In this video, Keith Townsend explains what network disaggregation means, and how separating the network operating system from hardware provides enterprises and service providers with valuable flexibility. Townsend is principal at The CTO Advisor and Interop ITX infrastructure chair.
New assurance software continuously verifies the network is operating as intended, the company claims.
Regardless of how much I write about (the ridiculousness of using) stretched VLANs, I keep getting questions along the same lines. This time it’s:
What type of applications require L2 Extension and L3 extension?
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone use L3 extension (after all, isn’t that what Internet is all about), so let’s focus on the first one.
Stretched VLANs (or L2 extensions) are used to solve a number of unrelated problems, because once a vendor sold you a hammer everything starts looking like a nail, and once you get used to replacing everything with nails, you want to use them in all possible environments, including public and hybrid clouds.
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The company says a Tier 1 North American operator is a customer.
The technology comes from its recent acquisition of LivingObjects.
"We are a new type of carrier that offers cloud DNA to the old world of WAN.”
There has been a great deal of interest in deep learning chip startup, Graphcore, since we first got the limited technical details of the company’s first-generation chip last year, which was followed by revelations about how their custom software stack can run a range of convolutional, recurrent, generative adversarial neural network jobs.
In our conversations with those currently using GPUs for large-scale training (often with separate CPU only inference clusters), we have found generally that there is great interest in all new architectures for deep learning workloads. But what would really seal the deal is something that could both training …
Graphcore Builds Momentum with Early Silicon was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
In Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.4, we made some changes to how inventory works. We introduced a new cli tool, and added an inventory plugin type.
The goal of this plugin type, was well, to make Ansible Engine even more pluggable. All kidding aside, we wanted to provide Ansible Engine content authors and Ansible Engine users a new way to visualize their target inventory. Using the ansible-inventory command, the targeted inventory will be listed with the details of the hosts in that inventory, and the hosts groups.
For example:
[thaumos@ecb51a545078 /]# ansible-inventory -i ~/Development/playbooks/inventory/prod.aws_ec2.yml --list
{
"_meta": {
"hostvars": {
"ec2-5x-xx-x-xxx.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com": {
"AmiLaunchIndex": 2,
"Architecture": "x86_64",
"BlockDeviceMappings": [
{
"DeviceName": "/dev/sda1",
"Ebs": {
"AttachTime": "2017-12-13T15:40:19+00:00",
"DeleteOnTermination": false,
"Status": "attached",
"VolumeId": "vol-0514xxx"
}
}
],
"ClientToken": "",
"EbsOptimized": false,
"Hypervisor": "xen",
"ImageId": "ami-0c2aba6c",
"InstanceId": "i-009xxxx3",
"InstanceType": "t2.micro",
"KeyName": "blogKey",
"LaunchTime": "2017-12-13T15:40:18+00:00",
"Monitoring": {
"State": "disabled"
},
"NetworkInterfaces": [
{
"Association": {
"IpOwnerId": "amazon",
"PublicDnsName": "ec2-5x-xx-x-xxx.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com",
"PublicIp": "5x.xx.x.xxx"
},
"Attachment": {
"AttachTime": "2017-12-13T15:40:18+00:00",
"AttachmentId": "eni-attach-97c4xxxx",
"DeleteOnTermination": true,
"DeviceIndex": 0,
"Status": "attached"
},
"Description": "",
"Groups": [
{
"GroupId": "sg-e63xxxxd",
"GroupName": "blogGroup"
}
],
"Ipv6Addresses": Continue readingOn layer 2 networks, high availability can be achieved by:
Layer 2 networks need very little configuration but come with a major drawback in highly available scenarios: an incident is likely to bring the whole network down.2 Therefore, it is safer to limit the scope of a single layer 2 network by, for example, using one distinct network in each rack and connecting them together with layer 3 routing. Incidents are unlikely to impact a whole IP network.
In the illustration below, top of the rack switches provide a default gateway for hosts. To provide redundancy, they use an MC-LAG implementation. Layer 2 fault domains are scoped to a rack. Each IP subnet is bound to a specific rack and routing information is shared between top of the rack switches and core routers using a routing protocol like OSPF.
There are two main issues with this design:
The Continue reading
At the Internet Society, we are worried about the state of the Internet today. This global “network of networks” is now a critical part of our daily lives. We use it to communicate and connect with our families, friends, co-workers and customers. It is the engine that powers the global economy. It is our source of entertainment, of education, and of information. The Internet brings so many opportunities to all.
But… those opportunities are now under attack from several threats:
Wireless networks aren’t easy, just ask the cable companies.