Cisco packing lots into new Catalyst Ethernet switch

Cisco next month will unveil an Ethernet switch designed for campus aggregation but in a space saving form factor that’s smaller than previous models.The Catalyst 6840-X is a 2RU device featuring up to 40 10G Ethernet ports and two 40G uplinks. It will include all of the software feature sets of the Catalyst 6800 line, which was introduced two years ago, and the 12+-year-old Catalyst 6500. The Catalyst 6840-X comes in four configurations: 16x10G, 32x10G, 24x10G with two 40G uplinks, and 40x10G with two 40G uplinks. All switches are Layer 2/3 IPv4/v6 devices with MPLS, VPLS, 256K IPv4 routes, 512K NetFlow flows, large buffers, TrustSec Security Group Tags, MACSec, LISP and support for Catalyst 6800 Instant Access switch clients.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EMC hopes to extend ViPR Controller’s reach with open-source release

EMC will release its ViPR Controller storage automation and control software as an open-source project, letting third parties develop their own services and applications on top of it and possibly make ViPR work with more parts of enterprise storage environments.The open-source release, called Project CoprHD, is set to go up on GitHub next month. It will be licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 so vendors, developers and others can contribute to the code. Project CoprHD will have essentially all the capabilities of ViPR Controller, which EMC will continue to sell in a commercial version that includes service and support.ViPR Controller is intended to turn multiple storage systems from EMC and other vendors into a single virtual pool and automate the provisioning of data capacity to applications based on policies. Among other things, it can work with most storage platforms from EMC, plus major hardware and software products from several other vendors, including HP, NetApp, HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) and Microsoft, according to EMC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sprint hangs on to third-largest carrier position ahead of T-Mobile

Sprint held on -- barely -- as the nation's third-largest carrier in the first quarter of 2015, with T-Mobile continuing in fourth place.Sprint said today it had 57.1 million total connections to its network, compared to 56.8 million for T-Mobile, as reported last week.T-Mobile was expected to edge ahead of Sprint, given T-Mobile's aggressive growth in the past year.Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure said in a conference call that T-Mobile CEO John Legere had spoken "prematurely" in statements he made last week about T-Mobile's improvement compared to Sprint.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 12 most powerful Internet of Things companies Claure called out Sprint's addition of 1.2 million net customer in the quarter, up from 967,000 in the prior quarter, and net losses of 383,000 in the same quarter in 2014. He said those additions were the highest in nearly three years, while churn (losses) among postpaid customers dropped to 1.84% and network performance improved, "all of which will position the company for profitable growth."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel’s 18-core Xeon chips tuned for machine learning, analytics

Smaller servers are taking over data centers, but Intel believes the future is also bright for powerful big-iron servers, thanks to companies’ embrace of machine learning, which requires a lot of horsepower to process complex algorithms and large data sets.With its new top-line Xeon E7 v3 server chips based on the Haswell microarchitecture, Intel hopes to capitalize on the demand for this type of server. With up to 18 CPU cores, the chips are Intel’s fastest, and designed for databases, ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems and analytics related to machine learning.Complex machine learning models can’t be distributed over the cloud or a set of smaller hyperscale servers in a data center. Instead, a more powerful cluster of servers is needed to run deep-learning systems, where the larger number of cores could power more precise analysis of oceans of data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

French lawmakers take first step toward gathering all communications metadata

French lawmakers have taken a first step toward allowing real-time surveillance of Internet and mobile phone use in France.Following attacks on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a supermarket in Paris in January, the government rushed out a bill that will allow French intelligence services to collect communications metadata on the entire country’s phone calls and Internet traffic, in some cases installing their own equipment on operators’ networks. On Tuesday, the French National Assembly approved the bill by 438 votes to 86.The proposed surveillance measures have encountered opposition from many quarters: Internet service providers, civil liberties groups, and even an association of motorcyclists, concerned about the potential for government monitoring of lobby groups.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

French lawmakers take first step toward gathering all communications metadata

French lawmakers have taken a first step toward allowing real-time surveillance of Internet and mobile phone use in France.Following attacks on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a supermarket in Paris in January, the government rushed out a bill that will allow French intelligence services to collect communications metadata on the entire country’s phone calls and Internet traffic, in some cases installing their own equipment on operators’ networks. On Tuesday, the French National Assembly approved the bill by 438 votes to 86.The proposed surveillance measures have encountered opposition from many quarters: Internet service providers, civil liberties groups, and even an association of motorcyclists, concerned about the potential for government monitoring of lobby groups.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Understanding NPV: Part 1 of a 2-part Series

N-Port Virtualization (NPV), and N-port ID Virtualization (NPIV) have been around for quite some time now. Enhancements have been made to the traditional NPV and NPIV implementations, making it more convenient for unified fabric topologies (which is what we will be discussing today). This blog, part 1 in a 2-part series, will be discussing the ‘fcoe-npv’ implementation of NPV/NPIV, while the next blog will be focused on the traditional implementation.

NPV and NPIV were created as a method in which we could add additional switches (i.e. port density), to a given fabric, without consuming additional domain-id’s, or adding to the administrative burden of a growing SAN (managing zoning, domain-id’s, principle switch elections, FSPF routing, etc…). A lot of this concern stemmed from the fact that the Fibre Channel standard limits us to 239 usable domain id’s. Essentially 8-bits, or the most significant byte in the Fibre Channel ID (FCID), is reserved for this domain-id. This byte is what is used within FSPF protocol to route traffic throughout a Fibre Channel fabric. While this gives us 256 addresses, only 239 are usable, as some are reserved. Beyond this, many vendors restrict us too a much smaller number of domain-id’s on Continue reading

Telerik pitches new framework for building Android, iOS, Windows apps

With Telerik’s open source framework NativeScript, programmers with expertise in JavaScript have a new option for cross-platform mobile app development. The resulting applications will be able to run directly on Android, iOS and Windows.After launching a beta in March, Progress Software-owned Telerik on Tuesday launched the first generally available version of NativeScript. The company describes it as a native framework that lets developers build apps for Android, iOS and later this year, Windows phones, with much of the same code. The choice of JavaScript as the underlying language wasn’t a coincidence.“We think it’s one of the most universal languages and skill sets out there,” said Todd Anglin, vice president of product management and marketing at Telerik.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Present Impact of Open Networking & Whitebox Switching

Dell is all about open networking, and several whitebox vendors had their wares on display at Interop. IP Infusion has released OcNOS, an open networking operating system with a rich feature set right out of the gate. Ethernet switching continues to change. If you are Yet Another Cisco Buyer, do you care? I think you should. There are real dollars at stake. Eventually, it gets silly and/or irresponsible to spend money on Cadillacs.

Juniper EX4550. EX1113. EX063. What?

Juniper EX4550

I came across some weird behavior (I think) in Junos recently. Nothing major, but an annoyance nonetheless.

Juniper EX4550

Let’s check out some statistics on this beautiful looking EX4550 stack, shall we?

john@EX4550> show pfe statistics bridge

Slot 0

PFE:                         0
----------------------------------------
----  Ingress Counters ----
-- Set0 --
Received:            654383803
VLAN Filtered:               0
Security Filtered:           0
Other Discards:            324
-- Set1 --
Received:            654383797
VLAN Filtered:               0
Security Filtered:           0
Other Discards:            324
[...]

Oh dear look, 324 “Other” discards on my EX4550. I sure hope they aren’t incrementing. Let’s issue the command again and check if the 324 figure has increased?

{master:0}
john@EX4550> show pfe statistics bridge

Slot 0

PFE:                         0
----------------------------------------
----  Ingress Counters ----
-- Set0 --
Received:               913272
VLAN Filtered:               0
Security Filtered:           0
Other Discards:              0
-- Set1 --
Received:               913267
VLAN Filtered:               0
Security Filtered:           0
Other Discards:              0
[...]

No it hasn’t. In fact it has mysteriously reset itself along with all the other PFE statistics. That is, well, suboptimal to say the least.

Countaz

It’s probably a known bug, though it’s not important enough for me to go look it up. Maybe it’s even intentional (though for the life of Continue reading

Zuckerberg’s zeal for free Internet shows in Internet.org video

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn't an evangelical preacher, but his latest video promoting the new Internet.org Platform is filled with a missionary zeal for free basic Internet for the 4 billion people worldwide without access.The nearly seven-minute video is also partly an ethical appeal by Zuckerberg to the tech community to put those without basic Internet service before their interest in "the intellectual purity of technology."Even though the appeal is evidently heartfelt, almost spiritual, analysts noted that Facebook, the corporation, stands to benefit ultimately from its free basic Internet message.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Do you need a container-specific Linux distribution?

You've always been able to run containers on a variety of operating systems: Zones on Solaris; Jails on BSD; Docker on Linux and now Windows Server; OpenVZ on Linux, and so on. As Docker in particular and containers in general explode in popularity, operating system companies are taking a different tack. They're now arguing that to make the most of containers you need a skinny operating system to go with them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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