Worth Reading: Raw sockets in IPv6

As part of a measurement experiment, we wanted an implementation of an IPv6 UDP server and a TCP server that generated fragmented IPv6 packets. However, as an added condition, we wanted the application to directly control the packet fragmentation function. The conventional standard socket interface masks any visibility to the underlying packet transactions, and therefore cannot be used for this experiment. —Geoff Huston @Potaroo

MetLife Uses Docker Enterprise Edition to Self Fund Containerization

MetLife is a 150 year old company in the business of securing promises and the information management of over 100M customers and their insurance policies. As a global company, MetLife delivers promises into every corner of the world – some of them built to last a lifetime. With this rich legacy comes a diverse portfolio of IT infrastructure to maintain those promises.

In April, Aaron Aedes from MetLife spoke about their first foray into Docker containerization with a new application, GSSP, delivered through Azure. Six months later, MetLife returns to the DockerCon stage to share their journey since this initial deployment motivated them to find other ways to leverage Docker Enterprise Edition [EE] within MetLife.

Jeff Murr, Director of Engineering for Containers and Open Source at MetLife spoke in the Day 1 DockerCon keynote session about how they are looking to scale containerization with Docker as they scale . He states that new technology typically adds more cost and overhead to an already taxed IT budget. But the Docker Modernize Traditional Apps [MTA] Program presented an opportunity to reduce the costs of their existing applications.

The MTA project at MetLife started with a single Linux Java-based application that handled the “Do Not Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How consumer demand is driving development of the Internet of Things

Few industries are as impacted by consumer demand as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the plethora of sectors reliant on in; when consumers demand a new gadget or a new service, an innovative startup springs up seemingly overnight to meet those demands. Similarly, few consumer goods are as customizable or responsive to changing user preferences as the gadgets and software that make up the commercial IoT. So how can savvy IoT enthusiast rely on consumer demand to better the IoT businesses?One can’t find success in the field of IT or within the IoT in general without understanding how crucial consumer demand is to the industry as a whole. More than anything else, this demand is driving the extraordinarily rapid development of the IoT, which could reach a dizzying 50 billion connections by 2020, according to Brookings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

QCT Open Data Center Technology Poised to Help Telcos ‘Win 5G Battles’

SAN JOSE, California — Quanta Cloud Technology’s (QCT) latest data center technology brings the benefits of disaggregation and composable infrastructure to cloud service providers and telco service providers, said Mike Yang, president of QCT at today’s Q.synergy 2017 event. The Rackgo R portfolio is based on the Intel Rack Scale Design (RSD) software framework, which... Read more →

Devaluing Data Exposures

I had a great time this week recording the first episode of a new series with my co-worker Rich Stroffolino. The Gestalt IT Rundown is hopefully the start of some fun news stories with a hint of snark and humor thrown in.

One of the things I discussed in this episode was my belief that no data is truly secure any more. Thanks to recent attacks like WannaCry and Bad Rabbit and the rise of other state-sponsored hacking and malware attacks, I’m totally behind the idea that soon everyone will know everything about me and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it.

Just Pick Up The Phone

Personal data is important. Some pieces of personal data are sacrificed for the greater good. Anyone who is in IT or works in an area where they deal with spam emails and robocalls has probably paused for a moment before putting contact information down on a form. I have an old Hotmail address I use to catch spam if I’m relative certain that something looks shady. I give out my home phone number freely because I never answer it. These pieces of personal data have been sacrificed in order to provide me Continue reading

IoT market keeps growing, with no end in sight

With all the hype it’s getting, you might think the Internet of Things (IoT) simply couldn’t gain any more momentum. Well, think again, because new market research and a wave of global IoT investments from sovereign nations and top-name companies keeps on accelerating the IoT momentum.Growth, growth and more growth First off, IHS Markit has published a new ebook in which it predicts serious growth for IoT: “The number of connected IoT devices worldwide will jump 12 percent on average annually, from nearly 27 billion in 2017 to 125 billion in 2030.”According to the ebook, titled “The Internet of Things: a movement, not a market,” (pdf) that growth “is impacting virtually all stages of industry and nearly all market areas — from raw materials to production to distribution and even the consumption of final goods.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware NSX/Kubernetes and F5 – A Cloud Native App Integration

Introduction When Bob Dylan wrote back in the 60’s “times they are a-changin” it’s very possible he knew how true that would be today.  Last week, we saw a few things announced in the container technology space during the DockerCon event in Copenhagen – but one thing that I believe came as a surprise to... Read more →

VMware NSX/Kubernetes and F5 – A Cloud Native App Integration

Introduction

When Bob Dylan wrote back in the 60’s “times they are a-changin” it’s very possible he knew how true that would be today.  Last week, we saw a few things announced in the container technology space during the DockerCon event in Copenhagen – but one thing that I believe came as a surprise to many was Docker’s announcement to begin including Kubernetes in Docker Enterprise edition sometime in early 2018.  This doesn’t concede or mark the death of Docker’s own scheduling and orchestration platform, Docker Swarm, but it does underscore what we’ve heard from many of our customers for quite some time now – almost every IT organization that is using/evaluating containers has jumped on the Kubernetes bandwagon.  In fact, many of you are probably already familiar with the integration supported today with NSX-T 2.0 and Kubernetes from the post that Yves did earlier in the year…

In the past few years, we’ve heard a lot about this idea of digital transformation and what it means for today’s enterprise.  Typically, a part of this transformation is something called infrastructure modernization, and this happens because most IT environments today have some hurdles that need to Continue reading

Technology Short Take 89

Welcome to Technology Short Take 89! I have a collection of newer materials and some older materials this time around, but hopefully all of them are still useful. (I needed to do some housekeeping on my Instapaper account, which is where I bookmark stuff that frequently lands here.) Enjoy!

Networking

• This is a slightly older post providing an overview of container networking, but still quite relevant. Julia has a very conversational style that works well when explaining new topics to readers, I think.
• Russell Bryant has a post on Open Virtual Network (OVN), a project within the Open vSwitch (OVS) community. If you’re not familiar with OVN, this is a good post with which to start.

Servers/Hardware

Hmm…I didn’t find anything again this time around. Perhaps I should remove this section?

Security

• This blog post discusses some of the new network security functionality available in vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) version 1.2; specifically, the new container network firewall functionality.
• The NIST and DHS have teamed up on some efforts to secure BGP; more information is available in this article.
• When I was using Fedora, I needed some useful information on firewall-cmd, and found this article to Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Don’t keep squandering one of your greatest storage assets: metadata

Storage has long been one of the biggest line items on the IT budget. Rightly so, given that data is valuable asset and the lifeblood of every business today. Critical applications consume data as quickly as they get it, and many companies are also using their data to find new insights that help them develop novel products and strategies.Regardless of how hot a file is when it is created, in time, its use cools. As a business matures, more and more cool, cold and even frigid data continues to pile up. With analytics now offering new insights on old data, however, no one wants to delete old files or send them to offline archival storage. This means buying more and more capacity is a given, just as death and taxes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Don’t keep squandering one of your greatest storage assets: metadata

Storage has long been one of the biggest line items on the IT budget. Rightly so, given that data is valuable asset and the lifeblood of every business today. Critical applications consume data as quickly as they get it, and many companies are also using their data to find new insights that help them develop novel products and strategies.Regardless of how hot a file is when it is created, in time, its use cools. As a business matures, more and more cool, cold and even frigid data continues to pile up. With analytics now offering new insights on old data, however, no one wants to delete old files or send them to offline archival storage. This means buying more and more capacity is a given, just as death and taxes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Service Provider MPLS : Inter-AS MPLS Options

Today I am going to talk about the Inter-AS MPLS or you can say that Inter-provider MPLS option. So in this case i am taking the example on the Cisco devices. To maintain the continuity of MPLS VPN services across multiple service providers, mainly for customers who span world wide on different service providers, IETF described 3 types of options. These options are 

• Option A
• Option B 
• Option C

 Inter-AS or Inter-Provider MPLS VPN solutions, while Cisco implemented three options (1, 2 and 3) with Cisco IOS (these options are also known in Cisco documents as 10A, 10B and 10C).

Lets start with all these option one by one. The first option is called as VRF to VRF connection between two different AS border routers and the explanation is as below.

Option A: VRF-to-VRF connections at the AS (Autonomous System) border routers

In this procedure, a PE router in one AS attaches directly to a PE router in another. The two PE routers will be attached by multiple sub-interfaces, at least one for each of the VPNs whose routes need to be passed from AS to AS. 

Fig 1.1- Inter-AS option A

Each PE will treat the other Continue reading

LLDP Information Now Available via the Administration Portal

In oVirt 4.2 we have introduced support for the Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP). It is used by network devices for advertising the identity and capabilities to neighbors on a LAN. The information gathered by the protocol can be used for better network configuration.Learn more about LLDP.

Why do you need LLDP?

When adding a host into oVirt cluster, the network administrator usually needs to attach various networks to it. However, a modern host can have multiple interfaces, each with its non-descriptive name.

Examples

In the screenshot below, taken from the Administration Portal, a network administrator has to know to which interface to attach the network named m2 with VLAN_ID 162. Should it be interface enp4s0, ens2f0 or even ens2f1? With oVirt 4.2, the administrator can hover over enp4s0 and see that this interface is connected to peer switch rack01-sw03-lab4, and learn that this peer switch does not support VLAN 162 on this interface. By looking at every interface, the administrator can choose which interface is the right option for networkm2.

A similar situation arises with the configuration of mode 4 bonding (LACP). Configurating LACP usually starts with network administrator defining a port group Continue reading

Ethernet History on Software Gone Wild

During Cisco Live Berlin 2017 Peter Jones (chair of several IEEE task forces) and myself went on a journey through 40 years of Ethernet history (and Token Bus and a few other choice technologies).

The sound quality is what you could expect from something recorded on a show floor with pigeons flying around, but I hope you’ll still enjoy our chat.

Can Vector Supercomputing Be Revived?

Seymour Cray loved vector supercomputers, and made the second part of that term a household word because of it. NEC, the last of the pure vector supercomputer makers, is so excited about its new “Aurora” SX-10+ vector processor and the “Tsubasa” supercomputer that will use it that it forgot to announce the processor to the world when it previewed the system this week.

Here at The Next Platform, we easily forgive such putting of carts before horses – so long as someone eventually explains the horse to us before the cart starts shipping for real. NEC is expected to …

Can Vector Supercomputing Be Revived? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

WPA2 and Infineon

The recent bug in WPA2 has a worst case outcome that is the same as using a wifi without a password: People can sniff, maybe inject… it’s not great but you connect to open wifi at Starbucks anyway, and you’re fine with that because you visit sites with HTTPS and SSH. Eventually your client will get a fix too, so the whole thing is pretty “meh”.

But there’s a reason I call it “WPA2 bug” and I call the recent issue with Infineon key generation “the Infineon disaster”. It’s much bigger. It seems like the whole of Estonia needs to re-issue ID cards, and several years worth of PC-, smartcard-, Yubikey, and other production have been generating bad keys. And these keys will stick around.

From now until forever when you generate, use, or accept RSA keys you have to check for these weak keys. I assume OpenSSH will if it hasn’t already.

But then what? It’s not like servers can just reject these keys, or it’ll lock people out. And it’s not clear that an adversary even has your public key for SSH. And you can’t crack the key if you don’t have the public half. Maybe a Continue reading

Elliott Management Acquires Gigamon for $1.6B

The private-equity firm will purchase Gigamon at a premium of 21 percent.

AWS First Up With Volta GPUs In The Cloud

It must be tough for the hyperscalers that are expanding into public cloud and the public cloud builders that also use their datacenters to run their own businesses to decide whether to hoard all of the new technologies that they can get their hands on for their own benefit, or to make money selling that capacity to others.

For any new, and usually constrained, kind of capacity, such as shiny new “Skylake” Xeon SP processors from Intel or “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators from Nvidia, it has to be a hard call for Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba to …

AWS First Up With Volta GPUs In The Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

SendGrid Re-Architects Its IT Infrastructure to Work with AWS

It needed to tease apart state versus compute.

IBM cranks up flash storage for greater capacity and speed

All-flash storage has become increasingly popular in data centers as a means of much faster data access than traditional hard disk, but its growth has been impeded by cost and storage density. There was too much of the former and too little of the latter.Every memory, storage and server vendor is working full out to address that issue, and it has turned into quite an arms race, which benefits the customer. So much so that Gartner predicts that within the next 12 months, solid-state arrays will improve in performance by a factor of 10 while doubling in density and cost-effectiveness.Also on Network World: After virtualization and cloud, what’s left on premises? IBM has just made its contribution to that growth. It has announced advances in flash storage that it claims will provide a three-fold increase in density in the same physical space for its FlashSystem 900 flash arrays, while reducing data capacity costs by 60 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here