Automation won’t cost you your job — it could save it

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you probably do a lot of professional work with networking, manage an enterprise data center or play around with networks as a hobby (if you don’t, close your eyes for just a moment and imagine yourself in a well air-conditioned data center). You also likely know about the day-to-day tasks that maintaining a network requires, and how much time they take out of the day. Or, perhaps you’re a director that’s trying to resolve the issues your networking team keeps having. Has it ever occurred to you that there might be a better way to tackle these daily problems? Sure, what you’re doing now works, but there’s so much else you could be doing if the management of these tasks were optimized. That’s where network automation solutions can step in and give you more free time than you could have dreamed of. Why automation? Well, let’s get into what problems it eliminates and the benefits it brings — you can thank us later!

Problem: A manually configured and operated network

A day in the life of a network engineer includes three layers of regular tasks. At the top, we have troubleshooting operation Continue reading

Building a Sustainable Community Network in Sarantaporo Greece

For over a year now we in the Sarantaporo.gr Non Profit Organization have been in contact with Internet Society in meetings, over online interactions, and through in-person collaboration with people of the organization who visited our village last summer. From the beginning we saw that Internet Society is an organization which we share a lot of common elements with in terms of vision, and that its network is a natural space for our Community Network to be a part of.

In September 2017 we applied for the Internet Society Beyond the Net Funding Programme to approach the organization more closely and pursue funding to finance our Community Network. We are very happy to announce that our proposal was successful and will be funded with $30,000 USD through 2018 and 2019. This grant arrives very timely, in a period of transformation for our Community Network.

Continuously growing since 2010 to expand from Sarantaporo to even more villages in the region, today Sarantaporo.gr Community Network has reached a point where it is no longer possible to keep growing under the previous model, which was heavily dependent on the volunteering work of the nonprofit’s core team. Local inhabitants need to step in and Continue reading

HPC System & Processor Trends for 2018

In this episode of The Interview from The Next Platform, we talk with Andrew Jones from independent high performance computing consulting firm, N.A.G. about processor and system acquisition trends in HPC for users at the smaller commercial end of the spectrum up through the large research centers.

In the course of the conversation, we cover how acquisition trends are being affected by machine learning entering the HPC workflow in the coming years, the differences over time between commercial HPC and academic supercomputing, and some of the issues around processor choices for both markets.

Given his experiences talking to end users …

HPC System & Processor Trends for 2018 was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Weekend Reads 020918: The Usual Stuff

The Linux Foundation which has been host to many leading open source networking projects, felt the need to streamline all its various ventures, informed Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking and orchestration at The Linux Foundation. The six founding open source projects involved in the LFN are FD.io, OpenDaylight, Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), PDNA and Streaming Network Analytics System. An additional 83-member organization is participating in LFN. This is significant because members of the Linux Foundation can choose whether they want to join LFN, and they can participate in as many or as few of the projects as they want. —Syeda Beenish @OpenSource

The plunder of more than $500 million worth of digital coins from the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck last week has added to a growing perception that cryptocurrencies are particularly vulnerable to hackers. It’s an expensive reminder that like many things in the cryptocurrency world, security technologies—and the norms, best practices, and rules for using them—are still emerging. Not least because of its enormous size, the Coincheck hack could go down as a seminal moment in that process. —Mike Orcutt @Technology Review

The days of pointing to a file cabinet and Continue reading

The Winds of Change From January

Some quick thoughts on networking from my last couple of weeks at Networking Field Day 17 and Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe:

  • Cisco is in the middle of turning a big ship away from hardware. All their innovation is coming in the software side of the house. Big announcements around network assurance. It’s not enough any more to do the things. Now you need to prove they were done and show your work. Context and Intent only work if you can quantitatively show that they were applied.
  • Containers are still a thing. Cisco has a new container platform. I also had the chance to chat with a startup called AppOrbit that’s doing some interesting things around containers but including storage and networking. They should be primed for some announcements soon, so stayed tuned for that!
  • Automation is cool again. Well, maybe it never stopped being cool. But thanks to Extreme Networks and Juniper people are really hopping on the train to talk more about removing the limitations of the CLI and doing it with tools like Slack. Check out Lindsay Hill and Matt Oswalt showing this off to people in some finely crafted demos.
  • 2018 is Continue reading

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

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

 

To those living in the past: the future is coming. (launch, great sound).

 

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.

  • 7.2 terabytes: data used during Super Bowl;  $220 million: projected podcast revenue this year; $127 billion: total addressable value of drone-powered solutions in all applicable industries; 100 billion billion billion: living microbial cells underlying all the worlds oceans, 200x biomass of humans; 110 billion: total market for memory; 1,000: drones North Korea may have, possibly with chemical or biological weapons, ready to attack South Korea; $123 billion: US apparel market; 100 million: iOS devices sold in Q4; $3: earnings in 24 hours from conscripting 5,000 Android devices into a mining botnet; 46%: cloud market growth in Q4; 104%: YoY Alibaba cloud growth; 

  • Quotable Quotes:

Just How Large Can Nvidia’s Datacenter Business Grow?

The combination of the excitement for new video games, the machine learning software revolution, the buildout of very large supercomputers based on hybrid CPU-GPU architectures, and the mining of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have combined into a quadruple whammy that is driving Nvidia to new heights for revenues, profits, and market capitalization. And thus it is no surprise Nvidia is one of the few companies that is bucking the trend in a very tough couple of weeks on Wall Street.

But having demand spiking for both its current “Volta” GPUs, which are currently aimed at HPC and AI compute, …

Just How Large Can Nvidia’s Datacenter Business Grow? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Technology Short Take 94

Welcome to Technology Short Take 94! Ready for another round of links, articles, and thoughts on data center technologies? (Who knows, maybe I’ll throw a rant or two in there.) OK, enough rambling…here’s the good stuff!

Networking

  • Amit Aneja has a two-part series (so far) explaining the routing architecture in NSX-T (which brings multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud support to the NSX platform). This is some good content and reminds me of the the old NVP/NSX content I generated back in the day. Ah, good times…anyway, check out Amit’s stuff here and here.
  • Sam McGeown has a nice diagram of the communications channels between the various VMware NSX components.
  • Roie Ben Haim has a post providing an introduction to NSX and Kubernetes.
  • Matt Oswalt tackles the idea of “intent-driven” or “intent-based” networking—all the rage right now—and outlines how something like this must interact with domains outside of networking in order to be effective. I particularly liked his (mini-)rant about how network automation can’t be only about making the network engineer’s life easier. Oh, snap!
  • I’m not really sure if this belongs in networking or not (how does one classify OS kernel-level work on networking and security?), but we’ll stick it Continue reading

Tips to improve IoT security on your network

Judging by all the media attention that The Internet of Things (or IoT) gets these days, you would think that the world was firmly in the grip of a physical and digital transformation. The truth, though, is that we all are still in the early days of the IoT.The analyst firm Gartner, for example, puts the number of Internet connected “things” at just 8.4 billion in 2017 – counting both consumer and business applications. That’s a big number, yes, but much smaller number than the “50 billion devices” or “hundreds of billions of devices” figures that get bandied about in the press.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Tips to improve IoT security on your network

Judging by all the media attention that The Internet of Things (or IoT) gets these days, you would think that the world was firmly in the grip of a physical and digital transformation. The truth, though, is that we all are still in the early days of the IoT.The analyst firm Gartner, for example, puts the number of Internet connected “things” at just 8.4 billion in 2017 – counting both consumer and business applications. That’s a big number, yes, but much smaller number than the “50 billion devices” or “hundreds of billions of devices” figures that get bandied about in the press.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Tips for securing IoT on your network

Judging by all the media attention that The Internet of Things (or IoT) gets these days, you would think that the world was firmly in the grip of a physical and digital transformation. The truth, though, is that we all are still in the early days of the IoT.The analyst firm Gartner, for example, puts the number of Internet connected “things” at just 8.4 billion in 2017 – counting both consumer and business applications. That’s a big number, yes, but much smaller number than the “50 billion devices” or “hundreds of billions of devices” figures that get bandied about in the press.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

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