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What is NFV – Network Function Virtualization

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) was founded by the European Telecommunication Standard Institute (ETSI) with Industry Specification Group (ISG) which contains seven of the world’s leading telecom network operators.

A challenge of large-scale telecom networks is increasing the variety of proprietary hardware and launching new services that may demand the installation of new hardware. This challenge requires additional floor space, power, cooling, and more maintenance. With evolving virtualization technologies in this decade, NFV focuses on addressing the telecom problems by implementing network functions into software that can run on server hardware or hypervisors.

Furthermore, by using NFV, installing new equipment is eliminated and it will be related to the health of underlay servers and the result is lower CAPEX and OPEX.

There are many benefits when operators use NFV in today’s networks. One of them is Reducing time-to-market to deploy new services to support changing business requirements and market opportunities for new services.

Decoupling physical network equipment from the functions that run on them will help telecom companies to consolidate network equipment types onto servers, storage, and switches that are in data centers. In NFV architecture, the responsibility for handling specific network functions (e.g. IPSEC/SSL VPN) that run in one Continue reading

Bilateral Peering and Multilateral Peering

Bilateral Peering is when two networks negotiate with each other and establish a direct BGP peering session. In one of the previous posts, Settlement Free Peering was explained, in this post, both Bilateral and Multilateral Peering will be explained and both are deployment modes of Settlement Free Peering.

This is generally done when there is a large amount of traffic between two networks. Tier 1 Operators just do Bilateral Peering as they don’t want to peer with anyone, other than other Tier 1 Operators. The rest of the companies are their potential customers, not their peers.

Multilateral Peering

As mentioned above, Bilateral Peering offers the most control, but some networks with very open peering policies may wish to simplify the process, and simply “connect with everyone”. To help facilitate this, many Exchange Points offer “multilateral peering exchanges”, or an “MLPE”.

An MLPE is typically an exchange point that offers a “route-server”, allowing a member to establish a single BGP session and receive routes from every other member connected to the MLPE.
Effectively, connecting to the MLPE is the same as agreeing to automatically peer with everyone else connected to the MLPE, without requiring the configuration of a BGP session Continue reading

What is CDN – Content Delivery Networks?

Content Delivery Network companies replicate content caches close to a large user population. They don’t provide Internet access or transit service to the customers or ISPs but distribute the content of the content providers. Today, many Internet Service Providers started their own CDN businesses as well. An example is Level 3. Level 3 provides its CDN services from its POP locations which are spread all over the World.

Content distribution networks reduce latency and increase service resilience (Content is replicated to more than one location). More popular contents are cached locally and the least popular ones can be served from the origin

Why CDN – Content Delivery Networks are necessary?

Before CDNs, the contents were served from the source locations which increased latency, thus reducing throughput. Contents were delivered from the central site. User requests were reaching the central site where the source was located.

CDN - Content Delivery Networks

Figure 1 – Before CDN

With CDN Technology, the Contents are distributed to the local sites.

CDN - Content Delivery Networks

Figure 2 – After CDN

Amazon, Akamai, Limelight, Fastly, and Cloudflare are the largest CDN providers which provide services to different content providers all over the world. Also, some major content providers such Continue reading

It’s Time to Get Serious about Supply Chain Security

The industry needs standard practices, tools, and even processes that promote – and perhaps even reward – those who diligently participate in the effort to secure the software supply chain.

Vultr Slices Up GPUs On The Cloud To Democratize Acceleration

Not all cloud providers are the same, and even among the three cloud giants – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud – there is some measure of differentiation. …

Vultr Slices Up GPUs On The Cloud To Democratize Acceleration was written by Daniel Robinson at The Next Platform.

Simplify and Standardize Mantra Encounters Reality

I’m usually telling networking engineers seriously considering whether to automate their networks to cleanup their design and simplify the network services first.

The only reasonable way forward is to simplify your processes – get rid of all corner cases, all special deals that are probably costing you more than you earned on them, all one-off kludges to support badly-designed applications – and once you get that done, you might realize you don’t need a magic platform anymore, because you can run your simpler network using traditional tools.

While seasoned automation practitioners agree with me, a lot of enterprise engineers face a different reality. Straight from a source that wished to remain anonymous…

Simplify and Standardize Mantra Encounters Reality

I’m usually telling networking engineers seriously considering whether to automate their networks to cleanup their design and simplify the network services first.

The only reasonable way forward is to simplify your processes – get rid of all corner cases, all special deals that are probably costing you more than you earned on them, all one-off kludges to support badly-designed applications – and once you get that done, you might realize you don’t need a magic platform anymore, because you can run your simpler network using traditional tools.

While seasoned automation practitioners agree with me, a lot of enterprise engineers face a different reality. Straight from a source that wished to remain anonymous…

Cloudflare Middle East & Turkey: a path to growth

This post is also available in عربي.

I am excited to announce that I have joined Cloudflare as Managing Director for the Middle East and Turkey (MET) region. Having worked in the domain of cyber security for more than two decades, I can see that Cloudflare is genuine in its mission of building a better Internet that is fast, safe and reliable for everyone. Being part of this journey that touches everyone’s life is surely an exciting thing to do, and I look forward to putting my experience in play towards successfully achieving this goal.

Cloudflare has been associated with delivering fast content over cloud in a most reliable and secure manner, accounting for at least 20% of the global Internet traffic. Cloudflare can cater for and support all types of organizations (businesses and public sector) including those with a social mission. The Middle East and Turkey as an emerging market is characterized by a relatively young population, with 70% of it being under the age of 30. This dynamic youth segment has an insatiable demand for both content and knowledge. To that extent, there has been a rapid uptake in Internet use, and digital transformation initiatives have significantly accelerated Continue reading

The rumored Broadcom purchase of VMware could raise enterprise concerns

If chipmaker Broadcom buys virtualization and multi-cloud vendor VMware as rumored, enterprise customers should watch out for whether the deal hampers the software vendor’s innovation, experts say.Others say the purchase—valued to be about $60 billion by the The Wall Street Journal—could be a boon for Broadcom by moving forward its years-long efforts to acquire enterprise technology.To read this article in full, please click here

The rumored Broadcom purchase of VMware could raise enterprise concerns

Nvidia Adds Breadth And Depth To System Designs

The annual Computex computer expo in Taiwan is one of the places that IT vendors like to trot out some of their new wares, and most of the time they have to do with consumer electronics or maybe PCs and smartphones, but every now and then, we get some insight into future datacenter chippery or gear. …

Nvidia Adds Breadth And Depth To System Designs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Learning BGP Module 2 Lesson 3: Messages And Updates – Video

Russ White’s BGP course continues with a lesson on messages and updates. Topics include: -BGP Open -BGP Reach -BGP MP-Reach -Address families -BGP Update -Update processing -TCP interaction You can subscribe to the Packet Pushers’ YouTube channel for more videos as they are published. It’s a diverse a mix of content from Ethan and Greg, […]

The post Learning BGP Module 2 Lesson 3: Messages And Updates – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

It’s Time For Zero Trust Network Access With Zero Exceptions

Today’s digital and cloud-first businesses everywhere are struggling to get a handle on the risks associated with hybrid work and direct-to-app connectivity. For many businesses, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) offers an opportunity to modernize and consolidate architectures while also providing a logical entrance into a broader Zero Trust journey.

The post It’s Time For Zero Trust Network Access With Zero Exceptions appeared first on Packet Pushers.

3 Consul Service Mesh Myths Busted

Van Phan Van is a technical product marketing manager for Consul at HashiCorp. He has been in the infrastructure space for most of his career and loves learning about new technologies and getting his hands dirty. When not staring at this computer screen, he's sharing pictures of food to his wife's dismay. He lives in San Jose, California, with his wife and two young boys. Most infrastructure engineers have a good idea what Terraform does, and those who care about security likely know about HashiCorp Vault, but what about popular open source networking tool back in 2014, it has grown into a much more comprehensive networking platform. So let’s take a look at three Consul capabilities you may have misconceptions about or not be taking full advantage of. Consul Bolsters Zero Trust Networking Ashher Syed Ashher is a product marketing leader at HashiCorp and is based in Austin, Texas. When he's Continue reading

News Reports Say Broadcom Seeks VMware Acquisition

The two companies have little overlap. But combined, VMware might offer a way to manage Broadcom's remote devices and equipment in data centers.

Network Break 383: Cyber Insurers Realize Customers Have Terrible Security; F5’s Big Vulnerability

This week's Network Break discusses a new threat containment feature from Rubrik to prevent companies from re-infecting themselves via compromised backups. F5 has released patches for a serious vulnerability in its Big-IP load balancer, cyber insurers raised premiums by as much 92% last year, and more IT news.

Large-Scale Weather Modeling Shows What True HPC Networking Can Do

The Korean Meteorological Administration (KMA) operates 20+ numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, including Korean numerical models, for weather forecasting. …

Large-Scale Weather Modeling Shows What True HPC Networking Can Do was written by David Gordon at The Next Platform.

Evolved on-prem networking with Netris

Network engineers, even those that have adopted a developer mentality, often struggle with getting to that next evolution of self-service in on-premises data centers. We have...

The post Evolved on-prem networking with Netris appeared first on /overlaid.

Broadening Your Horizons, or Why Broadcom Won’t Get VMware

You might have missed the news over the weekend that Broadcom is in talks to buy VMware. As of right now this news is still developing so there’s no way of knowing exactly what’s going to happen. But I’m going to throw my hat into the ring anyway. VMware is what Broadcom really wants and they’re not going to get it.

Let’s break some of this down.

Broad Street

Broadcom isn’t just one of the largest chip manufactures on the planet. Sure, they make networking hardware that goes into many of the products you buy. Yes, they do make components for mobile devices and access points and a whole host of other things, including the former Brocade fibre channel assets. So they make a lot of chips.

However, starting back in November 2018, Broadcom has been focused on software acquisitions. They purchased CA Technologies for $19 billion. They bought Symantec the next year for $10 billion. They’re trying to assemble a software arm to work along with their hardware aspirations. Seems kind of odd, doesn’t it?

Ask IBM how it feels to be the dominant player in mainframes. Or any other dominant player in a very empty market. It’s lonely Continue reading

Broadcom reportedly working to acquire VMware

Silicon Valley chipmaker Broadcom is working on a deal to acquire cloud service and virtualization provider VMware, although an agreement is not expected to be imminent, according to published reports.VMware's market cap sits around $40 billion, although no proposed purchase price has been disclosed as yet. If a deal is eventually reached, it would be the latest in a long line of acquisitions for Broadcom, which has built itself up, in large part, on the basis of multiple high-profile buyouts.The company acquired network switching manufacturer Brocade in November 2016 for nearly $6 billion, development and security software firm CA Technologies in November 2018 for $19 billion, and the enterprise security division of Symantec in August 2019 for more than $10 billion.To read this article in full, please click here

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