IDG Contributor Network: ITSM evolution on display at FUSION

Trends in enterprise IT are an interesting thing. Can you think of any other industry where hype has its own lifecycle?Whether it is because of the large budgets at stake or that enterprise IT professionals are uniquely susceptible to them, it seems the enterprise IT market is always awash in “hot new trends.” And as fast as they arise, most fizzle out.At least from that perspective, the IT service management (ITSM) space has had a pretty good run. It’s been over 20 years since the British government first introduced Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), creating the ITSM market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Inside Six of the Newest Top 20 Supercomputers

The latest listing of the Top 500 rankings of the world’s most powerful supercomputers has just been released. While there were no big surprises at the top of the list, there have been some notable additions to the top tier, all of which feature various elements of supercomputers yet to come as national labs and research centers prepare for their pre-exascale and eventual exascale systems.

We will be providing a deep dive on the list results this morning, but for now, what is most interesting about the list is what it is just beginning to contain at the top–and what

Inside Six of the Newest Top 20 Supercomputers was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

6 ways to add cybersecurity protections to outsourcing deals

As cybersecurity has become one of the most important strategic imperatives for the enterprise, concerns about how third-party IT services providers are protecting corporate data have grown. As a result, negotiation of cybersecurity and data privacy issues has become one of the most challenging areas in IT outsourcing contract negotiations, says Rebecca Eisner, partner in the Chicago office of law firm Mayer Brown.“Suppliers are understandably concerned about not paying damages that are disproportionate to the revenue received, and therefore seek to limit or disclaim their liability,” says Eisner. “Customers are equally concerned, particularly where suppliers do not have the same incentives to protect customer data as the customer, and because the negative impacts of a security incident are generally far more significant to the customer than to the supplier.” What’s more, the cybersecurity regulatory environment is rapidly evolving, making it difficult for both sides to access the risks. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Get started with TensorFlow

Machine learning couldn’t be hotter, with several heavy hitters offering platforms aimed at seasoned data scientists and newcomers interested in working with neural networks. Among the more popular options is TensorFlow, a machine learning library that Google open-sourced a year ago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Trump’s election sets stage for H-1B reform

President-elect Donald Trump gave laid-off IT workers something his rival, Hillary Clinton, did not during the campaign: Attention and a promise to reform the H-1B visa program.The IT workers that Trump wanted to appeal to don't work for startups, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. They run IT systems at insurance firms, banks, utilities and retailers. They live in Rust Belt cities and in New York City, but are too spread out for pollsters to measure.Trump recognized that IT workers are aggrieved and so did Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who worked with the president-elect on this issue. Sessions, after being appointed in early 2015 as the chairman of the Senate immigration subcommittee, set out to become "the voice of the American IT workers who are being replaced with guest workers."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Employees feel pressure to use personal smartphones at work

Eren says that businesses typically approach BYOD from the perspective of hardware security. But instead of worrying about security on devices and peripherals, Eren says businesses should focus on securing the corporate data that resides on the devices and creating policies around what can and cannot live on a personal device.Eren says it's not hardware and devices that are the security threat, it's the apps that host corporate data, which is what hackers are after. Your BYOD strategy doesn't need to be overly complex, he says, but it does need to work within the parameters of your business and be something that can grow and adapt as technology evolves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 11.14.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.NetCrunch 9.3Key features: Version 9.3 of the NetCrunch network monitoring system introduces an overhauled GUI, live up/down traffic on physical segments, new views for smaller networks, and integration with JIRA, ConnectWise and more. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 11.14.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.NetCrunch 9.3Key features: Version 9.3 of the NetCrunch network monitoring system introduces an overhauled GUI, live up/down traffic on physical segments, new views for smaller networks, and integration with JIRA, ConnectWise and more. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 11.14.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.NetCrunch 9.3Key features: Version 9.3 of the NetCrunch network monitoring system introduces an overhauled GUI, live up/down traffic on physical segments, new views for smaller networks, and integration with JIRA, ConnectWise and more. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung boosts audio, connected car businesses with $8B Harman buy

Samsung Electronics wants to buy its way into the connected car market, with a plan to acquire Harman for US$8 billion.It's the latest in a line of acquisitions by Samsung, as it seeks to diversify its business beyond the slowing smartphone market. Other recently announced deals include last month's buy of artificial intelligence startup Viv Labs, which has developed a virtual personal assistant Samsung hopes to put in its consumer electronics products, and the June purchase of Joyent, a supplier of cloud services for the internet of things.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Creating a new network value equation

Having worked on Wall Street for many years, I’m a big believer in extracting the biggest return on technology investments. After all, anything that impacts the bottom line should be thoroughly analyzed from all sides of the value equation.  Now more than ever, CIOs are being scrutinized for their ability to increase ROI while driving innovation and digital transformations. According to more than 3,000 CIOs and technology leaders gathered for the 2016 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey, the role of today’s CIO is being stretched in many directions amid shifting priorities and pressures. + Also on Network World: Network World annual State of the Network survey results + More CIOs report directly to CEOs than at any time in the past decade, rising 10 percent in the past year to 34 percent of the survey respondents. And, while 37 percent of the CIOs surveyed are still focused on saving money, almost two-thirds are helping CEOs identify IT projects that generate revenue. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Creating a new network value equation

Having worked on Wall Street for many years, I’m a big believer in extracting the biggest return on technology investments. After all, anything that impacts the bottom line should be thoroughly analyzed from all sides of the value equation.  Now more than ever, CIOs are being scrutinized for their ability to increase ROI while driving innovation and digital transformations. According to more than 3,000 CIOs and technology leaders gathered for the 2016 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey, the role of today’s CIO is being stretched in many directions amid shifting priorities and pressures. + Also on Network World: Network World annual State of the Network survey results + More CIOs report directly to CEOs than at any time in the past decade, rising 10 percent in the past year to 34 percent of the survey respondents. And, while 37 percent of the CIOs surveyed are still focused on saving money, almost two-thirds are helping CEOs identify IT projects that generate revenue. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Snippet: The story of the EFP

For a while now, the concept of EVC’s (Ethernet Virtual Circuits) and EFP’s (Ethernet Flow Points), has eluded me.

In this short post, i will provide you with a simple example of a couple of EFP’s. In a later post i will discuss the MEF concept of EVC’s.

As always, here is the topology i will be using:

topology

Its a very simple setup. R1 connects to R2 through its G1 interface and connects to R3 through its G2 interface.

On R2 and R3, we have the very common configuration of using subinterfaces for the individual Vlan’s in question. Namely Vlan 10 for the connection between R1 and R2 and Vlan 20 between R1 and R3.

Here is the configuration of R2 and R3:

R2#sh run int g1.10
Building configuration...
Current configuration : 98 bytes
!
interface GigabitEthernet1.10
encapsulation dot1Q 10
ip address 10.10.10.2 255.255.255.0
end

R3#sh run int g1.20
Building configuration...
Current configuration : 98 bytes
!
interface GigabitEthernet1.20
encapsulation dot1Q 20
ip address 10.10.10.3 255.255.255.0
end

Now on R1 is where the “different” configuration takes place:

R1#sh run int g1
Building configuration...
Current configuration :  Continue reading

BGP VPLS explained (Nokia & Juniper)

It may very well be that VPLS days are numbered and EVPN is to blame. Nevertheless, it would be naive to expect VPLS extinction in the near future. With all its shortcomings VPLS is still very well standardized, interop-proven and has a huge footprint in MPLS networks of various scale. In this post I will cover theory and

Best bookmark managers for Google Chrome

Recently, while going through my bookmarks in Chrome to determine which ones I wanted to keep, I accidentally deleted all of them. Rather than panic, I felt an odd sense of…relief. I realized that I had collected several hundred bookmarks over the years, and that managing them was difficult.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Arribem a Barcelona! Cloudflare’s 101st data center

Hola Barcelona! The land of Antoni Gaudí, Salvador Dalí, Ferrán Adriá and Lionel Messi is now also home to Cloudflare.

Located alongside the Mediterranean, Barcelona, is the capital of the autonomous community of Catalonia, the second-most populated municipality in Spain and the core of the fifth-most populous urban area in the Europe. Our data center in Barcelona is our 3rd in the Iberian Peninsula following our deployments in Madrid and Lisbon, our 28th in Europe, and 101st globally. This means not only better performance in Catalonia and Spain, but additional redundancy for European data centers. As of this moment, Cloudflare has a point of presence (PoP) in 7 out of Europe's 10 most populous urban areas, and with number 8 coming soon (all roads have been said to lead there…).

CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 image by Luc Mercelis

Cloudflare has connected to the Catalunya Neutral Internet Exchange (“CATNIX”). This raises the number of exchanges that Cloudflare is a participant in to over 150. As we expand our peering, more visitors get served locally. If you wish to connect with us at CATNIX (or any of our other locations) you can find our peering details on our PeeringDB profile.

Only a Continue reading