Troubleshooting: Half Split
The best models will support the second crucial skill required for troubleshooting: seeing the system as a set of problems to be solved. The problem/solution mindset is so critical in really understanding how networks really work, and hence how to troubleshoot them, that Ethan Banks and I are writing an entire book around this concept. The essential points are these—
- Understand the set of problems being solved
- Understand a wide theoretical set of solutions for this problem, including how each solution interacts with other problems and solutions, potential side effects of using each solution, and where the common faults lie in each solution
- Understand this implementation
of this solution
Having this kind of information in your head will help you pull in detail where needed to fill in the models of each system; just as you cannot keep all four of the primary systems in your head at once, you also cannot effectively troubleshoot without a reservoir of more detailed knowledge about each system, or the ready ability to absorb more information about each system as needed. Having a problem/solution mindset also helps keep you focused in troubleshooting.
So you have built models of each system, and you have learned Continue reading
NEC Partners with Dell EMC to Deliver SD-LAN
The technology is complementary to any WAN deployment.
Use a Zero Trust Approach to Protect Against WannaCry
Micro-segmentation with VMware NSX compartmentalizes the data center to contain the lateral spread of ransomware attacks such as WannaCry
On May 12 2017, reports began to appear of the WannaCry malware attacking organizations worldwide in one of the largest ransomware cyber incidents to date. The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) has reported more than 200,000 attacks in over 150 countries and in 27, with the full scope of the attack yet to be determined. Victims include organizations from all verticals.
WannaCry targets Microsoft Windows machines, seizing control of computer systems through a critical vulnerability in Windows SMB. It also utilizes RDP as an attack vector for propagation. It encrypts seized systems and demands a ransom be paid before decrypting the system and giving back control. The threat propagates laterally to other systems on the network via SMB or RDP and then repeats the process. An initial analysis of WannaCry by the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) can be found here, with a detailed analysis from Malware Bytes here.
One foundational aspect of increasing cybersecurity hygiene in an organization to help mitigate such attacks from proliferating is enabling a least privilege (zero trust) model by embedding security directly into the data center network. The Continue reading
TM Forum Tool Targets Slow Digital Adoption by Operators
The Digital Maturity Model application takes five metrics into account.
The Embiggening Bite That GPUs Take Out Of Datacenter Compute
We are still chewing through all of the announcements and talk at the GPU Technology Conference that Nvidia hosted in its San Jose stomping grounds last week, and as such we are thinking about the much bigger role that graphics processors are playing in datacenter compute – a realm that has seen five decades of dominance by central processors of one form or another.
That is how CPUs got their name, after all. And perhaps this is a good time to remind everyone that systems used to be a collection of different kinds of compute, and that is why the …
The Embiggening Bite That GPUs Take Out Of Datacenter Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Worth Reading: A simple start to project management
The post Worth Reading: A simple start to project management appeared first on rule 11 reader.
Data center network monitoring best practices part 3: Modernizing tooling
Implementing your strategy using modern tooling
In the previous two posts we discussed gathering metrics for long term trend analysis and then combining it with event-based alerts for actionable results. In order to combine these two elements, we need strong network monitoring tooling that allows us to overlay these activities into an effective solution.
Understanding drawbacks of older network monitoring tooling
The legacy approach to monitoring is to deploy a monitoring server that periodically polls your network devices via Simple Network Management Protocol. SNMP is a very old protocol, originally developed in 1988. While some things do get better with age, computer protocols are rarely one of them. SNMP has been showing its age in many ways.
Inflexibility
SNMP uses data structures called MIBs to exchange information. These MIBs are often proprietary, and difficult to modify and extend to cover new and interesting metrics.
Polling vs event driven
Polling doesn’t offer enough granularity to catch all events. For instance, even if you check disk utilization once every five minutes, you may go over threshold and back in between intervals and never know.
An inefficient protocol
SNMP’s polling design is a “call and response” protocol, this means the monitoring server will Continue reading
The Role of Operational and Cognitive Analytics in SDN/NFV
Analytics is an essential element of the transformation to SDN.
The Latest Docker Certified Container and Plugins for March and April 2017
The Docker Certification Program provides a way for technology partners to validate and certify their software or plugin as a container for use on the Docker Enterprise Edition platform. Since the initial launch of the program in March, more Containers and Plugins have been certified and available for download.
Certified Containers and Plugins are technologies that are built with best practices as Docker containers, tested and validated against the Docker Enterprise Edition platform and APIs, pass security requirements, reviewed by Docker partner engineering and cooperatively supported by both Docker and the partner. Docker Enterprise Edition and Certified Technology provide assurance and support to businesses for their critical application infrastructure.
Check out the latest Docker Certified technologies to the Docker Store:
- Dynatrace provides monitoring Docker applications and Docker clusters out of the box.
- {code} by Dell EMC certified a number of REX-ray volume plugins for the following: REX-Ray for AWS EFS, REX-Ray for AWS EBS, REX-Ray for S3FS, REX-Ray for Isilon, REX-Ray for GCE and REX-Ray for ScaleIO.
- HPE OpsBridge Agent provides monitoring of Docker applications with HPE Operations Bridge.
- CoScale Agent provides a lightweight solution for monitoring the performance of your Docker containers and microservices Continue reading