What is Cohesity and why did it just pull in $250M in venture money?

Normally venture funding stories don’t get much play here, but when a company scores $250 million, for a grand total of $410 million raised, one has to wonder what all the hoopla is about. Especially given some of the spectacular flameouts we’ve seen over the years.But Cohesity isn’t vapor; it’s shipping a product that it claims helps solve a problem that has plagued enterprises forever: data siloing.Founded in 2013 and led by Nutanix co-founder Mohit Aron, Cohesity just racked up a $250 million investment led by SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund, which includes funding from Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, and Sequoia Capital. Those are some big names, to say the least.To read this article in full, please click here

Docker’s Name and Operations Could Appeal to Microsoft, Red Hat, VMware

Acquisition rumors are nothing new for Docker, which said it has attracted more than 1 million new developers and hosted more than 1 million new applications in its Docker Hub over the past year.

Reflecting on the Internet Society’s 2017 Asia-Pacific Activities

The Asia-Pacific Bureau has been producing an annual snapshot of its activities and initiatives for a couple of years now, and we are pleased to present the 2017 edition. While it is not meant to be an exhaustive record of all that we did, it does provide a good overview of our activities in the region.

In addition to the Bureau’s core programmes, our Chapters are also very active in their local communities and, as volunteer-led entities, do amazing work in helping to support and carry out the Internet Society’s mission at the local level. We invited our chapters in the region to submit a summary of their activities, and the submissions that made it before the deadline are included in the report.

As I reflect on 2017, it probably stands out as the year the digital economy began to cement itself in the Asia-Pacific. Across the region, numerous developments, from the emergence (and to some extent, dominance) of local technology firms to new policies designed to facilitate the growth of connected societies all signify that countries in the largest region of the world – both in geography and population – are finally putting their plans into action.

Nowhere is Continue reading

Sprint Is Building a Dedicated IoT Core Network

By creating a separate core network, Sprint can dynamically add capacity and computing power as it is needed.

Public Cloud Providers Spent 32% More on Infrastructure Year Over Year, Says Synergy Research

This is squeezing the growth opportunity for traditional vendors such as Dell EMC, Cisco, and HPE.

Pivot3 CEO: Our HCI Tops the Acquisition Target List

CEO Ron Nash expects his company to be profitable by next year, which could set the stage for an IPO if Pivot3 isn’t gobbled up first.

Off to the Kubernetes – Networking in a Post VM world

Few people are using containers so why are all the vendors into it ?

Off the Cuff: Microsoft Purchases Github

Last week, Eyvonne, Donald, Alistair, and I sat and talked about the recent purchase of Github by Microsoft. Will this be the end of git as a widely used open source repository, or will we all look back in five years and think “move along, nothing to see here?”

x86 assembly doesn’t have to be scary (interactive)

x86 assembly doesn’t have to be scary (interactive)

Assembly programming can be intimidating for people who have never looked into it any deeper than a glance, but giving that it underpins how the computers we use work it can be helpful having cont

How Ably Efficiently Implemented Consistent Hashing

This is a guest post by Srushtika Neelakantam, Developer Advovate for Ably Realtime, a realtime data delivery platform.

Ably’s realtime platform is distributed across more than 14 physical data centres and 100s of nodes. In order for us to ensure both load and data are distributed evenly and consistently across all our nodes, we use consistent hashing algorithms.

In this article, we’ll understand what consistent hashing is all about and why it is an essential tool in scalable distributed system architectures. Further, we’ll look at data structures that can be used to implement this algorithm efficiently at scale. At the end, we’ll also have a look at a working example for the same.

Hashing revisited

Remember the good old naïve Hashing approach that you learnt in college? Using a hash function, we ensured that resources required by computer programs could be stored in memory in an efficient manner, ensuring that in-memory data structures are loaded evenly. We also ensured that this resource storing strategy also made information retrieval more efficient and thus made programs run faster.

The classic hashing approach used a hash function to generate a pseudo-random number, which is then divided by the size of the memory Continue reading

Network Break 189: The Big Cisco Live Roundup; LiveAction Buys Savvius

Worth Reading: Looking forward at session encryption

With TLSv1.3 approved and in the IETF publication queue, it’s time to think about deployment options and obstacles, and planning for changes inherent in this revision. —Kathleen Moriarty @APNIC

Conference Impostor Syndrome

In IT we’ve all heard of Impostor Syndrome by now. The feeling that you’re not just a lucky person that has no real skills or is skating by on the seat of their pants is a very real thing. I’ve felt it an many of my friends and fellow members of the community have felt it too. It’s easy to deal with when you have time to think or work on your own. However, when you take your show on the road it can creep up before you know it.

Conferences are a great place to meet people and learn about new ideas. It’s also a place where your ideas will be challenged and put on display. It’s not to difficult to imagine meeting a person for the first time at a place like Cisco Live or VMworld and not feeling little awe-inspired. After all, this could be a person whose works you’ve read for a long time. It could be a person you look up to or someone you would like to have mentor you.

For those in the position of being thrust into the limelight, it can be extremely difficult to push aside those feelings of Impostor Syndrome Continue reading

Net Neutrality Round Table

Debates regarding net neutrality regulation in the United States have been carried out for over a decade. Rulemakings by the FCC have been passed numerous times, won and lost in court, and been repealed, resulting in years of political back and forth. Now, net neutrality is being argued for and against on Capitol Hill and its regulatory future is unclear.

To address this political limbo, the Internet Society convened experts from the technical community, public interest groups, and academia to discuss how we can create a permanent solution for net neutrality that protect the interests of Internet users while fostering an environment that encourages investment and innovation. During this half-day event, participants began a conversation to define net neutrality, what conduct it should cover, how compliance could be assured, and how to balance consumer and private sector interests.

The discussion was moderated by Larry Stickling, Executive Director of the Collaborative Governance Project at the Internet Society, and included a balanced group of politically left- and right-leaning public interest groups, private sector organizations, and academics. The event was under Chatham House Rule and did not allow tweeting during the meeting in order to encourage participants to freely and respectfully voice their Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 3 providers fixing the middle mile problems of internet-based SD-WANs

A new global backbone provider emerged from stealth last week, giving organizations even more choice in how they build their Internet-based SD-WANs.  Mode introduced what it calls a “software-defined core” (SD-CORE) network that offers IT “affordable private-network reliability and quality of service” across the globe.The company joins Aryaka and Cato Networks as one of the few independent backbone providers helping enterprises solve the variability problems of the Internet core. Middle-mile performance forms the biggest challenge for delivering stable, global, low-latency connections.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 3 providers fixing the middle mile problems of internet-based SD-WANs

A new global backbone provider emerged from stealth last week, giving organizations even more choice in how they build their Internet-based SD-WANs.  Mode introduced what it calls a “software-defined core” (SD-CORE) network that offers IT “affordable private network reliability and quality of service” across the globe.The company joins Aryaka and Cato Networks as one of the few independent backbone providers helping enterprises solve the variability problems of the Internet core.  "Internet testing results: Why fixing the internet middle mile is essential for SD-WAN performance," middle-mile performance, forms the biggest challenge for delivering stable, global, low-latency connections.To read this article in full, please click here

The Week in Internet News: X-Ray I

AI to get X-ray vision: Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are getting close to creating AI that can see through walls, Geek.com reported. The research team is using AI to analyze radio signals bouncing off human bodies. The result is a neural network-generated stick figure that moves like the targeted person does.

Dr. AI will see you now: Perhaps more useful that looking through walls, some AI technologies are now being used to identify tuberculosis, pneumonia, upper respiratory infection, and bronchitis based on how a cough sounds, said AdWeek. Several companies are exploring other ways to use AI in healthcare settings.

Encryption wars, part 207: Apple has moved to close a security hole that law enforcement agencies used to defeat encryption on iPhones, according to many news reports, including one in the New York Times. The Apple move set off a new round of debate about encrypted devices and law enforcement access, the Washington Post noted.

It appears that at least one company that builds iPhone cracking tools already has a workaround, however, Motherboard reported.

Meanwhile, an FBI official suggested that each encrypted device that law enforcement agencies cannot crack represents a victim without justice, BusinessInsider. Continue reading

10 Key Interview Questions for Network Administrators

Cisco makes SD-WAN integration a top priority

Software and programmable intelligent networks were hot topics at Cisco Live last week, and one of the key components of that discussion was the direction of the company’s SD-WAN strategy.Central to that dialog is how Cisco plans to use and integrate the SD-WAN technology it acquired last year when it bought Viptela for $610 million. For the moment, Cisco says Viptela has brought with it interest to the tune of about 800 new customers in recent months.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft adds resiliency, redundancy, security to Windows Server 2019

With Windows Server 2019, Microsoft is adding resiliency and redundancy enhancements to the Shielded Virtual Machines security controls it introduced with Windows Server 2016.Shielded VMs originally provided a way to protect virtual machine assets by isolating them from the hypervisor infrastructure and could also help prove to auditors that systems were adequately isolated and controlled. Now Shielded VM enhancements in Window Server 2019 provide real-time failback configurations and host- and policy-based security improvements.[ Don’t miss customer reviews of top remote access tools and see the most powerful IoT companies . | Get daily insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Host key attestation Under Windows Server 2016, key authentication was based on trusted platform module (TPM) cryptoprocessors and Microsoft Active Directory authentication. Both of these are great solutions but were limited when it comes to extensibility and redundancy.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)