32 – VXLAN Multipod stretched across geographically dispersed datacenters

This article focuses on the single stretched Fabric across multiple locations as mentioned in the previous post (31) through the 1st option.

I have been working with my friends Patrice and Max for several months building a efficient and resilient solution to stretched a VXLAN Multipod fabric across two sites. The whole technical white paper is now available and can be accessible here:

One of the key use-case for that scenario is for an enterprise to select VXLAN EVPN as the technology of choice for building multiple greenfield data center pods. It becomes therefore logical to extend VXLAN between distant PoD’s that are managed and operated as a single administrative domain. This choice makes sense as a multipod fabric functionally and operationally is a single logical VXLAN fabric, and its deployment is a continuation of the work performed to roll out the pod, simplifying the provisioning of end-to-end Layer 2 and Layer 3 connectivity.

Technically speaking and thanks to the flexibility of VXLAN, we could deploy the overlay network on top of any Layer 3 architecture within a datacenter.

  • [Q] However, can we afford to stretch the VXLAN fabric as a single fabric without taking into consideration the risks of loosing the whole resources Continue reading

New peripherals are bringing Windows Hello to any Windows 10 PC

Japan's Mouse Computer has developed add-on biometric sensors that will bring Windows Hello to any PC running Windows 10. Windows Hello is Microsoft's biometric security system. It allows users to dump passwords for facial or fingerprint recognition, but only on PCs that have the correct hardware. Many new PCs do, but generations of older machines that can run Windows 10 don't have the infrared camera or fingerprint sensors that are required. That's where the new add-on peripherals come in. There's a USB camera unit and a tiny USB fingerprint reader. Both will bring Windows Hello to Windows 10 PCs, said Microsoft this week at the Computex trade show in Taipei.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New peripherals are bringing Windows Hello to any Windows 10 PC

Japan's Mouse Computer has developed add-on biometric sensors that will bring Windows Hello to any PC running Windows 10. Windows Hello is Microsoft's biometric security system. It allows users to dump passwords for facial or fingerprint recognition, but only on PCs that have the correct hardware. Many new PCs do, but generations of older machines that can run Windows 10 don't have the infrared camera or fingerprint sensors that are required. That's where the new add-on peripherals come in. There's a USB camera unit and a tiny USB fingerprint reader. Both will bring Windows Hello to Windows 10 PCs, said Microsoft this week at the Computex trade show in Taipei.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Drumpf: this is not how German works

In our willingness to believe any evil of Trump, some have claimed his original name was "Drumpf". This isn't true, this isn't how the German language works. Trump has the power to short-circuit critical thinking in both his supporters and his enemies. The "Drumpf" meme is just one example.

There was no official pronunciation or spelling of German words/names until after Trump's grandfather was born. As this The Guardian article describes, in the city ("Kallstadt") where Trump's grandfather was born, you'll see many different spellings of the family name in the church's records. like "Drumb, Tromb, Tromp, Trum, Trumpff, Dromb" and Trump. A person might spell their name different ways on different documents, and the names of children might be spelled different than their parent's. It makes German genealogy tough sometimes.

During that time, different areas of German had different dialects that were as far apart as Dutch and German are today. Indeed, these dialects persist. Germans who grow up outside of cities often learn their own local dialect and standard German as two different languages. Everyone understands standard German, but many villagers cannot speak it. They often live their entire lives within a hundred kilometers of where they grew Continue reading

Server market slumps after seven quarters of growth

The worldwide server market saw a year-on-year revenue slump of 3.6 percent in the first quarter to US$12.4 billion, after a winning streak of seven quarters of growth, IDC said Wednesday.The slowdown in the market, which also witnessed shipments of servers drop by 3 percent year-on-year to 2.2 million units, is largely put down to an end in the enterprise refresh cycle and what is described as a “pause” in investments in hyperscale server deployments.Those investments are expected to be back in the second half of this year with a pick up in expenditure on servers for existing data centers and the roll out of new ones.The slowdown in the server market in the first quarter has not affected key players uniformly. Hewlett Packard Enterprise retained its top position, with revenue of $3.3 billion and a 26.7 percent share of market revenue, after a year on-year growth of 3.5 percent. Dell and IBM retained their number two and three spots respectively, but with year-on-year decline in revenue.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Check out these crazy modded gaming rigs Corsair brought to Computex

Check out the crazy modded gaming rigs Corsair brought to ComputexImage by James NiccolaiWe stopped by Corsair’s suite at the Computex trade show this week to check out the gaming PCs built to show off its latest components. Pick a CPU, graphics card and motherboard, and Corsair has everything else you need to build out a custom, high performance rig. This system uses the Mirror's Edge Catalyst chassis, modelled after the game of the same name. Someone bolted an LED panel to the side just for the hell of it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle employee says she was sacked for refusing to fiddle cloud accounts

A senior finance manager in Oracle’s cloud business has complained to a federal court that she was terminated from her job because she refused to go along with, and threatened to blow the whistle on accounting principles that she considered to be unlawful.In a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Svetlana Blackburn has stated that her superiors instructed her “to add millions of dollars in accruals to financial reports, with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers, an act that Plaintiff warned was improper and suspect accounting.” The former employee is said to have warned her supervisor that she would blow the whistle if ordered to proceed further in the same manner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle employee says she was sacked for refusing to fiddle cloud accounts

A senior finance manager in Oracle’s cloud business has complained to a federal court that she was terminated from her job because she refused to go along with accounting principles she considered unlawful.In a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Svetlana Blackburn says her superiors instructed her “to add millions of dollars in accruals to financial reports, with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers, an act that Plaintiff warned was improper and suspect accounting.” The former employee is said to have warned her supervisor she would blow the whistle if ordered to continue in the same manner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS Brings Supercomputing Set Further into Fold

Back in 2009, when yours truly was assigned the primary beat of covering supercomputing on remote hardware (then dubbed the mysterious “cloud”), the possibility that cloud-based high performance computing was little more than a pipe dream.

At that time, most scientific and technical computing communities had already developed extensive grids to extend their research beyond physical borders, and the idea of introducing new levels of latency, software, and management interfaces did not appear to be anything most HPC centers were looking forward to—even with the promise of cost-savings (as easy “bursting” was still some time off).

Just as Amazon Web …

AWS Brings Supercomputing Set Further into Fold was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

25% off Logitech Wireless Keyboard with Touchpad for Internet-Connected TVs – Deal Alert

Logitech's K400 Wireless Keyboard for internet-enabled TVs is designed to be compact, comfortable, quiet, and easy to use from the comfort of your couch. It features a familiar key layout and a large 3.5-inch touchpad. A 33-foot range makes for a trouble free connection even in large rooms, and its battery is strong, lasting up to a year and a half without needing a charge, even with 2 hours of typing per day. The keyboard averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 860 customers (read reviews). It's regular list price of $39.99 has been reduced by 25% to just $29.99. See the discounted K400 wireless keyboard now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The PC upgrade cycle slows to every five to six years, Intel’s CEO says

The upgrade cycle for PCs has slowed down drastically, now extending to nearly six years, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said on Wednesday."[The] replacement cycle for the PC has extended," Krzanich said. "Four years was the average, now it has moved to about five to six years."Intel needs to ramp up its efforts and release the right innovations so people are motivated to upgrade PCs quickly and easily, Krzanich said at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York."Right now, it's easier to move your phone to a new phone than your PC to a new PC," he said. "We've got to go fix some of those things."PC upgrades have slowed because current operating systems can run well on older Intel-based PCs. Five years ago, Intel shipped Core processors code-named Sandy Bridge, and they can capably run Microsoft's Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Understanding Deep Text, Facebook’s text understanding engine

“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.”That Groucho Marx quote illustrates why it’s difficult for computers to understand humans. When programming for computers to understand humans, one must account for vagueness, ambiguity and uncertainty to distil the meaning of human language.Facebook announced today that it can now do that with Deep Text, a deep learning-based text-understanding engine running a neural network that can understand with near-human accuracy the textual content of several thousands of posts per second—and in more than 20 languages.Consumers interacting with computers Consumers regularly interact with computers trained with machine-learning techniques that understand human language. Ask Siri for the best Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, and Siri will give you a list of restaurants. Or ask Google how many people live in Lisle, Illinois, and Google will reply with the answer from the U.S. census. These intelligent systems parse the question like school children, using syntax to diagram a sentence and then answer the question with structured data sets: the list of restaurants labeled San Francisco and Japanese or the quantity of people labeled Lisle, IL, in the census database.To Continue reading

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