4 Emerging Wireless Standards To Watch
A look at what's ahead in WiFi, including the speedy 802.11ax and HaLow for IoT connectivity.
Workflow Enhanced Networking (WEN)
Software Defined Networking (SDN) offered lots of hope, a centralized control-plane, programmable network functions and authenticated network nodes. Once we all stopped laughing and rolling around the floor with rib ache, the reality of SDN dawned quickly. It was a nice academic thought and set of experiments, but for the masses, the original meaning of SDN has changed significantly. The software giants with mountains of cash will drive technology like this early and possibly pave the way for the rest of us eventually, but for the masses of enterprises that vendors serve and that have more immediate requirements, SDN isn’t something that’s had massive adoption. The question of ‘why’ is a pretty obvious place to start and you don’t have to look too far before you find answers.
I will not get in to the overlay and underlay arguments here. These have been done to death already. Lots of organizations and vendors offer various takes on the middle-ground, far left and far right. This isn’t a product pitch either.
This post is around the “next onwards step” as opposed to changing the world. I also ‘feel’, this is the natural pull as opposed to the industry push we’ve come to Continue reading
Have to choose between VMware NSX and Cisco ACI? You’re Not Alone
I keep getting questions along the lines of “should I go with VMware NSX or should I deploy Cisco ACI” every single week, and as you know it’s hard to answer anything but it depends without spending hours on the topic.
That’s exactly what we plan to do in Zurich next Tuesday (May 16th) in a DIGS workshop that will run in parallel with the Data Center & Cloud Day (part of the SIGS Technology Conference).
Read more ...Colombo, Sri Lanka: Six million Internet properties now faster for six million Internet users
We are excited to add four new data centers this week to Cloudflare's growing network, beginning with Colombo, Sri Lanka. This deployment is our 112th data center globally, and our 38th in Asia.
Faster Performance
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 image by Pavel Dobrovsky
Six million Internet properties using Cloudflare are now even faster across the island country of Sri Lanka. Previously, local visitors to Cloudflare customers were served out of our Singapore or Dubai data centers.
Latency (ms) decreases 4x to Cloudflare customers. Source: Cedexis
Sri Lanka added over one million Internet users in the past year alone. At ~30% Internet penetration, there is considerable room to grow.
Next Three Cities
Our deployments to be revealed later this week will provide additional redundancy to existing facilities in North America and Africa.
If you enjoy the idea of helping build one of the world's largest networks, come join our team!
Impatient For Fabrics, Micron Forges Its Own NVM-Express Arrays
There may be a shortage in the supply of DRAM main memory and NAND flash memory that is having an adverse effect on the server and storage markets, but there is no shortage of vendors who are trying to push the envelope on clustered storage using a mix of these memories and others such as the impending 3D XPoint.
Micron Technology, which makes and sells all three of these types of memories, is so impatient with the rate of technological advancement in clustered flash arrays based on the NVM-Express protocol that it decided to engineer and launch its own product …
Impatient For Fabrics, Micron Forges Its Own NVM-Express Arrays was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
A Dive into Deep Learning Chip Startup Graphcore’s Software Stack
The last two years have delivered a new wave of deep learning architectures designed specifically for tackling both training and inference sides of neural networks. We have covered many of them extensively, but only a few have seen major investment or acquisition—the most notable of which was Nervana Systems over a year ago.
Among the string of neural network chip startups, Graphcore stood out with its manycore approach to handling both training and inference on the same manycore chip. We described the hardware architecture in detail back in March and while its over $30 million in funding from a …
A Dive into Deep Learning Chip Startup Graphcore’s Software Stack was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Liveblog: OpenStack Summit Keynote, Day 2
This is a liveblog of the day 2 keynote of the OpenStack Summit in Boston, MA. (I wasn’t able to liveblog yesterday’s keynote due to a schedule conflict.) It looks as if today’s keynote will have an impressive collection of speakers from a variety of companies, and—judging from the number of laptops on the stage—should feature a number of demos (hopefully all live).
The keynote starts with the typical high-energy video that’s intended to “pump up” the audience, and Mark Collier (COO, OpenStack Foundation) takes the stage promptly at 9am. Collier re-iterates a few statistics from yesterday’s keynote (attendees from 63 countries, for example). Collier shares that he believes that all major challenges humanity is trying to solve counts on computing. “All science is computer science,” according to Collier, which is both great but also represents a huge responsibility. He leads this discussion by pointing out what he believes to be the fundamental role of open source in machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI). Collier also mentions a collection of “composable” open source projects that are leading the way toward a “cloud-native” future. All of these projects are designed in a way to be combined together in a “mix-and-match” Continue reading
Liveblog: AT&T’s Container Strategy and OpenStack’s Role in it
This is a liveblog of the OpenStack Summit session titled “AT&T’s Container Strategy and OpenStack’s Role in it”. The speakers are Kandan Kathirvel and Amit Tank, both from AT&T. I really wanted to sit in on Martin Casado’s presentation next door (happening at the same time), but as much as I love watching/hearing Martin speak, I felt this like presentation might expose me to some new information.
Kathirvel kicks off the session with some quick introductions, then sets the stage for the session. Naturally, Kathirvel starts out by describing AT&T’s cloud deployment. (I say “naturally” because it seems that every presentation starts out with describing how great and how awesome the presenter’s company’s OpenStack cloud is.)
Following the discussion of AT&T’s cloud, Kathirvel launches into a discussion of container trends and demands. He indicates that he believes container usage (or demand?) for enterprise IT applications is huge (and will continue to be large), but doesn’t believe that will hold true for virtual network functions (VNFs) in telco clouds.
As for how containers and OpenStack may be coming together, Kathirvel describes three different use cases:
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The first use case has OpenStack managing the infrastructure, with Kubernetes (or another container Continue reading