PlexxiPulse—Don’t Let Scalability Spook You

Last week, our director of product marketing, Bob Noel, penned a blog post that identified the five new networking requirements being driven by IoT and Big Data. This week, we are shining the spotlight on one of the third era of IT requirements Bob highlighted – scalability. In today’s dynamic application environments, the ability to scale gracefully to be able to handle distributed applications is critical. The network must be scaled to match demand, but the challenge (and a pain point for many) is how. Traditional “scale up” techniques were about replacing outgrown processing and storage capacity with bigger boxes and migrating data onto the new platform. Now, as the environment grows, more physical devices will be connected to the network. Providers need to think beyond adding capacity through bigger pipes and consider how to support a rapidly growing number of storage and compute nodes. It can be spooky thing to consider, but at Plexxi we make scaling your network to meet Third Era demands a treat, not a trick.

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Happy Halloween!

Enterprise Networking Planet: Better Networking Through the API
By Arthur Cole
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Black Friday, er, Black November tech deals include cheap iPads, free shipping

Online tech retailer Newegg isn’t messing around with just Black Friday anymore. It’s calling all of next month Black November as it gears up for holiday sales in what’s looking to be another all-out battle for techies’ wallets.Newegg hasn’t released specific sale information yet, but has outlined plans to kick off deals on more than 900 products Nov. 1-3, gaming bargains Nov. 4-9, a Black Friday preview sale Nov. 10-26, big savings on Black Friday (Nov. 27) itself, and then of course some more deals on Cyber Monday. More and more, we’re seeing retailers describing their holiday sales plans, in a less than detailed manner, with promises of specifics on dates to come.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Book Review: ‘The Peripheral’ By William Gibson

William Gibson is working at the height of his abilities in The Peripheral. Characters move back and forth between near present-day and an unusual post-apocalyptic future, and the book blends high-tech, visionary showpieces with themes of class, opportunity, and economic injustice.

The post Book Review: ‘The Peripheral’ By William Gibson appeared first on Packet Pushers.

All CoinVault and Bitcryptor ransomware victims can now recover their files for free

If your computer was infected with the CoinVault or Bitcryptor ransomware programs you're in luck -- at least compared to other ransomware victims. Chances are high that you can now recover your encrypted files for free, if you still have them.Researchers from Kaspersky Lab and the Dutch Public Prosecution Service have obtained the last set of encryption keys from command-and-control servers that were used by CoinVault and Bitcryptor, two related ransomware threats.Those keys have been uploaded to Kaspersky's ransomware decryptor service that was originally set up in April with a set of around 750 keys recovered from servers hosted in the Netherlands.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA: “Great Pumpkin” asteroid to zip by Earth on Halloween

NASA says the Halloween flyby of a 1,300-foot-wide asteroid will offer professional and non-skilled sky watchers an up-close – by celestial criteria – look at a pretty large piece of space rubble.+More on Network World: How to protect Earth from asteroid destruction+The asteroid, 2015 TB145 will fly past Earth at a safe distance slightly farther than the moon's orbit on Oct. 31 at 10:01 a.m. PDT (1:01 p.m. EDT). According to the catalog of near-Earth objects (NEOs) kept by the Minor Planet Center, this is the closest currently known approach by an object this large until asteroid 1999 AN10, at about 2,600 feet in size, approaches at about 1 lunar distance (238,000 miles from Earth) in August 2027, NASA stated in a release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 30th, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:


Movie goers Force Crashed websites with record ticket presales. Yoda commented: Do. Or do not. There is no try.
  • $51.5 billion: Apple quarterly revenue; 1,481: distance in light years of a potential Dyson Sphere; $470 billion: size of insurance industry data play; 31,257: computer related documents in a scanned library; $1.2B: dollars lost to business email scams; 46 billion: pixels in largest astronomical image; 27: seconds of distraction after doing anything interesting in a car; 10 billion: transistor SPARC M7 chip; 10K: cost to get a pound in to low earth orbit; $8.2 billion: Microsoft cloud revenue; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @jasongorman: A $trillion industry has been built on the very lucky fact that Tim Berners-Lee never thought "how do I monetise this?"
    • Cade Metz: Sure, the app [WhatsApp] was simple. But it met a real need. And it could serve as a platform for building all sorts of other simple services in places where wireless bandwidth is limited but people are hungry for the sort of instant communication we take for granted here in the US.
    • Adrian Hanft: Brand experts insist that success comes from promoting your Continue reading

Is DDoS Mitigation as-a-Service becoming a defacto offering for providers?

Republished from Corero DDoS Blog 

It’s well known in the industry that DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent and increasingly debilitating, turning DDoS mitigation into a mission critical initiative. From the largest of carriers to small and mid-level enterprises, more and more Internet connected businesses are becoming a target of DDoS attacks. What was once a problem that only a select few dealt with is now becoming a regularly occurring burden faced by network operators.

In my daily engagements with various customers of all shapes and sizes, it’s truly interesting to see how the approach to DDoS mitigation is changing. Much of this is the result of DDoS mitigation services shifting from a “nice to have” technology to a “must-have”, essential in order to maintain business continuity and availability.

When I built DDoS mitigation and detection services for Verizon back in 2004, the intent was to offer value-add revenue producing services to offer subscribers, in an effort to build out our security offerings. For many years, this concept was one that pretty much every provider I worked with was looking into; build a service with the intent of generating new revenue opportunity from customers when traditional avenues such as Continue reading

Cisco’s Lancope acquisition aims to improve network security from the inside out

Enterprise IT has gone through many major shifts over the past several decades. The industry currently sits in the midst of another major transformation as more and more businesses are striving to become digital organizations. The building blocks of the digital era are technologies like cloud computing, mobility, virtualization, and software defined networking, which are significantly different than legacy technologies.But what about security? In addition to new IT tools and processes, businesses need to think about how to secure the digital enterprise. While the technologies listed above allow us to work and serve customers in ways we never could before, they also create new security vulnerabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Threat of Telecom Sabotage

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Earlier this week, an article in New York Times captured the world’s imagination with the prospect of secret Russian submarines possessing the ability to sabotage undersea communication cables (with perhaps Marko Ramius at the helm, pictured above).  While it is a bit of a Hollywood scenario, it is still an interesting one to consider, although, as we’ll see, perhaps an unrealistic one, despite the temptation to exaggerate the risk.

Submarine cable cuts occur with regularity and the cable repair industry has considerable experience dealing with these incidents.  However, the vast majority of these failures are the result of accidents occurring in relatively shallow water, and not due to a deliberate actor intending to maximize downtime.  There is enormous capacity and resiliency among the cables crossing the Atlantic (the subject of the New York Times article), so to even make a dent, a saboteur would need to take out numerous cables in short order.

A mass telecom sabotage event involving the severing of many submarine cables (perhaps at multiple hard-to-reach deep-water locations to complicate repairs) would be profoundly disruptive to international communications — Internet or otherwise.  For countries like the U.S. with extensive local hosting, the impact Continue reading

QOTW: The Occupation of the Wise

Thus the wise man, at all times and on every road, carries a mind ripe for acquisitions that ordinary folk neglect. The humblest occupation is for him a continuation of the loftiest; his formal calls are fortunate chances of investigation; his walks are voyages of discovery, what he hears and his silent answers are a dialogue that truth carries on with herself within him.
Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

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Xen’s highly critical virtual machine escape flaw gets a fix

The Xen Project fixed several vulnerabilities in its popular virtualization software, including one that could allow potential attackers to break out of a virtual machine and gain control over the host system.Vulnerabilities that break the isolation layer between virtual machines are the most serious type for a hypervisor like Xen, whose main goal is to allow running multiple VMs on the same hardware in a secure manner.The Xen patches released Thursday fix a total of nine vulnerabilities, but the privilege escalation one identified as CVE-2015-7835 is the most serious one.It stems not from a traditional programming error, but from a logic flaw in how Xen implements memory virtualization for PV (paravirtualized) VMs. PV is a technique that enables virtualization on CPUs that don't support hardware-assisted virtualization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Galaxy Release 1.1.1

We’re back again with a quick update to Galaxy. In the last release we did some cool things to make searching roles much easier. This release is a mini release focused on fixing a few bugs and adding minor enhancements we couldn’t squeeze into the last cycle.

Galaxy issues are tracked publicly at https://github.com/ansible/galaxy-issues. Here are the issues addressed in release 1.1.1:

#88 Role Data Should Show Last Modified Instead of Created Date

#86 `ansible-galaxy -r roles.txt` - Incorrect Example

#84 README.md Fails to Render When it Contains a Variable String Like

#82 "Sign in" Option Should Appear on Home Page Header

#81 Better Filter for RHEL/Centos -> EL in Platform Search

#53 Adding a Role Called "Ansible" Results in Un-named Role

#14 Add Galaxy support for Debian Jessie

#9 Periods in Role Names Cause Installs to Fail

Fuzzy Searching

As part of fixing issue #81, Better Filter for RHEL/Centos -> EL in Platform Search, we changed the way the new role filtering works. A lot of times you know what you’re looking for, and don’t want to wait for autocomplete suggestions. For example, you might be looking for a Platform value of ‘centos’. Typing Continue reading

UK police arrest second teenager over TalkTalk hacking

UK police have arrested a second teenager in their investigation of an attack on the website of telecommunications operator TalkTalk that may have exposed the personal data of millions of customers.The arrest of the 16-year-old boy in Feltham, England, on Thursday follows the arrest Monday afternoon of a 15-year-old boy in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.Both boys were arrested on suspicion of offenses under the Computer Misuse Act, and have been released on bail. Thursday's arrest followed a search of homes in Feltham and Liverpool, police said. No arrest was made at the address in Liverpool.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Optimizing Traffic Engineering with NorthStar Controller on Software Gone Wild

Content providers were using centralized traffic flow optimization together with MPLS TE for at least 15 years (some of them immediately after Cisco launched the early MPLS-TE implementation in their 12.0(5)T release), but it was always hard to push the results into the network devices.

PCEP and BGP-LS all changed that – they give you a standard mechanism to extract network topology and install end-to-end paths across the network, as Julian Lucek of Juniper Networks explained in Episode 43 of Software Gone Wild.

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Man whose iPhone passcode DOJ wanted Apple to bypass enters guilty plea

Jun Feng, a defendant in a criminal case, has entered a guilty plea, removing pressure from a New York court to decide quickly whether Apple is required to aid investigators by bypassing his iPhone 5s passcode.Feng had been indicted on three counts related to the possession and distribution of methamphetamine. The U.S. Department of Justice had asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York for an expedited decision so as to secure evidence in a trial scheduled to begin on Nov. 16.But on Thursday, DOJ informed the court that Feng has entered a guilty plea. "The government persists in the application pending before the Court, but in view of the guilty plea, no longer requests expedited treatment," U.S. Attorney Robert L. Capers wrote in a letter to Magistrate Judge James Orenstein.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wi-Fi’s Whipping Boy Complex

If you’ve ever attended a large conference or exhibition, chances are everyone whined about the Wi-Fi. But the truth is, a lot of the time, it’s not Wi-Fi’s fault at all. While there is a litany of Wi-Fi-specific deployment options...
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