Digital transformation is giving IT spending a big boost

Digital transformation may promise critical benefits for the companies undertaking it, but it's also delivering a major boost to IT spending around the world.That's according to market researcher IDC, which on Monday released new data indicating that global spending on IT products and services will grow from nearly $2.4 trillion in 2016 to more than $2.7 trillion in 2020. A big part of that growth, it says, will come from companies investing in cloud, mobility, and big data technologies as part of their digital transformation efforts. Such efforts are now particularly prominent in financial services and manufacturing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FBI warns that hackers are targeting state election systems

The FBI has reportedly found evidence that foreign hackers breached two state election databases in recent weeks.An FBI alert warning election officials about the breach was leaked, and it was posted in a report by Yahoo News on Monday. Voter registration databases from both Illinois and Arizona were targeted in the hacks, according to the report.In the Illinois case, personal data on 200,000 voters was stolen. In July, an official with the state’s board of elections warned on Facebook that the voting system had fallen to a cyberattack, forcing a shutdown.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FBI warns that hackers are targeting state election systems

The FBI has reportedly found evidence that foreign hackers breached two state election databases in recent weeks.An FBI alert warning election officials about the breach was leaked, and it was posted in a report by Yahoo News on Monday. Voter registration databases from both Illinois and Arizona were targeted in the hacks, according to the report.In the Illinois case, personal data on 200,000 voters was stolen. In July, an official with the state’s board of elections warned on Facebook that the voting system had fallen to a cyberattack, forcing a shutdown.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

snaproute Go BGP Code Dive (9): Moving to Open

a href=”http://ntwrk.guru/bgp-code-dive-8/”>In the last session of snaproute BGP code dive—number 8, in fact— I started looking at how snaproute’s BGP moves from connect to open. This is the chain of calls from that post—

  • st.fsm.StopConnectRetryTimer()
  • st.fsm.SetPeerConn(data)
  • st.fsm.sendOpenMessage()
  • st.fsm.SetHoldTime(st.fsm.neighborConf.RunningConf.HoldTime, st.fsm.neighborConf.RunningConf.KeepaliveTime)
  • st.fsm.StartHoldTimer()
  • st.BaseState.fsm.ChangeState(NewOpenSentState(st.BaseState.fsm))

The past post covered the first two steps in this process, so this post will begin with the third step, st.fsm.sendOpenMessage(). Note the function call has st.fm... in the front, so this is a call by reference. Each FSM that is spun up (think of them as threads, or even processes, if you must, to get this concept in your head, even though they’re not) can have its own copy of this function, with its own state. When reading the code to sort out how it works, this doesn’t have much practical impact, other than telling us the sendOpenMessage function we’re looking for is going to be in the FSM file. The function is located around line 1233 in fsm.go:

func (fsm *FSM) sendOpenMessage() {
  optParams := packet.ConstructOptParams(uint32(fsm. Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Microservice tracing: Root cause performance issues in clusters and distributed platforms

Microservices are a popular architectural approach for cloud-native applications. But the idea of deconstructing a large service into smaller componets was originally conceived for clusters and distributed platforms—when applications were trying to increase compute performance and grow storage and network not available on a single host. Once the boundry of a server was crossed, an application’s software components required interaction via inter-server “east-to-west” communications. As this concept developed and was applied to modern-day cloud services, building blocks such as JSON, RESTful API and Thrift were added to create what we now know as microservices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 6s owners won’t care if the iPhone 7 is faster

iPhone 6s users won’t care that the iPhone 7 will be much faster. Its A10 SoC that will power the iPhone 7 will be much faster based on projecting the Geekbench3 benchmarks of the A10’s predecessors by Primate Labs. On average, the A10 could be 50% faster than the A9. But for most apps, iPhone 6s users won’t perceive the speed.Benchmarks don’t matter, Visual Reaction Time does Benchmarks like the one run by Primate Labs below are useful for comparing processors but not application performance. Benchmarks do not account for the user’s interaction with the device. The A10 performance projections were made based on the average incremental performance improvement of A6 through A9.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Stream Processing’s Hard Problems

Before we dive into why data access is a hard problem in stream processing, here is some background information. At LinkedIn, we develop and use Apache Samza as our stream processing framework, Apache Kafka as our durable pub-sub messaging pipe, and Databus (and its next generation replacement) for capturing change events from our databases. Our streams infrastructure team gets feedback from application developers across the company (and from the open source community) on scalability, reliability, usability, and other problems that they encounter in their production applications. —LinkedIn Engineering Blog

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IDG Contributor Network: ExtraHop integrates into VMware’s cloud management platform

While it would be easy reading the headlines to assume that every organization under the sun is fully committed to the public cloud, the fact of the matter is that public cloud adoption—albeit massive and growing fast—is still the tip of the IT iceberg. For every few million dollars spent on public cloud infrastructure, there are hundreds and hundreds of millions spent on more traditional ways of delivering IT.Which is where a company such as VMware comes in. VMware, which popularized the notion of virtualization—or creating multiple virtual servers on a single physical box—is often criticized (by me, as well) for being somewhat slow to innovate and really embrace the cloud world. But it's not quite so simple as that—VMware has thousands of customers, huge market share and great existing revenues. It needs to move at an appropriate speed for all of these different stakeholders.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Shiny New Way to Manage VMware Guests

Ansible

Way back in March of 2015, I wrote a post about managing VMware guests with the vsphere_guest module. A lot has changed since then with VMware support, including a whole bunch of new modules for managing the VMware infrastructure itself. We've also consolidated all VMware interaction around the pyvmomi Python library, replacing the aging and no longer maintained pysphere and psphere libraries. This support even extends to the VMware dynamic inventory, you will be pleased to know!

We took the opportunity to tidy up some of the parameters used in the old vsphere_guest module, and I think the new vmware_guest module is nicer to use. A couple of handy new additional parameters are validate_certs and wait_for_ip_address. I'm sure they don't need explaining, but for the sake of clarity they allow you to connect to vCentre servers that have a self signed SSL certificate, and for the module to wait for an IP address to become visible for the new VM.

This latter parameter is especially nice, because now you can have the single module wait for the IP address, instead of having to do something clunky with a block (as I did in my main demo).

So here is Continue reading

CCIE DCv2 Beta Rack Rentals Now Available

Our CCIE Data Center version 2.0 Rack Rental system is now in beta testing phase.  Click here to submit a request for beta access and I will contact you directly with more details on timing and availability.

Our CCIE DCv2 Rack Rentals consist of the following:

  • Nexus 9300 ACI Spines
  • Nexus 9300 ACI Leafs
  • Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC)
  • Nexus 7000s with F3 line cards
  • Nexus 5600s
  • Nexus 2300 & 2200 10GigE Fabric Extenders
  • UCS C series rack servers
  • UCS B series blade servers
  • UCS 6248 Fabric Interconnects
  • Nexus 1000v virtual switch
  • Dual 10GigE attached hosts for application testing
  • Fibre Channel SAN
  • iSCSI SAN

The visual topology topology diagrams are as follows:

Nutanix gets hyperconverged with PernixData and Calm.io

Nutanix has snapped up a couple of companies, PernixData and Calm.io, to extend its enterprise cloud platform.The company competes with the likes of Simplivity, Cisco Systems, EMC, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise on the delivery of hyperconverged infrastructure, a term it is credited with coining.The Calm.io acquisition will take Nutanix a step closer to its goal of delivering application and service orchestration, runtime lifecycle management, and policy-based governance across all application environments. The company plans to lean on Calm.io's devops automation capabilities to add new cloud automation and management capabilities to its existing software stack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

25% off Logitech K380 Multi-Device Bluetooth Keyboard (Blue) – Deal Alert

The Logitech K380 Bluetooth Keyboard allows you to easily connect to and type on your computer, tablet, smartphone and more: Windows, Mac, Chrome OS, Android, iOS (iPhone and iPad) and even Apple TV 2nd or 3rd generation.  This keyboard allows you to connect to up to three devices simultaneously. Simply touch a button on the keyboard to start typing on another device. The keyboard recognizes each device and automatically maps keys to give you a familiar layout with your favorite shortcuts.  This keyboard currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 300+ customers (read reviews).  Save 525% off the regular $39.99 list price on Amazon, and buy it now for $29.99To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud giveth and cloud taketh away: Rackspace edition

Hosting firm Rackspace has been a well-known name in the cloud industry for a long time, but lately the company has been struggling to keep up in the core cloud computing competition.Instead, the firm has concentrated on becoming the “#1 managed cloud company,” mixing its own hosting services and cloud offerings while also cutting deals to provide “fanatical” service and support to users of market leaders like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.It seems that strategy wasn’t enough, at least not by itself.Even as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform have been posting quarter after quarter of amazing growth that help cement their economies of scale, Rackspace’s stock stumbled, (the company had lost half of its market value before talk of a possible sale) which constrained its ability to find a better market position.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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