Accelerating the data center with NVIDIA, Mellanox + Cumulus

Today’s modern datacenter and cloud architectures are horizontally scalable disaggregated distributed systems. Distributed systems have many individual components that work together independently creating a powerful cohesive solution. Just like how compute is the brains behind a datacenter’s distributed system, the network is the nervous system, responsible for ensuring communication gets to all the individual components. This blog tells you why NVIDIA Mellanox gives NVIDIA a larger footprint in the datacenter. The combination of NVIDIA, Mellanox and Cumulus together can provide end-to-end acceleration technologies for the modern disaggregated data-center.

Accelerating the datacenter

All parties coming together in this acquisition are involved in acceleration technologies in the modern data center:

• NVIDIA is at the center of Compute acceleration: Its GPU’s provide compute acceleration for High performance computing and infrastructure for neural networks that power AI assisted application features.
• Mellanox comes to the table with its dominance in High performance interconnects, Data and network processing acceleration on the host and hardware for the network fabric
• Cumulus Networks provides the Linux stack to accelerate the network fabric by enabling networking hardware features, and accelerating deployment, integration and monitoring of the network fabric with Automation and the Linux ecosystem. Cumulus Networks software architecture and DNA Continue reading

Day Two Cloud 061: Using Public Cloud For Disaster Recovery

Day Two Cloud 061: Using Public Cloud For Disaster Recovery

The Day Two Cloud podcast explores different approaches to using the public cloud for disaster recovery. We examine costs and benefits, discuss recovery times, dive into planning, and more. The show draws on co-host Ned Bellavance's experience working on DR projects for a variety of customers during his VAR days.

The post Day Two Cloud 061: Using Public Cloud For Disaster Recovery appeared first on Packet Pushers.

NTC – Netpalm With Tony Nealon

Open source continues to accelerate in the network domain with projects such as Netmiko, NAPALM, and Nornir–all of which are led by individuals, not large organizations or venture-backed startups.  In this episode we sit down with Tony Nealon, creator of Netpalm. Netpalm is a network API platform that can abstract and render structured data, both inbound and outbound, to your network device’s native telnet, SSH, NETCONF or RESTCONF interface–leveraging popular libraries like NAPALM, Netmiko, and ncclient under the hood for network device communication

Helpful Links:

• https://github.com/tbotnz/netpalm
• http://netpalm.tech/
• #netpalm on Network to Code Slack

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post NTC – Netpalm With Tony Nealon appeared first on Network Collective.

How to Simplify and Accelerate Network Segmentation 

Network segmentation—splitting a network into subnetworks or segments—is widely accepted to be a powerful and effective method for improving cybersecurity within the data center. Yet even though it’s acknowledged to be an essential component of network security hygiene, organizations have frequently avoided putting segmentation into practice.  

Why? Because historically network segmentation has been complex, disruptive, and time-consuming to implement, requiring extensive changes to the physical network and/or network addresses. The potential impact of taking applications offline for network changes means that many organizations decide to forego this industry-wide best practice. Teams that do forge ahead often face months- or years-long effort to create security zones by re–architecting the network, relocating equipment, and re-assigning IP addresses.  

It doesn’t have to be that way. Today there’s an elegant solution that greatly simplifies and accelerates network segmentation: VMware NSX Service-defined Firewall. Purpose–built to protect east-west traffic, VMware Service-defined Firewall enables segmentation without any disruptive physical network or address changes. 

Attackers Love Flat Networks  

To back up a step, let’s examine why network segmentation  Continue reading

AnsibleFest 2020 – The Biggest AnsibleFest EVER

It is almost that time of year again for everyone’s favorite automation event! 2020 has given us our fair share of change (and then some). But we’re not just facing new challenges. We’re adapting to them and innovating to overcome them together. We’re distributed yet we’re connected -- connected to new technologies, to new ways of working, and most importantly, to each other.

This year’s AnsibleFest is now a virtual experience, and we are using this opportunity to engage and collaborate with Ansible users across the globe. It will be a free virtual experience where our communities can connect to a wider audience to collaborate and solve problems. The venue may be different this year, but it is still the same AnsibleFest you know and love.

Keynotes

This year we have a great lineup of keynote speakers. We have brought together a group of people rich with Ansible knowledge, tapped to share meaningful insights with you right at home:

• Richard Henshall, Senior Manager for Product Management - Ansible Product Updates
• Matt Jones, Ansible Senior Principal Software Engineer - The Future of Automation
• Chris Wright, Red Hat CTO - Automation at the Edge
• Robyn Bergeron, Senior Principal Community Architect - Continue reading

BGP Confederation Fundamentals – What is BGP Confederation?

The post BGP Confederation Fundamentals – What is BGP Confederation? appeared first on orhanergun.net.

BGP Route Server – Scalable IXP BGP Architecture

The post BGP Route Server – Scalable IXP BGP Architecture appeared first on orhanergun.net.

Worth Reading: Seamless Suffering

When someone sent me a presentation on seamless MPLS a long while ago my head (almost) exploded just by looking at the diagrams… or in the immortal words of @amyengineer:

“If it requires a very solid CCIE on an obscure protocol mix at 4am, it is a bad design” - Peter Welcher, genius crafter of networks, granter of sage advice.

Turns out I was not that far off… Dmytro Shypovalov documented the underlying complexity and a few things that can go wrong in Seamless Suffering.

Jinja Template Inheritance

Jinja template inheritance uses the concept of block to define sections of the base parent template that can be overridden by sections from a child template. An extends statement links the child template to the parent template so that when the child template is rendered the parent template is also rendered and the block statement contents inherited by the parent template.

Real-time trending of dropped packets

8 free Wi-Fi stumbling and surveying tools for Windows and Mac

There is enterprise-level software for surveying Wi-Fi networks, but even in large wireless networks, simple freeware tools are handy for a quick peek at the airwaves during design, deployment or troubleshooting.Here is a look at eight free tools – some for Windows and some for Mac OS X – that provide basic details about nearby Wi-Fi signals: SSIDs, signal strength, channels, MAC addresses and security status. Learn about 5G and Wi-Fi 6 What is 5G? How is it better than 4G? How to determine if WiFi 6 is right for you What is MU-MIMO? Why do you need it in your wireless routers? When to use 5G, when to use WiFi 6 How enterprises can prep for 5G networks Some can even reveal “hidden” or non-broadcasted SSIDs, display the noise levels, or display statistics on successful and failed packets of your wireless connection. One of them includes Wi-Fi password-cracking tools that are useful for educational or penetration testing purposes.To read this article in full, please click here

Deploying WordPress to the Cloud

I was curious the other day how hard it would be to actually set up my own blog or rather I was more interested in how easy it is now to do this with containers. There are plenty of platforms that host blogs for you but is it really now as easy to just run one yourself?

In order to get started, you can sign up for a Docker ID, or use your existing Docker ID to download the latest version of Docker Desktop Edge which includes the new Compose on ECS experience. 

Start with the local experience

To start I setup a local WordPress instance on my machine, grabbing a Compose file example from the awesome-compose repo.

Initially I had a go at running this locally on with Docker Compose:

$ docker-compose up -d

Then I can get the list of running containers:

$ docker-compose ps
           Name                          Command               State          Ports
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
deploywptocloud_db_1          docker-entrypoint.sh --def ...   Up      3306/tcp, 33060/tcp
deploywptocloud_wordpress_1   docker-entrypoint.sh apach ...   Up      0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp

And then lastly I had a look to see that this was running correctly:

Deploy to the Cloud

Great! Now I needed to look at the contents of the Compose file Continue reading

Heavy Networking 534: Managing Automated Networks With vCenter And Dell SmartFabric Services (Sponsored)

Heavy Networking 534: Managing Automated Networks With vCenter And Dell SmartFabric Services (Sponsored)

Heavy Networking dives into building cost-effective, practical, and easily managed leaf-spine networks with sponsor Dell Technologies. We discuss Dell's SmartFabric Services offering, including the underlying infrastructure and software overlay, key automation features, interconnects for enterprise uses such as HCI, and more. Our guest is Saleem Muhammad, Director of Product Management and Marketing at Dell Technologies.

The post Heavy Networking 534: Managing Automated Networks With vCenter And Dell SmartFabric Services (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Partnering with Euro-IX on Infrastructure Development, Routing Security, and More

We can only be successful in creating an Internet for everyone if everyone is part of the effort. That’s why the Internet Society is thrilled to be entering into a partnership with the European Internet Exchange Association (Euro-IX).

The partnership was made official with a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on 14 July. This formal agreement builds on an existing collaboration between the two organizations, who have worked together since 2012. But, whether it’s helping to bring cheaper and faster Internet to the world through the data provided in the IXP Database or making the Internet more secure by supporting the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS), our work has only just begun.

Kjetil Otter Olsen, the chair of Euro-IX said, “The Internet Society has been an excellent supporter of Internet exchange points (IXPs) for many years and has lent the support of its teams across the world to promoting the benefits of peering for Internet networks and the end users of those networks globally.

“Signing this MoU, on behalf of Euro-IX and the community of IXPs we represent, reflects our shared commitment with the Internet Society to continue this work into the future.

“This MoU extends our existing relationship Continue reading

Navigating Technical Support

I think we’ve all been there. The network is down, you’ve tried all the things that you know how to do, and now it’s time to call vendor support to figure out what the heck is going on with your network. Some of us dread this situation as navigating the support process can be daunting at times. We’re hoping to give you some tips in today’s episode to make that process go a little smoother. Listen in as we talk about our experiences with vendor support and what we’ve learned along the way to make the support process as painless as possible.

A considerable thank you to Unimus for sponsoring today’s episode. Unimus is a fast to deploy and easy to use Network Automation and Configuration Management solution. You can learn more about how you can start automating your network in under 15 minutes at unimus.net/nc.

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post Navigating Technical Support appeared first on Network Collective.

Network Break TV – The Video

A new video series publishing weekly. We will take a story that is suitable for video and cover it. Here is the first “Incident” for Network Break TV published on the Packet Pushers Youtube Channel. You should totally subscribe right now The music and intro screens are making me cringe a little. I’ll keep working […]

The post Network Break TV – The Video appeared first on EtherealMind.

Measuring the Internet – Mid Year Project Update

Here at the Internet Society, we believe that the Internet is for everyone. Our work centers on increasing the Internet’s reach, reliability and resilience, as well as ensuring that the network of networks remains open, globally connected, secure, and trustworthy.

But how do we assess whether our efforts – and the efforts of the global ecosystem of organizations that facilitate the smooth functioning of the Internet – are working? How can we see where protocols, such as IPv6, are being deployed and at what rate so we can better understand where more education on the benefits of such technologies might be helpful? Where can policy makers find a comprehensive set of data from various sources to help show decision makers that Internet Showdowns damage local economies and potentially harm citizens?

A Single Platform

There are many people, projects and organizations that are collecting data on various facets of the Internet, but there’s no single site that provides a curated set of insights. So, to help everyone gain deeper, data-driven insight into the Internet, the Internet Society is building a tool that consolidates trusted third-party Internet measurement data from various sources into a single platform – insights.internetsociety.org. 

Continue reading

How Network Engineers Can Manage Credentials and Keys More Securely in Python

For me, 2020 is going to be the year of taking my automation skills to the next level, and a Pandemic is not going to get in the way of that goal (much)! At the top of the list is handling credentials and API keys in a more secure fashion so lets look at how READ MORE

The post How Network Engineers Can Manage Credentials and Keys More Securely in Python appeared first on The Gratuitous Arp.