IDG Contributor Network: Prepare your digital enterprises for 2018

To gain the edge in today’s competitive digital marketplace, enterprises must update/transform from their old-school network services tools in favor of innovative solutions that revamp existing infrastructures. The best way to stay ahead of the digital evolution curve is to plan your digital infrastructures in advance and create strategic execution plans involving multiple teams. We’ve already determined that network automation is the ultimate solution, but challenges remain. In this article, we will discuss the visibility challenges ahead in 2018, and how to overcome them.  Major challenges faced by network teams today There are many automation technologies available for enterprises to strengthen digital infrastructures. Regardless of their availability, network teams are finding it extremely difficult to adapt. There is a huge misconception today that applying automation is a single-step process. The truth is, automation is a complex progression to put in place, as all existing infrastructures and processes must be redefined. Apart from this, network automation creates the demand for team restructuring, role defining, and allotment of access control for various tasks. Amidst these tasks, networking teams also face major visibility challenges when restructuring the digital networks. Below are few initiatives that can help businesses gain agility and security in Continue reading

2018: Time To Listen To The Voices of Women

2017 was a year when the voice of women resonated around the world. Global women’s marches, hashtags such as #MeToo and #TimesUp, record numbers of women entering politics – all together a global call for action that signaled women were tired of not being heard.

It’s been a year that’s left many in the western world asking how we got here and how we can make sure we never go back. A big reason for this is because of what the Internet helps us do. We can reach further, speak louder, and come together like never before.

We know that women use the Internet to build opportunities for business, their communities, and for their families. But for the first time we are seeing how women are using it to collaborate, coordinate, and unite to make change happen.

But now is the time to ask questions.

Just under 50% of the world’s population isn’t online. Break that down further, women are 50% less likely to be connected than men.

The Internet’s future is one where new divides are emerging. It’s not just the binary fact of being on or offline – it’s who, how, and where. And, as the world’s political Continue reading

BrandPost: 2018 New Year’s Resolutions for WAN Managers

I’d like to wish everyone a hearty Happy New Year! This is the time of year that we make promises to ourselves like saying we will get to the gym more often, lose weight, not text and drive, and other things that should improve our lives or the world we live in. Many of us make these resolutions annually, but fail to keep them because they are often unrealistic or simply too hard to live up to.I’d like to offer five New Year’s resolutions for those of you who manage your company’s wide-area network (WAN). They are as follows:I resolve to leverage automation. The concept of automating manual networking tasks certainly isn’t new. However, the implementation of automation has been very light to date, primarily because most skilled engineers could keep the network up and running doing things the way they’ve always been done. Also, networking professionals generally fear the concept of automation as it threatens to marginalize or eliminate their jobs.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco adds new capabilities to its IBN infrastructure

Cisco has advanced its intent-based networking gear so now it can both verify that networks are actually running according to the intentions set by admins and also so it can help to find and resolve network problems faster on both wired and wireless networks.The company says this is a new phase in the evolution of its IBN in which it is addressing assurance – the ability to assess whether the intentions that have been translated into policies and orchestrated throughout the network by configuring individual devices are carrying out the intentions they are supposed to.+DON'T MISS:Getting grounded in intent-based networking; A deep dive into Cisco's intent-based networking; What is intent-based networking?+To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco adds new capabilities to its IBN infrastructure

Cisco has advanced its intent-based networking gear so now it can both verify that networks are actually running according to the intentions set by admins and also so it can help to find and resolve network problems faster on both wired and wireless networks.The company says this is a new phase in the evolution of its IBN in which it is addressing assurance – the ability to assess whether the intentions that have been translated into policies and orchestrated throughout the network by configuring individual devices are carrying out the intentions they are supposed to.+DON'T MISS:Getting grounded in intent-based networking; A deep dive into Cisco's intent-based networking; What is intent-based networking?+To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco adds new capabilities to its IBN infrastructure

Cisco has advanced its intent-based networking gear so now it can both verify that networks are actually running according to the intentions set by admins and also so it can help to find and resolve network problems faster on both wired and wireless networks.The company says this is a new phase in the evolution of its IBN in which it is addressing assurance – the ability to assess whether the intentions that have been translated into policies and orchestrated throughout the network by configuring individual devices are carrying out the intentions they are supposed to.+DON'T MISS:Getting grounded in intent-based networking; A deep dive into Cisco's intent-based networking; What is intent-based networking?+To read this article in full, please click here

Revisited: The Need for Stretched VLANs

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.

Read more ...

Graphcore Builds Momentum with Early Silicon

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.

Dynamic Inventory: Past, Present & Future

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 reading

L3 routing to the hypervisor with BGP

On 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.

Legacy L2 design

There are two main issues with this design:

  1. The Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: What can data centers learn from the New England Patriots?

When February rolls around each year, every football fan knows what’s right around the corner – it’s time for the Super Bowl! This game brings together the two best teams in the National Football League to compete for the title, with all 32 teams battling throughout the year to earn that top spot. Believe it or not, this same competition is very similar to the data center industry.In fact, the NFL and data centers have many similarities. From the fundamental skills needed to be successful, to the strong team-centric leadership required and the same competition always at the top of their league or industry, below are a few examples of how the NFL and data centers have more in common than you may think.To read this article in full, please click here

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