Your guide to selecting pluggable transceiver modules

The high-cost of vendor-locked optics has spawned a lot of ingenuity over the years as other ‘non-approved’ manufacturers build the same optics to the same spec and try to get them to work as a low-cost alternative to preferred ODMs. But the whitebox revolution has now leveled the playing field. Lower cost whitebox hardware can work with low-cost or high-cost optics, without discrimination based on manufacturer brand. In the case of a data center deployment, the cost savings of using lower cost optics can translate to millions of dollars.

As long as the box manufacturer and the optics manufacturer both build to industry standards — both formal and informal ones — optics from any manufacturer should be able to work on any box. Most of the implementation details are specified by standards. However, that doesn’t guarantee that you can pick any module on the internet, order a thousand units and have a successful deployment.

At Cumulus Networks, we do everything we can to ensure a smooth, easy deployment. We believe that one of the critical benefits of disaggregation is that it provides you with the ability to choose whatever hardware and software best suit your business needs.

When it comes Continue reading

VMC Launches with Ansible Modules for Provisioning and Management

With the recent announcement of VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) availability and pricing, the first question the Ansible team received was, “Will the vmware_guest modules work with cloud?”

Before we answer that question, let’s take a step back and look at why teams use Ansible to provision and manage VMware environments. VMware offers several automation tools that work well within the VMware ecosystems - so why Ansible?

What if you want to share automation across VMware and non-VMware infrastructure?

Enter Ansible. Ansible allows organizations to standardize on a simple IT automation language, regardless of technology, vendor or functional area.

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  • Cloud - Pool-Check-Mark-01.svg
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  • Etc.

The Ansible VMware page does a good job of covering the key points if you want more detail.

VMC Launch

The good news is - yes - the Ansible VMware modules work with VMC out of the box.

VMC was announced as a hybrid cloud solution for VMware customers who want to leverage tools and skills that already exist in the organization. Using Ansible to provision VMs in on-premise (vSphere) and cloud (VMC) environments works in exactly the same manner.

This is the way you would expect the Ansible modules Continue reading

Disruptive Cryptography: Post-Quantum & Machine Learning With Encrypted Data

Shay Gueron, Associate Professor of Mathematics, University of Haifa, Israel, and Raluca Ada Popa, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley

Moderator: John Graham-Cumming, CTO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

Raluca is also a Co-Director of the RISELab at UC Berkeley as well as Co-Founder and CTO of a cybersecurity startup called PreVeil. She developed practical systems that protect data confidentiality by computing over encrypted data as well as designed new encryption schemes that underlie these systems.

Shay was previously a Senior Principal Engineer, serving as Intel’s Senior Cryptographer and is now senior principal at AWS, and an expert in post-quantum, security, and algorithms.

JGC: Tell us about what you actually do.

RP: Computing on encrypted data is not just theoretical; it’s also exciting because you can keep data encrypted in the cloud. It covers hacking attacks while still enabling the functionality of the system. This is exciting because we can cover so many hacking attacks in one shot.

SG: I’m working on making new algorithms; also on making solutions for quantum computers that are increasingly strong.

SG: I’ve been working on cryptography: making it faster, recently I’ve been thinking about solutions for what will happen when we Continue reading

What Will AI Mean for Everyday Life?

Willie Tejada, Chief Developer Advocate, IBM and Anthony Goldbloom, CEO, Kaggle

Moderator: Jen Taylor, Head of Product, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

JT: Our focus today is really what does AI mean for everyday life. I’m hearing a lot about AI. What is your assessment about where we are and how it is making a difference?

WT: we’re in an unprecedented, interesting era. From a consumer perspective, negative connotation.
It’s an interesting era we are in; these technologies are going to do a tremendous amount in terms of consumers selecting what they buy, Helping patient-centric care.

Combination of data set & availability of resources is fueling AI.

You might hear 90% of the world’s data has been created in the past two years. AI will help us deal with that kind of information overload.

The big difference with programming systems is that AI knows how to understand, reason, learn, interact.

AG: There is a set of techniques through which we can more accurately predict fraud, insurance plans, credit scoring.

This is a jump in the past 15 years.

5 years ago, the ability to do very exciting things with unstructured data, i.e. automating radiology. Then digital networks Continue reading

The View from Washington: The State of Cybersecurity

Avril Haines, Former Deputy National Security Advisor, Obama Administration

Moderator: Doug Kramer, General Counsel, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

Avril began her career on the National Security Council, and went on to become the first female deputy at the CIA.

DK: How will cyber will play a role in military operations?

AH: We look at it from the perspective of “asymmetric threats”; state actors (those who have high-value assets that they can hold at risk with no threat to them). The US is more technologically advanced and relies on cyber more and more; we are as a consequence more vulnerable to cyber threats. Asymmetric threats thus hold at risk those things that are most important to us.

In the cyber realm we can’t quite define what constitutes a use of force, and saying so can be used against us. So this is an area that is crucial to continue working in; in many respects the US has the most to lose from using a framework that doesn’t work.

“The private sector is utterly critical in creating a framework that is going to work.”

We want to have widely-accepted norms and rules so that we can ask other countries Continue reading

A Rare Peek Inside A 400G Cisco Network Chip

Server processor architectures are trying to break the ties between memory and compute to allow the capacities of each to scale independently of each other, but switching and routing giant Cisco Systems has already done this for a high-end switch chip that looks remarkably like a CPU tuned for network processing.

At the recent Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley, Jamie Markevitch, a principal engineer at Cisco showed off the guts of an unnamed but currently shipping network processor, something that happens very rarely in the switching and routing racket. With the exception of the upstarts like Barefoot Networks with …

A Rare Peek Inside A 400G Cisco Network Chip was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: Measuring the economic value of data

Today, there are new and changing uses of data in the digital economy. The big questions however are, who is winning with data, where is this data being kept, what makes new data different, when should data be kept, moved, deleted or transformed, how should data be valued, and why data is so much more important than it used to be?Data is one of the most important assets that any company has, but it’s surprising that we don’t put the same rigor into understanding and measuring the value of our data that we put into more traditional physical assets. Furthermore, should data be depreciated as an asset? Or perhaps it appreciates like art. Counter-intuitively, the answer is “yes” to both.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Measuring the economic value of data

Today, there are new and changing uses of data in the digital economy. The big questions however are, who is winning with data, where is this data being kept, what makes new data different, when should data be kept, moved, deleted or transformed, how should data be valued, and why data is so much more important than it used to be?Data is one of the most important assets that any company has, but it’s surprising that we don’t put the same rigor into understanding and measuring the value of our data that we put into more traditional physical assets. Furthermore, should data be depreciated as an asset? Or perhaps it appreciates like art. Counter-intuitively, the answer is “yes” to both.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Microsoft’s self-soaring sailplane improves IoT, digital assistants

A machine learning project to build an autonomous sailplane that remains aloft on thermal currents is impressive enough. But the work conducted by Microsoft researchers Andrey Kolobov and Iain Guilliard will also improve the decision making and trustworthiness of IoT devices, personal assistants and autonomous cars.The constraints limiting the computational resource of weight and space imposed by the airframe of the sailplane adds relevance to the many new developments in ubiquitous computing. The autonomous sailplane is controlled by a 160MHz Arm Cortex M4 with 256KB of RAM and 60KB of flash running on batteries that monitor the sensors, run the autopilot and control the servo motors, to which the researchers have added a machine learning model that continuously learns how to autonomously ride the thermal currents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Shedding Light on on Dark Bandwidth

We have heard much about the concept of dark silicon but there is a separate, related companion to this idea.

Dark bandwidth is a term that is being bandied about to describe the major inefficiencies of data movement. The idea of this is not unknown or new, but some of the ways the problem is being tackled present new practical directions as the emphasis on system balance over pure performance persists.

As ARM Research architect, Jonathan Beard describes it, the way systems work now is a lot like ordering a tiny watch battery online and having it delivered in a …

Shedding Light on on Dark Bandwidth was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Iron Mountain introduces cloud backup and management service

Data backup and records management vendor Iron Mountain has launched Iron Cloud, an enterprise-class cloud storage platform and services offering for data protection, preservation, restoration and recovery.The Iron Cloud hybrid data management system combines cloud storage with the ability to manage policies governing data access while migrating more and more data to the cloud, which can get expensive as storage and bandwidth costs accumulate.As more companies embrace cloud services, they are also getting hit with rude surprises, like the monthly bandwidth and storage bill. Then they have to deal with compliance regulation, especially firms in heavily regulated industries like healthcare and finance, and decide what can go into the cloud and what must stay on premises.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Planning for cloud’s limitations

Protecting data from losses requires a well-planned data-management strategy. Many strategic plans include using cloud services, but IT and other departments must understand the cloud’s strengths and limitations when it comes to protection. The benefits of the cloud include inexpensive storage costs, instant scale, high availability and the elimination of on-premises hardware infrastructure. Used properly, the cloud is essential for many firms that simply couldn’t offer their service through any other platform. Despite these advantages, the cloud has limitations, and firms should build their plans around their understanding of these limitations. —David Zimmerman @ the Data Center Journal

The post Worth Reading: Planning for cloud’s limitations appeared first on rule 11 reader.

74% off Vansky Bias Lighting for HDTV USB LED Multi Color Strip Accent Lighting – Deal Alert

This bias lighting strip, currently discounted by 74% on Amazon from $49.99 down to just $12.99, reduces eye-strain caused by differences in picture brightness from scene to scene in movies, shows and games, by adding a subtle backlight to your monitor or TV.  The LED lights can be changed with up to 20 color selections customizing and setting the mood of your workspace. The strip is easy to install and can be cut to size and plugs directly in the USB port of the TV or monitor.  Just Plug-and-play!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

74% off Vansky Bias Lighting for HDTV USB LED Multi Color Strip Accent Lighting – Deal Alert

This bias lighting strip, currently discounted by 74% on Amazon from $49.99 down to just $12.99, reduces eye-strain caused by differences in picture brightness from scene to scene in movies, shows and games, by adding a subtle backlight to your monitor or TV.  The LED lights can be changed with up to 20 color selections customizing and setting the mood of your workspace. The strip is easy to install and can be cut to size and plugs directly in the USB port of the TV or monitor.  Just Plug-and-play!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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