Suddenly the server market is hot again

After years of shrinking sales, the server market is suddenly hot, very hot. According to the latest figures from IDC, worldwide server shipments increased 20.7% year over year to 2.7 million units in Q1 of 2018, and revenue rose 38.6%.This is the third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, and it’s being driven by a number of factors. They include a marketwide enterprise refresh cycle, strong demand from cloud service providers, increased use of servers as the core building blocks for software-defined infrastructure, broad demand for newer CPUs, and growing deployments of next-generation workloads.Average selling prices (ASP) increased during the quarter due to richer configurations and increased component costs. The increased ASPs also contributed to revenue growth. Volume server revenue grew by 40.9%, to $15.9 billion, while midrange server revenue grew 34%, to $1.7 billion, and high-end systems grew 20.1%, to $1.2 billion.To read this article in full, please click here

Avoiding A MacGyvered Network

Ivan Pepelnjak has an interesting post up today about MacGyver-ing in the network. He and Simon Milhomme are right that most small-to-medium sized networks are pretty much non-reference architectures and really, really difficult to manage and maintain properly on the best of days. On the worst of days, they’re a nightmare that make you want to run screaming into the night. But why?

One Size Never Fits All

Part of the issue is that reference architectures and cookie-cutter designs aren’t made for SMEs. Sure, the large enterprise and cloud providers have their own special snowflakes. But so too do small IT shops that have been handed a pile of parts and told to make it work.

People like Greg Ferro and Peyton Maynard-Koran believe this is due to vendors and VARs pushing hardware and sales cycles like crazy. I have attributed it to the lack of real training and knowledge about networking. But, it also has a lot to do with the way that people see IT as a cost center. We don’t provide value like marketing. We don’t collect checks like accounting. At best, we’re no different than the utility companies. We’re here because we have to be.

Likewise, Continue reading

Weekend Reads 060118: GDPR Heavy

“But what’s the harm?” Far too often, this is one of the biggest questions posed in debates about the value of privacy and the costs of violating it in the United States. Just last fall, the Federal Trade Commission conducted a workshop exploring the contours of “informational injury”, in which CDT participated. —Joseph Jerome @CDT

WHOIS is a service that was inherited from the pre-ICANN registries and has never had a formal definition or rationale beyond that’s the way it’s always been. None of the attempts to rationalize WHOIS have gone anywhere, and there was a broad agreement that the processes had been repeatedly derailed by trademark lawyers who want a one-stop source for whom to sue if someone utters their client’s name in vain. —John Levine @CircleID

Email addresses are seemingly simple to eliminate in theory, devilishly difficult in practice, and potentially expensive mistakes under GDPR. Send an unreacted address to the wrong place, and someone in Europe becomes a Euro Millionaire. Whoops. —Neil Schwartzman @CircleID

The General Data Protection Regulation is here, and soon we will see if it ushers in a new era of individual empowerment or raises novel barriers to innovation in technology. Fears of Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: When it comes to your IT infrastructure, visibility matters

CIOs everywhere are faced with a common question: do we have the right infrastructure for our business today and tomorrow? The question is complicated since there is no right answer – even though the major public cloud providers would say otherwise.Most large companies have hybrid infrastructures, comprising internal data centers, private clouds and at least one public cloud service. Increasingly, companies are using more than one public cloud service, as each one has something different to offer and prices are always changing. These choices provide needed flexibility and the potential for carving out the perfect environment for a company’s multifarious needs.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: When it comes to your IT infrastructure, visibility matters

CIOs everywhere are faced with a common question: do we have the right infrastructure for our business today and tomorrow? The question is complicated since there is no right answer – even though the major public cloud providers would say otherwise.Most large companies have hybrid infrastructures, comprising internal data centers, private clouds and at least one public cloud service. Increasingly, companies are using more than one public cloud service, as each one has something different to offer and prices are always changing. These choices provide needed flexibility and the potential for carving out the perfect environment for a company’s multifarious needs.To read this article in full, please click here

We’ve Added A New Cybersecurity Certified Penetration Testing Engineer Course To Our Library!

Cybersecurity has become an integral part of any IT system. This course is focused on the 5 key elements of penetration testing: Information Gathering, Scanning, Enumeration, Exploitation, and Reporting. These key areas build upon each other and provide you with the technical know-how to gear you up for a career in penetration testing.


 


Who Should Watch:

This course is for students who want to become a penetration tester. It is recommended to have at least 3 years experiences with networking and basic security knowledge. Other cybersecurity certifications are always a help.


What You’ll Learn:

In this course you will learn the required skills to pass the CPTE demonstration practical knowledge of penetration testing and cybersecurity. At the end of this course you will have the understanding of the basic course requirements to pass the exam and conduct penetration tests.


About The Instructor:

Joe Brinkley has over 10 years of professional IT and Information Security experience under his belt. Joe has always been a tinkerer, geek and all around “computer guy.” He has numerous certifications including the CPTE.

All Access Pass members can view this course on our streaming site. You can also purchase this course at ine.com.

We have lift off – Rocket Loader GA is mobile!

We have lift off - Rocket Loader GA is mobile!

Today we’re excited to announce the official GA of Rocket Loader, our JavaScript optimisation feature that will prioritise getting your content in front of your visitors faster than ever before with improved Mobile device support. In tests on www.cloudflare.com we saw reduction of 45% (almost 1 second) in First Contentful Paint times on our pages for visitors.

We have lift off - Rocket Loader GA is mobile!
Photo by SpaceX / Unsplash

We initially launched Rocket Loader as a beta in June 2011, to asynchronously load a website’s JavaScript to dramatically improve the page load time. Since then, hundreds of thousands of our customers have benefited from a one-click option to boost the speed of your content.

With this release, we’ve vastly improved and streamlined Rocket Loader so that it works in conjunction with mobile & desktop browsers to prioritise what matters most when loading a webpage: your content.

Visitors don’t wait for page “load”

To put it very simplistically - load time is a measure of when the browser has finished loading the document (HTML) and all assets referenced by that document.

When you clicked to visit this blog post, did you wait for the spinning wheel on your browser tab to start reading this content? You Continue reading

Cisco Gets Modular With Servers In Epyc Fashion

Believe it or not, Cisco Systems has a bunch of customers for its UCS blade and rack servers that are in the gaming industry, which has its share of near-hyperscale players who have widely geographically distributed clusters spread around the globe so players can get very low latency access over the Internet to games running on that infrastructure. …

Cisco Gets Modular With Servers In Epyc Fashion was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Cisco taps AMD to power a hyper-dense server for data centers, edge computing

Cisco this week broadened its server family with a high-density box aimed at handling compute intensive data center workloads and distributed edge computing environments.The Cisco C-Series C4200 multinode rack server is a 2RU box comprised of the C4200 chassis and C125 server nodes which Cisco says brings up to 128% higher processor core density and 33% more memory compared to its existing two-socket UCS M5 rack servers.  The C4200 chassis can house up to four server nodes.[ Now see who's developing quantum computers.] “As computing demand shifts from large, traditional data centers to include smaller, more distributed environments at the edge, the ability to mix form factors seamlessly in ‘micro data centers,’ and to manage and automate operations from the cloud becomes vitally important,” wrote Kaustubh Das, Cisco vice president of strategy and product development, storage in its Computing Systems Product Group in a blog about the new server.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco taps AMD to power a hyper-dense server for data centers, edge computing

Cisco this week broadened its server family with a high-density box aimed at handling compute intensive data center workloads and distributed edge computing environments.The Cisco C-Series C4200 multinode rack server is a 2RU box comprised of the C4200 chassis and C125 server nodes which Cisco says brings up to 128% higher processor core density and 33% more memory compared to its existing two-socket UCS M5 rack servers.  The C4200 chassis can house up to four server nodes.[ Now see who's developing quantum computers.] “As computing demand shifts from large, traditional data centers to include smaller, more distributed environments at the edge, the ability to mix form factors seamlessly in ‘micro data centers,’ and to manage and automate operations from the cloud becomes vitally important,” wrote Kaustubh Das, Cisco vice president of strategy and product development, storage in its Computing Systems Product Group in a blog about the new server.To read this article in full, please click here

Link Propagation 121: All The Links Fit To Click

Welcome to Link Propagation, a Packet Pushers newsletter. Link Propagation is included in your free membership. Each week we hand-select the most relevant practitioner blog posts, tech news, and product announcements. We age them in oak barrels for up to seven days and then distill them using ancient craft techniques handed down by Tim Berners-Lee. […]

Living in Times of Digital Uncertainty: Are Control and Trust Compatible?

The Cambridge Analytica data misuse is the most recent high-profile incident to impact Internet trust. Trust – or the lack thereof – is the term used to describe much of the current state of the Internet. For years now, we have been hearing about a decline in user trust because of fears of surveillance, cybercrime, data breaches, crack downs on speech, or misuse of their data.

However, recently updated data from a recently released edition of CIGI’s annual survey on Trust seems to shatter commonly-held views on the state of trust and raise some novel questions. While the survey covers a wide range of issues from privacy to e-commerce and online habits, one particular result is rather striking:

Three quarters of respondents (73%) said that they agree with the statement “overall, I trust the Internet.” Last year only 56% said that. The trust was highest in China (91%) and India (90%).

This result appears to contradict the assumption that overall trust in the Internet is diminishing.

If, indeed, there is an overall increase in trust, then the first question we should ask is: what type of trust are we talking about?

WISP Design – OSPF “Leapfrog” path for traffic engineering

Introduction

One challenge that every WISP owner or operator has faced is how to leverage unused bandwidth on a backup path to generate more revenue.

For networks that have migrated to MPLS and BGP, this is an easier problem to solve as there are tools that can be used in those protocols like communities or MPLS TE to help manage traffic and set policy.

However, many WISPs rely solely on OSPF and cost adjustment to attempt to influence traffic. Alternatively, trying to use policy routing can lead to a design that doesn’t failover or scale well.

Creating a bottleneck on a single path

WISPs that are OSPF routed will often have a primary path back to the Internet at one or more points in the network typically from a tower that aggregates multiple backhauls.

As more towers are added that rely on this path, it can create a bottleneck while other paths are unused.

ospf-leapfrog-pic1

Creating an alternate best path by leapfrogging another router

One way to solve this problem is to use VLANs to create another subnet for OSPF to form an adjacency.

By tagging the VLAN from Tower 6 through Tower 3 and into Tower 4, a new path Continue reading

WISP Design – OSPF “Leapfrog” path for traffic engineering

Introduction

One challenge that every WISP owner or operator has faced is how to leverage unused bandwidth on a backup path to generate more revenue.

For networks that have migrated to MPLS and BGP, this is an easier problem to solve as there are tools that can be used in those protocols like communities or MPLS TE to help manage traffic and set policy.

However, many WISPs rely solely on OSPF and cost adjustment to attempt to influence traffic. Alternatively, trying to use policy routing can lead to a design that doesn’t failover or scale well.

Creating a bottleneck on a single path

WISPs that are OSPF routed will often have a primary path back to the Internet at one or more points in the network typically from a tower that aggregates multiple backhauls.

As more towers are added that rely on this path, it can create a bottleneck while other paths are unused.

ospf-leapfrog-pic1

Creating an alternate best path by leapfrogging another router

One way to solve this problem is to use VLANs to create another subnet for OSPF to form an adjacency.

By tagging the VLAN from Tower 6 through Tower 3 and into Tower 4, a new path Continue reading

1 … 1,653 1,654 1,655 1,656 1,657 … 3,909