Cisco’s ThousandEyes can peer into SaaS performance

Cisco has broadened the scope of its ThousandEyes network-intelligence gathering software to let customers watch over their growing expanse of software-as-a-service applications.In addition to its existing Internet Insights platform, ThousandEyes has a new program called Application Outages that promises to provide views into the availability of the SaaS applications employees are using.Internet Insights gathers data from what Cisco says are tens of thousands of ThousandEyes Cloud Agents and Enterprise Agents spread across the internet and enterprise networks globally. ThousandEyes’ technology warns when a user’s experience is less than ideal and can pinpoint failures.To read this article in full, please click here

AMD launches big data-center push vs. Intel, Nvidia

AMD has emerged from its long defensive crouch to taking the fight directly to Intel and Nvidia, a bold move but one backed by a company that's been racking up wins lately.Coming on the heels of a record-setting quarter, AMD announced new EPYC server CPUs, a new line of Instinct brand GPUs it says are faster in than Nvidia’s best, the next generation of its CPU architecture, and a deal with Meta, formerly known as Facebook.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] EPYC Milan-X CPU AMD CEO Lisa Su introduced the EPYC Milan-X processors, an iteration of its third-generation server processors with a 3D-stacked L3 cache called 3D V-Cache. One problem with increasing cache is you get transistor sprawl and the die gets progressively bigger. 3D stacking reduces the physical size while increasing density.To read this article in full, please click here

AMD launches big data-center push vs. Intel, Nvidia

AMD has emerged from its long defensive crouch to taking the fight directly to Intel and Nvidia, a bold move but one backed by a company that's been racking up wins lately.Coming on the heels of a record-setting quarter, AMD announced new EPYC server CPUs, a new line of Instinct brand GPUs it says are faster in than Nvidia’s best, the next generation of its CPU architecture, and a deal with Meta, formerly known as Facebook.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] EPYC Milan-X CPU AMD CEO Lisa Su introduced the EPYC Milan-X processors, an iteration of its third-generation server processors with a 3D-stacked L3 cache called 3D V-Cache. One problem with increasing cache is you get transistor sprawl and the die gets progressively bigger. 3D stacking reduces the physical size while increasing density.To read this article in full, please click here

Drone demo shows it’s possible to protect 5G-managed devices from DDoS, exfiltration attacks

A demonstration earlier this year at Stanford School of Engineering proved that a small fleet of computer-controlled drones can maintain their flight integrity in the face of continual cyberattacks on the 5G network used to manage the devices through the deployment of software-defined networking (SDN).For enterprise IT pros charged with securing devices wirelessly across a 5G network, the drone test results are promising evidence that SDN can help networks under cyberattack to recover almost instantaneously.To read this article in full, please click here

Drone demo shows it’s possible to protect 5G-managed devices from DDoS, exfiltration attacks

A demonstration earlier this year at Stanford School of Engineering proved that a small fleet of computer-controlled drones can maintain their flight integrity in the face of continual cyberattacks on the 5G network used to manage the devices through the deployment of software-defined networking (SDN).For enterprise IT pros charged with securing devices wirelessly across a 5G network, the drone test results are promising evidence that SDN can help networks under cyberattack to recover almost instantaneously.To read this article in full, please click here

Python Script Pulling AWS IP Prefixes – Part 3

The two previous posts described what the script does and modules used as well as how the script leverages YAML.

This time, we will go through the function that generates the access-list name. The code for this is below:

def generate_acl_name(interface_name: str) -> str:
    """Generate unique ACL name to avoid conflicts with any existing ACLs
    by appending a random number to the outside interface name"""
    # Create a random number between 1 and 999
    random_number = random.randint(1, 999)
    acl_name = f"{interface_name}_{random_number}"
    return acl_name

The goal with this code is to generate a new access-list with a unique name. Note that the script doesn’t do any check if this access-list already exists which is something I will look into in an improved version of the script. I wanted to first start with something that works and take you through the process together with myself as I learn and improve on the existing code.

The function takes an interface_name which is a string. This is provided by the YAML data that we stored in the yaml_dict earlier. The function is then called like this:

acl_name = generate_acl_name(yaml_dict["outside_interface"])

The name is stored in the yaml_dict under the outside_interface mapping:

In [6]: yaml_dict  Continue reading

Building a Separate Infrastructure for Guest Access

One of my readers sent me an age-old question:

I have my current guest network built on top of my production network. The separation between guest- and corporate network is done using a VLAN – once you connect to the wireless guest network, you’re in guest VLAN that forwards your packets to a guest router and off toward the Internet.

Our security team claims that this design is not secure enough. They claim a user would be able to attach somehow to the switch and jump between VLANs, suggesting that it would be better to run guest access over a separate physical network.

Decades ago, VLAN implementations were buggy, and it was possible (using a carefully crafted stack of VLAN tags) to insert packets from one VLAN to another (see also: VLAN hopping).

Building a Separate Infrastructure for Guest Access

One of my readers sent me an age-old question:

I have my current guest network built on top of my production network. The separation between guest- and corporate network is done using a VLAN – once you connect to the wireless guest network, you’re in guest VLAN that forwards your packets to a guest router and off toward the Internet.

Our security team claims that this design is not secure enough. They claim a user would be able to attach somehow to the switch and jump between VLANs, suggesting that it would be better to run guest access over a separate physical network.

Decades ago, VLAN implementations were buggy, and it was possible (using a carefully crafted stack of VLAN tags) to insert packets from one VLAN to another (see also: VLAN hopping).

Juniper’s marketing lags its technology

Like a lot of other people, I remember the Juniper ads of decades ago that used cartoons to poke fun at competitors. It was in-your-face marketing, and it seemed to pay off for Juniper in visibility.Then they got quiet, and while Juniper continued to innovate at the product level, they didn’t make news like they used to. Then they held their Nov. 2 analyst event, and they got in their competitors’ faces again. Why, and how?The why is related to a principle of marketing I’ve talked about for decades: trajectory management. All sales processes these days aim at converting “suspects” into “customers” through a series of steps. First you get mentioned in tech news articles and analyst briefs. Second, those who see those mentions go to your website for more information, which leads them to the third step—a request to talk to a salesperson. In-your-face marketing gets good ink, and Juniper got more coverage of its event than it’s gotten for anything else in years.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper’s marketing lags its technology

Like a lot of other people, I remember the Juniper ads of decades ago that used cartoons to poke fun at competitors. It was in-your-face marketing, and it seemed to pay off for Juniper in visibility.Then they got quiet, and while Juniper continued to innovate at the product level, they didn’t make news like they used to. Then they held their Nov. 2 analyst event, and they got in their competitors’ faces again. Why, and how?The why is related to a principle of marketing I’ve talked about for decades: trajectory management. All sales processes these days aim at converting “suspects” into “customers” through a series of steps. First you get mentioned in tech news articles and analyst briefs. Second, those who see those mentions go to your website for more information, which leads them to the third step—a request to talk to a salesperson. In-your-face marketing gets good ink, and Juniper got more coverage of its event than it’s gotten for anything else in years.To read this article in full, please click here

Rockport’s Switchless Networking – Don’t Call It A SmartNIC

Rockport Networks has announced a switchless data center networking product that targets high-performance compute clusters running latency-sensitive workloads. Instead of switches in a leaf-spine or Clos fabric design, Rockport builds a multi-path mesh using network cards installed in the PCIe slots of servers and storage systems.

The post Rockport’s Switchless Networking – Don’t Call It A SmartNIC appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The AMD “Aldebaran” GPU That Won Exascale

If you want to know how and why AMD motors have been chosen for so many of the pre-exascale and exascale HPC and AI systems, despite the dominance of Intel in CPUs and the dominance of Nvidia in GPUs, you need look no further for an answer than the new “Aldebaran” Instinct MI200 GPU accelerator from Nvidia and its Infinity Fabric 3.0 coherent interconnect that is being also added to selected Epyc CPUs from Nvidia.

The AMD “Aldebaran” GPU That Won Exascale was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The 400G Era

As an industry leader in data-driven networking, Arista’s introduction of 400G platforms in 2019 intersected the emerging needs of hyper-scale cloud and HPC customers to dramatically increase bandwidth for specific ultra-high performance applications. 

A Brief History of the Meris Botnet

A Brief History of the Meris Botnet
A Brief History of the Meris Botnet

Meris first got our attention due to an exceptionally large 17.2 million requests per second (rps) DDoS attack that it launched against one of our customers. This attack, along with subsequent attacks originated by the Meris botnet, was automatically detected and mitigated by our DDoS protection systems. Cloudflare customers, even ones on the free plan, are protected against Meris attacks.

Over the past months, we’ve been tracking and analyzing the activity of the Meris botnet. Some main highlights include:

  • Meris targets approximately 50 different websites every single day with a daily average of 104 unique DDoS attacks.
  • More than 33% of all Meris DDoS attack traffic targeted China-based websites.
  • More than 12% of all websites that were attacked by Meris are operated by US-based companies.

View more Meris attack insights and trends in the interactive Radar dashboard.

So what is Meris?

Meris (Latvian for plague) is the name of an active botnet behind a series of recent DDoS attacks that have targeted thousands of websites around the world. It was originally detected in late June 2021 by QRator in joint research they conducted with Yandex. Their initial research identified 30,000 to 56,000 bots, but they estimated that the numbers Continue reading

A $1.9B FCC fund to replace banned 5G telco gear might be too little

The Federal Communications Commission has opened up a $1.9 billion fund to help smaller, rural US telcos replace the 5G and other gear in their networks that is made by China-based Huawei and ZTE, whose equipment has been banned since the telecom providers bought it.The Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program will help service providers remove, replace, and dispose of the equipment, but it's not likely to cover all their costs. “It’s hard to say what the gap is, but what I’m hearing from the rural wireless carriers and the others impacted by this, it won’t be enough,” said IDC research manager Patrick Filkins.The fund is open only to carriers with 10 million or fewer subscribers, and that means mostly rural providers who were attracted to the Chinese companies at least in part because of their less expensive product lines.To read this article in full, please click here

Anycast in Segment Routing

MPLS or Anycast Routing – for a long time, you had to choose one. Segment Routing allows you to have both.

Introduction

It’s hard to overstate how important anycast routing is. DNS root servers and CDN rely on it to …

Creating BGP Multipath Lab with netlab

I was editing the BGP Multipathing video in the Advanced Routing Protocols section of How Networks Really Work webinar, got to the diagram I used to explain the intricacies of IBGP multipathing and said to myself “that should be easy (and fun) to set up with netlab”.

Fifteen minutes later1 I had the lab up and running and could verify that BGP works exactly the way I explained it in the webinar.