IBM, HPE tout new A.I.-oriented servers

IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week introduced new servers optimized for artificial intelligence, and the two had one thing in common: Nvidia technology.HPE this week announced Gen10 of its HPE Apollo 6500 platform, running Intel Skylake processors and up to eight Pascal or Volta Nvidia GPUs connected by NVLink, Nvidia’s high-speed interconnect.A fully loaded V100s server will get you 66 peak double-precision teraflops of performance, which HPE says is three times the performance of the previous generation.The Apollo 6500 Gen10 platform is aimed at deep-learning workloads and traditional HPC use cases. The NVLink technology is up to 10 times faster than PCI Express Gen 3 interconnects.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM, HPE tout new A.I.-oriented servers

IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week introduced new servers optimized for artificial intelligence, and the two had one thing in common: Nvidia technology.HPE this week announced Gen10 of its HPE Apollo 6500 platform, running Intel Skylake processors and up to eight Pascal or Volta Nvidia GPUs connected by NVLink, Nvidia’s high-speed interconnect.A fully loaded V100s server will get you 66 peak double-precision teraflops of performance, which HPE says is three times the performance of the previous generation.The Apollo 6500 Gen10 platform is aimed at deep-learning workloads and traditional HPC use cases. The NVLink technology is up to 10 times faster than PCI Express Gen 3 interconnects.To read this article in full, please click here

Link Propagation 111

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. Blogs Is Patching And Tech Support […]

How NSX Is Tapping into the Human Element Behind Network Virtualization

How NSX Is Tapping into the Human Element Behind Network Virtualization Virtualization can be a tricky concept for some people to wrap their heads around. Trying to explain the functionalities and benefits of technology like VMware NSX can quickly devolve into techno-babble. With that said, we’re trying to take another approach—a more human approach. Below are three customer stories that emphasize a human-interest element behind network... Read more →

How NSX Is Tapping into the Human Element Behind Network Virtualization

 

Virtualization can be a tricky concept for some people to wrap their heads around. Trying to explain the functionalities and benefits of technology like VMware NSX can quickly devolve into techno-babble. With that said, we’re trying to take another approach—a more human approach. Below are three customer stories that emphasize a human-interest element behind network virtualization and showcase the power of technologies like NSX to better human lives.

 

NSX Powers a ‘Classroom in the Cloud’ for Illinois Students

 When the technology leaders of Bloomington’s public schools started looking for a way to make advanced, enterprise-level computing and Internet services affordable to students, they went the co-op route and turned to IlliniCloud. IlliniCloud has proven to be a game-changer for a public education system in crisis. The co-op is transforming the technology infrastructures of not just Bloomington’s public school district, but every school district in Illinois with an affordable and efficient model that results in major cost savings for schools, along with upgrades in technology and aging infrastructures.

 

VMware is the backbone of IlliniCloud and a natural fit, according to Jason Radford, CTO of IlliniCloud: “VMware believed in the IlliniCloud. They gave us the tools that were Continue reading

Ansible 2.5: Traveling space and time

Ansible-2-5-Blog-HeaderWelcome to another Ansible release! Version 2.5–“Kashmir”–has a lot of great stuff to play around with, and we're excited to get it in your hands so you can try it out.

Some of the items in this release have been covered in depth in previous Feature Spotlights: AWS EC2 Dynamic inventory plugin, the new Loop keyword, and the all-new ec2_instance module. But those are just appetizers for all of the new things that are included in this release.

Fact Namespacing

In 2.5, we are introducing fact namespacing, which makes Ansible facts available under the ansible_facts namespace (i.e. ansible_facts.os_distribution) without the ansible_ prefix.

Facts will continue to be added into the main namespace directly, but there is now a configuration boolean to enable this. Today, it’s ”On” by default, in a future release, we’ll switch that to “Off”.

Module Blacklisting

We have added a configuration file that enables administrators to filter modules that should be excluded from being used in playbook runs. Operationally, this ensures administrators have more control over which Ansible Modules are approved for use.

New magic vars

Magic vars are variables that Ansible provides to playbook runs without having to be requested. Continue reading

Shedding light on broadband performance for an optimized SD-WAN

A decade ago, if I had asked a network manager to consider using broadband to connect branch offices, he would have looked at me as if I had a second head. Times and opinions change, though, and broadband is now as viable as MPLS or any other network service.The catalyst for this has been the rise of software-defined WANs (SD-WANs). Their multipath capabilities and network optimization make it possible to use broadband for business connectivity, and organizations of all sizes have been jumping aboard this trend. One of the challenges that remain, though, is that not all connections or types of broadband are created equal.Not all broadband is created equal A network manager at a business with branches located nationwide recently told me that his company's preferred broadband type has been cable, but he has been surprised by the variability in the resulting bandwidth by location and time of day. For example, in one large metro area, he is purchasing 50MB of bandwidth, more than adequate for most branches. During the mornings he often sees throughput of 100MB or more. Later in the day, however, when kids get home from school and the Xboxes and Netflix subscriptions start Continue reading

Show 382: Whitebox In The Enterprise With Pica8 (Sponsored)

On today’s show we explore whitebox switching in the enterprise with our sponsor Pica8.

Pica8 makes a network OS for data centers and enterprises, which customers can run on a variety of third-party switches including Dell, HPE, and Edgecore.

Our guests are  James Liao, CEO and co-founder of Pica8; and Sharad Ahlawat, VP of Technology.

We get details about Pica8’s switch OS, called PicOS, and find out how Pica8 differentiates itself from other OSs.

We also talk about how SDN has to change to be useful, such as targeting specific use cases. We look at the state of the whitebox market, the role of open source, and why Pica8 is shifting its focus to enterprise customers.

Show Links:

Pica8.com

Pica8 on Twitter

Pica8 on LinkedIn

Pica8 on Facebook

The post Show 382: Whitebox In The Enterprise With Pica8 (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

BrandPost: How Wi-Fi Won the Super Bowl 

With a thrilling win over the New England Patriots, the Philadelphia Eagles are this year’s Super Bowl Champions, the first championship in their franchise’s history. Game-changers weren’t exclusively on the field during this year’s game; they were in the stands as well and they come with unique post-game analysis.For the 5th straight year, Extreme Networks was named the Official Wi-Fi Analytics provider of the Super Bowl. ExtremeAnalytics provides granular insights into how the network performed throughout the event, as well as providing a detailed understanding of the mobile engagement behaviors of connected fans.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: An Efficient Network: The Fabric of a Complex Paperless Hospital System

As CTO of a large regional hospital system, I know that the network is vital to everything. I consider the network in the same critical category as electricity, oxygen, and water. It needs to be available 24x7x365 to support Concord Hospital’s half a million patients and over 5,000 network users across our 30 locations.Because we don’t do anything on paper, the network can never go down. Extreme Fabric Connect has solved that problem for us. It provides a secure, self-healing, highly-available network to serve our patients effectively in our complex paperless environment. All the Benefits of MPLS, None of the HeadachesWe decided to upgrade our network from Split Multi-Link Trunking to Fabric Connect to get the self-networking benefits of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) without the complexity. Fabric Connect is like having a carrier-class MPLS network, where you can put any network anywhere and only the right people can see it.To read this article in full, please click here

Introducing Certificate Transparency and Nimbus

Introducing Certificate Transparency and Nimbus

Introducing Certificate Transparency and Nimbus

Certificate Transparency (CT) is an ambitious project to help improve security online by bringing accountability to the system that protects HTTPS. Cloudflare is announcing support for this project by introducing two new public-good services:

  • Nimbus: A free and open certificate transparency log
  • Merkle Town: A dashboard for exploring the certificate transparency ecosystem

In this blog post we’ll explain what Certificate Transparency is and how it will become a critical tool for ensuring user safety online. It’s important for website operators and certificate authorities to learn about CT as soon as possible, because participating in CT becomes mandatory in Chrome for all certificates issued after April 2018. We’ll also explain how Nimbus works and how CT uses a structure called a Merkle tree to scale to the point of supporting all trusted certificates on the Internet. For more about Merkle Town, read the [follow up post] by my colleague Patrick Donahue.

Trust and Accountability

Everything we do online requires a baseline level of trust. When you use a browser to visit your bank’s website or your favorite social media site, you expect that the server on the other side of the connection is operated by the organization indicated in Continue reading

Is Patching And Tech Support Bad? A Response

Hopefully, you’ve had a chance to watch this 7 minute video from Greg Ferro about why better patching systems can lead to insecure software. If you haven’t, you should:

Greg is right that moral hazard is introduced because, by definition, the party providing the software is “insured” against the risks of the party using the software. But, I also have a couple of issues with some of the things he said about tech support.

Are You Ready For The Enterprise

I’ve been working with some Ubiquiti access points recently. So far, I really enjoy them and I’m interested to see where their product is going. After doing some research, the most common issue with them seems to be their tech support offerings. A couple of Reddit users even posted in a thread that the lack of true enterprise tech support is the key that is keeping Ubiquiti from reaching real enterprise status.

Think about all the products that you’ve used over the last couple of years that offered some other kind of support aside from phone or rapid response. Maybe it was a chat window on the site. Maybe it was an asynchronous email system. Hell, if you’ve ever installed Continue reading