Frinx Does Software-Defined Networking for SoftBank

"SoftBank trusted us in 2016, and we’ve been working with them as partners ever since," says Frinx's CEO. "Folks say it is very important who your first customer is.”

Coriant Deal and CenturyLink Spending Fail to Assuage Infinera Investors

The company's CEO attempted to moderate his previous comments about growing pricing pressure from larger rivals, stating "You should assume that I communicated very poorly last quarter."

Why Problems With Service Chaining Are Stalling NFV

Since ETSI set standards for NFV six years ago, the technology has yet to reach its full potential as operators get stuck on physical limitations.

Transforming Security in a Cloud and Mobile World – Security Showcase Session

Over the last several years, VMware has been heavily investing in technology and solutions to transform security.  Our goal has been simple; leverage the virtual and mobile infrastructure to build security in – making it intrinsic, simple, aligned to applications and data, and infinitely more effective.

5 years ago, with NSX, we introduced the concept of micro-segmentation, enabling organizations to leverage network virtualization to compartmentalize their critical applications at a network level.

Last VMworld, we introduced VMware AppDefense, to protect the applications running on that virtual infrastructure.  This enabled organizations to leverage server virtualization to ensure the only thing running is what the application intended – flipping the security model to “ensuring good” versus “chasing bad”

Meanwhile, our Workspace ONE team has been steadily building out their platform that leverages user infrastructure, to ensure only legitimate users can get access to critical applications from devices we can trust.

The momentum for NSX, AppDefense, and Workspace ONE has been growing exponentially. And our product teams have not been standing still.  They’ve been hard at work on some incredible innovations and integrations.

Transforming Security in a Cloud and Mobile World

In my security showcase session, Transforming Security in Continue reading

Case Study: Pokémon GO on Google Cloud Load Balancing

There are a lot of cool nuggets in Google's New Book: The Site Reliability Workbook. If you haven't put it on your reading list, here's a tantalizing excerpt from CHAPTER 11 Managing Load by Cooper Bethea, Gráinne Sheerin, Jennifer Mace, and Ruth King with Gary Luo and Gary O’Connor.

Niantic launched Pokémon GO in the summer of 2016. It was the first new Pokémon game in years, the first official Pokémon smartphone game, and Niantic’s first project in concert with a major entertainment company. The game was a runaway hit and more popular than anyone expected—that summer you’d regularly see players gathering to duel around landmarks that were Pokémon Gyms in the virtual world.

Pokémon GO’s success greatly exceeded the expectations of the Niantic engineering team. Prior to launch, they load-tested their software stack to process up to 5x their most optimistic traffic estimates. The actual launch requests per second (RPS) rate was nearly 50x that estimate—enough to present a scaling challenge for nearly any software stack. To further complicate the matter, the world of Pokémon GO is highly interactive and globally shared among its users. All players in a given area see the same view of the game Continue reading

Intel ends the Xeon Phi product line

You can scratch the Xeon Phi off your shopping list. And if you deployed it, don’t plan on upgrades. That's because Intel has quietly killed off its high-performance computing co-processor because forthcoming Xeon chips have all the features of the Phi, no separate chip or add-in card needed.Intel quietly ended the life of the Xeon Phi on July 23 with a “Product Change Notification” that contained Product Discontinuance/End of Life information for the entire Knight’s Landing line of Xeon Phis.The last order date for the Xeon Phi is Aug. 31, 2018, and orders are non-cancelable and non-returnable after that date. The final shipment date is set for July 19, 2019.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel ends the Xeon Phi product line

You can scratch the Xeon Phi off your shopping list. And if you deployed it, don’t plan on upgrades. That's because Intel has quietly killed off its high-performance computing co-processor because forthcoming Xeon chips have all the features of the Phi, no separate chip or add-in card needed.Intel quietly ended the life of the Xeon Phi on July 23 with a “Product Change Notification” that contained Product Discontinuance/End of Life information for the entire Knight’s Landing line of Xeon Phis.The last order date for the Xeon Phi is Aug. 31, 2018, and orders are non-cancelable and non-returnable after that date. The final shipment date is set for July 19, 2019.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: Honeypot DDoS monitoring

The first flaw allows an attacker to spoof requests to a vulnerable service in the name of the victim; the second flaw causes the vulnerable service to answer this request immediately. —Johannes Krupp @APNIC

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

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.

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

Designing Custom Chips In-House For Specific Tasks Is The New Normal

Cloud giants Amazon, Alibaba, Baidu, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are now designing their own AI accelerator chips. …

Designing Custom Chips In-House For Specific Tasks Is The New Normal was written by Paul Teich at .

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

How to Configure 2 IP Addresses

An inside look at hybrid Office 365 phishing attacks | Salted Hash Ep 41

In this episode, Steve Ragan shows what a hybrid phishing attack looks like as it starts off on one service, and quickly moves to another.

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.

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