DreamWorks: The animation studio’s powerful network

If you don’t know what DreamWorks is, you probably haven’t been to the movies for a couple decades. It’s a digital film studio that turns out critically acclaimed CGI animated movies like Shrek, Madagascar, and Kung Fu Panda, averaging about two a year since the turn of the century, and a major contributor to the cause of keeping kids occupied for a couple of hours.The creation of CGI movies is enormously demanding from a network standpoint. Animation and rendering require very low input latency and create huge files that have to be readily available, which poses technological challenges to the DreamWorks networking team.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: What Cisco's new programmable switches mean for you + Trend: Colocation facilities provide tools to manage data center infrastructureTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reaction: The End of MPLS?

Jason Wells, over on LinkedIn, has an article up about the end of MPLS; to wit—

MPLS, according to Akkiraju, is old-hat and inefficient – why should a branch office backhaul to get their cloud data, when Internet connections might be faster – and 100X cheaper? Cisco, in acquiring Viptela, has brought Akkiraju, his company, and his perspective back into the fold, perhaps heralding the beginning of the end of Cisco’s MPLS-based offerings (or at least the beginning of the end of the mindset that they should still have an MPLS-based offering).

To being—I actually work with Aryaka on occasion, and within the larger SD-WAN world more often (I am a member of the TAB over at Velocloud, for instance). This is decidedly not a post about the usefulness or future of SD-WAN solutions (though I do have opinions there, as you might have guessed). Rather, what I want to point out is that we, in the networking industry, tend to be rather sloppy about our language in ways that are not helpful.

To understand, it is useful to back up a few years and consider other technologies where our terms have become confused, and how it has impacted our Continue reading

Life as an IT contractor

The upside of life as an IT contractor is alluring. You get to be your own boss, accept only the jobs you want, and work flexible hours. With each assignment comes the opportunity to learn new skills and gain exposure to different environments.But there are obvious sacrifices – job security and paid vacations, for starters. As an IT contractor, you’re also often responsible for your own benefits (healthcare, retirement), paying taxes, and marketing yourself for the next gig.Tech pros who successfully balance the pros and cons of contracting play an important role in the IT world. They provide manpower when workloads spike and can bring key expertise or niche skills to a team. In recent years, companies have increasingly relied on a contingent workforce to augment their full-time staff. According to new survey data from IT staffing and services firm TEKsystems, 26% of IT hiring managers expect to increase headcount for contingent workers in the second half of 2017 (another 46% report that headcount will remain the same for temporary workers, and 13% say it will decrease).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware Evolve Transform Security is Coming to A City Near You!

Modern IT professionals face significant security challenges. As digital transformation continues to connect applications, users, and data in the cloud, perimeter security models that once offered businesses protection are no longer sufficient. Critical visibility into users and endpoints is missing, enforcing policies is difficult, and, in the meantime, cyberattacks are more sophisticated and costly than ever.

What do IT teams need to defend today’s applications, users, and data from potentially brand-damaging attacks?

That’s the question VMware experts will be tackling during our VMware EVOLVE Transform Security events, coming to a city near you. During these half-day, in-person events, you will learn how a ubiquitous software layer can help support the security challenges of the modern business. 

VMware experts will guide you through how to:

  • Secure application infrastructure and better align security controls to apps
  • Secure identity and endpoints to control access and enforce data loss prevention
  • Streamline governance, risk management and compliance to limit cyber-attack vectors

Reserve your spot at an upcoming Transform Security-focused VMware EVOLVE event in your city:

The post VMware Evolve Transform Security is Coming to A City Near You! appeared first on Network Virtualization.

Announcing Docker 17.06 Community Edition (CE)

Today we released Docker CE 17.06  with new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Docker CE 17.06 is the first Docker version built entirely on the Moby Project, which we announced in April at DockerCon. You can see the complete list of changes in the changelog, but let’s take a look at some of the new features.

We also created a video version of this post here:

Multi-stage builds

The biggest feature in 17.06 CE is that multi-stage builds, announced in April at DockerCon, have come to the stable release. Multi-stage builds allow you to build cleaner, smaller Docker images using a single Dockerfile.

Multi-stage builds work by building intermediate images that produce an output. That way you can compile code in an intermediate image and use only the output in the final image. So for instance, Java developers commonly use Apache Maven to compile their apps, but Maven isn’t required to run their app. Multi-stage builds can result in a substantial image size savings:

REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID                CREATED              SIZE

maven      Continue reading

Creating a wireless smart infrastructure: 4 expert recommendations

The mobile internet was a simpler infrastructure to design than the one that will be needed for the smart city, smart grid, smart health and smart transportation. Smartphones are homogeneous with relatively powerful processors and batteries driving transmission and reception. Designed to bring the internet to smartphones, 3G and 4G networks could be simpler. But IoT devices will span a range of heteroneous designs.The range of heterogeneity of the IoT is defined today by autonomous vehicles, which have thousands of sensors powered by high-capacity batteries that frequently communicate at high speed and low latency to simple sensors. Those sensors are powered by ambient power sources, sending a few infrequent bytes to communicate state (on/off, temperature, vibration amplitude and phase, etc.).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Let’s Think Differently to Shape ‪Tomorrow

In 2015 the world made one of the biggest promises to itself in the form of 17 Global Goals set out by the United Nations. These goals – the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – are aimed at achieving extraordinary things in the next 15 years. They are dedicated to fighting injustice and inequalities, ending climate change, beating discrimination, bringing in sustainable energy, and making sure no one goes hungry. 

Ms. Kathryn Brown

Docker at Nutanix .NEXT Conference – Visit us at Booth #S11

Today marks the start of Nutanix .NEXT Conference in Washington, D.C., the annual conference for Nutanix customers and partners. One of the major themes of the conference is hybrid cloud, and Docker will be there to demonstrate how Docker Enterprise Edition delivers application portability across different infrastructure platforms through a complete enterprise-ready Container as a Service (CaaS) solution for IT.

Docker and Nutanix will also be highlighting the Nutanix Docker Volume Plug-in (DVP), a Docker Certified Plugin available in the Docker Store. This plugin connects Docker containers to enterprise-grade persistent storage from Nutanix even as the container is powered on, powered off, or moved to a new host. As part of the certification process, Docker and Nutanix validate that the plugin is built with Docker recommended best practices and passes an additional suite of API compliance testing and vulnerability scanning. Docker EE customers also have access to support from both Docker and Nutanix.

 

Watch a Demo of Docker EE at Nutanix .NEXT

For those heading to Nutanix .NEXT, be sure to swing by booth #S11 to learn more about this plugin as well as other IT use cases for EE. Watch a demo and Continue reading

Stupidly Simple DDoS Protocol (SSDP) generates 100 Gbps DDoS

Last month we shared statistics on some popular reflection attacks. Back then the average SSDP attack size was ~12 Gbps and largest SSDP reflection we recorded was:

  • 30 Mpps (millions of packets per second)
  • 80 Gbps (billions of bits per second)
  • using 940k reflector IPs

This changed a couple of days ago when we noticed an unusually large SSDP amplification. It's worth deeper investigation since it crossed the symbolic threshold of 100 Gbps.

The packets per second chart during the attack looked like this:

The bandwidth usage:

This packet flood lasted 38 minutes. According to our sampled netflow data it utilized 930k reflector servers. We estimate that the during 38 minutes of the attack each reflector sent 112k packets to Cloudflare.

The reflector servers are across the globe, with a large presence in Argentina, Russia and China. Here are the unique IPs per country: 

$ cat ips-nf-ct.txt|uniq|cut -f 2|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr|head
 439126 CN
 135783 RU
  74825 AR
  51222 US
  41353 TW
  32850 CA
  19558 MY
  18962 CO
  14234 BR
  10824 KR
  10334 UA
   9103 IT
   ...

The reflector IP distribution across ASNs is typical. It pretty much follows the world’s largest residential ISPs:

$ cat ips-nf-asn.txt |uniq|cut -f 2|sort|uniq  Continue reading

Worth Reading: The blue disco ball

We deal with procurement departments every day. It’s a fact of modern day corporate life. But this week, I’ve had to respond to so many RFPs asking for “blue disco balls,” (my metaphoric name for a specific kind of middle management error that most vendors, suppliers and even solutions providers love most), I’m thinking about hanging one over my desk. What is a “blue disco ball?” Here’s a story I wrote last year about every senior executive’s worst nightmare and every vendor’s holiday bonus all rolled into a budget-busting good time. —Shelly Palmer

The post Worth Reading: The blue disco ball appeared first on rule 11 reader.

How do you troubleshoot UCaaS problems? Put a ThousandEyes on it

Cisco Live kicked off this week in Las Vegas. The annual event is where Cisco shows off its latest and greatest innovations, such as the intent-based networking system Cisco announced last week.However, it’s also a forum for many of Cisco’s technology partners to show off their wares in the World of Solutions Expo Hall. One of the more interesting vendors there was ThousandEyes, which demonstrated their network monitoring solution, as well as their new Unified Communications monitoring and management capabilities that provide visibility into the performance and connectivity across Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), on premises and hybrid VoIP deployments. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How do you troubleshoot UCaaS problems? Put a ThousandEyes on it

Cisco Live kicked off this week in Las Vegas. The annual event is where Cisco shows off its latest and greatest innovations, such as the intent-based networking system Cisco announced last week.However, it’s also a forum for many of Cisco’s technology partners to show off their wares in the World of Solutions Expo Hall. One of the more interesting vendors there was ThousandEyes, which demonstrated their network monitoring solution, as well as their new Unified Communications monitoring and management capabilities that provide visibility into the performance and connectivity across Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), on premises and hybrid VoIP deployments. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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