Abidjan Holds a Successful AfPIF 2017

Abidjan became the third West African city to hold the annual Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF), attracting top African and global players in the Internet ecosystem.

This year’s forum attracted 227 participants working in IXPs, ISPs, governments, content carriers, network providers, hardware providers, and software service providers among others. The meeting tool, which allows participants to discuss ways to exchange content, had 276 registered users who scheduled 170 meetings. Twenty networks introduced themselves during “Peering Introductions” session, held every day. This year there were 23 sponsors: Seacom, Liquid Telecom, Angonix, Angola Cables, De Cix, Linx, Adva, Afrinic, Akamai, Dolphin, Facebook, Flexoptix, France IX, Google, icolo.io, Main One, Netflix, Netnod, Yahoo, Medalion, MTN, Teraco, and ARTCI.

Getting more statistics

Research conducted by PCH reinforced the fact that most peering agreements have no formal agreement. The study done in 2016 found that 99 per cent of peering agreements in 148 countries were through a handshake. The study asked questions such as: are there formal agreements, is the peering arrangement symmetrical, is the content is IPv6 or IPv4, and what are the laws governing the agreement. Out of the 1,935,822 agreements, 49 percent comprised of matching peers, meaning it was easy Continue reading

Abidjan Holds a Successful AfPIF 2017

IDG Contributor Network: The 3 types of SD-WAN architecture

If you’re contemplating whether SD-WAN will improve your company’s Wide Area Network, I’ve learned it’s important to first get a grasp of the different SD-WAN architectures.As a long-time business ISP and cloud broker, I’ve had the best seat in the house for watching the SD-WAN craze take flight. As dozens of SD-WAN product offerings pop up, I have the enviable job of making sense of it all. [sigh]In my observation, there are 3 main buckets of SD-WAN architecture, each of which benefit certain types of companies. Which architecture is “best” depends on the applications your company is accessing through your WAN.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The 3 types of SD-WAN architecture

If you’re contemplating whether SD-WAN will improve your company’s Wide Area Network, I’ve learned it’s important to first get a grasp of the different SD-WAN architectures.As a long-time business ISP and cloud broker, I’ve had the best seat in the house for watching the SD-WAN craze take flight. As dozens of SD-WAN product offerings pop up, I have the enviable job of making sense of it all. [sigh]In my observation, there are 3 main buckets of SD-WAN architecture, each of which benefit certain types of companies. Which architecture is “best” depends on the applications your company is accessing through your WAN.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How the end of net neutrality could affect IoT development

With the development of the Internet of Things approaching breakneck speeds, many aspiring developers and consumers alike are asking themselves what’s next for the internet-driven phenomenon that’s come to define the market of today. More often than not, these innovators are coming to the same conclusion that the battle over net neutrality will be the defining aspect of the IoT’s future.So how exactly is the battle over net neutrality and internet-connectivity playing out, and what connotations does it carry for IoT development? What steps are the industry’s leaders taking to prepare themselves for the future, and just what should consumers and producers of IoT gadgets and software expect for the rest of the 21st century?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New Coder: Real World Code Development

It’s one thing to learn the syntax for a programming language, but it’s another to have the ability to think through a problem and break it down into a logical set of tasks which the code can execute.

On the Solarwinds Thwack Geek Speak blog I worked through a real world automation process to see what the steps might be, and how it can sometimes be possible, and even advantageous, to reuse code or hand off a task to another tool. Please do take a trip to Thwack and check out my post, “New Coder: Real World Code Development“.

Please see my Disclosures page for more information about my role as a Solarwinds Ambassador.

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at New Coder: Real World Code Development and give me a share/like. Thank you!

Prime Members Get 60% off Nucleus Anywhere Intercom with Amazon Alexa Right Now – Deal Alert

Nucleus is a family communication device that connects you with the people you love, whether they're downstairs or across the country. Make audio and video calls by simply asking Alexa. Designed with the kids and Grandma in mind, making it easier than ever to set up and just say "hello."  Chat on the go: Use the mobile app to check in with from anywhere.  Right now Prime members get 60% off Nucleus Anywhere Intercom, so you can buy it on Amazon now for just $99.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What is Colocation, POP , Carrier Hotels and Meetme Room ?

What is Colocation, POP , Carrier Hotels and Meetme Room ?   If you are working in operator domain or a network engineer who wants to learn what is colocation , what is POP (Point of Presence) , how POPs are physically connected , POP terminology , understand meetme room and carrier hotel, this post […]

The post What is Colocation, POP , Carrier Hotels and Meetme Room ? appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

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

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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