Network Break 412: IT Spending, ChatGPT, Cloud Repatriation And Other 2023 IT Speculations

Take a Network Break! For our first show of 2023 we skip the news to spend some time speculating on technologies and trends that may influence IT and networking in the coming year, including the influence of AI, machine learning, and ChatGPT in tech; data center network automation; cloud repatriation; and more.

The post Network Break 412: IT Spending, ChatGPT, Cloud Repatriation And Other 2023 IT Speculations appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Supermicro launches Arm-powered servers

Supermicro is the latest OEM to offer Arm-based servers with the launch of its Mt. Hamilton platform. The new servers will be sold under the MegaDC brand name and run the Altra line of Arm-based CPUs from Ampere Computing.While the servers can be used on-premises, at the edge, or in the cloud, Supermicro is emphasizing a cloud-performance angle. The Mt. Hamilton platform is designed to target cloud-native applications, such as video-on-demand, IaaS, databases, dense VDI, and telco edge, and it addresses specific cloud-native workload objectives, such as performance per watt and very low latency responses.The Mt. Hamilton platform is modular and supports a variety of storage and PCI-Express configurations. It includes support for up to four double-width GPUs or two dozen 2.5-inch U.2 NVM-Express SSDs. For networking, the motherboards use Nvidia’s ConnectX4 SmartNICs. The systems are available in 1U and 2U single-socket configurations, supporting up to 4TB of memory.To read this article in full, please click here

Supermicro launches Arm-powered servers

Supermicro is the latest OEM to offer Arm-based servers with the launch of its Mt. Hamilton platform. The new servers will be sold under the MegaDC brand name and run the Altra line of Arm-based CPUs from Ampere Computing.While the servers can be used on-premises, at the edge, or in the cloud, Supermicro is emphasizing a cloud-performance angle. The Mt. Hamilton platform is designed to target cloud-native applications, such as video-on-demand, IaaS, databases, dense VDI, and telco edge, and it addresses specific cloud-native workload objectives, such as performance per watt and very low latency responses.The Mt. Hamilton platform is modular and supports a variety of storage and PCI-Express configurations. It includes support for up to four double-width GPUs or two dozen 2.5-inch U.2 NVM-Express SSDs. For networking, the motherboards use Nvidia’s ConnectX4 SmartNICs. The systems are available in 1U and 2U single-socket configurations, supporting up to 4TB of memory.To read this article in full, please click here

How to Use Time-Stamped Data to Reduce Network Downtime 

Increased regulations and emerging technologies forced telecommunications companies to evolve quickly in recent years. These organizations’ engineers and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams must use technology to improve performance, reliability and service uptime. Learn how WideOpenWest challenges that vary depending on where the company is in their life cycle. Across the industry, businesses must modernize their infrastructure while also maintaining legacy systems. At the same time, new regulations at both the local and federal levels increase the competition within the industry, and new businesses challenge the status quo set by current industry leaders. In recent years, the surge in people working from home requires a more reliable internet connection to handle their increased network bandwidth needs. The increased popularity of smartphones and other devices means there are more devices requiring network connectivity — all without a reduction in network speeds. Latency issues or poor uptime lead to unhappy customers, who then become flight risks. Add to this situation more frequent security breaches, which then  requires all businesses to monitor their networks to detect potential breaches faster. InfluxData is the Continue reading

Organise Efficiently with Zapier — Dropbox / S3 / Sheets— Integration to organise scanned documents and important attachments

< MEDIUM: https://medium.com/@raaki-88/organise-efficiently-with-zapier-dropbox-s3-sheets-integration-to-organise-scanned-4f47d51f4a54 >

One biggest problem with my google drive is that it’s flooded with a lot of documents, images and everything which seems really important during that instant of time with names which are almost impossible to search later.

I tried various Google APIs and Python programs with Oauth2.0 and its integration is, not something easy and needs tinkering for the OAuth consent page.

I wanted something easier, a workflow when I scan documents in the scanner-pro app on IPAD/iPhone and upload them to storage it should then be organised with certain rules which can be easily searchable and also listable. What I mean by listable is that I need some sort of Google Sheet integration which can just enter the filename and date once it’s uploaded to S3.

When there is an excel sheet even if the search is available it gives me so much pleasure to fire up pandas and analyse or search for it, just makes me happy

Note: I am a Paid user of Zapier and using S3 is a premium app, Am not an advertiser for Zapier in any way, I found the service useful

Moving on, here is the workflow

Continue reading

Bring your own certificates to Cloudflare Gateway

Today, we’re announcing support for customer provided certificates to give flexibility and ease of deployment options when using Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform. Using custom certificates, IT and Security administrators can now “bring-their-own” certificates instead of being required to use a Cloudflare-provided certificate to apply HTTP, DNS, CASB, DLP, RBI and other filtering policies.

The new custom certificate approach will exist alongside the method Cloudflare Zero Trust administrators are already used to: installing Cloudflare’s own certificate to enable traffic inspection and forward proxy controls. Both approaches have advantages, but providing them both enables organizations to find the path to security modernization that makes the most sense for them.

Custom user side certificates

When deploying new security services, organizations may prefer to use their own custom certificates for a few common reasons. Some value the privacy of controlling which certificates are deployed. Others have already deployed custom certificates to their device fleet because they may bind user attributes to these certificates or use them for internal-only domains.

So, it can be easier and faster to apply additional security controls around what administrators have deployed already–versus installing additional certificates.

To get started using your own certificate first upload your root certificates via API Continue reading

Cloudflare is faster than Zscaler

Every Innovation Week, Cloudflare looks at our network’s performance versus our competitors. In past weeks, we’ve focused on how much faster we are compared to reverse proxies like Akamai, or platforms that sell edge compute that compares to our Supercloud, like Fastly and AWS. For CIO Week, we want to show you how our network stacks up against competitors that offer forward proxy services. These products are part of our Zero Trust platform, which helps secure applications and Internet experiences out to the public Internet, as opposed to our reverse proxy which protects your websites from outside users.

We’ve run a series of tests comparing our Zero Trust services with Zscaler. We’ve compared our ZT Application protection product Cloudflare Access against Zscaler Private Access (ZPA). We’ve compared our Secure Web Gateway, Cloudflare Gateway, against Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA), and finally our Remote Browser Isolation product, Cloudflare Browser Isolation, against Zscaler Cloud Browser Isolation. We’ve found that Cloudflare Gateway is 58% faster than ZIA in our tests, Cloudflare Access is 38% faster than ZPA worldwide, and Cloudflare Browser Isolation is 45% faster than Zscaler Cloud Browser Isolation worldwide. For each of these tests, we used 95th percentile Time to First Byte Continue reading

Introducing Digital Experience Monitoring

This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語, Français and Español.

Today, organizations of all shapes and sizes lack visibility and insight into the digital experiences of their end-users. This often leaves IT and network administrators feeling vulnerable to issues beyond their control which hinder productivity across their organization. When issues inevitably arise, teams are left with a finger-pointing exercise. They’re unsure if the root cause lies within the first, middle or last mile and are forced to file a ticket for the respective owners of each. Ideally, each team sprints into investigation to find the needle in the haystack. However, once each side has exhausted all resources, they once again finger point upstream. To help solve this problem, we’re building a new product, Digital Experience Monitoring, which will enable administrators to pinpoint and resolve issues impacting end-user connectivity and performance.

To get started, sign up to receive early access. If you’re interested in learning more about how it works and what else we will be launching in the near future, keep scrolling.

Our vision

Over the last year, we’ve received an overwhelming amount of feedback that users want to see the intelligence that Cloudflare possesses from our Continue reading

Weave your own global, private, virtual Zero Trust network on Cloudflare with WARP-to-WARP

Millions of users rely on Cloudflare WARP to connect to the Internet through Cloudflare’s network. Individuals download the mobile or desktop application and rely on the Wireguard-based tunnel to make their browser faster and more private. Thousands of enterprises trust Cloudflare WARP to connect employees to our Secure Web Gateway and other Zero Trust services as they navigate the Internet.

We’ve heard from both groups of users that they also want to connect to other devices running WARP. Teams can build a private network on Cloudflare’s network today by connecting WARP on one side to a Cloudflare Tunnel, GRE tunnels, or IPSec tunnels on the other end. However, what if both devices already run WARP?

Starting today, we’re excited to make it even easier to build a network on Cloudflare with the launch of WARP-to-WARP connectivity. With a single click, any device running WARP in your organization can reach any other device running WARP. Developers can connect to a teammate's machine to test a web server. Administrators can reach employee devices to troubleshoot issues. The feature works with our existing private network on-ramps, like the tunnel options listed above. All with Zero Trust rules built in.

To Continue reading

Tier 1 Carriers Performance Report: December, 2022

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of December, 2022.

The post Tier 1 Carriers Performance Report: December, 2022 appeared first on Noction.

Work from home is here to stay, so how should IT adjust?

The pandemic has changed how we work, probably forever. Most employees with jobs that can be done effectively from home have no intention of returning full time to the office. They find that their work-life balance is much more balanced without the long commutes and constant interruptions that accompany office work.According to a McKinsey/Ipsos survey, 58 percent of American workers had the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week in 2022, while 38 percent were not generally required to be in the office at all.To read this article in full, please click here

Work from home is here to stay, so how should IT adjust?

The pandemic has changed how we work, probably forever. Most employees with jobs that can be done effectively from home have no intention of returning full time to the office. They find that their work-life balance is much more balanced without the long commutes and constant interruptions that accompany office work.According to a McKinsey/Ipsos survey, 58 percent of American workers had the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week in 2022, while 38 percent were not generally required to be in the office at all.To read this article in full, please click here

netlab Release 1.4.2: Juniper vMX and Junos Features

One of the last things I did before going on the Christmas break was to push out netlab release 1.4.2. Its highlights include:

• Juniper vMX by Stefano Sasso
• BFD, VRF, MPLS, SR-MPLS, and MPLS/VPN on Junos (also by Stefano)
• Full VLAN support on vMX and routed VLAN interfaces on vSRX (yet again, Stefano’s contribution)
• VyOS containerlab support by Oleg A. Arkhangelsky
• CSR 1000v VLAN and VXLAN support

Upgrading is as easy as ever: execute pip3 install --upgrade networklab.

New to netlab? Start with the Getting Started document and the installation guide.

netlab Release 1.4.2: Juniper vMX and Junos Features

One of the last things I did before going on the Christmas break was to push out netlab release 1.4.2. Its highlights include:

• Juniper vMX by Stefano Sasso
• BFD, VRF, MPLS, SR-MPLS, and MPLS/VPN on Junos (also by Stefano)
• Full VLAN support on vMX and routed VLAN interfaces on vSRX (yet again, Stefano’s contribution)
• VyOS containerlab support by Oleg A. Arkhangelsky
• CSR 1000v VLAN and VXLAN support

Upgrading is as easy as ever: execute pip3 install --upgrade networklab.

New to netlab? Start with the Getting Started document and the installation guide.

Automation 20. GNMI to Spreadsheet via Pandas or Intro to Data Analysis in Network Automation

Dear friend,

We all like spreadsheets, as this is an easy and intuitive way of representing data for us, humans. The possibility to analyze data with spreadsheets are endless, starting from simple aggregation till complicated pivots are endless. Even the people who say that they don’t like spreadsheets, use them so often. Network automation, for sure, is not an exclusion here.

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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Are Spreadsheets Valid In Automation Era?

They absolutely are. We haven’t seen so far any non-IT person, or even IT high-profile engineer or manager, which won’t like spreadsheets. To put it simple, spreadsheets can be an easy way to represent data collected from network devices; likewise, it can be a good way to provide some input, either as inventory or as configuration details for your network automation intent. So the questions becomes, provided you can read data from your spreadsheet in a programmatic way, what would you do with it?

The good news is that Continue reading

Welcome to CIO Week 2023

When you are the Chief Information Officer (CIO), your systems need to just work. A quiet day when users go about their job without interruption is a celebration. When they do notice, something has probably fallen apart.

We understand. CIOs own some of an organization's most mission-critical challenges. Your security counterparts expect safety to be robust while your users want it to be unintrusive. Your sales team continues to open offices in new locations while those new hires need rapid connectivity to your applications. You own a budget that never seems to grow fast enough to match price increases from point solution vendors. On top of that, CIOs must support their organizations' shifts to new remote and hybrid work models, which means modernizing applications and infrastructure faster than ever before.

Today marks the start of CIO Week, our celebration of the work that you and your teams accomplish every day. We’ve assembled this week to showcase features, stories, and tools that you can use to continue to deliver on your mission while also improving the experience of your users and administrators. We’ve even included announcements to help on the budget front.

We’re doing this because we’ve been in the Continue reading

Azure Host-Based Networking: VFP and AccelNet Introduction

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an architecture where the network’s control plane is decoupled from the data plane to centralized controllers. These intelligent, programmable controllers manage network components as a single system, having a global view of the whole network. Microsoft’s Azure uses a host-based SDN solution, where network virtualization and most of its services (Firewalls, Load balancers, Gateways) run as software on the host. The physical switching infrastructure, in turn, offers a resilient, high-speed underlay transport network between hosts.

Figure 1-1 shows an overview of Azure’s SDN architecture. Virtual Filtering Platform (VFP) is Microsoft’s cloud-scale software switch operating as a virtual forwarding extension within a Hyper-V basic vSwitch. The forwarding logic of the VFP uses a layered policy model based on policy rules on Match-Action Table (MAT). VFP works on a data plane, while complex control plane operations are handed over to centralized control systems. VFP layers, such as VNET, NAT, ACL, and Metering, have dedicated controllers that programs policy rules to MAT using southbound APIs.

Software switches switching processes are CPU intensive. To reduce the burden of CPU cycles, VFP offloads data forwarding logic to hardware NIC after processing the first packet of the flow and creating the flow Continue reading

BrandPost: Got Network Downtime? Here’s How to Proactively Reduce It

The hybrid workforce will continue for the foreseeable future, according to the Foundry 2022 Future of Work study. And the trend is affecting hiring and retention, with 62% of IT leaders saying their organizations are guaranteeing flexible work options to stay competitive in the marketplace.Just as important: The technology and systems these employees use must be reliable and secure. Poor connectivity or network downtime not only frustrates users but also eats into productivity.And yet both hybrid and on-site workers are experiencing a high volume of network interruptions, according to a Juniper Networks survey. For example:To read this article in full, please click here

Weekend Reads 010623

Undersea cables between the U. S. and Cuba have long been intertwined with politics.

People like to tout NISTâ€s SP 800-207 [Zero Trust Architecture] as the hot new thing, but the fact is, zero trust network models have been around for over a decade.

As Russian ground troops prepared to enter Ukraine in February 2021, Ukrainian governmental departments, online media organizations, financial firms, and hosting providers were slammed with a surge of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Prosecutors said the five IT officials of the public administration department had failed to check the security of the system and update it with the most recent antivirus software.

What exactly is the edge? What makes something an edge appliance? These are trickier questions than you might think, and depending on who you ask — and honestly, what theyâ€re trying to sell you — the answers can vary wildly.

Youâ€ve likely been hearing about the World Wide Web Consortiumâ€s (W3C) Web Authentication (WebAuthn) and considering whether youâ€re ready to implement it in your environment.

In this episode of PING, Luuk Hendricks and Willem Toorop from NLNet Labs discuss applying Express Data Path (XDP) to the DNS protocol.

A recent Continue reading

BrandPost: IT Leaders Have a Green Opportunity to Support Sustainability

There are multiple benefits to gain from investing resources into sustainability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts — including operational efficiencies, swift compliance with regulations, employee and customer satisfaction, as well as the criticality of addressing climate change.IT leaders have a significant role to play here. Estimates project that by 2040, IT operations will produce 14% of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions — up from 4% today.There is an opportunity to reduce these emissions, support sustainable business growth, and achieve other advantages by addressing IT systems and processes. And it should start with the network architecture.To read this article in full, please click here