Intel is shipping the next generation of Xeon Scalable processors

After almost a year and a half of delays, Intel has begun to ship its 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors, code-named Sapphire Rapids, to customers, and it has set January 10, 2023 as the formal launch date.The launch is a formality because, according to an Intel spokesperson, the new Xeons are already shipping to customers—OEMs—now, but it falls to those OEMs to announce their product release plans.CEO Pat Gelsinger said during the company’s earnings call last week that the company was ramping up production for launch and that he expected the new Xeons to see the fastest ramp to one million units ever.The challenge for Intel wasn’t in design, it was manufacturing. This will be the first generation of chips using Intel 7 fabrication, an advanced 10nm design that took years to get right.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel is shipping the next generation of Xeon Scalable processors

After almost a year and a half of delays, Intel has begun to ship its 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors, code-named Sapphire Rapids, to customers, and it has set January 10, 2023 as the formal launch date.The launch is a formality because, according to an Intel spokesperson, the new Xeons are already shipping to customers—OEMs—now, but it falls to those OEMs to announce their product release plans.CEO Pat Gelsinger said during the company’s earnings call last week that the company was ramping up production for launch and that he expected the new Xeons to see the fastest ramp to one million units ever.The challenge for Intel wasn’t in design, it was manufacturing. This will be the first generation of chips using Intel 7 fabrication, an advanced 10nm design that took years to get right.To read this article in full, please click here

Announcing Networking and Advanced Security Enhancement in NSX 4.0.1.1

We’re thrilled to announce the general availability of VMware NSX 4.0.1.1, another exciting release with updates in networking, security, and operations for private, public, and multi-clouds.

With this release, VMware NSX customers will be able to leverage accelerated NSX networking and security performance, enhanced network observability, and new network monitoring and troubleshooting features for increased flexibility.

NSX 4.0.1.1 will also deliver enhanced threat detection and prevention capabilities, helping customers bolster network defenses to block advanced threats from moving laterally across multi-cloud environments.

Read on to get the details on our latest NSX release.

Distributed Malware Prevention

The NSX Distributed Firewall has added malware detection and prevention support for Linux guest endpoints (VMs). Linux has become the most common operating system across multi-cloud environments, powering more than 78% of the most popular websites. With the recent emergence of more Linux-specific threats, and current malware countermeasures being mostly focused on addressing Windows-based threats, there is an imperative to address the specific security needs of Linux machines. Adding Linux to our prevention solution enables the NSX Distributed Firewall to provide more effective prevention coverage and fewer false positives across multi-cloud environments.

In addition, we expanded the Continue reading

Enhanced NSX Edge and Networking Services in NSX 4.0.1.1

VMware NSX 4.0.1.1 introduces exciting new capabilities and enhancements for virtualized networking and security for private, public, and multi-clouds. Check out the release blog for an overview of the new features.

Among these new features is NSX Gateway Stateful Active/Active Services. This feature delivers a key security enhancement, giving you the full power of the NSX Edge cluster for your services without worrying about bandwidth and CPU limitations. In this blog post, we’ll cover all the terminology you need to know for this new feature, as well as configuration and architecture, and design considerations.

Stateful Active/Active Services

Prior to VMware NSX 4.0.1.0, configuring NSX using any of the variety of NSX services offered by VMware required you to set up NSX Edge Gateways in Active/Standby High Availability mode. Under this configuration, traffic is forwarded through a single (Active) NSX Edge Node. So, when designing the architecture, you needed to be aware of the limits imposed by the Active/Standby mode on the bandwidth and CPU (Central Processing Unit) utilization of the node.

With the NSX 4.0.1.0 release of NSX Stateful Active/Active Services, this consideration no longer applies. This new feature makes it Continue reading

Tech Bytes: Why SASE Is An Architecture, Not A Product (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast, we’ll be investigating Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE, including the current state of the market and how SASE is evolving. We’ll also look at how sponsor Juniper Networks is moving into the SASE space. Our guest is Kate Adam, Sr. Director of Security Product Marketing at Juniper Networks.

The post Tech Bytes: Why SASE Is An Architecture, Not A Product (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Network Break 406: Gluware Adds API Modeling To Network Automation; Arista Revenues Rise

This week's Network Break covers new features in Gluware and Aviatrix, new servers from HPE, and new partner specializations from Cisco. We also cover financial results from Fortinet and Arista and Russian threats against commercial satellites.

The post Network Break 406: Gluware Adds API Modeling To Network Automation; Arista Revenues Rise appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Adventures in Upgrading Netbox

I’ve been using Netbox for a while now, and, frankly, I can’t live without it. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a Source of Truth for your network automation tasks started by Jeremy Stretch. I use it to document my networks (hardware inventory, subnets, physical connections, etc.), which provides my automation tasks a place to pull and push all sorts of information like management IPs, rack locations, power connections, network drops…the list goes on. In better words, your automation tools can ask Netbox what the state of your network is, and send it an update if that tool discovers something different. There are plenty of better places to discuss the benefits of a Souce of Truth, so just do the Googles for it.

My production instance is running Netbox 2.7.6, which is very old. The latest version of Netbox as of today is 3.3.7, so that should tell you how far behind we are. I’ve had mine running for over two years, and, in the meantime, the world has moved forward. If I update the server it’s running on (Ubuntu 20.04), then Netbox breaks. Yes, it’s so far behind Continue reading

3 ways to reach the cloud and keep loss and latency low

Adoption of public cloud IaaS platforms like AWS and Azure, and PaaS and SaaS solutions too, has been driven in part by the simplicity of consuming the services: connect securely over the public internet and start spinning up resources. But when it comes to communicating privately with those resources, there are challenges to address and choices to be made.The simplest option is to use the internet—preferably an internet VPN—to connect to the enterprise’s virtual private clouds (VPC) or their equivalent from company data centers, branches, or other clouds.However, using the internet can create problems for modern applications that depend on lots of network communications among different services and microservices. Or rather, the people using those applications can run into problems with performance, thanks to latency and packet loss.To read this article in full, please click here

Mashing Up CXL And OpenCAPI For Shared Disaggregated Memory

The industry is impatient for disaggregated and shared memory for a lot of reasons, and many system architects don’t want to wait until PCI-Express 6.0 or 7.0 transports are in the field and the CXL 3.0 and beyond protocols that ride on it to reach out to external memory have been tweaked to do proper sharing across servers.

Mashing Up CXL And OpenCAPI For Shared Disaggregated Memory was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Continuity is Not Recovery

It was a long weekend for me but it wasn’t quite as long as it could have been. The school district my son attends is in the middle of a ransomware attack. I got an email from them on Friday afternoon telling us to make sure that any district-owned assets are powered off until further notice to keep our home networks from being compromised. That’s pretty sound advice so we did it immediately.

I know that the folks working on the problem spent the whole weekend trying to clean it up and make sure there isn’t any chance of getting reinfected. However, I also wondered how that would impact school this week. The growing amount of coursework that happens online or is delivered via computer is large enough that going from that to a full stop of no devices is probably jarring. That got me to thinking once more about the difference between continuity and recovery

Keeping The Lights On

We talk about disaster recovery a lot. Backups of any kind are designed to get back what was lost. Whether it’s a natural disaster or a security incident you want to be able to recover things back to the way Continue reading

Adventures in Upgrading Netbox

I’ve been using Netbox for a while now, and, frankly, I can’t live without it. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a Source of Truth for your network automation tasks started by Jeremy Stretch. I use it to document my networks (hardware inventory, subnets, physical connections, etc.), which provides my automation tasks a place to pull and push all sorts of information like management IPs, rack locations, power connections, network drops…the list goes on. In better words, your automation tools can ask Netbox what the state of your network is, and send it an update if that tool discovers something different. There are plenty of better places to discuss the benefits of a Souce of Truth, so just do the Googles for it.

My production instance is running Netbox 2.7.6, which is very old. The latest version of Netbox as of today is 3.3.7, so that should tell you how far behind we are. I’ve had mine running for over two years, and, in the meantime, the world has moved forward. If I update the server it’s running on (Ubuntu 20.04), then Netbox breaks. Yes, it’s so far behind Continue reading

Find and delete ServiceNow records en masse with the updated Ansible Content Collection

Have you ever had to query and remove a long list of ServiceNow records? Yeah, neither have I until recently. Nobody broke into my instance, and this isn't a one-time operation, I just happen to maintain an instance that we use to test our Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for ServiceNow ITSM

To set up the environment, I use a demo system and another workflow to create a random user and then allow a learner to progress through some challenges using full Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform deployments and a shared ServiceNow instance. Because this is a real live instance, there's no telling what sort of records learners will create. For this reason, I recently had to develop some automation to clean up records created by these demo user accounts.

Although my use-case was to clean up demo user accounts, this could just as well have been a critical ServiceNow instance that had erroneous records that needed cleaning up. This Collection can be leveraged to create, update, modify, or delete just about anything on ServiceNow.

If you’re following along, make sure you install a version of the servicenow.itsm Collection equal to or greater than 2.0.0 Continue reading