Drilling Down Into Ethernet Switch Trends

Of the three pillars of the datacenter – compute, storage, and networking – the one that consistently still has some margins and yet does not dominate the overall system budget is networking. While these elements affect each other, they are still largely standalone realms, with their own specialized devices and suppliers. And so it is important to know the trends in the technologies.

Until fairly recently, the box counters like IDC and Gartner have been pretty secretive about the data they have about the networking business. But IDC has been gradually giving a little more flavor than just saying Cisco …

Drilling Down Into Ethernet Switch Trends was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

DNSSEC Activities at ICANN 61 in San Juan on March 11-14, 2018

Sunday marks the beginning of the DNSSEC activities at the ICANN 61 meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. As per usual there will be a range of activities related to DNSSEC or DANE. Two of the sessions will be streamed live and will be recorded for later viewing. Here is what is happening.

All times below are Atlantic Standard Time (AST), which is UTC-4.

DNSSEC For Everybody: A Beginner’s Guide – Sunday, 11 March

On Sunday, March 11, we’ll have our “DNSSEC For Everybody: A Beginner’s Guide” session that will include our usual skit where a bunch of engineers act out how DNS and DNSSEC work! Yes, it’s a good bit of fun and people have told us it has helped tremendously.

Please come with your questions and prepare to learn all about DNSSEC!

DNSSEC Workshop – Wednesday, 14 March

Our big 6-hour workshop will take place on Wednesday, March 14, from 09:00 – 15:00 in Room 208-BC. Lunch will be included. Thank you to our lunch sponsors: Afilias, CIRA, and SIDN.

The very full agenda includes:

Link Propagation 109

Welcome to Link Propagation, a Packet Pushers newsletter. Link Propagation is included in your free membership. Each week we scour the InterWebs to find the most relevant practitioner blog posts, tech news, and product announcements. We drink from the fire hose so you can sip from a coffee cup. A Note From Greg Why Link […]

Getting Started with Ansible Tower

If you’re considering evaluating Red Hat Ansible Tower, you might also be curious about what sort of support is included with a trial key. This post will explain what sort of help is available while you conduct a PoC, along with information to assist you with errors and more.

Ansible Experts Are Here to Help

After you download a trial of Ansible Tower and request a license key, there is more than just documentation and reading materials to help guide you through errors. Once you and your team are connected with Ansible and want to start working on an evaluation or proof of concept installation, there are a boatload of resources to help you on your automation journey:

Sales Representatives: Provide support from day one, helping you understand what Ansible Engine and Ansible Tower can do for you and your environment.

Getting Started Team: The product field engineering team (known colloquially as the "Getting Started" team) helps with the installation, configuration and integration of Ansible Engine and Ansible Tower.

Solution Architects: For cases that delve into deeper understanding of all things Ansible Automation, writing playbooks, or consultation/screenshared demos to ensure success of the project, a Solutions Architect can save Continue reading

U.S. SEC Targets Unregulated Cryptocurrency Exchanges

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission could soon crack down on unregulated cryptocurrency trading platforms after the agency sent a strongly worded warning to them this week.

The SEC warned that unregulated online trading platforms may be misleading investors by calling themselves “exchanges,” which implies federal oversight. An SEC-related securities exchange, among other safeguards, has rules designed to prevent fraud and other manipulative practices, the SEC said in an advisory issued Wednesday.

The SEC advisory served as much as a warning to investors using cryptocurrency trading platforms as to the platforms themselves.

“The SEC staff has concerns that many online trading platforms appear to investors as SEC-registered and regulated marketplaces when they are not,” the advisory said. “Many platforms refer to themselves as ‘exchanges,’ which can give the misimpression to investors that they are regulated or meet the regulatory standards of a national securities exchange.”

The SEC does not review the trading protocols used by unregulated trading platforms, it said. “Although some of these platforms claim to use strict standards to pick only high-quality digital assets to trade, the SEC does not review these standards or the digital assets that the platforms select, and the so-called standards should Continue reading

Internet Intelligence, Now Available In The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) team is proud of the data centers and network we are building for the next generation of cloud users and, in the spirit of transparency, we want to share with our users tools to better evaluate and measure the performance they will experience on our cloud. Today, we are pleased to announce two new network tools available in the Console to help you measure and analyze network performance.

OCI Market Performance is an interactive visualization tool that displays network performance metrics from OCI regions to cities around the globe.  Performance is measured over time to a carefully curated set of endpoint IP addresses within the top providers in each market, providing the user with aggregated performance data for markets and providers over the last day, week, month or three months. This latency data from our Phoenix, Ashburn, and Frankfurt regions can help you predict and manage network performance.  We will be adding metrics for more of our regions as they come online (including our twelve recently announced regional data centers).

OCI Market Performance can also assist in planning for growth, as you extend your footprint into new global markets.  For FastConnect customers, this tool can help to predict performance between an OCI region and a specific Continue reading

How to check your network connections on Linux

The ip command has a lot to tell you about the configuration and state of your network connections, but what do all those words and numbers mean? Let’s take a deep dive in and see what all the displayed values are trying to tell you.When you use the ip a (or ip addr) command to get information on all the network interfaces on your system, you're going to see something like this:$ ip a 1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000 link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00 inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever inet6 ::1/128 scope host valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 2: enp0s25: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP group default qlen 1000 link/ether 00:1e:4f:c8:43:fc brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 192.168.0.24/24 brd 192.168.0.255 scope global dynamic enp0s25 valid_lft 57295sec preferred_lft 57295sec inet6 fe80::2c8e:1de0:a862:14fd/64 scope link valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever The two interfaces on this system — the loopback (lo) and network (enp0s25) — are displayed along with a lot of stats. The "lo" interface is clearly the loopback. We can see the loopback IPv4 address (127.0.0.1) and the loopback Continue reading

LIVE in 1 hour, CCNA/CCNP Q&A!

Don’t forget to watch Keith Bogart’s live CCNA/CCNP Q&A session TODAY at 1pm!

 

During this live Q&A Keith bogart will answer all of your questions about the Cisco CCNA and CCNP Routing and Switching exams. Check back at 1 pm (EST) to get all of your questions answered by an industry expert.

Ansible for Extreme Devices

Here’s something I’ve been working on recently: Ansible modules for Extreme SLX switches & routers. Ansible is a popular automation framework, and with good reason: it has a low barrier to entry. Time to usefulness is short. But you need device-specific modules to work with networking devices. Finally we have some modules for SLX. Read on for how to use them.

This blog is not an intro to Ansible in general. There’s plenty of good intros out there. This is specifically about demonstrating Ansible with SLX switches.

Background

Ansible is an agent-less configuration management system. It uses “playbooks”, written in YAML, to define desired configuration state. “modules” written in Python translate this into whatever is needed to configure the system, application, database or network device.

Ansible has been making great strides in adding network automation capabilities. But we haven’t had any modules for working with ~Brocade~ Extreme devices. That is now changing.

PaulQuack has contributed MLXe (Ironware) modules, which will go GA in Ansible 2.5 (due for release in March 2018). And I’ve been working on modules for the SLX, with my colleagues. These have not yet been merged upstream, but it’s Open Source, so you can grab Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 9th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

The largest simulation of the cosmos ever run finally produces a universe similar to our own. All it required was 24,000 processors, more than two months, and it produced 500 terabytes of data.

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And I'd appreciate if you would recommend my new book—Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10—to anyone who needs to understand the cloud (who doesn't?). I think they'll learn a lot, even if they're already familiar with the basics.

 

  • 72 bits: Google's new quantum computer; 50,000: sites infected with cryptocurrency mining malware; $40 billion: purchases via talking tubes by 2022; $12,000: value of 1 million YouTube views a month; $15 billion: Netflix 2018 revenue; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @ValaAfshar: Jeff Bezos, CEO @amazon: I very frequently get the question: "what's going to change in he next 10 years?" I almost never get the question: "what's not going to change in the next 10 years?" I submit to you that the second question is actually the more important of the two.
    • @svscarpino: Sharing and consuming fake news is highly concentrated. Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: The delivery challenges every SD-WAN project must consider

It’s no secret that enterprises are looking at SD-WAN as the means for evolving their networks. The technology improves on MPLS with better agility, more capacity increased resiliency and, of course, cost savings. Those advantages are in much need; just ask anyone who’s runs an MPLS network. They’ll tell you about its high costs, long provisioning times, and susceptibility to last-mile failures.But keep listening and MPLS customers are also bound to talk about the technology’s rock-solid reliability. They’ll hate the price and delays, but they’ll love their SLA-backed performance and how the MPLS provider takes care of everything — the last mile connectivity, managing the backbone, consolidated billing and more.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The delivery challenges every SD-WAN project must consider

It’s no secret that enterprises are looking at SD-WAN as the means for evolving their networks. The technology improves on MPLS with better agility, more capacity increased resiliency and, of course, cost savings. Those advantages are in much need; just ask anyone who’s runs an MPLS network. They’ll tell you about its high costs, long provisioning times, and susceptibility to last-mile failures.But keep listening and MPLS customers are also bound to talk about the technology’s rock-solid reliability. They’ll hate the price and delays, but they’ll love their SLA-backed performance and how the MPLS provider takes care of everything — the last mile connectivity, managing the backbone, consolidated billing and more.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How edge computing makes voice assistants faster and more powerful

Voice is becoming a pervasive way to manage and interact with everyday tech devices, going from initial adoption in phones and smart speakers toward smartwatches, cars, laptops, home appliances and much more.Cloud platforms take most of the praise for enabling voice assistant services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant or Microsoft Cortana – neglecting due credit to the increasing role that edge computing plays in enabling voice interfaces. A substantial amount of processing and analysis occur on devices themselves to allow users to interface with them by simply talking.Keyword detection Voice-enabled devices are not constantly recording audio and sending it to the cloud to determine if someone is giving them an instruction. That would not only be a privacy concern, but also a waste of energy, computing and network resources. Having to send all words to the cloud and back also introduces latency and slows the responsiveness of the system. Today’s voice interfaces typically use keyword or “wake-word” detection, dedicating a small portion of edge computing resources (i.e. computing done on the device itself or “at the edge”) to process microphone signals while the rest of the system remains idle. This is a power-efficient approach particularly important Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How edge computing makes voice assistants faster and more powerful

Voice is becoming a pervasive way to manage and interact with everyday tech devices, going from initial adoption in phones and smart speakers toward smartwatches, cars, laptops, home appliances and much more.Cloud platforms take most of the praise for enabling voice assistant services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant or Microsoft Cortana – neglecting due credit to the increasing role that edge computing plays in enabling voice interfaces. A substantial amount of processing and analysis occur on devices themselves to allow users to interface with them by simply talking.Keyword detection Voice-enabled devices are not constantly recording audio and sending it to the cloud to determine if someone is giving them an instruction. That would not only be a privacy concern, but also a waste of energy, computing and network resources. Having to send all words to the cloud and back also introduces latency and slows the responsiveness of the system. Today’s voice interfaces typically use keyword or “wake-word” detection, dedicating a small portion of edge computing resources (i.e. computing done on the device itself or “at the edge”) to process microphone signals while the rest of the system remains idle. This is a power-efficient approach particularly important Continue reading

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