Complexity Bites Back

What percentage of business-impacting application outages are caused by networks? According to a recent survey by the Uptime Institute, about 30% of the 300 operators they surveyed, 29% have experienced network related outages in the last three years—the highest percentage of causes for IT failures across the period.

A secondary question on the survey attempted to “dig a little deeper” to understand the reasons for network failure; the chart below shows the result.

We can be almost certain the third-party failures, if the providers were queried, would break down along the same lines. Is there a pattern among the reasons for failure?

Configuration change—while this could be somewhat managed through automation, these kinds of failures are more generally the result of complexity. Firmware and software failures? The more complex the pieces of software, the more likely it is to have mission-impacting errors of some kind—so again, complexity related. Corrupted policies and routing tables are also complexity related. The only item among the top preventable causes that does not seem, at first, to relate directly to complexity is network overload and/or congestion problems. Many of these cases, however, might also be complexity related.

The Uptime Institute draws this same lesson, though Continue reading

Tech Bytes: How Palo Alto Networks Differentiates Prisma SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Palo Alto Networks sponsors today's Tech Bytes. We drill into key differentiators of the Prisma SD-WAN platform including its use of machine learning, the unique CloudBlades offering, and its app-defined approach to path selection and policy enforcement. Our guest from Palo Alto Networks is Rohan Grover, Senior Director of Product Management.

The post Tech Bytes: How Palo Alto Networks Differentiates Prisma SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Third Time Charm Of AMD’s Milan Epyc Processors

With every passing year, as AMD first talked about its plans to re-enter the server processor arena and give Intel some real, much needed, and very direct competition and then delivered again and again on its processor roadmap, it has gotten easier and easier to justify spending at least some of the server CPU budget with Intel’s archrival in the X86 computing arena. …

The Third Time Charm Of AMD’s Milan Epyc Processors was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Network Break 324: Cisco ASIC Hits 25.6Tbps; AWS Extends VPC Flow Logs For Better Visibility

This week's Network Break discusses new ASICs from Cisco, new metadata fields in AWS VPC flow logs, a cloud visibility fabric from packet broker specialist Gigamon, lessons from a data center fire, and more tech news.

The post Network Break 324: Cisco ASIC Hits 25.6Tbps; AWS Extends VPC Flow Logs For Better Visibility appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Week in Internet News: Berners-Lee Warns of Growing Digital Divide

A big divide: Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, says the digital divide has grown during the COVID-19 pandemic, the BBC reports. He called on governments to provide universal broadband by 2030 in his annual letter marking the anniversary of the Web. About one-third of young people do not have Internet access and many more people lack connections that are good enough to allow them to work or learn from home.

Spy vs. spy: Hackers have breached surveillance camera data collected by Silicon Valley startup Verkada and gained access to live feeds of 150,000 security cameras inside hospitals, companies, police departments, prisons, and schools, Bloomberg reports. Live cameras inside Tesla factories, women’s health clinics, and psychiatric hospitals were also breached. The breach exposed the reach of surveillance, the Washington Post suggested, with one expert saying that “our desire for some fake sense of security is its own security threat.”

Drones to the rescue: A Wisconsin company is working on a way to use drones to provide reliable cellular service and Internet access to a rural area of the state, Wisconsin Public Radio reports. About 15 percent of the Northland Pine School District’s 1,340 students have no Continue reading

Liz Rice: Following the ‘Superpower’ Promise of eBPF

Liz Rice Liz Rice, chair of the CNCF’s technical oversight committee For lots of folks in software engineering, every now and again a technology comes along that really sparks the imagination. I’m sure that many readers of The New Stack will recall their first encounters with containers, very possibly through Docker, and the realization that this was a technology that could change everything. Containerization is arguably the lynchpin of the move to cloud native. But every step forward creates new challenges, and new boundaries to push. For me, eBPF is another transformational technology and one that I’m excited to get more deeply involved in, as I join the leadership team at eBPF pioneers, Brendan Greggs from Netflix coined the phrase “superpowers for Linux,” and that’s no exaggeration. In my role as chair of the Continue reading

Enhancing privacy-focused Web Analytics to better meet your metrics needs

Enhancing privacy-focused Web Analytics to better meet your metrics needs
Enhancing privacy-focused Web Analytics to better meet your metrics needs

Last December we opened up our brand new privacy-first Web Analytics platform to everyone. Today, we’re excited to announce the release of three of the most requested features: adding multiple websites to an account, supporting Single-page Applications (SPA) as well as showing Core Web Vitals in Web Analytics.

Bringing privacy-first analytics to everyone

Since we launched two months ago, we’ve received a lot of feedback from our users. We are really happy that we are able to provide our privacy-first analytics to so many of you.

Popular analytics vendors have business models driven by ad revenue. Using them implies a bargain: they track visitor behavior and create buyer profiles to retarget your visitors with ads; in exchange, you get free analytics.

Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and part of that is to deliver essential web analytics to everyone with a website without compromising user privacy. We’ve never been interested in tracking users or selling advertising. We don’t want to know what you do on the Internet — it’s not our business.

You now can measure multiple sites

When we launched Web Analytics, each account was only able to measure one website. We are happy to announce Continue reading

NVMe over TCP: How it supercharges SSD storage using standard IP networks

Soon after data centers began transitioning from hard drives to solid-state drives (SSD), the NVMe protocol arrived to support high-performance, direct-attached PCIe SSDs. NVMe was followed by NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), which was designed to efficiently support hyperscale remote SSD pools, effectively replacing direct-attached storage (DAS) to become the default protocol for disaggregated storage within a cloud infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware, Nvidia offer GPU-powered AI in virtual machines

VMware and Nvidia have expanded their alliance to support Nvidia GPU-based applications on VMware's new vSphere 7 Update 2. The upgraded version of vSphere 7 will support the new Nvidia AI Enterprise offering, a suite of enterprise-grade AI tools and frameworks that enables GPU-accelerated applications to run in VMware virtual machines and containers.VMware's vSphere 7 U2 adds support for Nvidia's A100 Tensor Core GPU and its multi-instance GPU feature, which allows for partitioning of the cores on an A100 for use by multiple users, much in the same way VMware partitions CPU cores out to multiple users. Read more: Highflying Nvidia widens its reach into enterprise data centers To read this article in full, please click here

NVMe over TCP: How it supercharges SSD storage using standard IP networks

Soon after data centers began transitioning from hard drives to solid-state drives (SSD), the NVMe protocol arrived to support high-performance, direct-attached PCIe SSDs. NVMe was followed by NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), which was designed to efficiently support hyperscale remote SSD pools, effectively replacing direct-attached storage (DAS) to become the default protocol for disaggregated storage within a cloud infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware, Nvidia offer GPU-powered AI in virtual machines

VMware and Nvidia have expanded their alliance to support Nvidia GPU-based applications on VMware's new vSphere 7 Update 2. The upgraded version of vSphere 7 will support the new Nvidia AI Enterprise offering, a suite of enterprise-grade AI tools and frameworks that enables GPU-accelerated applications to run in VMware virtual machines and containers.VMware's vSphere 7 U2 adds support for Nvidia's A100 Tensor Core GPU and its multi-instance GPU feature, which allows for partitioning of the cores on an A100 for use by multiple users, much in the same way VMware partitions CPU cores out to multiple users. Read more: Highflying Nvidia widens its reach into enterprise data centers To read this article in full, please click here

SD-WAN may be the key to smart network services

If you stop and think, a lot of our expectations about network services are really about personality—our own.  We’d like our services to work, well, the way we work.  We’d like them to know us, to tune to our needs, right?  Do you think that some giant global interconnect with hundreds of thousands of elements is going to be able to do that?  Nope, which means personalized services will have to come down to the only piece we really own—the lowly network edge.We learned decades ago that you can’t make giant networks user- or service-aware.  Awareness of this sort, which is known as “statefulness” in network-speak, means sticking little pieces of a virtual-you into the network to represent your interests. Maybe these pieces are an entry in a routing table, or maybe they’re a policy stored in some repository and sent to the devices that handle your traffic, but they’re individualized if what they’re doing is to personalize.  That just doesn’t scale.  Not only are there too many little pieces, network traffic could get reconfigured or a device could fail, and all at once your personalizing pieces aren’t even where your traffic Continue reading

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