Show 243 – Network Virtualization with Juniper QFX & Contrail – Sponsored

The Packet Pushers discuss network virtualization, automation, and scaling up data centers with our sponsor, Juniper Networks. Our guests are Parantap Lahiri, Sr. Director, Solutions Engineering and Damien Garros, Technical Marketing Engineer at Juniper Networks.

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The Next Era of IT

An Agile & Dynamic Network to Keep Pace With Applications, Compute & Storage

I have been on the road a lot lately meeting with customers, prospects, partners and investors and it has become clear to me that there is a very simple, but profound trend emerging in Information Technology. Today you hear a lot about Third Platform, Bimodal IT, Hyperconvergence and Software Defined ”X” (Networking, Storage, Data Center etc.). The discussions about these technologies are prevalent, but the question is why? Why these topics and why now? Why should we care about Third Platform, Bimodal IT, Hyperconvergence and SD”X”? The answer is simple; storage and compute have evolved to be highly dynamic, and the network itself now needs to keep pace.

Looking Back

Over the last 2 decades, data center architectures have traditionally been highly static from the perspective of both the application and the network. Designing a data center was a lengthy process of capacity planning and design, after which the network team built a data center network around physically redundant two-tier leaf/spine architectures. Depending on pre-planned growth models and expected product lifecycles, multiple chassis were typically used as the spine. Leaf switches, dual homed back to the spine, were Continue reading

My Firefly music festival iPhone survival kit

Bob Brown/NetworkWorld Heading from outside Boston to Dover, Del., last week for the 4-day Firefly musical festival with another adult and four teenagers, I had lots more to think about than iPhone charging. But I did have iPhone charging needs on my mind.So before I went, I arranged to have Kensington send me a couple of their gadgets to help me weather the festival and some pretty serious storms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Friday, June 26

Self-driving cars face off when Google’s cuts off Delphi’sWith developers of autonomous vehicle technology releasing their projects into the wild, it was perhaps inevitable that two self-driving cars would eventually meet on the road. Google’s certainly seems to be programmed for assertive behavior: According to the director of Delphi Labs, one of Google’s self-driving Lexus RX test vehicles cut off Delphi’s test car on a street in Mountain View, California. Apparently the Delphi vehicle did as your parents advised and drove defensively, preventing a collision.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM Power Systems GM: Big scale and big data demand OpenPower

IBM’s Power Systems division – which sells servers and systems based on the Power system architecture, as opposed to the Intel-based x86 architecture used in most personal computers – had been in free-fall for some time, posting year-on-year revenue declines of up to 37% per quarter over the past couple of years. According to the conventional wisdom, Power was another victim – along with SPARC and, to a lesser extent, ARM – of the inexorable march of the commodity x86 server.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Red Hat makes its case to be THE container company + IBM, Box partner on cloud analytics technologies +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bad Network Design

Bad Network Design – Availability of  a system is mainly measured with two parameters. Mean time between failure (MTBF) and Mean time to repair (MTTR) MTBF is calculated as average time between failures of a system. MTTR is the average time required to repair a failed component (Link, node, device in networking terms) Operator mistakes […]

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Bi-Modal IT Bemusement – I Call It Project-Driven IT

I’ve been much amused byBi-Modal IT that Gartner coughed up a few months back. Bimodal IT refers to having two modes of IT, each designed to develop and deliver information- and technology-intensive services in its own way. Mode 1 is traditional, emphasizing scalability, efficiency, safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is nonsequential, emphasizing agility and speed. […]

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Facebook like Google makes scant progress in hiring blacks, women

Facebook and other tech companies aren’t changing the racial mix or the percentage of women in their workforce fast enough, which has become a matter of concern to civil rights activists.Blacks, for example, accounted for 2 percent of Facebook’s U.S. workforce as of May 31 this year, according to diversity data released by the company on Thursday. The corresponding figure for June last year was again 2 percent.The figure for Hispanics also remained at 4 percent of the U.S. workforce, while people of two or more races accounted for 3 percent.A positive but minute change was that the percentage of female employees increased from 31 percent in June 2014 to 32 percent in May 2015. The figures for participation by women are calculated by the company on a worldwide basis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Software-Defined Hardware Forwarding Pipeline on HP Switches

Writing OpenFlow controllers that interact with physical hardware is harder than most people think. Apart from developing a distributed system (which is hard in itself), you have to deal with limitations of hardware forwarding pipelines, differences in forwarding hardware, imprecise abstractions (most vendors still support single OpenFlow table per switch), and resulting bloated flow tables.

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Magento e-commerce platform targeted with sneaky code

Attackers are using a sneaky method to steal payment card data from websites using Magento, eBay’s widely used e-commerce platform.Researchers from Sucuri, a company that specializes in securing websites, said the attackers can collect any data submitted by a user to Magento but carefully filters out anything that doesn’t look like credit card data.The attackers are injecting their malicious code into Magento, but it’s still unclear how that process happens, wrote Peter Gramantik, a senior malware researcher with Sucuri.“It seems though that the attacker is exploiting a vulnerability in Magento core or some widely used module/extension,” he wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco warns of default SSH keys shipped in three products

Cisco Systems said Thursday it released a patch for three products that shipped with default encryption keys, posing a risk that an attacker with the keys could decrypt data traffic.The products are Cisco’s Web Security Virtual Appliance, Email Security Virtual Appliance and Security Management Virtual Appliance, it said in an advisory. Versions downloaded before Thursday are vulnerable.Cisco said it “is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerabilities that are described in this advisory.”The three products all shipped with preinstalled encryption keys for SSH (Secure Shell), which is used to remotely log into machines. It’s considered a bad security practice to ship products that all have the same private keys.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco warns of default SSH keys shipped in three products

Cisco Systems said Thursday it released a patch for three products that shipped with default encryption keys, posing a risk that an attacker with the keys could decrypt data traffic.The products are Cisco’s Web Security Virtual Appliance, Email Security Virtual Appliance and Security Management Virtual Appliance, it said in an advisory. Versions downloaded before Thursday are vulnerable.NEW CISCO CEO: Meet the Real Chuck RobbinsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Scott McNealy on privacy: You still don’t have any

Scott McNealy is best known for his role as cofounder and long-serving CEO at Sun Microsystems, but some remember him even better for a few choice comments he made about privacy back in 1999.Consumer privacy issues are a “red herring,” McNealy told a group of reporters that year. “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”The statement seemed shocking all those years ago, but its pertinence has only increased over time. Privacy is the hot-button issue in this era of social profiling and mass surveillance, and concern among consumers is growing—with good reason.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Here’s how Facebook wants to make sharing links easier on mobile

Sharing links with friends in Facebook’s mobile app is a pain that requires—gasp—leaving Facebook and copying and pasting URLs. Now there’s a feature that simplifies the process.Facebook has added a new button in its iOS app that appears when you’re composing a status update. It appears as a link icon in the lower bar. Tap it, and you’ll be able to search for videos, articles and other links that have previously been shared on Facebook. The feature, called “add a link,” will let you view the articles and embed one in your status update with a single tap.It’s not clear how many links are in Facebook’s database, but they’re culled from the company’s index of roughly one trillion posts, wrote Facebook engineering manager Tom Whitnah.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yahoo spruces up mobile search with related content

Yahoo is updating its search service on mobile devices, taking a leaf out of Google’s book and highlighting content such as images, videos and reviews ahead of regular search results.The changes, announced Thursday, apply to Yahoo search on the mobile web in the U.S., in browsers such as Safari and Chrome. Yahoo’s mobile app and desktop site already provide some additional content within results.A search on the mobile web for Barack Obama, for instance, displays information about him from Wikipedia, such as his height and birth date, as well as links to news, images and YouTube videos. In one search Thursday, the videos included some curious choices, including “Barack Obama is Illuminati.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Satya Nadella’s new mission for Microsoft: help people ‘achieve more’

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella laid out his new mission for the company in an email sent out Thursday to all employees.“Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” he wrote.It’s a much briefer mission statement than the one he unveiled when he took over the top job last year, and indicative of the changes Nadella has made since he took Microsoft’s helm. During his tenure, Microsoft has focused on broadening the reach of its services and applications across platforms and has pushed ahead with a new version of its Windows operating system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Enterprise disaggregation is inevitable

Back in March, the issue was raised whether disaggregation – decoupling network software from hardware for lower cost, choice and flexibility – could play in the enterprise as well as the service provider realm.The answer, judging by recent events, is that it can. But currently to a lesser extent than it does with service providers, who will still reap most of the benefits of initial enterprise deployments.Announcements by Pica8, Ciena and AT&T that they plan to offer bare metal and white box switches, and virtual network functions as customer premises equipment, do signal that enterprises are indeed a target for disaggregation. But penetration is currently limited to that – CPE supplied and managed by service providers for the purpose of connecting that enterprise to its service network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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