If you still live in a world of the script-driven approach for both service provider and enterprise networks, you are going to reach limits. There is only so far you can go alone. It creates a gap that lacks modeling and database at a higher layer. Production-grade service provider and enterprise networks require a production-grade automation framework. 

In today's environment, the network infrastructure acts as the core centerpiece, providing critical connection points. Over time, the role of infrastructure has expanded substantially. In the present day, it largely influences the critical business functions for both the service provider and enterprise environments. 

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VMware is expanding its security range with a new version of its virtualization software that has security integrated into the hypervisor.

“Our flagship VMware vSphere product now has AppDefense built right in,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told the audience at VMworld 2018, which kicked off this week in Las Vegas. “Platinum will enable virtualization teams – you – to give an enormous contribution to the security profile of your enterprise.”

Announced one year ago, AppDefense is VMware’s data-center endpoint-security product, designed to protect applications running in virtualized environments. AppDefense uses machine learning and behavioral analytics to understand how an application is supposed to behave, and it detects threats by monitoring for changes to the application’s intended state.

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Microsoft is offering extended support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 to customers who shift these platforms from on-premises into Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

The scheduled ends of extended support for the 2008 versions of Server and SQL Server are Jan. 14, 2020 and July 9, 2019, respectively. But if customers move these workloads into the Azure cloud, they get three extra years of support at no extra cost beyond the price of the Azure service.

In the past, when the end-of-life clock started ticking, organizations made a mad dash to upgrade operating systems and SQL servers in order to keep their systems supported. Some organizations chose to continue running their applications completely unsupported, unpatched and un-updated – a very bad thing to do in this age of viruses, malware and cyberattacks.

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How soon the 4.18 kernel lands on your system or network depends a lot on which Linux distributions you use. It may be heading your way or you may already be using it.

If you have ever wondered whether the same kernel is used in all Linux distributions, the answer is that all Linux distributions use the same kernel more or less, but there are several big considerations that make that "more or less" quite significant:

1. Most distributions add or remove code to make the kernel work best for them. Some of these changes might eventually work their way back to the top of the code heap where they will be merged into the mainstream, but they'll make the distribution's kernel unique — at least for a while.
2. Some releases intentionally hold back and don't use the very latest version of the kernel in order to ensure a more predictable and stable environment. This is particularly true of versions that are targeted for commercial distribution. For example, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Edition) will not be nearly as aggressively updated as Fedora.
3. Some distributions use a fork called Linux-libre, which is Linux without any proprietary drivers built in. It omits software that does not include its source code, has its source code obfuscated, or is released under proprietary licenses.

What is kernel.org?

In case this URL isn't familiar, www.kernel.org is the website of the organization that distributes the Linux kernel and other open source software to the public without charge. The site provides kernel archives where anyone can download source. And, yes, even you can go and download source code for Linux.

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Every data center admin knows that dealing with excess heat is one of the biggest, most expensive factors involved in running a modern data center.

For decades, engineers have been looking for new ways to mitigate the issue, and now Norway is building a brand-new town designed to turn the problem into an opportunity to lower costs, reduce energy usage, and fight climate change.

Hug your servers ... to stay warm

According to Fast Company, the town of Lyseparken, now under construction near Bergen, Norway, is being built to use the excess heat generated by a new data center in the heart of the community to keep a nearly 6.5 million square feet of nearby planned business and office space—and eventually up to 5,000 homes—warm. It works like this:

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Ciena

New innovations stemming from artificial intelligence, machine learning and connected health are changing the way medical professionals treat their patients. Doctors are having to adapt to take advantage of these developments – but has their network adapted to support them?

Two newborns are delivered on the same day by the same doctor in the same hospital.  The truth is, the decisions their respective parents are about to make can have an enormous impact on their daughters’ health and quality of life for the next several decades. 

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I’ve long felt Japan has been severely overlooked in recent years due to two “lost decades” and China overshadowing it — and supercomputing is no exception.

In 2011, Fujitsu launched the K computer at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. Calling it a computer really is a misnomer, though, as is the case in any supercomputer these days. When I think “computer,” I think of the 3-foot-tall black tower a few feet from me making the room warm. In the case of K, it’s rows and rows of cabinets stuffed with rack-mounted servers in a space the size of a basketball court.

With its distributed memory architecture, K had 88,128 eight-core SPARC64 VIIIfx processors in 864 cabinets. Fujitsu was a licensee of Sun Microsystems’ SPARC processor (later Oracle) and did some impressive work on the processor on its own. When it launched in 2011, the K was ranked the world's fastest supercomputer on the TOP500 supercomputer list, at a computation speed of over 8 petaflops. It has since been surpassed by supercomputers from the U.S. and China.

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Imagine you are in a crowded ER, and doctors are running from room to room. In the waiting area, patients are checking in via an online portal, and hospital staff are quickly capturing their confidential medical and insurance information on a mobile device. You look down the hall, where admitted patients are receiving treatment through Wi-Fi enabled biomedical devices, and some are even streaming their favorite show on Netflix while they wait. In a hospital, there are hundreds of individuals conducting critical tasks at any given moment, and they rely on thousands of connected devices to get the job done. But, this begs the question: What happens if that network fails?

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To the surprise of many not living it every day, a robust, resilient, and reliable network is one of the most important drivers behind success in today’s business world. Organizations must continuously improve their network infrastructure to better meet organizational requirements and offer the experiences their customers expect. Recent changes in the network market mean this continuous improvement needs to go beyond optimizations and extend all the way to re-architecting the network.

The forces driving network re-architecture are twofold: new demands on the network, and innovations in network technology and solutions. These new demands on the network stem from enterprise-wide digital transformation initiatives such as cloud, SD-WAN, machine learning and AI, IoT, edge computing, and more. While these new requirements offer a host of business benefits, they’re also introducing disruptive complexity to the network, driving the need to simplify and accelerate the way all IT services are delivered today.

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Dell EMC has launched a new line of high-performance servers called the PowerEdge MX that the company said is designed to support a wide variety of traditional and emerging data center workloads, such as artificial intelligence.

PowerEdge MX offers the first modular infrastructure architecture designed to easily adapt to future technologies and offers what Dell calls “server disaggregation.” What that means is customers can tailor configurations to their needs from shared pools of disaggregated resources, which can be changed as needed. If a company needs more or less compute, it can reprovision that resource on the fly to avoid overprovisioning and wasted assets.

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Network traffic, by nature, is often unbalanced. For example, a client that requests a video on demand may receive ten times more bandwidth than it sends for that service. Likewise, most web applications are very one-sided, with the bulk of the traffic being from server to client. The opposite is true for many backup applications, where the bulk of the traffic originates at the client and terminates at the server.

The United States is like your network – suffering from a trade imbalance. For every packet we ship to a foreign network, we are receiving four or five in return. Just as there are barriers to trade, we apply barriers to our inbound traffic. The barrier for most of us is the actual size of our Internet service interface. Packets queue up and drop at our carrier’s equipment prior to even being seen by our equipment. If you purchase a 50Meg download speed, any packets that arrive at a faster rate (even for a sub-second of time) will be dropped without prejudice. This is a barrier, restriction and tariff on your services that limit your business. The only solution – buy more bandwidth!

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Microsoft and Salesforce have separately announced plans to release some key software products as open source for anyone to use in their data centers.

Microsoft plans to release its Open Network Emulator (ONE), a simulator of its entire Azure network infrastructure that it uses as a way to find and troubleshoot problems before they cause network outages. The announcement was made by Victor Bahl, a distinguished scientist with Microsoft Research, on a Microsoft podcast.

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Deploying private internet of things LTE networks using open-access, about-to-be-released, shared spectrum is getting closer to the starting gate, according to the CBRS Alliance, which has just announced the inception of eight global test labs for its OnGo equipment certifications. Enterprises will be able to use their own, in-building, dedicated equipment for the cellular-like systems on new frequencies.

As a sign “of market readiness, OnGo access points from several member companies have already started the testing process,” CBRS Alliance says in the release on its website. OnGo is CBRS Alliance’s moniker for the mobile broadband-like CBRS LTE shared-spectrum equipment.

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Whether users are looking to stabilize cloud-connected resources, better manage remote networks or simply upgrade a timeworn wide area environment, software-defined-WAN (SD-WAN) technologies are what’s on the purchasing menu.

The proof lies in the fact that this segment of the networking market will hit $4.5 billion and grow at a 40.4% compound annual growth rate from 2017 to 2022. In 2017 alone, SD-WAN infrastructure revenues increased 83.3% in 2017 to reach $833 million, according to IDC's recent SD-WAN Infrastructure Forecast.  

A related report from researchers at the Dell’Oro Group predicts revenue from SD-WAN software components, including controller and virtual network functions, will grow almost twice as fast as the hardware components.  Over the next five years, SD-WAN software revenue will grow at a 41% compounded annual growth rate, compared to 21% for hardware.

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Welcome to what we’re hoping is the first in a long string of regular updates from the world of IoT; everything from security to platform news will be fair game, and the aim is to help you be better grounded in the rapidly expanding Internet of Things space.

Schneider’s building open things

Schneider Electric, the Andover, Mass.,-based building-infrastructure manufacturer, recently rolled out a new open framework for IoT implementations, dubbing the product EcoStruxure Building.

It’s a software platform that makes it easy for sensors and controllers to talk to each other, even in complicated, large-scale building projects where there could be a lot of both types of devices.

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What impact is the internet of things having on enterprise networks and the way we use DNS? For many network and security pros today, the answer is “no clue,” due to the lack of source address validation combined with the explosive growth of IoT, expected to hit more than 75 billion connected devices by 2025^[2].

From embedded sensors laced with unknown code to devices that can exfiltrate data from otherwise secure networks, IoT devices are already leading a new wave of cyberthreats, from sensors designed with little or no thought towards security to network connectivity relying on default passwords, that can lead to cameras that query SQL databases. This blog post looks at some of the dangers with a view to how DNS can help stop them before they do harm.

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The selection process for this roundup started back in May at the tail-end of a previous, but closely related competition, 10 Hot IoT startups to watch.

AI wasn’t a key selection criterion then. Some startups had it, some did not, but enough of them focused squarely on AI that it made sense to look more closely at this subsector of the overall IoT market.

This roundup considered about 20 companies from the previous contenders that had strong AI components. Notice of the search for candidates was posted on HARO, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., and all told, just under 40 startups were considered.

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There are many challenges that service providers must deal with in multi-layer networks. A majority of them stem from the lack of coordinated visibility and orchestration across the optical and IP/MPLS layers. Ciena’s Kailem Anderson details these challenges and the benefits that multi-layer orchestration can bring. For even more details, also be sure to attend our upcoming Light Reading webinar.

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For cities to evolve and realize the full benefits of becoming “smart,” they will require real-time access to multiple sources of data from different locations. Ciena’s Daniele Loffreda explains what is needed from the next-generation of networks to make smart cities a reality.

Apple CEO, Tim Cook, said it best during a commencement address at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last year when he proclaimed science and technology are worthless, if they aren’t motivated by the desire to help people. This belief can be just as correctly applied to the planning and development of smart city initiatives.

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The ability to network devices quickly and easily is critical in a hyper-connected world, and although it has been around for decades, DHCP remains an essential method to ensure that devices are able to join networks and are configured correctly.

 DHCP greatly reduces the errors that are made when IP addresses are assigned manually, and can stretch IP addresses by limiting how long a device can keep an individual IP address.

DHCP definition

DHCP stands for dynamic host configuration protocol and is a network protocol used on IP networks where a DHCP server automatically assigns an IP address and other information to each host on the network so they can communicate efficiently with other endpoints.

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A CIO of a retail chain recently issued an edict that all requirements for networking must be stated as business needs, including all RFIs, RFQs and internal proposals. No networking protocols, features or terms are now permitted. At first glance this seems like a relatively simple instruction, but the IT staff struggled to articulate business needs and map them to network capabilities. The CIO is imposing a discipline of asking “why” three times to try to understand and separate the inertia of past choices from what their business needs today. I believe the CIO is wise in trying to connect the business needs to network capabilities.

Speaking the language of the industry

Networking professionals are being left out of the narrative. We are deemed a necessary evil rather than a partner in producing products and services. We are the people that slow things down, make things harder and budget for things people do not understand nor value. Becoming part of the narrative requires that each networking professional understand and anticipate their business’s needs. In fact, I would argue that the public cloud, bring your own device and shadow IT are the result of networking not being part of the narrative.

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One year ago, Charlie Giancarlo took the helm of Pure Storage, which in fiscal year 2018 reported its first billion-dollar year.

Giancarlo was a managing director and senior advisor at Silver Lake Partners before joining Pure Storage. Prior to that, he held multiple executive positions at Cisco, where he helped steer the company into markets such as Ethernet switching, VoIP, Wi-Fi and telepresence.

Giancarlo talked with Network World's Ann Bednarz about what Pure is doing to keep the storage industry moving forward, and how the experience he gained during Cisco’s growth spurt is helping.

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As enterprises endeavor to expand domestic and global footprints, agile network infrastructure connectivity across geographies continues to prove an ongoing challenge. In particular, ensuring that data shared over these networks is protected from unauthorized access is a primary directive in today’s evolving cyber threat landscape. These often-contradictory demands call for IT decision makers to invest in innovation that will facilitate network flexibility and agility without compromising security, productivity or performance.

This challenge begs a simple question. How can a WAN deliver the flexibility and agility necessary to help an organization grow without increasing exposure to data breaches and other security problems? After all, if the cost of convenience is increased network vulnerabilities, can it be considered a sound approach?

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Hybrid IT networking has come a long way in the past decade, as enterprises have gradually come to embrace and trust cloud computing. Yet, despite the growing popularity of both private and public clouds, many enterprise IT teams are still struggling with how to handle the resulting migration challenges.

Originally envisioned as simply a way to reduce costs, migration to the cloud has escalated in large part due to a drive for greater agility and flexibility. In fact, according to a recent State of the Network global survey of more than 600 IT professionals, the top two reasons enterprises are moving to the cloud are to increase IT scalability and agility, and to improve service availability and reliability. The need to lower costs was ranked number four, tied with the desire to deliver new services faster.

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