Technology Short Take #86

Welcome to Technology Short Take #86, the latest collection of links, articles, and posts from around the web, focused on major data center technology areas. Enjoy!

Networking

• Csilla Bessenyei has a series of articles on step-by-step automation that you might find helpful. I found the articles at step 5, the benefits of Git for network engineers, but the previous four articles also look helpful.
• James Governor provides a useful explanation of a service mesh in the context of Istio and Linkerd; this is helpful for those of you out there who’ve heard the terms/names but haven’t had time to really dig in and understand what’s happening here.
• Speaking of service mesh: a couple related articles passed across my desk(top) recently. The first of these is an article on using Traefik with Kubernetes and Let’s Encrypt (throwing in a Consul back-end for the fun of it). The second is this post on Istio plus Linkerd, which talks about how to use Linkerd in conjunction with Istio to build a service mesh. (Do I need to talk about how understanding a service mesh is a good thing for networking professionals? That might be a good blog post topic right there! Continue reading

Challenges of Data Center Fabric Deployments [Video]

One of the use cases we covered in Network Automation Use Cases webinar is a fully-automated data center fabric deployment. Dinesh Dutt (Cumulus Networks) started this section with an overview of challenges you might face in data center fabric deployments.

If you want to automate your fabric with Ansible, enroll into the Ansible for Networking Engineers course, or attend the Building Network Automation Solutions course if you want to get a broader view.

VMware NSX-V: Security for VxRAIL Hyper-Converged Solutions

Check-out the new white paper on leveraging NSX-V for security within the VxRAIL hyper-converged platform. The paper outlines how VxRAIL hyper-converged solutions leveraging NSX-V for security solves many of the security challenges with traditional silo-based architectures. A brief outline is provided below. Make sure to checkout the white paper for additional details.  Continue reading

Woot! Passed My CCDE Recert (2nd Attempt)

Friday, August 18th was the day. Yup. Just last week.   My 2nd attempt at the CCDE written to re-certify my 3 “Es”.  To say I was nervous would very much be a decided understatement.  I don’t think I have ever been so nervous to take a Cisco written exam ever before.  Seriously ever before.

It’s funny… in all these years of taking the recert exams… I pretty much have always had the same pattern and same view on it.  My pattern usually is to take the 1st attempt 6-9 months before my 2 years is slated to be up.  My view on it has always been that of “time to refresh my broader knowledge again” and make it deep again.  There is that old adage “if you don’t use it you lose it”.   Teehee… yeah… that is typically IS-IS for me. 

My view this time around was different.  And given that my first CCIE was from 1997…. this change in view was a surprise to me.  My view was more of it being something I “had to do” instead of “wanted to do”.

Why?  Because for the first Continue reading

AfPIF Day Two: Identifying Challenges and Opportunities

Take a Brief Survey to Support Community Networks

The Internet Society has worked with NetCommons to promote community networks. They are a conducting a survey to examine users’ concerns about Internet use and explore the potential of alternative Internet provision.

The netCommons project funded by EU (EU Horizon 2020 project netCommons: Network Infrastructure as Commons) aspires to study, support, and further promote community-based networking and communication services that can offer a complement, or even an alternative, to the global Internet’s current dominant model. It involves a collaboration of six organizations, namely the University of Trento in Italy, The Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) in Spain, the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, the University of Westminster (UK), the Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece, and the non-profit organization Nethood in Switzerland. 

Community networks provide citizens with access to a neutral, bottom- up network infrastructure, which increases the transparency of data flow, but they also represent an archetype of networked collective cooperation and action, mixing common or communal ownership and management of an infrastructure with a balanced set of services supported by the local stakeholders. In this way, they are a departure from the standard Internet, which is dominated by commercial Internet providers, global corporate Continue reading

On-premises data center spending drops in priority

A survey has found that on-premises data centers are the lowest priority for investment by IT organizations, a reflection of the growing impact of cloud infrastructure and services. For Computer Economics’ annual IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks report, the organization surveyed more than 200 IT organizations over the first half of this year. It noted that top-line findings show that IT organizations continue on a path of “steady but modest growth in operational budgets while capital budgets and hiring are essentially flat.”+ Also on Network World: IT budgets shift away from capital expenses thanks to the cloud + Now, that’s not to say data center spending will be cut. It’s just that it won’t get the priority for increased spending and is being reduced. IT capital spending now accounts for only 18% of total IT spending, compared to 24% in 2013. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

On-premises data center spending drops in priority

A survey has found that on-premises data centers are the lowest priority for investment by IT organizations, a reflection of the growing impact of cloud infrastructure and services. For Computer Economics’ annual IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks report, the organization surveyed more than 200 IT organizations over the first half of this year. It noted that top-line findings show that IT organizations continue on a path of “steady but modest growth in operational budgets while capital budgets and hiring are essentially flat.”+ Also on Network World: IT budgets shift away from capital expenses thanks to the cloud + Now, that’s not to say data center spending will be cut. It’s just that it won’t get the priority for increased spending and is being reduced. IT capital spending now accounts for only 18% of total IT spending, compared to 24% in 2013. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon Adds Check Point Security to Virtual Network Services

Verizon customers requested Check Point security.

Worth Reading: Detecting network outages with RIPE ATLAS

As much as we dislike it, large-scale Internet outages do happen, sometimes as a result of technical problems or sometimes even politically motivated. We’d like to be notified when these outages occur, ideally in real-time, as they can explain connectivity issues or other Internet phenomena (for instance, events seen at a NOC). They can also potentially be seen as metrics for the health of the Internet. —Anant Shah @ APNIC

The post Worth Reading: Detecting network outages with RIPE ATLAS appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Drilling Into Microsoft’s BrainWave Soft Deep Learning Chip

There are a lot of different ways to skin the deep learning cat. But for hyperscalers and cloud providers who want to use a single platform internally as well as providing deep learning services to customers externally, they really want to have as few different architectures as possible in their datacenters to maximize efficiencies and to lower both capital and operational costs. This is particularly true when the hyperscaler is also a cloud provider.

If Moore’s Law had not run out of gas – or at least shifted to lower octane fuel – then the choice would have been easy. …

Drilling Into Microsoft’s BrainWave Soft Deep Learning Chip was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cumulus does container networking the right way

About a month ago, someone asked me to define the term “digital transformation.” At first, I thought about giving a long technical definition that mentioned the convergences of people, process and data, but then I shortened to one word — speed. Digital transformation is all about doing things faster than the competition. This is one of those things that’s easier to say than do. Most businesses simply can’t move faster just because they want to. Instead it requires an entirely new approach to IT. Gartner uses the term “Mode 2,” but other terms are things like agile development or DevOps. + Also on Network World: Adapting the network for the rise of containers + This new approach to IT has brought with it several new technologies, one of which is containers. The use of containers has steadily increased because IT departments can quickly spin them up, do whatever task they need to do and then shut them down. The whole process can be automated, so the IT organization doesn’t even need to be involved. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cumulus does container networking the right way

About a month ago, someone asked me to define the term “digital transformation.” At first, I thought about giving a long technical definition that mentioned the convergences of people, process and data, but then I shortened to one word — speed. Digital transformation is all about doing things faster than the competition. This is one of those things that’s easier to say than do. Most businesses simply can’t move faster just because they want to. Instead it requires an entirely new approach to IT. Gartner uses the term “Mode 2,” but other terms are things like agile development or DevOps. + Also on Network World: Adapting the network for the rise of containers + This new approach to IT has brought with it several new technologies, one of which is containers. The use of containers has steadily increased because IT departments can quickly spin them up, do whatever task they need to do and then shut them down. The whole process can be automated, so the IT organization doesn’t even need to be involved. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon Considers Competing with Cisco, Juniper on Software

The evolution of its Virtual Network Services could lead to selling network software.

IT powerhouses try to come from behind in enterprise IoT

It’s unusual for technology vendors of sufficient size not to be the most powerful companies in any market space they enter – the mere fact that they’re there arranges other players into a “Google/Microsoft/Amazon against everybody else” formation.That’s why, according to experts, the heterodox, wide-open IoT platform marketplace is so strange – it’s an area in which all the traditional powerhouses of IT are playing, but they’re not dominating market share the way they usually do.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: How Google is speeding up the Internet + Cisco brings its SDN to Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s public cloudTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hedvig SD-Storage Adds All-Flash Capabilities and Native Encryption

HPE's endorsement has helped this startup grow.

IDG Contributor Network: 4 ways to simplify data management

If it seems your IT team has more data to manage than ever before, you’re not mistaken. Just about every enterprise is trying to determine how to manage more data growth without scaling budget or staff as well.451 Research analyst Henry Baltazar emphasized this trend in a recent report, noting, “The increasing relevancy of data management is in parallel with the ongoing growth of the sheer volume of data that enterprises must deal with.” The good news is that there are many approaches IT can take to ease the challenges of data growth. Let's take a look at four steps IT can use to make a big impact.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 4 ways to simplify data management

If it seems your IT team has more data to manage than ever before, you’re not mistaken. Just about every enterprise is trying to determine how to manage more data growth without scaling budget or staff as well.451 Research analyst Henry Baltazar emphasized this trend in a recent report, noting, “The increasing relevancy of data management is in parallel with the ongoing growth of the sheer volume of data that enterprises must deal with.” The good news is that there are many approaches IT can take to ease the challenges of data growth. Let's take a look at four steps IT can use to make a big impact.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6WIND Lures Brocade vRouter Customers Left Out in Cold

6WIND’s vRouter is based on DPDK.

ZTE Sees Profits Soar 30% in 1H of 2017

The company says it has deployed SDN and NFV in 240 networks globally.