PlexxiPulse—Defining the New Network

The network is changing; there is no doubt about it. Undergoing its own transformation to meet advancements in storage and compute, the network is becoming more important than ever as Big Data and IoT continue to evolve. Our own Bob Noel penned a blog post this week that identifies areas of improvement for the network to meet the requirements of tomorrow. Take a look and tell us your thoughts for the future of the network. Which of Bob’s requirements do you think is the most important?

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

Enterprise Storage Forum: The New Era of Secondary Storage HyperConvergence
By Jim Whalen, Senior Analyst, Taneja Group
The rise of hyperconverged infrastructure platforms has driven tremendous change in the primary storage space, perhaps even greater than the move from direct attached to networked storage in decades past.  Now, instead of discrete, physically managed components, primary storage is being commoditized, virtualized and clustered, with the goal of providing a highly available virtual platform to run applications on, abstracted away from the individual hardware components themselves.  This has provided dramatic benefits to IT, allowing them to Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Report details biggest IT failures of the past decade

This month, radio electronics publication IEEE Spectrum is commemorating the 10th anniversary of its ground-breaking 2005 article, "Why software fails." The now-archived article studied some troubled, large-scale IT projects. IEEE said they were preventable failures and explained why. Along with the celebration, the publication has just brought out an updated database of IT debacles. This bunch covers the last 10 years. It makes for fascinating reading. Financial waste, endless delays correcting things, and the vast numbers of people affected contribute to the horrific, gory screw-ups.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Show 260: Design & Build 7: Security In Small/Medium Enterprises

The Packet Pushers talk with Jay Swan, Operations Security Engineer at GitHub, about how small and medium-size organizations can build robust security and ops without spending a ton of money.

The post Show 260: Design & Build 7: Security In Small/Medium Enterprises appeared first on Packet Pushers.

DARPA: Monitoring heat, electromagnetic and sound outputs could assess safety of IoT devices

DARPA is looking for a platform that can tell whether Internet of Things devices have been hijacked based on fluctuations in the heat, electromagnetic waves and sound they put out as well as the power they use.The agency wants technology that can decipher these analog waves and reveal what IoT devices are up to in their digital realms, according to a DARPA announcement seeking research proposals under the name “Leveraging the Analog Domain for Security (LADS)”.The LADS program would separate security monitoring from the device itself so if it is compromised, the monitoring platform can’t be affected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New CCIE Collaboration Videos Have Arrived!

Attention all CCIE Collaboration candidates!! We’re excited to announce that Andy Vassar has been tirelessly working on new videos, and we have a brand new CCIE Lab Video on Demand playlist available!

Andy has gone through and broken down all the technologies to make sure that you have the most up to date information to help you effectively prepare for your CCIE Collaboration Lab Exam. In this playlist you’ll find 48 videos, broken down by blueprint section and technology, with the need to know information and topics covered in the lab exam.

All of this is in a high quality HD format that is clear and engaging to watch.

Stay tuned to see what other great video updates we’ll have in the coming days and weeks for our Collaboration track, as well as for our other tracks and certifications.

Make sure you swing by your Member’s Area today to check out this new playlist! We’re pretty excited about it, but don’t just take our word for it… have a look for yourself.

Juniper Networks Posts Strong 3Q Results

Routing, switching, enterprise, carrier — it all came together in Q3.

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 23rd, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

The amazing story of Voyager's walkabout and the three body problem.

• $18 billion: wasted on US Army Future Combat system; 70%: Americans who support an Internet sales tax;  $1.3 billion: wasted on an interoperable health record system; trillions: NSA breaking Web and VPN connections; 615: human data teams beat by a computer; $900,000: cost of apps on your smartphone 30 years ago.


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @PatrickMcFadin: 'Sup 10x coder. Grace Hopper invented the compiler and has a US Navy destroyer named after her. Just how badass are you again?
  • @benwerd: I love Marty McFly too, but more importantly, the first transatlantic voice transmission was sent 100 years ago today. What a century.
  • Martin Goodwell: The nearly two-billion requests that Netflix receives each day result in roughly 20 billion internal API calls.
  • sigma914: It's great to see people implementing distributed services using a vertically scalable technology stack again. The past ~decade has seen a lot of "We can scale sideways so constant overheads are irrelevant! We'll just use Java and add Continue reading

Results of experimenting with Brotli for dynamic web content

Compression is one of the most important tools CloudFlare has to accelerate website performance. Compressed content takes less time to transfer, and consequently reduces load times. On expensive mobile data plans, compression even saves money for consumers. However, compression is not free—it comes at a price. It is one of the most compute expensive operations our servers perform, and the better the compression rate we want, the more effort we have to spend.

The most popular compression format on the web is gzip. We put a great deal of effort into improving the performance of the gzip compression, so we can perform compression on the fly with fewer CPU cycles. Recently a potential replacement for gzip, called Brotli, was announced by Google. Being early adopters for many technologies, we at CloudFlare want to see for ourselves if it is as good as claimed.

This post takes a look at a bit of history behind gzip and Brotli, followed by a performance comparison.

Compression 101

Many popular lossless compression algorithms rely on LZ77 and Huffman coding, so it’s important to have a basic understanding of these two techniques before getting into gzip or Brotli.

LZ77

LZ77 is a simple technique developed Continue reading

HL: General Howe’s Dog

The post HL: General Howe’s Dog appeared first on 'net work.

Getting Started with VMware NSX Distributed Firewall – Part 1

Who saw it coming that segmentation would be a popular term in 2015?!? Gartner analyst Greg Young was almost apologetic when he kicked off the Network Segmentation Best Practices session at the last Gartner Security Summit.

As a professional with a long history in the enterprise firewall space, I know I found it odd at first. Segmentation is such a basic concept, dovetailing with how we secure networks – historically on network boundaries. Network segmentation is the basis for how we write traditional firewall rules – somehow get the traffic TO the firewall, and policy can be executed. How much more can we say about network segmentation?

But there is a problem with the reach of segmentation based on network. If traffic does not cross the firewall, you are blind. All hosts in the same network, commonly the same VLAN, can abuse each other at will. Perhaps netflow or IPS sensors are throughout your network – just to catch some of this internal network free-for-all. And the DMZ? I like to think of all these networks as blast-areas, where any one compromise could potentially take everything else on the same network down.

It’s not really network segmentation that’s all the Continue reading

QOTW: Obsession with Knowledge

Like Gollum’s self-destructive obsession with the ring in Tolkien’s novels, when we see knowledge as something to possess, not only do we miss out on the fulfillment of seeing that knowledge positively influence the lives of those around us, but we miss out on the rich personal growth that results from participation in a free give and take of truth.
Philip Dow, Virtuous Minds

The post QOTW: Obsession with Knowledge appeared first on 'net work.

Securing OpenStack Hosts with Ansible

Deploying OpenStack can be a challenging process, and securing it can be even more daunting. Fortunately, there's a new project in the OpenStack big tent that wants to make this process easier: openstack-ansible-security.

Start Standardizing With the STIG

Securing an OpenStack deployment involves multiple levels of configuration:

1. Securing the network
2. Securing the host
3. Securing the interconnected services

The goal of openstack-ansible-security is to tackle the second level -- securing the host.  A spec was proposed for the Mitaka release of OpenStack to secure OpenStack infrastructure hosts using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG).

The STIG is a collection of best practices for securing a host and its services against common attacks.  The collection is broken up into multiple sections, called categories.  The STIG Viewer service makes these categories easier to review.  The categories include:

• Cat 1: For highly sensitive systems
• Cat 2: For medium sensitivity systems
• Cat 3: For low sensitivity systems

These are meant to be stackable, so an extremely sensitive system would require categories 1, 2 and 3.  Each STIG item provides a description of what needs to be changed, why it should be changed, how to change it, and Continue reading

Cisco fixes iOS 9 compatibility issue that blocked some VPNs

When iOS 9 debuted in September, Cisco's AnyConnect VPN client for iOS stopped working correctly with some VPN server configurations, preventing resources from loading. During iOS 9's beta period, Cisco filed a bug report with Apple about iOS 9 breaking DNS resolution in IPv4-based split tunnneling, but iOS 9 shipped without a fix. So did iOS 9.01, 9.02, and this week's iOS 9.1.But on Thursday, Cisco released an AnyConnect client update in the App Store, version 4.0.03016, that resolves the issue. Split-tunnel VPNs again work correctly, InfoWorld's tests reveal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to Make a Science Reasonable Research Paper

They are simply not a reality of what faculty is really like although movies like Dog House are unquestionably engaging. Some college students might differ with me, but faculty is not about becoming successful socially, all, instead, it’s about being successful academically. Your freshman year is your vital year of school. For all, it fails them as university students or makes them. Students who wander onto university their year thinking that faculty is one occasion that is large come in to get a rude awakening, particularly if they’ve been hearing upperclassmen reveal reports about waiting before the last second to create that report and not going to course. Continue reading

How to Publish a Two Page Paper in a Single Day

A dog photo in a “poop argument” has enraged visitors of a SWAT group standoff when nearly several users of the Wisconsin police SWAT team turned up, positioned themselves behind an armored vehicle, and pumped two fits right into a little, end-wagging puppy. The SWAT were termed following the pet, who lowered a deuce within the wrong position, started a defecation conflict between his neighbors and an man. Writes the NY Daily Information on Nov. 3: ” SWAT crew delivered to manage a town argument over waste ended up igniting a firestorm of criticism from the nearby police force, and harming canine. Continue reading

Russian cyberspies targeted the MH17 crash investigation

A Russian cyberespionage group that frequently targets government institutions from NATO member countries tried to infiltrate the international investigation into the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17).MH17 was a passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that crashed in eastern Ukraine close to the Russian border on 17 July, 2014. All 283 passengers and 15 crew members lost their lives.The Dutch Safety Board led an international investigation into the incident and released a final report on Oct. 13, concluding that the Boeing 777-200 aircraft was shot down by a warhead launched from a Russian-built Buk missile system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

25% Off Your ONUG Fall 2015 Registration

The Packet Pushers will be at the Open Networking User Group fall gathering at the New York University Kimmel Center in Manhattan, November 4 & 5, 2015. We'll be attending most of the open sessions, chatting with real people, and doing some live blogging. If you haven't registered for ONUG yet, you can get 25% off using code Packet25.

The post 25% Off Your ONUG Fall 2015 Registration appeared first on Packet Pushers.

AWS & Azure Keep the Cloud Growing in Q3

It's good to be a cloud provider — if you're one of the large ones.

CCNA – Operation Of IP Data Networks 1.5

We move on to the next topic which is

1.5 Predict the data flow between two hosts across a network

This is a very important topic for the CCNA. It may feel a bit overwhelming at first to grasp all the steps of the data flow but as a CCNA you need to learn how this process works. We will start out with an example where two hosts are on the same LAN and then we will look at an example which involves routing as well.

The first topology has two hosts H1 and H2 with IP adresses 10.0.0.10 and 10.0.0.20 respectively.

Host 1 and Host 2 are both connected to Switch 1 and has not communicated previously. H1 has the MAC adress 0000.0000.0001 and H2 has the MAC address 0000.0000.0002. H1 wants to send data to H2, which steps are involved?

1. H1 knows the destination IP of H2 (10.0.0.20) and runs AND to determine that they are on the same subnet.
2. H1 checkts its ARP cache which is empty for 10.0.0.20.
3. H1 generates ARP message Continue reading

Video: Simplify Network Configurations with Cumulus Linux

Many vendors talk about network automation these days, and almost all of them gloss over an important detail: automation works best when you manage to simplify things to the bare minimum needed to get the job done.

One of the vendors that focus on simplifying the network device configuration is Cumulus Linux.