The Skylake Calm Before The Compute Storm

It looks like the push to true cloud computing that many of us have been projecting for such a long time is actually coming to pass, and despite many of the misgivings that many of us have expressed about giving up control of our own datacenters and the applications that run there.

That chip giant Intel is making money as it rolls up its 14 nanometer manufacturing process ramp is not really a surprise. During the second quarter of this year, rival AMD had not yet gotten its “Naples” Epyc X86 server processors into the field, and IBM has pushed …

The Skylake Calm Before The Compute Storm was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: Do startup employees make more?

Since the average startup founder who makes it to Series A earns more than a large company employee, many believe that early-stage startup employees also earn more (albeit less than founders). Dustin Moskovitz has even claimed that startup early employees have better earnings prospects than founders. We’ve looked at the data, and this does not seem to be true on average. —Ben West @ 80000hours

The post Worth Reading: Do startup employees make more? appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Cray buys Seagate’s enterprise storage array business

Supercomputer specialist Cray announced it is acquiring Seagate’s ClusterStor HPC storage array business for an undisclosed sum as part of a strategic deal and partnership. The deal should close in the third quarter. Cray will take over development, manufacturing, support and sales of the ClusterStor product line, picking up 100 Seagate employees in the process. Seagate acquired Xyratex, the maker of ClusterStor for $374 million in 2014. Cray already sells ClusterStor under its Sonexion scale out Lustre arrays. Sonexion is based on ClusterStor, so it simply comes in-house. Cray is the biggest OEM for the ClusterStor line. Even though Cray was already knee deep in ClusterStor, it brought the technology in-house so it can reduce margins and push further on development to align with its strategy, which sounds like it intends to compete with Dell EMC. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cray buys Seagate’s enterprise storage array business

Supercomputer specialist Cray announced it is acquiring Seagate’s ClusterStor HPC storage array business for an undisclosed sum as part of a strategic deal and partnership. The deal should close in the third quarter. Cray will take over development, manufacturing, support and sales of the ClusterStor product line, picking up 100 Seagate employees in the process. Seagate acquired Xyratex, the maker of ClusterStor for $374 million in 2014. Cray already sells ClusterStor under its Sonexion scale out Lustre arrays. Sonexion is based on ClusterStor, so it simply comes in-house. Cray is the biggest OEM for the ClusterStor line. Even though Cray was already knee deep in ClusterStor, it brought the technology in-house so it can reduce margins and push further on development to align with its strategy, which sounds like it intends to compete with Dell EMC. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware NSX is something something awesome

At times I have trouble focusing on writing articles for some of the presentations I am exposed to at Tech Field Day. Because of that, I really wanted to try something different. This article is more of my free-formed thoughts about NSX and why I’m excited to deploy it at my current $job. From the time I heard that the NSX team was going to be presenting at TFD15 for 4 hours, I knew that I would be writing this article because. Unfortunately it took me far too long to gather up this half formed thought.

First things first – NSX and Micro-Segmentation

I love the concept of Micro-Segmentation that NSX enables. Think of NSX as a virtual distributed firewall that is integrated with your hypervisor, but it really is so much more. This allows you to connect a security policy directly to the vNIC of your guest VM’s. Attaching it to the VM allows that policy to follow the VM anywhere, and everywhere it goes. You don’t have to worry about inter- or intra-VLAN segmentation as all of that is done on each vNIC. On top of that, NSX’s firewall is PCI DSS 3.2 compliant! Another rather compelling Continue reading

Bespoke Processors and the Future of Networks

As I spend a lot of time on Oak Island (not the one on television, the other one), I tend to notice some of those trivial things in life. For instance, when the tide is pretty close to all the way in, it probably is not going to come in much longer; rather, it is likely to start going back out soon. If you spend any time around clocks with pendulums, you might have noticed the same thing; the maximum point at which the pendulum swings is the point where it also begins swinging back. Of course my regular readers are going to recognize the point, because I have used it in many presentations about the centralization/decentralization craze the networking industry seems to go through every few years.

Right now, of course, we are in the craze of centralization. To hear a lot of folks tell it, in ten years there simply are not going to be routing protocols. Instead, we are going to all buy appliances, plug them in, and it is “just going to work.” And that is just for folks who insist on having their own network—for the part of the world that is not completely Continue reading

Is IoT really driving enterprise digital transformation?

The Internet of Things is often thought of as primarily an industrial and consumer technology. But there’s a growing consensus that IoT is also taking a leading role in digital transformation in a wide variety of business applications in locations around the world. Survey says: Global enterprises bullish on IoT A recent study by satellite communications vendor Inmarsat, for example, reveals that IoT is the top priority for 92 percent of the more than 500 enterprises surveyed across the globe. Titled “The Future of IoT in Enterprise 2017,” the report assembles responses from companies that have more than 1,000 workers in agritech, energy production, transportation and mining.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Automation and State

To State or not to State

State

State its purpose.

That is a state matter.

It was a messy night. Alice was filthy. She was in a state.

The router had some state.

What to do with state

Automation is a constantly changing state of affairs. It raises questions like:

a) If a service or API is idempotent, do I have to track state?
b) Should my workflows consider external state?
c) Should I normalise state?

Idempotency

Something is said to be idempotent if it gives you the same response if you call it repetitively.

I always view idempotency quite simply.

  1. Bob makes a terrible mistake building a NETCONF server for Alice.
  2. Alice punished Bob with the task of hoovering the office floor.
  3. Bob starts hoovering at 3pm when Alice is out of the office.
  4. Alice Tweets Bob mid-hoovering (because they’re millennials) with “Bob, it’s time to hoover.”.
  5. As Bob is idempotent, Bob carries on hoovering and ignores Alice’s Tweet.

If Bob wasn’t idempotent, he might have packed away the hoover, gotten it back out and started hoovering again (also assuming Bob was actually delivering on his punishment and hadn’t outsourced it to a cleaner).

Can you imagine the Continue reading

Worth Reading: Crafted DDoS

We’d like to introduce you to one of the most devastating ways to cause service instability in modern micro-service architectures: application DDoS. A specially crafted application DDoS attack can cause cascading system failures often for a fraction of the resources needed to conduct a more traditional DDoS attack. This is due to the complex, interconnected relationships between applications. —Scott Behrens and Bryan Payne @ Netflix

The post Worth Reading: Crafted DDoS appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Standards bodies (like W3C) need more transparency

Any organization that creates and promotes industry standards should operate in an open and transparent way. Any lack of visibility will cause tremendous doubt and concerns around those standards. Case in point: the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). A few weeks back, I wrote about one of their most recent standards—Electronic Media Extensions (EME)—which sought to create a standard framework for Digital Right Management (DRM) on the web. When the W3C officially approved this standard, it generated massive backlash from every corner of the technology world. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flat OSPF network is not a problem ! But

Flat OSPF network, or single area OSPF networks are real. In fact most of the OSPF network today deployed, is flat OSPF networks. But how many routers can be placed safely in an OSPF area ? Any number from the real world OSPF deployment ? I will share in this post. Let me explain what […]

The post Flat OSPF network is not a problem ! But appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

A better way to monitor the end-user experience

The concept of user performance management (UPM) is easy to understand but very difficult to implement. The Holy Grail of UPM would be a single, unified dashboard where IT operations would be able to “see” the status of every user. If a website were taking too long to load or an application were performing poorly, the operations staff could click on that user and immediately see where the problem is. One challenge for IT departments is that today’s user isn’t always a person. Thanks to the rise in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, “headless” clients that provide critical services to users now pump data through the network. For example, medical devices deliver time-critical information that can be the difference between life and death. Getting a grip on how these headless devices are performing on the network has become a daunting task for IT staff. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A better way to monitor the end-user experience

The concept of user performance management (UPM) is easy to understand but very difficult to implement. The Holy Grail of UPM would be a single, unified dashboard where IT operations would be able to “see” the status of every user. If a website were taking too long to load or an application were performing poorly, the operations staff could click on that user and immediately see where the problem is. One challenge for IT departments is that today’s user isn’t always a person. Thanks to the rise in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, “headless” clients that provide critical services to users now pump data through the network. For example, medical devices deliver time-critical information that can be the difference between life and death. Getting a grip on how these headless devices are performing on the network has become a daunting task for IT staff. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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