ECMP visibility with Cumulus Linux

Demo: Implementing the Big Data Design Guide in the Cumulus Workbench is a great demonstration of the power of zero touch provisioning and automation. When the switches and servers boot they automatically pick up their operating systems and configurations for the complex Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) routed network shown in the diagram.

Topology discovery with Cumulus Linux looked at an alternative Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG) configuration and shows how to extract the configuration and monitor traffic on the network using sFlow and Fabric View.

The paper Hedera: Dynamic Flow Scheduling for Data Center Networks describes the impact of colliding flows on effective ECMP cross sectional bandwidth. The paper gives an example which demonstrates that effective cross sectional bandwidth can be reduced by a factor of between 20% to 60%, depending on the number of simultaneous flows per host.

This article uses the workbench to demonstrate the effect of large "Elephant" flow collisions on network throughput. The following script running on each of the servers uses the iperf tool to generate pairs of overlapping Elephant flows:

cumulus@server1:~$ while true; do iperf -c 10.4.2.2 -t 20; sleep 20; done
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.4.2.2, TCP port  Continue reading

Facebook acquires The Find e-commerce search engine

Facebook has acquired The Find, a nine-year-old company with a search engine that indexes products across thousands of e-commerce sites.The deal, the value of which was not disclosed, was announced in a post on The Find’s website.“Key members of our team are joining the company and will be working hard to integrate our technology to make the ads you see on Facebook every day better and more relevant to you,” the company said.That probably means the ads Facebook users see will be more relevant to products they’ve been browsing and buying online, perhaps highlighting local retailers. One of The Find’s features is that it attempts to mix online and local stores and says its results are based on “your social profile.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook acquires The Find e-commerce search engine

State Dept. to shut down email system to clean out malware

The U.S. Department of State will shut down its unclassified email system for a short time to clean up malware that may have resided there since late last year.The State Department said Friday it has scheduled a planned outage of the unclassified email system to make security improvements and to respond to “activity of concern” on the network.The State Department’s unclassified email system was compromised by a suspected state-sponsored hacking campaign, possibly originating in Russia, according to media reports from November.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MacBook makes a case for wireless docking — but too soon

The new MacBook is supposed to usher in a wire-free future for laptops, but Apple left out technologies that could have saved road warriors a few ungainly wires.“The only intelligent vision for the future of the notebook is one without wires, where you don’t have to plug up cables to connect to things,” Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller said as he introduced the MacBook on Monday.But while he crowed about the IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 built into the laptop, Schiller never mentioned that Apple passed on emerging technologies to make a USB connection over the air or wirelessly link peripherals at 7Gbps (bits per second).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s solar-drone Internet tests about to take off

Google’s ambitious plans to provide Internet access to remote areas via solar-powered drones are getting ready to take off.Titan Aerospace, the drone-maker acquired last year by Google to help realize the project, recently applied for and received two licenses from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to run tests over the next six months.The licenses, which are valid from March 8 until September 5, don’t give away much because Google has asked the FCC to keep many of the details confidential for commercial reasons, but they reveal the tests will take place inside a 1,345 square kilometer (520 square mile) area to the east of Albuquerque. The area includes the town of Moriarty, where Titan Aerospace is headquartered and conducts its research and development work.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PlexxiPulse—Arrow IoT Immersions in Boston 3/26

Last week, we were in Santa Clara, California for Arrow Electronics’ Internet of Things Immersions conference. We demonstrated our big data fabrics, learned about Arrow’s #FiveYearsOut philosophy and conversed with innovators and thought leaders from businesses, government agencies and academia. We will be exhibiting at the last installment of the Immersions conference in Boston on March 26 at the Hynes Convention Center. Come see Plexxi in action and to talk with our team about the next era of IT. You can register to attend here. We can’t wait to see you!

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

Channelnomics: SDN and SDS key for CIOs – Walsh
By Jessica Meek
Software defined networking (SDN) and software defined storage (SDS) are key concerns for chief information officers (CIOs), delegates at the ITEX 2015 National Conference and Expo in Fort Lauderdale, FL heard today. In his keynote address, Lawrence M. Walsh, CEO and chief analyst at The 2112 Group, said this was a top concern for CIOs he speaks with. “CIOs consistently tell me that what’s getting them excited is SDN and SDS. This is the ability to Continue reading

How the Apple Watch is made

Apple products are highly touted for being extremely sleek and well-designed. While some companies opt to use cheaper materials in an effort to preserve the bottom line, Apple has a penchant for sparing no expense when it comes to manufacturing.As a result, Apple not only opts to use the best materials available, but it's also willing to expend millions upon millions of dollars on advanced machinery and tooling processes that competitors either a) can't afford to use themselves or b) simply don't want to. Consequently, the build quality on Apple products is typically best in class.Apple's next big game-changing product is the Apple Watch, slated for release on April 24. During Apple's recent media event, the company, as it's prone to do, showcased a video detailing certain aspects of the Apple Watch manufacturing process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel to ship built-to-order Xeon D chips in second half

Intel will start offering custom chips based on the Xeon D starting in the second half of this year, making it easier to tailor servers to process specific workloads.Intel this week announced Xeon D chips for servers, storage and networking, but the four- and eight-core chips have a fixed set of components and features. The built-to-order chips later this year will be tailored to customer specifications, and to needs in storage, networking and web serving.For example, Intel will be able to customize chips to include components such as FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are reprogrammable chips used for specific tasks. For example, Microsoft uses FPGAs in servers to boost the accuracy of search results in Bing. Bringing FPGAs inside Xeon D could make the chip more versatile.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU ministers OK new cross-border data protection plan, sparking criticism

Ministers of European Union countries have agreed on a new plan to deal with cross-border privacy cases. Companies and a variety of critics, though, have called the proposal a mess.The plan, at least originally, was supposed to put in place a “one-stop-shop” mechanism that would make it easier for businesses and citizens to deal with privacy-related complaints. The idea of a streamlined approach to resolving privacy issues is a key pillar of EU data-protection reform and member states agreed on a version of such a plan on Friday, said Vra Jourová, European Commissioner for Justice during a press conference.At the moment, companies operating in the EU like Google, Facebook and Apple can be held responsible for privacy issues by national data protection authorities (DPAs). In Google’s case, for instance, this has led to multiple simultaneous investigations into the privacy policy it introduced in 2012. Enforcement actions related to various complaints have been taken in several EU countries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Analysis: CloudFlare Keyless SSL Scales Down Internet Connections

Providing a web application on the Internet can be a risky business. DDOS attacks are commonly exceeding 40 Gigabits per second of data, crackers are web crawling the Internet looking for vulnerabilities and much more. As a result, the data centre Internet connection is scaled for a worst case scenario and not for customer need. […]

The post Analysis: CloudFlare Keyless SSL Scales Down Internet Connections appeared first on EtherealMind.

Why I Love Docker… and Why You’ll Love it Too

About Me John Willis joined docker from the recent Socketplane acquisition. John is one of the founding members of the core Devopsdays team and was an early executive of both Chef and Enstratius (sold to Dell). A little history… In … Continued

Why joining APs to a Controller Across a NAT Needs Special Configurations

Many wireless engineers know that having a lightweight AP join up to a controller across a NAT requires some extra configuration. But many don’t understand why it needs the configuration. This article will talk about what the NAT is, why it causes a problem for the normal join process, and what the configuration changes do to make things work.

What is NAT and where do we see it in the wireless world?

NAT stands for Network Address Translation, and it does pretty much what the name implies. It translates addresses from their original values to something new. Let’s take a look at a classic wireless example.

Let’s say I have an office Extend AP (OEAP) in my house, and I want it to join the WLC in my company’s DMZ. But I don’t want to actually configure a public IP on my WLC. This is where the NAT comes into play.

In the image above, the OEAP talks through the firewall in order to talk to the DMZ WLC. In order for the AP to talk to the WLC, it has to target a public IP because it needs to communicate across the Internet. So if the WLC itself doesn’t Continue reading

iPexpert’s Newest “CCIE Wall of Fame” Additions 3/13/2015

Please join us in congratulating the following iPexpert client’s who have passed their CCIE lab!

This Week’s CCIE Success Stories

Celso Akira Myasaki, CCIE #47386 (Data Center)
David Ratcliffe, CCIE #47463 (Wireless)
Frederik Schon, CCIE #47321 (Wireless)
JP Cedeno, CCIE #47408 (Routing & Switching)
Sandeep Choudhary, CCIE #47462 (Wireless)

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!

Digital transformation requires a different approach to IT

The digitization of information is impacting businesses faster than ever before. It seems every week a new company pops up and disrupts the status quo. Think of how fast Uber has disrupted the taxicab industry or how rapidly Airbnb is reshaping hospitality. Another good example is how Square has enabled point of sale to be offered on low-cost mobile devices instead of having to pay thousands of dollars for proprietary systems with long installation times.Business disruption used to take decades to happen. Consider how Walmart changed the face of retail over a 20-year period. This was considered fast at the time, but now think of how the companies I mentioned above seemingly changed their industry in just a few years. How is this possible? Well, businesses like Square, Airbnb, and Uber were born in the digital era, where agility is the norm. A traditional retailer using legacy systems can take months or even years to change direction.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Don’t trust other people’s USB flash drives, they could fry your laptop

Have you ever heard stories about malicious USB thumb drives frying laptops and thought they were far fetched? An electronics engineer heard them too, and then set out to create a prototype.The “USB Killer” device was created by a do-it-yourself hardware enthusiast who described his project, complete with pictures and technical details, on a Russian blogging platform in February. An English-language version was posted on a different site earlier this week.The malicious USB thumb drive uses an inverting DC-to-DC converter to draw power from the computer’s USB port in order to charge a capacitor bank to -110 Volts (negative voltage). The power is then sent back into the USB interface via a transistor and the process is repeated in a loop.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oldest dot-com address sits sadly underused 30 years after its historic registration

Someone had to go first, so on March 15, 1985, Lisp computer maker Symbolics, Inc., registered the Internet’s first dot-com address: Symbolics.com.Sunday will mark the 30th anniversary of that registration.The Cambridge-headquartered company went out of business about a decade ago (though remnants live on) and in August 2009 the Symbolics.com address was sold for an undisclosed sum to XF.com Investments, whose CEO Aron Meystedt said in a press release: “For us to own the first domain is very special to our company, and we feel blessed for having the ability to obtain this unique property."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This isn’t your father’s enterprise software

When Patrick Benson joined Ovation Brands back in September 2013, he was given a tall order: modernize an array of legacy IT systems that could no longer keep up with the restaurant-chain conglomerate’s business processes.“I was strapped to a rocket and shot out of a cannon,” said Benson, the company’s CIO. “My job was to figure out what tools were needed.”Originally founded in 1983 under the name Old Country Buffet, Ovation had grown considerably over the years to comprise more than 300 restaurants in 35 states, operating under brands including Tahoe Joe’s Famous Steakhouse and Ryan’s.“We were conducting business in a much different way that was better and faster than our systems could keep up with,” Benson explained.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This isn’t your father’s enterprise software

UK traffic diverted through Ukraine

On the heels of the BGP leak yesterday that briefly impaired Google services around the world, comes another routing incident that impacted some other important Internet services.

Beginning on Saturday, Ukrainian telecom provider, Vega, began announcing 14 British Telecom (BT) routes, resulting in the redirection of Internet traffic through Ukraine for a handful of British Telecom customers. Early yesterday morning, Vega announced another 167 BT prefixes for 1.5 hours resulting in the rerouting of additional traffic destined for some of BT’s customers, including the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, the “organization responsible for the design, manufacture and support of warheads for the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent.”

Background

In early 2013, Ukrainian provider Vega (AS12883) became a reseller of BT services, but prior to Saturday had never announced any BT routes. Then, in the middle of a weekend night in Europe (02:37 UTC on Saturday, March 7^th), Vega began announcing 14 prefixes typically announced by AS2856 of BT. These prefixes are listed below.
109.234.168.0/21 Thales Transport and Security Ltd (Barnet, GB) 109.234.169.0/24 Thales Transport and Security Ltd (Ealing, GB) 144.87.142.0/24 Royal Mail Group Limited (Sheffield, GB) 144.87.143.0/24 Royal Mail Group Limited (Chesterfield, GB) 147.182.214.0/24 Black & Veatch (Manchester, GB) 193.113.245.0/24 BT - 21CN (GB) 193.221.55.0/24 Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget SCA (GB) 193. Continue reading

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