The Ecosystem Expands For AMD Epyc Servers

The “Naples” Epyc server processors do not exactly present a new architecture from a new processor maker, but given the difficulties that AMD had at the tail end of the Opteron line a decade ago and its long dormancy in the server space, it is almost like AMD had to start back at the beginning to gain the trust of potential server buyers.

Luckily for AMD, and its Arm server competitors Qualcomm and Cavium, there is intense pressure from all aspects of high-end computing – internal applications and external ones at hyperscalers and some cloud builders as well as enterprises …

The Ecosystem Expands For AMD Epyc Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: How to help your files speak S3

Among the many clouds in the storage sky, Amazon Web Services is the dominant leader by far. The annual AWS re:Invent trade show is taking place in Las Vegas this week, and given how many enterprises have some data in the AWS cloud, the event is expected to sell out.It’s no secret that the cloud is one of today’s top storage industry disruptors, significantly reshaping enterprise IT architectures and investments. Cloud object storage has a well-earned reputation for cutting costs since enterprises can avoid both upfront capital and costly operational expenditures by storing data off-premises. However, the challenges of getting data to the cloud means many enterprises are only getting started on adoption. There is much more growth ahead, as the cloud’s elastic scaling can also deliver agility, but so far, most enterprises are relegating cloud storage for archival.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: Quad9

In a joint project, IBM Security along with Packet Clearing House (PCH) and The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) today launched a free service designed to give consumers and businesses added online privacy and security protection. The new DNS service is called Quad9 in reference to the IP address 9.9.9.9 offered for the service. The group says the service is aimed at protecting users from accessing malicious websites known to steal personal information, infect users with ransomware and malware, or conduct fraudulent activity. —CircleIDIn a joint project, IBM Security along with Packet Clearing House (PCH) and The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) today launched a free service designed to give consumers and businesses added online privacy and security protection. The new DNS service is called Quad9 in reference to the IP address 9.9.9.9 offered for the service. The group says the service is aimed at protecting users from accessing malicious websites known to steal personal information, infect users with ransomware and malware, or conduct fraudulent activity. —CircleID

NetDevOpEd: The right tool for the right job

I’ve been traveling to northern Europe these past few months to meet with various customers, deliver onsite trainings and speak at meetups. I’ve noticed some common themes that crop up no matter with whom I speak. IT professionals are exhausted by the complexity required to manage and maintain their infrastructure. Somehow, networking and server interconnectivity has become this unmanageable complex mess over the past 20 years. And I don’t blame them. As networking has layered on more and more solutions, it becomes hard to separate out the complexity from the deployment.

Normally when I have these conversations, I start at the most basic levels. I focus on two topics that create the most grief for the vast majority of networks:

  1. Layer 1 cabling issues
  2. Typos and misconfigurations

The reason I start there is because resolving these two issues in the data center would eradicate over 90% of all issues that cause late maintenance windows and urgent midnight troubleshooting calls.

At Cumulus Networks, we resolve these issues by rethinking what it means to configure a network device. The most effective solution to both of these issues is simplification of configuration. Because we focus on integration and solution first, we are able Continue reading

Terminology Tuesday Presents: Blockchain

Think of Blockchain as primarily two things.  1) A peer-to-peer technology 2) A way of keeping a public record.

The technological backing of Blockchain is the ability to have many (many) computers host the same information.  Snippets of code (known as blocks) are duplicated and maintained in so many different places rendering fraud impossible.  The fact that each of these blocks is timestamped and unique makes it increasingly challenging to outsmart.  If you’re interested in learning more about the technological specifics there are a number of great resources online including this presentation by Binh Nguyen, IBM’s Blockchain Fabric Chief Architect.

Today, Blockchain is most commonly thought of in connection to Bitcoin as it describes the technology and process that we’ve all come to know as being so secure.  Bitcoin’s past affiliations with illegalities of all sorts have given a bad name to Blockchain but there are many benefits to secure transactions all with a public record as our purchases and currency become increasingly digital.

Want to learn more?  Check out these sources:

 

Terminology Tuesday is a new blog series.  What would you like Continue reading

Three tips for developing a digital strategy

Paul Whimpenny is Senior Officer for Digital Strategy at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), an agency that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Its goal is to achieve food security for all and make sure that people have regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives. It has more than 194 member states and works in over 130 countries worldwide.Our organization, like many others has been both inspired and slightly terrified at the same time by the emergence of new digital markets. From AirBnB to Spotify, we see how whole industries can be changed almost in the blink of an eye, sometimes triggering a rapid decline of more traditional industries.To read this article in full, please click here

Three tips for developing a digital strategy

Paul Whimpenny is Senior Officer for Digital Strategy at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), an agency that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Its goal is to achieve food security for all and make sure that people have regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives. It has more than 194 member states and works in over 130 countries worldwide.Our organization, like many others has been both inspired and slightly terrified at the same time by the emergence of new digital markets. From AirBnB to Spotify, we see how whole industries can be changed almost in the blink of an eye, sometimes triggering a rapid decline of more traditional industries.To read this article in full, please click here

Linux for the Industry 4.0 era: New distro for factory automation

NXP Semiconductors, a world leader in secure connectivity solutions, just announced a Linux distribution that is intended to support factory automation. It's called Open Industrial Linux (OpenIL), and it's promising true industrial-grade security based on trusted computing, hardened software, cryptographic operations and end-to-end security.The fact that factory managers and industrial equipment manufacturers are turning to Linux is not surprising considering its operational stability, professional approach to system security, and its obvious low cost of ownership. The importance of the security and reliability of manufacturing security to the well being of any industrial nation is clear from the focus that DHS places on this sector.To read this article in full, please click here

Liveblog: Deep Dive on Amazon Elastic File System

This is a liveblog of the AWS re:Invent 2017 session titled “Deep Dive on Amazon Elastic File System (EFS).” The presenters are Edward Naim and Darryl Osborne, both with AWS. This is my last session of day 2 of re:Invent; thus far, most of my time has been spent in hands-on workshops with only a few breakout sessions today. EFS is a topic I’ve watched, but haven’t had time to really dig into, so I’m looking forward to this session.

Naim kicks off the session with looking at the four phases users go through when they are choosing/adopting a storage solution:

  1. Choosing the right storage solution
  2. Testing and optimizing
  3. Ingest (loading data)
  4. Running it (operating it in production)

Starting with Phase 1, Naim outlines the three main things that people think about. The first item is storage type. The second is features and performance, and the third item is economics (how much does it cost). Diving into each of these items in a bit more detail, Naim talks about file storage, block storage, and object storage, and the characteristics of each of these approaches. Having covered these approaches, Naim returns to file storage (naturally) and talks about why file Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 5 ways to shape Ajit Pai’s proposal to actually benefit broadband users via net neutrality

The FCC’s December 14th vote on repealing net neutrality will have far reaching implications for our future. It is important in that case to not only read articles and watch the videos, but to actually read Ajit Pai’s proposal in its entirety. This Harvard grad and former Verizon lawyer chooses words carefully, leaning on legal terminology rather than technical verbiage to produce a conclusion that does not stem from his premise. It is not clear what the intent of this proposal is, however, it clearly does not benefit broadband users.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Making digitalization work

 What is digitalization? According to Gartner, “digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities. It is the process of moving to a digital business.” This includes evolving existing products more quickly, and being more agile in bringing new products to market.At a greater level of detail, digitalization means that the enterprise implements its critical business processes in software. These include: Marketing to prospective customers Engaging with existing customers Managing the relationships with suppliers Managing the entire production to fulfillment process Managing the relationships with partners Managing the relationships with employees and contractors It is also clear from the Gartner research that CEO’s expect digitalization to drive growth in sales and profits and that they expect their technology management teams (IT) and technology leadership teams (the CIO and his staff) to successfully lead and implement the technology initiatives that will deliver these benefits from digitalization.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Making digitalization work

 What is digitalization? According to Gartner, “digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities. It is the process of moving to a digital business.” This includes evolving existing products more quickly, and being more agile in bringing new products to market.At a greater level of detail, digitalization means that the enterprise implements its critical business processes in software. These include: Marketing to prospective customers Engaging with existing customers Managing the relationships with suppliers Managing the entire production to fulfillment process Managing the relationships with partners Managing the relationships with employees and contractors It is also clear from the Gartner research that CEO’s expect digitalization to drive growth in sales and profits and that they expect their technology management teams (IT) and technology leadership teams (the CIO and his staff) to successfully lead and implement the technology initiatives that will deliver these benefits from digitalization.To read this article in full, please click here

Debating The Role Of Commodity Chips In Exascale

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.

The Chinese government is pouring money and resources into its roadmaps for both pre-exascale and exascale systems, Japan is moving forward with Fujitsu’s Post-K system that will use processors based on the Arm architecture rather than the …

Debating The Role Of Commodity Chips In Exascale was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: DNS performance metrics

Most of these benchmarks focus on denial-of-service resistance: What is the maximum query load that can be served? This is indeed a metric that is good to know. Less discussed, however, is performance under normal conditions. Every time a nameserver is slow, a user somewhere is waiting. And not only is a user waiting, some government agencies, one of which is the UK’s OFCOM, take a very strong interest in DNS latencies. In addition, in contractual relations, there is frequently the desire to specify guaranteed performance levels. —Bert Hubert @ APNIC

How Docker Enterprise Edition Helps Open Doors at Assa Abloy

ASSA ABLOY is the world’s largest lock manufacturer with 47,000 employees worldwide and well-known brands like Yale, Sargent and Assa in their portfolio. The vision for ASSA ABLOY is to become the most innovative provider of door opening solutions through growth of electro-mechanical and digital entry solutions. With increasingly global operations to deal with as well, ASSA ABLOY recognized the opportunity to leverage public cloud, microservices and containers to fuel this digital transformation.

Jan Hedstrom, Cloud Infrastructure Architect in the Shared Technologies department at ASSA ABLOY, and Patrick Van Der Bleek, Solutions Engineer at Docker, presented at DockerCon Europe how ASSA ABLOY leveraged Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE)  as their central secure container management platform for their global hardware and software workflow . 

You can watch their entire talk here:

 

Journey from Docker CE to Docker EE

Some developers at ASSA ABLOY started using Docker for microservice development back in 2014, but it was uncoordinated with manual, scripted deployments of containers onto individual servers, inconsistent practices, no separation between teams, and without any image standards. Additionally, ASSA ABLOY knew that going to a public cloud like AWS would give them a “datacenter with superpowers”, but they were concerned about cloud Continue reading

The Migration of Political Internet Shutdowns

In January 2011, what was arguably the first significant disconnection of an entire country from the Internet took place when routes to Egyptian networks disappeared from the Internet’s global routing table, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. It was followed in short order by nationwide disruptions in Bahrain, Libya, and Syria. These outages took place during what became known as the Arab Spring, highlighting the role that the Internet had come to play in political protest, and heralding the wider use of national Internet shutdowns as a means of control.

“How hard is it to disconnect a country from the Internet, really?”

After these events, and another significant Internet outage in Syria, this question led a blog post published in November 2012 by former Dyn Chief Scientist Jim Cowie that examined the risk of Internet disconnection for countries around the world, based on the number of Internet connections at their international border. “You can think of this, to [a] first approximation,” Cowie wrote, “as the number of phone calls (or legal writs, or infrastructure attacks) that would have to be performed in order to Continue reading

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