Network Break 177: Dell Launches New Branch CPE; Sonic In The Spotlight

Take a Network Break! In this week’s show, Dell EMC rolls out new branch hardware to run VNFs, the Sonic switch OS gets its turn in the open networking spotlight, and Innovium announces sampling of its Teralynx programmable ASIC.

The IEEE ratifies a standard for 25Gbps over single-mode fiber, Dropbox embraces security researchers, and Micro Focus suffers a massive drop in value.

Cryptojacking roars onto the threat scene, and Orbitz reports that attackers may have breached a legacy site, exposing up to 880,000 customers.

Get links to all these stories after our sponsor message.

Sponsor: ThousandEyes

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Show Links:

Dell EMC Takes on Cisco, Launches Open uCPE for SD-WAN – SDX Central

Dell EMC Takes Open Networking to the Edge for Next-Generation Access – Dell EMC

Innovium announces OCP SAI and open-source SONiC solution to accelerate TERALYNX market adoption – Innovium

Apstra Demonstrates Open Networking SONiC over Mellanox at OCP Summit Continue reading

Time to Evolve

I first started getting into VMware around 2003, possibly earlier (I can’t recall exactly when it was). I remember thinking that VMware’s impact on the industry was going to be significant, and I wanted to be part of this industry change. I was right—virtualization like what VMware offers has fundamentally changed the industry. However, just as technology evolves, technology careers must evolve as well. Specifically, my technology career must change and grow. It’s time to evolve.

This need to evolve has been building for a couple years. You’ve probably observed that the amount of VMware-centric content produced here on the site has slowly been replaced by topics like Linux, Docker, Vagrant, Terraform, AWS, Azure, and others. These topics represent where I think my next period of growth and change resides, and after a couple years of slow growth in these areas it’s now time to “put the pedal to the metal” and accelerate things.

As of this coming Friday, March 30, 2018, I will be leaving VMware after a little over 5 years with the company. My time with VMware (as an employee) has been an amazing adventure. I’m thankful to Brad Hedlund for his Continue reading

Penn State secures building automation, IoT traffic with microsegmentation

It was time to get a handle on BACnet traffic at Penn State.BACnet is a communications protocol for building automation and control (BAC) systems such as heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC), lighting, access control and fire detection. Penn State standardized on BACnet because of its openness.[ For more on IoT see tips for securing IoT on your network, our list of the most powerful internet of things companies and learn about the industrial internet of things. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] “Any device, any manufacturer – as long as they talk BACnet, we can integrate them,” says Tom Walker, system design specialist in the facility automation services group at Penn State. “It’s a really neat protocol, but you have to know the quirks that come with deploying it, especially at scale.”To read this article in full, please click here

Penn State secures building automation, IoT traffic with microsegmentation

It was time to get a handle on BACnet traffic at Penn State.BACnet is a communications protocol for building automation and control (BAC) systems such as heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC), lighting, access control and fire detection. Penn State standardized on BACnet because of its openness.[ For more on IoT see tips for securing IoT on your network, our list of the most powerful internet of things companies and learn about the industrial internet of things. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] “Any device, any manufacturer – as long as they talk BACnet, we can integrate them,” says Tom Walker, system design specialist in the facility automation services group at Penn State. “It’s a really neat protocol, but you have to know the quirks that come with deploying it, especially at scale.”To read this article in full, please click here

Penn State secures building automation, IoT traffic with microsegmentation

It was time to get a handle on BACnet traffic at Penn State.BACnet is a communications protocol for building automation and control (BAC) systems such as heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC), lighting, access control and fire detection. Penn State standardized on BACnet because of its openness.[ For more on IoT see tips for securing IoT on your network, our list of the most powerful internet of things companies and learn about the industrial internet of things. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] “Any device, any manufacturer – as long as they talk BACnet, we can integrate them,” says Tom Walker, system design specialist in the facility automation services group at Penn State. “It’s a really neat protocol, but you have to know the quirks that come with deploying it, especially at scale.”To read this article in full, please click here

Penn State secures building automation, IoT traffic with microsegmentation

It was time to get a handle on BACnet traffic at Penn State.BACnet is a communications protocol for building automation and control (BAC) systems such as heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC), lighting, access control and fire detection. Penn State standardized on BACnet because of its openness.[ For more on IoT see tips for securing IoT on your network, our list of the most powerful internet of things companies and learn about the industrial internet of things. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] “Any device, any manufacturer – as long as they talk BACnet, we can integrate them,” says Tom Walker, system design specialist in the facility automation services group at Penn State. “It’s a really neat protocol, but you have to know the quirks that come with deploying it, especially at scale.”To read this article in full, please click here

Stateful vs Stateless firewalls: Which one to use when?

Firewalls provide traffic filtering and protects the trusted environment for the untrusted. A firewall can be stateful or stateless A stateful firewall is capable of tracking connection states, it is better equipped to allow or deny traffic based on such knowledge.  A TCP connection for example goes through the handshake (SYN-SYN+ACK-SYN), to EASTABLISHED state, and … Continue reading Stateful vs Stateless firewalls: Which one to use when?

OpenPower At The Inflection Point

When IBM launched the OpenPower initiative publicly five years ago, to many it seemed like a classic case of too little, too late. But hope springs eternal, particularly with a datacenter sector that is eagerly and actively seeking an alternative to the Xeon processor to curtail the hegemony that Intel has in the glass house.

Perhaps the third time will be the charm. Back in 1991, Apple and IBM and Motorola teamed up to create the AIM Alliance, which sought to create a single unified computing architecture that was suitable for embedded and desktop applications, replacing the Motorola 68000 processors …

OpenPower At The Inflection Point was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

London & Barcelona developers, we want to meet you this week

London & Barcelona developers, we want to meet you this week

London & Barcelona developers, we want to meet you this week

Are you based in London or Barcelona? Drop by the Cloudflare London office to meet Kenton Varda, lead architect of Cloudflare Workers, front end developers Marta Bondyra and David Sancho from Typeform, or drop by the Typeform office in Barcelona to hear from Jason Harmon, Typeform’s Chief Platform Officer. My Developer Relations teammates and I are visiting these cities over the next two weeks. We’d love to meet you and invite you to the three events we’re hosting.

Our first stop is the Cloudflare London office. Developers from our Cloudflare Apps partner, Typeform, are leading a talk on Tuesday, March 27th. The lead architect of Cloudflare Workers, Kenton Varda, is going to lead a follow-up talk about edge computing on Wednesday, March 28th.

Event #1: Building for a tech audience: Great dev lessons for adventurous makers

London & Barcelona developers, we want to meet you this week

Tuesday, March 27th: 18:00-20:00

Location: Cloudflare London - 25 Lavington St, Second floor | SE1 0NZ London

Creating software from scratch, although fun, can be time consuming and expensive. Marta and David, both developers at Typeform, will tell you why their teams built tools to make the lives of developers a little easier and what they learned along the way.

Continue reading

A tour through Merkle Town, Cloudflare’s Certificate Transparency dashboard

A tour through Merkle Town, Cloudflare's Certificate Transparency dashboard

For a quick primer on Certificate Transparency, please read my colleague Nick Sullivan’s post from earlier today. The discussion below expands on that post and details how Cloudflare monitors the health and performance of Certificate Transparency (CT) logs.

A tour through Merkle Town, Cloudflare's Certificate Transparency dashboard

The success of Certificate Transparency rests on the existence of a robust ecosystem of logs and log operators. Without logs that CAs can depend on, it’s not practical for browsers to require that SSL certificates have been logged to be trusted—as Chrome plans to do on April 30. With this deadline fast approaching and others browsers likely to follow suit, it’s critical that the CT ecosystem continues to strengthen and expand with new log operators.

As we wrote about earlier today, Cloudflare recently joined this group of trusted log operators, helping strengthen this critical ecosystem. Now, we’d like to take you on a quick guide through our new publicly accessible tool that tracks the health of all trusted logs. In addition to basic uptime and response times, Merkle Town, provides statistics on the type and frequency of certificates issued, the top issuers, and the inter-dependencies CAs have on existing logs and each other. Click here to jump right into our Continue reading

IoT security spending to spike above $1.5 billion in the next year

The market for IoT security products is set to grow sharply, as the general IoT market becomes ever more ubiquitous, according to a report released this month by Gartner Research. While there are numerous drivers behind the increased demand for IoT security, a growing sense that regulatory compliance will shortly become an issue is one of the most pressing.The report lists security as the top barrier to success for IoT initiatives, according to a survey on IoT adoption conducted by Gartner. A big part of the problem, the report said, is that businesses often don’t have full control over which devices and software are being used at each level of a given IoT project.To read this article in full, please click here

IoT security spending to spike above $1.5 billion next year

The market for IoT security products is set to grow sharply, as the general IoT market becomes ever more ubiquitous, according to a report released this month by Gartner Research. While there are numerous drivers behind the increased demand for IoT security, a growing sense that regulatory compliance will shortly become an issue is one of the most pressing.The report lists security as the top barrier to success for IoT initiatives, according to a survey on IoT adoption conducted by Gartner. A big part of the problem, the report said, is that businesses often don’t have full control over which devices and software are being used at each level of a given IoT project.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

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 →