remodel. My human has replaced my old litter box with a loud scary one. The flashing lights blind me. I am not feline good about this.

Day 14
When I hop out of this new litter box, a scary rake comes to gather the litter, ruining my sense of order. I shall spread litter around the house to rectify this mess, but first I must hide behind the new contraption.

I see the word “smart.” This must be a clue. I feel that I am onto something. I have no time to lose, and must dash to the room with the Continue reading

Seagate announces new flash drives for hyperscale markets

The Flash Memory Summit is taking place in Santa Clara, California, this week, which means a whole lot of SSD-related announcements headed my way. One already has my attention for the unique features the vendor is bringing to an otherwise dull market.Seagate is expanding the Nytro portfolio of SSD products with emphasis on the enterprise and hyperscale markets and focusing on read-intensive workloads such as big data and artificial intelligence (AI). It has some of the usual areas of emphasis: lower power requirements and capacity that scales from 240GB to 3.8TB.[ Learn what hyperconvergence is and whether you’re ready for hyperconverged storage. | For regularly scheduled insights, sign up for Network World newsletters. ] Also being updated is data protection via Seagate Secure, which prevents data loss during power failure by enabling data inflight to be saved to the NAND flash. The DuraWrite feature increases random write performance by up to 120 percent or provides maximum capacity to the user.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: SDS: Running Storage Like It’s An Application

As data volumes escalate, many organizations are looking for storage efficiencies — and they have found it with software-defined storage (SDS). “For IT organizations undergoing digital transformation, SDS provides a good match for the capabilities needed — flexible IT agility; easier, more intuitive administration driven by the characteristics of autonomous storage management; and lower capital costs due to the use of commodity and off-the-shelf hardware,” said Eric Burgener, research director at IDC. The analyst firm predicts the SDS market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 13.5% through 2021.To read this article in full, please click here

Another Benefit of Open-Source Networking Software

You probably know my opinion on nerd knobs and the resulting complexity, but sometimes you desperately need something to get the job done.

In traditional vendor-driven networking world, you might be able to persuade your vendor to implement the knob (you think) you need in 3 years by making it a mandatory requirement for a $10M purchase order. In open-source world you implement the knob, write the unit tests, and submit a pull request.

Read more ...

HHVM JIT: A profile-guided, region-based compiler for PHP and Hack

HHVM JIT: A profile-guided, region-based compiler for PHP and Hack Ottoni, PLDI’18

HHVM is a virtual machine for PHP and Hack (a PHP extension) which is used to power Facebook’s website among others. Today’s paper choice describes the second generation HHVM implementation, which delivered a 21.7% performance boost when running the Facebook website compared to the previous HHVM implementation.

…the PHP code base that runs the Facebook website includes tens of millions of lines of source code, which are translated to hundreds of megabytes of machine code during execution.

I’m clearly suffering from an over-simplified understanding of what the Facebook web application actually does, but at the same time if I asked you to write a Facebook clone for just the website (not the backing services, not the mobile apps, etc.), would your initial estimate be on the order of tens of millions of lines of code???!

HHVM high-level overview

The starting point for HHVM is source code in PHP or Hack. Hack is a PHP dialect used by Facebook and includes support for a richer set of type hints. From the perspective of HHVM though the two languages are fundamentally equivalent. In particular, Hack’s type hints are Continue reading

What the Caesars (@DefCon) WiFi situation looks like

So I took a survey of WiFi at Caesar's Palace and thought I'd write up some results.


When we go to DEF CON in Vegas, hundreds of us bring our WiFi tools to look at the world. Actually, no special hardware is necessary, as modern laptops/phones have WiFi built-in, while the operating system (Windows, macOS, Linux) enables “monitor mode”. Software is widely available and free. We still love our specialized WiFi dongles and directional antennas, but they aren’t really needed anymore.

It’s also legal, as long as you are just grabbing header information and broadcasts. Which is about all that’s useful anymore as encryption has become the norm -- we can pretty much only see what we are allowed to see. The days of grabbing somebody’s session-cookie and hijacking their web email are long gone (though the was a fun period). There are still a few targets around if you want to WiFi hack, but most are gone.

So naturally I wanted to do a survey of what Caesar’s Palace has for WiFi during the DEF CON hacker conference located there.

Here is a list of access-points (on channel 1 only) sorted by popularity, the number of stations using Continue reading

Vagrant Libvirt Install openSUSE

I have recently started using openSUSE as my server platform of choice. This post will go over installing qemu-kvm and libvirt for use with Vagrant and the vagrant-libirt provider on openSUSE. For reference the following software will be used in this post. openSUSE - 15 Vagrant - 2.1.2 ...

MikroTik ISP Design: Building an 802.1q trunk between sites using VPLS and S-tag

Use Case

ISPs that use MikroTik are always looking for new ways to deliver services to customers and expand their offerings. Delivering Layer 2 at scale for customers is a design challenge that comes up frequently.

While it’s easy enough to build a VLAN nested inside of another VLAN  (see below), this requires you to build all of the VLANs a customer wants to use into the PE router or handoff switch.

However, if you have a client that needs a layer 2 service delivered to two or more points and wants to be able to treat it just like an 802.1q trunk and add VLANs in an ad-hoc way, then using the S-Tag feature in RouterOS along with VPLS transport is a great option.

What’s the S-tag do???

S-Tag

Clients will often ask me “what’s the S-Tag check box for?”

So a little background on this, there is a protocol for using outer and inner VLAN tags specified in IEEE 802.1ad that uses Service Tag (or S-Tag) to denote the outer VLAN tag used to transport Customer Tags (or C-Tags).

What makes the S-Tag/C-Tag a little bit different is that it actually changes the ethertype of the Frame.

Continue reading

MikroTik ISP Design: Building an 802.1q trunk between sites using VPLS and S-tag

Use Case

ISPs that use MikroTik are always looking for new ways to deliver services to customers and expand their offerings. Delivering Layer 2 at scale for customers is a design challenge that comes up frequently.

While it’s easy enough to build a VLAN nested inside of another VLAN  (see below), this requires you to build all of the VLANs a customer wants to use into the PE router or handoff switch.

VLAN-inside-VLAN

However, if you have a client that needs a layer 2 service delivered to two or more points and wants to be able to treat it just like an 802.1q trunk and add VLANs in an ad-hoc way, then using the S-Tag feature in RouterOS along with VPLS transport is a great option.

What’s the S-tag do???

S-Tag

Clients will often ask me “what’s the S-Tag check box for?”

So a little background on this, there is a protocol for using outer and inner VLAN tags specified in IEEE 802.1ad that uses Service Tag (or S-Tag) to denote the outer VLAN tag used to transport Customer Tags (or C-Tags).

What makes the S-Tag/C-Tag a little bit different is that it actually changes the ethertype of the Frame.

Continue reading

Juniper Announces New Acceleration Cards For SRX5000 Security Appliances

Juniper Networks has announced that it will soon begin shipping new SPC3 (Services Process Card) Advanced Security Acceleration cards for its SRX5000 line of security gateways, which includes the 5400, 5600, and 5800 appliances. These security appliances target large enterprises, service providers, and cloud providers. Customers can mix and match security features including firewalling, IPS, […]

How many labels for VPN in MPLS

How many labels for VPN in MPLS ?     For those who has good amount of knowledge in MPLS already may know the answer. Or if you have taken my CCDE course before, this question is basic for you.   But understanding this fundamental piece of knowledge is key to understand MPLS Applications. MPLS …

The post How many labels for VPN in MPLS appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

How many labels for VPN in MPLS

How many labels for VPN in MPLS ?     For those who has good amount of knowledge in MPLS already may know the answer. Or if you have taken my CCDE course before, this question is basic for you.   But understanding this fundamental piece of knowledge is key to understand MPLS Applications. MPLS …

The post How many labels for VPN in MPLS appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.