Cloud Builders: Building Networks for Third Era Cloud Environments

It’s no secret that network architecture is evolving to address the new needs and requirements of the Third Era of IT. This is happening for a reason. There is a trifecta of events affecting the industry: new requirements, new application architectures and new consumption models.

What all this reveals is that a new IT landscape has arrived – the Third Platform, where applications and service offerings define IT rather than the opposite.

The need of businesses to drive new application development, change, and deployment is changing the consumption models for IT so radically that for the first time the industry is prioritizing consumption of an entire service over individual infrastructure silos. It’s quickly becoming apparent that IT will increasingly be consumed as service offerings whether delivered through private or public cloud providers (SaaS, IaaS and PaaS).

The Changing Nature of the Private Cloud

Cloud enables rapid scaling; both up and down, of compute and storage capacity and facilitates agility for the introduction of new services and applications as well as resource alignment to the changing needs of the business. Public cloud has been the most prevalent adoption model to date, however we see a growing trend where organizations are Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Scientists developing solar panel that doubles as a Li-Fi receiver

Light-based data communications, or Li-Fi, which uses LEDs to create networked communications, can be integrated into a solar panel to create a self-powered Li-Fi receiver.The solar panel receives light from the LED to create power, and also receives light from the network to act as the broadband receiver, thereby powering itself, the technology's inventor says.Solar cells The currently prototyped solution allows "a solar cell to be tightly integrated into communication nodes, to then receive relatively high bandwidth data while also providing electrical power for the nodes' operation," the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Research and Innovation subsidiary says on its website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CloudFlare launches India data centers in Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi

India is home to 400 million Internet users, second only to China, and will add more new users this year than any other country in the world. CloudFlare protects and accelerates 4 million websites, mobile apps and APIs, and is trusted by over 10,000 new customers each day. Combine these forces, and we are positioned to connect hundreds of millions of Indian users with the millions of internet applications they use each day.

Today, we accelerate this momentum with the announcement of three new points of presence (PoPs) in Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi. These new sites represent the 66th, 67th and 68th data centers respectively across our global network.

We’ve come a long way

The beginnings of the “internet” in India as we know it started in 1986 when the country launched ERNET (the Education and Research Network). Six years later, a 64 Kbps digital leased line was commissioned from the National Centre for Software Technology in Mumbai to UUNet in Virginia to connect India with the rest of the internet. By comparison, a single port on our router in each of Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi has nearly 160,000 times the capacity today.

The pace of progress has Continue reading

Worth Reading: Net Neutrality

‘Neutrality’ has an evil twin, namely ‘discrimination’. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between the intentional and operational semantics of broadband. Neither concept is a term of the art of performance engineering or computer science. No packet networks have ever been ‘neutral’, and none ever will be. No scheduling algorithm is ‘(non-)discriminatory’. The assumed intentionality of random processes is false. The idea of ‘defending’ neutrality is thus a pure intellectual nonsense. via circleid

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How tech led to the death of France’s public enemy number 1

When one of the terrorists involved in the Paris shootings dropped his smartphone in a trashcan outside the Bataclan concert venue on Friday night, he wasn't worried about encrypting his text messages or stored documents. Why would he be? With a bomb strapped to his waist, he knew he was about to die.But that telephone, and wiretaps on another, led police to announce Thursday that the suspected organizer of the shootings and a string of other attacks, Abdel Hamid Abaaoud, was dead.The phone discarded by one of the terrorists contained an SMS sent to an unidentified recipient at 9.42 p.m. local time, moments before the shooting there began: "On est parti on commence" ("We're going in"), public prosecutor François Molins told a news conference Wednesday evening.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Message service blocks 78 ISIS-related encrypted channels

Encrypted messaging app maker Telegram blocked 78 ISIS-related propaganda channels in reaction to abuse reports sent by users, Telegram tweeted late Wednesday.The Berlin-based company said in a statement that it took the action because "we were disturbed to learn that Telegram's public channels were being used by ISIS to spread propaganda. We are carefully reviewing all reports sent to use at [email protected] and are taking appropriate action to block such channels."Telegram also said it will block terrorist bots and channels including those that are ISIS-related, but will not block anybody who peacefully expresses alternative opinions. Telegram announced on its second anniversary in August that it was delivering 10 billion messages daily.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Connecting the next billion users

Internet access is still a mirage to most in the developing world, let alone broadband. A lot of statistics are thrown around on the number of users with access to Internet. For Example Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) pegs the numbers at 14 million Internet subscribers and 22 million internet users against a population of 41 million. This translates to 34% internet subscribers and 54% internet users over an African average of 19% Internet users according to ITU. via circleid

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Cybersecurity Lessons Learned from the 9/11 Commission Report

Cybersecurity and IT professionals would be wise to review the findings of the 9/11 Commission report published in 2004. The report provides a comprehensive analysis of events surrounding the attacks and points to a number of systemic problems in several areas: Management. “The missed opportunities to thwart the 9/11 plot were symptoms of a broader inability to adapt the way government manages problems to the new challenges of the twenty-first century… Management should have ensured that information was shared and duties were clearly assigned across agencies, and across the foreign-domestic divide.” The chain of command. “At more senior levels, communication was poor. Senior military and FAA leaders had no effective communication with each other. The chain of command did not function well.” Emergency response. “Effective decision making in New York was hampered by problems in command and control and in internal communications. Within the Fire Department of New York, this was true for several reasons: the magnitude of the incident was unforeseen; commanders had difficulty communicating with their units; more units were actually dispatched than were ordered by the chiefs; some units self-dispatched; and once units arrived at the World Trade Center, they were neither comprehensively accounted for Continue reading

The story of one latency spike

A customer reported an unusual problem with our CloudFlare CDN: our servers were responding to some HTTP requests slowly. Extremely slowly. 30 seconds slowly. This happened very rarely and wasn't easily reproducible. To make things worse all our usual monitoring hadn't caught the problem. At the application layer everything was fine: our NGINX servers were not reporting any long running requests.

Time to send in The Wolf.

He solves problems.

Following the evidence

First, we attempted to reproduce what the customer reported—long HTTP responses. Here is a chart of of test HTTP requests time measured against our CDN:

We ran thousands of HTTP queries against one server over a couple of hours. Almost all the requests finished in milliseconds, but, as you can clearly, see 5 requests out of thousands took as long as 1000ms to finish. When debugging network problems the delays of 1s, 30s are very characteristic. They may indicate packet loss since the SYN packets are usually retransmitted at times 1s, 3s, 7s, 15, 31s.

Blame the network

At first we thought the spikes in HTTP load times might indicate some sort of network problem. To be sure we ran ICMP pings against two IPs over many Continue reading

Home IoT security could come from a glowing rock next year

An Internet of Things security startup thinks it can reduce the complexity of a home full of connected devices to three colors: red, orange, and green. Those colors will glow from a wireless orb that looks like a smooth river rock and is small enough to fit in your hand. But it's what is behind this friendly bit of decor that will make the colors meaningful. The San Francisco startup, Dojo-Labs, makes a network security device that plugs into your home Internet gateway and talks to a cloud-based service. It's all managed through a smartphone app.  Dojo aims for nothing less than protecting a consumer's entire collection of home IoT gear against cyber attacks. It plans to do that by monitoring all devices around the clock for odd behaviors and then either alerting the user and fixing the problem (orange light) or telling the user there's something they need to do (red light). When everything's fine, it will show a green light. The orb is wireless, battery-powered and controlled by Dojo's client device via Bluetooth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell-EMC deal will ‘set back innovation,’ says Sun co-founder Vinod Khosla

While he thinks Dell buying EMC makes sense financially, Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla has little faith in the merged company's ability to innovate."EMC and Dell merging is a really good financial move for Michael, but it will set back innovation and distract from innovation," said Khosla, now a prominent venture capitalist, in an onstage interview at the Structure conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.MORE: Hottest Black Friday Windows dealsAsked about the future for old-line technology companies like Cisco, IBM and Dell, Khosla was pessimistic. In his view, only about half of those tech titans will stick around in the future. What's more, he said, innovation from those companies has been seriously lacking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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