Up to 30% off Amazon Kindle and Fire Tablets – Deal Alert

Through May 7th, in honor of Mother's Day, Amazon has discounted various models of Kindle and Fire Tablets, some up to 30% off their regular list price. Use the links below to learn more and explore buying options. Save $30 on the Fire HD 6 Save $50 on the Fire HD 10 Save $50 on Fire HD 6 Kids Edition, 6" HD Display, Wi-Fi, 16 GB $20 Off Kindle Paperwhite -- Amazon's best-selling Kindle. $20 Off Kindle -- small, light, and perfect for reading. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell partners up to address the networking needs of the digital enterprise

Dell has made a tremendous amount of noise in the media over the past few months caused by the ripple effect of its acquisition of EMC. Whether one thinks the merger is a good idea or not, it’s a fact that the merger will have a significant impact on the storage and server industries.Today, Dell announced plans that will bolster its position in networking. The move to become a digital organization is a trend that’s now being felt across almost all companies in every vertical. The building blocks of digital are technologies such as cloud, mobile, big data and analytics. What do these have in common? They’re all network-centric, meaning the network plays a key role in the shift to a digital enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell partners up to address the networking needs of the digital enterprise

Dell has made a tremendous amount of noise in the media over the past few months caused by the ripple effect of its acquisition of EMC. Whether one thinks the merger is a good idea or not, it’s a fact that the merger will have a significant impact on the storage and server industries.Today, Dell announced plans that will bolster its position in networking. The move to become a digital organization is a trend that’s now being felt across almost all companies in every vertical. The building blocks of digital are technologies such as cloud, mobile, big data and analytics. What do these have in common? They’re all network-centric, meaning the network plays a key role in the shift to a digital enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Analytics of Everything

The ashes of network monitoring products from the last 30 years is a Sauron-sized mountain of tears on which we must build the a new generation of tools. Analytics, machine learning, big data and user interfaces are the new hope. Network as a Service A key feature in “as a Service” products is transparency & […]

The post Analytics of Everything appeared first on EtherealMind.

Microsoft outlines new features coming in Windows 10 Anniversary Update

Microsoft has posted what it calls “a major build” of Windows 10, with significant new features scheduled for the Anniversary Update due this summer. The news has been detailed by Gabe Aul, vice president of the engineering systems team in the Windows group.Microsoft posted Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14328 for both PC and Mobile to the Windows Insiders Fast ring, which gets more rapid updates than Insider, and thus isn’t for everyone. You’re getting builds hot off the compiler, so to speak, which means they are liable to be buggier. This is for true testers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Multi-tenant sFlow

This article discusses how real-time sFlow telemetry can be shared with network tenants to provide each tenant with a real-time view of their slice of the shared resources. The diagram shows a simple network with two tenants, Tenant A and Tenant B, each assigned their own subnet, 10.0.0.0/24 and 10.0.1.0/24 respectively.

One option would be to simply replicate the sFlow datagrams and send copies to both tenants. Forwarding using sflowtool describes how sflowtool can be used to replicate and forward sFlow and sFlow-RT can be configured to forward sFlow using its REST API:
curl -H "Content-Type:application/json" \
-X PUT --data '{"address":"10.0.0.1","port":6343}' \
http://127.0.0.1:8008/forwarding/TenantA/json
However, there are serious problems with this approach:
  1. Private information about Tenant B's traffic is leaked to Tenant A.
  2. Information from internal links within the network (i.e. links between s1, s2, s3 and s4) is leaked to Tenant A.
  3. Duplicate data from each network hop is likely to cause Tenant A to over-estimate their traffic.
The sFlow-RT multi-tenant forwarding function addresses these challenges. The first task is to provide sFlow-RT with an accurate network topology specifying the internal links connecting the Continue reading

Skype for Business finally makes its way to the Mac

Microsoft's new business communication product is finally coming to the Mac after the company launched it for PC users last year.The company announced the first technical preview of Skype for Business for Mac on Tuesday morning, giving users of Apple computers an easy way to connect to meetings they have scheduled through Microsoft's professional audio and videoconferencing software. When users sign into the app, they'll see their Skype for Business meetings for the current day and the following one, and be able to easily join them to discuss whatever business things they want to with the other people invited.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Financial analysts forecast first-ever year-over-year decline in iPhone sales

Later today, Apple will announce downbeat results from the first quarter of 2016, nearly three dozen financial analysts bet today.According to Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who formerly blogged about Apple for Fortune but left the magazine earlier this month to kick off his own Apple 3.0 subscription-based site, all 11 independent and 19 institutional analysts pegged rare year-over-year declines in Apple's revenue and a fall in unit sales of its iPhone and iPad lines. Most of the 30 analysts also bet that Mac sales would also slip from the same quarter of 2015.Elmer-DeWitt has been collecting and averaging financial analysts' forecasts for years, and continued the chore on his new site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Android Wear smartwatches get fashion boost

Emphasizing fashion over functionality, Google today announced the MODE interchangeable and colorful, silicon and leather smartwatch straps—a sign that Android Wear smartwatch growth will come from making Android Wear more fashionable.Early Android Wear smartwatches, circa 2014, such as the Samsung Gear Live and the LG G Watch stressed functionality over style and form. These were prototypes to seed developers with a software platform they could use to begin to build apps and were for enthusiasts to begin to use and understand the smartwatch category.Many consumers, however, complained Android Wear watches didn’t match their expectations of what watches should look like. After all, a watch is a fashion statement first, a time piece second and app platform third. And so Android Wear watches began to subtly change, with Motorola’s Moto 360 winning praise for its round design over the Apple Watch and the round Huawei watch acting as Google’s de facto Nexus smartwatch.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

More protection needed to guard grid from electromagnetic storm threat

The United States isn’t as deeply unprepared for electromagnetic threats – either from space or man-made -- as it was a few years ago but a lot of work remains and awareness of the danger needs to be amped-up if the country wants to truly protect the electric grid.That was the general conclusion from a report by the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this that looked at federal efforts to address electromagnetic risks to the electric grid.+More on Network World: Threat or menace?: Gaging electromagnetic risks to the electric grid+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

More protection needed to guard grid from electromagnetic storm threat

The United States isn’t as deeply unprepared for electromagnetic threats – either from space or man-made -- as it was a few years ago but a lot of work remains and awareness of the danger needs to be amped-up if the country wants to truly protect the electric grid.That was the general conclusion from a report by the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this that looked at federal efforts to address electromagnetic risks to the electric grid.+More on Network World: Threat or menace?: Gaging electromagnetic risks to the electric grid+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

More protection needed to guard grid from electromagnetic storm threat

The United States isn’t as deeply unprepared for electromagnetic threats – either from space or man-made -- as it was a few years ago but a lot of work remains and awareness of the danger needs to be amped-up if the country wants to truly protect the electric grid.That was the general conclusion from a report by the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this that looked at federal efforts to address electromagnetic risks to the electric grid.+More on Network World: Threat or menace?: Gaging electromagnetic risks to the electric grid+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flooding Domains versus Areas

At a fundamental level, OSPF and IS-IS are similar in operation. They both build neighbor adjacencies. They both use Dijkstra’s shortest path first (SPF) to find the shortest path to every destination in the network. They both advertise the state of each link connected to a network device. There are some differences, of course, such as the naming (OSI addresses versus IP addresses, intermediate systems versus routers). Many of the similarities and differences don’t play too much in the design of a network, though.

One difference that does play into network design, however, is the way in which the two protocols break up a single failure domain into multiple failure domains. In OSPF we have areas, while in IS-IS we have flooding domains. What’s the difference between these two, and how does it effect network design? Let’s use the illustration below as a helpful reference point for the two different solutions.

flooding-domains-02

In the upper network, we have an illustration of how OSPF areas work. Each router at the border of a flooding domain (an Area Border Router, or ABR), has a certain number of interfaces in each area. Another way of saying this is that an OSPF ABR is Continue reading

Flooding Domains versus Areas

At a fundamental level, SPF and IS-IS are similar in operation. They both build neighbor adjacencies. They both use Dijkstra’s shortest path first (SPF) to find the shortest path to every destination in the network. They both advertise the state of each link connected to a network device. There are some differences, of course, such as the naming (OSI addresses versus IP addresses, intermediate systems versus routers). Many of the similarities and differences don’t play too much in the design of a network, though.

One difference that does play into network design, however, is the way in which the two protocols break up a single failure domain into multiple failure domains. In OSPF we have areas, while in IS-IS we have flooding domains. What’s the difference between these two, and how does it effect network design? Let’s use the illustration below as a helpful reference point for the two different solutions.

flooding-domains-02

In the upper network, we have an illustration of how OSPF areas work. Each router at the border of a flooding domain (an Area Border Router, or ABR), has a certain number of interfaces in each area. Another way of saying this is that an OSPF ABR is Continue reading

Kiev, Ukraine: CloudFlare’s 78th Data Center

alt

Здоровенькі були! CloudFlare just turned up our newest datacenter in Kiev, the capital and largest city of Ukraine.

Kiev is an old city with more than 1,000 years of history. It was the capital of Kievan Rus’, an ancient country which is considered to be the ancestor of modern Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. If you visit the city by plane, you may be almost blinded by the shining golden domes of numerous old churches and cathedrals - and once there, be sure to try the famous Ukrainian beet soup, “Borscht”. CloudFlare decided to contribute to the long history of Kiev with our 22nd data center in Europe, and our 78th data center globally.

Localizing content

alt
Frankfurt is arguably the biggest point of interconnection in the world, and is home to Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange (DE-CIX) which plays an absolutely critical role and sees close to 5Tbps in traffic. While this is great if you live near Frankfurt, it is also where most traffic is exchanged for other parts of Germany, large parts of Europe (think Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Montenegro, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine, etc.), and even countries such Continue reading