Cisco to network engineers: Get comfortable with software. It’s here to stay

The shift to software-defined networks (SDN) was the catalyst to usher in a whole new way of running networks—and that’s through software. Some may argue that network engineers have been using software for decades, as every good router jockey had a laptop filled with scripts and templates that could be cut and pasted into the command line interface. This ad hoc model is highly error prone and not scalable, which is why human error still accounts for much of the downtime with respect to networks. Historically, Cisco hasn’t exactly helped its customers be more proficient with software. Oh sure, it had programs such as the Cisco Technology Developer Program (CTDP) that were targeted at developers, but what about the network engineer? The person who wants to do his job more efficiently? For that audience, Cisco didn’t have an answer. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco to network engineers: Get comfortable with software. It’s here to stay

The shift to software-defined networks (SDN) was the catalyst to usher in a whole new way of running networks—and that’s through software. Some may argue that network engineers have been using software for decades, as every good router jockey had a laptop filled with scripts and templates that could be cut and pasted into the command line interface. This ad hoc model is highly error prone and not scalable, which is why human error still accounts for much of the downtime with respect to networks. Historically, Cisco hasn’t exactly helped its customers be more proficient with software. Oh sure, it had programs such as the Cisco Technology Developer Program (CTDP) that were targeted at developers, but what about the network engineer? The person who wants to do his job more efficiently? For that audience, Cisco didn’t have an answer. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Less Is More – Why The IPv6 Switch Is Missing

At Cloudflare we believe in being good to the Internet and good to our customers. By moving on from the legacy world of IPv4-only to the modern-day world where IPv4 and IPv6 are treated equally, we believe we are doing exactly that.

"No matter what happens in life, be good to people. Being good to people is a wonderful legacy to leave behind." - Taylor Swift (whose website has been IPv6 enabled for many many years)

Starting today with free domains, IPv6 is no longer something you can toggle on and off, it’s always just on.

How we got here

Cloudflare has always been a gateway for visitors on IPv6 connections to access sites and applications hosted on legacy IPv4-only infrastructure. Connections to Cloudflare are terminated on either IP version and then proxied to the backend over whichever IP version the backend infrastructure can accept.

That means that a v6-only mobile phone (looking at you, T-Mobile users) can establish a clean path to any site or mobile app behind Cloudflare instead of doing an expensive 464XLAT protocol translation as part of the connection (shaving milliseconds and conserving very precious battery life).

That IPv6 gateway is set by a simple Continue reading

New, faster Internet protocol for disasters proposed

The Internet isn’t fast enough, or bandwidth capacious enough for data-intensive emergency traffic during disaster response such as in hurricanes and earthquakes, scientists think. Video streams of flood scenes, say, along with laser mapping theoretically helps responders quickly allocate resources, but it gets bogged down along with other responder traffic, video chats and social media during the incidents.Multi Node Label Routing (MNLR) is a new protocol that will solve this reliability problem by routing responder data through a “high-speed lane of online traffic,” says an article in Rochester Institute of Technology’s (RIT) University News. Researchers at the school have developed the tech.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: New, faster Internet protocol for disasters proposed

The Internet isn’t fast enough, or bandwidth capacious enough for data-intensive emergency traffic during disaster response such as in hurricanes and earthquakes, scientists think. Video streams of flood scenes, say, along with laser mapping theoretically helps responders quickly allocate resources, but it gets bogged down along with other responder traffic, video chats and social media during the incidents.Multi Node Label Routing (MNLR) is a new protocol that will solve this reliability problem by routing responder data through a “high-speed lane of online traffic,” says an article in Rochester Institute of Technology’s (RIT) University News. Researchers at the school have developed the tech.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: New, faster Internet protocol for disasters proposed

The Internet isn’t fast enough, or bandwidth capacious enough for data-intensive emergency traffic during disaster response such as in hurricanes and earthquakes, scientists think. Video streams of flood scenes, say, along with laser mapping theoretically helps responders quickly allocate resources, but it gets bogged down along with other responder traffic, video chats and social media during the incidents.Multi Node Label Routing (MNLR) is a new protocol that will solve this reliability problem by routing responder data through a “high-speed lane of online traffic,” says an article in Rochester Institute of Technology’s (RIT) University News. Researchers at the school have developed the tech.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Big Data will enable better network and application intelligence in 5G

We are fortunate to live in an exciting time where multiple technological leaps are occurring. Specifically, I am thinking of the mobile industry transition from 4G to 5G, and the cross-industry IT paradigm shift to the Big Data approach. The 5G standards community is already planning to support the collection and transmission of massive amounts of data. This is one of its key requirements pillars in the area of supporting the IoT. What is left, however, is for the 5G community to ensure that the other component of Big Data, namely support for network and application intelligence, is also baked into the 5G architecture. Otherwise, 5G may become simply a pipe for Big Data passing between devices and the cloud infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Postcards from the network edge

I was recently invited to participate on a panel at a major IT conference, where questions from the audience provided an interesting window into the top issues that networking professionals are dealing with as part of their organizations’ digital transformation.Every enterprise, it seems, is planning a cloud strategy.  On closer inspection, most are already using the cloud in the form SaaS ERP and CRM applications like Salesforce, NetSuite, etc. These applications have performed well enough on top of traditional, legacy networks.However, newer, more multi-dimensional cloud applications are forcing businesses to look for ways to make their networks more agile. One of these is Microsoft Office 365.  Microsoft is aggressively investing in their infrastructure to provide a superior experience for users. Nevertheless, the enterprise network, and more specifically the wide area network (WAN), remains one of the biggest impediments to providing an on-premise caliber quality of experience for cloud applications. Finding the most efficient exit to Office 365 and best performance server are usually the culprits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Postcards from the network edge

I was recently invited to participate on a panel at a major IT conference, where questions from the audience provided an interesting window into the top issues that networking professionals are dealing with as part of their organizations’ digital transformation.Every enterprise, it seems, is planning a cloud strategy.  On closer inspection, most are already using the cloud in the form SaaS ERP and CRM applications like Salesforce, NetSuite, etc. These applications have performed well enough on top of traditional, legacy networks.However, newer, more multi-dimensional cloud applications are forcing businesses to look for ways to make their networks more agile. One of these is Microsoft Office 365.  Microsoft is aggressively investing in their infrastructure to provide a superior experience for users. Nevertheless, the enterprise network, and more specifically the wide area network (WAN), remains one of the biggest impediments to providing an on-premise caliber quality of experience for cloud applications. Finding the most efficient exit to Office 365 and best performance server are usually the culprits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

InfoVista ABCs of APIs Webinar Q&A: SDN+NFV-Driven Evolution of Performance Assurance Architectures

ABCs of APIs Webinar Q&A Thanks to all who joined us for the InfoVista ABCof APIs Webinar: SDN+NFV-Driven Evolution of Performance Assurance Architectures, where the award-winning multi-vendor discussed API, and proof of concept for multi-operator networking-as-a-service featuring LSO concepts within the context of SDN and NFV. After the webinar, we took questions from the audience but unfortunately ran out of time before we... Read more →

Patent Troll Battle Update: Doubling Down on Project Jengo

Project Jengo Doubles In Size
Jengo Fett by Brickset (Flickr)

We knew the case against patent trolls was the right one, but we have been overwhelmed by the response to our blog posts on patent trolls and our program for finding prior art on the patents held by Blackbird Tech, which we’ve dubbed Project Jengo. As we discuss in this post, your comments and contributions have allowed us to expand and intensify our efforts to challenge the growing threat that patent trolls pose to innovative tech companies.

We’re SIGNIFICANTLY expanding our program to find prior art on the Blackbird Tech patents

In a little over a week since we started the program, we’ve received 141 separate prior art submissions. But we know there’s an opportunity to find a lot more.

We’ve been impressed with the exceptionally high quality of the submissions. The Cloudflare community of users and readers of our blog are an accomplished bunch, so we have a number of searches that were done by expert engineers and programmers. In one case that stood out to us, someone wrote in about a project they personally had worked on as an engineer back in 1993, which they are convinced is conclusive prior art Continue reading

Worth Reading: A better way to compare yourself

Comparing your work or abilities to someone else’s can be an unproductive and self-destructive activity. Yet we compare ourselves all the time. In my own experience, it feels like every day I’m comparing my work against those I admire. Even now, a decade into my career, I can always find someone doing something I wish I could do even half as well. These types of comparisons can often leave you feeling unmotivated or discouraged, afraid of a seemingly waning future, completely deprived of a way forward. When I compare myself I end up feeling like I’d rather watch TV or play video games than do anything else, because why bother? I could never do what those I admire have been able to. —Free Code Camp

The post Worth Reading: A better way to compare yourself appeared first on rule 11 reader.

HPC Center NERSC Eases Path to Optimization at Scale

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) application performance team knows that for many users, “optimization is hard.” They’ve thought a lot about how to distill the application optimization process for users in a way that would resonate with them.

One of the analogies they use is the “Ant Farm.” Optimizing code is like continually “running a lawnmower over a lawn to find and cut-down the next tallest blade of grass,” where the blade of grass is analogous to a code bottleneck that consumes the greatest amount of runtime. One of the challenges is that each bottleneck …

HPC Center NERSC Eases Path to Optimization at Scale was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

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