New global internet reliability concerns emerge

Undersea, internet-carrying cables are not protected well enough and there isn’t an alternative in place should they fail.That's according to a new report from U.K.-based Policy Exchange, which outlines potential catastrophic effects that a simple cut in the hosepipe-sized underwater infrastructure could create.Also on Network World: The hidden cause of slow Internet and how to fix it Tsunamis, a vessel dragging an anchor, or even saw-wielding Russians could bring down the global financial system or cripple a solo nation’s internet access, Policy Exchange says in its new study (pdf).To read this article in full, please click here

New global internet reliability concerns emerge

Undersea, internet-carrying cables are not protected well enough and there isn’t an alternative in place should they fail.That's according to a new report from U.K.-based Policy Exchange, which outlines potential catastrophic effects that a simple cut in the hosepipe-sized underwater infrastructure could create.Also on Network World: The hidden cause of slow Internet and how to fix it Tsunamis, a vessel dragging an anchor, or even saw-wielding Russians could bring down the global financial system or cripple a solo nation’s internet access, Policy Exchange says in its new study (pdf).To read this article in full, please click here

Arista brings the benefits of leaf-spine to routing

About a decade ago almost all data centers were built on a traditional three- (or sometimes more) tier architectures that used the spanning tree protocol (STP). That prevented routing loops but also deactivated all the backup links, which accounted for almost half the ports in large environments. This caused organizations to significantly overspend on their networks.Leaf-spine networks, on the other hand, have only two tiers, are much flatter and use something called ECMP (equal cost multi-pathing). So all routes are active, creating a much more efficient network that more agile and costs less.Also on Network World: 10 Most important open source networking projects The traditional three-tier data center was designed to scale up, which was the key requirement in the client/server era. Leaf-spine is optimized for rapid scale out, which has become critical in data centers today, as more and more traffic is moving in an East-West direction. To read this article in full, please click here

Arista brings the benefits of leaf-spine to routing

About a decade ago almost all data centers were built on a traditional three- (or sometimes more) tier architectures that used the spanning tree protocol (STP). That prevented routing loops but also deactivated all the backup links, which accounted for almost half the ports in large environments. This caused organizations to significantly overspend on their networks.Leaf-spine networks, on the other hand, have only two tiers, are much flatter and use something called ECMP (equal cost multi-pathing). So all routes are active, creating a much more efficient network that more agile and costs less.Also on Network World: 10 Most important open source networking projects The traditional three-tier data center was designed to scale up, which was the key requirement in the client/server era. Leaf-spine is optimized for rapid scale out, which has become critical in data centers today, as more and more traffic is moving in an East-West direction. To read this article in full, please click here

CAA of the Wild: Supporting a New Standard

CAA of the Wild: Supporting a New Standard

One thing we take pride in at Cloudflare is embracing new protocols and standards that help make the Internet faster and safer. Sometimes this means that we’ll launch support for experimental features or standards still under active development, as we did with TLS 1.3. Due to the not-quite-final nature of some of these features, we limit the availability at the onset to only the most ardent users so we can observe how these cutting-edge features behave in the wild. Some of our observations have helped the community propose revisions to the corresponding RFCs.

We began supporting the DNS Certification Authority Authorization (CAA) Resource Record in June behind a beta flag. Our goal in doing so was to see how the presence of these records would affect SSL certificate issuance by publicly-trusted certification authorities. We also wanted to do so in advance of the 8 September 2017 enforcement date for mandatory CAA checking at certificate issuance time, without introducing a new and externally unproven behavior to millions of Cloudflare customers at once. This beta period has provided invaluable insight as to how CAA records have changed and will continue to change the commercial public-key infrastructure (PKI) ecosystem.

As of today, Continue reading

J-AUT Course

Hi ,

I have enrolled for Juniper-JAUT Course and looking forward to it.

Below are the details. Its a 5 Day course and am expecting more out of this course.

https://learningportal.juniper.net/juniper/user_activity_info.aspx?id=5186

My main interest lies in YAML / JSON use cases with Juniper Devices and their interaction. I will let you know how the course goes as the day progresses and over all efficiency of the course.

 

-Rakesh

BrandPost: Where Do you Rank? IDC Lists Top Drivers for SD-WAN Adoption

IDC concluded a worldwide survey in September 2017 to learn and report on the key factors driving SD-WAN deployments for enterprises. I’m pleased to see the alignment in the findings with what I wrote in my previous article, SD-WAN Delivers Real Business Outcomes to Cloud-first Enterprises back in September. The results of the survey identified the following top four drivers for deploying an enterprise SD-WAN solution:To read this article in full, please click here

Libertarians are against net neutrality

This post claims to be by a libertarian in support of net neutrality. As a libertarian, I need to debunk this. "Net neutrality" is a case of one-hand clapping, you rarely hear the competing side, and thus, that side may sound attractive. This post is about the other side, from a libertarian point of view.



That post just repeats the common, and wrong, left-wing talking points. I mean, there might be a libertarian case for some broadband regulation, but this isn't it.

This thing they call "net neutrality" is just left-wing politics masquerading as some sort of principle. It's no different than how people claim to be "pro-choice", yet demand forced vaccinations. Or, it's no different than how people claim to believe in "traditional marriage" even while they are on their third "traditional marriage".

Properly defined, "net neutrality" means no discrimination of network traffic. But nobody wants that. A classic example is how most internet connections have faster download speeds than uploads. This discriminates against upload traffic, harming innovation in upload-centric applications like DropBox's cloud backup or BitTorrent's peer-to-peer file transfer. Yet activists never mention this, or other types of network traffic discrimination, because they no more care about "net Continue reading

Worth Reading: Debating Exascale Commodity Hardware

Building the first exascale systems continues to be a high-profile endeavor, with efforts underway worldwide in the United States, the European Union, and Asia – notably China and Japan – that focus on competition between regional powers, the technologies that are going into the architectures, and the promises that these supercomputers hold for everything from research and government to business and commerce. —Jeffery Burt @ The Next Platform

Getting Started: Setting Up A Job Template

Getting-Started-Job-Template.png

Welcome to another post in our Getting Started series. In our previous post, we discussed the basic structure of how you can write your first playbook.

In this post, we will discuss how to set up job templates and run them against your inventory. We will also discuss job output and how you can view previous job runs to compare and contrast successful/failed runs.

Before we get started, a gentle reminder that in order to run job templates successfully in Red Hat® Ansible® Tower, you will need to have an inventory present, an updated project to select a playbook from to run against and up-to-date credentials. 

Job Templates: What Are They?

Job templates are a definition and set of parameters for running an Ansible Playbook. In Ansible Tower, job templates are a visual realization of the ansible-playbook command and all flags you can utilize when executing from the command line. A job template defines the combination of a playbook from a project, an inventory, a credential and any other Ansible parameters required to run.

When you run playbooks from the command line you use arguments to control and direct it. Whether you're invoking an inventory file Continue reading

Renting The Cleanest HPC On Earth

One of the most interesting and strategically located datacenters in the world has taken a shining to HPC, and not just because it is a great business opportunity. Rather, Verne Global is firing up an HPC system rental service in its Icelandic datacenter because its commercial customers are looking for supercomputer-style systems that they can rent rather than buy to augment their existing HPC jobs.

Verne Global, which took over a former NATO airbase and an Allied strategic forces command center outside of Keflavik, Iceland back in 2012 and converted it into a super-secure datacenter, is this week taking the …

Renting The Cleanest HPC On Earth was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Reaction: Science and Engineering

Are you a scientist, or an engineer? This question does not seem to occur to most engineers, but it does seem science has “taken the lead role” in recent history, with engineers being sometimes (or perhaps often) seen as “the folks who figure out how to make use of what scientists are discovering.” There are few fields where this seems closer to the truth than computing. Peter Denning has written an insightful article over at the ACM on this topic; a few reactions are in order.

Denning separates engineers from scientists by saying:

The first concerns the nature of their work. Engineers design and build technologies that serve useful purposes, whereas scientists search for laws explaining phenomena.

While this does seem like a useful starting point, I’m not at all certain the two fields can be cleanly separated in this way. The reality is there is probably a continuum starting from what might be called “meta-engineers,” those who’s primary goal is to implement a technology designed by someone else by mentally reverse engineering what this “someone else” has done, to the deeply focused “pure scientist,” who really does not care about the practical application, but is rather simply searching Continue reading

AMD scores its first big server win with Azure

AMD built it, and now the OEM has come. In this case, its Epyc server processors have scored their first big public win, with Microsoft announcing Azure instances based on AMD’s Epyc server microprocessors.AMD was first to 64-bit x86 design with Athlon on the desktop and Opteron on the servers. Once Microsoft ported Windows Server to 64 bits, the benefit became immediately apparent. Gone was the 4GB memory limit of 32-bit processors, replaced with 16 exabytes of memory, something we won’t live to see in our lifetimes (famous last words, I know).Also on Network World: Micro-modular data centers set to multiply When Microsoft published a white paper in 2005 detailing how it was able to consolidate 250 32-bit MSN Network servers into 25 64-bit servers thanks to the increase in memory, which meant more connections per machine, that started the ball rolling for AMD. And within a few years, Opteron had 20 percent server market share.To read this article in full, please click here

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