SDxCentral Weekly News Roundup — January 6, 2017
T-Mobile accelerates IoT; Viptela partners with Inbox Business to deploy SD-WAN in Pakistan.
Cisco Retains Enterprise Infrastructure Market Dominance
Synergy report shows networking giant continues to lead nearly every infrastructure segment.
2017: the Internet Society’s 25th Anniversary Year
Happy New Year! Along with the excitement and expectations each new year brings, 2017 marks a significant milestone for the Internet Society. This year, we celebrate 25 years of dedication to an open, secure Internet that benefits all people throughout the world.
We all know how far the Internet has come since the early 1990’s, but today our work has never been more important. As the Internet ecosystem becomes increasingly complex, so too do the issues it faces. We have an important role to play in highlighting the challenges that need attention and in mapping out a path forward to safeguard and protect the Internet we believe in.
Ms. Kathryn Brown
Docker Storage and Infinit FAQ
Last December, Docker acquired a company called Infinit. Using their technology, we will provide secure distributed storage out of the box, making it much easier to deploy stateful services and legacy enterprise applications on Docker.
During the last Docker Online Meetup, Julien Quintard, member of Docker’s technical staff and former CEO at Infinit, went through the design principles behind their product and demonstrated how the platform can be used to deploy a storage infrastructure through Docker containers in a few command lines.
Providing state to applications in Docker requires a backend storage component that is both scalable and resilient in order to cope with a variety of use cases and failure scenarios. The Infinit Storage Platform has been designed to provide Docker applications with a set of interfaces (block, file and object) allowing for different tradeoffs.
Check out the following slidedeck to learn more about the internals of their platform:
Unfortunately, the video recording from the meetup is not available this time around but you can watch the following presentation and demo of Infinit from its CTO Quentin Hocquet at the Docker Distributed Systems Summit:
Docker and Infinit FAQ
1. Do you consider NFS/GPFS and other HPC cluster Continue reading
Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 6th, 2017
Hey, it's HighScalability time:
Hot rods in space. The Smith Cloud plummets towards our galaxy at nearly 700,000 mph. Vroom!
- 3 of top 5: Stackoverflow questions are about Git; 3,000: four-passenger cars could serve 98 percent of NYC taxi demand; 44%: US population lives within 20 miles of Amazon fulfillment center; 72%: Amazon customers shopped using mobile device; 110%: increase in industrial control system attacks; 455: Number of scripted television series aired this year; $28.5 billion/yr: App downloads on iOS;
- Quotable Quotes:
- @ValaAfshar: Number of robots working in Amazon warehouses: 2016: 45,000 / 2015: 30,000 2014: 15,000 / 2013: 1,000 — @JonErlichman
- @jason_kint: updated duopoly #s. new IAB data came out yesterday. easy to run vs earnings for goog and fb, it's evident everyone else is zero sum game.
- rb2k_: I also haven't seen one [company in Germany] that isn't riddled with MBA grads that mainly push Jira tickets around.
- Joe McCann: The best software developers I know are always hacking over the holidays. True story.
- @kaffeecoder: Sigh. Async vs blocking protocol is irrelevant. What matters is communicating Continue reading
Posit: Private Cloud Has Less Lock-In
Posit: A private cloud has less lock-in than a public cloud because realistic, practical alternatives exist and migration is possible
- Moving between public cloud services is practically impossible.
- It may never be possible.
- Your business process is hostage to a third party and completely outside of your control from a timeline, cost and change view
- Consider, your business is under threat and cutting costs is imperative. Your cloud provider is forcing a migration to a updated service and you have fixed time period to complete the upgrade process. You must spend to maintain service. Control is lost
- Loss of control is a lock in
In private cloud, you have some greater degree of control over these issues. Its a tradeoff.
Addendum: 20170106-17:30
- Take for examples, the collapse of public clouds by VMware, Cisco, HPE, Verizon etc. All of these are forcing your business to undertake an activity outside of your control.
- Amazon is quite ruthless about forcing customers to fit its technology. Machines are force rebooted, products are deprecated and discontinued reguarly.
- Azure if forcing upgrades on its SQL products as a rapid pace, often beyond what customers are able to handle (they don’t have the resources to change their systems).
Worth Reading: DRM versus civil liberties
Imagine a world where your Internet-connected car locks you in at the behest of its manufacturer—or the police. Where your media devices only let you consume mass media, not remix it to publish a counter-narrative or viral meme. Where your phone is designed to report on your movements and communications. Where your kid’s toy tells them it’s their friend, then talks about how much it loves sponsored products and transmits everything it hears in your home back to its manufacturer. Where your phone stops working if the police or the manufacturer ask it to. Where these backdoors are vulnerable to hacking, so anyone with the right resources can take advantage of them. —CircleID
The post Worth Reading: DRM versus civil liberties appeared first on 'net work.
Boosting Operational Efficiency in Cloud NFV Infrastructures
The server is the core building block of the NFV infrastructure.
MP on SpecTechUlar’s “6 Blogs for 2017” List
While I’m giving out good wishes, I’d like to also give a shout out and a thank you to Mark Silver at SpecTechUlar for including me on his list of “6 Blogs All Product and IT Specialists Should Add to Their 2017 Reading List.”
6 Blogs All Product and IT Specialists Should Add to Their 2017 Reading List
I fear that Mark has discovered my secret as he points out that “[my] eccentric personality definitely shows through in this technology blog.” I quite like that 
Thank you, Mark, for the kind words and the inclusion on your list! Mark works as a Product Manager for WalkMe, and runs the SpecTechUlar blog, pulling together interesting stories and best practices about technology and product management written by himself and other guest authors. He has found some amazing images for his blog posts, and even a glance at the home page pulls you in to the articles (I should learn from this!).
Thanks, Mark; I enjoyed discovering SpecTechUlar too, and I think many of my readers may also enjoy visiting.
If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at MP on SpecTechUlar’s “6 Blogs for 2017” List and give me a share/like. Thank you!
ERSPAN on Comware
The Comware documentation doesn't spell it out clearly, but it's possible to get ERSPAN-like functionality by using a GRE tunnel interface as the target for a local port mirror session.This is very handy for quick analysis of stuff that's not L2 adjacent with an analysis station.
First, create a local mirror session:
mirroring-group 1 local
Next configure an unused physical interface for use by tunnel interfaces:
service-loopback group 1 type tunnel
interface <unused-interface>
port service-loopback group 1
quit
Now configure a GRE tunnel interface as the destination for the mirror group:
interface Tunnel0 mode gre
source <whatever>
destination <machine running wireshark>
mirroring-group 1 monitor-port
quit
Finally, configure the source interface(s):
interface <interesting-source-interface-1>
mirroring-group 1 mirroring-port inbound
interface <interesting-source-interface-2>
mirroring-group 1 mirroring-port inbound
Traffic from the source interfaces arrives at the analyzer with extra Ethernet/IP/GRE headers attached. Inside each GRE payload is the original frame as collected at a mirroring-group source interface. If the original traffic with extra headers attached (14+20+4 == 38 bytes) exceeds MTU, then the switch fragments the frame. Nothing gets lost and Wireshark handles it gracefully.
Three Months with Google Fiber
I'm one of the lucky few to benefit from Google Fiber's recent expansion into new regions (before they nixed the whole thing). I've had the service fire three months now and figured I should write up my experience with it thus far.
The Installation
Google Fiber announced that it would be expanding to the Raleigh-Durham metro area, known locally as "The Triangle", in January 2015. It's been a long game of hurry-up-and-wait since then, watching crews laying fiber all over town without hearing a peep from Google regarding availability. But in the fall of 2016, people were finally able to start signing up for service. Here's how my installation went.
September 3
Google Fiber registration opens! I sign up for service and pay a paltry $10 deposit, which gets credited toward my first bill. Over the next couple weeks, various utilities swing by to mark their lines in the ground. (Here's the color code for utility markings in the US, if you're curious.)
September 24
Google's contractor arrives on site to lay fiber from the curb to my house and to many of my neighbors' houses. Surprisingly, they cut my trench by hand, possibly due to the steep Continue reading