HPE refreshes its Superdome servers with SGI technology

Can two old technologies make it in the brave new world of cloud computing? Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) thinks yes with its updates to the Superdome servers featuring its recently acquired SGI technology.HPE bought SGI in late 2016, ending for good the name and company that was once a Hollywood darling. The company enjoyed almost celebrity status around 1993 when its computers were credited for creating the realistic dinosaurs in the movie Jurassic Park.Also on Network World: REVIEW: How rack servers from HPE, Dell and IBM stack up After that, though, it fell on hard times as the environment zigged and poor management zagged, blowing one opportunity after another. In 2009, Rackable Systems acquired SGI’s assets and changed its name to SGI because it thought there was some value in the name — for some inexplicable reason.To read this article in full, please click here

FINALLY! A Cloud Service That Gives You Visibility Into Your Virtual Apps, Desktops & Users

Now you can get deep visibility into your XenApp and XenDesktop deployment from a single web-based console as part of Citrix NetScaler Management and Analytics Service. The same features that have been tried and tested in the on-premises version of NetScaler MAS now are available in a Citrix Cloud service. And best of all, you... Read more →

Privacy Pass – “The Math”

This is a guest post by Alex Davidson, a PhD student in Cryptography at Royal Holloway, University of London, who is part of the team that developed Privacy Pass. Alex worked at Cloudflare for the summer on deploying Privacy Pass on the Cloudflare network.

During a recent internship at Cloudflare, I had the chance to help integrate support for improving the accessibility of websites that are protected by the Cloudflare edge network. Specifically, I helped develop an open-source browser extension named ‘Privacy Pass’ and added support for the Privacy Pass protocol within Cloudflare infrastructure. Currently, Privacy Pass works with the Cloudflare edge to help honest users to reduce the number of Cloudflare CAPTCHA pages that they see when browsing the web. However, the operation of Privacy Pass is not limited to the Cloudflare use-case and we envisage that it has applications over a wider and more diverse range of applications as support grows.

In summary, this browser extension allows a user to generate cryptographically ‘blinded’ tokens that can then be signed by supporting servers following some receipt of authenticity (e.g. a CAPTCHA solution). The browser extension can then use these tokens to ‘prove’ honesty in future communications with the Continue reading

Worth Reading: Fixing the Plumbing

At LinkedIn, we pay attention to site speed at every step of the release process, from code development to production ramp. But inevitably, the performance of our pages degrades over time (we use the word “pages” to denote webpages as well as mobile apps). In this post, we go over the tools and processes we use to catch and fix these degradations. While this is a post about automation to identify latency leaks, it is also a tale of how a human touch is still necessary. –Ritesh Maheshwari @ LinkedIn

Cloudflare supports Privacy Pass

Enabling anonymous access to the web with privacy-preserving cryptography

Cloudflare supports Privacy Pass, a recently-announced privacy-preserving protocol developed in collaboration with researchers from Royal Holloway and the University of Waterloo. Privacy Pass leverages an idea from cryptography — zero-knowledge proofs — to let users prove their identity across multiple sites anonymously without enabling tracking. Users can now use the Privacy Pass browser extension to reduce the number of challenge pages presented by Cloudflare. We are happy to support this protocol and believe that it will help improve the browsing experience for some of the Internet’s least privileged users.

The Privacy Pass extension is available for both Chrome and Firefox. When people use anonymity services or shared IPs, it makes it more difficult for website protection services like Cloudflare to identify their requests as coming from legitimate users and not bots. Privacy Pass helps reduce the friction for these users—which include some of the most vulnerable users online—by providing them a way to prove that they are a human across multiple sites on the Cloudflare network. This is done without revealing their identity, and without exposing Cloudflare customers to additional threats from malicious bots. As the first service to support Privacy Continue reading

AI and the Future of Network Security

Engine XML Brings a Smoother Flow of Data Into oVirt

on November 8, oVirt 4.2 saw the introduction of an important behind-the-scenes enhancement.

The change is associated with the exchange of information between the engine and the VDSM. It addresses the issue of multiple abstraction layers, with each layer needing to convert its input into a suitably readable format in order to report to the next layer.

This change improves data communication between the engine and Libvirt - the tool that manages platform virtualization.

Background

Previously, the configuration file for a newly created virtual machine (VM) originated in the engine as a map or dictionary. Then, in the VDSM, it was converted into an XML file that was readable by Libvirt. This process required a greater coding effort which in turn slowed down the development process.

What's changed?

Now, this map or dictionary has been replaced by engine XML, an XML configuration file that complies with the Libvirt API. VDSM now simply routes this Libvirt-readable file to/from Libvirt, in VM lifecycle (virt) related flows.

As an oVirt user, it’s business as usual.

However, if you are a developer dealing with debugging issues that involve running a VM, simply be aware that the Domain XML is now generated by ovirt-engine, Continue reading

Create a VLAN Map from Network Operational Data

It’s always great to see students enrolled in Building Network Automation Solutions online course using ideas from my sample playbooks to implement a wonderful solution that solves a real-life problem.

James McCutcheon did exactly that: he took my LLDP-to-Graph playbook and used it to graph VLANs stretching across multiple switches (and provided a good description of his solution).

Rough Guide to IETF 100: Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a major buzzword around the Internet industry and the broader technology and innovation business arenas. We are often asked what the IETF is doing in relation to IoT and in this Rough Guide to IETF 100 post I’d like to highlight some of the relevant sessions scheduled during the upcoming IETF 100 meeting in Singapore. Check out the IETF Journal IoT Category, the Internet Society’s IoT page, or the Online Trust Alliance IoT page for more details about many of these topics.

The Thing-to-Thing Research Group (T2TRG) investigates open research issues in turning the IoT into reality. The research group will be holding a half-day joint meeting with the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) on the Friday before IETF, and they will also be meeting on Tuesday afternoon in Singapore to report out on their recent activities. Included on the agenda is the upcoming Workshop on Decentralized IoT Security and Standards (DISS). This workshop will be held in conjunction with the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium on 18 February 2018 in San Diego, CA, USA. The DISS workshop will gather researchers and the open standards community together to help address Continue reading

AT&T Wields Disproportionate Influence in ONAP, But Everyone’s OK With It

Larger operators are letting AT&T lead, for now.

Qualcomm’s Amberwing Arm Server Chip Finally Takes Flight

It is going to be a busy week for chip maker Qualcomm as it formally jumps from smartphones to servers with its new “Amberwing” Centriq 2400 Arm server processor during the same week that it has received an unsolicited $130 billion takeover offer from sometimes rival chipmaker Broadcom.

The Centriq 2400 is the culmination of over four years of work and investment, which according to the experts in the semiconductor industry we have talked to, easily took on the order of $100 million to $125 million to make happen ­– remember there was a prototype as well as the …

Qualcomm’s Amberwing Arm Server Chip Finally Takes Flight was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Arm Smooths the Path for Porting HPC Apps

One of the arguments Intel officials and others have made against Arm’s push to get its silicon designs into the datacenter has been the burden it would mean for enterprises and organizations in the HPC field that would have to modify application codes to get their software to run on the Arm architecture.

For HPC organizations, that would mean moving the applications from the Intel-based and IBM systems that have dominated the space for years, a time-consuming and possibly costly process.

Arm officials over the years have acknowledged the challenge, but have noted their infrastructure’s embrace of open-source software and …

Arm Smooths the Path for Porting HPC Apps was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

ARM Takes Wing: Qualcomm vs. Intel CPU comparison

One of the nicer perks I have here at Cloudflare is access to the latest hardware, long before it even reaches the market.

Until recently I mostly played with Intel hardware. For example Intel supplied us with an engineering sample of their Skylake based Purley platform back in August 2016, to give us time to evaluate it and optimize our software. As a former Intel Architect, who did a lot of work on Skylake (as well as Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Icelake), I really enjoy that.

Our previous generation of servers was based on the Intel Broadwell micro-architecture. Our configuration includes dual-socket Xeons E5-2630 v4, with 10 cores each, running at 2.2GHz, with a 3.1GHz turbo boost and hyper-threading enabled, for a total of 40 threads per server.

Since Intel was, and still is, the undisputed leader of the server CPU market with greater than 98% market share, our upgrade process until now was pretty straightforward: every year Intel releases a new generation of CPUs, and every year we buy them. In the process we usually get two extra cores per socket, and all the extra architectural features such upgrade brings: hardware AES and CLMUL in Westmere, Continue reading

Worth Reading: Choosing a developer job

See, in my employment searches, I’ve always focused on which tech stack a company used or if I thought I would be a successful employee from a technical perspective. If I liked the people and the job enough and my skill-set aligned, I would accept the job. I was happy just working as a developer with my head buried in code all day solving problems. –Gwendolyn Faraday @ Free Code Camp

Cumulus Makes Open Networking OS Available on Facebook’s Voyager

This moves Cumulus into the data center interconnect market.

Researchers developing building-free data centers

Servers should be stored in vats of cooling, non-conductive oil instead of elaborate, outfitted structures, say engineers who are working on a radical, building-free, data center concept.French company Horizon Computing is one of the developers behind the project and provides support. It proposes using stacks of 10-gallon barrels filled with Shell DIALA dielectric mineral oil or natural equivalent. Dielectric oil doesn’t have any water in it, so it won’t conduct electricity, but it cools just like water. The computers function as normal and aren’t subject to rust either.Benefits of RuggedPOD containers The idea is that common servers are fully submerged in the barrels where they are chilled by the immersion. Expensive humidity control and air conditioning thus become irrelevant, as do buildings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers developing building-free data centers

Servers should be stored in vats of cooling, non-conductive oil instead of elaborate, outfitted structures, say engineers who are working on a radical, building-free, data center concept.French company Horizon Computing is one of the developers behind the project and provides support. It proposes using stacks of 10-gallon barrels filled with Shell DIALA dielectric mineral oil or natural equivalent. Dielectric oil doesn’t have any water in it, so it won’t conduct electricity, but it cools just like water. The computers function as normal and aren’t subject to rust either.Benefits of RuggedPOD containers The idea is that common servers are fully submerged in the barrels where they are chilled by the immersion. Expensive humidity control and air conditioning thus become irrelevant, as do buildings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BT Caters to Enterprises that Want Cisco in Their VNF Plans

Not all BT customers want a future with Cisco, but many do.

What to consider when deploying a next-generation firewall

Firewalls have become ubiquitous across enterprises over the past decade, but the combination of new and varied access methods combined with increasingly sophisticated attacks has forced network operators and security professionals to constantly evaluate their defenses. Typically, firewalls are on a five-year refresh cycle, according to Gartner researcher Adam Hils, and that gives organizations the opportunity to evaluate fairly regularly what type of firewall and what features best suit their needs.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What is a firewall? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What to consider when deploying a next-generation firewall

Firewalls have become ubiquitous across enterprises over the past decade, but the combination of new and varied access methods combined with increasingly sophisticated attacks has forced network operators and security professionals to constantly evaluate their defenses. Typically, firewalls are on a five-year refresh cycle, according to Gartner researcher Adam Hils, and that gives organizations the opportunity to evaluate fairly regularly what type of firewall and what features best suit their needs.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What is a firewall? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here