Hardware life cycle approaches to save money, ensure network reliability

High-quality, reliable network hardware and data center cabling are requirements for a high-performing technology infrastructure and for a successful IT team that helps drive more business. It’s the life cycle for your network.However, in these days of shrinking budgets and rising demands, CIOs, IT professionals, and buyers are being pressured to do more while reducing costs. How can this be done?Having the right approach when it comes to network hardware and data center cabling is a powerful way to enable your IT organization to do a lot more while optimizing your budget. [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ] The IT value within the life cycle There are many nuances to a hardware investment that some organizations don’t take into account. The opportunity to reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX) spends exists, but it requires incorporating pre-owned hardware into the equation.To read this article in full, please click here

Hardware life cycle approaches to save money, ensure network reliability

High-quality, reliable network hardware and data center cabling are requirements for a high-performing technology infrastructure and for a successful IT team that helps drive more business. It’s the life cycle for your network.However, in these days of shrinking budgets and rising demands, CIOs, IT professionals, and buyers are being pressured to do more while reducing costs. How can this be done?Having the right approach when it comes to network hardware and data center cabling is a powerful way to enable your IT organization to do a lot more while optimizing your budget. [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ] The IT value within the life cycle There are many nuances to a hardware investment that some organizations don’t take into account. The opportunity to reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX) spends exists, but it requires incorporating pre-owned hardware into the equation.To read this article in full, please click here

From Imagination to Action: In Latin America, Building the Internet That Women Want

In 1843, Ada Lovelace published “Sketch of the analytical engine invented by Charles Babbage” in the book Scientific Memoirs. But because of her “condition” as a woman she, like many women who were pioneers in their time, was forgotten by history. Women could not access education or the sciences and, for that reason, history forgot them, just as we forgot that many women were mothers of the Internet.

“History drove us out of the digital industry, we stopped being important and a male industry was created.”
– Kemly Camacho, Sula Batsú

Every day many people ask us, where are the women? Why don’t they participate? I tell them to look at the immense number of initiatives that women are doing in Latin America and the Caribbean.

With the cold of Buenos Aires, between its tall buildings and its warm people, our friends at the Tierra Violeta Cultural Center received us after four months of planning the FemHackParty LAC. In December 2016, at the Internet Governance Forum that took place in Guadalajara, Mexico, we organized with a group of women the first FemHackParty, within the framework of 16 days of activism against violence against women. We had the chance to learn Continue reading

Worth Reading: The cost of downtime

Downtime—when a network is unable to provide its intended action or service–remains a serious threat for network managers. The consequences can wreak havoc on finances and can lead to negative perceptions of the business. —David Bjerke And Nilson Gabela @Data Center Journal

Kubernetes with Cilium and Containerd using Kubeadm

Now, if that isn’t a title jam-packed with buzzwords, I don’t know what is! In seriousness, though, I wanted to share how to use kubeadm to turn up a Kubernetes cluster using containerd (instead of Docker) and Cilium as the CNI plugin. I’m posting this because I wasn’t able to find a reasonable article that combined all the different threads—some posts talked about using containerd, others talked about using Cilium, and the official Kubernetes docs have examples for using kubeadm. The purpose of this post is to try to pull those threads together.

For structure and context, I’ll build upon the official Kubernetes document outlining creating highly available clusters with kubeadm. You may find it helpful to pull up that article next to this one, as I won’t be duplicating that content here. Instead, I’ll just reference additions/changes to the process in order to accommodate containerd and Cilium.

Before getting started, make sure that your systems will meet the minimum requirements for Cilium. For my testing, I used Ubuntu 16.04 with the latest HWE kernel (4.15.0-33-generic). I used a private fork of Wardroom to build the AWS AMIs with containerd and all the Kubernetes 1.11.2 Continue reading

How to pin a pile of addresses onto a Google map

Turning a list of names, addresses and related information into a Google map is a lot easier than you might think. The effort required depends, as you might imagine, on the information that you starting with. But if the format is fairly consistent, it’s relatively easy to massage the information into a form that can be uploaded into a format that works.First, what you can expect Once you’ve loaded a list of names and addresses into a Google map, you will be able view the location of each person and set up your map such that clicking on any of the map markers displays the information collected for that address.To read this article in full, please click here

Last Month In Internet Intelligence: August 2018

eBay Moves Away From OpenStack, Embraces Kubernetes and Docker

The company has also built its own servers and plans to open source them. It's midway through its re-platforming project with the goal of making its infrastructure more homogenous.

PQ 154: Design Challenges In Military Networks

On today's Priority Queue we explore the challenges of building military networks, including bandwidth constraints, hostile environments, survivability, training and skills development, and much more. Our guest is PC Drew, an officer in the Marine Corps Reserve and a network engineer.

The post PQ 154: Design Challenges In Military Networks appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Orchestrating the Requirements of Intent-Based Networking

Current networks require an intent-based networking system based on proper orchestration to keep current infrastructure intact while integrating next-generation platforms.

Getting Started: Visit Us at AnsibleFest!

Hello, and welcome to another Getting Started blog post… though this one is a bit different. I’d like to tell you about AnsibleFest 2018 in Austin, TX, where for the first time there will be a dedicated Getting Started section at this annual event!

Participants who visit our area will be able to meet some members of the Getting Started team as well as attend presentations. The scheduled talks include Ansible Essentials (similar to the monthly webinars) and Writing Your First Playbook, based on our most popular blog post.

In addition to the two scheduled talks each day, there will also be a lounge area where attendees can ask questions and get answers from Ansible experts in person! Come stop by to learn about what makes Ansible different, how it works, and get a quick overview of Ansible Tower. No experience is required, which means this is going to be a great chance for you or perhaps a teammate who is new to Ansible to learn about it from the ground up.

Make sure to register soon so that we can see you in Austin this October!

Using DevOps to Simplify Disaster Recovery

Valley-Free Routing

Reading academic articles about Internet-wide routing challenges you might stumble upon valley-free routing – a pretty important concept with applications in WAN and data center routing design.

If you’re interested in the academic discussions, you’ll find a pretty exhaustive list of papers on this topic in the Informative References section of RFC 7908; here’s the over-simplified version.

BiB 053: Mode.net’s Cloud Private Network For Your SD-WAN

Mode briefed Ethan Banks about their cloud private network. Whoa! Thought Mode was an SD-WAN company? Not quite. Mode partners with several SD-WAN platforms so that it's easy to stand up a tunnel from your SD-WAN forwarders to Mode's private network. That makes Mode a network alternative to private MPLS that integrates with your SD-WAN fabric.

The post BiB 053: Mode.net’s Cloud Private Network For Your SD-WAN appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Worth Reading: VMWare wants to rearchitect your containers

One of the compelling advantages that Pivotal Container Service (PKS) has exhibited over the other container platforms in which VMware has invested, is that it promises to be an implementation of “plain vanilla Kubernetes,” requiring nothing special and no exclusive treatment from developers. —Scott M. Fulton III @The New Stack

Episode 34 – MPLS Part 3 – Traffic Engineering

Traffic engineering is one of the most complex topics in network design and operation. Join us in this episode of the Network Collective as we discuss the concepts and tradeoffs in traffic engineering using MPLS.

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 34 – MPLS Part 3 – Traffic Engineering appeared first on Network Collective.

IDG Contributor Network: What’s wrong with Cisco running SD-WAN on your routers?

Cisco’s announcement earlier this month that it will add the Viptela SD-WAN technology to the IOS XE software running the ISR/ASR routers will be a mixed blessing for enterprises.On the one hand, it brings SD-WAN migration closer to Cisco customers. On the other hand, two preliminary indicators —  one-on-one conversations and Cisco’s refusal to participate in an SD-WAN test —  suggest enterprises should expect reduced throughput if they enable the SD-WAN capabilities on their routers.Cisco’s easy migration to SD-WAN By including the SD-WAN code with IOS XE, Cisco will provide a migration path for the more than one million ISR/ASR edge routers in the field. There’s been a lot of conversation as to whether or not SD-WAN is going to kill the router performance. Delivering SD-WAN code on the ISRs is Cisco’s answer: routers are here to stay but they’ll morph into SD-WAN appliances.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What’s wrong with Cisco running SD-WAN on your routers?

Cisco’s announcement earlier this month that it will add the Viptela SD-WAN technology to the IOS XE software running the ISR/ASR routers will be a mixed blessing for enterprises. On the one hand, it brings SD-WAN migration closer to Cisco customers. On the other hand, two preliminary indicators —  one-on-one conversations and Cisco’s refusal to participate in an SD-WAN test —  suggest enterprises should expect reduced throughput if they enable the SD-WAN capabilities on their routers.Cisco’s easy migration to SD-WAN By including the SD-WAN code with IOS XE, Cisco will provide a migration path for the more than one million ISR/ASR edge routers in the field. There’s been a lot of conversation as to whether or not SD-WAN is going to kill the router performance. Delivering SD-WAN code on the ISRs is Cisco’s answer: routers are here to stay but they’ll morph into SD-WAN appliances.To read this article in full, please click here

Ciena Buys DonRiver to Boost Blue Planet Portfolio

A DonRiver team of specialized OSS software, integration, and consulting experts will form a specialized services group within the Blue Planet Organization.

Europe Embraces Network Virtualization, Time Zones Become a Pain Point

There seem to be a lot more European vendors, emerging from anonymity, that are having success in network virtualization.