IDG Contributor Network: Making sense of the SD-WAN business case

As enterprises finalize budgets for 2018, a common question in IT departments is how to budget for the implementation of SD-WAN technology. The fact that these conversations are even happening is noteworthy in itself; this is a technology that has gone from being a curiosity 18 months ago to a top-5 initiative for many IT teams in recent months.There are many variations between SD-WAN vendors and service providers on what the technology offers, how it’s paid for, and how the business case stacks up. Here are a few items to consider:For most enterprises, SD-WAN savings are based on transport savings One of the headline benefits of SD-WAN that attract most enterprises is the prospect of significant savings. This can mean many things, but the bulk of these savings typically comes from replacing private MPLS connectivity with Internet-based services, and using SD-WAN to glue these together. Internet “may” be poorer quality (more on that later), and may not have performance guarantees, but the path performance tracking and steering capabilities of SD-WAN can work around these limitations. This may be the case, but it isn’t universal:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Cisco drives its industrial IoT business forward

Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) does not have the explosive growth of the consumer internet. It’s a nitty-gritty, complicated, and sometimes downright boring business. It is too complex and diverse for explosive growth like the narrowly defined, one-size-fits-all iPhone. That said, the promise of rich returns on investment from new business models that are possible with IoT is very compelling.The only way to cut through the venture-driven IoT hype cycle is with conversations with builders and implementers at companies investing in IoT, such as Cisco’s co-innovation center chief, Maciej Kranz.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The multiple cloud mindset

Public cloud or private cloud? Amazon or Azure? There once was a time when you could go to any bar in Las Vegas after a day of trade shows and hear people debating such topics, sometimes with great passion. But what has emerged more recently is the stance that you don’t have to choose one or the other, painting yourself into a figurative box of vendor lock-in. Instead, what more and more organizations are choosing is to not choose at all.Our friends at IDC call this Hybrid Cloud, but that terminology implies a single application using multiple clouds. It’s more accurate to say that organizations increasingly have a multiple cloud mindset. What does that mean? Choose the right cloud for the right job on an application-by-application basis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cohesity makes it easier to manage secondary storage

The rise of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) has been well documented over the past few years. The technology greatly reduces the operational overhead required to run workloads such as VDI and remote office/branch office workloads. The turnkey nature of HCI makes it easy to deploy and simple to operate while guaranteeing great performance. Recently, I ran across a company called Cohesity that brings the benefits of HCI to an area I had never considered it for — secondary storage. I understand that the topic of secondary storage may be boring, but it’s one of the biggest pain points for companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to be an infosec thought leader – YouTube

Funny because its true. Security professionals are a weird bunch of people. Becoming a thought leader is the epitome of professional success. But a thought leader isn’t a title that one attains by going to Harvard, or Cambridge. No, it’s a title bestowed by your peers. How to be an infosec thought leader – YouTube […]

Worth Reading: Low Earth Satellite Internet Access

Satellites are now cheaper, smaller and lighter. OneWeb and their manufacturing partner Airbus say automation and re-design will enable them to manufacture three satellites per day at a cost of less than $1 million each and launch cost per satellite will be low since they are small and light. In a talk at the opening of the SpaceX satellite engineering office in 2015, CEO and Lead Designer Elon Musk expressed confidence that they would be able to mass produce satellites and also pointed out that the failure of one or a few satellites in a constellation of thousands was relatively unimportant. If a satellite fails, the remaining satellites will route around it, and increased tolerance of failure reduces manufacturing cost. —Larry Pess @ CircleID

Tips and Tricks of the Docker Captains

My talk at DockerCon EU was designed to provide the audience with a bunch of tips for making the most of Docker. The tips were inspired by suggestions, blogs and presentations by other Docker Captains as well members of the larger Docker community.

The motivation for the talk was to enable users to quickly gain a higher level of proficiency and understanding in Docker. The metaphor I use is with traditional carpentry tools; whilst a novice can pick up a saw and cut a piece of wood, an expert will be able to do the same job more quickly, more accurately, and with less frustration. The reason why is partly experience, but also because the expert has a more thorough understanding-of and affinity-with her tools. The tips in my talk are designed both to reduce frustration and increase efficiency when working with Docker.

To give an example, one of the tips I present is on configuring the `docker ps` output format. By default `docker ps` prints out a really long line that looks messy except on the widest of terminals. You can fix this by using the `--format` argument to pick what fields you’re interested in e. Continue reading

Episode 15 – Characteristics of a Well Run Network

In episode 15, Pete Welcher and Chris Kane join us to talk about what exactly characterizes a well run network. Is it great documentation? Is it consistent application of best practices? Maybe it’s process and procedure? Join our guests, and the decades of experience they bring, as they sit around the virtual roundtable to share their thoughts on the topic.

 

Show Notes

Design

  • Keep it simple. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
  • Complexity is not just a networking attribute, it’s an overall system attribute
  • Proper design leads to simplicity (most of the time)
  • What technologies are simple? How do you recognize complexity? Is vendor lock-in one indicator? Network management software / API lock-in another growing one?
  • There are some pretty simple campus/user, datacenter, Internet Edge, and WAN approaches Big organizations can handle and may need a bit more complexity — or not
  • Modularity- too many moving parts that have to work together = complex

Operations

  • Transparent Network. It just works
  • Able to easily implement changes
  • Agnostic to both today’s needs and flexible to absorb tomorrow’s needs
  • Up-to-date diagrams and documentation matter
    • Organized around OSI layers
    • Documented naming conventions with fixed fields
    • MTTR e.g. from NetMRI and Continue reading

Episode 15 – Characteristics of a Well Run Network

In episode 15, Pete Welcher and Chris Kane join us to talk about what exactly characterizes a well run network. Is it great documentation? Is it consistent application of best practices? Maybe it’s process and procedure? Join our guests, and the decades of experience they bring, as they sit around the virtual roundtable to share their thoughts on the topic.

 

Show Notes

Design

  • Keep it simple. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
  • Complexity is not just a networking attribute, it’s an overall system attribute
  • Proper design leads to simplicity (most of the time)
  • What technologies are simple? How do you recognize complexity? Is vendor lock-in one indicator? Network management software / API lock-in another growing one?
  • There are some pretty simple campus/user, datacenter, Internet Edge, and WAN approaches Big organizations can handle and may need a bit more complexity — or not
  • Modularity- too many moving parts that have to work together = complex

Operations

  • Transparent Network. It just works
  • Able to easily implement changes
  • Agnostic to both today’s needs and flexible to absorb tomorrow’s needs
  • Up-to-date diagrams and documentation matter
    • Organized around OSI layers
    • Documented naming conventions with fixed fields
    • MTTR e.g. from NetMRI and Continue reading

Linux command line tools for working with non-Linux users

I spend most of my computing life in the Shell (command line, terminal or whatever you want to call it on your platform of choice). This can be a bit challenging, though, when I need to work with large groups of other people, especially in big enterprise companies that — well — use anything but the Shell.The problems that crop up are made worse when other people within your company use a different platform than you. I tend to use Linux. If I’m doing a lot of my daily work from a Linux terminal and the bulk of my co-workers use Windows 10 (entirely from the GUI side), things can get … problematic.Also on Network World: 11 pointless but awesome Linux terminal tricks Luckily, over the past few years, I’ve figured out how to deal with these problems. I’ve found ways to make using a Linux (or other Unix-like systems) Shell much more doable within a non-Unix, corporate environment. These tools/tips apply equally well for SysAdmins working on a company’s servers as they do for developers or marketing people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Giving thanks to your data center manager

What do the peaking colors of fall foliage, the nighttime appearance of the hunter’s moon, and escalating college football and NFL rivalries indicate? That autumn has officially arrived, and Thanksgiving is right around the corner.Thanksgiving is primarily associated with family and friends gathering together, enjoying an uncomfortable amount of turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie, and then lapsing into a tryptophan and sugar-induced state of semi-consciousness. While Americans may also associate Thanksgiving with the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians, the holiday actually spans cultures, continents and millennia. In ancient times, the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all feasted and paid tribute to their deities as an annual celebration of the harvest and its bounty.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Giving thanks to your data center manager

What do the peaking colors of fall foliage, the nighttime appearance of the hunter’s moon, and escalating college football and NFL rivalries indicate? That autumn has officially arrived, and Thanksgiving is right around the corner.Thanksgiving is primarily associated with family and friends gathering together, enjoying an uncomfortable amount of turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie, and then lapsing into a tryptophan and sugar-induced state of semi-consciousness. While Americans may also associate Thanksgiving with the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians, the holiday actually spans cultures, continents and millennia. In ancient times, the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all feasted and paid tribute to their deities as an annual celebration of the harvest and its bounty.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM’s latest private cloud is built on Kubernetes, and is aimed at Microsoft

IBM today announced a new version of its private cloud platform that supports the popular open source application container platform Kubernetes.IBM Cloud Private gives customers an option to deploy applications on to the private cloud software in three ways: Either through Kubernetes, through the container management platform Cloud Foundry, or through traditional virtual machines. IBM says the private cloud management software also allows customers to run other legacy apps in containers and connect them to off-premises resources.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What is hybrid cloud computing? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM Builds Private Cloud Stack With Kubernetes And Containers

When enterprises talk about cloud computing, they invariably talk about hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Not all of their workloads will run on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform – or only on one public cloud, for that matter.

In highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services, some workloads will run in private clouds hosted by the enterprises themselves for compliance, security, and privacy reasons. Companies that have invested millions of dollars in their datacenters over the years also will want to protect those investments by leveraging them for private clouds. What’s important to them is being …

IBM Builds Private Cloud Stack With Kubernetes And Containers was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

RIPE 75: IoT & Routing Security

RIPE 75 was held on 22-26 October 2017 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and was the second time the meeting has come to the Middle East. 483 participants from 54 countries including 175 newcomers came together to discuss operational issues and share expertise about the Internet, with a particular focus on the RIPE region that covers Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Jan Žorž and Kevin Meynell from the Deploy360 team, along with Salam Yamout from the Middle East Bureau were also actively involved in the launch of a new Internet-of-Things Working Group, hosting a Routing Security BoF, and raising awareness of IRTF work on Human Rights Protocol Considerations.

The BoF session on ‘Internet Routing Health’ was organised by the Internet Society, and chaired by Jan and Benno Overreinder (NLnet Labs). The BoF attracted 20 participants variously drawn from commercial network operators and cloud providers, Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), and academia, with the aim of discussing ideas for measuring the health of the Internet routing system in order to obtain empirical data to strengthen the case for collaborative routing security.

The IoT session aimed to build on the RIPE IoT Roundtable meeting that was held on 21 September 2017 in Leeds, UK, and Continue reading

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