10 hot storage companies to watch

Innovations such as software-Defined Storage (SDS), hyper-converged infrastructures (HCI), and blockchain have investors flocking to enterprise storage startups, and this market shows no signs of slowing down.Collectively, the 10 startups featured in this roundup have raised more than $736 million in VC funding. This total is even more impressive when you factor in two startups not included in that calculation. One of them is entirely self-funded, while the other has a unique business model and an equally unique source of non-VC funding: an ICO, or Initial Coin Offering.[ Don’t miss customer reviews of top remote access tools and see the most powerful internet of things companies . | Get weekly insights by signing up for our CIO Leader newsletter. ] According to research firm IDC, the worldwide enterprise storage market expanded by 13.7 percent year-over-year to just under $13.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017. Other research firms believe the growth rate will accelerate in the near term. Research and Markets, for instance, predicts that one fast-growing segment of the overall enterprise storage market, cloud storage, will expand to become a $92.5 billion market by 2022.To read this article in full, please click here

What is the Open Compute Project?

The Open Compute Project began in 2011 when Facebook published the designs of some homebrew servers it had built to make its data centers run more efficiently.Facebook hoped that other companies would adopt and adapt its initial designs, pushing down costs and improving quality – and they have: Sales of hardware built to Open Compute Project designs topped $1.2 billion in 2017, double the previous year, and are expected to reach $6 billion by 2021.[ Don’t miss customer reviews of top remote access tools and see the most powerful internet of things companies . | Get weekly insights by signing up for our CIO Leader newsletter. ] Those figures, from IHS Markit, exclude hardware spending by OCP board members Facebook, Intel, Rackspace, Microsoft and Goldman Sachs, which all use OCP to some degree. The spend is still a small part of the overall market for data-center systems, which Gartner estimated was worth $178 billion in 2017, but IHS expects OCP’s part to grow 59 percent annually, while Gartner forecasts that the overall market will stagnate, at least through 2019.To read this article in full, please click here

Could We Build an IXP on Top of VXLAN Infrastructure?

Andy sent me this question:

I'm currently playing around with BGP & VXLANs and wondering: is there anything preventing from building a virtual IXP with VXLAN? This would be then a large layer 2 network - but why have nobody build this to now, or why do internet exchanges do not provide this?

There was at least one IXP that was running on top of VXLAN. I wanted to do a podcast about it with people who helped them build it in early 2015 but one of them got a gag order.

Read more ...

JUNIPER QFX10K | EVPN-VXLAN | EVPN ANYCAST GATEWAY VERIFICATION

This article is the second post in a series that is all about EVPN-VXLAN and Juniper QFX technology. This particular post is focussed specifically on EVPN Anycast Gateway and how to verify control plane and data plane on Juniper QFX10k series switches.

Overview

In my first post, I explained how to verify MAC learning behaviour in a single-homed host scenario. This time we’re going to look at how to verify control plane and data plane when using EVPN Anycast Gateway. As explained in my previous post, verifying and troubleshooting EVPN-VXLAN can be very difficult. Especially when you consider all the various elements that build up the control plane and data plane.

So, what is EVPN Anycast Gateway?

During the initial conception of EVPN L3 gateway, it was assumed that all PE devices would be configured with a Layer 3 interface (IRB) for a given Virtual Network. It was also intended that all IRB interfaces would be configured with the same IP address thus creating a redundant gateway mechanism.

This worked great until EVPN-VXLAN came along and crucially the hardware that was being deployed at the leaf layer no longer provided support for VXLAN L3 Gateway (IRB). As a result, Anycast Gateway, or Virtual Gateway Continue reading

Nvidia’s DGX-2 System Packs An AI Performance Punch

When Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang told the assembled multitudes at the keynote opening to the GPU Technology Conference that the new DGX-2 system, weighing in at 2 petaflops at half precision using the latest Tesla GPU accelerators, would cost $1.5 million when it became available in the third quarter, the audience paused for a few seconds, doing the human-speed math to try to reckon how that stacked up to the DGX-1 servers sporting eight Teslas.

This sounded like a pretty high price, even for such an impressive system – really a GPU cluster with some CPU …

Nvidia’s DGX-2 System Packs An AI Performance Punch was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

BrandPost: What IT Needs to Learn from New Education Technologies

The combination of new technology, the emergence of the digital generation, and technology that dramatically reduces the impact of distance on learning has fundamentally changed K-12 education. It’s no longer a case of “engaging with technology,” but technology that actually empowers the learning process.To start, device-based learning is the new normal. Unlike decades ago when the use of technology was limited to an hour a day in the “PC Lab,” devices are now used constantly. And unlike the PC days, these new devices depend on central servers, storage, and the network to deliver the apps and information used for coursework. If your central IT—either the systems or the supporting data center—cannot provide very high levels of reliability, teachers and students will lose valuable class time.To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia Memory Switch Welds Together Massive Virtual GPU

It has happened time and time again in computing in the past three decades in the datacenter: A device scales up its capacity – be it compute, storage, or networking – as high as it can go, and then it has to go parallel and scale out.

The NVLink interconnect that Nvidia created to lash together its “Pascal” and “Volta” GPU accelerators into a kind of giant virtual GPU were the first phase of this scale out for Tesla compute. But with only six NVLink ports on a Volta SXM2 device, there is a limit to how many Teslas can …

Nvidia Memory Switch Welds Together Massive Virtual GPU was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Free Range Routing Project turns one: A year in review, and what to expect next

Today, we’re celebrating the one year anniversary of FRR: The Free Range Routing project, a project we at Cumulus Networks set out to collaborate on with innovators in the industry to help shape the future of web-scale networking. With FRRouting (FRR), the community has built on the foundations of Quagga and taken huge steps forward to build the most full-featured, high-performance open routing stack available — making engineers’ lives significantly easier in the process. Now, FRR is the easiest and quickest way for the community to contribute to the future of routing.

To honor its success and growth, we’d like to highlight a few key moments in time since the project began…

Increased adoption and contribution

As we set out to expand the technology, we knew we needed a team of industry leaders. Companies like 6WIND, Architecture Technology Corporation, LabN Consulting, NetDEF (OpenSourceRouting) and Orange were some of the first to collaborate with us at Cumulus Networks on the project’s mission.

At Cumulus, we knew that FRR was going to be a game-changer for our own customers, so we too adopted FRR on Cumulus Linux. Now, all 1,000+ of our customers are benefiting from a more flexible infrastructure.

Over Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Best practices for IoT security

The Internet of Things (IoT) is projected to grow significantly over the coming years. Research firm Gartner Inc. has estimated that 8.4 billion connected things were in use worldwide in 2017, up 31% from 2016, and expects the number to reach 20.4 billion by 2020.This growth is being driven by the promise of increased insight, enhanced customer satisfaction, and greater efficiency. These benefits are made possible as sensor data from devices and the power of Internet-based cloud services converge. One of the key concerns related to the successful adoption of the IoT is having sufficiently strong security mechanisms in place throughout the ecosystem—to mitigate the increased security risks of connecting devices to the Internet.To read this article in full, please click here

SD-Branch market expected to reach $3 billion by 2022

As long as I have been an industry analyst, network engineers have tried to build multifunction boxes that are capable of addressing a wide range of network functions. These all-purpose network boxes have been lost to history as single-function platforms optimized for network performance (e.g., router or WAN optimization) dominated the market. The branch network is poised to benefit from the advances in software networking to collapse all network functions on to a single platform — the software-defined branch (SD-Branch).A total addressable market (TAM) analysis of the SD-Branch market starts with understanding the total spend on branch networking hardware and software. Worldwide spending on routers, WAN optimization, SD-WAN, network security, Wi-Fi, and ethernet switches at branch locations is approximately $15 billion, according to Doyle Research. (Disclosure: I’m the principal analyst at Doyle Research.)To read this article in full, please click here

SD-Branch market expected to reach $3 billion by 2022

As long as I have been an industry analyst, network engineers have tried to build multifunction boxes that are capable of addressing a wide range of network functions. These all-purpose network boxes have been lost to history as single-function platforms optimized for network performance (e.g., router or WAN optimization) dominated the market. The branch network is poised to benefit from the advances in software networking to collapse all network functions on to a single platform — the software-defined branch (SD-Branch).A total addressable market (TAM) analysis of the SD-Branch market starts with understanding the total spend on branch networking hardware and software. Worldwide spending on routers, WAN optimization, SD-WAN, network security, Wi-Fi, and ethernet switches at branch locations is approximately $15 billion, according to Doyle Research. (Disclosure: I’m the principal analyst at Doyle Research.)To read this article in full, please click here

Just One Bit

I'm never surprised by the ability of an IETF Working Group to obsess over what to any outside observer would appear to be a completely trivial matter. Even so, I was impressed to see a large-scale discussion emerge over a single bit in a transport protocol being standardized by the IETF.

Capital One Machine Learning Lead on Lessons at Scale

Machine learning has moved from prototype to production across a wide range of business units at financial services giant Capital One due in part to a centralized approach to evaluating and rolling out new projects.

This is no easy task given the scale and scope of the enterprise but according to Zachary Hanif who is director of Capitol One’s machine learning “center for excellence”, the trick is to define use cases early that touch as broad of a base within the larger organization as possible and build outwards. This is encapsulated in the philosophy Hanif spearheads—locating machine learning talent in …

Capital One Machine Learning Lead on Lessons at Scale was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

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