Why Cisco Should – And Should Not – Acquire Pure Storage

Flash memory has become absolutely normal in the datacenter, but that does not mean it is ubiquitous and it most certainly does not mean that all flash arrays, whether homegrown and embedded in servers or purchased as appliances, are created equal. They are not, and you can tell not only from the feeds and speeds, but from the dollars and sense.

It has been nine years since Pure Storage, one of the original flash array upstarts, was founded and seven years since the company dropped out of stealth with its first generation of FlashArray products. In that relatively short time, …

Why Cisco Should – And Should Not – Acquire Pure Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

What John Oliver gets wrong about Bitcoin

John Oliver covered bitcoin/cryptocurrencies last night. I thought I'd describe a bunch of things he gets wrong.


How Bitcoin works

Nowhere in the show does it describe what Bitcoin is and how it works.

Discussions should always start with Satoshi Nakamoto's original paper. The thing Satoshi points out is that there is an important cost to normal transactions, namely, the entire legal system designed to protect you against fraud, such as the way you can reverse the transactions on your credit card if it gets stolen. The point of Bitcoin is that there is no way to reverse a charge. A transaction is done via cryptography: to transfer money to me, you decrypt it with your secret key and encrypt it with mine, handing ownership over to me with no third party involved that can reverse the transaction, and essentially no overhead.

All the rest of the stuff, like the decentralized blockchain and mining, is all about making that work.

Bitcoin crazies forget about the original genesis of Bitcoin. For example, they talk about adding features to stop fraud, reversing transactions, and having a central authority that manages that. This misses the point, because the existing electronic banking system already Continue reading

Rough Guide to IETF 101: Internet Infrastructure Resilience

In this post of the Internet Society Rough Guide to IETF 101, I’ll focus on important work the IETF is doing that helps improve security and resilience of the Internet infrastructure.

BGP

What happens if an IXP operator begins maintenance work on the switches without ensuring that BGP sessions between the peers have been shut down? A network disruption and outage. A draft now in the RFC editor queue, “Mitigating Negative Impact of Maintenance through BGP Session Culling”, provides guidance to IXP operators on how to avoid such situations by forcefully tearing down the BGP sessions (session culling) affected by the maintenance before the maintenance activities commence. This approach allows BGP speakers to pre-emptively converge onto alternative paths while the lower layer network’s forwarding plane remains fully operational.

Another draft also in the RFC editor queue, “Graceful BGP session shutdown”, addresses issues related to planned maintenance. The procedures described in this document can be applied to reduce or avoid packet loss for outbound and inbound traffic flows initially forwarded along the peering link to be shut down.  These procedures trigger, in both Autonomous Systems (AS), rerouting to alternate paths if they exist within the Continue reading

Rough Guide to IETF 101: Back to London

Starting next weekend, the Internet Engineering Task Force will be in London for IETF 101, where about 1000 engineers will discuss open internet standards and protocols. The week begins on Saturday, 17 March, with a Hackathon and Code Sprint. The IETF meeting itself begins on Sunday and goes through Friday.

As usual, we’ll write our ‘Rough Guide to the IETF’ blog posts on topics of mutual interest to both the IETF and the Internet Society:

  • Overview of ISOC @ IETF
  • Routing Infrastructure Security Resilience
  • Internet of Things
  • IPv6
  • DNSSEC, DANE and DNS Security
  • Identity, Privacy, and Encryption
  • Community Networks

More information about IETF 101:

Here are some of the activities that the Internet Society is involved in during the week.

IETF Journal

Catch up on the world of the IETF and open Internet standards by reading the IETF Journal. The November issue marked the final printed version; now we plan to share longer-form articles online and via our Twitter and Facebook channels. Our two most recent articles are “Big Changes Ahead for Core Internet Protocols” by Mark Nottingham and “QUIC: Bringing flexibility to the Internet” Continue reading

Worth Reading: How to Talk to a C-Level Executive

Ever wondered who manages to produce deja-moo like this one and why they’d do it?

We unveiled a vision to create an intuitive system that anticipates actions, stops security threats in their tracks, and continues to evolve and learn. It will help businesses to unlock new opportunities and solve previously unsolvable challenges in an era of increasing connectivity and distributed technology.

As Erik Dietrich explains in his blog post, it’s usually nothing more than a lame attempt to pretend there are some clothes hanging on the emperor.

Just in case you’re interested: we discussed the state of Intent-Based Majesty’s wardrobe in Network Automation Use Cases webinar.

Disjoint Path Routing and LP

We are all well aware about the problem space of finding the Shortest Path and use of Dijsktra algorithm. In this blog, we will take a peek at the problem space for Disjoint Path routing, see how it can be reduced to the optimization problem and a few algorithms in that space. So first, let’s […]

CGN, IPv6 and fighting online crime…

Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) is commonly used by network operators as a way of ekeing out the limited supply of public IPv4 addresses. This is where private IPv4 addresses are allocated to end customers, who in turn also use private IPv4 address ranges on their own Local Area Networks, which means there can be multiple layers of Network Address Translation (NAT) before traffic reaches the publicly addressed Internet.
Whilst CGN offers something of a technical solution to the shortage of public IPv4 addresses, it presents a number of problems for investigating and solving online crime. A CGN environment means that many hundreds of users can be sharing a single public IPv4 address, so that when a crime is committed, tracing the perpetrator is very difficult. Furthermore, sometimes action needs to be taken against a public IPv4 address that’s the origin of particular problems, but this then penalises many hundreds or even thousands of innocent users who may also be sharing that IP address.
Europol, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, has identified that CGN is an impediment to investigating online crime, and is therefore consulting the Internet community on how network operators can be encouraged to deploy IPv6.

Drilling Down Into Ethernet Switch Trends

Of the three pillars of the datacenter – compute, storage, and networking – the one that consistently still has some margins and yet does not dominate the overall system budget is networking. While these elements affect each other, they are still largely standalone realms, with their own specialized devices and suppliers. And so it is important to know the trends in the technologies.

Until fairly recently, the box counters like IDC and Gartner have been pretty secretive about the data they have about the networking business. But IDC has been gradually giving a little more flavor than just saying Cisco …

Drilling Down Into Ethernet Switch Trends was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

DNSSEC Activities at ICANN 61 in San Juan on March 11-14, 2018

Sunday marks the beginning of the DNSSEC activities at the ICANN 61 meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. As per usual there will be a range of activities related to DNSSEC or DANE. Two of the sessions will be streamed live and will be recorded for later viewing. Here is what is happening.

All times below are Atlantic Standard Time (AST), which is UTC-4.

DNSSEC For Everybody: A Beginner’s Guide – Sunday, 11 March

On Sunday, March 11, we’ll have our “DNSSEC For Everybody: A Beginner’s Guide” session that will include our usual skit where a bunch of engineers act out how DNS and DNSSEC work! Yes, it’s a good bit of fun and people have told us it has helped tremendously.

Please come with your questions and prepare to learn all about DNSSEC!

DNSSEC Workshop – Wednesday, 14 March

Our big 6-hour workshop will take place on Wednesday, March 14, from 09:00 – 15:00 in Room 208-BC. Lunch will be included. Thank you to our lunch sponsors: Afilias, CIRA, and SIDN.

The very full agenda includes:

Link Propagation 109

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. A Note From Greg Why Link […]

Getting Started with Ansible Tower

If you’re considering evaluating Red Hat Ansible Tower, you might also be curious about what sort of support is included with a trial key. This post will explain what sort of help is available while you conduct a PoC, along with information to assist you with errors and more.

Ansible Experts Are Here to Help

After you download a trial of Ansible Tower and request a license key, there is more than just documentation and reading materials to help guide you through errors. Once you and your team are connected with Ansible and want to start working on an evaluation or proof of concept installation, there are a boatload of resources to help you on your automation journey:

Sales Representatives: Provide support from day one, helping you understand what Ansible Engine and Ansible Tower can do for you and your environment.

Getting Started Team: The product field engineering team (known colloquially as the "Getting Started" team) helps with the installation, configuration and integration of Ansible Engine and Ansible Tower.

Solution Architects: For cases that delve into deeper understanding of all things Ansible Automation, writing playbooks, or consultation/screenshared demos to ensure success of the project, a Solutions Architect can save Continue reading

U.S. SEC Targets Unregulated Cryptocurrency Exchanges

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission could soon crack down on unregulated cryptocurrency trading platforms after the agency sent a strongly worded warning to them this week.

The SEC warned that unregulated online trading platforms may be misleading investors by calling themselves “exchanges,” which implies federal oversight. An SEC-related securities exchange, among other safeguards, has rules designed to prevent fraud and other manipulative practices, the SEC said in an advisory issued Wednesday.

The SEC advisory served as much as a warning to investors using cryptocurrency trading platforms as to the platforms themselves.

“The SEC staff has concerns that many online trading platforms appear to investors as SEC-registered and regulated marketplaces when they are not,” the advisory said. “Many platforms refer to themselves as ‘exchanges,’ which can give the misimpression to investors that they are regulated or meet the regulatory standards of a national securities exchange.”

The SEC does not review the trading protocols used by unregulated trading platforms, it said. “Although some of these platforms claim to use strict standards to pick only high-quality digital assets to trade, the SEC does not review these standards or the digital assets that the platforms select, and the so-called standards should Continue reading

Internet Intelligence, Now Available In The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) team is proud of the data centers and network we are building for the next generation of cloud users and, in the spirit of transparency, we want to share with our users tools to better evaluate and measure the performance they will experience on our cloud. Today, we are pleased to announce two new network tools available in the Console to help you measure and analyze network performance.

OCI Market Performance is an interactive visualization tool that displays network performance metrics from OCI regions to cities around the globe.  Performance is measured over time to a carefully curated set of endpoint IP addresses within the top providers in each market, providing the user with aggregated performance data for markets and providers over the last day, week, month or three months. This latency data from our Phoenix, Ashburn, and Frankfurt regions can help you predict and manage network performance.  We will be adding metrics for more of our regions as they come online (including our twelve recently announced regional data centers).

OCI Market Performance can also assist in planning for growth, as you extend your footprint into new global markets.  For FastConnect customers, this tool can help to predict performance between an OCI region and a specific Continue reading

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