ThunderX2 Arms Hyperscale And HPC Compute

In the long run, networking chip giant and one-time server chip wannabe Broadcom might regret selling off its “Vulcan” 64-bit Arm chip business to Cavium, soon to be part of Marvell. The ThunderX2 processors based on the Vulcan designs have been tweaked by Cavium and have been enthusiastically tire-kicked by hyperscalers and HPC centers alike, and are looking like the front runner as a competitor to the X86 architecture for these customers.

The 32-core Vulcan variants of the ThunderX2, which we detailed last November, are getting their own coming out party in San Francisco now that they …

ThunderX2 Arms Hyperscale And HPC Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: Container security: crafting application identity

Over the years, we have embraced new technologies to find improved ways to build systems.  As a result, today's infrastructures have undergone significant evolution. To keep pace with the arrival of new technologies, legacy is often combined with the new, but they do not always mesh well. Such fusion between ultra-modern and conventional has created drag in the overall solution, thereby, spawning tension between past and future in how things are secured.The multi-tenant shared infrastructure of the cloud, container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, and new architectures like microservices and serverless, while technically remarkable, increase complexity. Complexity is the number one enemy of security. Therefore, to be effectively aligned with adoption of these technologies, a new approach to security is required that does not depend on shifting infrastructure as the control point.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Container security: crafting application identity

Over the years, we have embraced new technologies to find improved ways to build systems.  As a result, today's infrastructures have undergone significant evolution. To keep pace with the arrival of new technologies, legacy is often combined with the new, but they do not always mesh well. Such fusion between ultra-modern and conventional has created drag in the overall solution, thereby, spawning tension between past and future in how things are secured.The multi-tenant shared infrastructure of the cloud, container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, and new architectures like microservices and serverless, while technically remarkable, increase complexity. Complexity is the number one enemy of security. Therefore, to be effectively aligned with adoption of these technologies, a new approach to security is required that does not depend on shifting infrastructure as the control point.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: Data center interconnect and performance

What factors influence the performance of a high-speed, high-latency data center interconnect? Redundant data centers are common, providing organizations with business continuity. But how far apart is too far for good, reliable application performance? —Terry Slattery @Netcraftsmen

Blacklisting modules on Linux

The Linux kernel is modular — composed of modules that work together but are largely independent of each other. New functionality can be added when a kernel module is loaded, but there are times when you might need to block functionality because modules interfere with each other or leave a system vulnerable. When that is the case, you can restrict what modules the kernel is able to use by blacklisting the troublemakers. This blocks them from being loaded.Listing Kernel modules You can list kernel modules with the lsmod command. For a taste of what you’re likely to see, the lsmod command below shows us the top of the lsmod command output on a sample system.To read this article in full, please click here

Aqua Security Sprinkles Support Over CRI-O Kubernetes Runtime Platform

CRI-O was launched as a lighter alternative to using Docker as the runtime for Kubernetes.

HPE Says Software Is Nimble Storage’s ‘Secret Sauce’

Nimble platforms now support Storage Class Memory (SCM) and NVMe for super-fast, low-latency flash storage.

Why is the Feasibility Condition Less Than?

A reader recently emailed me with this question: Why isn’t the condition for a Feasible Successor set to less than (<), rather than less than of equal (<=), in EIGRP? It certainly seems, as noted in the email, that this rules out a lot of possible possible loop free alternate paths. The network below will be used to illustrate.

First, assume all links are cost of 1 except D->C, which is cost of 2. Here D will choose B as the Successor, and the FC will be set to 2. The RD of C will be 1, so C will be an FS. Now consider two failures. The first failure is D->B. D will immediately reroute to the FS, which is C, without changing the FC. This works, because C’s cost to 100::/64 via D is 4, much higher than it’s cost to 100::64 along C->A. Now consider what happens if A->100::/64 fails. If the timing of the query “works right,” C and B will be notified first, then finally D. Even if D is somehow notified before C, and D switches to C as its FS, the traffic is dropped, rather than looped—so all is happy.

Now change the situation a little. Assume the A->C link is cost Continue reading

Nokia Snaps Up IoT Energy Startup SpaceTime

SpaceTime’s CEO Rob Schilling, a former general manager at SAP, will join Nokia’s IoT unit.

Tune in to Our Q&A tomorrow!

Don’t miss our CCNA/CCNP Kickoff with Keith Bogart Tomorrow!

Join Keith May 8th at 10 am PST/ 1 pm EST for his CCNA/CCNP Kickoff.

This is a FREE live session that is open to everyone. In this open forum, you’ll have the opportunity to ask Keith all of your questions regarding the CCNA or CCNP Routing & Switching exam and related technologies.

Get all of your questions answered by an experienced industry expert! Just click here.

Telefónica Extends Its Nokia Nuage SD-WAN Infrastructure to Include SDDC

The service provider is using a single platform from Nokia's Nuage to enable end-to-end automation between its WAN overlay service and its data center overlay service.

Enterprises are moving SD-WAN beyond pilot stages to deployment

Research conducted by market research firm IHS Markit found that 74 percent of firms surveyed had SD-WAN lab trials in 2017, and many of them plan to move into production this year.The report, titled “The WAN Strategies North America” (pdf, registration required), found security is the number one network concern by a wide margin and the top reason to invest in new infrastructure, as companies must fend off the constant threat of cyber attacks.There are other reasons, as well, such as traffic growth, company expansion, adoption of the Internet of things (IoT), the need for greater control over the WAN, and the need to put WAN costs on a sustainable path.To read this article in full, please click here

Enterprises are moving SD-WAN beyond pilot stages to deployment

Research conducted by market research firm IHS Markit found that 74 percent of firms surveyed had SD-WAN lab trials in 2017, and many of them plan to move into production this year.The report, titled “The WAN Strategies North America” (pdf, registration required), found security is the number one network concern by a wide margin and the top reason to invest in new infrastructure, as companies must fend off the constant threat of cyber attacks.There are other reasons, as well, such as traffic growth, company expansion, adoption of the Internet of things (IoT), the need for greater control over the WAN, and the need to put WAN costs on a sustainable path.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: The development of the domain name market

If we traveled back in time, we would discover that unauthorized squatting on someone else’s property is an ancient tort, but in cyberspace, it dates from the mid-1990s. Its emergence brought together governments and intellectual property stakeholders to demand a rights protection mechanism devised to deal with this new form of squatting. —Gerald M. Levine @CircleID

Successful Machine Learning With A Global Data Fabric

One of the most common misconceptions about machine learning is that success is solely due to its dynamic algorithms. In reality, the learning potential of those algorithms and their models are driven by the data preparation, staging and delivery. When suitably fed, machine learning algorithms work wonders. Their success, however, is ultimately rooted in the data logistics.

Data logistics are integral to how sufficient training data is accessed. They determine how easily new models are deployed. They specify how changes in data content can be isolated to compare models. And, they facilitate how multiple models are effectively used as part …

Successful Machine Learning With A Global Data Fabric was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Network Break 183: VMware Embraces Cloud Networking; Cisco Acquires Accompany

Hybrid Operations with Ansible

Hybrid Operations with Ansible

One of the most common questions I hear while talking about Ansible's support for cloud providers is whether it will work in hybrid environments. You may not be able to use the ec2 module to create an instance in your datacenter, but Ansible has modules for RHV, OpenStack, and VMWare to talk to virtualization tools in your datacenter. I love working in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud but most environments I've worked in have had on-prem systems as well.

That's what I've been invited to Red Hat Summit to talk about -- best practices for automating all the infrastructure at your disposal, not just the cloud services. My demos will feature a couple new Ansible Core/Engine 2.5 features, as well as preview new 2.6-only features.

My favorite feature to show off is part of the new ec2_instance module. In the demo we'll have a look at how Tower provisioning callbacks are now built in to the ec2_instance module, making provisioning brand new instances as easy as:

- ec2_instance:
  image:
    id: "{{ latest_centos.image_id }}"
  key_name: my-secret-key
  instance_type: t2.large
  name: call-me-maybe
  security_groups:
    - demo-web-sg
  # COOL MAGIC HERE
  tower_callback:
    host_config_key: "{{ your_secret_here }}"
    job_template_id:  Continue reading

Fabrics Open The Way For Storage Class Memory

Dell EMC has long been a vocal proponent of NVM-Express, the up and coming protocol that cuts out the CPU jib-jab with PCI-Express peripherals and that boost throughput and drops latency for flash and other non-volatile memory.

For the past two years, Dell, like other system makers, has put NVM-Express drives in its servers while ramping up the flash in its high-end storage systems and preparing to bring the protocol to those external storage appliances. It has taken time to get the arrays reworked, for the price of NVM-Express drives to come down, and for the volumes to ramp up. …

Fabrics Open The Way For Storage Class Memory was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

What is BGP Hijacking, Anyway?

Two weeks ago, we learned about yet another routing security incident, namely the hijack of BGP routes to the Amazon DNS infrastructure, used as a stepping stone to steal about $150,000 of Ethereum cryptocurrency from MyEtherWallet.com. We’ve been talking a lot lately about BGP hijacking, digging into the details of what happened in this post. But maybe we need to back up a minute and answer: What in the world is BGP hijacking, anyway, and why does it matter? Here, we’ll explain the basics and how network operators and Internet Exchange Points can join MANRS to help solve the problem.

What is BGP?

BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol, is used to direct traffic across the Internet. Networks use BGP to exchange “reachability information” – networks they know how to get to. Any network that is connected to the Internet eventually relies on BGP to reach other networks.

What is BGP Hijacking?

In short, BGP hijacking is when an attacker disguises itself as another network; it announces network prefixes belonging to another network as if those prefixes are theirs. If this false information is accepted by neighboring networks and propagated further using BGP, it distorts the “roadmap” of the Continue reading

Frequency Shielding Paint

This exists.