BrandPost: SD-WAN Vision vs. Acquisition

The migration of applications to the cloud is motivating enterprises to rethink how they architect their WANs, and this in turn has created the SD-WAN market category. The recent acquisition of VeloCloud by VMware, and of Viptela by Cisco earlier in the year, represent attempts by two of the bigger players in IT to stake a claim in this fast-growing new market.While it’s convenient to place products into categories, there are many approaches to SD-WAN, each focused on a different use case or customer base. It was not unexpected to see Cisco go for Viptela. Of all the SD-WAN solutions, Viptela is arguably the one that most closely emulates a traditional router, including conventional device-by-device CLI-based configuration, with a limited amount of central orchestration. It certainly represents the least disruptive approach for Cisco, and gives them an angle to extend the life of the old Swiss army knife known as the ISR.To read this article in full, please click here

How to handle the vanishing radio spectrum: Share frequencies

With the billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices projected to come on-stream over the next few years, questions are arising as to just where the bandwidth and radio channels are going to come from to make it all work.The sensors need to send their likely increasingly voluminous data back to networks wirelessly to be processed.RELATED: 8 tips for building a cost-effective IoT sensor network But there’s a finite amount of radio spectrum available, and much of it is already allocated to incumbent primary users, such as public safety agencies. Other spectrum is dedicated to mobile network operators who have licensed chunks of it. Some is leftover in the millimeter frequencies, which is thus far pretty much untested in the real world — it’s going to be used for 5G in the future.To read this article in full, please click here

How to handle the vanishing radio spectrum: Share frequencies

With the billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices projected to come on-stream over the next few years, questions are arising as to just where the bandwidth and radio channels are going to come from to make it all work.The sensors need to send their likely increasingly voluminous data back to networks wirelessly to be processed.RELATED: 8 tips for building a cost-effective IoT sensor network But there’s a finite amount of radio spectrum available, and much of it is already allocated to incumbent primary users, such as public safety agencies. Other spectrum is dedicated to mobile network operators who have licensed chunks of it. Some is leftover in the millimeter frequencies, which is thus far pretty much untested in the real world — it’s going to be used for 5G in the future.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: Intel moves into 5G

The Intel XMM 8000-series of 5G-capable modems will bring the next generation of wireless connectivity to PCs, smartphones and infrastructure devices with a target consumer-product launch in mid-2019. Intel INTC, -2.23% also updated plans for a new 4G LTE modem that will offer speeds as high as 1.6 gigabits per second, a substantial upgrade from current connectivity options on smartphones (peaking at 1.0 gigabits per second), again with a 2019 target release. — Ryan Shrout @ Market Watch

Your Holiday Cybersecurity Guide

Many of us are visiting parents/relatives this Thanksgiving/Christmas, and will have an opportunity to help our them with cybersecurity issues. I thought I'd write up a quick guide of the most important things.

1. Stop them from reusing passwords

By far the biggest threat to average people is that they re-use the same password across many websites, so that when one website gets hacked, all their accounts get hacked.

To demonstrate the problem, go to haveibeenpwned.com and enter the email address of your relatives. This will show them a number of sites where their password has already been stolen, like LinkedIn, Adobe, etc. That should convince them of the severity of the problem.

They don't need a separate password for every site. You don't care about the majority of website whether you get hacked. Use a common password for all the meaningless sites. You only need unique passwords for important accounts, like email, Facebook, and Twitter.

Write down passwords and store them in a safe place. Sure, it's a common joke that people in offices write passwords on Post-It notes stuck on their monitors or under their keyboards. This is a common security mistake, but that's only because the Continue reading

Installing Postman on Fedora 27

I recently had a need to install the Postman native app on Fedora 27. The Postman site itself only provides a link to the download and a rather generic set of instructions for installing the Postman native app (a link to these instructions for Ubuntu 16.04 is also provided). There were not, however, any directions for Fedora. Hence, I’m posting the steps I took to set up the Postman native app on my Fedora 27 laptop.

(Note that these instructions will probably work with other versions of Fedora as well, but I’ve only used them on Fedora 27.)

Here are the steps I followed:

  1. Download the installation tarball, either via your browser of choice or via the command line. If you’d prefer to use the command line, this command should take care of you:

    curl -L https://www.getpostman.com/app/download/linux64 -O postman-linux-x64.tar.gz

  2. Unpack the tarball into the directory of your choice. I prefer to put third-party applications such as this into the /opt directory; you can (obviously) put it wherever you prefer. This command should do the trick:

    sudo tar xvzf postman-linux-x64.tar.gz -C /opt

    If you prefer a directory other than /opt, specify the Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: The future of SD-WAN: Gen2 is here

SD-WAN is the hottest topic in networking today. On the one hand, analyst reports state that this industry is in its infancy with less than 5% adoption through 2017. On the other hand, the same analysts project over 50% customer adoption in the next 36 months. Why has adoption been modest to-date, and why is 10X acceleration expected now? The answer lies in understanding the differences between the first generation of SD-WAN (Gen1) and the second generation of SD-WAN (Gen2).In the old days, WAN routers were focused on providing connectivity using MPLS. The goal of Gen1 SD-WAN was to enable usage of broadband for connectivity. So Gen1 SD-WAN provided better VPN manageability and improved the delivery of voice traffic over broadband connections. However, like many first-generation products, Gen1 SD-WAN has serious limitations, three of which I examine below.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The future of SD-WAN: Gen2 is here

SD-WAN is the hottest topic in networking today. On the one hand, analyst reports state that this industry is in its infancy with less than 5% adoption through 2017. On the other hand, the same analysts project over 50% customer adoption in the next 36 months. Why has adoption been modest to-date, and why is 10X acceleration expected now? The answer lies in understanding the differences between the first generation of SD-WAN (Gen1) and the second generation of SD-WAN (Gen2).In the old days, WAN routers were focused on providing connectivity using MPLS. The goal of Gen1 SD-WAN was to enable usage of broadband for connectivity. So Gen1 SD-WAN provided better VPN manageability and improved the delivery of voice traffic over broadband connections. However, like many first-generation products, Gen1 SD-WAN has serious limitations, three of which I examine below.To read this article in full, please click here

Thoughts on Open/R

Since Facebook has released their Open/R routing platform, there has been a lot of chatter around whether or not it will be a commercial success, whether or not every hyperscaler should use the protocol, whether or not this obsoletes everything in routing before this day in history, etc., etc. I will begin with a single point.

If you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough.

Design is about tradeoffs. Protocol design is no different than any other design. Hence, we should expect that Open/R makes some tradeoffs. I know this might be surprising to some folks, particularly in the crowd that thinks every new routing system is going to be a silver bullet that solved every problem from the past, that the routing singularity has now occurred, etc. I’ve been in the world of routing since the early 1990’s, perhaps a bit before, and there is one thing I know for certain: if you understand the basics, you would understand there is no routing singularity, and there never will be—at least not until someone produces a quantum wave routing protocol.

Ther reality is you always face one of two choices in routing: build a protocol specifically tuned Continue reading

OpenStack and CITC – Creating and learning about OpenStack networking

Part 1 – Examining the existing network

In my previous post, I was playing around with Cumulus in the Cloud (CITC) and how it was integrated with OpenStack. Now that I was playing with OpenStack in CITC, I wanted to dive deeper into the networking specific technology.

In this blog post I will be discussing how I leveraged a flat network to initially create simple instance deployments. Then I’ll dive more deeply into how I created a VXLAN network for my OpenStack instances to create more scalable east-west communication. In the previous post I used the CITC console as my primary interface for configuration. This time I will be using an SSH client and the direct SSH information, as the outputs I’m gathering have wider width that is easier to obtain via an SSH client.

To do so, I just clicked the SSH access button on the right hand side of the GUI. This provided me with the username, password and IP address that would allow me to use my own SSH client to connect to the CITC infrastructure.

For the uninitiated, here is a great intro doc into OpenStack networking. In addition, my colleague Eric Pulvino pointed me Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Symbiont, Loupe, Etleap, Aerospike, Stream, Scalyr, VividCortex, Domino Data Lab, MemSQL, Zohocorp

Who's Hiring? 

  • Symbiont is a New York-based financial technology company building new kinds of computer networks to connect independent financial institutions together and allow them to share business logic and data in real time. This involves developing a distributed system which is also decentralized, and which allows for the creation of smart contracts, self-executing cryptographic agreements among counterparties. To do so, we're using a lot of techniques in blockchain technology, as well as those from traditional distributed systems, programming language design and cryptography. We are hiring for a number of roles, from entry-level to expert, including Haskell Backend Engineer, Database Engineer, Product Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Programming Language Engineer and SecOps Engineer. To find out more, just e-mail us your resume. 

  • Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

  • On-demand Webinar. Fast & Frictionless - The Decision Engine for Seamless Digital Business. In this session, guest speakers Michele Goetz, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and Matthias Baumhof, VP Worldwide Engineering at ThreatMetrix, discuss: How risk-based authentication leveraging digital identities is key to empowering customer transactions; How real-time customer trust decisions can reduce fraud and improve customer satisfaction; How a high performance Hybrid Memory Continue reading

14 Linux apps that will change how you work

Linux productivity toolsThe sheer number of Linux apps available today is mind boggling and one category in particular has exploded over the last few years: productivity tools. While there are a few well-known apps such as LibreOffice and NeoOffice (both forks of OpenOffice), there are many more tools that can make your work easier. Here are a variety of killer Linux office productivity apps you may not know about. (Note: many of them are also available for macOS and Windows, so if you have to hop between operating systems, you can keep at least a semblance of consistency.)To read this article in full, please click here

Living In A Multi-Cloud World

Living In A Multi-Cloud World

A few months ago at Cloudflare’s Internet Summit, we hosted a discussion on A Cloud Without Handcuffs with Joe Beda, one of the creators of Kubernetes, and Brandon Phillips, the co-founder of CoreOS. The conversation touched on multiple areas, but it’s clear that more and more companies are recognizing the need to have some strategy around hosting their applications on multiple cloud providers.

Earlier this year, Mary Meeker published her annual Internet Trends report which revealed that 22% of respondents viewed Cloud Vendor Lock-In as a top 3 concern, up from just 7% in 2012. This is in contrast to previous top concerns, Data Security and Cost & Savings, both of which dropped amongst those surveyed.

Living In A Multi-Cloud World

At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better internet. To fulfill this mission, our customers need to have consistent access to the best technology and services, over time. This is especially the case with respect to storage and compute providers. This means not becoming locked-in to any single provider and taking advantage of multiple cloud computing vendors (such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform) for the same end user services.

The Benefits of Having Multiple Cloud Vendors

There are Continue reading

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