COVID-19 best practices for data-center operators

Data-center operators are trained to anticipate upheaval due to fires, floods, power outages and other catastrophic events. The novel coronavirus, however, is sending people in charge of mission-critical facilities into uncharted territory."Data centers and IT teams are typically very good at planning. We plan for normal operations, we plan for the future, we plan for abnormal events ... [but] very few people have planned for the type of pandemic that we're facing now," said Fred Dickerman, senior vice president for management services at Uptime Institute. READ MORE: Coronavirus challenges remote networkingTo read this article in full, please click here

Kernel of Truth season 3 episode 3: Linux networking with eBPF

Subscribe to Kernel of Truth on iTunes, Google Play, SpotifyCast Box and Sticher!

Click here for our previous episode.

This podcast is all about Linux and to talk about it, we have two of the top Linux kernel experts. Kernel of Truth host Roopa Prabhu is one and chats with our special guest David Ahern about eBPF. If you haven’t heard of eBPF, it’s the hottest Linux kernel technology bringing programmability and acceleration to many Linux subsystems. In this podcast we focus on eBPF’s impact on networking and the million possibilities it brings to the table.

Guest Bios

Roopa Prabhu: Roopa Prabhu is Chief Linux Architect at Cumulus Networks. At Cumulus she and her team work on all things kernel networking and Linux system infrastructure areas. Her primary focus areas in the Linux kernel are Linux bridge, Netlink, VxLAN, Lightweight tunnels. She is currently focused on building Linux kernel dataplane for E-VPN. She loves working at Cumulus and with the Linux kernel networking and debian communities. Her past experience includes Linux clusters, ethernet drivers and Linux KVM virtualization platforms. She has a BS and MS in Computer Science. You can find her on Twitter at @__roopa.

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HashiCorp Scores $175M Funding Round, $5B Valuation

The company has posted a 100% year-over-year increase in revenue during the past four years, and...

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Electronics should sweat to cool down, say researchers

Computing devices should sweat when they get too hot, say scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, where they have developed a materials application they claim will cool down devices more efficiently and in smaller form-factors than existing fans.It’s “a coating for electronics that releases water vapor to dissipate heat from running devices,” the team explain in a news release. “Mammals sweat to regulate body temperature,” so should electronics, they believe.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The group’s focus has been on studying porous materials that can absorb moisture from the environment and then release water vapor when warmed. MIL-101(Cr) checks the boxes, they say. The material is a metal organic framework, or MOF, which is a sorbent, a material that stores large amounts of water. The higher the water capacity one has, the greater the dissipation of heat when it's warmed.To read this article in full, please click here

Daily Roundup: COVID-19 Postpones Google Cloud Next

COVID-19 postponed Google Cloud Next; SoftIron placed its bets on SONiC; and Telefónica tapped...

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DoCoMo 5G Service Gets Launch Date

The carrier's network will have 500 base stations covering around 150 “locations” around the...

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Telefónica Wades Into Open RAN Across Global Footprint

Open RAN is gaining momentum around the world and it’s being driven further by recently increased...

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Nutanix Scales Out on Objects Update

Nutanix updated its object storage platform to bring “simplicity” and “performance” to big...

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Juniper, Cox Pump $216M Into StackPath Coffers

In addition to leading the Series B, Juniper and Cox are also StackPath customers although they use...

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SoftIron Bets on SONiC With Hyperscale Switches

"Networking is the most neglected integrated thing that exists in IT right now," says SoftIron CEO...

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Day Two Cloud 040: Building And Operating A Private Cloud

Today's Day Two Cloud delves into how and why to build a private cloud that functions as well as a public cloud. We examine the design and operational challenges of assembling and running cloud infrastructure on premises. Our guest is Bryan Sullins, Senior Systems Engineer for a large retailer.

The post Day Two Cloud 040: Building And Operating A Private Cloud appeared first on Packet Pushers.

A New Path For Certifications

Cisco leads the industry when it comes to respected and valued IT infrastructure certification paths and last month Cisco made some significant changes to the way they do certifications. In today’s episode we discuss some of these changes and what the implications are for those of us pursuing new Cisco certifications or maintaining the certifications we already hold.  

Nick Russo
Guest
Kyler Middleton
Guest
Craig Stansbury
Guest
Jordan Martin
Host

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 A New Path For Certifications appeared first on Network Collective.

The problem with thread^W event loops

The problem with thread^W event loops

Back when Cloudflare was created, over 10 years ago now, the dominant HTTP server used to power websites was Apache httpd. However, we decided to build our infrastructure using the then relatively new NGINX server.

There are many differences between the two, but crucially for us, the event loop architecture of NGINX was the key differentiator. In a nutshell, event loops work around the need to have one thread or process per connection by coalescing many of them in a single process, this reduces the need for expensive context switching from the operating system and also keeps the memory usage predictable. This is done by processing each connection until it wants to do some I/O, at that point, the said connection is queued until the I/O task is complete. During that time the event loop is available to process other in-flight connections, accept new clients, and the like. The loop uses a multiplexing system call like epoll (or kqueue) to be notified whenever an I/O task is complete among all the running connections.

In this article we will see that despite its advantages, event loop models also have their limits and falling back to good old threaded architecture is sometimes Continue reading

An empirical guide to the behavior and use of scalable persistent memory

An empirical guide to the behavior and use of scalable persistent memory, Yang et al., FAST’20

We’ve looked at multiple papers exploring non-volatile main memory and its implications (e.g. most recently ‘Efficient lock-free durable sets‘). One thing they all had in common is an evaluation using some kind of simulation of the expected behaviour of NVDIMMs, because the real thing wasn’t yet available. But now it is! This paper examines the real-world behaviour of Intel’s Optane DIMM, and finds that not all of the assumptions baked into prior works hold. Based on these findings, the authors present four guidelines to get the best performance out of this memory today. Absolutely fascinating if you like this kind of thing!

The data we have collected demonstrate that many of the assumptions that researchers have made about how NVDIMMs would behave and perform are incorrect. The widely expressed expectation was that NVDIMMs would have behavior that was broadly similiar to DRAM-based DIMMs but with lower performance (i.e., higher latency and lower bandwidth)… We have found the actual behavior of Optane DIMMs to be more complicated and nuanced than the "slower, persistent DRAM" label would suggest.

Optane Continue reading

Solving “NAME is not exported by MODULE” When Using Local NPM Dependencies

This blog post will focus on a topic I don’t usually dive into (Javascript and related tooling), but I felt like others might benefit from the solution to a problem I encountered while doing local development for antidote-web, the web front-end that powers NRE Labs. A quick aside on the architecture for the front-end code for the Antidote platform - the antidote-web project is the lynchpin for everything. It’s where the general structure of the front-end app is managed.