HP Enterprise expands GreenLake program to cover HPC systems

When it bought Cray back in May 2019, HP Enterprise hinted at offering HPC systems as a service. Now it is delivering on that with the introduction of HPE GreenLake cloud services for HPC.HPE has made a lot of headway with its GreenLake program, the pay-per-use model created in response to the popularity of cloud service providers. It lets customers pay as if they are buying a cloud service, but it’s provisioned using infrastructure deployed at customer sites or in colocation facilities. Up to now it’s been used in standard IT applications, like app and Web serving or databases.To read this article in full, please click here

HP Enterprise expands GreenLake program to cover HPC systems

When it bought Cray back in May 2019, HP Enterprise hinted at offering HPC systems as a service. Now it is delivering on that with the introduction of HPE GreenLake cloud services for HPC.HPE has made a lot of headway with its GreenLake program, the pay-per-use model created in response to the popularity of cloud service providers. It lets customers pay as if they are buying a cloud service, but it’s provisioned using infrastructure deployed at customer sites or in colocation facilities. Up to now it’s been used in standard IT applications, like app and Web serving or databases.To read this article in full, please click here

Business without labour, Automation without workers

First posted in Human Infrastructure Magazine in March 2020 Its fashionable in Enterprise IT is to reduce headcount. This reflects a wider business fashion of ‘business without labour’ that chases the dream of ‘profits without cost’. You see, investors watch ‘revenue per employee’ or ‘profit per employee’ and IT managers feel  pressure to ditch people […]

Multicloud management: Challenges for technology, people, processes

When it comes to managing hybrid and multicloud environments there are many options but no easy path nor lack of challenges. Tech Spotlight: Multicloud Are you ready for multicloud? A checklist (InfoWorld) 5 challenges every multicloud strategy must address (CIO) How to manage multiple cloud collaboration tools in a WFH world (Computerworld) Building stronger multicloud security: 3 key elements (CSO) While cloud computing has been around in some form for more than a decade, tools to manage its current enterprise iterations from private, on-premises, or public locations are still evolving at a rapid rate. Gartner says that more than 90 vendors—including IBM/Red Hat, VMware, CloudBolt, Flexera, Scalr, Cisco, and Nutanix—offer varying degrees of cloud-management capabilities.To read this article in full, please click here

Multcloud management: Challenges for technology, people, processes

When it comes to managing hybrid and multicloud environments there are many options but no easy path nor lack of challenges. Tech Spotlight: Multicloud Are you ready for multicloud? A checklist (InfoWorld) 5 challenges every multicloud strategy must address (CIO) How to manage multiple cloud collaboration tools in a WFH world (Computerworld) Building stronger multicloud security: 3 key elements (CSO) While cloud computing has been around in some form for more than a decade, tools to manage its current enterprise iterations from private, on-premises, or public locations are still evolving at a rapid rate. Gartner says that more than 90 vendors—including IBM/Red Hat, VMware, CloudBolt, Flexera, Scalr, Cisco, and Nutanix—offer varying degrees of cloud-management capabilities.To read this article in full, please click here

Partnering with Global Cyber Alliance on Open Standards, Routing Security, and More

Our work is strengthened, and our impact magnified, when we collaborate with partners to build a secure and trustworthy Internet for all. That’s why we’re proud to announce we’ve entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) to work together on routing security, open Internet standards, and other areas of joint interest. The Global Cyber Alliance is an international, cross-sector effort dedicated to reducing cyber risk and improving our connected world.

This relationship is not new. The Internet Society and GCA have a long history of working together, from promoting email and Internet of Things (IoT) security to improving routing security, increasing deployment of open standards, and helping stakeholders participate meaningfully in the multistakeholder management of core Internet resources.

Both organizations have emphasized the importance of research, capacity building, and advocacy to develop key technologies and policies. This work helps promote the Internet, its resources, the need for vigilant user-enabled security, and the need for the Internet to remain open, inclusive, and an enabler of opportunities.

“We’re proud to extend and formalize our long-standing relationship with GCA to create real change for network operators and Internet users around the globe. By joining forces, we can promote enhanced Continue reading

Repost: Drawbacks and Pitfalls of Cut-Through Switching

Minh Ha left a great comment describing additional pitfalls of cut-through switching on my Chasing CRC Errors blog post. Here it is (lightly edited).


Ivan, I don’t know about you, but I think cut-through and deep buffer are nothing but scams, and it’s subtle problems like this [fabric-wide crc errors] that open one’s eyes to the difference between reality and academy. Cut-through switching might improve nominal device latency a little bit compared to store-and-forward (SAF), but when one puts it into the bigger end-to-end context, it’s mostly useless.

Repost: Drawbacks and Pitfalls of Cut-Through Switching

Minh Ha left a great comment describing additional pitfalls of cut-through switching on my Chasing CRC Errors blog post. Here it is (lightly edited).


Ivan, I don’t know about you, but I think cut-through and deep buffer are nothing but scams, and it’s subtle problems like this [fabric-wide crc errors] that open one’s eyes to the difference between reality and academy. Cut-through switching might improve nominal device latency a little bit compared to store-and-forward (SAF), but when one puts it into the bigger end-to-end context, it’s mostly useless.

An overview of end-to-end entity resolution for big data

An overview of end-to-end entity resolution for big data, Christophides et al., ACM Computing Surveys, Dec. 2020, Article No. 127

The ACM Computing Surveys are always a great way to get a quick orientation in a new subject area, and hot off the press is this survey on the entity resolution (aka record linking) problem. It’s an important part of many modern data workflows, and an area I’ve been wrestling with in one of my own projects.

Entity Resolution (ER) aims to identify different descriptions that refer to the same real-world entity appearing either within or across data sources, when unique entity identifiers are not available.

When ER is applied to records from the same data source it can be used for deduplication, when used to join records across data sources we call it record linking. Doing this well at scale is non-trivial; at its core, the problem requires comparing each entity to every other, i.e. it is quadratic in input size.

An individual record/document for an entity is called an entity description. A set of such descriptions is an entity collection. Two descriptions that correspond to the same real world entity are called matches or Continue reading

Privacy and Compliance Reading List

Privacy and Compliance Reading List
Privacy and Compliance Reading List

Privacy matters. Privacy and Compliance are at the heart of Cloudflare's products and solutions. We are committed to providing built-in data protection and privacy throughout our global network and for every product in our portfolio. This is why we have dedicated a whole week to highlight important aspects of how we are working to make sure privacy will stay at the core of all we do as a business.

In case you missed any of the blog posts this week addressing the topics of Privacy and Compliance, you’ll find a summary below.

Welcome to Privacy & Compliance Week: Reflecting Values at Cloudflare’s Core

We started the week with this introduction by Matthew Prince. The blog post summarizes the early decisions that the founding team made to make sure customer data is kept private, that we do not sell or rent this data to third parties, and why trust is the foundation of our business. > Read the full blog post.

Introducing the Cloudflare Data Localization Suite

Cloudflare’s network is private and compliant by design. Preserving end-user privacy is core to our mission of helping to build a better Internet; we’ve never sold personal data about customers or end-users of our Continue reading

Supporting Jurisdictional Restrictions for Durable Objects

Supporting Jurisdictional Restrictions for Durable Objects
Supporting Jurisdictional Restrictions for Durable Objects

Over the past week, you’ve heard how Cloudflare is making it easy for our customers to control where their data is stored and protected.

We’re not the only ones building these data controls. Around the world, companies are working to figure out where and how to store customer data in a way that is compliant with data localization obligations. For developers, this means new deployment models and new headaches — wrangling infrastructure in multiple regions, partitioning user data based on location, and staying on top of the latest rules from regulators.

Durable Objects, currently in limited beta, already make it easy for customers to manage state on Cloudflare Workers without worrying about provisioning infrastructure. Today, we’re announcing Jurisdictional Restrictions for Durable Objects, which ensure that a Durable Object only stores and processes data in a given geographical region. Jurisdictional Restrictions make it easy for developers to build serverless, stateful applications that not only comply with today’s regulations, but can handle new and updated policies as new regulations are added.

How Jurisdictional Restrictions Work

When creating a Durable Object, developers generate a unique ID that lets a Cloudflare Worker communicate with the Object.

Let’s say I want to create a Durable Continue reading

Learning To Make The Machine Part Of AI Invisible And Easy

About 15 years ago, as Swami Sivasubramanian was making his way from grad school back into the working world, he saw that developers and builders at enterprises were being held back not by their skills or their ideas, but by their inability to access the technology needed to bring those ideas to the fore.

Learning To Make The Machine Part Of AI Invisible And Easy was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

DNS Flag Day 2020

One of the outcomes of the 'stacked' architecture of network protocol design is that upper level protocols should not try to do the job of the lower layers. Packet adaptation through fragmentation is a IP layer 'problem' and applications do not have to concern themselves with this. We've come some distance from this position and these days many applications need to be highly aware of transport layer and IP layer properties, and the DNS is no exception. There have been some recent steps in the DNS with the DNS Flag Day 2020 to try and tune the DNS to avoid packet fragmentation. How bad is the problem with packet fragmentation and do the DNS Flag Day measures address the issue?