The $475 S key

I have a Macbook Air, purchased from the Apple Refurb store about two years ago. It now has a dead key. It’s the S key. After cleaning it with compressed air, it worked badly for a while and is now dead. A query to the local Apple repair shop indicates it’s fixable for about $380. One look at the iFixit repair PDF, and it’s easy to see that it’s very labor intensive. For. One. Key. I obtained an appointment at the area Apple Store Genius Bar. After about 40 minutes, it was determined that Apple could repair my MacBook Air. The price would be $475, but that would include other refurbishments as determined at the time, perhaps including a new battery or whatever else was found “wrong” with the machine. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google upgrades G Suite with tools for IT pros

Google today bolstered its G Suite of productivity apps with new controls and tools for IT professionals. G Suite administrators now have more access to control security key enforcement, data control with data loss prevention (DLP) for Google Drive and Gmail, and additional insights by connecting Gmail to BigQuery, Google’s enterprise data warehouse designed to enable SQL queries, according to Google.All of the changes, which are live today, are designed to elevate G Suite for the enterprise, especially among companies that need more confidence in the controls they can maintain over corporate data, according to Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google upgrades G Suite with tools for IT pros

Google today bolstered its G Suite of productivity apps with new controls and tools for IT professionals. G Suite administrators now have more access to control security key enforcement, data control with data loss prevention (DLP) for Google Drive and Gmail, and additional insights by connecting Gmail to BigQuery, Google’s enterprise data warehouse designed to enable SQL queries, according to Google.All of the changes, which are live today, are designed to elevate G Suite for the enterprise, especially among companies that need more confidence in the controls they can maintain over corporate data, according to Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Application monitoring becomes table stakes in the digital age

Bill Hineline had two requirements as he was searching last year for a new tool to keep tabs on the hundreds of interconnected applications that keep United Airline's planes flying. It had to ensure critical flight operations software was working and it had to meet customers' demands for accessing information from smartphones and tablets. The airline's director of application performance management also wanted a cloud application rather than another on-premises tool to manage internally. United Airlines Bill Hineline, director of application performance management at United Airlines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Illumio extends its segmentation to the network and cloud

Data centers have become increasingly dynamic and distributed, which is why there has been a rise in technologies such as virtual machines, containers and hyperconverged systems.Security has been slow to evolve to meet the needs of the new world, but thanks to innovative start-ups such as Illumio, security is starting to change and is able to meet the demands of digital organizations. One of the big advancements in data center security has been the rise of segmentation tools. In actuality, coarse-grained segmentation has been around for decades in the form of firewalls, VLANs and ACLs, but companies like Illumio and VMware have extended the paradigm to applications, workloads and users. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Illumio extends its segmentation to the network and cloud

Data centers have become increasingly dynamic and distributed, which is why there has been a rise in technologies such as virtual machines, containers and hyperconverged systems.Security has been slow to evolve to meet the needs of the new world, but thanks to innovative start-ups such as Illumio, security is starting to change and is able to meet the demands of digital organizations. One of the big advancements in data center security has been the rise of segmentation tools. In actuality, coarse-grained segmentation has been around for decades in the form of firewalls, VLANs and ACLs, but companies like Illumio and VMware have extended the paradigm to applications, workloads and users. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Savings in the cloud: How to find them and when to make your move

This contributed piece has been edited and approved by Network World editorsC-level executives are increasingly calling on IT to investigate cloud options. In fact, according to Gartner, 90% of organizations are looking into crafting a cloud strategy. There are, in fact, significant economic advantages to be found in the cloud. But despite the potential benefits, you need to look carefully before you leap.Cloud providers have many things working in their favor. For starters, their ability to procure and operate at scale gives them substantial discounts that can be passed along to customers. Cloud customers also benefit by being able to purchase compute for specific applications on a pay-as-you-go basis, without the need for a long-term commitment. The real savings come from elasticity and not having to lay out substantial capital if you only want to ramp up compute for a short period of time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Savings in the cloud: How to find them and when to make your move

This contributed piece has been edited and approved by Network World editors

C-level executives are increasingly calling on IT to investigate cloud options. In fact, according to Gartner, 90% of organizations are looking into crafting a cloud strategy. There are, in fact, significant economic advantages to be found in the cloud. But despite the potential benefits, you need to look carefully before you leap.

Cloud providers have many things working in their favor. For starters, their ability to procure and operate at scale gives them substantial discounts that can be passed along to customers. Cloud customers also benefit by being able to purchase compute for specific applications on a pay-as-you-go basis, without the need for a long-term commitment. The real savings come from elasticity and not having to lay out substantial capital if you only want to ramp up compute for a short period of time.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco: Spam is making a big-time comeback

Spam is making a surprising resurgence as a threat to corporate security and becoming a more significant carrier of attacks as varied as spear phishing, ransomware and bots, according to Cisco’s 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report.The company’s 10th such report says spam is way up. It accounts for 65% of all corporate email among customers who opted in to let the company gather data via telemetry in Cisco gear.Whereas spam had been knocked down as a threat in 2010 and kept at relatively low levels through 2015, it made a surge in 2016. In 2010, Cisco recorded 5,000 spam messages being sent per second. That number stayed generally below 1,500 for the next five years, spiking to about 2,000 briefly in 2014. But in 2016 it leaped to more than 3,000.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco: Spam is making a big-time comeback

Spam is making a surprising resurgence as a threat to corporate security and becoming a more significant carrier of attacks as varied as spear phishing, ransomware and bots, according to Cisco’s 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report.The company’s 10th such report says spam is way up. It accounts for 65% of all corporate email among customers who opted in to let the company gather data via telemetry in Cisco gear.Whereas spam had been knocked down as a threat in 2010 and kept at relatively low levels through 2015, it made a surge in 2016. In 2010, Cisco recorded 5,000 spam messages being sent per second. That number stayed generally below 1,500 for the next five years, spiking to about 2,000 briefly in 2014. But in 2016 it leaped to more than 3,000.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

RTGWG Interim Meeting on Data Center Challenges

Last week, the Routing Area Working Group (IETF) held an interim meeting on challenges and (potential) solutions to large scale data center fabric design. I’ve filed this here because I spoke for all of about 3 minutes out of the entire meeting—but I really wanted to highlight this meeting, as it will be of interest to just about every network engineer “out there” who deals with data center design at all.

There are three key URLs for the interim

The agenda
The session slides and links to drafts presented
A Webex recording of the entire proceedings

My reaction, in general, is that we are starting to really understand the challenges in a networking way, rather than just as a coding problem, or a “wow, that’s really big.” I’m not certain we are heading down the right path in all areas; I am becoming more convinced than ever that the true path to scale is to layer the control plane in ways we are not doing today. You can see this in the LinkedIn presentation, which Shawn and I shared. I tend to think the move towards sucking every bit of state possible out of the control plane is a Continue reading

Secure applications, not the cloud

Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not advocate a position that is particular to the author’s employer and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.Cloud adoption is a strategic initiative for nearly every company today, but there is still a fair amout of fear, uncertainty and doubt around cloud security, most of it unfounded. In my experience, coding errors and application vulnerabilities are the root of most security problems, regardless of where the data resides.  When it comes to cloud, you need to look past the distractions and focus primarily on securing applications.The main difference between on-premise and cloud security is there is no longer a well-defined security perimeter that can be protected by hardware appliances. Security teams need to move away from hardware-defined approaches to programmatic, software-defined solutions. And it’s worth noting, cloud is not the only driver in this dissipation, the rapid onset of mobile-first is another key contributor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Secure applications, not the cloud

Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not advocate a position that is particular to the author’s employer and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.

Cloud adoption is a strategic initiative for nearly every company today, but there is still a fair amout of fear, uncertainty and doubt around cloud security, most of it unfounded. In my experience, coding errors and application vulnerabilities are the root of most security problems, regardless of where the data resides.  When it comes to cloud, you need to look past the distractions and focus primarily on securing applications.

The main difference between on-premise and cloud security is there is no longer a well-defined security perimeter that can be protected by hardware appliances. Security teams need to move away from hardware-defined approaches to programmatic, software-defined solutions. And it’s worth noting, cloud is not the only driver in this dissipation, the rapid onset of mobile-first is another key contributor.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSX Growth and Success in 2016

Last week VMware hosted its Q4 2016 earnings call and shared financial results. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and the executive team have frequently highlighted VMware NSX growth and success on these calls. For Q4, NSX license bookings grew over 50 percent year-over-year. Annualizing our Q4 total bookings for NSX, it is now at a $1B run rate. With one month into 2017, we’d like to share more on NSX customer success in 2016.

Customer Success

2,400+

Exiting 2016, we shared our latest customer count at more than 2,400, which is almost double the customer count from last year. In Q4 we also had the largest NSX-only deal, more than $10M. For every customer I meet with or hear about from my team, I am continued to be impressed how they choose to go about using NSX. We love to share these success stories, whether we’re talking about all the customers we had speaking at VMworld last year, or the many videos and case studies the team publishes regularly. These stories go into details on the significant NSX wins across multiple verticals and every major geography.

Customer Deployments & Expansion

Success for our team is when customers expand their use of Continue reading

What P4 programming is and why it’s such a big deal for Software Defined Networking

P4 The dawn of software defined networking (SDN) ushered in an era of disaggregation of the networking control plane from the data plane; management of the network was no longer bound to the networking hardware it ran on.This created a market of overlay control-plane software from companies like Nicira, which was sold to VMware and is now NSX; Cisco ACI and others followed suit. But at the data plane – where network packets are actually forwarded - there has been less innovation, says IDC data center network research director Brad Casemore. Until now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenCL Opens Doors to Deep Learning Training on FPGA

Hardware and device makers are in a mad dash to create or acquire the perfect chip for performing deep learning training and inference. While we have yet to see anything that can handle both parts of the workload on a single chip with spectacular results (the Pascal general GPUs are the closest thing yet, with threats coming from Intel/Nervana in the future), there is promise for FPGAs to find inroads.

So far, most of the work we have focused on for FPGAs and deep learning has centered more on the acceleration of inference versus boosting training times and accuracy …

OpenCL Opens Doors to Deep Learning Training on FPGA was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

IoT network builders sign up partners for small devices

There’s a land grab happening now between networks to link small, battery-powered IoT devices.If countless forecasts are true, there will soon be a lot more tiny, low-power devices like sensors out in the world. The 2G networks that connected many of these to the cloud are gradually going away and newer, more specialized networks are emerging. Vendors are pushing different LPWANs (low-power, wide-area networks) to do the job and trying to get more users and network operators on their side. Their survival may depend on building up a big ecosystem of devices.On Monday, U.S. network operator Ingenu partnered with distributor and system builder Arrow Electronics, which will offer Ingenu’s RPMA (Random Phase Multiple Access) technology when it develops IoT systems for enterprises and smaller businesses in the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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