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Gordon Bell Looks Out Into A Parallel World

It was 31 years ago when Alan Karp, then an IBM employee, decided to put up $100 of his own money in hopes of solving a vexing issue for him and others in the computing field. When looking at the HPC space, there were supercomputers armed with eight powerful processors and designed to run the biggest applications of the day. However, there also were people putting 1,000 wimpy chips into machines that leveraged parallelism to run workloads, a rarity at the time.

According to Amdahl’s Law in 1986, even if 95 percent of a workload runs in parallel, the speedup …

Gordon Bell Looks Out Into A Parallel World was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

SD-WAN 101: Introduction to Software-Defined Wide Area Networks

No doubt, there’s a plethora of information on the web about SD-WAN, short for Software-Defined Wide Area Network. It’s the next big thing in networking and everyone’s writing, making a video, or talking about it. But, if you’re like me, any time a new technology emerges, I prefer to learn the fundamentals before jumping into... Read more →

IDG Contributor Network: VeloCloud SD-WAN might be under the hood of many ISPs, but it’s not the same

If you’ve researched purchasing an SD-WAN solution from an ISP, there’s a good chance it’s not your ISP who is providing the actual SD-WAN service. [say what?!]Way back in 2016… the demand for SD-WAN emerged so furiously, ISP’s have had to make a quick decision: 1) roll-out a solution immediately; or 2) get tabbed as an old rickety out-of-date ISP. Consequently, rather than building their own solution (a lengthy process), most ISP’s have decided to take the easy route and white label someone else’s vetted product.Many of these ISP’s have chosen VeloCloud to be the SD-WAN solution under the hood.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: VeloCloud SD-WAN might be under the hood of many ISPs, but it’s not the same

Deploy360 at IETF 100, Day 5: Zaìjiàn from the Lion City

There’s a couple of sessions of interest on the last day of IETF 100 before we wrap up for the week. Friday is only a half-day, but still manages to fit in sessions on human rights considerations and encryption. Human rights is not a topic that Deploy360 typically covers, but we have been increasingly asked to discuss the IRTF initiative on Human Rights Protocols Considerations. (There’s also a recent IETF Journal article on Human Rights Protocol Considerations.)

HRPC is researching the human rights threats on the Internet, whether standards and protocols can enable or threaten these, and is developing recommendations on developing Internet protocols around this. It recently published RFC 8080 outlining human rights threats on the Internet, and will be meeting at 09.30 SGT/UTC+8 to discuss three other drafts relating to Freedom of Association on the Internet, the Politics of Standards, and Unrequested Communications. There will also be a presentation on Chainiac: end-to-end software supply chain security and transparency, plus the next steps forward will be discussed.

NOTE: If you are unable to attend IETF 100 in person, there are multiple ways to participate remotely.

PERC is also meeting at the same time, and has three drafts up for discussion. Continue reading

HPE and Rackspace offer on-premises ‘cloud’ systems

HPE and Rackspace have partnered to offer pay-as-you-go services similar to the public cloud but located in private data centers. The OpenStack-based services can have the systems installed in users' own data centers, in a colocation facility, or in Rackspace’s data centers.The move is meant to counter the growing popularity of public cloud services where you pay as you go rather than make the up-front massive investment and then have to maintain and eventually dispose of the systems when they are old.Also on Network World: 6 steps for a future-ready cloud storage strategy And in case you haven’t noticed, this idea is gaining traction. Microsoft offers Azure Stack, which puts Azure in your private data center, Oracle has Cloud at Customer, and Google and Cisco plan to bring Google Cloud Platform to on-premises users in the near future.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE and Rackspace offer on-premises ‘cloud’ systems

IPv6 Migration: 5 Best Practices

Follow these expert tips to smooth the process of adopting the new Internet Protocol standard.

Microsoft, Daimler to use fuel cells to power data centers

In separate announcements, Microsoft Corp. and Daimler indicated that hydrogen fuel cells could provide significantly better energy solutions for data centers than existing electrical grid and backup power technology.Daimler, best known for its Mercedes-Benz automobile brand, presented this week its latest-generation fuel cell technology, which is 30 percent smaller, has 40 percent more power and is small enough to fit into the engine compartment of Mercedes-Benz passenger vehicles. The company plans to expand the use of that technology in a hydrogen-powered data center power plant, collaborating with HPE, Power Innovations (PI) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft, Daimler to use fuel cells to power data centers

Pluribus Networks… 2 Years Later

I first met Pluribus Networks 2.5 years ago during their Networking Field Day 9 presentation, which turned controversial enough that I was advised not to wear the same sweater during NFD16 to avoid jinxing another presentation (I also admit to be a bit biased in those days based on marketing deja-moo from a Pluribus sales guy I’d been exposed to during a customer engagement).

Pluribus NFD16 presentations were better; here’s what I got from them:

One Week to IPv6, Routing Security, and More at ION Belgrade

One week from today, we’ll be at ION Belgrade! Our last event of the year take place on Thursday, 23 November 2017, alongside the 3rd Republic of Serbia Network Operators’ Group (RSNOG).

As always, ION Conferences bring network engineers and leading industry experts together to discuss emerging technologies and hot technology topics. Early adopters provide valuable insight into their own deployment experiences and bring participants up to speed on new standards emerging from the IETF.

Agenda

The half-day agenda and all our great speakers for ION Belgrade will make this a great event. Here’s a quick look at the day:

Opening Remarks
Welcome from the ISOC Serbia Chapter
MANRS, Routing Security, and Collaboration
NAT64check
What’s Happening at the IETF? Internet Standards and How to Get Involved
Panel Discussion: IPv6 Success Stories
Closing Remarks

Registration

ION Belgrade registration is open! Learn more about our co-host on the RSNOG main page.

Webcast

RSNOG will be live streaming the ION in the morning and RSNOG in the afternoon. The stream will be embedded on the conference main page, right above the agenda, here (Serbian) and here (English).

IPv6 Tutorial

Jordi Palet Martinez will conduct an IPv6 training session the day before the ION. Continue reading

Basics of VRF(Virtual Routing forwarding)

Today I am going to talk about one of the most important concept on which MPLS works. I understand many of you already knew about the MPLS but some of you guys are still want me to explain the concept of MPLS and the MPLS starts from the concept of VRF.

Before we will start with the concept of the VRF, Please subscribe our Youtube Channel, as we are going to upload many networking videos there soon.

Subscribe us on Youtube: http://y2u.be/0c4lMYVp9go

What is VRF- Virtual Routing forwarding ?

As you already knew that VRF stands for Virtual Routing Forwarding and is a separate routing table within a router. VRFs are to a router what VLANs are to a switch. Using VRFs, it is possible to virtualize a single router into several instances, each of them being (relatively) independent of each other, allowing for overlapping subnets, separate instances of routing protocols, separate set of interfaces assigned to each VRF.

In other words you can say that VRF stands for virtual routing and forwarding. When you create a vrf, you tell it what routes to import/export. Then you assign that vrf to an interface. Once the vrf is attached to Continue reading

IO-500 Goes Where No HPC Storage Metric Has Gone Before

The landscape of HPC storage performance measurement is littered with unrealistic expectations. While there are seemingly endless strings of benchmarks aimed at providing balanced metrics, these far too often come from the vendors themselves.

What is needed is an independent set of measurements for supercomputing storage environments that takes into account all of the many nuances of HPC (versus enterprise) setups. Of course, building such a benchmark suite is no simple task—and ranking the results is not an easy exercise either because there are a great many dependencies; differences between individual machines, networks, memory and I/O tricks in software, and …

IO-500 Goes Where No HPC Storage Metric Has Gone Before was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Cisco Security Revenue Grew 8% in Fiscal Q1 2018

Revenue from the company's core business of routers and switches declined 4 percent.

Oak Ridge Lab’s Quantum Simulator Pulls HPC Future Closer

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been investing heavily in quantum computing across the board. From testing new devices, programming models, and figuring out workflows that combine classical bits with qubits, this is where the DoE quantum investment seems to be centered.

Teams at Oak Ridge have access to the range of available quantum hardware devices—something that is now possible without having to own the difficult-to-manage quantum computer on sight. IBM’s Q processor is available through a web interface, as is D-Wave’s technology, which means researchers at ORNL can test their quantum applications on actual hardware. As we just …

Oak Ridge Lab’s Quantum Simulator Pulls HPC Future Closer was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

How to gauge your network’s openness

So, you’ve done your research, learned about the many benefits of open networking, and decided you’re interested in building an open network. Congratulations, and welcome to the future of networking! You’ve made a great first step, but maybe you’re concerned about where to begin when it comes to vendors. A lot of network providers will claim that they have open solutions…but how can you be sure you’re choosing the best one? Or how can you determine if your vendor is truly an open solution? Fortunately, there are ways to gauge if your solution is as open as you need it to be. If you don’t want to get duped by phony open vendors, make sure to keep these three things in mind:

The definition of “open networking” is not set in stone

While there are common criteria and ideologies that tend to be associated with open networks, the definition of open networking is still very fluid and can mean different things to different vendors. So, when you’re trying to decide which vendor to go with, don’t let them off easy with simple answers. Ask specific questions about what exactly “open” means to them. Simplicity, flexibility, and modularity are Continue reading

Security with Fish: My First Couple Months

In late June I wrote Security Here I Come! The transition wasn’t quite as fast as I thought it would be. But for the past couple months I’ve been able to really start digging in.

My initial response after watching just 2 CiscoLive VoDs? FEAR!

Defense Against Emerging Threats – BRKSEC-1010 by Neil Lovering
Simple Hacking Tools For Your Own Network – BRKSEC-1008 by Jerry Lin

I really enjoyed these sessions a great deal!! They were the absolute perfect eye-opener to me!

Neil Lovering had the “Verizon Data Breach Report” in his slides (below).

Its funny because I have seen it before. To be completely honest I have seen it quite a number of times. But it was just something about how he presented it. He got past my not wanting to really “hear” about the risk and the danger and the reality of the security landscape in the world around us. I paused the VoD on this slide…. paused it and just really took the time to take it all in.

My reaction to this slide? Lol. This is when the fear began. Two simple facts on the Continue reading