Red Hat Ansible Tower wins SIIA CODiE Award

We are excited to share that Red Hat Ansible Tower was awarded a 2018 Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) CODiE Award in the Best DevOps Tool category. The award recognizes the best tools for supporting collaboration between developers and operations. Additionally, we proud to share that Ansible Tower was honored with the Best Overall Business Technology Solution award. This award represents the product with the highest scores of both rounds of judging across all 52 business technology categories.

The SIIA CODiE Awards are the industry's only peer-recognized awards program. Business technology leaders including senior executives, analysts, media, consultants and investors evaluate assigned products during the first-round review which determines the finalists. SIIA members then vote on the finalist products and the scores from both rounds are tabulated to select the winners. Finalists represent the best products, technologies, and services in software, information and business technology.

We would like to thank the Ansible community for their continued support, contributions and excitement for the solution. The community is at the heart of all Ansible products and these awards were made possible because of our tireless community that collaborates everyday to help more people experience the power of automation.

Congratulations to the Continue reading

Rackspace introduces data center colocation services

The effort around data center reduction has been to draw down everything, from hardware to facilities. Rackspace has an interesting new twist, though: Put your hardware in our data centers.The company announced a new data center colocation business this week, offering space, power, and network connectivity to customers who provide their own hardware. The facilities are in 10 locations around the world.It’s not a bad idea. The servers are the cheapest expense compared to facility costs, such as the physical building, power, and cooling.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency and how Windows Server 2019 embraces hyperconverged data centers. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] 'Lift and shift' to the cloud The new business, dubbed Rackspace Colocation, is positioned as a way for enterprises to kick off their cloud journey by getting out of their self-managed data center to lower their expenses as they move to the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

Rackspace introduces data center colocation services

The effort around data center reduction has been to draw down everything, from hardware to facilities. Rackspace has an interesting new twist, though: Put your hardware in our data centers.The company announced a new data center colocation business this week, offering space, power, and network connectivity to customers who provide their own hardware. The facilities are in 10 locations around the world.It’s not a bad idea. The servers are the cheapest expense compared to facility costs, such as the physical building, power, and cooling.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency and how Windows Server 2019 embraces hyperconverged data centers. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] 'Lift and shift' to the cloud The new business, dubbed Rackspace Colocation, is positioned as a way for enterprises to kick off their cloud journey by getting out of their self-managed data center to lower their expenses as they move to the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco Claims 800-Plus SD-WAN Customers Post Viptela Acquisition

Cisco plans to add intent-based networking functionality to its SD-WAN offering in the next 12 to 18 months.

Introducing the Internet Intelligence Map

AppViewX Names Former Cedexis Chief Executive Ryan Windham as CEO

Ryan Windham is the network management company’s second CEO this year. Anand Purusothaman became CEO after Manuel Rivelo left in January, and while Windham dealt with the acquisition of Cedexis.

Rubrik Wraps Its Data Management Software Around Hybrid Cloud

The Alta 4.2 release supports Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud-native workloads and traditional IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris environments.

MIPS in Hand, AI Chip Startup Wave Computing Delivers First Silicon

When it comes to deep learning chip startups, hype moves fast but crossing the finish line to real production silicon takes an incredibly long time. …

MIPS in Hand, AI Chip Startup Wave Computing Delivers First Silicon was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .

A Partnership to Tackle Growing Risks in a Connected World

With a shared vision of putting people at the center of the Internet, the Internet Society and Consumers International have formed a new working partnership aimed at creating a safer, more trusted Internet for everyone.

As stated in a joint letter to G20 leaders, both organizations share the view that the unwritten future of the Internet is full of endless opportunity, but that if we want everyone to benefit from its potential we need to make sure it is fair, open, safe and secure.

Only by prioritizing the needs of people in an increasingly-connected world, can we make this possible. Consumers should be confident in their use of Internet-connected devices, and have the right to know how their personal data is collected, protected, shared and stored.

Our organizations plan to work together on a wide range of initiatives including to make sure individuals have access to secure Internet-connected devices, understand what online privacy and security means for them, and are empowered to make informed choices about the technology they use in their daily lives.

The Internet of Things (or IoT) offers the promise of convenience, efficiency and more personalized services. It’s a phenomenon that’s being seen all around the Continue reading

BrandPost: Blockchain is Coming for Storage

Although much of the initial excitement for blockchain technology centered around bitcoin and financial services, it’s quickly showing applicability to other areas for increased business value.For example, Walmart has invested in blockchain to improve its supply chain operations. In initial tests, the retailer says the technology reduced the time it takes to track food as it moves from farms to stores — from six days to two seconds.That’s all due to the decentralized nature of blockchain. It’s often referred to as a distributed consensus model, consisting of nodes or blocks of encrypted information. Each node contains the exact same data and transaction history, and that information is secured with cryptographed hashes and digital signatures.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: Work-life Balance

“This work-life harmony thing is what I try to teach young employees and actually senior executives at Amazon too. But especially the people coming in,” he said. “I get asked about work-life balance all the time. And my view is, that’s a debilitating phrase because it implies there’s a strict trade-off.” —Kari Paul @Marketwatch

MANRS BCOP published as RIPE document

The MANRS initiative’s set of Best Current Operational Practices has received recognition from the RIPE community by being published as RIPE-706.

Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) – which is supported by the Internet Society – aims to help network operators around the world to improve the security and resilience of the global routing system through four actions that include filtering, anti-spoofing, coordination and support for global validation. It currently involves over 85 organisations encompassing nearly 200 Autonomous Systems around the world, including some of the largest ISPs.

The MANRS BCOP offers guidance on how to practically implement each of the MANRS actions, based on the operational experiences of numerous network operators around the world. It’s a must read for those working with the global routing system, as routing security is a shared responsibility and needs commitment to good practices from all its participants.

The RIPE documents are developed and approved by the RIPE community, having been published since 1989. They include technical and operational recommendations, as well as policy, procedural and organisational documents. The publication of RIPE-706 represents community recognition of the MANRS principles and the importance of a commitment to routing security.

The MANRS initiative would like to thank David Freedman, Brian Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Intent-based networking

In campus networking, there are a number of emerging trends impacting the way networks will be modeled in the future. These arising trends include mobility, Internet of Things (IoT), and uniformed security across the wired and wireless connections.To be in tune with these trends, a new era of networking is required that enforces policy-based automation from the edge of the network to public and private clouds using an intent-based paradigm. An example of such would be SD-Access.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Intent-based networking

In campus networking, there are a number of emerging trends impacting the way networks will be modeled in the future. These arising trends include mobility, Internet of Things (IoT), and uniformed security across the wired and wireless connections.To be in tune with these trends, a new era of networking is required that enforces policy-based automation from the edge of the network to public and private clouds using an intent-based paradigm. An example of such would be SD-Access.To read this article in full, please click here

Datanauts 138: What’s Up With Ethernet Fabrics?

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins: Get ready for the network’s next act

Cisco’s annual user event, Cisco Live, is being held in Orlando, Florida, this week. While Orlando is home to DisneyWorld, Universal Studios and other places where fantasies come true, the one thing that isn’t make-believe is the turnaround of Cisco since Chuck Robbins took over as CEO. When the baton was passed to Robbins in August of 2015, Cisco’s stock was trading at about $25/share and had been moving sideways for years. Today, it’s trading at about $45/share and at a 17-year high, and the turnaround is well underway.Cisco goes back to the network How did Robbins get Cisco’s mojo’s back in such a short period of time? The answer lies in its roots and a refocus on the network. In fact, when Robbins took over as CEO, I wrote a post outlining some priorities for him as he stepped into the role. My first point was to approach IT through the lens of the network. In the years leading up to the transition to Robbins, I felt Cisco had tried too hard to prove itself as a server and traditional IT vendor instead of staying true to networking.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins: Get ready for the network’s next act

Cisco’s annual user event, Cisco Live, is being held in Orlando, Florida, this week. While Orlando is home to DisneyWorld, Universal Studios and other places where fantasies come true, the one thing that isn’t make-believe is the turnaround of Cisco since Chuck Robbins took over as CEO. When the baton was passed to Robbins in August of 2015, Cisco’s stock was trading at about $25/share and had been moving sideways for years. Today, it’s trading at about $45/share and at a 17-year high, and the turnaround is well underway.Cisco goes back to the network How did Robbins get Cisco’s mojo’s back in such a short period of time? The answer lies in its roots and a refocus on the network. In fact, when Robbins took over as CEO, I wrote a post outlining some priorities for him as he stepped into the role. My first point was to approach IT through the lens of the network. In the years leading up to the transition to Robbins, I felt Cisco had tried too hard to prove itself as a server and traditional IT vendor instead of staying true to networking.To read this article in full, please click here

Wireshark and File Compression

What Is Intent-Based Networking?

This blog post was initially sent to the subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

Whenever someone mentions intent-based networking I try to figure out what exactly they’re talking about. Not surprisingly, I get a different answer every single time. Confused by all that, I tried to find a good definition, but all I could find was vendor marketing along the lines of “Intent-based networking captures and translates business intent so that it can be applied across the network,” or industry press articles regurgitating vendor white papers.

Medea: scheduling of long running applications in shared production clusters

Medea: scheduling of long running applications in shared production clusters Garefalakis et al., EuroSys’18

(If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by following the link above directly from The Morning Paper blog site).

We’re sticking with schedulers today, and a really interesting system called Medea which is designed to support the common real world use case of mixed long running applications (LRAs) and shorter duration tasks within the same cluster. The work is grounded in production cluster workloads at Microsoft and is now part of the Apache Hadoop 3.1 release. In the evaluation, when compared to the Kubernetes’ scheduling algorithm Medea reduces median runtimes by up to 32%, and by 2.1x compared to the previous generation YARN scheduler.

…a substantial portion of production clusters today is dedicated to LRAs…. placing LRAs, along with batch jobs, in shared clusters is appealing to reduce cluster operational costs, avoid unnecessary data movement, and enable pipelines involving both classes of applications. Despite these observations, support for LRAs in existing schedulers is rudimentary.

The challenges of scheduling long-running applications

Example uses of long running application containers include streaming systems, interactive data-intensive applications (maintaining Continue reading