How converged infrastructure can accelerate the AI journey

The technology that powers businesses is evolving faster than ever before, allowing us to do more than we ever thought possible. Things that were once only seen in science fiction movies are actually coming to life.One of these areas is the field of artificial intelligence (AI). We’re on the verge of having machines diagnose cancer, map out the universe, take over dangerous jobs, and drive us around. The downside to the rapid evolution has been a rise in complexity. Putting together the infrastructure and software to power AI-based systems can often take months to build, tune, and tweak so that it runs optimally.Compounding the difficulty is that AI infrastructure is often deployed by data scientists who do not have the same level of technical acumen as the IT team. To read this article in full, please click here

How converged infrastructure can accelerate the AI journey

The technology that powers businesses is evolving faster than ever before, allowing us to do more than we ever thought possible. Things that were once only seen in science fiction movies are actually coming to life.One of these areas is the field of artificial intelligence (AI). We’re on the verge of having machines diagnose cancer, map out the universe, take over dangerous jobs, and drive us around. The downside to the rapid evolution has been a rise in complexity. Putting together the infrastructure and software to power AI-based systems can often take months to build, tune, and tweak so that it runs optimally.Compounding the difficulty is that AI infrastructure is often deployed by data scientists who do not have the same level of technical acumen as the IT team. To read this article in full, please click here

Vint Cerf Envies the Modern ‘Internet Adventure’ with Open Routing, Switching

The disaggregation of the control plane and data plane with open interfaces feels a bit like the free-wheeling days of the early internet.

Worth Reading: FRR turns one

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. —Kelsey Havens @Cumulus

Cloudflare Arrives in the Canadian Prairies! Welcome Calgary, Saskatoon and Winnipeg

We just turned up Calgary, Saskatoon and Winnipeg - Cloudflare’s 143rd, 144th, and 145th data centers. This brings our Canadian presence to six cities, joining Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. I grew up just outside of Saskatoon, so I couldn’t be happier that Cloudflare’s network has expanded to the Canadian Prairies. My parents still live there and I just booked flights to go and visit them this summer. When I tell people that I grew up in Saskatchewan, most people don’t know a lot about the region, so I wanted to share some of my favorite things about the region, starting from west to east:

• Calgary was home to the 1988 Winter Olympics and is a 90 minute drive from Banff, an incredible National Park that is absolutely worth visiting. Calgary has grown quickly over the last twenty years because of all the natural resources, including oil and gas. They host a famous rodeo, Calgary Stampede, for 10 days every summer. Definitely something to add to your bucket list. With Cloudflare’s new deployment in Calgary, we’ll make the Internet even faster for visitors. Hello Calgary!

• About 1 million people live in the province of Saskatchewan. Saskatoon is the Continue reading

$91B on IT Security Solutions and no security in sight.

Sell vitamins not medicine.

Rewind & recap: OCP Summit 2018

As you probably know, Cumulus Networks is an active contributor and enthusiastic member of the OCP community. So naturally, we couldn’t bear to miss OCP Summit 2018! The summit was held in San Jose from March 20th – 21st, and believe us, if you’re into open source anything, it was THE place to be. From BoF sessions to engineering workshops and everything in-between, there’s so much to talk about — but we’ll spare you an essay-length article and keep this short blog limited to our absolute favorite Cumulus OCP Summit highlights from the event. So whether you’re an OCP fan that couldn’t make it or you’re an attendee that wants to reminisce, check out these stellar moments from OCP Summit 2018.

Cumulus’ OCP projects

It was great to hear Omar Baldonado from Facebook give Backpack a shoutout during his keynote address. With the support of OCP, we’ve teamed up our OS with Celestica’s hardware to bring this project to fruition, and what better place to highlight this venture than at OCP Summit? As Baldonado points out, “Cumulus also has been a very long standing partner and contributor and driver within the OCP community,” and we intend to continue those efforts. Continue reading

Kathy Brown’s Op-Ed in the Hill Times: Canada’s Unique Opportunity to Lead the Future of the Internet

Kathy Brown, CEO of the Internet Society, recently penned an Op-Ed for Canada’s the Hill Times calling for a multistakeholder approach to Internet governance: “an approach that is collaborative, one that engages the entire Internet community.” According to Brown, “The time has come to expand this inclusive model of governance to more places around the world.”

“No
 one party, government, corporation, or non-profit controls the Internet and we are all better for it. Nor does any one party have the knowledge or the ability to identify the solutions to these complex policy challenges. It has been this approach—what we call the multistakeholder model—that has allowed humankind’s most advanced and powerful communications tool to spread so far and so fast.”

She cites the partnership between the Internet Society, Innovation, Science and Economic Development, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, CANARIE, and CIPPIC as an example of the multistakeholder approach working successfully. “[Canada] is addressing cybersecurity head-on by working with the Internet Society to engage the Canadian Internet community in a process to develop recommendations to secure the Internet of Things.”

Read the entire Op-Ed, then learn how you can participate in the Collaborative Governance Project, Continue reading

Kubernetes Development Remains Hot, But What’s Next?

The latest update showed continued maturation, but enterprises, developers, and vendors are still struggling to adapt.

2018 Next Gen Data Center Networking Report Available Now

Download now to learn the latest on the Next-Generation Data Center market.

Removing The Storage Bottleneck For AI

If the history of high performance computing has taught us anything, it is that we cannot focus too much on compute at the expense of storage and networking. Having all of the compute in the world doesn’t mean diddlysquat if the storage can’t get data to the compute elements – whatever they might be – in a timely fashion with good sustained performance.

Many organizations that have invested in GPU accelerated servers are finding this out the hard way when their performance comes up short when they get down to do work training their neural networks, and this is particularly …

Removing The Storage Bottleneck For AI was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

History of Networking: Dinesh Dutt on the divergence of compute and networking

Australian Macquarie Telecom Rolls Out SD-WAN for Aged Care Provider

The SD-WAN network will connect more than 20 Hall and Prior nursing home locations in Western Australia and New South Wales.

VMware Boosts Cloud Management Automation, Promises Azure Support Soon

VMware added new cloud management automation capabilities to its data center software and said Microsoft Azure support is “very near.”

Hybrid Cloud Security 101: What IT Leaders Need to Know

Hybrid cloud environments present a revolutionary change in how organizations store and manage their data. But what happens if access to the cloud is compromised or interrupted?

Docker CTO Solomon Hykes Will Leave the Company He Co-Founded

Hykes said the reason behind the move is because Docker Inc.’s current business requires a CTO with decades of experience shipping and supporting software.

Nokia Will Slash 353 Jobs in Network, Technology Units

Nokia total revenues dipped 1 percent to $8.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017.

Worth Reading: One QUIC 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. —Geoff Huston @APNIC

BrandPost: Introducing the Adaptive Network Vision

Why now? The networking industry is being disrupted.There is an explosion in network demand, driven by ultramobile users who want the ability to access the cloud and consume high-definition content, video, and applications when and where they choose. This disruption of the network will only be exacerbated by the adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G, the use of which involves billions of devices interacting with machines, users, and clouds to drive consumer and business interactions.For instance, what happens when users want to engage in a 4K-based virtual reality session hosted in the cloud, while traveling at high speed in their driverless cars? What happens when the physical devices currently used to support networking functions become virtual—and so do the user end-points? Network providers are now realizing the level of complexity and variability this type of demand will introduce, and that their current networks are not up to the challenge.To read this article in full, please click here

Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius: Launching three new European Cloudflare data centers

Cloudflare announces the turn up of our newest data centers located in Riga (Latvia), Tallinn (Estonia) and Vilnius (Lithuania). They represent the 140th, 141st and 142nd cities across our growing global network, and our 37th, 38th, 39th cities in Europe. We are very excited to help improve the security and performance of over 7 million Internet properties across 72 countries including the Baltic states.

We will be interconnecting with local networks over multiple Internet exchanges: Baltic Internet Exchange (BALT-IX), Lithuanian Internet eXchange Point (LIXP), LITIX, Tallinn Internet Exchange (TLLIX), Tallinn Governmental Internet Exchange (RTIX), Santa Monica Internet Local Exchange (SMILE-LV), and potentially, the Latvian Internet Exchange (LIX-LV).

If you are an entrepreneur anywhere in the world selling your product in these markets, or a Baltic entrepreneur reaching a global audience, we've got your back.

Baltic Region

Photo by Siim Lukka / Unsplash
Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania join the list of other countries with shorelines along the Baltic Sea and Cloudflare data centers. That list includes Denmark, Finland, Germany, Poland, Russia and Sweden.

Of the five countries that in the drainage basin but do not border the sea, Cloudflare has deployments Continue reading