Microsoft acquires BlueStripe for operations management

To help enterprise customers better manage applications sprawled across hybrid clouds, Microsoft has purchased BlueStripe Software, a provider of technology for watching over distributed applications.Microsoft plans to fold BlueStripe’s software into its System Center and Operations Management Suite software for managing IT resources, giving users more details on how their applications are running on premise and in the cloud.“BlueStripe’s enterprise-class solution enables IT professionals to move from monitoring IT at the infrastructure level to gaining visibility into applications at the transaction level,” Mike Neil, Microsoft general manager for the enterprise cloud operations, wrote in a blog post Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

German parliament may need to replace all software and hardware after hack

All software and hardware in the German parliamentary network might need to be replaced. More than four weeks after a cyberattack, the government hasn’t managed to erase spyware from the system, according to a news report.Trojans introduced to the Bundestag network are still working and are still sending data from the internal network to an unknown destination, several anonymous parliament sources told German publication Der Spiegel.In May, parliament IT specialists discovered hackers were trying to infiltrate the network. So far, they have been unable to mitigate the attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Orchestration means more than rapid provisioning of carrier services

Service orchestration is important, but there's a lot more to it than being able to allow customers to quickly self-provision connections and bandwidth. Orchestration should also mean being able to rapidly detect and resolve connection problems.I read a lot about service orchestration, and the top vendors and industry organizations that talk to me about it are manifold. There's the MetroEthernet Forum (MEF), with its Third Network, and Lifecycle Service Orchestration vision. There are companies like CENX, Cyan, and Tail-f (now part of Cisco). All too often, the messages are good, but repetitive: Customers are sick of waiting weeks or months for new connections. They want to be able to do their own moves, adds, and changes. They want to have MPLS service or Carrier Ethernet to have the agility of, say, the ubiquitous Internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud startup Zettabox touts privacy and local storage to appeal to EU customers

Anticipating the approval of stricter data protection rules in the European Union, cloud storage startup Zettabox bets it will be able to compete against bigger rivals by guaranteeing customers that their data will be housed in Europe.Zettabox, whose service came out of beta on Wednesday, is entering a market dominated by U.S. cloud providers. To differentiate itself, Zettabox is setting up storage space in data centers across the continent so companies and governments can store data in their home countries if they want to.Zettabox has offices in London and Prague and was founded by James Kinsella and Robert McNeal, U.S. executives who have been working on the service for over two years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple deploying camera-equipped cars to improve its maps service

Apple has confirmed it’s deploying camera-equipped cars to capture data—including images—to improve its mapping service.The cars have been spotted in several U.S. cities over the past few months, leading to speculation that Apple was collecting mapping data to better compete with Google Maps.“Some of the data” the cars collect will appear in future updates of Apple Maps, the company said Wednesday. Beyond mentioning images, Apple didn’t say what additional information the vehicles would collect. Apple also didn’t share what it would do with the data that doesn’t make it into Maps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

House panel adds requirements to ICANN transition

A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee has approved a bill that would add new requirements before a government agency ends its oversight of ICANN, the coordinator of the Internet’s domain name system.The goal of the Domain Openness Through Continued Oversight Matters (DOTCOM) Act is to safeguard Internet users and ensure a smooth transition away from U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) oversight of ICANN’s key domain-name functions, supporters said.Wednesday’s voice vote approving the DOTCOM Act in the Internet subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sends the bill to the full committee for action.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Duqu cyberespionage group compromised venues hosting Iran nuclear negotiations

A state-sponsored espionage group that uses a malware platform called Duqu has compromised the computer networks of several hotels and venues that hosted negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.The attacks that took place in 2014 and this year involved the use of a new version of the Duqu cyberespionage malware, according to antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, which also found the malware on its own systems.Kaspersky Lab discovered in early spring that several of its internal systems had been compromised and the subsequent investigation resulted in the identification of what the company now calls Duqu 2.0.Duqu is a highly sophisticated malware platform used for cyberespionage that was originally found in 2011. It is believed to be related to Stuxnet, the computer worm developed by the U.S. and Israel to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Ultimate SDN Forum: The 2015 Open Networking Summit

The promise of SDN, problems encountered by developers in the industry, and many more topics will be discussed at the 2015 Open Networking Summit.

iBGP Fall-over Trick

BGP fall-over is a neat BGP convergence optimisation technique whereby BGP peering is brought down as soon as the route to neighbor disappears from a routing table. The difference between external and internal BGP is that the former usually peers over a directly-attached interface so that when the interface to neighbor is disconnected, route is withdrawn from the routing table which triggers eBGP fall-over to bring down the neighborship. iBGP, on the other hand, normally uses device loopbacks to establish peering sessions. What this means is if a summary or a default route is present in the routing table (either static or learned via IGP), there is always a route to iBGP neighbor. In this case BGP has to wait for default 180 seconds (3 x keepalive timer) to bring down the neighborship and withdraw all the routes learned from dead neighbor.
To overcome that there’s a route-map option for a neighbor fall-over command which allows user to specify the exact prefix for which to look in the routing table. In the example below, the router will look for specific host routes representing neighbor’s loopbacks and will trigger reconvergence as soon as those routes disappear.

Outgoing Cisco CEO Chambers fesses up to mistakes, touts company’s grit

SAN DIEGO – Reflecting on a two-decade tenure as Cisco CEO marked by enviable success, John Chambers says he wishes the company could have moved faster. “Mistakes that I’ve made [have been] when I haven’t moved fast enough” into new market opportunities, Cisco’s outgoing CEO said to a room full of reporters during an open-ended question-and-answer session at the Cisco Live conference in San Diego. “Or I moved too fast without process behind it.” It was perhaps Chambers’ last meeting with the press as CEO given that he will step down in late July. Incoming CEO Chuck Robbins shared the stage and fielded questions along Chambers. (See How Chambers kept a high profile.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft Surface Hub goes on sale in September

Microsoft has a gigantic new member of its Surface family of touch-enabled devices called the Surface Hub, a widescreen all-in-one computer that can act as the focal point of conference-room meetings.Announced in January, the Surface Hub will go on sale in September, according to Brian Eskridge, senior manager for the Microsoft Surface Hub. Pre-orders for the computer begin Wednesday.The company is marketing the Surface Hub as a less expensive, and easier to maintain, replacement for the traditional assortment of office audio-video and computer equipment used in today’s conference rooms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rethinking Centralization

In general, my line of thinking here is this: some things work well when they’re distributed, others work well when they’re centralized. Our bodies have a “central nervous system,” which is tied to a single point of failure (the brain), though our brains turn out to have some redundancy. On the other hand, other systems in our bodies are distributed, such as our reaction to being cut (and bleeding to death). What we need to start doing is thinking through what works well where, and figuring out how to move each one to that specific destination.

Another parallel in this space is what we’re facing now in application development. We like to say that we’re moving towards the cloud — which means thin clients and thick servers. The reality is, though, services are being broken down into microservices and distributed, and a lot of the processing that takes place does so on the client side by code pushed there from the server. In other words, our belief that the cloud “centralizes everything” is an oversimplification.

Taking one step back, we can always build centralized systems that scale to today’s requirements — the challenge is that we don’t know what tomorrow’s Continue reading

Structured Approach to Troubleshooting of L3VPN Networks

With the amount of configuration involved in a typical L3VPN configuration, troubleshooting process can get pretty chaotic, especially in a time-constrained environments like CCIE lab. That’s why it is extremely important to have a well-structured approach to quickly narrow down the potential problem area. I used the below algorithm while preparing for my lab exam. Like most of the networking problems, troubleshooting of L3VPNs can and must be split into two different phases - control plane and data plane. All steps must be done sequentially with each next step relying on the successful verification of all previous steps.

Problem definition

CE-1 (10.0.0.1) can not reach CE-2 (10.0.0.2)

European authorities bust cybercrime gang that hijacked business payments

Police in several European countries arrested 49 suspected members of a gang they say broke into corporate email accounts, using them to divert payments from business customers.The gang operated in Italy, Spain, Poland, the U.K., Belgium and Georgia, according to Eurojust and Europol, the two agencies that coordinated and provided support to the police operation on the ground.The gang’s members, who were mainly from Nigeria, Cameroon and Spain, used malware and social engineering to compromise the computers of various large European companies. They then gained access to corporate email accounts and monitored them for payment-related communications from customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco has an SDN for you

SAN DIEGO -- Cisco is out to prove it has an SDN for everyone.At its Cisco Live conference, the company unveiled offerings to drive programmability across its product line to address the requirements of enterprises, service providers and mega-scale data centers.The additions are to Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) EVPN and NX-OS programmable network options. ACI is targeted at the mass market – commercial, enterprise and public sector customers – while BGP EVPN is aimed at service providers and programmable NX-OS at mega-scale data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco has an SDN for you

SAN DIEGO -- Cisco is out to prove it has an SDN for everyone.At its Cisco Live conference, the company unveiled offerings to drive programmability across its product line to address the requirements of enterprises, service providers and mega-scale data centers.The additions are to Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) EVPN and NX-OS programmable network options. ACI is targeted at the mass market – commercial, enterprise and public sector customers – while BGP EVPN is aimed at service providers and programmable NX-OS at mega-scale data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

vArmour Releases Free Visibility Tool for Data Center Security

Visibility is the first step toward data center security, vArmour reasons.

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, June 10

SpaceX working on satellite network to provide InternetSpaceX is working on a network of micro-satellites to provide Internet access, the company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk confirmed via Twitter. The project is in the early stages and will be announced in two to three months, and its aim is to provide Internet access at a low cost, he said.Do Apple’s deals with music labels break antitrust laws?There were murmurs in advance of the Apple Music debut this week that Apple was using the industry power it wields via iTunes to pressure music labels not to permit any free tier streaming through rivals like Spotify. Now it’s been confirmed that the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut are looking into just that issue, and whether Apple may have run afoul of antitrust law in hammering out its deals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, June 10

Do Apple’s deals with music labels break antitrust laws? There were murmurs in advance of the Apple Music debut this week that Apple was using the industry power it wields via iTunes to pressure music labels not to permit any free tier streaming through rivals like Spotify. Now it’s been confirmed that the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut are looking into just that issue, and whether Apple may have run afoul of antitrust law in hammering out its deals. North Korea threatens U.S. with cyberattacksTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, June 10

Do Apple’s deals with music labels break antitrust laws? There were murmurs in advance of the Apple Music debut this week that Apple was using the industry power it wields via iTunes to pressure music labels not to permit any free tier streaming through rivals like Spotify. Now it’s been confirmed that the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut are looking into just that issue, and whether Apple may have run afoul of antitrust law in hammering out its deals. North Korea threatens U.S. with cyberattacksTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here