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To Compress or Not to Compress, that was Uber’s Question

Uber faced a challenge. They store a lot of trip data. A trip is represented as a 20K blob of JSON. It doesn't sound like much, but at Uber's growth rate saving several KB per trip across hundreds of millions of trips per year would save a lot of space. Even Uber cares about being efficient with disk space, as long as performance doesn't suffer.

This highlights a key difference between linear and hypergrowth. Growing linearly means the storage needs would remain manageable. At hypergrowth Uber calculated when storing raw JSON, 32 TB of storage would last than than 3 years for 1 million trips, less than 1 year for 3 million trips, and less 4 months for 10 million trips.

Uber went about solving their problem in a very measured and methodical fashion: they tested the hell out of it. The goal of all their benchmarking was to find a solution that both yielded a small size and a short time to encode and decode.

The whole experience is described in loving detail in the article: How Uber Engineering Evaluated JSON Encoding and Compression Algorithms to Put the Squeeze on Trip Data. They came up with a matrix of Continue reading

Network Break 79: HPE Hyperconverges; Dropbox Drops AWS

Network Break serves up a bubbling cauldron of tech news, including a new hyperconverged platform from HPE, and big-name defectors from AWS such as Dropbox and Apple. There's also product and licensing news from Cisco, chip stories from Cavium and Broadcom, laurels for Huawei in an SDN competition, and more.

The post Network Break 79: HPE Hyperconverges; Dropbox Drops AWS appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Network Break 79: HPE Hyperconverges; Dropbox Drops AWS

The post Network Break 79: HPE Hyperconverges; Dropbox Drops AWS appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Worth Reading: Improving Communication

You’d think that after all these years of technology being a driving force behind business growth, there’d be similarly strong communication links between IT and business leaders. Alas, it’s still the case that those kinds of close relationships remain the exception rather than the rule. Let’s face it, even IT executives and the engineers or analysts who report to them sometimes seem to be speaking different languages. -via Netcraftsmen

The post Worth Reading: Improving Communication appeared first on 'net work.

27% of US office workers would sell their passwords

In a survey released today, 27 percent of of U.S. office workers at large companies would sell their work password to an outsider, compared to a global average of 20 percent.And despite all the recent media attention on data breaches, password hygiene is actually deteriorating, said Juliette Rizkallah, CMO at SailPoint Technologies, which sponsored the survey.The study itself was conducted by Vanson Bourne, an independent research firm. The same survey was conducted last year as well, but then only one in seven employees were willing to sell their passwords.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Network Disaggregation Isn’t For The Enterprise

Despite all the hype, disaggregation doesn’t make sense for most enterprise networks.

How Hard Is It to Think about Failures?

Mr. A. Anonymous, frequent contributor to my blog posts left this ~~bit of wisdom~~ comment on the VMware NSX Update blog post:

I don't understand the statement that "whole NSX domain remains a single failure domain" because the 3 NSX controllers are deployed in the site with primary NSX manager.

I admit I was a bit imprecise (wasn’t the first time), but is it really that hard to ask oneself “what happens if the DCI link fails?”

Multi-Cloud Is Going Mainstream

Using multiple cloud providers can reduce cost and risk for an enterprise.

New products of the week 3.21.16

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.Appthority Android AppKey features: Provides customers with comprehensive on-device monitoring and protection for employees and enterprises with the ability to know an app’s risk and compliance status before it ever gets installed on their device. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 3.21.16

5 reasons to move to an SD-WAN

The enterprise WAN has transitioned from dedicated TDM circuits with Frame Relay and ATM, to Packet-over-SONET and MPLS, and now to Ethernet-access services. However, two things have remained constant, WAN bandwidth is still expensive and provisioning WAN services can take a long time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Big Data vs. SDN

During one Software Defined Networking (SDN) workshop I hosted in Jakarta early this year, my friend was presenting a session with thought provoking title: Big Data vs. SDN. He is the CEO of a Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and Data Analytic company that relies on Big Data technologies, so I can understand why he brought up such topic. But just like the new movie Batman vs. Superman that will be released this week, should the two heroes are fighting each other? Should the two are competing between each other? Big Data and SDN obviously solve different problems. And the way I look at it, they are actually closer to work together to deliver platform to help business with CAPEX reduction, OPEX reduction and agility in delivering new services.

The most natural approach to define Big Data is with the bigness. However according to Gartner, Big Data is defined as “high volume, high velocity and/or high variety information assets” that can be used to improve decision making and provide better insights.The majority of raw data, particularly Big Data, does not offer a lot of value in its unprocessed state. Big Data Analytic is the process of examining Big Data to Continue reading

Researchers find flaw in Apple’s iMessage, decrypt iCloud photo

Apple's iMessage system has a cryptography flaw that allowed researchers to decrypt a photo stored in iCloud, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.The researchers, led by cryptography expert Matthew D. Green of Johns Hopkins University, wrote software that mimicked an Apple server and then targeted an encrypted photo stored on iCloud, the publication reported.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Vagrant, Ubuntu “Wily Werewolf,” and Networking

In what has been a fairly classic “yak shaving” exercise, I’ve been working on getting Ubuntu 15.10 “Wily Werewolf” running with Vagrant so that I can perform some testing with some other technologies that need a Linux kernel version of at least 4.2 (which comes with Ubuntu 15.10 by default). Along the way, I ran smack into a problem with Ubuntu 15.10’s networking configuration when used with Vagrant, and in this post I’m going to explain what’s happening here and provide a workaround.

The issue (described here on GitHub, among other places) involves a couple of changes in Ubuntu Linux (and upstream Debian GNU/Linux as well, although I haven’t personally tested it). One of the changes is in regards to how network interfaces are named; instead of the “old” eth0 or eth1 naming convention, Ubuntu 15.10 now uses persistent interface names like ens32 or ens33. Additionally, an update to the “ifupdown” package now returns an error where an error apparently wasn’t returned before.

The end result is that when you try to create a Vagrant VM with multiple network interfaces, it fails. Using a single network interface is fine; the issue only rears its Continue reading

Why we are upset with the NYTimes Paris terrorist article

On the Twitters, we've been mocking that NYTimes article on the Paris terrorists and how they used "encryption". I thought I'd write up a brief note as to why.

It's a typical example of yellow journalism. The public isn't familiar with "encryption", so it's easy to sensationalize it, to make it seem like something sinister is going on.

At one point, the article says:

According to the police report and interviews with officials, none of the attackers’ emails or other electronic communications have been found, prompting the authorities to conclude that the group used encryption. What kind of encryption remains unknown, and is among the details that Mr. Abdeslam’s capture could help reveal.

That's not how encryption works. Instead, if "encryption" were the one thing the terrorists were using to hide, then you'd certainly find encrypted emails and encrypted messages -- ones you couldn't read without knowing the key.

The lack of emails/messages instead hints that the terrorists were meeting in person, passing paper notes to each other, or using telepathy. All of these, even telepathy, are more likely explanation for the lack of evidence than "encryption".

This article cites anonymous "authorities" here as concluding encryption was used. The New Continue reading

OSM Comes to NFV MANO With Code in Hand

It's all about making VNFs easier to build, OSM members say.

Government sets new FOIA failure record: Can find NO files for 1 in 6 FOIA requests

Sunshine Week 2016 may be over, but the public’s right to access public government information in order to make the government accountable never ends.Before Barack Obama was president, he repeatedly promised many things that never came to fruition such as to provide the “most transparent” administration in history. But the truth is that the Obama administration has set an all-time new record for failure to provide documents via FOIA requests. The Associated Press analyzed FOIA requests sent to 100 federal government agencies in 2015 – the final figures to be released during Obama’s administration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Redefining the WAN

One of the more interesting recent trends in the network space has been around software defined WAN (SDWAN). While I’ll admit I first didn’t give it much attention, I’ve since given it a harder look and see quite a bit of promise in the technology. The WAN is a part of the network that, until recently, hasn’t received much attention particularly as it relates to SDN. SDN in the enterprise space seems mostly focused on the data center since that’s where the network always seems to be the most complicated. The unfortunate outcome of that mindset is that while we focus on the data center network, technologies like SDWAN appear and don’t always get the attention they deserve. I think the primary reason for this is that many of us have WANs that we think are ‘working just fine’. And while that may be the case, I think SDWAN has the potential to significantly reduce costs, improve WAN performance, and increase network agility.

One of the vendors in this market that I’ve recently had the chance to hear about is Silver Peak. Silver Peak has been around for quite some time and is Continue reading

Edward Snowden: Privacy can’t depend on corporations standing up to the government

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden opened the Free Software Foundation's LibrePlanet 2016 conference on Saturday with a discussion of free software, privacy and security, speaking via video conference from Russia.Snowden credited free software for his ability to help disclose the U.S. government's far-reaching surveillance projects – drawing one of several enthusiastic rounds of applause from the crowd in an MIT lecture hall.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Pwn2Own contest highlights renewed hacker focus on kernel issues + Apple engineers could walk away from FBI’s iPhone demandsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Edward Snowden: Privacy can’t depend on corporations standing up to the government

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