Computing Is Bigger Than The Datacenter

For several years there has been the ongoing debate about ARM and its future in the datacenter. That debate goes on, but the talk is changing.

At the beginning of the decade, ARM Holdings, the company behind the ARM chip architecture that is now owned by Japanese high-tech conglomerate Softbank, said its low-power system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs were a good alternative to Intel’s dominant Xeon and derivative processors for servers and other hardware at a time when energy efficiency in systems was becoming increasingly important.

Over the years that has been speculation about when ARM-based chips would find a foothold

Computing Is Bigger Than The Datacenter was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

15% off APC 11-Outlet Surge Protector with USB Charging Ports and SurgeArrest – Deal Alert

Be it a lightning strike that destroys a home entertainment center or consistently fluctuating power that degrades the performance and shortens the life of your electronics – surges, lightning, and other power disturbances can have a devastating impact on the valuable electronics you rely on every day. The P11U2 from APC offers guaranteed surge protection. Connect and protect up to 11 electronics, and conveniently charge your mobile devices via 2 additional USB ports. Installation is convenient and easy with a 180-degree rotating power cord and right-angle plug. Lastly, three LED indicators inform you if there is any overload, unit, or wall wiring issues. The P11U2 averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 1,800 people on Amazon (read reviews), where its typical list price of $34.25 is discounted 15% to $28.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

15% off APC 11-Outlet Surge Protector with USB Charging Ports and SurgeArrest – Deal Alert

Be it a lightning strike that destroys a home entertainment center or consistently fluctuating power that degrades the performance and shortens the life of your electronics – surges, lightning, and other power disturbances can have a devastating impact on the valuable electronics you rely on every day. The P11U2 from APC offers guaranteed surge protection. Connect and protect up to 11 electronics, and conveniently charge your mobile devices via 2 additional USB ports. Installation is convenient and easy with a 180-degree rotating power cord and right-angle plug. Lastly, three LED indicators inform you if there is any overload, unit, or wall wiring issues. The P11U2 averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 1,800 people on Amazon (read reviews), where its typical list price of $34.25 is discounted 15% to $28.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Introduction to TACACS and TACACS+ (Terminal Access Controller Access Control System)

Today I am going to talk about the TACACS and TACACS+ basics with you. I am sure most of you already knew TACACS and TACACS+ as many of you worked and configured the configuration on your devices whether it will Cisco, Juniper or any other vendor in your network.

Here in this article I am Just talk about TACACS and TACACS+ as follow.

What is TACACS and TACACS+ ?
Well all of you already listern this term so many times but many of you confuse what is TACACS and TACACS+.

Terminal Access Controller Access Control System or called as TACACS is a authentication protocol and is commonly used within the UNIX based networks that allows a remote access server to forward a user's logon password to an authentication server to determine whether access can be allowed to a given system.

TACACS and TACACS+
TACACS is a simple UDP-based access control protocol originally developed by BBN for MILNET. TACACS+ is an enhancement to TACACS and uses TCP to ensure reliable delivery.

Fig 1.1- TACACS and TACACS+ Server
TACACS+ is an enhancement to the TACACS security protocol. TACACS+ improves on TACACS by separating the functions of authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) and Continue reading

How to Tag Docker Images with Git Commit Information

I’ve recently been working on a very simple Flask application that can be used as a demo application in containerized environments (here’s the GitHub repo). It’s nothing special, but it’s been useful for me as a learning exercise—both from a Docker image creation perspective as well as getting some additional Python knowledge. Along the way, I wanted to be able to track versions of the Docker image (and the Dockerfile used to create those images), and link those versions back to specific Git commits in the source repository. In this article, I’ll share a way I’ve found to tag Docker images with Git commit information.

Before I proceed any further, I’ll provide the disclaimer that this information isn’t unique; I’m building on the work of others. Other articles sharing similar information include this one; no doubt there are countless more I haven’t yet seen. I’m presenting this information here simply to show one way (not the only way) of including Git commit information with a Docker image.

Getting the necessary information from Git is actually far easier than one might think. This variation of the git log command will print only the full hash of the last commit Continue reading

DMVPN or Firewall-Based VPNs?

One of my readers sent me this question:

I'm having an internal debate whether to use firewall-based VPNs or DMVPN to connect several sites if our MPLS connection goes down. How would you handle it? Do you have specific courses answering this question?

As always, the correct answer is it depends, in this case on:

Read more ...

Difference Between Cisco ACI Multi-Pod Vs Cisco ACI Multi-Site

Today I am going to talk about the difference between the Cisco ACI Multi-Site and Cisco ACI Multi-Pod deployment. I already talk about the basics of Cisco ACI Multi-Site and Cisco ACI Multi-Pod in my earlier posts. If you want to look through it, Please have a look to the below link to understand the Cisco ACI Multi-Pod and Cisco ACI Multi-Site

Introduction to Cisco ACI stretched fabric and ACI Multi-pod Fabric Designs
Introduction to ACI Multi-Site Fabric Design Network

Hope you go through the above links to understand, So let me talk about the basic difference between the Cisco ACI Multi-Pod and Cisco ACI Multi-Site. 


Fig 1.1- ACI Multi-Site and Multi-Pod Deployments

Below are the difference as :
  • In Multi-Pod you can have, Full ACI functionality across an entire Multi-Pod fabric while in in Multi-Site you can have Tenants, Applications, VRFs, BDs, Subnets, EPGs (including μSeg), policies stretched across ACI fabrics 
  • Availability Zone: In Multi-Pod, Single availability zone with one APIC cluster for an entire Multi-Pod fabric that provides central point of management while in Multi-Site we have Multiple availability zones.In each fabric with its separate APIC cluster is an availability zone managed by Multi-Site.
  • VM Migration : In Multi-Pod, Live Continue reading

Rough Guide to IETF 100 – IPv6

In this post for the Internet Society Rough Guide to IETF 100, I’m reviewing what’ll be happening at IETF 100 in Singapore next week.

IPv6 global adoption rates passed 20% shortly after IETF 99, with a number of countries making substantial strides in IPv6 deployment in the past few months. Belgium still leads the way at over 60%, but India has shot up to over 50% which is extremely encouraging in such a large market. Adoption rates also exceed 40% in the United States and Germany, and with most major content and cloud providers now supporting IPv6, there’s a substantial amount of IPv6-related work happening in Singapore. In fact, there’s no less than five IPv6-related working groups on the first day alone.

The IPv6 Operations (v6ops) Working Group is always one of the key groups, and since the last meeting has published two RFCs on Host Address Availability Recommendations (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7934) and Local-Use IPv4/IPv6 Translation Prefix (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8215). The meeting kicks off on Monday afternoon and continues on Thursday morning, starting with a case study on IPv6-only deployment at Cisco.

There are also seven drafts being discussed including 464XLAT Deployment Guidelines for Operator Continue reading

Easing The Pain Of Prepping Data For AI

Organizations are turning to artificial intelligence and deep learning in hopes of being able to more quickly make the right business decisions, to remake their business models and become more efficient, and to improve the experience of their customers. The fast-emerging technologies will let enterprises gain more insight into the massive amounts of data they are generating and find the trends that normally would have been hidden from them. And enterprises are quickly moving in that direction.

A Gartner survey found that 59 percent of organizations are gathering information to help them build out their AI strategies, while the rest

Easing The Pain Of Prepping Data For AI was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

New AWS Instances Sport Customized Intel Skylakes, KVM Hypervisor

The global server market is increasingly driven by the hyperscalers, and the trendsetter for all of them is Amazon Web Services. The massive company dominates the fast-growing public cloud space, outpacing rivals like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud, and is the top consumer of servers among a group of hyperscalers that are becoming the most powerful buyers of systems and new components, such as processors.

This can be seen in the numbers. According to IDC analysts, hyperscalers in the first and second quarters this year made a significant push to deploy servers, with AWS accounting for more

New AWS Instances Sport Customized Intel Skylakes, KVM Hypervisor was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

BrandPost: FlexWare: Year Two

It’s been over a year since AT&T introduced its FlexWare offering. It was positioned as the next big thing in enterprise networking, and in the intervening months, AT&T has rolled out a number of important virtual network functions (VNFs) that run on its x86-based FlexWare devices.Those VNFs essentially replace proprietary boxes that historically have been costly to operate and replace in terms of time and money.Light Reading’s Carol Wilson said that AT&T’s venture into “white box services” is “a clear signal to traditional telecom suppliers that the gig’s up on closed system sales.” That’s cheery news to enterprises that have long chafed over the relative inflexibility of on-site equipment solutions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Deep Dive into Container Images in Kolla

This is a liveblog of my last session at the Sydney OpenStack Summit. The session title is “OpenStack images that fit your imagination: deep dive into container images in Kolla.” The presenters are Vikram Hosakote and Rich Wellum, from Cisco and Lenovo, respectively.

Hosakote starts with an overview of Kolla. Kolla is a project to deploy OpenStack services into Docker containers. There are two ways to use Kolla: using Ansible (referred to as Kolla-Ansible) or using Kubernetes (referred to as Kolla-Kubernetes). Hosakote mentions that Kolla-Kubernetes also uses Helm and Helm charts; this makes me question the relationship between Kolla-Kubernetes and OpenStack-Helm.

Why Kolla? Some of the benefits of Kolla, as outlined by Hosakote, include:

  • Fast(er) deployment (Hosakote has deployed in as few as 9 minutes)
  • Easy maintenance, reconfiguration, patching, and upgrades
  • Containerized services are found in container registry
  • One tool to do multiple things

Hosakote briefly mentions his preference for Kolla over other tools, including Juju, DevStack, PackStack, Fuel, OpenStack-Ansible, TripleO, OpenStack-Puppet, and OpenStack-Chef.

Other benefits of using containers for OpenStack:

  • Reproduce golden state easily
  • No more “Works in DevStack” but doesn’t work in production
  • Production-ready images (this seems specific to Kolla, not just containers for OpenStack control plane)
  • Continue reading

Top 5 From The Last 3 Months

 

In the year 2017, news comes at you fast. So, it’s easy to miss the important or informational items that just weren’t on your radar when they first arrived. While we believe VMware NSX should be firmly on everyone’s virtualization radar, we understand that you may miss a few items from time to time. That’s why we’re putting together this VMware NSX news round-up.

This news round-up recaps the latest NSX-related material you may have missed over the past few months for you peruse at your leisure. We’ll compile these posts again from time to time, so be sure to keep your eye on this space for more VMware NSX news rounds-ups and informational posts!

Real World Use Cases for NSX and Pivotal Cloud Foundry

From the post: Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is the leading PaaS solution for enterprise customers today, providing a fast way to convert their ideas from conception to production. This is achieved by providing a platform to run their code in any cloud and any language taking care of all the infrastructure “stuff” for them.

From building the container image, compiling it with the required runtime, deploying it in a highly available mode and connecting Continue reading

Carrier-Grade SDN-Based OpenStack Networking Solution

This session was titled “Carrier-Grade SDN Based OpenStack Networking Solution,” led by Daniel Park and Sangho Shin. Both Park and Shin are from SK Telecom (SKT), and (based on the description) this session is a follow-up to a session from the Boston summit where SK Telecom talked about an SDN-based networking solution they’d developed and released for use in their own 5G-based network.

Shin starts the session with some presenter introductions, and sets the stage for the presentation. Shin first provides some background on SKT, and discusses the steps that SKT has been taking to prepare their network for 5G infrastructure/services. This involves more extensive use of virtual network functions (VNFs) and software-defined infrastructure based on open software and open hardware. Shin reinforces that the SKT project (which is apparently called COSMOS?) exclusively leverages open source software.

Diving into a bit more detail, Shin talks about SONA Fabric (which is used to control the leaf/spine fabric used as the network underlay), SONA (which handles virtual network management), and TACO (which is an SKT-specific version of OpenStack). The network monitoring solution is called TINA, and this feeds into an integrated monitoring system known as 3DV.

TACO (stands for SKT All Continue reading