Free Book: Practical Scalablility Analysis with the Universal Scalability Law

If you are very comfortable with math and modeling Dr. Neil Gunther's Universal Scalability Law is a powerful way of predicting system performance and whittling down those bottlenecks. If not, the USL can be hard to wrap your head around.

There's a free eBook for that. Performance and scalability expert Baron Schwartz, founder of VividCortex, has written a wonderful exploration of scalability truths using the USL as a lens: Practical Scalablility Analysis with the Universal Scalability Law. 

As a sample of what you'll learn, here are some of the key takeaways from the book:

  • Scalability is a formal concept that is best defined as a mathematical function.
  • Linear scalability means equal return on investment. Double down on workers and you’ll get twice as much work done; add twice as many nodes and you’ll increase the maximum capacity twofold. Linear scalability is oft claimed but seldom delivered.
  • Systems scale sublinearly because of contention, which adds queueing delay, and crosstalk, which inflates service times. The penalty for contention grows linearly and the crosstalk penalty grows quadratically. (An alternative to the crosstalk theory is that longer queues are more costly to manage.)
  • Contention causes throughput to asymptotically approach the reciprocal of Continue reading

The Next Horizon for Cloud Networking & Security

VMware NSX has been around for more than two years now, and in that time software-defined networking and network virtualization have become VMware Networking Expert Guido Appenzellerinextricably integrated into modern data center architecture. It seems like an inconceivable amount of progress has been made. But the reality is that we’re only at the beginning of this journey.

The transformation of networking from a hardware industry into a software industry is having a profound impact on services, security, and IT organizations around the world, according to VMware’s Chief Technology Strategy Officer for Networking, Guido Appenzeller.

“I’ve never seen growth like what we’ve found with NSX,” he says. “Networking is going through a huge transition.” Continue reading

Arista steps outside the data center with Cloud Connect solution

The rise of virtualization has had a profound impact on the technology industry. In the networking industry, perhaps no vendor has ridden the wave of cloud more than Arista Networks. The company was founded a little over a decade ago, and today it is a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of over $4.6 billion. However, almost all of Arista's revenues today come from selling products inside the data center. The company was one of the most aggressive vendors in pushing the concept of a spine/leaf architecture as a replacement for a traditional multi-tier network. This week, Arista announced its first solution that is outside the data center. The Arista Cloud Connect solution connects public and private cloud data centers. Moving into the data center interconnect market is a logical extension for Arista and highlights just how far merchant silicon has come over the past decade.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to use SANless clusters to protect SQL in the cloud

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

While cloud computing has proven to be beneficial for many organizations, IT departments have been slow to trust the cloud for business-critical Microsoft SQL Server workloads. One of their primary concerns is the availability of their SQL Server, because traditional shared-storage, high-availability clustering configurations are not practical or affordable in the cloud.

Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure both offer service level agreements that guarantee 99.95% uptime (fewer than 4.38 hours of downtime per year) of IaaS servers. Both SLAs require deployment in two or more AWS Availability Zones or Azure Fault Domains respectively. Availability Zones and Fault Domains enable the ability to run instances in locations that are physically independent of each other with separate compute, network, storage or power source for full redundancy. AWS has two or three Availability Zones per region, and Azure offers up to 3 Fault Domains per “Availability Set.”

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Adobe patches flaws in ColdFusion, LiveCycle Data Services and Premiere Clip

Adobe has released security updates for its ColdFusion application server, LiveCycle Data Services framework and Premiere Clip iOS app. The company published hotfixes for ColdFusion versions 11 and 10, namely ColdFusion 11 Update 7 and ColdFusion 10 Update 18. Both updates address two input validation issues that could be exploited to execute cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. In addition, the hotfixes include an updated version of BlazeDS, a Java messaging protocol for rich Internet applications, that resolves an important server-side request- forgery vulnerability.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Stack Full Of It

pancakestack

During the recent Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Meeting, there was a lot of discussion around the idea of a Full Stack Engineer. The idea of full stack professionals has been around for a few years now. Seeing this label applied to networking and network professionals seems only natural. But it’s a step in the wrong direction.

Short Stack

Full stack means having knowledge of the many different pieces of a given area. Full stack programmers know all about development, project management, databases, and other aspects of their environment. Likewise, full stack engineers are expected to know about the network, the servers attached to it, and the applications running on top of those servers.

Full stack is a great way to illustrate how specialized things are becoming in the industry. For years we’ve talked about how hard networking can be and how we need to make certain aspects of it easier for beginners to understand. QoS, routing protocols, and even configuration management are critical items that need to be decoded for anyone in the networking team to have a chance of success. But networking isn’t the only area where that complexity resides.

Server teams have their own jargon. Their language Continue reading

Initial Thoughts: BroadView

On a technical level, BroadView is a collection of open-source software, plugins to multiple ecosystem projects (such as OpenDaylight and OpenStack), and documentation. It offers programmable access to the internal workings of switching architecture for enhanced network control tasks such as monitoring, congestion control and advanced troubleshooting. via broadcom

What’s interesting about this “product,” produced by Broadcom, is they are open source. We tend to think software will eat the world, but when something like this comes out in the open source space, it makes me think that if software eats the world, profit is going to take a long nosedive into nothingness. From Broadcom’s perspective this makes sense, of course; any box you buy that has a Broadcom chipset, no matter who wrapped the sheet metal around the chipset, will have some new added capability in terms of understanding the traffic flow through the network. Does this sort of thing take something essential away from the vendors who are building their products based on Broadcom, however? It seems the possibility is definitely there, but it’s going to take a lot deeper dive than what’s provided in the post above to really understand. If these interfaces are exposed simply through Continue reading

How a telecom investment in North Korea went horribly wrong

An Egyptian company that launched North Korea's first 3G cellular network and attracted as many as 3 million subscribers has revealed that it lost control of the operator despite owning a majority stake.The plight of Orascom Telecom and Media Technology in North Korea takes place against a backdrop of rapid telecom modernization and a public eager to adopt a new technology. It's ultimately a lesson in the perils of getting into bed with a government that's not known for respecting international law.When Orascom announced plans to launch the 3G service in 2008 it met with skepticism. The North Korean government severely limits its citizens' ability to communicate and has jailed or killed anyone who speaks out against the regime. The regime has regularly threatened war against its foes and was under sanctions at the time for a 2006 nuclear test.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Extreme tech positions of the presidential candidates

This is an election where extreme positions have become the norm, and the implications for science and technology may be huge.In some cases, the Republican and Democratic candidates have stated positions with clarity. But many of ideas are still vague, roughly sketched out and incomplete.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Techies back Democrats in Presidential race +These emerging proposals, the ones with the most impact on technology, deserve attention. The surviving candidates are certain to refine them in the months ahead. But here's a look at some tech implications of the 2016 contest.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Spearphishing Attacks Against Hostmonster Customers

I tend to see a lot of phishing emails. The message I received this morning caught my eye. It was fairly well crafted and obviously targeted. After searching the Internet, I found that some GoDaddy customers have received something similar. This seems to be making its way around the internet to website administrators. The most curious thing to me is how someone associated the email address with a Hostmonster account.

Phishing Email Message

Screen Shot 2015-11-18 at 6.58.02 AM

As can be seen above, the message read–

Your account contains more than 4035 directories and may pose a potential performance risk to the server. Please reduce the number of directories for your account to prevent possible account deactivation.

In order to prevent your account from being locked out we recommend that you create special temp directory.

The link goes to kct67<dot>ru.

Message headers also suggest a Russian origin–

Received: by 10.140.27.139 with SMTP id 11csp1084546qgx;
        Tue, 17 Nov 2015 20:25:39 -0800 (PST)
X-Received: by 10.25.161.211 with SMTP id k202mr1408853lfe.161.1447820739327;
        Tue, 17 Nov 2015 20:25:39 -0800 (PST)
Return-Path: <[email protected]>
Received: from bmx1.z8.ru (bmx1.z8.ru. [80.93.62.39])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTPS  Continue reading

Carrier Grade NAT and the DoS Consequences

Republished from Corero DDoS Blog:

The Internet has a very long history of utilizing mechanisms that may breathe new life into older technologies, stretching it out so that newer technologies may be delayed or obviated altogether. IPv4 addressing, and the well known depletion associated with it, is one such area that has seen a plethora of mechanisms employed in order to give it more shelf life.

In the early 90s, the IETF gave us Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR), which dramatically slowed the growth of global Internet routing tables and delayed the inevitable IPv4 address depletion. Later came DHCP, another protocol which assisted via the use of short term allocation of addresses which would be given back to the provider's pool after use. In 1996, the IETF was back at it again, creating RFC 1918 private addressing, so that networks could utilize private addresses that didn't come from the global pool. Utilizing private address space gave network operators a much larger pool to use internally than would otherwise have been available if utilizing globally assigned address space -- but if they wanted to connect to the global Internet, they needed something to translate those addresses. This is what necessitated the development of Network Address Translation (NAT).

NAT Continue reading

SentinelOne adds feature to restore files hit by ransomware

SentinelOne has added a feature to its endpoint detection products that can restore files encrypted by cybercriminals, a common type of attack known as ransomware. The "rollback" feature will be available in the 1.6 versions of its Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) and the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) products at no charge, said Dal Gemmell, director of product management. SentinelOne is among several vendors that are trying to displace traditional antivirus vendors with products that detect malware using deep analysis rather than signature-based detection. The company's products use a lightweight agent on endpoints such as laptops and desktops, which looks at the core of the operating system -- the kernel -- as well the the user space, trying to spot changes that might be linked to malware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In wake of Paris attacks, legislation aims to extend NSA program

A U.S. senator plans to introduce legislation that would delay the end of the bulk collection of phone metadata by the National Security Agency to Jan. 31, 2017, in the wake of security concerns after the terror attacks last Friday in Paris.Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, believes that the termination of the program, scheduled for month-end under the USA Freedom Act,  "takes us from a constitutional, legal, and proven NSA collection architecture to an untested, hypothetical one that will be less effective."The transition will happen in less than two weeks, at a time when the threat level for the U.S. is "incredibly high," he said Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Cisco is trying to keep NSA spies out of its gear

Cisco is working to build the confidence of prospective customers in its products, two years after disclosures of spying by the U.S. National Security Agency seeded doubt, particularly in China. It is increasingly putting more stringent security requirements on its suppliers and has launched a beta program that allows customers to analyze its products in a highly secure environment before buying. The efforts are intended to introduce more transparency to allay growing concerns over how supply chains could be opportunistically used by spies and cybercriminals. "I worry about manipulation, espionage and disruption," said Edna Conway, chief security officer of Cisco's global value chain, in a recent interview. "We worry about tainted solutions, counterfeit solutions and the misuse of intellectual property."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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