The latest tape storage is faster and holds more, but is it better?

Magnetic storage tape has’t been the recommended destination for the initial backup copy of data for quite some time, and the question is whether LTO-9, the latest tape open standard, and other market dynamics will changed that.Here's a look at modern tape drives, discussion of the degree to which ransomware changes the equation, and a closer look at LTO-9.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Tape drives: Too fast for their own good?In the 80s and early 90s, there was almost a perfect match between the speed of tape drives and the speed of the backup infrastructure. The backup drives were capable of writing at roughly the same speed that the backup system could send.To read this article in full, please click here

Looking at Linux disk usage with the ncdu command

The ncdu command provides a useful and convenient way to view disk usage. The name stands for "NCurses disk usage". This means that it's based on ncurses which, like curses, is a terminal control library used on Unix/Linux systems. The curses part of each name is a pun on "cursor" or "cursor optimization" and is unrelated to the use of foul language.You can think of ncdu as a disk usage analyzer with an ncurses interface. It can be especially useful when looking for disk-space hogs on a remote server for which you don't have access to a graphical interface.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] To use ncdu, you can just type "ncdu", but what you will see depends on where you have positioned yourself in the file system as it reports the space used by files and directories in that location.To read this article in full, please click here

Tech Bytes: Bringing ChatOps Into SD-WAN To Simplify Operations (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we discuss a new ChatOps feature in Palo Alto’s Prisma SD-WAN. Engineers and administrators can query the SD-WAN controller from a chat app such as Microsoft Teams and get a meaningful response. Sutapa Bansal, Director of Product Management at Palo Alto Networks, joins us to discuss how it works, use cases, and implementation.

Tech Bytes: Bringing ChatOps Into SD-WAN To Simplify Operations (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we discuss a new ChatOps feature in Palo Alto’s Prisma SD-WAN. Engineers and administrators can query the SD-WAN controller from a chat app such as Microsoft Teams and get a meaningful response. Sutapa Bansal, Director of Product Management at Palo Alto Networks, joins us to discuss how it works, use cases, and implementation.

The post Tech Bytes: Bringing ChatOps Into SD-WAN To Simplify Operations (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Aruba’s EdgeConnect Microbranch aims to simplify remote-work networking

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) subsidiary Aruba Networks has announced a new offering, called EdgeConnect Microbranch, designed to simplify the complexity of work-from-home networking for enterprises.The COVID-19 pandemic has forced enterprises to change the way they use their networks as they had to support an increasing number of users and devices connecting from remote locations. During the pandemic the number of workers working remotely for enterprises jumped, reaching 72% of the total workforce, compared to just 38% before COVID hit, according to an IDC survey. The survey also showed that enterprises expect that more than half of their employees will work remotely in one way or another, indicating the need of a long-term shift in network architectures.To read this article in full, please click here

HS014 Software Defined Infrastructure – New Build or Not ?

Do you need new hardware to cloud enable your infrastructure ? Should you strategise products on new hardware/greenfield basis or enable your existing brownfield infrastructure ? In this episode we discuss value of enabling existing infrastructure Beware of the vendor goldfield that Greenfield represents Whether supply chain impacts your decisions ? The value of federated... Read more »

HS014 Software Defined Infrastructure – New Build or Not ?

Do you need new hardware to cloud enable your infrastructure ? Should you strategise products on new hardware/greenfield basis or enable your existing brownfield infrastructure ? In this episode we discuss value of enabling existing infrastructure Beware of the vendor goldfield that Greenfield represents Whether supply chain impacts your decisions ? The value of federated […]

The post HS014 Software Defined Infrastructure – New Build or Not ? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Designing Netflix

 

This is a guest post by Ankit Sirmorya. Ankit is working as a Machine Learning Lead/Sr. Machine Learning Engineer at Amazon and has led several machine-learning initiatives across the Amazon ecosystem. Ankit has been working on applying machine learning to solve ambiguous business problems and improve customer experience. For instance, he created a platform for experimenting with different hypotheses on Amazon product pages using reinforcement learning techniques. Currently, he is in the Alexa Shopping organization where he is developing machine-learning-based solutions to send personalized reorder hints to customers for improving their experience.

Problem Statement

Design a video streaming platform similar to Netflix where content creators can upload their video content and viewers are able to play video on different devices. We should also be able to store user statistics of the videos such as number of views, video watched duration, and so forth.

Gathering Requirements

Network Break 363: Broadcom Buys AppNeta For Experience Monitoring; Cloudflare Offers New Firewall Service

This week's Network Break asks whether Broadcom's acquisition of AppNeta, which offers SaaS-based digital experience monitoring, is a good fit. We look at new features in the SONiC network OS, dive into a new firewall service available from Cloudflare, and more IT news.

The post Network Break 363: Broadcom Buys AppNeta For Experience Monitoring; Cloudflare Offers New Firewall Service appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Maximum redirects, minimum effort: Announcing Bulk Redirects

Maximum redirects, minimum effort: Announcing Bulk Redirects

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Maximum redirects, minimum effort: Announcing Bulk Redirects

The Internet is a dynamic place. Websites are constantly changing as technologies and business practices evolve. What was front-page news is quickly moved into a sub-directory. To ensure website visitors continue to see the correct webpage even if it has been moved, administrators often implement URL redirects.

A URL redirect is a mapping from one location on the Internet to another, effectively telling the visitor's browser that the location of the page has changed, and where they can now find it. This is achieved by providing a virtual ‘link’ between the content’s original and new location.

URL Redirects have typically been implemented as Page Rules within Cloudflare, up to a maximum of 125 URL redirects per zone. This limitation meant customers with a need for more URL redirects had to implement alternative solutions such Cloudflare Workers to achieve their goals.

To simplify the management and implementation of URL redirects at scale we have created Bulk Redirects. Bulk Redirects is a new product that allows an administrator to upload and enable hundreds of thousands of URL redirects within minutes, without having to write a single line of code.

We’ve moved!

Mail forwarding is a product offered by postal Continue reading

How to Secure the Software Supply Chain with Container Network Security

The way enterprises design, build and run applications has changed significantly over the past several years with the evolution of microservices and containers. No longer are applications built using a monolithic architecture—evenly stacked and centrally organized in a way that made it easy to manage and secure. Today’s modern applications are spread out in thousands of microservices across data centers and the cloud—able to be spun up and down wherever users log in.  

While microservices provide reusable elements to accelerate software development, the software supply chain itself could become an attack vector. In an effort to enable business agility without putting the enterprise at risk, organizations need to infuse security directly into DevOps processes and throughout the software supply chain at large. This makes security everyone’s responsibility—whether they are a user, a developer or a platform owner—to protect the applications that are consumed for work and for life. 

The Rise (and Risk) of Kubernetes 

Microservices applications need Kubernetes as an orchestrator to handle scheduling of containers in a cluster of servers, load balancing those containers, managing permissions and access control and many other Day 2 concerns. Kubernetes wasn’t the first orchestrator, but its rapid adoption makes it a defecto standard today for running scalable and resilient containerized applications. According Continue reading

Top Student Entrepreneurs

When you hear the word “entrepreneur” what do you think? Do you imagine a successful businessman or woman, like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, who founded and is running their own company? Or maybe someone who has an online business that they run from home. Well, these are both examples of entrepreneurial success stories. But not everyone can be as lucky as those two! There are many people out there who have started their own businesses with no experience in entrepreneurship whatsoever. So how did they become so successful? Let’s take a look at 5 students who became successful entrepreneurs to find out!

Jack Kim – Benelab Technologies

Benelab Technologies is an online business that specializes in selling CBD products. It was started by Jack Kim when he was just 15 years old, after his parents were diagnosed with cancer and needed to use the medicinal benefits of cannabinoids for pain relief. Now at 20 years old, this young entrepreneur has turned Benelab into a multi-million dollar company.

Jack is perhaps the most well-known student entrepreneur in this list, with his story being featured everywhere from Forbes to CNET News. However, he isn’t the only young person on our list Continue reading

MikroTik CHR – Breaking the 100G barrier

Introduction

The world is strange today. Despite the Covid-19 crisis all over the world, most ISPs are fighting a battle to deliver more bandwidth on a daily basis.

  • Work from home
  • Online schools
  • increasing content consumption

All pushed ISPs to their bandwidth limits, leaving ISP’s no option but to look for upgrades, for everlasting bandwidth demands. There, they are having another set of problems, facing them in this completely new and strange world. Chip shortage, logistic and labor health issues caused higher prices and no stock availability. Here in IP ArchiTechs, we are spending lot of our time finding a good solution for our customers and to help them overcome these hard times. Whether that is our regular Team meeting or just a chat with our colleagues in almost any occasion someone mentions something about new solution to improve capacity and performance for our customers.

Starting with a thought, what is available as a platform today, and of course it’s ready to be shipped immediately after you checkout and pay one thing obviously was just in front of me. X86 server, dozens of them. They are left from the time when we were buying new hardware just because new generation Continue reading

Running Network Automation Tools in a Container

Setting up a network automation development environment is an interesting task:

  • You have to install a half-dozen tools, each one with tons of dependencies;
  • SSH libraries like paramiko have to installed manually;
  • Ansible modules for individual network devices might need extra libraries;
  • Parsing tools invoked with Ansible Jinja2 filters have to be installed separately;
  • Add your pet peeve here ;)

Now imagine having to do that for a dozen networking engineers and software developers working on all sorts of semi-managed laptops. Containers seem to be one of the sane solutions1.

Running Network Automation Tools in a Container

Setting up a network automation development environment is an interesting task:

  • You have to install a half-dozen tools, each one with tons of dependencies;
  • SSH libraries like paramiko have to installed manually;
  • Ansible modules for individual network devices might need extra libraries;
  • Parsing tools invoked with Ansible Jinja2 filters have to be installed separately;
  • Add your pet peeve here ;)

Now imagine having to do that for a dozen networking engineers and software developers working on all sorts of semi-managed laptops. Containers seem to be one of the sane solutions1.

Automation 6. Multi vendor Network Automation in 2021/2022: NAPALM vs OpenConfig

Hello my friend,

Recently I was talking to a colleague from the network automation area, and during the discussion we touched a topic of NAPALM, and which role it plays today, and what may be its future. This discussion triggered me to think more about this topic and I decided to share thoughts with you.


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Will Network Automation Become Less Popular?

No, it won’t. Actually, it is quite opposite. It will be becoming even more important and it will be taking even more complicated forms, such as integration with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) to help companies to reduce amounts and durations of downtimes. It doesn’t mean that traditional network technology knowledge are less important: they absolutely are. However, the automation is unavoidable and you have to know it in order to stay in the profession. And pretty much, like with network technology you start with fundamentals of protocols before starting configuring them, in the Continue reading