The Majority Of Systems Sold Are Converged, Maybe

In the early days of computing in the datacenter, vendors of systems pretty much owned their platforms, from the chip all the way up to the compiler.

When you invested in an IBM, Sperry, Burroughs, NEC, Bull, Hitachi, or Fujitsu mainframe, or one of the myriad minicomputer systems from Big Blue, Digital, Hewlett-Packard, or eventually Unix systems from Sun Microsystems and its competition (mainly Data General, SGI, HP, and IBM), you were really investing in a way of computing life. A lot of the decisions about what to buy were already made, and you didn’t have to think much about …

The Majority Of Systems Sold Are Converged, Maybe was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Now You Can Setup Centrify, OneLogin, Ping and Other Identity Providers with Cloudflare Access

Now You Can Setup Centrify, OneLogin, Ping and Other Identity Providers with Cloudflare Access

We use Cloudflare Access to secure our own internal tools instead of a VPN. As someone that does a lot of work on the train, I can attest this is awesome (though I might be biased). You can see it in action below. Instead of having to connect to a VPN to reach our internal jira, we just login with our Google account and we are good to go:

Now You Can Setup Centrify, OneLogin, Ping and Other Identity Providers with Cloudflare Access
Before today, you could setup Access if you used GSuite, Okta or Azure AD to manage your employee accounts. Today we would like to announce support for two more Identity Providers with Cloudflare Access: Centrify and OneLogin.

We launched Cloudflare Access earlier this year and have been overwhelmed by the response from our customers and community. Customers tell us they love the simplicity of setting up Access to secure applications and integrate with their existing identity provider solution. Access helps customers implement a holistic solution for both corporate and remote employees without having to use a VPN.

If you are using Centrify or OneLogin as your identity provider you can now easily integrate them with Cloudflare Access and have your team members login with their accounts to securely reach your internal Continue reading

A Carbon Neutral North America

A Carbon Neutral North America

A Carbon Neutral North America
Photo by Karsten Würth (@inf1783) / Unsplash

Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. While working toward our goals, we want to make sure our processes are conducted in a sustainable manner.

In an effort to do so, we’ve reduced Cloudflare’s environmental impact by contracting to purchase regional renewable energy certificates, or “RECs,” to match 100% of the electricity used in our North American data centers as well as our U.S. offices. Cloudflare now has servers in 154 unique cities around the world, with 38 located in North America. Cloudflare has opted to support geographically diverse projects in proximity to our office and data center electricity usage. This renewable energy initiative reduces our electricity-based carbon footprint by 5,561 tons of CO2 which has a positive environmental impact. The impact can be compared to growing 144,132 trees seedlings for 10 years, or taking 1,191 cars off the road for one year.

A Carbon Neutral North America

How does buying a REC help reduce Cloudflare's carbon footprint you may ask? When 1MWh of electricity is produced from a renewable generator, such as a wind turbine, there are two products: the energy, which is delivered to the grid and mixes with other forms of energy, Continue reading

Whatever is vOLT-HA?

Many network engineers find the entire world of telecom to be confusing—especially as papers are peppered with a lot of acronyms. If any part of the networking world is more obsessed with acronyms than any other, the telecom world, where the traditional phone line, subscriber access, and network engineering collide, reigns as the “king of the hill.”

Recently, while looking at some documentation for the CORD project, which stands for Central Office Rearchitected as a Data Center, I ran across an acronym I had not seen before—vOLT-HA. An acronym with a dash in the middle—impressive! But what is, exactly? To get there, we must begin in the beginning, with a PON.

There are two kinds of optical networks in the world, Active Optical Networks (AONs), and Passive Optical Networks (PONs). The primary difference between the two is whether the optical gear used to build the network amplifies (or even electronically rebuilds, or repeats) the optical signal as it passes through. In AONs, optical signals are amplified, while ins PONs, optical signals are not amplified. This means that in a PON, the optical equipment can be said to be passive, in that it does not modify the optical signal in Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: AI Could Reshape the Music Industry, in a Good Way

AI Hits the Right Notes: Artificial intelligence-generated music is reshaping the industry, but that’s not such a bad thing, notes Billboard.com. AI won’t replace the artists we love or end creativity, but it could empower creators with new songwriting and other tools, the story suggests.

Drilling for AI: Oil producers are also turning to AI to help them with several tasks, according to an interview with oil executive Philippe Herve of SparkCongnition, published in Houston’s Chron.com. AI can assist oil producers with predictive maintenance of their expensive field equipment and help them make sense of all the data they collect, he said.

Collateral damage for app ban: Russia has attempted to shut down messaging app Telegram, after the service refused to provide authorities encryption keys to its software. It’s not going so well, however. Russian’s attempts to block the app have inadvertently knocked out a bunch of small business websites in the country, reports the New York Times. Telegram attempted to get around the ban by shifting its service to U.S. Web hosts Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, while repeatedly changing its IP address. In response, Russia shut down huge blocks of subnets instead of trying Continue reading

Vexata Has Its Own Twist On Scaling Flash Storage

When looking for all-flash storage arrays, there is no lack of options. Small businesses and hyperscalers alike helped fuel the initial uptake of flash storage several years ago, and since then larger businesses have taken the plunge to help drive savings in such areas as power and cooling costs, floor and rack space, and software licensing.

The increasing demand for the technology – see the rapid growth of Pure Storage, the original flash array upstart over the past nine years – has not only fueled the rise of smaller vendors but also the portfolio expansion of such established …

Vexata Has Its Own Twist On Scaling Flash Storage was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Strategy: Use TensorFlow.js in the Browser to Reduce Server Costs

 

One of the strategies Jacob Richter describes (How we built a big data platform on AWS for 100 users for under $2 a month) in his relentless drive to lower AWS costs is moving ML from the server to the client.

Moving work to the client is a time honored way of saving on server side costs. Not long ago it might have seemed like moving ML to the browser would be an insane thing to do. What was crazy yesterday often becomes standard practice today, especially when it works, especially when it saves money:

Our post-processing machine learning models are mostly K-means clustering models to identify outliers. As a further step to reduce our costs, we are now running those models on the client side using TensorFlow.js instead of using an autoscaling EC2 container. While this was only a small change using the same code, it resulted in a proportionally massive cost reduction. 

To learn more Alexis Perrier has a good article on Tensorflow with Javascript Brings Deep Learning to the Browser:

Tensorflow.js has four layers: The WebGL API for GPU-supported numerical operations, the web browser for user interactions, and two APIs: Continue reading

Network Break 181: Russia Accused Of Infrastructure Attacks; US Targets ZTE

Take a Network Break! The US and British governments have accused Russian state actors of compromising routers and other network infrastructure, the United States forbids American companies from selling components to Chinese telecom firm ZTE, and Huawei rethinks its US strategy.

Cisco releases notes on its 9500 switches and UADP silicon, IBM releases a mainframe that takes the same space as a traditional 19-inch server rack, and VMware shares rise on rumors that Dell won’t reverse-merge with it.

Arista’s share price stumbles, and then recovers; Cisco ditches the Spark brand name; a Cisco security exec says we’re all screwed; and the United States is the leading source of botnet attacks in the world.

Find links to all these stories just after our sponsor message.

Sponsor: InterOptic

InterOptic offers high-performance, high-quality optics at a fraction of the cost. Find out more at InterOptic.com, and if you re attending Interop 2018 in Vegas, stop by the InterOptic booth to learn how they can help you spec the right optics for your network.

Show Links:

Russian State-Sponsored Cyber Actors Targeting Network Infrastructure Devices – US-CERT

Huawei, Failing to Crack U.S. Market, Signals a Change in Tactics – The New York Times

Continue reading

5 key enterprise IoT security recommendations

Not so long ago, the phrase “consumerization of IT” was on everyone’s lips. Whole publications and conferences (remember CITE, for Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise?) were created to chronicle the trend of corporations relying on products and services originally created for consumers — which was often easier to use and of higher quality than its business-oriented competitors.Well, no one talks much about the consumerization of IT anymore… not because the trend went away, but because consumer tech has now permeated every aspect of business technology. Today, it’s just how things work — and if you ask me, that’s a good thing.To read this article in full, please click here

5 key enterprise IoT security recommendations

Not so long ago, the phrase “consumerization of IT” was on everyone’s lips. Whole publications and conferences (remember CITE, for Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise?) were created to chronicle the trend of corporations relying on products and services originally created for consumers — which was often easier to use and of higher quality than its business-oriented competitors.Well, no one talks much about the consumerization of IT anymore… not because the trend went away, but because consumer tech has now permeated every aspect of business technology. Today, it’s just how things work — and if you ask me, that’s a good thing.To read this article in full, please click here

5 key enterprise IoT security recommendations

Not so long ago, the phrase “consumerization of IT” was on everyone’s lips. Whole publications and conferences (remember CITE, for Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise?) were created to chronicle the trend of corporations relying on products and services originally created for consumers — which was often easier to use and of higher quality than its business-oriented competitors.Well, no one talks much about the consumerization of IT anymore… not because the trend went away, but because consumer tech has now permeated every aspect of business technology. Today, it’s just how things work — and if you ask me, that’s a good thing.To read this article in full, please click here

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