Pat Gelsinger explains what Dell-EMC deal means for VMware

When Dell announced the $67 billion debt-financed takeover of VMware parent company EMC in October, the news sent shockwaves across the EMC portfolio of companies, including internally at VMware, and with customers and partners."When the deal was announced, everybody was surprised, shocked," VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a pre-VMWorld interview with Network World. "It was a big, big deal and those questions were internal as well as with customers and partners... As I described it, everybody had the deer in the headlights response." (L-R) Joe Tucci, David Goulden, Pat Gelsinger and Michael Dell in October, 2015. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Cloud Key and Key Escrow

The problem Apple wanted to solve is this. Suppose that you have some sort of iToy — an iPhone, an iPad, etc. — or Mac. These systems allow you to back up your keychain to Apple’s iCloud service, where they’re protected by your AppleID (an email address) and password. If you buy a new device from Apple, your keychain can be downloaded to it once you log on to iCloud. (Note: uploading keys to iCloud is optional and disabled by default, though you are prompted about enabling it during device setup.) —CircleID

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Cybersecurity and VMworld

With memories of Black Hat still in my head, I’m back in Las Vegas for VMworld.  I’m sure there will be plenty of generic VMware and partner announcements but I’m here to assess how VMware is addressing enterprise security requirements with its technologies and partner relationships.  I will be focusing on a few key areas:1.      NSX penetration.  Last year, VMware talked a lot about emerging demand for NSX but I’ve seen a lot of momentum over the past 12 months.  From a security perspective, large organizations adopt NSX to do a better job of segmenting workloads and network traffic, as well as network security operations.  I’m interested to see how VMware security use cases are maturing and how VMware customers are moving toward building additional security controls and monitoring on top of NSX capabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybersecurity and VMworld

With memories of Black Hat still in my head, I’m back in Las Vegas for VMworld.  I’m sure there will be plenty of generic VMware and partner announcements but I’m here to assess how VMware is addressing enterprise security requirements with its technologies and partner relationships.  I will be focusing on a few key areas:1.      NSX penetration.  Last year, VMware talked a lot about emerging demand for NSX but I’ve seen a lot of momentum over the past 12 months.  From a security perspective, large organizations adopt NSX to do a better job of segmenting workloads and network traffic, as well as network security operations.  I’m interested to see how VMware security use cases are maturing and how VMware customers are moving toward building additional security controls and monitoring on top of NSX capabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s new Catapult v2 server design is targeted at AI

For years, Microsoft has been delivering speedy and accurate Bing results with experimental servers called Project Catapult, which have now received an architectural upgrade.The Catapult servers use reprogrammable chips called FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), which are central to delivering better Bing results. FPGAs can quickly score, filter, rank, and measure the relevancy of text and image queries on Bing.Microsoft has now redesigned the original Catapult server, which is used to investigate the role of FPGAs in speeding up servers. The proposed Catapult v2 design is more flexible in circumventing traditional data-center structures for machine learning and expands the role of FPGAs as accelerators.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware ‘Cloud Foundation’ integrates virtual compute, network and storage systems

At VMWorld this week the virtualization giant is announcing a new integrated system for building private clouds made up of the company’s virtualized compute, network and storage products packaged together with a new management software.VMware calls its new VMware Cloud Foundation product a hyperconverged infrastructure offering. It’s also meant to be the basis for VMware’s software defined data center (SDDC). Cloud Foundation will be available to run on customers’ premises or in the public cloud, making it the basis for a hybrid cloud too.Cloud Foundation is a packaging of the company’s traditional compute virtualization software vSphere with its NSX network virtualization product and its VSAN software-defined storage area network product. Cloud Foundation also includes a new software management product named SDDC Manager which controls the virtualized compute, network and storage resources. Combined, VMware envisions this system as the basis for building private clouds, running virtual desktops and hosting newly-built applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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

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