Technology Short Take #51

Welcome to Technology Short Take #51, another collection of posts and links about key data center technologies like networking, virtualization, cloud management, and applications/operating systems. Here’s hoping you find something useful in this collection!

Networking

  • I’m not sure if this falls here or into the “Cloud Computing/Cloud Computing” category, but Shannon McFarland—fellow co-conspirator with the Denver OpenStack Meetup group—has a nice article describing some design and deployment considerations for IPv6 in the OpenStack Kilo release.
  • I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned Open Virtual Network (OVN) here before, as I’m pretty jazzed about the work going on with this project. If you’re unfamiliar with OVN, Gal Sagie has a couple of articles that might help. I’d start with the later of the two articles, which provides an introduction to OVN, before moving on to Gal’s discussion of OVN and the distributed controller and his article on OVN and containers.
  • Speaking of OVN, Russell Bryant has a detailed description of using OVN with OpenStack Neutron (via DevStack).
  • Using Jinja2 templates for automating network device configuration is a topic that’s getting a fair amount of attention (there were at least two sessions discussing this technique while I was at Interop). Rick Sherman has Continue reading

PlexxiPulse—A Visit From Networking Legend Dr. Doug Comer

It has been an exciting week here at Plexxi! Dr. Doug Comer spent the day with us on Wednesday learning about our products and new network architecture. Dr. Comer is an internationally recognized networking guru, widely known for his series of groundbreaking textbooks on computer networks, the Internet, computer operating systems and computer architecture (including the popular ‘Internetworking with TCP/IP’). He designed and implemented X25NET and Cypress networks as well as the Xinu operating system. He is currently a professor of computer science at Purdue University where he teaches courses on operating systems and computer networks. It was a pleasure having him at the Plexxi headquarters—we hope he learned as much from us as we did from him! Take a look at a few photos from his visit.

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Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

InfoWorld: 3 ways the data lake is actually not helping with IT agility
By Yves de Montcheuil
Loosely speaking, a data lake is the big data version of an operational data store, plus a network storage appliance, plus data processing/query engines, all combined — typically in a Hadoop cluster Continue reading

US Senate leader pushes to extend NSA phone dragnet

The U.S. Senate was deadlocked on Friday over whether to extend authorization for the National Security Agency’s massive collection of domestic telephone records, with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insisting the surveillance program should continue with no new limits.With a weekend deadline looming, McConnell advocated for extending the section of the Patriot Act that the NSA has used to justify its collection of millions of U.S. phone records over the last nine years. Section 215 of the Act, which allows the agency to collect any telephone and business records relevant to a counterterrorism investigation, expires June 1, and Congress is scheduled to take a week-long recess starting this weekend.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US Senate leader pushes to extend NSA phone dragnet

The U.S. Senate was deadlocked on Friday over whether to extend authorization for the National Security Agency’s massive collection of domestic telephone records, with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insisting the surveillance program should continue with no new limits.With a weekend deadline looming, McConnell advocated for extending the section of the Patriot Act that the NSA has used to justify its collection of millions of U.S. phone records over the last nine years. Section 215 of the Act, which allows the agency to collect any telephone and business records relevant to a counterterrorism investigation, expires June 1, and Congress is scheduled to take a week-long recess starting this weekend.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco’s IoE keeps abreast of cancer

The Internet of Things/Everything can serve as a potentially lifesaving tool. Sensor-based wearable technology can monitor bodily vitals to determine if any health risks are imminent.Cisco and customer Cyrcadia Health are involved in the development of what it calls an iTBra to monitor a woman’s body temperature to determine if she is at risk for breast cancer. The iTBra is a personal screening tool intended as an intelligent monthly breast health monitor.The iTBra is made up of patches placed under a normal bra that collect up to 12 hours of normal and abnormal cellular activity associated with breast cancer. The iTBra bra is designed to take tissue density, a gating factor in the accuracy of mammography screening, out of the detection equation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tutorial for creating first external SDN application for HP SDN VAN controller – Part 1/3: LAB creation and REST API introduction

For best article visual quality, open Tutorial for creating first external SDN application for HP SDN VAN controller – Part 1/3: LAB creation and REST API introduction directly at NetworkGeekStuff.

In this tutorial series, I will show you by example, how to build your first external REST API based SDN application for HP SDN VAN controller, with web interface for the user control. Target will be to learn how to use REST API, curl and perl scripting to generate some basic and useful code to view and also manipulate network traffic.

This article is part of “Tutorial for creating first external SDN application for HP SDN VAN controller” series consisting these articles:

In this Part 1/3, we will discuss creation of a quick development lab with HP SDN VAN controller and Mininet network and explore the REST API interface quickly.

Internal vs External SDN applications

The difference is this, external applications do not need to run inside the SDN controller itself and can rely on REST API commands transferred over network from Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Connected cars will overload mobile networks, report says

If you think stop-and-go city traffic can be bad around rush hour, just wait until connected cars get in on the act and start bringing mobile networks to a standstill too. There isn't enough capacity, a new report says.Market intelligence strategist Machina Research paints a gloomy connectivity picture of excessive growth from M2M, which includes connected cars.Growth in that area threatens to disrupt all mobile data traffic.Parking lot UK-based Machina Research analyzes Internet of Things (IoT), M2M and Big Data. Its report says that mobile data will double in certain cells at rush hour. The report predicts a 97% increase over 10 years. The big driver will be cars.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Connected cars will overload mobile networks, report says

If you think stop-and-go city traffic can be bad around rush hour, just wait until connected cars get in on the act and start bringing mobile networks to a standstill too. There isn't enough capacity, a new report says.Market intelligence strategist Machina Research paints a gloomy connectivity picture of excessive growth from M2M, which includes connected cars.Growth in that area threatens to disrupt all mobile data traffic.Parking lot UK-based Machina Research analyzes Internet of Things (IoT), M2M and Big Data. Its report says that mobile data will double in certain cells at rush hour. The report predicts a 97% increase over 10 years. The big driver will be cars.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Adblock browsers for Android and iOS to keep mobile ads, tracking at bay

By building browsers with integrated ad blocking, German company Eyeo hopes to attract more users. A beta version of the Android browser is now available for download from the Play store.There are several reasons people choose to block ads: They can cause pages to load slower, consume data plans, and shorten battery life, according to Eyeo. The company also contends users are safer since malware often hides behind ads.The Adblock Browser for Android is based on Firefox and Adblock Plus. The functionality is the same as when using the existing Adblock Plus add-on.The reason for developing browsers with ad blocking baked in is that the add-on hasn’t attracted many users. By integrating the functionality, it becomes easier for non-tech savvy users to benefit from it, according to Ben Williams, communications and operations manager at Eyeo.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPexpert’s Newest “CCIE Wall of Fame” Additions 5/22/2015

Please join us in congratulating the following iPexpert students who have passed their CCIE lab!

This Week’s CCIE Success Stories

  • Alan Arruda, CCIE #48677 (Data Center)
  • Matthew Nowlin, CCIE #48875 (Routing and Switching)
  • Daniel Cleary, CCIE #47503 (Routing and Switching)
  • Nik Kale, CCIE #46112 (Security)

We Want to Hear From You!

Have you passed your CCIE lab exam and used any of iPexpert’s self-study products, or attended a CCIE Bootcamp? If so, we’d like to add you to our CCIE Wall of Fame!

Torque G02 smartphone doesn’t mind a saltwater dunk

Many smartphones can stand up to a splash or a dip in fresh water, but they don’t go too well in seawater due to the corrosive salt.Now electronics maker Kyocera has launched an Android smartphone in Japan that’s at home in shallow seas, allowing users to surf, selfie and text at the same time.The Torque G02 is a ruggedized outdoor phone that can be dunked in seawater to a depth of 1.5 meters for 30 minutes. In Kyocera’s tests, it also withstood the weight of a 100 kilogram load spread evenly across its surface.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading — 0522

It’s Friday, which means it’s time to talk about some stuff around the ‘web that’s worth reading.

If you’ve not been asleep this week (most people seem to be, given the rate at which my emails are being answered!), then you’ve probably heard about logjam — a man in the middle attack against IKE and other DHE cypher suites. If you haven’t this is a really short (and cryptic) explanation of the attack, and how to mitigate it.

Bufferbloat has been in the news recently, with speedtest and other tools building in the ability to measure bufferbloat in DSL and cable connections. Buffers have always been a topic of hot discussion in the networking world — in fact, buffer size came up just this last week while in discussions in building an Ericsson reference design for data center fabric underlays. The point always comes down to this — can’t you just do better QoS and larger buffers, and skip all the 1:1 subscription rates? The answer I always give is a resounding NO!, but it’s hard to explain why without getting into an explanation of buffer bloat, and it’s effects on jitter (the often ignored step child of Continue reading

6 things almost every viral Kickstarter has in common

For many entrepreneurs, crowdfunding is a mystery. Celebrity music videos can flop, while simple, silly ideas can go viral overnight. Some campaigns are all about grassroots fundraising, while others can succeed on the strength of one or two wealthy backers.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: The most magnificent high-tech flying machines On closer inspection, however, there are a few signals in the noise. We looked at the thousand most successful Kickstarter projects ever based on percent funded—campaigns that raised more than 15 times as much money as they asked for—then compared those numbers to every Kickstarter campaign in history, over 220,000 in all.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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