IDG Contributor Network: Shrink your data migration schedule

If there’s one problem just about every IT professional can relate to, it is the pain of a storage migration. Aging is part of life not only for us IT veterans, but also the storage systems we manage. Despite the fact that we’ve been having to move data off old storage for decades, the challenge of moving data from one storage resource to another, without disrupting business, remains one of the most time consuming and stressful projects for an IT team.Many of the IT professionals I speak with tell me that their migrations are scheduled over months, and can even take a year to plan and execute. It’s no surprise then that IT professionals named migrations as the number two issue facing their departments in a recent survey. Only performance presents a bigger challenge for today’s IT professionals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Moving fast and making friends: the power of a tight-knit industry community

The internet is a smaller place than it seems. Despite the gigantic weight of the industries built on it, the near ubiquity of the internet in our lives, and the complexity and scale of modern online applications, at its core the internet operates atop a relatively small set of systems.Pockets of deep knowledge and operational expertise around these key systems have developed over the years. There are tight-knit and cooperative communities focused on network operations, infosec, email and HTTP, to name just a few.DNS—the entry point to nearly every online application and a key anchor of the internet —is no different. A relatively small community of deep experts and operators drives the protocol and its key operational aspects. Homes for this community include DNS-OARC, IETF/ICANN, email lists and regular small meetings of key operators.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Basics on Riverbed WAN optimization Solution

Today I am going to talk about basics of Riverbed WAN optimization solution. WAN optimization solutions that deliver broad-spectrum improvement of WANs and the name comes into the mind is Riverbed WAN optimization solution. With Riverbed products, enterprises can implement solutions that help them empower their distributed workforce while eliminating IT capital expenditures and simplifying IT management. 
  • With the help of Riverbed enterprise can Centralize distributed infrastructure like file servers, mail servers, network attached storage (NAS), and remote office backup systems without affecting remote users 
  • It is a challenge to share large files but with the help of riverbed you can share large files among colleagues on different continents 
  • Are you afraid of backup and replication over WAN links, well with Riverbed you can perform backup and replication over long distance WAN links and will have complete them during backup windows that were unachievable just a year ago 
  • Enterprises need not to upgrade the bandwidth of their WAN circuits as with the Riverbed you can deliver significantly more services on existing WANs 
Fig 1.1- Riverbed Steelhead deployment in WAN

If you guys aware of the TCP, TCP has a window of packets that can be Continue reading

Response to the Community on .CAT Issues

Last week I published a statement about Internet blocking measures in Catalonia, Spain.

The situation in Catalonia is delicate and politically sensitive. Understandably, my statement prompted some strong reactions from the Internet community.

In light of this, we feel it is important to clarify what we set out to do in the statement.

The statement was not drafted as a comment on the current political debate and it was not intended to be read in this way. There are many other stakeholders who are much better positioned than the Internet Society to deal with and comment on these political aspects.

Rather, we wanted to highlight the potential consequences for the Internet that stem from the court order requiring .CAT to monitor content and use the DNS (domain name system) to block that content. In this instance, the content in question related to the 1st October referendum.

We firmly believe that intermediaries (in this case the top-level domain (TLD) operator, but it could be any other intermediary such as an Internet Service Provider (ISP)) should not be put in the position of having to decide what content is legal and what is not. Simply put, this is not the role of Continue reading

Kubernetes in the enterprise with VMware NSX-T and vRealize Automation

We’ve all seen the VMware PKS announcement at VMworld 2017, and we are all excited about it. The idea of provisioning Kubernetes clusters in an easy way, with day-2 operations, inside your datacenters, has been a request from most of the VMware customers who are starting their journeys into the brave new cloud-native world. As we saw also from the announcement, PKS is currently under development by VMware, Google and Pivotal and is targeted for GA Q4 this year.

Until then, what if we have a solution today that you can start piloting right away without waiting? And what if it is based on the VMware solutions that you’ve grown to use and love. Better yet, what if we can add to that mix a solid networking and security capabilities to run your Kubernetes clusters in a self-service and IT governance to maintain your existing operational models?

Figure 1: Solution Overview

I’ve just started a new blog series that I named “Kubernetes in the Enterprise” which answers all those questions in a form of an enterprise-grade solution. This solution is very grounded to the real-world and business challenges, and driven by many discussions that I have been having with my Continue reading

Recapping the Incredible Presentations at future:net 2017

For those of you unable to attend future:net 2017 in Las Vegas, NV last month, fear not—what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas!

That’s right, thanks to the wonder that is YouTube, there are video recordings available of the amazing keynote speakers and presentations that took place at this year’s future:net conference, which brought together the technical and networking leaders shaping new network strategies, solutions and innovations for the future of digital transformation.

To cure you of any FOMO you may have, check out a recap of future:net presentations below, including links to their videos and a brief description of the speakers and topics discussed during each.

The Clever Machinations Of Livermore’s Sierra Supercomputer

The potent combination of powerful CPUs, floating point laden GPU accelerators, and fast InfiniBand networking are coming to market and reshaping the upper echelons of supercomputing. While Intel is having issues with its future Knights massively parallel X86 processors, which it has not really explained, the two capability class supercomputers that are being built for the US Department of Energy by IBM with the help of Nvidia and Mellanox Technologies, named “Summit” and ‘Sierra” and installed at Oak Ridge National Lab and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, are beginning to be assembled.

We have previously profiled the nodes in

The Clever Machinations Of Livermore’s Sierra Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Demo: Multi-site Active-Active with NSX, F5 Networks GSLB, and Palo Alto Networks Security

I wrote this post prior on my personal blog at HumairAhmed.com. You can also see many of my prior blogs on multisite and Cross-vCenter NSX here on the VMware Network Virtualization blog site. This post expands on my prior post, Multi-site Active-Active Solutions with NSX-V and F5 BIG-IP DNS. Specifically, in this post, deploying applications in an Active-Active model across data centers is demonstrated where ingress/egress is always at the data center local to the client, or in other words localized ingress/egress. Continue reading

Intel plans hybrid CPU-FPGA chips

Two years ago, Intel spent $16.7 billion to acquire FPGA chip vendor Altera. So, what’s it going to do with that big purchase? The company is finally ready to say. A field-programmable gate array, or FPGA, is an integrated circuit that can be customized to perform specific functions. Whereas the x86 executes only the x86 instruction sets, an FPGA can be reprogrammed on the fly to perform specified tasks. That’s why x86s are considered general compute processors and FPGAs are viewed as customizable. Also on Network World: What you need when the big breakout for the Internet of Things arrives The company’s strategy is interesting in that it effectively puts Intel in competition with itself. If you want to do massive floating-point computation, Intel has the Xeon Phi line of add-in cards that compete with Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Now the FPGAs are also targeting those use cases. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel plans hybrid CPU-FPGA chips

Two years ago, Intel spent $16.7 billion to acquire FPGA chip vendor Altera. So, what’s it going to do with that big purchase? The company is finally ready to say. A field-programmable gate array, or FPGA, is an integrated circuit that can be customized to perform specific functions. Whereas the x86 executes only the x86 instruction sets, an FPGA can be reprogrammed on the fly to perform specified tasks. That’s why x86s are considered general compute processors and FPGAs are viewed as customizable. Also on Network World: What you need when the big breakout for the Internet of Things arrives The company’s strategy is interesting in that it effectively puts Intel in competition with itself. If you want to do massive floating-point computation, Intel has the Xeon Phi line of add-in cards that compete with Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Now the FPGAs are also targeting those use cases. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Red Hat Stretches Gluster Clustered Storage Under Containers

Red Hat has been aggressive in building out its capabilities around containers. The company last month unveiled its OpenShift Container Platform 3.6, its enterprise-grade Kubernetes container platform for cloud native applications that added enhanced security features and greater consistency across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

A couple of weeks later, Red Hat and Microsoft expanded their alliance to make it easier for organizations to adopt containers. Red Hat last year debuted OpenShift 3.0, which was based on the open source Kubernetes orchestration system and Docker containers, and the company has since continued to roll out enhancements to the platform.

The

Red Hat Stretches Gluster Clustered Storage Under Containers was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Brace yourselves, DockerCon Europe 2017 is coming!

DockerCon Europe 2017 is just around the corner and the whole European Docker community is getting ready for four days of incredible learning, networking and collaboration!

If you’re a registered attendee, login on to the DockerCon Europe Agenda Builder using the information you set up during the registration process. You can use the keyword search bar or filter by topics, days, tracks, experience level or target audience to get recommended sessions and build you schedule.

Every DockerCon Europe Attendee should have received an invitation to join the Docker Community Slack (dockercommunity.slack.com). If that’s not the case, please reach out to [email protected] and we’ll make sure to resend the invitation.

DockerCon EU

Monday 16 October

Attendees who have signed up for Paid-Workshops or want to check in and pick up their badge and backpacks early should plan to be in Copenhagen by Monday morning.

Registration

Registration will be open from 12:00 – 19:30.

Workshops

Interested in attending a DockerCon EU Workshops on Monday? Here is the list of the workshops that are still available:

  • Introduction to Docker for Enterprise Developers
  • Docker on Windows: From 101 to Production
  • Docker for Java Developers
  • Learn DockerDockerCon EU

If you’ve already registered for a workshop, Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Wi-Fi analytics SaaS can make retail cool

Retail hasn’t lost its “cool.” [aaaayyyyy]It’s just reinventing it. We know this but Amazon’s recent purchase of Whole Foods sure gave everyone a wake-up call to “innovate or get left-in-the-dust.”I know, you’re in charge of IT, not corporate strategy… but bear with me. This ends up being an IT thing.As Forbes recently detailed, while Amazon unveiled its plans for Whole Foods (which includes decreased prices and the addition of industry-disrupting in-store technology), the market reacted. That same afternoon, stocks of several major brick-and-mortar retailers and grocery stores experienced significant drops in stock price.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Wi-Fi analytics SaaS can make retail cool

Retail hasn’t lost its “cool.” [aaaayyyyy]It’s just reinventing it. We know this but Amazon’s recent purchase of Whole Foods sure gave everyone a wake-up call to “innovate or get left-in-the-dust.”I know, you’re in charge of IT, not corporate strategy… but bear with me. This ends up being an IT thing.As Forbes recently detailed, while Amazon unveiled its plans for Whole Foods (which includes decreased prices and the addition of industry-disrupting in-store technology), the market reacted. That same afternoon, stocks of several major brick-and-mortar retailers and grocery stores experienced significant drops in stock price.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here