Is SONiC Right for Your Data Center and Private Cloud Network?

Many data center operators are interested in bringing the benefits of hyperscaler technologies to on-prem data centers. One of these technologies is SONiC, an open source network operating system that is being advanced under the auspices of the Open Compute Project (OCP). There are a number of questions that enterprises, communication service providers and tier 2 cloud service providers need to ask themselves to understand if SONiC is a good choice for their on-prem data center and private cloud networks.

What is SONiC?

SONiC, which stands for “Software for Open Networking in the Cloud,” is a network operating system originally designed by Microsoft for their data center networks. Microsoft was frustrated with the overly complex operating systems provided by vendors like Cisco, Juniper and Arista that included many features that Microsoft simply did not need for their Azure cloud network. Thus, SONiC was built by Microsoft in a completely modular way based on running networking functions in containers so components could be added or removed as a mechanism to build a lean, optimized OS that only contained the essential features to run the Microsoft Azure cloud network. They also developed the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) with a goal of enabling Continue reading

APIs pose the latest threat of networking-vendor lock-in

In my surveys of enterprises, the number worried about vendor lock-in has hovered around 90% for 30 years.  When you ask enterprises how they avoid it, they respond “standard interfaces” or “open-source”. Even today, the percentage who include “managing APIs” in their list of lock-in avoidance measures is in the statistical noise level, but APIs are perhaps the fastest-growing lock-in problem today, and they’re surely going to become a major problem in the future.API stands for “application programming interface”, but the term is broadly used in software today to describe the interfaces between all the software components used in an application, a cloud, or even a network. APIs let pieces of software talk with each other, and they’re essential in every situation where software components rather than hardware devices are connected. What’s creating a challenge in lock-in from APIs today is the fact that networking is shifting more to software, which means it’s shifting to a model where APIs are just as important as those standard interfaces, and enterprises aren’t tracking that important shift.To read this article in full, please click here

FTC investigation of Nvidia/Arm deal will only hurt Arm

The proposed Nvidia-Arm merger had another roadblock thrown in front of it when the US Federal Trade Commission’s filed a lawsuit objecting to the $40 billion deal last week.The acquisition met with almost immediate opposition from UK entities when it was announced in September 2020. Now, 15 months laster the FTC weighs in and has set an administrative trial for Aug. 9, 2022.“Tomorrow’s technologies depend on preserving today’s competitive, cutting-edge chip markets,” said Holly Vedova, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition in a statement. “This proposed deal would distort Arm’s incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia’s rivals.”To read this article in full, please click here

FTC investigation of Nvidia/Arm deal will only hurt Arm

The proposed Nvidia-Arm merger had another roadblock thrown in front of it when the US Federal Trade Commission’s filed a lawsuit objecting to the $40 billion deal last week.The acquisition met with almost immediate opposition from UK entities when it was announced in September 2020. Now, 15 months laster the FTC weighs in and has set an administrative trial for Aug. 9, 2022.“Tomorrow’s technologies depend on preserving today’s competitive, cutting-edge chip markets,” said Holly Vedova, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition in a statement. “This proposed deal would distort Arm’s incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia’s rivals.”To read this article in full, please click here

APIs pose the latest threat of vendor-lock-in networking

In my surveys of enterprises, the number worried about vendor lock-in has hovered around 90% for 30 years.  When you ask enterprises how they avoid it, they respond “standard interfaces” or “open-source”. Even today, the percentage who include “managing APIs” in their list of lock-in avoidance measures is in the statistical noise level, but APIs are perhaps the fastest-growing lock-in problem today, and they’re surely going to become a major problem in the future.API stands for “application programming interface”, but the term is broadly used in software today to describe the interfaces between all the software components used in an application, a cloud, or even a network. APIs let pieces of software talk with each other, and they’re essential in every situation where software components rather than hardware devices are connected. What’s creating a challenge in lock-in from APIs today is the fact that networking is shifting more to software, which means it’s shifting to a model where APIs are just as important as those standard interfaces, and enterprises aren’t tracking that important shift.To read this article in full, please click here

Aryaka broadens enterprise targets with managed SD-WAN, SASE services

Aryaka Networks is looking to target more enterprises with a new managed secure access service edge (SASE) offering and an improved, lower cost SD-WAN offerings.Aryaka is known for offering WAN and SD-WAN services over its global Layer 2 network with more than 40 points . The new services spring from that backbone to provide additional, flexible WAN services. SD-WAN buyers guide: Key questions to ask vendors The first is based on a new iteration of Aryaka’s L2 core—the L3—which is optimized for cost and non-mission critical applications or sites that don’t require top-shelf performance. The L2 core is optimized for performance-sensitive applications.To read this article in full, please click here

Aryaka broadens enterprise targets with managed SD-WAN, SASE services

Aryaka Networks is looking to target more enterprises with a new managed secure access service edge (SASE) offering and an improved, lower cost SD-WAN offerings.Aryaka is known for offering WAN and SD-WAN services over its global Layer 2 network with more than 40 points . The new services spring from that backbone to provide additional, flexible WAN services. SD-WAN buyers guide: Key questions to ask vendors The first is based on a new iteration of Aryaka’s L2 core—the L3—which is optimized for cost and non-mission critical applications or sites that don’t require top-shelf performance. The L2 core is optimized for performance-sensitive applications.To read this article in full, please click here

What’s New in vRealize Network Insight Cloud and vRealize Network Insight 6.4 for NSX-T 3.2

We’re pleased to announce another close collaboration between NSX-T 3.2, vRealize Network Insight Cloud, and vRealize Network Insight 6.4 in this latest release. As enterprises strive for the latest in cloud networking, the network management piece combines the end-user experience, applications, and technology to provide the visibility needed to ensure applications are consistently performing and secure. As we know, broad network observability is a critical step in securing the infrastructure.

vRealize Network Insight Cloud is available as a SaaS or on-premises solution for end-to-end network visibility, troubleshooting, and analytics. It works closely with NSX-T 3.2. vRealize Network Insight Cloud also helps optimize multi-cloud network performance with troubleshooting capabilities for applications, virtual machines, physical servers, or Kubernetes.

NSX Federation

Customers use NSX Federation to scale across different locations globally, making it easier to create hierarchies and dramatically simplifying management. vRealize Network Insight Cloud now supports network visibility for NSX Federation. This new feature will enable customers to leverage views across multiple NSX-T data centers at the global, regional, and local site levels. Several new cross-site VM to VM paths will be available, including inter-site VM-VM paths, intra-site VM-VM paths, VM-VM across sites with NAT, VM-VM paths across Continue reading

VMware NSX 3.2 Delivers New, Advanced Security Capabilities 

It’s an impactful release focused on significant NSX Security enhancements

Putting a hard shell around a soft core is not a recipe for success in security, but somehow legacy security architectures for application protection have often looked exactly like that: a hard perimeter firewall layer for an application infrastructure that was fundamentally not built with security as a primary concern. VMware NSX Distributed Firewall pioneered the micro-segmentation concept for granular access controls for cloud applications with the initial launch of the product in 2013. The promise of Zero Trust security for applications, the simplicity of deployment of the solution, and the ease of achieving internal security objectives made NSX an instant success for security-sensitive customers.

Our newest release — NSX-T 3.2 — establishes a new marker for securing application infrastructure by introducing significant new features to identify and respond to malware and ransomware attacks in the network, to enhance user identification and L7 application identification capabilities, and, at the same time, to simplify deployment of the product for our customers.

“Modern day security teams need to secure mission-critical infrastructure from both external and internal attacks. By providing unprecedented threat visibility leveraging IDS, NTA, and Network Detection and Response (NDR) capabilities along with granular controls leveraging L4-L7 Firewall, IPS, and Malware Prevention capabilities, NSX 3.2 delivers an incredible security solution for our customers“  

– Umesh Mahajan, SVP, GM (Networking and Security Business Unit) 

This blog captures critical enhancements NSX-T 3.2 delivers from a security perspective. And stay tuned —we’ll follow up with more detailed blogs on Continue reading

Announcing NSX-T 3.2: Innovations in Multi-Cloud Security, Networking, and Operations 

We’re excited to announce VMware NSX-T 3.2, one of the largest NSX releases so far. NSX-T 3.2 includes key innovations across multi-cloud security, scale-out networking for containers, VMs, and physical workloads. It also delivers simplified operations that help enterprises achieve a one-click, public cloud experience wherever their workloads are deployed. 

Strong Multi-Cloud Security 

NSX-T 3.2 provides strong, multi-cloud, easy-to-operationalize network defenses that secure application traffic within and across clouds. NSX-T 3.2 goes a step further in making it easy to enable Zero Trust application access across multi-cloud environments — enabling customers to secure traffic across applications and individual workloads with security controls that are consistent, automated, attached to the workload, and elastic in scale. 

Tapless Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)

Network traffic analysis (NTA) and sandboxing solutions are integrated directly into the NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW). NSX eliminates traffic hairpins by distributing NTA as a service within the hypervisor. Combined with distributed IDS/IPS capabilities, security teams can now virtualize the entire security stack and eliminate blind spots while allowing security policies and controls to follow workflows throughout their lifecycle, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. 

Gateway Firewall

The enhanced gateway firewall serves as a software-based gateway with L2-L7 controls — including URL filtering and advanced threat prevention with malware analysis and sandboxing. This extends centralized security controls to physical workloads, the data center perimeter, and the public cloud edge — ensuring consistent security controls across both east-west and north-south application traffic Continue reading

What’s new: an introduction to automation mesh

As part of the most recent Ansible Automation Platform 2.1 release announced December 2, 2021, we are excited to debut one of the most long-awaited features of the release: automation mesh. 

Automation mesh enables you to reliably and consistently automate at scale, across on-premises environments, the hybrid cloud, and to the edge. It delivers flexible design options, from single-site deployments to platform installations spanning the globe, wherever you are in your automation journey.

This blog details the benefits of automation mesh, a high-level overview of how it works, and how it helps you simplify scaling your automation across your enterprise environments. We are planning more detailed technical deep dive blogs with automation mesh use cases in the future, so stay tuned!

Why automation mesh?

Scaling automation across different platforms and locations is challenging. How do you ensure your automation executes consistently while still managing your platform centrally? How do you automate endpoints in remote areas with limited connectivity?

The best practice to overcome these challenges is delivering and running automation closer to the devices that need it. This design limits execution interruptions, which lead to inconsistent states, and possible downtime to IT services.

Enterprises, however, have multiple Continue reading

Gartner: Key infrastructure and operations trends to dominate 2022

The impact of COVID on the workforce is making the IT world more challenging for infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders, but it's also a chance for those leaders to drive some serious business changes and increase resiliency, according to analysts presenting at this week’s virtual Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference.“I&O leaders need to drive change, not simply absorb it,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner, to the virtual audience. I&O leaders are expected to deliver more adaptable and resilient service from anywhere — and for an increasingly distributed workforce, Hewitt said.To read this article in full, please click here

Store your Cloudflare logs on R2

Store your Cloudflare logs on R2
Store your Cloudflare logs on R2

We're excited to announce that customers will soon be able to store their Cloudflare logs on Cloudflare R2 storage. Storing your logs on Cloudflare will give CIOs and Security Teams an opportunity to consolidate their infrastructure; creating simplicity, savings and additional security.

Cloudflare protects your applications from malicious traffic, speeds up connections, and keeps bad actors out of your network. The logs we produce from our products help customers answer questions like:

  • Why are requests being blocked by the Firewall rules I’ve set up?
  • Why are my users seeing disconnects from my applications that use Spectrum?
  • Why am I seeing a spike in Cloudflare Gateway requests to a specific application?

Storage on R2 adds to our existing suite of logging products. Storing logs on R2 fills in gaps that our customers have been asking for: a cost-effective solution to store logs for any of our products for any period of time.

Goodbye to old school logging

Let’s rewind to the early 2000s. Most organizations were running their own self-managed infrastructure: network devices, firewalls, servers and all the associated software. Each company has to manage logs coming from hundreds of sources in the IT stack. With dedicated storage needed for retaining Continue reading

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