Intesa Sanpaolo Builds a Resilient Foundation for Banking With Docker Enterprise Edition

Intesa Sanpaolo is the largest bank in Italy and maintains a network of over 5,000 banking branches across Europe and North Africa. With nearly 19 million customers and €739 billion in assets, Intesa Sanpaolo is an integral part of the financial fabric and as such, Italian regulations require that they keep their business and applications online to serve their customers.

As a bank that can trace its roots back to the early 1800s, the majority of Intesa’s edge applications are still monolithic and hard to move between data centers, never mind migrate to the cloud. Diego Braga, Intesa IT Infrastructure Architect, looked to Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) at the recommendation of his Kiratech business partner Lorenzo Fontana to improve their application availability, portability and add cloud friendly application delivery. With Docker EE, Intesa was able to consolidate infrastructure by nearly 60%, thus saving significant money over their previous design, while also enabling higher application availability across regional data centers and preparing themselves for the cloud.

Docker Enterprise

Prior to the Docker EE implementation, not only were the applications monoliths, but Intesa maintained two separate data centers as mirrors of each other to achieve high availability. This design required excess, cold standby hardware capacity in Continue reading

FRRouting Software with EIGRP Support

In September 2016 I wrote the article about EIGRP support in Quagga network routing suite. More than one year later, I am going to check the progress of development EIGRP in Linux again. To do so, I have installed a fork of Quagga -  FRRouting (FRR) with EIGRP support on Linux Core. EIGRP routing daemon included inside FRR benefits from active development brought by Cumulus employees. For the purpose of FRR testing, I have created a minimalistic Linux Core Pure64 virtual machine  with FRR suite compiled as frr extension. Meanwhile, I have submitted FRR extension so it will be available in the next few days in Tinycore repository.

Content of Disk - CorePure64-frr_3-1.vmdk:

  • Linux Core Pure 64 version 8.2,kernel 4.8.17
  • FRRouting 3.1dev
  • OpenSSL 1.0.2l 25 May 2017
  • OpenSSH_7.2p2
  • GNU bash, 4.4.0(1)
  • iproute2-ss140411
  • iptables v1.4.21
  • tcpdump 4.7.4
  • Nmap 7.12
  • mtr 0.86
  • hping 3.0.0-alpha-1
  • iperf 3.1b3
  • D-ITG 2.8.1 (r1023)

Software:

  • Host OS - Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS x64
  • GNS3 2.0.3
  • QEMU x64 emulator version 2.8.0

Picture 1 - Network Topology

The FRR EIGRP instance with attached CorePure64-frr_3-1.vmdk Continue reading

Aerohive and Dell EMC announce OEM relationship

Cloud Wi-Fi vendor Aerohive Networks has signed an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) agreement with Dell EMC to distribute its Wi-Fi hardware and its HiveManager NG Cloud Management Platform.In addition to product distribution, the relationship includes joint sales, marketing, support and services. It will also bring together Aerohive’s innovative products with the massive power and scale of the Dell EMC channel and services.Also on Network World: 9 tips for speeding up your business Wi-Fi Dell and Aerohive have a relationship that goes back to 2015 when Dell become a global reseller partner for Aerohive’s products. The following year, the two companies collaborated and enabled HiveManager NG to manage Dell’s N-series wired switches, as well as the Aerohive APs, giving customers a true “single pane of glass.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Validating cloud applications before going live

As businesses turn to the cloud as a primary resource in driving competitive advantage, migrating to this new environment should be undertaken in a deliberate and systematic manner. Although the promise of higher reliability coupled with a lower cost may lure businesses to the cloud, 41% of businesses find themselves poorly prepared for the migration and end up moving applications back to colocation facilities. For enterprises seeking to ensure success in their migration, and even those considering making the switch, the validation of cloud applications should be of primary concern.Developing cloud applications or migrating to a cloud environment means adding a lot of variable conditions between client and server. Applications that perform adequately on a corporate headquarters’ local network are often sluggish, slow, or downright unresponsive once deployed. WAN conditions, such as bandwidth constraints, latency, jitter and packet loss, can bring an application to a screeching halt once deployed within a cloud environment where distance is taken into consideration. In fact, 47% of businesses returning to traditional colocation cite latency as the biggest contributing factor to their leaving the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Abstract, Automate & Secure — From Data Center to Cloud to Edge

By Milin Desai, Vice President of Products, NSBU

It feels like only yesterday when we started our journey into networking at VMware. Even from the early beginnings in 2011, it became clear to some of us that the abstraction and operations model of virtualization for compute and memory, which completely transformed the modern data center, was something we needed to extend to networking. We understood that that a network based on software and abstraction in the long run would extend beyond our customers’ data centers to public clouds and ultimately to the Edge.

We’ve been executing on this vision for almost eight years; reinventing data center networking and enabling our customers to be smarter about how they secure, manage and connect their applications and users.

Starting with the Data Center

The Nicira acquisition, alongside our internal innovations, resulted in the release of VMware NSX in 2013. VMware NSX made network virtualization a mainstream possibility for the data center. The goal was simple — abstract the application from the physical network and deliver the networking attributes in software at machine speeds. After four years, multiple thousands of customers and the creation of a billion-dollar run rate business, we have transformed the Continue reading

Introducing oVirt 4.2.0 Beta

On October 31st, the oVirt project released version 4.2.0 Beta, available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, CentOS Linux 7.4, or similar.

Since the release of oVirt 4.2.0 Alpha a month ago, a substantial number of stabilization fixes have been introduced.

What's new in this release?

Support for LLDP, a protocol for network devices for advertising identity and capabilities to neighbors on a LAN. LLDP information can now be displayed in both the UI and via the API. The information gathered by the protocol can be used for better network configuration.

oVirt 4.2.0 Beta features Gluster 3.12.

oVirt's hyperconverged solution now enables a single replica Gluster deployment.

OVN (Open Virtual Network) is now fully supported and recommended for isolated overlay networks. OVN is automatically deployed on the the host, and made available for VM connectivity.

Snapshots can now be uploaded and downloaded via the REST API (and the SDKs).

An improvement has been introduced to the self-hosted engine. Now, the self-hosted-engine will connect to all IPs discovered, allowing both higher performance via multiple paths as well as high availability in the event that one of the targets fails.

A new Continue reading

Where Does Automation Fit into Enterprise IT?

One of my readers coming from system development area asked a fundamental question about the role of automation in enterprise IT (somewhat paraphrased):

[In system development] we automate typical tasks from the pre-defined task repository, so I would like to understand broader context as the automation (I guess) is just a part of the change we want to do in the system. Someone needs to decide what to do, someone needs to accept the change and finally the automation is used.

Of course he’s absolutely right.

Read more ...

Docker Networking Tip – Troubleshooting

Debugging Container and Docker Networking issues can be daunting at first considering that containers do not contain any debug tools inside the container. I normally see a lot of questions around Docker networking issues in Docker and stackoverflow forum. All the usual networking tools can be used to debug Docker networking, it is just that … Continue reading Docker Networking Tip – Troubleshooting →

PTT – Push To Talk

When was the last time you were looking for the unmute button in Webex and it took you more than two seconds to find it?

When was the last time you thought you are on mute but actually everyone can hear you snore?

I spend a lot of time in conference calls. This mute thing happens to me a lot.

PTT stands for Push To Talk like we used in walkie-talkies. The computer mic would be normally muted and as long as I press the PTT button, it will unmute the mic.

I couldn't find any such off the shelf device, so I decided to create one on my own.

To do so I had to integrate few components. Here is the flow of things:

When I press a button on my special device, it will send the key combination of "PrintScreen+F11". Then a special program called AutoHotKey will intercept that key combination and execute an application I wrote that controls the computer mic.

The PTT button


I am using an Arduino like microcontroller called Teensy LC. I value my time and my money, and there is nothing better than the Teensy line of microcontrollers which are very powerful, Arduino Continue reading

AMD rumored to double server core count on Epyc chip

AMD has staged quite the comeback with its Zen architecture, sold under the Ryzen brand for desktops and Epyc brand for server processors. After years as an also-ran, the Zen architecture is showing true competitiveness with Intel’s best, and at a far cheaper price tag.AMD just introduced its Epyc server processor line as the successor to its Opteron brand, but it is already reportedly working on the next wave of chips. Canard PC Hardware, a French hardware site with a good track record of accuracy, claims to have obtained specifications for AMD's next generation of Epyc processors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AMD rumored to double server core count on Epyc chip

AMD has staged quite the comeback with its Zen architecture, sold under the Ryzen brand for desktops and Epyc brand for server processors. After years as an also-ran, the Zen architecture is showing true competitiveness with Intel’s best, and at a far cheaper price tag.AMD just introduced its Epyc server processor line as the successor to its Opteron brand, but it is already reportedly working on the next wave of chips. Canard PC Hardware, a French hardware site with a good track record of accuracy, claims to have obtained specifications for AMD's next generation of Epyc processors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco aims to simplify multi-cloud deployments

One general rule of thumb I have with respect to technology deployments is that the solution to a problem should be simpler than the original problem itself. Unfortunately, we often forget that in IT and have significantly more problems after implementing a solution than we did before. Virtualization is a great example of this. Early in the rise of VMware, server admins would often tell me that the number of virtual machines and complexity was significantly higher than it was pre-server consolidation. Eventually, the good folks at VMware built vCenter, and it brought some manageability to large VMware shops.Also on Network World: 6 steps for a future-ready cloud storage strategy The same thing can be said for cloud computing. Many businesses adopt cloud so they can simplify and speed up development cycles. If all the company did was shift all of their on-premises data, compute cycles and development tools to a single cloud provider, it might indeed make things simpler.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT supplier learns new moves thanks to IoT

Tech Data may walk softly in terms of public perception – the Florida-based company isn’t exactly a household name – but it carries a big stick in the IT industry. It’s one of the biggest distributors and resellers out there, partnering with the majority of the biggest names in technology and boasting net sales of more than $26 billion in its last full financial year.Yet even major players like Tech Data have to bend to the new realities of the technology industry. We caught up with Michelle Curtis, director of IoT solutions at Tech Data, at a Microsoft IoT event in Boston on Monday.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: After virtualization and cloud, what’s left on premises? + Internet of things definitions: A handy guide to essential IoT termsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Checklists

Thirty-six seconds after launch, lightning struck the Apollo 12 and its six million pounds of high explosive fuel. The instruments blacked out. Twenty-two seconds later lightning struck again. What few instruments remained started flashing red failure lights. The “you’re about to die” alarm started blaring. Over the radio the crew heard the voice of John Aaron: “Flight, try SCE to Aux.” Astronaut Alan Bean flipped the tiny switch immediately. —Jonathan Solórzano-Hamilton @ Free Code Camp

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