Lenovo announces hybrid liquid-cooling system: Neptune

Water cooling for enterprise servers is slowly creeping in from the fringes to the mainstream of data center use as vendors and end users alike realize the limitations of air cooling. With increased compute density, fans just don’t cut it anymore, and water cooling is far more efficient.Several vendors have adapted their cabinets to accommodate water-cooling systems, and now Lenovo is the latest to get religion on the subject with Neptune, a series of technologies for the data center. The company announced the new system at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt, Germany.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Neptune is a three-pronged approach, borrowed from the legend of the Roman god of the seas Neptune, who wields a three-pointed spear. It offers direct-to-node liquid cooling, rear door heat exchangers, and hybrid cooling that mixes air and liquid, all of which is documented in a lighthearted blog post by the company.To read this article in full, please click here

What is NVMe, and how is it changing enterprise storage

NVMe (non-volatile memory express) is shaking up the enterprise storage industry.A communications protocol developed specifically for all-flash storage, NVMe enables faster performance and greater density compared to legacy protocols. It's geared for enterprise workloads that require top performance, such as real-time data analytics, online trading platforms and other latency-sensitive workloads.[ Check out AI boosts data-center availability, efficiency. Also learn what hyperconvergence is and whether you’re ready for hyperconverged storage. | For regularly scheduled insights sign up for Network World newsletters. ] NVMe vs. serial-attached SCSI (SAS) NVMe is aimed at reducing the software overhead between applications and storage in all-flash systems.To read this article in full, please click here

IoT Security is the Heart of the Matter

The Internet Society is raising awareness around the issues and challenges with Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and the OTA IoT Trust Framework is promoting best practices in protection of user security and privacy. The importance of this was brought home with the keynote talk at the recent TNC18 Conference, which was given by Marie Moe (SINTEF) who related her experiences with her network-connected heart pacemaker.

Marie is a security researcher (who also formerly worked for NorCERT, the Norwegian National Cybersecurity Centre) who has an implanted pacemaker to monitor and control her heart, and has used the opportunity to investigate the firmware and security issues that have had detrimental and potentially fatal consequences. Quite aside from uncovering misconfigurations that required tweaking (e.g. the maximum heartbeat setting turned out to be set too low for a younger person), and an adverse event that required a firmware upgrade, she was even more concerned to discover that little consideration had gone into the authentication and access aspects that might allow an attacker to take control of the device.

These devices allow their recipients to lead normal lives, and of course being network-connectable has many practical advantages in terms of monitoring and Continue reading

Worth Reading: Fake News in IT

Stumbled upon “Is Tech News Fake” article by Tom Nolle. Here’s the gist of his pretty verbose text:

When readers pay for news, they get news useful to readers.  When vendors pay, not only do the vendors get news they like, the rest of us get that same story.  It doesn’t mean that the story being told is a lie, but that it reflects the view of an interested party other than the reader.

High-quality content is not cheap, so always ask yourself: who’s paying for the content… and if it’s not you, you may be the product.

Full disclosure: ipSpace.net is funded exclusively with subscriptions and online courses. Some of our guest speakers work for networking vendors, but we always point that out, and never get paid for that.

ConflictJS: finding and understanding conflicts between JavaScript libraries

ConflictJS: finding and understanding conflicts between JavaScript libraries Patra et al., ICSE’18

The JavaScript ecosystem is fertile ground for dependency hell. With so many libraries being made available and the potential for global namespace clashes, it’s easy for libraries to break each other. Sometimes in an obvious to spot way (that’s a good day!), and sometimes in subtle ways that are harder to detect.

ConflictJS is a tool for finding conflicting JavasScript libraries. It’s available as open source and nicely documented, so you can try it for yourself from https://github.com/sola-da/ConflictJS.

We use ConflictJS to analyze and study conflicts among 951 real-world libraries. The results show that one out of four libraries is potentially conflicting and that 166 libraries are involved in at least one certain conflict.

Why do conflicts happen?

At a language level, until ES6 modules at least, there was no built-in namespacing mechanism (though we do have a number of conventions and module libraries). In principle developers can follow a ‘single API object’ pattern where the entire API of a library is encapsulated behind a single object. In practice, many of them don’t (71% of libraries did not do this, from 951 studied for this Continue reading

HPE places a $4B bet on its edge-network portfolio

[ Check out our corporate guide to addressing IoT security. ] HPE's pledge to pump billions of dollars into developing edge systems shines a light on the company's ambition to be the leading end-to-end computing infrastructure provider.CEO Antonio Neri made the investment announcement at the company's Discover conference Tuesday in Las Vegas, in his first appearance at the company's annual event as chief executive. He took over the CEO role from Meg Whitman in February.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE places a $4B bet on its edge-network portfolio

[ Check out our corporate guide to addressing IoT security. ] HPE's pledge to pump billions of dollars into developing edge systems shines a light on the company's ambition to be the leading end-to-end computing infrastructure provider.CEO Antonio Neri made the investment announcement at the company's Discover conference Tuesday in Las Vegas, in his first appearance at the company's annual event as chief executive. He took over the CEO role from Meg Whitman in February.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE places a $4B bet on its edge-network portfolio

[ Check out our corporate guide to addressing IoT security. ] HPE's pledge to pump billions of dollars into developing edge systems shines a light on the company's ambition to be the leading end-to-end computing infrastructure provider.CEO Antonio Neri made the investment announcement at the company's Discover conference Tuesday in Las Vegas, in his first appearance at the company's annual event as chief executive. He took over the CEO role from Meg Whitman in February.To read this article in full, please click here

Top 5 tips for transitioning to 100G networking

No doubt about it: the prospect of adding another zero to the end of your top network speeds is exciting. And the reward of the immediately noticeable performance improvement never gets old. Speed makes a noticeable, and not just measurable, difference. And with the massive increase in the amount of data servers need to process, 100G is soon going to be a necessity for many organizations.

But increasing network speed is about more than pushing more bits across a wire. Faster networks enable you to squeeze more out of your physical rack space. You need fewer servers, fewer network connections, and – dare I say it – fewer switches. It’s true. A faster network lets you pack more computing into the same space.

Whether you plan to do a forklift upgrade to 100G or intend to replace one switch at a time, there are some key things you need to know to avoid getting locked into one switch vendor or losing backward compatibility with your existing equipment. In this post, I’m going to give you my top 5 tips for making transitioning to 100G networking a smooth one.

Tip No. 1: Decide where 25G/100G makes sense

First, a little background. Continue reading

How I Switched from Docker-Compose to Pure Ansible

From-Docker-to-Ansible-1

Humble Beginnings

Let me tell you a story. It’s 2014 and I had read so many articles about Docker (as the project was called then), how awesome it is and how it makes the lives of developers so much easier. Being one, I decided to try it out. Back in the day, I was working on some django applications. Those apps were really simple: just a webserver and a database. So I went straight ahead to docker-compose. I read in the docs that I should create a docker-compose.yml file and then just docker-compose up. An error message here and there but I was able to navigate the containers to success with no big issues. And that was it. One command to run my application. I was sold on containers.

I Need to Tell Everyone

I was so excited that I started talking about Docker and docker-compose to everyone, everywhere. In the office breakroom, to my dad, at a meetup, to a crowd of 50 at a local conference. It wasn’t completely easy, since some people argued or did not understand fully. But I definitely made some converts. We even made a workshop series with my friends Peter Schiffer and Continue reading

Test New Features and Iterate Quickly with Cloudflare Workers

Test New Features and Iterate Quickly with Cloudflare Workers

Test New Features and Iterate Quickly with Cloudflare Workers
Photo by NESA by Makers / Unsplash

At Cloudflare, we believe that getting new products and features into the hands of customers as soon as possible is the best way to get great feedback. The thing about releasing products early and often is that sometimes they might not be initially ready for your entire user base. You might want to provide access to only particular sets of customers that may be: power users, those who have expressed interest participating in a beta, or customers in need of a new feature the most.

As I have been meeting with many of the users who were in our own Workers beta program, I’ve seen (somewhat unsurprisingly) that many of our users share the same belief that they should be getting feedback from their own users early and often.

However, I was surprised to learn about the difficulty that many beta program members had in creating the necessary controls to quickly and securely gate new or deprecated features when testing and releasing updates.

Below are some ideas and recipes I’ve seen implemented inside of Cloudflare Workers to ensure the appropriate customers have access to the correct features.

How Workers Work

First, a brief Continue reading

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