Does Juniper Need To Be Purchased?

You probably saw the news this week that Nokia was looking to purchase Juniper Networks. You also saw pretty quickly that the news was denied, emphatically. It was a curious few hours when the network world was buzzing about the potential to see Juniper snapped up into a somewhat larger organization. There was also talk of product overlap and other kinds of less exciting but very necessary discussions during mergers like this. Which leads me to a great thought exercise: Does Juniper Need To Be Purchased?

Sins of The Father

More than any other networking company I know of, Juniper has paid the price for trying to break out of their mold. When you think Juniper, most networking professionals will tell you about their core routing capabilities. They’ll tell you how Juniper has a great line of carrier and enterprise switches. And, if by some chance, you find yourself talking to a security person, you’ll probably hear a lot about the SRX Firewall line. Forward thinking people may even tell you about their automation ideas and their charge into the world of software defined things.

Would you hear about their groundbreaking work with Puppet from 2013? How about their wireless Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 1st, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

  Isn't this all of software? @thomasfuchs: Here we see a group of JavaScript engineers implementing a method that adds two numbers

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And there's my new book, Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10, for complete cloud newbies. 

• 82%: chance a file on GitHub is a duplicate; 11: new AWS regions; 42%: AWS yearly growth; 1,100: new AWS services in 2017; 300%: year of year growth in Lambda; 00000000: code to launch a Minuteman missile; 100 megawatts in 100 days: biggest battery in the world; 40: months in prison for VW engineer; 3,000 cores: Raspberry Pi cluster; 11: lost cities found by building a database from 4,000-year-old clay tablets; 1.25 million: Riot Games builds per year; 41.78: miles walked at reinvent; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @gigastacey: This FCC is going to destroy net neutrality, strangle competition in media, let wireline providers off the hook for replacing copper with fiber or an equivalent to copper AND kill broadband access for the poor. This is an unprecedented attack on consumers.
  • Continue reading

Worth Reading: Open Source Supply Chain

Diversity and inclusivity in the technology industry—and in open source communities more specifically—have received a lot of coverage, both on Opensource.com and elsewhere. One approach to the issue foregrounds arguments about concepts that are more abstract—like human decency, for example. But the “supply chain” metaphor works, too. And it can be an effective argument for championing greater inclusivity in our open organizations, especially when people dismiss arguments based on appeals to abstract concepts. —Ben Cotton @ Open Source

Rancher Labs Deepens Kubernetes Support With New Installer

Company claims superiority over other Kubernetes installers.

The Systems of the Future Will Be Conversational

It’d be difficult to downplay the impact Amazon Web Services has had on the computing industry over the past decade. Since launching in 2006, Amazon’s cloud computing division has become the set the pace in the public cloud market, rapidly growing out its capabilities from the first service – Simple Storage Service (S3) – it rolled out to now offering thousands of services that touch on everything from compute instances to databases, storage, application development and emerging technologies like machine learning and data analytics.

The company has become dominant by offering organizations of all sizes a way of simply accessing …

The Systems of the Future Will Be Conversational was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Networking: When Good Enough Is No Longer Enough

How Did NETCONF Start on Software Gone Wild

A long while ago Marcel Wiget sent me an interesting email along the lines “I think you should do a Software Gone Wild podcast with Phil Shafer, the granddaddy of NETCONF”

Not surprisingly, as we started discovering the history behind NETCONF we quickly figured out that all the API and automation hype being touted these days is nothing new – some engineers have been doing that stuff for almost 20 years.

All Of Ethan’s Podcasts And Articles For November 2017

Here’s a catalog of all the media I produced (or helped produce) in November 2017. I’ve included content summaries to motivate you to click. See, that’s coming right at you with how I’m trying to manipulate your behavior. I’m honest like that.

PACKET PUSHERS WEEKLY PODCAST

• Episode 364 – ThousandEyes Adds Infrastructure Visibility (Sponsored). The crew at ThousandEyes fires a shot across the bow of several other NMS vendors, getting into monitoring internal network infrastructure.
• Episode 365 – You Can’t Do That In Enterprise Networks. We chat with Peyton Maynard-Koran about why it’s so hard to change the paradigm in enterprise networking. We met Peyton at the Future:Net conference in Las Vegas this year after he made a controversial presentation. He doesn’t back down in this recording.
• Episode 366 – Inside Cisco EVPN (Sponsored). We get into the emerging use cases of EVPN. That matters to us, because unlike so many of the new networking technologies that have come out in the last few years, EVPN seems on track to go mainstream.
• Episode 367 – Silver Peak & The Maturing Of SD-WAN (Sponsored). One of my favorite people to interview is David Hughes. He comes on this show to talk Continue reading

All Of Ethan’s Podcasts And Articles For November 2017

Here’s a catalog of all the media I produced (or helped produce) in November 2017. I’ve included content summaries to motivate you to click. See, that’s coming right at you with how I’m trying to manipulate your behavior. I’m honest like that.

PACKET PUSHERS WEEKLY PODCAST

• Episode 364 – ThousandEyes Adds Infrastructure Visibility (Sponsored). The crew at ThousandEyes fires a shot across the bow of several other NMS vendors, getting into monitoring internal network infrastructure.
• Episode 365 – You Can’t Do That In Enterprise Networks. We chat with Peyton Maynard-Koran about why it’s so hard to change the paradigm in enterprise networking. We met Peyton at the Future:Net conference in Las Vegas this year after he made a controversial presentation. He doesn’t back down in this recording.
• Episode 366 – Inside Cisco EVPN (Sponsored). We get into the emerging use cases of EVPN. That matters to us, because unlike so many of the new networking technologies that have come out in the last few years, EVPN seems on track to go mainstream.
• Episode 367 – Silver Peak & The Maturing Of SD-WAN (Sponsored). One of my favorite people to interview is David Hughes. He comes on this show to talk Continue reading

Intel’s Data Center Chief Diane Bryant Moves to Google Cloud

Bryant will bring more firepower to Google Cloud.

Reinventing the FPGA Programming Wheel

For several years, GPU acceleration matched with Intel Xeon processors were the dominating news items in hardware at the annual Supercomputing Conference. However, this year that trend shifted in earnest, with a major coming-out party for ARM servers in HPC and more attention than ever paid to FPGAs as potential accelerators for future exascale systems.

The SC series held two days of lightening-round presentations on the state of FPGAs for future supercomputers, with insight from both academia, vendors, and end users at scale, including Microsoft. To say Microsoft is an FPGA user is a bit of an understatement, however, since …

Reinventing the FPGA Programming Wheel was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Inside Nvidia’s Next-Gen Saturn V AI Cluster

Generally speaking, the world’s largest chip makers have been pretty secretive about the giant supercomputers they use to design and test their devices, although occasionally, Intel and AMD have provided some insight into their clusters.

We have no idea what kind of resources Nvidia has for its EDA systems – we are trying to get some insight into that – but we do know that it has just upgraded a very powerful supercomputer to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence that is also doing double duty on some aspects of its chip design business.

As part of …

Inside Nvidia’s Next-Gen Saturn V AI Cluster was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: Can technology help privacy evolve?

The topic of privacy came up over coffee, of course – and I was glad to hear that it is not only seen as a key issue for technology and governance, but it’s also seen as being closely interconnected with issues of cybersecurity. As readers of the Internet Society’s blogs will know, we think so too. You can’t have good privacy if you don’t have good security tools, and you can’t have good security in the absence of privacy. — Robin Wilton @ The Internet Society

IDG Contributor Network: New-gen technologies make IoT transformational

Over the last few years, many people—myself included—have been touting the Internet of Things (IoT) as a driving force behind digital transformation.But is IoT by itself truly that transformational?Well, I would argue that it is not.IoT focuses mainly on securely connecting devices that generate data. It is a key element of disruption and change, but it needs to partner with other technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and fog computing to create billions—some say trillions—of dollars in value and transform industries.Let’s take a closer look at these cross-technology relationships:AI is the brain, IoT is the body IoT and AI have a remarkably synergistic relationship. AI, especially machine learning, provides intelligence—the ability to evaluate options, learn from experience and make smart decisions. IoT, like the body, provides the ability to sense and act. IoT delivers both the data AI needs, and the physical means to act on AI’s decisions.  To read this article in full, please click here

Nuage Virtual Services Platform Supports Fujitsu’s Expansion of its Cloud Service

Fujitsu wants customers to move bare metal workloads to its K5 cloud, built on OpenStack.

Dell EMC Moves Hyperconverged Appliances onto Next-Gen Servers

Dell EMC’s cozy relationship with VMware has helped boost its HCI sales.

Network Virtualization to Determine Winner of Hybrid Cloud Computing Race

Network virtualization overlays will determine winner of hybrid cloud computing race.

The Redemption Of NFS

If thinking of NFS v4 puts a bad taste in your mouth, you are not alone. Or wrong. NFS v4.0 and v4.1 have had some valid, well-documented growing pains that include limited bandwidth and scalability. These issues were a result of a failure to properly address performance issues in the v4.0 release.

File systems are the framework upon which the entire house is built, so these performance issues were not trivial problems for us in IT. Thanks to the dedication of the NFS developer community, NFS v4.2 solves the problems of v4.0 and v4.1 and also introduces a host of …

The Redemption Of NFS was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Verizon Enterprise Launches Bundled VNS Pricing Scheme

Verizon also plans to integrate unified communications into the VNS platform.

Public – not hybrid – cloud dominates day 1 at Amazon re:Invent

There’s been a resurgence in the IaaS cloud computing market in the past year of vendors talking more and more about hybrid cloud computing.As the cloud market is maturing, users are crystalizing what workloads are best for public cloud and what will remain on premises or in a private cloud. At Amazon Web Service’s annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week, a big question heading into the show was: What would AWS say about hybrid?+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What is hybrid cloud computing? +Hybrid has been somewhat of a taboo topic for AWS over the years. AWS CEO Andy Jassy has repeatedly maintained that “in the fullness of time” he expects most workloads will run in the public IaaS cloud. We’re not there yet, though. A 451 Research poll from last year found that just 6% of enterprise workloads are running in the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here