How an outsourcing contract can boost IT service provider performance

IT outsourcing customers are increasingly looking for their service providers not just to cut technology costs or improve process efficiency, but to deliver business results. But getting that kind of business value from IT suppliers has proven to be a challenge.The secret getting technology providers on board with delivering innovation may actually be the terms of the IT outsourcing deals. “Most IT services buyers seek compliance, not improved supplier performance” from their contracts, says Brad Peterson, partner in the Chicago office of law firm Mayer Brown. “That’s all that’s necessary for most it services categories. However, IT buyers can create substantially more value by using incentives to deliver innovation, analytics, data security, mobility, cloud and other fast-changing it services categories.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Technology Short Take #48

Welcome to Technology Short Take #48, another installation in my irregularly-published series that collects links, articles, and thoughts from around the web. This time around, the content is a bit heavier on cloud management and applications/operating systems, but still lots of good content all the way around (I hope, anyway).

Networking

  • Matt Oswalt recently wrapped up his 3-part “DevOps for Networking” series. I referenced part 1 of the series back in TST #46, and parts 2 and 3 are just as good as the first one. Part 2 talks about source-driven configuration for NetOps (which discusses the use of Git and Gerrit to manage network device configurations), while Part 3 walks through a continuous integration pipeline for networking (which adds Jenkins to the mix described in part 2). Helpful and informative content, no question about it.
  • The NFV discussion seems to be heating up a bit, particularly the “networking” part of NFV. Craig Matsumoto of SDxCentral recently published a piece on NFV performance; that article was based largely on a blog post by Martin Taylor of Metaswitch found here. The key takeaway is that NFV networking performance requirements are something that projects like OpenStack and Open vSwitch (OVS) Continue reading

Cumulus Networks CEO JR Rivers on what’s hot for Open Computing in 2015

Over the past few years of blogging, many of my most popular posts have been interviews with industry thought leaders. To that end, I have started a new interview series I call 'the catch-up,’ where I will catch up with interesting thought leaders in the industry.This is the first interview in the series, featuring Cumulus Networks CEO JR Rivers. Over the next few weeks, I will post interviews with Martin Casado, David Meyer, Rob Hirschfeld, Dan Pitt, and many more. In the past I have only posted the text from interviews; now I have also started recording the interviews and will post them on my YouTube channel, OpenNetworking.TV.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Would you buy a smartwatch from a watch company?

It's becoming the biggest question in wearable computing – will the future of smartwatches be determined by tech companies making watches or by watchmakers adding technology?Last week, Swiss watch giant Swatch revealed that it's planning to release its own smartwatch within the next few months. Known for cheap, colorful designs, Swatch is hardly a high-end luxury brand, though it owns a few of those (including Tissot, which has some smart-ish watches in its line).According to what Swatch CEO Nick Hayek said to Bloomberg, the device will communicate via NFC and won't have to be charged (most likely powered by a replaceable watch battery). It will also support mobile payments and work with Windows and Android smartphones (no word on iOS).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BGP Communities

BGP Communities has to be one of my favorite features added to the BGP protocol.  As you should know by now, BGP passes several attributes between peers that help influence the BGP best path selection algorithm. One of these is the BGP Community attribute. Think of this as another tag placed on the route advertisement that can give us additional information.

This tag is formatted as 32bit value that is typically displayed in two 16 bit parts. The most typical, and most widely accepted best practices treat these as your Autonomous System Number (ASN), followed by a 16 bit attribute. For example, if your ASN was 65248 and you wanted to tag this route with the number 666, you would set something like 65248:666.

As for the second half of our tag, this number is arbitrary. BGP Communities are a transitive attribute that is completely optional. This means that BGP treats these tags as purely information, and that it is up to the network engineer to decide what these values mean, and what to do with them.

RFC 1997 defines some well known communities that have global significance. These values and their operations should be respected by any community Continue reading

The security implications of IoT: A roundtable discussion with four experts

The Internet of Things (IoT) will usher in a new era of network intelligence and automation, but its arrival raises a host of serious security questions. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix explores the topic in depth with four experts: * Marc Blackmer,
 Product Marketing Manager, Industry Solutions, Cisco * Ari Juels, Professor in the Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech (formerly Chief Scientist at RSA) * Patrick Tague, Associate Research Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Information Networking Institute, and Associate Director, Information Networking Institute Carnegie MellonTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

My First Week at Cumulus Networks

From the first time I spoke with someone at Cumulus Networks, I realized I’d come across something spectacular. My interviews started with a “screening” call from Nat Morris, but it didn’t start with any of those awkward “tell me about yourself” ice-breaker questions. Nat immediately began the conversation with a detailed description of the Cumulus Workbench, his plans for where to take it, and what I thought about them. For someone like me, being able to talk candidly about a concrete project made it easy for me to see myself in the position, and I felt like I was being treated as if I were already a part of the company. This conversation left such a powerful impression that it literally carried me through the entire interview process.

I started on the day before the RDU team moved from the Apex office to the new office in Cary. All of the furniture was gone, everyone was huddled at folding card tables, and I ended up sitting on the floor in another room since we didn’t have enough chairs even after borrowing some from the restaurant next door! The team assured me that it wasn’t a bait-and-switch by showing me Continue reading

The Packet Flow Duality

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Quantum physics is a funny thing. It seeks to solve all the problems in the physical world by breaking everything down into the most basic unit possible. That works for a lot of the observable universe. But when it comes to light, quantum physics has issues. Thanks to experiments and observations, most scientists understand that light isn’t just a wave and it’s not just a collection of particles either. It’s both. This concept is fundamental to understanding how light behaves. But can it also explain how data behaves?

Moving Things Around

We tend to think about data as a series of discrete data units being pushed along a path. While these units might be frames, packets, or datagrams depending on the layer of the OSI model that you are operating at, the result is still the same. A single unit is evaluated for transmission. A brilliant post from Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) sums up the forwarding thusly:

  • Frames being forwarded by MAC address lookup occur at layer 2 (switching)
  • Packets being forwarded by IP address lookup occur at layer 3 (routing)
  • Data being forwarded at higher levels is a stream of packets (flow forwarding)

It’s simple when you think Continue reading

Verizon, T-Mobile and SK Telecom have the hots for LTE on Wi-Fi spectrum

In the hunt for ways to improve coverage and increase cellular speeds, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile in the U.S., and SK Telecom of South Korea, are considering using LTE over 5GHz, which today is used by Wi-Fi networks.The operators have all taken part in tests conducted by telecommunications equipment vendor Ericsson in Canada and Sweden, Ericsson said on Tuesday. The underlying technology is still under development and hasn’t been standardized, but Ericsson is able to reach 450Mbps while at the same time playing nice with Wi-Fi devices in its labs.Of the three operators, T-Mobile in the U.S. has been most vocal in its support for the technology. It increases peak and average data speeds to smartphones and other devices with reduced packet latencies, CTO Neville Ray said in a blog post last month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone still king of enterprise mobile as usage skyrockets, study finds

Apple’s iPhones and iPads are still the most-used mobile devices in the enterprise, even as the market expands at high speed, according to a Citrix mobile analytics report released this morning. The study found that the total number of enterprise mobile devices in use rose by 72% over the course of the past year. A little less than two out of three of every business-focused mobile device runs iOS. Apple’s numbers are highest in Asia and the Americas, at 67% each, and slightly lower in Europe and the Middle East, at 57%. + ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD:Microsoft CEO Nadella joins Ballmer and Gates in making silly predictions + 18 ways to get the most out of Android 5.0 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone still king of enterprise mobile as usage skyrockets, study finds

Apple’s iPhones and iPads are still the most-used mobile devices in the enterprise, even as the market expands at high speed, according to a Citrix mobile analytics report released this morning. The study found that the total number of enterprise mobile devices in use rose by 72% over the course of the past year. A little less than two out of three of every business-focused mobile device runs iOS. Apple’s numbers are highest in Asia and the Americas, at 67% each, and slightly lower in Europe and the Middle East, at 57%. + ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD:Microsoft CEO Nadella joins Ballmer and Gates in making silly predictions + 18 ways to get the most out of Android 5.0 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, February 10

Qualcomm pays up to end investigation in ChinaThe Chinese goverment has fined chip-maker Qualcomm about US$975 billion for abusing its dominant position in the market, including overcharging local mobile device manufacturers. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips go into many smartphones, and its wireless technology is licensed for use in a majority of 3G, 4G and LTE modems; renegotiated deals with Chinese handset makers should allow them to offer even cheaper smartphones to undercut competitors at the low end of that market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, February 10

Qualcomm pays up to end investigation in ChinaThe Chinese goverment has fined chip-maker Qualcomm about US$975 billion for abusing its dominant position in the market, including overcharging local mobile device manufacturers. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips go into many smartphones, and its wireless technology is licensed for use in a majority of 3G, 4G and LTE modems; renegotiated deals with Chinese handset makers should allow them to offer even cheaper smartphones to undercut competitors at the low end of that market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HTIRW: The IETF Draft Process

In our deeper investigations of the IETF as a “sample standards body” in this (apparently forever running) series on how the Internet really works, let’s take a look at the IETF standards process. This is a rather sanitized, informal review — I may leave out some steps, or describe things in a way that doesn’t […]

Author information

Russ White

Principal Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White has scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, nibbled and noodled at a lot of networks, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about — or don't really care about. You can find Russ at 'net Work, the Internet Protocol Journal, and his author page on Amazon.
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The post HTIRW: The IETF Draft Process appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.

Kubernetes 101 – The constructs

In our last post, we got our base lab up and running.  In this post, I’d like to walk us through the four main constructs that Kubernetes uses.  Kubernetes defines these constructs through configuration files which can be either YAML or JSON.  Let’s walk through each construct so we can define it, show possible configurations, and lastly an example of how it works on our lab cluster.

Pods
Pods are the basic deployment unit in Kubernetes.  A pod consists of one or more containers.  Recall that Kubernetes is a container cluster management solution.  It concerns itself with workload placement not individual container placement.  Kubernetes defines a pod as a group of ‘closely related containers’.  Some people would go as far as saying a pod is a single application.  I’m hesitant of that definition since it it seems too broad.  I think what it really boils down to is grouping containers together that make sense.  From a network point of view, a pod has a single IP address.  Multiple containers that run in a pod all share that common network name space.  This also means that containers Continue reading

As Wi-Fi calls come to smartphones, networks get ready to carry them

Wi-Fi may carry many voice calls within the next few years, but the technology required to make those calls is still young in some ways.Mobile subscribers have been talking and doing video chats over Wi-Fi for a long time using Internet-based services such as Skype. Now carriers are offering ways to call up friends and family over wireless LANs using their regular phone numbers.Wi-Fi calling made a splash last year when the iPhone 6 came out with the capability, though a number of Android and other devices also have it. T-Mobile USA and Sprint both allow Wi-Fi calling with selected smartphones. AT&T and Verizon, as well as EE in the UK, plan to follow.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco ISLB Issue

Usually people are blogging on a certain topic because they want to share they knowledge with a certain protocol or product. Today I ll take another approach with that fact and I will actually do the exact opposite. I have an issue with ISLB which allows load balancing for my iSCSI sessions. Today I will elaborate […]
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