Cisco, Mellanox, Ixia and Cumulus: Last Day of NFD17!

In case you have missed the noise on my Twitter feed (@mrtugs) in the last couple of days, I’m currently at Networking Field Day 17 in Silicon Valley, and today (Friday, January 26) is the last day of presentations. So far this week, along with eleven other lucky delegates, we’ve been treated to presentations from Juniper, Thousand Eyes, Extreme Networks and VMware, including Velocloud from VMware. As usual, it has been a firehose of information and thankfully all the videos will be posted soon so I can go back and figure out what I might have missed.

The last two days of presentations have seen a very strong focus on automation, network fabric (including cloud connectivity) and hybrid cloud services. It’s uncanny how everything aligns, sometimes!

Today is the last day of NFD17 and we’re going to be starting at Cisco at 8AM PST, then after lunch we’re hearing from Mellanox, Ixia and Cumulus, all beginning at 1:30PM PST. We live stream all the presentations, so if you want to tune in and join us, pop over to the NFD17 site and the stream will be live on that page. If you are watching in real time and have a Continue reading

Legacy IT Is Not A Monument

During Networking Field Day 17, there was a lot of talk about legacy IT constructs, especially as they relate to the cloud. Cloud workloads are much better when they are new things with new applications and new processes. Existing legacy workloads are harder to move to the cloud, especially if they require some specific Java version or special hardware to work properly.

We talk a lot about how painful legacy IT is. So why do we turn it into a monument that spans the test of time?’

Keeping Things Around

Most monuments that we have from ancient times are things that we never really intended to keep. Aside from the things that were supposed to be saved from the beginning, most iconic things were never built to last. Even things like the Parthenon or the Eiffel Tower. These buildings were always envisioned to be torn down sooner or later.

Today, we can’t imagine a world without those monuments. We can’t conceive of a time without them. And, depending on Continue reading

Meltdown, Spectre and Security Automation

Keeping computer systems secure is one of those never ending tasks. You could be forgiven for thinking of it like "Painting the Forth Bridge". Most of the time it's 'put new software' in place, and you're good. Every now and then it’s, well, a bit more complicated.

The first week of January saw two flaws announced, called “Meltdown” and “Spectre.” Both involved the hardware at the heart of more or less every computing device on the planet – the processor. There is a great in-depth review of the two flaws here. You can also find some additional information in this blog by Red Hatter Jon Masters.

In the complex world of IT, keeping on top of security can be less painful with the help of an easy automation tool. One of our Ansible engineers, Sam Doran, has written a couple of Ansible plays to patch systems. While Meltdown and Spectre are not completely mitigated, we'd like to share these plays with you to demonstrate how to easily deploy the patches that are available; you can find them here:

If you make any improvements to them we'd welcome pull requests!

How to use VPNs in China without breaking the law

A lot of people outside China ask whether the government there is going to shut down the corporate VPNs of international companies with facilities in China. How will the new Chinese cybersecurity law impact foreign IT operations in the country? Is it safe to transfer information into and out of China?To answer, let’s start with the Great Firewall of China (GFC), which has a big impact on what information is allowed to move in and out of the country. The GFC is a combination of government policies and advanced telecom equipment deployed by the main Internet Service Providers in China. It is intended to safeguard the national security and the best interests of China.To read this article in full, please click here

How to use VPNs in China without breaking the law

A lot of people outside China ask whether the government there is going to shut down the corporate VPNs of international companies with facilities in China. How will the new Chinese cybersecurity law impact foreign IT operations in the country? Is it safe to transfer information into and out of China?To answer, let’s start with the Great Firewall of China (GFC), which has a big impact on what information is allowed to move in and out of the country. The GFC is a combination of government policies and advanced telecom equipment deployed by the main Internet Service Providers in China. It is intended to safeguard the national security and the best interests of China.To read this article in full, please click here

The Hard Limits for Deep Learning in HPC

If the hype is to be believed, there is no computational problem that cannot be tackled faster and better by artificial intelligence. But many of the supercomputing sites of the world beg to differ.

With that said, the deep learning boom has benefitted HPC in numerous ways, including bringing new cred to the years of hardware engineering around GPUs, software scalability tooling for complex parallel codes, and other feats of efficient performance at scale. And there are indeed areas of high performance computing that stand to benefit from integration of deep learning into the larger workflow including weather, cosmology, molecular …

The Hard Limits for Deep Learning in HPC was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Using Docker Machine with Azure

I’ve written about using Docker Machine with a number of different providers, such as with AWS, with OpenStack, and even with a local KVM/Libvirt daemon. In this post, I’ll expand that series to show using Docker Machine with Azure. (This is a follow-up to my earlier post on experimenting with Azure.)

As with most of the other Docker Machine providers, using Docker Machine with Azure is reasonably straightforward. Run docker-machine create -d azure --help to get an idea of some of the parameters you can use when creating VMs on Azure using Docker Machine. A full list of the various parameters and options for the Azure drive is also available.

The only required parameter is --azure-subscription-id, which specifies your Azure subscription ID. If you don’t know this, or want to obtain it programmatically, you can use this Azure CLI command:

az account show --query "id" -o tsv

If you have more than one subscription, you’ll probably need to modify this command to filter it down to the specific subscription you want to use.

Additional parameters that you can supply include (but aren’t limited to):

  • Use the --azure-image parameter to specify the VM image you’d like to Continue reading

Automatic Product Pitch Generator

Because we all like a little bit of fun, I created an automatic Product Pitch Generator for network vendors. More accurately, a conversation about buzzwords occurred in the context of Networking Field Day 17 where it was jokingly suggested that we needed to take some of the amazing words we were hearing and make a generator. Here’s the best part (if you look at it this way); we ended up with two generators!

Big props to Jordan Martin who hacked together some Python, and created his Network Product Buzzword Generator which I think is hilarious (go try it out!). Meanwhile, I was hacking together some Go and came up with this mess of a Product Pitch Generator:

Hit Refresh to get a new Pitch!

And finally, if you’re watching the NFD17 livestream, why not ML-wash yourself and play NFD17 Buzzword Bingo?

NFD17 Bingo!

Have fun! ?

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at Automatic Product Pitch Generator and give me a share/like. Thank you!

Addressing 2017

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.

Data could one day be stored on molecules

Billions of terabytes of data could be stored in one small flask of liquid, a group of scientists believe. The team from Brown University says soon it will be able to figure out a chemical-derived way of storing and manipulating mass-data by loading it onto molecules and then dissolving the molecules into liquids.If the method is successful, large-scale, synthetic molecule storage in liquids could one day replace hard drives. It would be a case of the traditional engineering that we’ve always pursued for storage being replaced by chemistry in our machines and data centers.Also on Network World: The future of storage: Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo shares his predictions The U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded the Brown team $4.1 million to work out how move the concept forward.To read this article in full, please click here

Data could one day be stored on molecules

Billions of terabytes of data could be stored in one small flask of liquid, a group of scientists believe. The team from Brown University says soon it will be able to figure out a chemical-derived way of storing and manipulating mass-data by loading it onto molecules and then dissolving the molecules into liquids.If the method is successful, large-scale, synthetic molecule storage in liquids could one day replace hard drives. It would be a case of the traditional engineering that we’ve always pursued for storage being replaced by chemistry in our machines and data centers.Also on Network World: The future of storage: Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo shares his predictions The U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded the Brown team $4.1 million to work out how move the concept forward.To read this article in full, please click here

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