A more sustainable end-of-life for your legacy hardware appliances with Cloudflare and Iron Mountain

A more sustainable end-of-life for your legacy hardware appliances with Cloudflare and Iron Mountain
A more sustainable end-of-life for your legacy hardware appliances with Cloudflare and Iron Mountain

Today, as part of Cloudflare’s Impact Week, we’re excited to announce an opportunity for Cloudflare customers to make it easier to decommission and dispose of their used hardware appliances sustainably. We’re partnering with Iron Mountain to offer preferred pricing and discounts for Cloudflare customers that recycle or remarket legacy hardware through its service.

Replacing legacy hardware with Cloudflare’s network

Cloudflare’s products enable customers to replace legacy hardware appliances with our global network. Connecting to our network enables access to firewall (including WAF and Network Firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems, etc), DDoS mitigation, VPN replacement, WAN optimization, and other networking and security functions that were traditionally delivered in physical hardware. These are served from our network and delivered as a service. This creates a myriad of benefits for customers including stronger security, better performance, lower operational overhead, and none of the headaches of traditional hardware like capacity planning, maintenance, or upgrade cycles. It’s also better for the Earth: our multi-tenant SaaS approach means more efficiency and a lower carbon footprint to deliver those functions.

But what happens with all that hardware you no longer need to maintain after switching to Cloudflare?

A more sustainable end-of-life for your legacy hardware appliances with Cloudflare and Iron Mountain

The life of a hardware box

The life of a hardware Continue reading

Independent report shows: moving to Cloudflare can cut your carbon footprint

Independent report shows: moving to Cloudflare can cut your carbon footprint

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Independent report shows: moving to Cloudflare can cut your carbon footprint

In July 2021, Cloudflare described that although we did not start out with the goal to reduce the Internet's environmental impact, that has changed. Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and clearly a better Internet must be sustainable.

As we continue to hunt for efficiencies in every component of our network hardware, every piece of software we write, and every Internet protocol we support, we also want to understand in terms of Internet architecture how moving network security, performance, and reliability functions like those offered by Cloudflare from on-premise solutions to the cloud affects sustainability.

To that end, earlier this year we commissioned a study from the consulting firm Analysys Mason to evaluate the relative carbon efficiency of network functions like firewalls, WAF, SD-WAN, DDoS protection, content servers, and others that are provided through Cloudflare against similar on-premise solutions.

Although the full report will not be available until next year, we are pleased to share that according to initial findings:

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) "generates up to around 90% less carbon than on-premises appliances at low-medium traffic demand."

Needless to say, we Continue reading

Equinix’s fix for high power bills? Hotter data centers

Data-center giant Equinix has found a low-tech solution to high data-center electric bills: turn up the thermostat.Guidance from the American Society of Heat, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) recommends a temperature range for data-center servers from 59°F (15°C) to as high as 89°F (31.6°C). Equinix is looking at setting the temperature at 80°F (26.6°C), up from the current setting of 73°F (22.7°C).To read this article in full, please click here

Equinix’s fix for high power bills? Hotter data centers

Data-center giant Equinix has found a low-tech solution to high data-center electric bills: turn up the thermostat.Guidance from the American Society of Heat, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) recommends a temperature range for data-center servers from 59°F (15°C) to as high as 89°F (31.6°C). Equinix is looking at setting the temperature at 80°F (26.6°C), up from the current setting of 73°F (22.7°C).To read this article in full, please click here

A Quick Look at AWS Scalable Reliable Datagram Protocol

One of the most exciting announcements from the last AWS re:Invent was the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) Express functionality that uses the Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD) protocol as the transport protocol for the overlay virtual networks. AWS claims ENA Express can push 25 Gbps over a single TCP flow and that SRD improves the tail latency (99.9 percentile) for high-throughput workloads by 85%.

Ignoring the “DPUs could change the network forever” blogosphere reactions (hint: they won’t), let’s see what could be happening behind the scenes and why SRD improves TCP throughput and tail latency.

Read more …

A Quick Look at AWS Scalable Reliable Datagram Protocol

One of the most exciting announcements from the last AWS re:Invent was the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) Express functionality that uses the Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD) protocol as the transport protocol for the overlay virtual networks. AWS claims ENA Express can push 25 Gbps over a single TCP flow and that SRD improves the tail latency (99.9 percentile) for high-throughput workloads by 85%.

Ignoring the “DPUs could change the network forever” blogosphere reactions (hint: they won’t), let’s see what could be happening behind the scenes and why SRD improves TCP throughput and tail latency.

Read more …

In Defense of OSPF In The Underlay (In Some Situations)

When choosing an underlay for an EVPN/VXAN network, the prevailing wisdom is that BGP is the best choice for the underlay routing protocol. And overall, I think that’s true. But OSPF can make a compelling underlay too, as it has a few logistical advantages over BGP in certain cases.

When building out EVPN/VXLAN networks, I like to break the build into four components. They are layers that are built one-by-one on top of each other.

  • Topology (typically leaf/spine)
  • Underlay (provides IP connecitivity for loopbacks)
  • Overlay (exchanges EVPN routes)
  • EVPN services (these are the Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks internal hosts and external networks connect to)

This article is exclusively about the underlay portion. It’s a very simple routed network that has one job, and job only:

Provide routes to enable IP connectivity from any loopbacks on a device to any loopback on any other device.

That’s it.

In normal operation the routing table will be incredibly static. The only time the routing table would change is when a switch is added or removed, or a link goes down, or a switch is upgraded, etc. In regular operation it won’t change.

The underlay is important, but the underlay isn’t Continue reading

Meta considers liquid to cool its hard drives

A joint effort by immersion cooling firm Iceotope and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, found cooling hard drives with a dielectric liquid is safe and a more effective means of cooling than using fans.Hyperscalers like Meta deploy thousands of HDDs in their data centers, and while the heat given off on an individual basis is tiny, it adds up, especially since the drives are in constant use and are close together. The drives are stored in server racks that hold nothing but dozens of hard drives and are referred to as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks).A JBOD can overheat without cooling, which up to now has been done with fans, but some drives were further away from fans than others, causing uneven cooling.To read this article in full, please click here

Meta considers liquid to cool its hard drives

A joint effort by immersion cooling firm Iceotope and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, found cooling hard drives with a dielectric liquid is safe and a more effective means of cooling than using fans.Hyperscalers like Meta deploy thousands of HDDs in their data centers, and while the heat given off on an individual basis is tiny, it adds up, especially since the drives are in constant use and are close together. The drives are stored in server racks that hold nothing but dozens of hard drives and are referred to as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks).A JBOD can overheat without cooling, which up to now has been done with fans, but some drives were further away from fans than others, causing uneven cooling.To read this article in full, please click here

Ransomware: It’s coming for your backup servers

Backup and recovery systems are at risk for two types of ransomware attacks: encryption and exfiltration – and most on-premises backup servers are wide open to both. This makes backup systems themselves the primary target of some ransomware groups, and warrants special attention.Hackers understand that backup servers are often under-protected and administered by junior personnel that are less well versed in information security. And it seems no one wants to do something about it lest they become the new backup expert responsible for the server. This is an age-old problem that can allow backup systems to pass under the radar of sound processes that protect most servers.To read this article in full, please click here

Ransomware: It’s coming for your backup servers

Backup and recovery systems are at risk for two types of ransomware attacks: encryption and exfiltration – and most on-premises backup servers are wide open to both. This makes backup systems themselves the primary target of some ransomware groups, and warrants special attention.Hackers understand that backup servers are often under-protected and administered by junior personnel that are less well versed in information security. And it seems no one wants to do something about it lest they become the new backup expert responsible for the server. This is an age-old problem that can allow backup systems to pass under the radar of sound processes that protect most servers.To read this article in full, please click here

Migration Coordinator with HCX – Simplified Workload Migration

With the NSX 4.0.1.1 release, Migration Coordinator adds two game-changing features that help simplify workload migration in the case of lift and shift migration mode. These features build on top of the User Defined Topology mode of migration and add one more config mode. Folks familiar with the User Defined Topology will find the workflow very similar with the added benefit of simplified workload migration, leveraging HCX.   

In this blog post, we will look at this new feature and how to take advantage of it. Please check out the resource links for more information on Migration Coordinator.  We will start with a high-level overview before digging into the details. 

Migration Coordinator 

Migration Coordinator was introduced with NSX-T 2.4 to enable customers to migrate from NSX for vSphere to NSX-T Data Center. It’s a free, fully supported tool that’s built into NSX-T Data Center. Migration Coordinator is flexible with multiple options enabling multiple ways to migrate based on customer requirements. The first release provided a way to migrate everything, including config, workloads, and hosts in place using the same hardware if the deployed topology matched the supported topologies. Starting with the NSX-T 3. Continue reading

7 ways to look at network connections on Linux

Whether you’re managing a network at work or just watching out for your home systems, it’s important to understand your network connections--how you communicate with public systems and those on the local network. This article covers some of the most important commands available on Linux to help you get a clear understanding of your local network and how it reaches outside.While the links provided include important tips on using network commands, some include commands that have been deprecated in favor of newer commands. Some of the most important commands to know today include ip a, ip neigh, ping, tracepath, dig, tcpdump and whois.To read this article in full, please click here

7 ways to look at network connections on Linux

Whether you’re managing a network at work or just watching out for your home systems, it’s important to understand your network connections--how you communicate with public systems and those on the local network. This article covers some of the most important commands available on Linux to help you get a clear understanding of your local network and how it reaches outside.While the links provided include important tips on using network commands, some include commands that have been deprecated in favor of newer commands. Some of the most important commands to know today include ip a, ip neigh, ping, tracepath, dig, tcpdump and whois.To read this article in full, please click here

Full Stack Journey 073: Finding And Following Technical Passion Projects

Today's Full Stack Journey podcast welcomes software engineer Kat Morgan to discuss finding and following passion projects---which for Kat include KubeVirt and UOR Framework. Scott and Kat have a technical and entertaining conversation about how pursuing passion projects can inform, shape, and create career opportunities.

The post Full Stack Journey 073: Finding And Following Technical Passion Projects appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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