GET IN THERE! Sign up for VMware’s Hands-On Labs and Enter to Win a Paid Trip to VMworld 2018

VMworld is almost upon us! As the world’s premier digital infrastructure event, VMworld attracts the most talented professionals around the world who care deeply about virtualization and cloud computing.

If you’re new to VMware products and want to get a deep dive, take any of our newly released Hands-on Labs (including the extremely popular “NSX -Getting Started”) to get one-on-one guidance from VMware experts that you can bring back to your organization to hit the ground running. Hands-on Labs (HOL) are the fastest, easiest way to test-drive the full technical capabilities of VMware products for free and without needing to install anything.

Sign up for a Qualifying Hands-on Lab and Enter to Win a Free Trip to VMworld

As an added bonus, if you sign up for a qualifying Hands-on Lab, you’ll be entered to win an all-expenses-paid trip to VMworld US or Europe (up to $5,000 USD). The winner will not only rub elbows with the team that delivers HOL, they’ll also get VIP access to the “behind the scenes” command centers.

As a VMworld attendee and Hands-on Labs student, you’ll gain special access to the latest VMware technologies without being required to purchase equipment, Continue reading

Cumulus content roundup: May

Hope you brought your networking acronyms dictionary with you – this month’s Cumulus content roundup is going full tech-geek and we’re NOT ashamed! We’re brushing up on EVPN, ECMP, DWDM and TGIF (okay, not the last one. But did that make you LOL?) See a term that makes you go WTF? Don’t worry — we’ve got webinars, videos, blog posts and more to help you differentiate between BGP and OMG.

From Cumulus Networks:

EVPN content hub: Deploying EVPN enables you to enhance your layer 3 data center with benefits such as multitenancy, scalability, ARP suppression and more. Don’t know where to begin? Browse this EVPN resources page to learn more about how you can incorporate EVPN into your Cumulus network.

Celebrating ECMP in Linux — part one: Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) routes are a big component of all the super-trendy data center network designs that are en vogue right now. Read part one of this series about ECMP’s history, how it’s evolved and what Cumulus is doing to help.

Networking how-to video — What is Voyager?: Voyager is a Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) platform Facebook brought to the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), bringing the first Continue reading

HPE Buys Its Way Into Virtual Networking With Plexxi

It is safe to say that companies that have traditionally built server, storage, and switch hardware have had a tough time finding their place in a world that is increasingly allergic to appliances and wants everything to come as software that customers have more control over. Even those vendors that are innovating at the hardware level have a heavy software hook, and no hardware vendor can leave itself in the position of just shifting boxes if it hopes to have a profitable business.

Hence the recent acquisitions by both Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Dell, of course, shelled out a …

HPE Buys Its Way Into Virtual Networking With Plexxi was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

How to speak Linux

I didn’t even stop to imagine that people pronounced Linux commands differently until many years ago when I heard a coworker use the word “vie” (as in "The teams will vie for the title") for what I’d always pronounced “vee I”. It was a moment that I’ll never forget. Our homogenous and somewhat rebellious community of Unix/Linux advocates seemed to have descended into dialects – not just preferences for Solaris or Red Hat or Debian or some other variant (fewer back in those days than we have today), but different ways of referring to the commands we knew and used every day.The "problem" has a number of causes. For one thing, our beloved man pages don't include pronunciation guidelines like dictionaries do. For another, Unix commands evolved with a number of different pronunciation rules. The names of some commands (like "cat") were derived from words (like "concatenate") and were pronounced as if they were words too (some actually are). Others derived from phrases like "cpio" which pull together the idea of copying (cp) and I/O. Others are simply abbreviations like "cd" for "change directory". And then we have tools like "awk" that go in an entirely different direction by Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Spin Bit

The spin bit and VEC were designed to be a minimal-risk, maximum-utility signal fit for a single purpose: on-path measurement of end-to-end RTT, to generate RTT samples for a variety of passive latency measurement tasks. —Brian Trammell @APNIC

DDOS Attacks in 2018 are very large

Not just big, but huge.

What Qualcomm’s rumored exit from data centers means

The tech industry got a jolt last week worse than the 3.5 magnitude quake that hit Oakland, California, on Monday. A report by Bloomberg, citing the usual anonymous sources, said that after a whole lot of R&D and hype, Qualcomm was looking to shut down or sell its Centriq line of ARM-based data center processors.Qualcomm launched the 48-core Centriq 2400 last November. At the time, potential customers, such as Microsoft, Alibaba and HPE, took to the stage to voice their support and interest.To read this article in full, please click here

What Qualcomm’s rumored exit from data centers means

The tech industry got a jolt last week worse than the 3.5 magnitude quake that hit Oakland, California, on Monday. A report by Bloomberg, citing the usual anonymous sources, said that after a whole lot of R&D and hype, Qualcomm was looking to shut down or sell its Centriq line of ARM-based data center processors.Qualcomm launched the 48-core Centriq 2400 last November. At the time, potential customers, such as Microsoft, Alibaba and HPE, took to the stage to voice their support and interest.To read this article in full, please click here

ADVA Drives Cloud-Native Encryption Into ConnectGuard Platform

The cloud-native update also bolsters the platform's ability to protect against the Spectre and Meltdown processor vulnerabilities.

CoreOS Is New Linux, Not A RHEL Classic Killer

One of the most important lessons in marketing is that you don’t change something that is working, but that you also have to be able to carefully and cautiously innovate to protect against changing tastes or practices that might also spell doom for the business.

Two and a half decades ago, Coca-Cola famously made a mistake in trying to push New Coke, a different formula that was sweeter and more like Pepsi, replacing the original Coke, which had to be brought back as Coke Classic and which, eventually, killed off New Coke completely. Coca-Cola was not just changing things for …

CoreOS Is New Linux, Not A RHEL Classic Killer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPE Buys Plexxi, Flexes Hyperconverged and Composable Muscles

Plexxi simultaneously announced updates to its hyperconverged software stack, building on its intent-based networking capabilities.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Scoops Up Plexxi

Adtran Shepherds Broadband Forum Project on Application-Level Testing

While Adtran has been working internally to build models for application-level testing, with Broadband Forum it can create a standards-based approach to the modeling.

History of Networking: BGP Security

Verizon to Migrate 1,000 Biz Apps and Backend Systems to AWS

The deal bolsters Verizon’s overall operations, but it also boosts AWS’ position among the country’s largest telecom operators.

HPE snaps-up hyperconverged-network (HCN) vendor Plexxi

HPE today took a step toward bolstering its data-center technology with plans to acquire Plexxi and its hyperconverged networking fabric.HPE said it expects the deal to close in its third quarter, which ends July 31, 2018 but did not release other financial details. Plexxi was founded in 2010 and targeted the nascent software-defined networking (SDN) market.[ Check out our 12 most powerful hyperconverged infrasctructure vendors. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] “Plexxi’s technology will extend HPE’s market-leading software-defined compute and storage capabilities into the high-growth, software-defined networking market, expanding our addressable market and strengthening our offerings for customers and partners,”To read this article in full, please click here

HPE snaps-up hyperconverged-network (HCN) vendor Plexxi

HPE today took a step toward bolstering its data-center technology with plans to acquire Plexxi and its hyperconverged networking fabric.HPE said it expects the deal to close in its third quarter, which ends July 31, 2018 but did not release other financial details. Plexxi was founded in 2010 and targeted the nascent software-defined networking (SDN) market.[ Check out our 12 most powerful hyperconverged infrasctructure vendors. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] “Plexxi’s technology will extend HPE’s market-leading software-defined compute and storage capabilities into the high-growth, software-defined networking market, expanding our addressable market and strengthening our offerings for customers and partners,”To read this article in full, please click here

Tap the Full Potential of Failsafe SD-WAN Q&A

Thanks to all who joined us for the Talari Networks DemoFriday, Tap the Full Potential of Failsafe SD-WAN. During the webinar, Talari Networks demonstrated the latest innovations, product feature updates and UI enhancements to its award-winning SD-WAN platform. After the demo, we took questions from the audience. Below is the full Tap the Full Potential of Failsafe SD-WAN Q&A.

T-Mobile: Not an All or Nothing When It Comes to vRAN

Virtualizing the RAN is a goal for operators but it won’t happen overnight.

Internet Companies Have More Work to Do on Privacy, Freedom of Expression, Report Says

Top Internet, mobile, and telecom companies across the globe still have many steps they could take to better protect their users’ freedom of expression and privacy, a new report says.

The 2018 Corporate Accountability Index, released recently by Ranking Digital Rights, gave Google a top score of 63 among 22 companies rated for protecting freedom of expression and privacy. But with a perfect score being 100, all the companies rated fell far short, with most receiving failing grades, the group said.

The good news for users is that 17 of the 22 companies evaluated for the 2018 Index improved scores from last year in at least one area, and many had improvements in multiple areas. Ranking Digital Rights, a nonprofit research center tied to the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, rates the companies on 35 indicators.

“We’ve seen some improvement, but there’s a long way to go,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, director of the Ranking Digital Rights project. “At the same time, some of the improvements we’ve seen have been genuinely meaningful.”

A second piece of good news for users: Some of the companies, particularly the rank-and-file employees, seem to pay attention to their rankings in consumer-focused studies, Continue reading