BrandPost: Key SD-WAN Solution Evaluation Criteria

On June 3, 2017, Andrew Lerner, vice president of research for enterprise networking at Gartner published a new blog: SD-WAN is going Mainstream. In this blog, Andrew offered two key takeaways:1.  SD-WAN is real and has real and tangible benefits.2.  At the same time, SD-WAN has downsides and/or challenges affiliated with early deployments. The downsides are mainly around gaps many vendors have for features like IPv6, WAN optimization, etc.I agree with Andrew’s assessment that there are downsides to many offerings, and want to underscore the key considerations for distributed enterprise when selecting the right SD-WAN solution. It’s reflective of carefully listening, learning and adapting to our more than 400 production customers around the world who evaluated multiple SD-WAN solutions before selecting Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fragmentation, Standards Remain Challenges to Open Optical Networks

Vendor community looks to avoid standards being forced onto the market.

Worth Reading: Hijacking Bitcoin

It turns out that if you can hijack less than a hundred BGP prefixes (feasible) you can isolate about 50% of the mining power in the network. Once a collection of nodes are partitioned from the network the network becomes more vulnerable to double spending attacks, transaction filtering, and selfish mining attacks. —Morning Paper

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IDG Contributor Network: Fraud and the Internet of Things

During the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become one of the hottest movements of our time. Although many technology trends and buzzwords come and go overnight, it’s clear that the IoT is here to stay. Almost half of the world's population is online, and technology is a deeply integrated part of our lives. Smart thermostats regulate our business and household temperatures, connected cameras watch over our homes and pets, online TVs and speakers respond to our every need, and intelligent devices constantly monitor our health.According to Gartner, the number of world-wide Internet connected devices will grow to 11.4 billion by 2018. It’s a phenomenal trend that will continue to spread until human and machine connectivity becomes ubiquitous and unavoidably present.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Fraud and the Internet of Things

During the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become one of the hottest movements of our time. Although many technology trends and buzzwords come and go overnight, it’s clear that the IoT is here to stay. Almost half of the world's population is online, and technology is a deeply integrated part of our lives. Smart thermostats regulate our business and household temperatures, connected cameras watch over our homes and pets, online TVs and speakers respond to our every need, and intelligent devices constantly monitor our health.According to Gartner, the number of world-wide Internet connected devices will grow to 11.4 billion by 2018. It’s a phenomenal trend that will continue to spread until human and machine connectivity becomes ubiquitous and unavoidably present.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BGP Monitoring Protocol

The post BGP Monitoring Protocol appeared first on Noction.

How to make your site HTTPS-only

The Internet is getting more secure every day as people enable HTTPS, the secure version of HTTP, on their sites and services. Last year, Mozilla reported that the percentage of requests made by Firefox using encrypted HTTPS passed 50% for the first time. HTTPS has numerous benefits that are not available over unencrypted HTTP, including improved performance with HTTP/2, SEO benefits for search engines like Google and the reassuring lock icon in the address bar.

So how do you add HTTPS to your site or service? That’s simple, Cloudflare offers free and automatic HTTPS support for all customers with no configuration. Sign up for any plan and Cloudflare will issue an SSL certificate for you and serve your site over HTTPS.

HTTPS-only

Enabling HTTPS does not mean that all visitors are protected. If a visitor types your website’s name into the address bar of a browser or follows an HTTP link, it will bring them to the insecure HTTP version of your website. In order to make your site HTTPS-only, you need to redirect visitors from the HTTP to the HTTPS version of your site.

Going HTTPS-only should be as easy as a click of a button, so we Continue reading

Leading Into Prime Day, Amazon Offers 4 Months of Music Unlimited for $0.99 – Deal Alert

Amazon's Music Unlimited service is typically offered at $9.99/month, but Amazon has activated a special promotion as a teaser to their upcoming Prime Day on July 11. The promotion just dropped today and gets you 4 months of their Music Unlimited service for just $0.99, if you're a Prime member (or have a 30 day Prime free trial: get one here). Music Unlimited offers tens of millions of songs, with new releases from today's most popular artists. Listen ad-free with unlimited skips on all of your devices, and download for offline listening. Learn more about the very competitive streaming music service from Amazon, and take advantage of the $0.99 subscription offer, at Amazon's Music Unlimited page located here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Linux Container Security: 10 Essential Elements

Automation or Orchestration?

Have you ever wondered what the difference between automation and orchestration is?

Wikipedia defines automation as use of various control systems for operating equipment. The definition I prefer (because it’s easier to understand in network automation environment) is elimination of well-defined repeatable manual tasks – the emphasis being on well-defined and repeatable.

How To: Setting up VPN (IPSec tunnel) to an AWS VPC

Recently I've had to set up an VPN tunnel (IPSec) between a private data center and a private Amazon VPC. There are two ways to set this up:

1. Amazon's VPN connection service that uses the customer gateway and virtual private gateway.
2. Using a VPN appliance that acts as a gateway terminating IPSec tunnel.

This post will describe method 1. Note that Amazon's VPN offering costs extra money like most other services. 

AWS side configuration

1. Create a Virtual Private Gateway. This does not take any settings except a tag/name
2. Create a Customer Gateway.
3. Make sure the Customer Gateway mimic’s your external / gateway router in your infrastructure. (WAN IP). Select BGP or non-BGP according to your router config.
4. Create a new VPC, say 10.0.0.0/16
5. Connect the Virtual Private Gateway to this VPC. (VPG -> Attach VPC -> Select your vpc)
6. Open the route table for this VPC and enable route propagation (VPC -> Route table -> Route Propataion -> Yes)
7. Create new VPN 
1. Choose specific VPG to associate along with Customer Gateway. You can create a Customer Gateway when creating a VPN if you haven't already done step 1).
2. Set routing options. Dynamic if your gateway router Continue reading

Packet Tracer in Firepower Threat Defense

I wanted to share a quick post on a feature that I have found incredibly useful on the ASA and has been extended to Firepower Threat Defense. The feature is called Packet Tracer and is an easy way to apply “packet walk” logic to a flow that would be initiated through the platform. Like most things FTD, the Firepower Management Console is the point of contact for initiating the process.

To initiate Packet Tracer in FTD, open the Firepower Management Console and choose ‘Devices‘ then ‘Device Management‘. Next, select the device that you want to perform the operation and select the icon that looks like a screwdriver and wrench.

This will produce the screen that provides health monitoring and troubleshooting for the device. Selecting “Advanced Troubleshooting” will change the view to a multi-tab troubleshooting screen.

Selecting the Packet Tracer tab will allow for input like Source/Destination, Protocol, Port, SGT, etc.

After filling out this information and choosing “Start“, the device would be put through the same process as an initial packet of a new connection. The resulting packet walk is shown in an expandable tree view or raw text (user selectable).

Tree View

Continue reading

Do We Need Chassis Switches Anymore in the DC?

While Cisco Live this year was far more about the campus than the DC, Cisco did announce the Cisco Nexus 9364C, a spine-oriented switch which can run in both ACI mode and NX-OS mode. And it is a monster.

It’s (64) ports of 100 Gigabit. It’s from a single SoC (the Cisco S6400 SoC).

It provides 6.4 Tbps in 2RU, likely running below 700 watts (probably a lot less). I mean, holy shit.

Cisco Nexus 9364C: (64) ports of 100 Gigabit Ethernet.

And Cisco isn’t the only vendor with an upcoming 64 port 100 gigabit switch in a 2RU form factor. Broadcom’s Tomahawk II, successor to their 25/100 Gigabit datacenter SoC, also sports the ability to have (64) 100 Gigabit interfaces. I would expect the usual suspects to announce switches based on these soon (Arista, Cisco Nexus 3K, Juniper, etc.)

And another vendor Innovium, while far less established, is claiming to have a chip in the works that can do (128) 100 Gigabit interfaces. On a single SoC.

For modern data center fabric, which rely on leaf/spine Clos style topologies, do we even need chassis anymore?

For a while we’ve been reliant upon the Sith-rule on Continue reading

Weakening encryption might be an easy fix, but counterproductive in the long-run

23% off FitBit Aria WiFi Smart Scale – Deal Alert

Fitbit's Aria WiFi smart scale is a great add-on for anyone using a Fitbit to track progress towards their fitness goals. The current 23% discount shaves a solid $30 off its regular $129.95 list price, so you can buy it now on Amazon for $99.95 (see this item on Amazon). The Fitbit Aria will accurately track weight, % body fat, and Body Mass Index (BMI) for up to 8 users. Using WiFi, data is automatically uploaded to your Fitbit account, so you can graph and track your progress easily and privately online. The product averages 3.5 out of 5 stars from over 6,200 people on Amazon (see reviews). Click over to Amazon for more information and to review buying options for the discounted Fitbit Aria smart scale.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Why data integration is on the front line

Data is increasingly viewed as a strategic asset with real revenue impact for businesses of every size. A 2016 Capgemini survey found 61% of executives surveyed felt big data was a driver of revenue and was as valuable to their bottom line as the products or services they sell. Additionally, 65% of the surveyed executives felt they risked becoming irrelevant or uncompetitive if they failed to embrace big data. —Data Center Journal

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IDG Contributor Network: What companies need to know about interconnection to succeed at digital business

What is interconnection, and why does it matter?Interconnection is the deployment of IT traffic exchange points that integrate direct, private connections between counterparties. Interconnection is best achieved hosted in carrier-neutral data center campuses, where distributed IT components are collocated. In an age when reams of information race around the world with the click of a finger and massive transactions routinely occur several times faster than the blink of an eye, interconnection powers digital business.Interconnection is much more than successfully connecting Point A to Point B. Telephone wires pulled off that kind of simple connectivity ages ago. Today’s enterprise-grade interconnection has some key characteristics that can help take digital business to the next level:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What companies need to know about interconnection to succeed at digital business

What is interconnection, and why does it matter?Interconnection is the deployment of IT traffic exchange points that integrate direct, private connections between counterparties. Interconnection is best achieved hosted in carrier-neutral data center campuses, where distributed IT components are collocated. In an age when reams of information race around the world with the click of a finger and massive transactions routinely occur several times faster than the blink of an eye, interconnection powers digital business.Interconnection is much more than successfully connecting Point A to Point B. Telephone wires pulled off that kind of simple connectivity ages ago. Today’s enterprise-grade interconnection has some key characteristics that can help take digital business to the next level:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What companies need to know about interconnection to succeed at digital business

What is interconnection, and why does it matter?Interconnection is the deployment of IT traffic exchange points that integrate direct, private connections between counterparties. Interconnection is best achieved hosted in carrier-neutral data center campuses, where distributed IT components are collocated. In an age when reams of information race around the world with the click of a finger and massive transactions routinely occur several times faster than the blink of an eye, interconnection powers digital business.Interconnection is much more than successfully connecting Point A to Point B. Telephone wires pulled off that kind of simple connectivity ages ago. Today’s enterprise-grade interconnection has some key characteristics that can help take digital business to the next level:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Housing developer builds resiliency with DRaaS

When Steve Werner joined Milhaus, the company was gearing up for a growth spurt that took it from roughly 80 employees in 2015 to more than 270 employees today. Upgrading the company’s IT infrastructure was a priority for Werner, who is the first director of technology at the Indianapolis-based company, which designs, builds and manages luxury apartments in urban areas.“They went from a very small business to a pretty good sized business in a short amount of time. But we were still running on small business hardware, with a small business backup plan,” Werner says. The company’s IT gear was running in an old server closet with no air conditioning. “It couldn’t handle all that we were adding to it,” Werner says. “Everything was about to melt down.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here