Lenovo introduces four new HCI solutions

Lenovo Data Center Group on Thursday introduced four new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) products aimed at a variety of workloads, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), SAP HANA, Microsoft Azure, and Kubernetes.HCI products have grown in popularity because they are easily deployed and can get a variety of workloads up and running quickly. HCI is available either in hardware/appliance form or as software. HCI hardware vendors are the usual suspects – HP Enterprise, Dell, Lenovo – while the software vendors include Nutanix and VMware.Lenovo is focused on ready-to-deploy HCI solutions from both software firms. It boasts that its hardware is easy to deploy and manage with simple updates, automatic scalability and a consumption-based use model.To read this article in full, please click here

Getting Started with Docker Using Node – Part II

In part I of this series, we learned about creating Docker images using a Dockerfile, tagging our images and managing images. Next we took a look at running containers, publishing ports, and running containers in detached mode. We then learned about managing containers by starting, stopping and restarting them. We also looked at naming our containers so they are more easily identifiable.

In this post, we’ll focus on setting up our local development environment. First, we’ll take a look at running a database in a container and how we use volumes and networking to persist our data and allow our application to talk with the database. Then we’ll pull everything together into a compose file which will allow us to setup and run a local development environment with one command. Finally, we’ll take a look at connecting a debugger to our application running inside a container.

Local Database and Containers

Instead of downloading MongoDB, installing, configuring and then running the Mongo database as a service. We can use the Docker Official Image for MongoDB and run it in a container.

Before we run MongoDB in a container, we want to create a couple of volumes that Docker can manage to Continue reading

Server Hunger Is Stronger Than Economic Uncertainty

The appetite for compute capacity, and presumably also for storage and networking capacity, in the datacenter of the world might be waning in some sectors of the economy, but thanks to the voracious hunger of the hyperscalers and cloud builders and more than a few large enterprises that need to do more, not less, computing in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, server sales are now consistently at the levels we saw way back in the Dot-Com Boom more than twenty years ago. …

Server Hunger Is Stronger Than Economic Uncertainty was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cisco extends Meraki SD-WAN to Microsoft Azure

Cisco Meraki added to its SD-WAN portfolio with support for workloads running in Microsoft Azure cloud environments.Specifically, Cisco said it has integrated its SD-WAN Powered by Cisco Meraki offering with Microsoft’s Azure Virtual WAN service, which will let customers automate secure connectivity between Meraki MX appliances at branch locations directly with the Azure  service, regardless of geographical location.More about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • How to pick an off-site data-backup method •  SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it • What are the options for security SD-WAN? The Meraki SD-WAN package is tyically aimed at what Cisco calls “lean IT environments” and includes a variety of integrated branch connectivity, security, management, orchestration and automation support.To read this article in full, please click here

Taking the ‘hands-on’ out of data center administration

Discussions about networking in a work-from-home world often focus on employees and endpoints, but how can network administrators do more than just keep the lights on if they can’t go to the data center? Maintaining what exists isn’t enough, especially as the entire world is redefining the future of work. Organizations need to be able to adapt to change, so how is that possible when administrators can’t go hands on?

There are any number of remote administration options available today, and any number of ways to compare them. Deciding between them is all about finding the right balance between cost, capability, and the labor intensity of implementation. In other words, they’re subject to all of the same considerations as any other technology implementation.

To dispense with the network administration 101 portion of the discussion*, yes, networking is mostly a matter of remote administration anyway. If you can remote into something that has access to the management network, you can use SSH, HTTPS, or what-have-you to administer networks just as you would if you were in the office. That’s maintenance, not change.

Accomplishing change remotely and at scale requires automation and orchestration. In practice, this is heavily dependent upon virtualization and/or Continue reading

Achieving CI Velocity at Tigera using Semaphore

Tigera serves the networking and policy enforcement needs of more than 150,000 Kubernetes clusters across the globe and supports two product lines: open source Calico, and Calico Enterprise. Our development team is constantly running smoke, system, unit, and functional verification tests, as well as all our E2Es for these products. Our CI pipelines form an extremely important aspect of the overall IT infrastructure and enable us to test our products and catch bugs before release.

We eventually reached a point where we needed to adopt a complete continuous integration and delivery architecture to maintain our development velocity, from code push to Kubernetes. We decided to adopt the hosted CI solution from Semaphore as an integral part of our workflow. Our test rigs on Semaphore ensure that the product is tested on three Kubernetes versions on seven different platforms, including Kubeadm, GKE, EKS, AKS, OpenShift, Rancher, and Kops. As a result, a typical pipeline can have up to 100 jobs distributed over various stages. We also have different pipelines to test our code and build Docker images for it.

Here’s a run for one of the components of our open source offering: All the Continue reading

Operations Channel at AnsibleFest 2020

AnsibleFest 2020 is right around the corner and we could not be more excited. This year we have some great content in each of our channels. Here is a preview of what attendees can expect from the Operations channel at AnsibleFest.

 

Operations Channel

This channel will take Operators on an automation journey through the Technical Operations lifecycle and how The Ansible Automation Platform is the center of your automation goals. Learn how to get your automation moving with Certified Content Collections, then scale out with execution environments and tune the performance. Once you are running at scale we have tools to show you what teams are using automation and how much it is saving you with some real world examples and by using Analytics. 

You should be leaving with some great examples and walkthroughs on infrastructure automation, from  operating systems to public cloud and how you can leverage Ansible Automation Platform to foster cross-functional team collaboration and empower your whole organization with automation they need.

There will be something for everyone. You’ll get to hear from customers, Red Hatters and our partners. Also pick up some tips for your server deployments, performance and cluster management. 

 

Operation Continue reading

Let World Alzheimer’s Day Remind Us to Take Our Own Brain Health Seriously

In the list of diseases that can affect your brain, Alzheimer’s disease is a critical one. From it not only affects the biology of the brain, it also affects the personality of the person. That is why it is necessary to talk about Alzheimer’s, because talking about this disease helps create awareness about brain health. On World Alzheimer’s Day, Sept. 21, 2020, talking about it will help create a sense of seriousness and importance.

How to Keep Your Brain Healthy

There are some diseases that are inevitable. That means that they cannot be stopped from occurring, but what an individual can do is make sure that you keep your brain health better and active.

Sleep Better

By sleeping better, you are making sure that your brain is getting the right rest. This means that you make sure that you are being provided with a situation where you are resting and your brain is working actively to make sure that it keeps you and your body healthy. That is why a good night’s sleep can help not only elevate your mood but also help keep you healthy and strong.

Eat Well and Healthy

By eating healthy and well, you will Continue reading

Migrating cdnjs to serverless with Workers KV

Migrating cdnjs to serverless with Workers KV

Cloudflare powers cdnjs, an open-source project that accelerates websites by delivering popular JavaScript libraries and resources via Cloudflare’s network. Since our major update in December, we focused on remodelling cdnjs for scalability and resilience. Today, we are excited to announce how Cloudflare delivers cdnjs—a migration to a serverless infrastructure using Cloudflare Workers and its distributed key-value store Workers KV!

What is cdnjs?

Migrating cdnjs to serverless with Workers KV

For those unfamiliar, cdnjs is an acronym describing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for JavaScript (JS). A CDN simply refers to a geographically distributed network of servers that provide Internet content, whether it is memes, cat videos, or HTML pages. In our case, the CDN refers to Cloudflare’s ever expanding network of over 200 globally distributed data centers.

And here’s why this is relevant to you: it makes page load times lightning-fast. Virtually every website you visit needs to fetch JS libraries in order to load, including this one. Let’s say you visit a Sydney-based website that contains a local file from jQuery, a popular library found in 76.2% of websites. If you are located in New York, you may notice a delay, as it can easily exceed 300ms to fetch the file—not to mention Continue reading

Telehealth usage soars during COVID-19

Internet-based virtual healthcare, sometimes called telehealth or telemedicine, has seen a massive increase in usage during the pandemic, according to new research.A study by University of Michigan's National Poll on Healthy Aging (NPHA) found that a quarter of older adults aged between 50 and 80 had a virtual medical visit over a network in the first three months of the coronavirus pandemic. By comparison, in a similar poll from 2019, just 4% of people over 50 said they had ever had a virtual visit with a doctor. READ MORE: Pandemic reveals the need for better telemedicineTo read this article in full, please click here

Disaster Recovery: a Vendor Marketing Tale

Several engineers formerly working for a large virtualization vendor were pretty upset with me when I claimed that the virtualization consultants promote “disaster recovery using stretched VLANs” designs instead of alternatives that would implement proper separation of failure domains.

Guess what… it’s even worse than I thought.

Here’s a sequence of comments I received after reposting one of my “disaster recovery doesn’t need stretched VLANs” blog posts on LinkedIn sometime in late 2019:

Read more …

DNS Query Privacy Revisited

A year has passed since we first looked at the level of use of Query Name Minimisation in the DNS and at the time the results were not impressive. It's time to relook at this topic and see what has changed in the DNS resolution environment over the past 12 months.

A smarter emacs

I’ve been running Emacs for like 25 years. But I’ve never really configured it with anything fancy.

Sure, I’ve set some shortcut keys, and enabled global-font-lock-mode and set indent size, but that’s almost it.

All my coding is done in tmux&Emacs. One project gets exactly one tmux session. Window 0 is emacs. Window 1 is make && ./a.out (sometimes split panes to tail logs or run both server and client), and to run git commands. The remaining windows are used for various things like reading manpages etc….

I have that same workflow whether I’m editing a blog post or doing kernel programming.

This way I can work at my desk with large and plentiful screens, and then move to my laptop and everything continues working exactly the same.

tmux I’ve customized, but not that much with Emacs.

So, step one to get my coding environment to be less 1995, and more 2020: make my editor understand my code, and show me stuff about it.

I’m learning as I’m going, and writing what I’m learning. As always if you see something wrong then please leave a comment.

Code annotations and other semantic understanding

The way to do this is Continue reading

Spotlight on NSX Performance at VMworld 2020

As we ramp up towards one of the premiere online tech events — in one of the most extraordinary years of a lifetime — I would like to shine a spotlight on what is being planned around NSX performance during this year’s virtual conference to help you get the most out of the event. VMWorld 2020 is right around the corner — and for the first time in two decades, it’s free! So, Register Now if you haven’t done so already!

NSX Performance Thus Far

Over the years, we’ve looked at the NSX performance numbers with and without hardware-level features, such as Geneve Offload and Geneve Rx Filters, that are key to optimal performance. If these topics are new to you, I would encourage reading up on the performance section of the NSX-T Reference Design Guide for a working knowledge of NSX-T performance before attending this year’s NSX-T Performance Session at VMworld.

NSX-T Performance Session at VMworld 2020

Given the virtual format of this year’s NSX-T Performance Session, I’ve decided to take a slightly different approach. Not only will I share performance numbers, but I’ll also demonstrate how different hardware-level features influence performance, and I’ll discuss feature and tuning Continue reading

My Thoughts on LinkedIn in 2020

LinkedIn originated with a focus on connecting professionals and contacts were supposed to be people that you know or worked with. The early team worked hard to build a monopoly/network effect around business connections.  Much of LinkedIn’s interface usability stems from that design intention. Now there is tension between what was LinkedIn was 10 years […]

Developer Channel at AnsibleFest 2020

As a developer, have you ever made a change that takes down an entire Kubernetes production cluster, requiring you to rebuild all YAML and automation scripts to get production back up?  Have you ever wanted to create reproducible, self-contained environments that can be run locally or in production? Welcome to the new AnsibleFest Developer Channel! Here you can learn how Ansible is critical to the journey of the developer as an open-source software configuration management, provisioning and application-deployment tool that enables infrastructure as code.  

 

Ansible Developer Channel

Many themes will be presented in the Ansible Developer Channel, including Kubernetes operations, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform use cases, as well as execution speed and development efficiency considerations. You can learn how Ansible can streamline Kubernetes Day 2 Operations, where monitoring, maintenance and troubleshooting come into play and the application moves from a development project to an actual strategic advantage for your business. You will also learn how Ansible execution environments solve problems for developers using Ansible Automation Platform and how to create self-contained environments that can be run locally or in production Red Hat Ansible Tower deployments. In addition, you can learn how to optimize execution speed and Continue reading

New Arm processor promises smart storage

Arm Ltd. last week announced the Cortex-R82, a chip that is both storage and data processing-capable, which could enable a whole new generation of storage devices that help process the data they store.Storage processor chips, such as those made by Marvell but also storage device makers like EMC, handle the I/O and disk management, but if you want to process the data, that job falls to the CPU. This means data has to be moved in and out of the drive to be processed, a job that falls to two separate devices.But there is an emerging hardware category known as computational storage where the processing is done where the data resides, rather than moving it into memory. Data is processed through various methods, like indexing and schema, eliminating the latency of data movement and freeing up the CPU. Obviously this can only be done on SSDs.To read this article in full, please click here

New Arm processor promises smart storage

Arm Ltd. last week announced the Cortex-R82, a chip that is both storage and data processing-capable, which could enable a whole new generation of storage devices that help process the data they store.Storage processor chips, such as those made by Marvell but also storage device makers like EMC, handle the I/O and disk management, but if you want to process the data, that job falls to the CPU. This means data has to be moved in and out of the drive to be processed, a job that falls to two separate devices.But there is an emerging hardware category known as computational storage where the processing is done where the data resides, rather than moving it into memory. Data is processed through various methods, like indexing and schema, eliminating the latency of data movement and freeing up the CPU. Obviously this can only be done on SSDs.To read this article in full, please click here

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