Cisco, Chambers looking for one last shot at VMware?

Reports surfaced last week that Cisco may be close to buying hyperconvergence start-up Nutanix.The speculation is based on an article in Storage Newsletter by Jared Rinderer, an analyst at Equity Capital Research Group. In it, Rinderer says outgoing Cisco CEO John Chambers is looking to leave with a bang – one last big acquisition to stick it to partners-turned rivals EMC and VMware.Nutanix makes integrated compute/storage, networking, virtualization and management products for the data center that run on x86 hardware. The privately held company is recognized as the leader in the hyperconverged infrastructure market, which was recently entered by VMware with its EVO:RAIL product.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS upgrades highlight growing focus on cloud management

Amazon Web Services is hoping better management tools will convince enterprises to move more applications to the cloud, but getting their internal management processes right is even more important than anything the vendor can offer.On Monday, Amazon updated its OpsWorks management platform to work with Windows Server, and published a new API that lets IT staff start thousands of so-called spot instances with one request.Step by step, cloud providers like Amazon are adding new features to make the IT management capabilities they offer to their customers more efficient and all-encompassing. As enterprises move more and larger IT systems to the cloud, advanced management functionality is becoming increasingly important.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

URL-spoofing bug in Safari could enable phishing attacks

The latest versions of Safari for Mac OS X and iOS are vulnerable to a URL-spoofing exploit that could allow hackers to launch credible phishing attacks.The issue was discovered by security researcher David Leo, who published a proof-of-concept exploit for it. Leo’s demonstration consists of a Web page hosted on his domain that, when opened in Safari, causes the browser to display dailymail.co.uk in the address bar.The ability to control the URL shown by the browser can, for example, be used to easily convince users that they are on a bank’s website when they are actually on a phishing page designed to steal their financial information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, May 19

Obama finally claims his Twitter accountU.S. President Barack Obama is on Twitter for real. The @POTUS account is verified, and unlike @BarackObama which is mostly run by staffers, it will feature tweets by the man himself. The first tweet on the account, sent Monday morning, reads “Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack. Really! Six years in, they’re finally giving me my own account.” Now, what’s the protocol for turning over control of the Twitter account to your successor on Inauguration Day? Bill Clinton wanted to know, and Obama tweeted back reassuringly, “The handle comes with the house.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, May 19

Obama finally claims his Twitter accountU.S. President Barack Obama is on Twitter for real. The @POTUS account is verified, and unlike @BarackObama which is mostly run by staffers, it will feature tweets by the man himself. The first tweet on the account, sent Monday morning, reads “Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack. Really! Six years in, they’re finally giving me my own account.” Now, what’s the protocol for turning over control of the Twitter account to your successor on Inauguration Day? Bill Clinton wanted to know, and Obama tweeted back reassuringly, “The handle comes with the house.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple, Google urge Obama to reject encryption back doors

Apple and Google are appealing to U.S. President Barack Obama to reject proposals to allow encryption “back doors” in mobile devices.A letter signed by Apple and Google to be sent Tuesday is aimed at protecting privacy and limiting law enforcement access to encrypted data, according to a report in The Washington Post.“Strong encryption is the cornerstone of the modern information economy’s security,” the paper quotes the letter as saying.Over 140 technology companies, technologists and civil society groups also signed it, calling on the president to not “in any way subvert, undermine, weaken or make vulnerable” security software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 new access points deliver super-fast Wi-Fi

Access points put to the testWe put four new access points to the test, from Linksys, Xclaim, Amped and ZyXel, using the same test-bed and methods as our last review. The Linksys LAPAC1750PRO performed best in the throughput tests and was a feature-rich product. The Amped Wireless AP was a close second in the speed tests and is a solid business-class access point. The Xclaim unit did well given it’s only a two stream (2x2) AP. The ZyXEL unit was last in throughput, but has a number of advanced features in the areas of configuration, management and security. (Read our full review.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 new access points deliver super-fast Wi-Fi

Continuing our ongoing series of 802.11ac reviews, we put four new access points to the test, bringing our total to 13. This time around, we looked at products from Linksys, Xclaim, Amped and ZyXel, using the same test-bed and methods as our last review.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Login system supplies fake passwords to hackers

A team of researchers has developed a system that makes it much harder for hackers to obtain usable passwords from a leaked database, which could help blunt the damage from a data breach.The system is described in a research paper that has been submitted for consideration at the 2015 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, which takes place in Los Angeles in December.Called ErsatzPasswords, the system is aimed at throwing off hackers who use methods to “crack” passwords, said Mohammed H. Almeshekah, a doctoral student at Purdue University in Indiana.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DevNet Zone at Cisco LIVE

Going to Cisco LIVE? Interested in chatting about network automation or about how DevOps principles can be used on the network? Well, if you are, feel free to reach out - I would love to have a conversation out in San Diego! I just booked a trip to Cisco LIVE, but am only purchasing the $49 DevNet Explorer pass. This means I should have plenty of time to socialize and will likely be spending most of my time at the DevNet zone. I’ll have access to my remote lab and should be able to demo much of what I’ve posted about in the past few months too.

Email me (jedelman8 at gmail) or comment below if you’re interested in meeting up.

Thanks,
Jason

Twitter: @jedelman8

Analytics and SDN

Recent presentations from AT&T and Google describe SDN/NFV architectures that incorporate measurement based feedback in order to improve performance and reliability.

The first slide is from a presentation by AT&T's Margaret Chiosi; SDN+NFV Next Steps in the Journey, NFV World Congress 2015. The future architecture envisions generic (white box) hardware providing a stream of analytics which are compared to policies and used to drive actions to assure service levels.


The second slide is from the presentation by Google's Bikash Koley at the Silicon Valley Software Defined Networking Group Meetup. In this architecture, "network state changes observed by analyzing comprehensive time-series data stream." Telemetry is used to verify that the network is behaving as intended, identifying policy violations so that the management and control planes can apply corrective actions. Again, the software defined network is built from commodity white box switches.

Support for standard sFlow measurements is almost universally available in commodity switch hardware. sFlow agents embedded within network devices continuously stream measurements to the SDN controller, supplying the analytics component with the comprehensive, scaleable, real-time visibility needed for effective control.

SDN fabric controller for commodity data center switches describes the measurement and control capabilities available in commodity switch hardware. Continue reading

This well-funded startup could turn bitcoin mining – and the chip industry – on its head

A startup company with some very big-name backers has just come out of stealth mode and revealed a business plan that could turn bitcoin mining—and even the economics of selling chips and smartphones—on its head.The first thing to know about the company, which calls itself 21, is that it has designed an embedded chip for bitcoin mining—the process of running complex algorithms that are required to solve an equation to generate, or mine, new coins in the digital currency.Bitcoin mining initially was done by individuals on home PCs, but the work has gradually been taken over by mining collectives and large compute clusters that are now needed to solve the increasingly complex Bitcoin algorithms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook could cash in from Messenger games

Facebook is said to be eyeing games for its mobile Messenger product, a move that might jump-start the revenue the company generates from non-advertising sources.Facebook is in talks with gaming developers to incorporate or tie their apps in some way into Messenger, The Information news site reported on Monday. The talks are at an early stage and they could break down. But incorporating games into Messenger, which is popular among a growing number of mobile users, could boost the company’s gaming business, which depends heavily on the declining number of desktop computer users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Open source meets telecom at NFV World Congress

When Linux first became a serious challenger for enterprise-class infrastructure, traditional IT vendors had to contend and to rationalize just what exactly this open source thing was. The initial response from many vendors was to attempt to stop it, but it only grew. And as open source grew, many mostly younger businesses learned to leverage it for great commercial success; however, the titans of the previous era have had challenges adapting their business models to embrace open source successfully.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CIOs put the Internet of Things in perspective

When you hear the phrase Internet of Things (IoT), you are probably excited, confused, concerned or tired of hearing the buzzphrase -- or maybe all of those things plus a few more. After all, the reality of digital devices acting on their own to capture, transmit and, in some cases, act on data affects everything from home appliances to telehealth is attention-getting. >> More Internet of Things coverage on CIO.com << Just how many "things" are are talking about? Gartner estimates that by 2020, the IoT will consist of 25 billion devices. Those devices, according to Cisco, will dominate the Internet by 2018. Yep, dominate – meaning machines will communicate over the Internet more than we (i.e. humans) do. So if there’s a little fear, uncertainty and doubt mixed in among the excitement, it’s only natural.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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