Meraki Is Almost An Enterprise Solution

You may remember a three or so years ago when I famously declared that Meraki is not a good solution for enterprises. I know the folks at Meraki certainly haven’t. The profile for the hardware and services has slowly been rising inside of Cisco. More than just wireless with the requisite networking components, Meraki has now embraced security, SD-WAN, and even security cameras. They’ve moved into a lot of areas that customers have been asking about while also still trying to maintain the simplicity that Meraki is known for.

Having just finished up a Meraki presentation during Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the progress that Meraki has been making toward embracing their enterprise customer base. I’m not entirely convinced that they’ve made it yet, but the progress is starting to look good.

Playing for Scale

The first area where Meraki is starting to really make strides is in the scalability department. This video from Tech Field Day Extra is all about new security features in the platform, specifically with firewalls. Take a quick look:

Toward the end of the video is one of Continue reading

Arcadia makes supporting clean energy easier

Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to power your home with clean energy, and yet, many Americans don’t know how to make the switch. Luckily, you don’t have to install expensive solar panels or switch utility companies to support a cleaner, sustainable future. If you’re interested in supporting clean energy and saving money on your power bill, consider Arcadia.Arcadia is a platform that makes it easy for homeowners and renters to choose clean, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. You can visit Arcadia’s website and input your ZIP code to see how clean energy compares to traditional sources in your area. To power your home with clean energy, all you have to do is connect your utility bill, and you can choose between wind and community solar farms in your area, or you can use Arcadia’s Smart Rate to find the lowest price available. In fact, you’ll even save money on your power bill if clean energy is cheaper in your area. To read this article in full, please click here

Intro to the Linux command line

If you’re new to Linux or have simply never bothered to explore the command line, you may not understand why so many Linux enthusiasts get excited typing commands when they’re sitting at a comfortable desktop with plenty of tools and apps available to them. In this post, we’ll take a quick dive to explore the wonders of the command line and see if maybe we can get you hooked.First, to use the command line, you have to open up a command tool (also referred to as a “command prompt”). How to do this will depend on which version of Linux you’re running. On RedHat, for example, you might see an Activities tab at the top of your screen which will open a list of options and a small window for entering a command (like “cmd” which will open the window for you). On Ubuntu and some others, you might see a small terminal icon along the left-hand side of your screen. On many systems, you can open a command window by pressing the Ctrl+Alt+t keys at the same time.To read this article in full, please click here

Seamless offloading of web app computations from mobile device to edge clouds via HTML5 Web Worker migration

Seamless offloading of web app computations from mobile device to edge clouds via HTML5 web worker migration, Jeong et al., SoCC’19 [^1]

This paper caught my eye for its combination of an intriguing idea (opportunistic offload of computation from mobile devices to the edge) and the elegance of the way the web worker interface supports this use case. It’s live migration – but for web workers instead of the more usual VMs or containers.

Why would we want to live migrate web workers?

Emerging mobile applications, such as mobile cloud gaming or augmented reality, require strict latency constraints as well as high computer power… A survey on the latency of games has reported that less than ~50ms of network latency is preferred for time-critical games, which is hard to achieve with a traditional cloud system where computing servers are located in datacenters far from clients…

So you’ve got mobile devices without the computing power needed to deliver a great experience, and cloud computing that has all the needed power that’s too far away. Edge servers are the middle ground – more compute power than a mobile device, but with latency of just a few ms. The kind of Continue reading

How bacteria could run the Internet of Things

Biologically created computing devices could one day be as commonplace as today’s microprocessors and microchips, some scientists believe. Consider DNA, the carrier of genetic information and the principal component of chromosomes; it's showing promise as a data storage medium.A recent study (PDF) suggests taking matters further and using microbes to network and communicate at nanoscale. The potential is highly attractive for the Internet of Things (IoT), where concealability and unobtrusiveness may be needed for the technology to become completely ubiquitous.To read this article in full, please click here

Video: Wi-Fi vs 5G, AI/ML for network management, more

IDC analyst and networking expert Brandon Butler joins Computerworld Executive Editor Ken Mingis and IDG Video Content Producer Juliet Beauchamp to discuss networking trends.They hit upof Wi-Fi versus 5G and how artificial intelligence and machine learning can simplify network management. They also discuss how enterprises are beginning to deploy more advanced networks to enable newer tech innovations like IoT and successfully analyze huge amounts of data.Watch here: To read this article in full, please click here

IBM Injects Red Into Its Blue Executive Suite

Big Blue tapped Arvind Krishna, who led its Red Hat acquisition, to replace long-tenured CEO Ginni...

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Daily Roundup: VMware Slashes Jobs

VMware slashed jobs; Microsoft soared to new heights on the cloud; and the EU punts on Huawei.

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Downgrade all Debian packages to a specific date

Unlike NixOS, Debian doesn’t have a builtin mechanism to rollback an installation to a specific point in time. However, thanks to snapshot.debian.org, a wayback machine for Debian packages, it is possible to downgrade all packages to the versions from a chosen date.

Let’s suppose we want to go back to January, 20th 2020. In /etc/apt/sources.list.d/snapshot.list, we add a date-specific snapshot as a source:

deb [check-valid-until=no] https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20200120T111800Z/ unstable main contrib non-free

In /etc/apt/preferences.d/snapshot.pref, we set the priority of all packages from this source to 1001. This is above the default priority of 500 and over 1000 to allow downgrade. See apt_preferences(5) manual page for more details.

Package: *
Pin: origin snapshot.debian.org
Pin-Priority: 1001

After running apt update, we can check the result with apt policy:

$ apt policy
Package files:
 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     release a=now
1001 https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20200120T111800Z unstable/non-free amd64 Packages
     release o=Debian,a=unstable,n=sid,l=Debian,c=non-free,b=amd64
     origin snapshot.debian.org
1001 https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20200120T111800Z unstable/contrib amd64 Packages
     release o=Debian,a=unstable,n=sid,l=Debian,c=contrib,b=amd64
     origin snapshot.debian.org
1001 https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20200120T111800Z unstable/main amd64 Packages
     release o=Debian,a=unstable,n=sid,l=Debian,c=main,b=amd64
     origin snapshot.debian.org
[…]

When requesting an upgrade, we Continue reading

If You’ve Got It, Flaunt It — Kubernetes Experience, That Is

Employer demand for IT professionals with Kubernetes experience is growing faster than candidate...

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VMware ‘Rebalances’ Jobs Following 12-Month Buying Spree

“We are rebalancing some areas of our business to align to our top growth priorities,” a VMware...

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EU Defers Huawei Security Issue to Member States

The EU won't ban or limit Huawei from participating in 5G build outs. Instead, lingering national...

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SAI 1.5

The Open Compute Project (OCP), "is a rapidly growing community of engineers around the world whose mission is to design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs available for scalable computing."

The OCP SAI (Switch Abstraction Interface) Project is an important part of the networking effort, defining "a vendor-independent way of controlling forwarding elements, such as a switching ASIC, an NPU or a software switch in a uniform manner." SAI 1.5 Release Notes describe enhancements to existing sFlow API, in particular adding support for the Linux psample netlink channel, see  Linux 4.11 kernel extends packet sampling support. Supporting the standard Linux interface for packet sampling simplifies the implementation of sFlow agents (e.g. Host sFlow) and ensures consistent behavior across hardware platforms to deliver real-time network-wide visibility using industry standard sFlow protocol.

Verizon Maintains 5G, Virtualization Spend

The carrier will maintain the approximately $18 billion it spent on capex in 2019.

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Apstra’s Intent-Based Networking Brings Enterprises to Cloud Parity

For some companies, things like cloud native deployments on Kubernetes with microservices is a given. For others, those technologies comprise a still distant future, and contemporary complexities include the stuff of network switches, proprietary, vendor-specific configurations, and on-prem networks that require manual operations to manage. For companies in the latter category, intent-based networking (IBN), which means to replace the manual processes of configuring networks and reacting to network issues with a system that responds to a system administrator’s outcome-focused requests. Apstra has been in the business of delivering intent-based networking since 2014, emerging from stealth in 2016. Apstra CEO and co-founder SONiC network operating system, which is based on Linux and is meant to run on switches from various vendors. Much like Apstra’s initial intention of providing a singular, automated entry point to manage a variety of different network components, SONiC provides “a full-suite of network functionality, like BGP and RDMA” that functions regardless of proprietary hardware. Feature image by Pixabay. The post Apstra’s Intent-Based Networking Brings Enterprises to Cloud Parity appeared first on The New Stack.