The Fat Pipe - All Packet Pushers Pods

Today’s Tech Bytes episode explores the Link State Vector Routing (LSVR) protocol, an IETF draft standard that lets you use BGP to build a data center fabric.

Our sponsor is Arrcus, and we discuss how LSVR works, including how it reduces resource consumption in routers and speeds convergence, and how it can be used with BGP EVPN.

Our guests explain how LSVR ties to Arrcus’s ArcOS network operating system, what it can do for organizations building CLOS fabrics in their data centers, and common use cases.

Joining us from Arrcus are Keyur Patel, CTO and cofounder; and Murali Gandluru, VP of product management and marketing.

Show Links:

Link State Over Ethernet – IETF

Link State Vector Routing (lsvr) – IETF

Arrcus

Follow Arrcus on Twitter

Follow Arrcus on LinkedIn

PQ 160: Inside ArcOS®: The Internet-Scale, Carrier-Grade Network OS (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

Take a Network Break. This week we analyze how ASUS got spanked by clever attackers, lazy software patching from Cisco and Huawei, a new venture firm funded by Cisco to spur enterprise startups, the latest release of OpenDaylight, and more IT news.

Take a Network Break! Attackers infiltrate ASUS’s update servers to propagate malware to customers, Cisco gets caught issuing a lazy security patch for its RV320 and RV325 routers, and Huawei takes four years to fix vulnerable code.

Britain’s Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC) Oversight Board gives Huawei poor marks for software engineering and security hygiene practices, AWS announces Voice Collector for toll bypass as part of its Chime collaboration package, and Microsoft rolls out Data Box hardware for hybrid Azure use cases.

Cisco launches Decibel, an independent venture capital firm to spur enterprise startups, OpenDaylight debuts the Neon release of its SDN controller, and a former startup employee takes some shine off the startup dream.

Citrix rebrands XenServer to Citrix Hypervisor, and Office Depot gets smacked with a $25 million fine from the FTC for scamming customers with crooked malware scans.

Sponsor: ExtraHop

ExtraHop is the enterprise cyber analytics company delivering performance and security from the inside out. ExtraHop offers complete visibility with machine learning to help you make quick, confident decisions about your IT environment. Explore the ExtraHop Performance Platform at extrahop.com/packetpushers.

TechBytes: Arrcus And LSVR

Stay tuned after the news for a conversation about a new data center protocol, Link State Vector Routing (LSVR). We talk with sponsor Arrcus about how its ArcOS network operating system leverages LSVR to help you build a BGP-based data center fabric.

Show Links:

Malicious updates for ASUS laptops – Kaspersky Lab official blog

Hackers Hijacked ASUS Software Updates to Install Backdoors on Thousands of Computers – Motherboard

Hackers dropped a secret backdoor in Asus’ update software – TechCrunch

ASUS response to the recent media reports regarding ASUS Live Update tool attack – ASUS

How Microsoft found a Huawei driver that opened systems to attack – Ars Technica

Cisco bungled RV320/RV325 patches, routers still exposed to hacks – ZDNet

Huawei’s half-arsed router patching left kit open to botnets: Chinese giant was warned years ago – then bungled it – The Register

Huawei cyber security evaluation centre oversight board: annual report 2019 – Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC) Oversight Board (PDF)

Huawei savaged by Brit code review board over pisspoor dev practices – The Register

Today's Heavy Networking, sponsored by VMware, dives into the latest security features in NSX-T, and examines how NSX is expanding from the data center to the WAN and the cloud. We also hear from NSX customer Sky UK about how NSX helps bridge the gap between infrastructure and developer teams.

On today’s Heavy Networking we explore the evolution of the NSX platform with sponsor VMware.

This episode has two parts. In the first, we look at how NSX is expanding from the data center to encompass the WAN via integrations with VeloCloud, and into the public cloud.

We also examine new security features and capabilities in NSX-T, including the service-defined firewall and adaptive microsegmentation. Our guest for part one is Tom Gillis, SVP and General Manager in VMware’s Networking and Security Business Unit.

In the second segment we hear from an NSX customer. James Cruikshank, Platform Engineer at Sky UK, shares how NSX-T makes it possible for the networking side of the house to enable developers to quickly provision resources such as VLANs, load balancers, and other elements using CI/CD tools.

He also talks about how VMware helps remove barriers between infrastructure and developer teams, and what that means for overall operations.

Show Links:

VMware Network Virtualization Blog – VMware

Introducing NSX-T 2.4 – A Landmark Release in the History of NSX – VMware

NSX Mindset – VMware

VeloCloud by VMware

Networking and Security – VMware Radius – Networking – VMware

The following is a transcript of the audio file you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s March 28, 2019, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Lightbits Labs earlier this month. Why? Because I believe NVMe over TCP is going to make major inroads into enterprise environments over the next months and years, and Lightbits Labs employs many of the folks who wrote the spec. These folks are at the heart of all that is NVMe over TCP, and I wanted to hear about their product and what they’ve been doing with customers, as that might be you in the near future.

Network As Directly Attached Storage

Lightbits Labs has announced a software defined storage with hardware acceleration product. In a nutshell, the product is a global flash translation layer that decouples SSDs and compute. Put your compute wherever, mount a box full of fast storage via Lightbits using the NVMe over TCP protocol, and get storage latency that performs like directly attached storage, but without the waste of space.

Lightbits is aiming this offering at folks who are looking for hardcore storage performance. These folks are operating private clouds and large enterprises. Usually, these companies have their own composable stack. What they want from Lightbits is an API and speed.

Lightbits Is Different

If you’re thinking that this is essentially distributed storage and nothing new, you’re sort of right. Abstracting disk from compute isn’t new. But Lightbits cites four differentiators that we’ll talk through.

First, Lightbits works with the server hardware you bring dedicated to storage, provided it’s x86 with standard NVMe SSDs…nothing fancy. You can load the server with 8, 16, or even 32 SSDs. The NIC can be a standard Ethernet NIC. TCP offload is not required. TCP windowing is optimized by the NVMe over TCP stack to get a consistent latency profile for the storage server traffic.

If you want your rev up your stock x86 hardware a little, Lightbits will sell you an optional acceleration card for SSD management and data services. The LightField Card is a PCIe add-in that offloads data reduction, data protection, NVMe/TCP, and the global flash translation layer functions.

Second, Lightbits claims that the global flash translation layer, something you typically find at the host level, is unique. As I dug around the Internet, I couldn’t find anything to dispute that claim. Lightbits calls their global FTL LightOS. LightOS is the operating system software layer that virtualizes pools of SSDs. Lightbits claims that LightOS can improve the endurance of SSDs up to 4x, especially with compression and thin provisioning. And if that’s true, there’s an ROI calculation you perform, because the physical flash disk is going to last longer with LightOS sitting on top of it. LightOS doesn’t offer de-duplication today, but it’s on the roadmap.

Third, NVMe over TCP is, as the name implies, TCP. You can run this over your existing IP network. You can run it multi-hop, not a given in storage protocols. You don’t have to build a special network to handle special storage protocol magic. NVMe over TCP works with what you’ve got. That said, I will point out that NVMe over TCP might ask a little bit of that network you’ve got, and you should do some homework. Dr. J Metz did a dense, detail-filled presentation on NVMe over fabrics for network engineers, and you can find that presentation on our Ignition.PacketPushers.net website for free. But the point stands that NVMe over TCP doesn’t need a special network, which probably means it’s coming to your network at some point.

Fourth, Lightbits points out that t…

The following is a transcript of the audio file you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s March 28, 2019, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Lightbits Labs earlier this month. Why? Because I believe NVMe over TCP is going to make major inroads into enterprise environments over the next months and years, and Lightbits Labs employs many of the folks who wrote the spec. These folks are at the heart of all that is NVMe over TCP, and I wanted to hear about their product and what they’ve been doing with customers, as that might be you in the near future.

Network As Directly Attached Storage

Lightbits Labs has announced a software defined storage with hardware acceleration product. In a nutshell, the product is a global flash translation layer that decouples SSDs and compute. Put your compute wherever, mount a box full of fast storage via Lightbits using the NVMe over TCP protocol, and get storage latency that performs like directly attached storage, but without the waste of space.

Lightbits is aiming this offering at folks who are looking for hardcore storage performance. These folks are operating private clouds and large enterprises. Usually, these companies have their own composable stack. What they want from Lightbits is an API and speed.

Lightbits Is Different

If you’re thinking that this is essentially distributed storage and nothing new, you’re sort of right. Abstracting disk from compute isn’t new. But Lightbits cites four differentiators that we’ll talk through.

First, Lightbits works with the server hardware you bring dedicated to storage, provided it’s x86 with standard NVMe SSDs…nothing fancy. You can load the server with 8, 16, or even 32 SSDs. The NIC can be a standard Ethernet NIC. TCP offload is not required. TCP windowing is optimized by the NVMe over TCP stack to get a consistent latency profile for the storage server traffic.

If you want your rev up your stock x86 hardware a little, Lightbits will sell you an optional acceleration card for SSD management and data services. The LightField Card is a PCIe add-in that offloads data reduction, data protection, NVMe/TCP, and the global flash translation layer functions.

Second, Lightbits claims that the global flash translation layer, something you typically find at the host level, is unique. As I dug around the Internet, I couldn’t find anything to dispute that claim. Lightbits calls their global FTL LightOS. LightOS is the operating system software layer that virtualizes pools of SSDs. Lightbits claims that LightOS can improve the endurance of SSDs up to 4x, especially with compression and thin provisioning. And if that’s true, there’s an ROI calculation you perform, because the physical flash disk is going to last longer with LightOS sitting on top of it. LightOS doesn’t offer de-duplication today, but it’s on the roadmap.

Third, NVMe over TCP is, as the name implies, TCP. You can run this over your existing IP network. You can run it multi-hop, not a given in storage protocols. You don’t have to build a special network to handle special storage protocol magic. NVMe over TCP works with what you’ve got. That said, I will point out that NVMe over TCP might ask a little bit of that network you’ve got, and you should do some homework. Dr. J Metz did a dense, detail-filled presentation on NVMe over fabrics for network engineers, and you can find that presentation on our Ignition.PacketPushers.net website for free. But the point stands that NVMe over TCP doesn’t need a special network, which probably means it’s coming to your network at some point.

Fourth, Lightbits points out that t…

More and more companies are learning that hosting an app in the cloud doesn’t mean you can forget about infrastructure design.

If you want that application rocket to stay in the air, you’ve got to prepare for failure and design for resiliency. Only then do you make it to orbit.

Our Datanauts discussion today is with Tom Vachon, a Microsoft Cloud Solutions Architect who’s going to share design insights for hosting resilient apps on Azure.

While Tom is a Microsoft employee, this isn’t a sponsored show and Tom isn’t speaking for the company.

We start with a definition of application resilience and how it aligns with and differs from business continuity and disaster recovery. We also examine why you need to consider resiliency even when using the cloud.

In part two, Tom and the Datanauts drill into Azure’s resilience mechanisms including availability zones, availability sets, paired regions, and more. Tom shares his recommendations for when to use these mechanisms.

Part three considers the role of DNS in application resilience, addresses security issues, and examines monitoring and testing options.

Show Links:

Tom Vachon on Twitter

ThomasVachon.com

Azure Architecture Center – Microsoft

Azure For AWS Professionals – Microsoft

Availability Checklist – Microsoft

Resiliency Checklist – Microsoft

Resiliency Checklist For Specific Azure Services – Microsoft

More and more companies are learning that hosting an app in the cloud doesn’t mean you can forget about infrastructure design.

If you want that application rocket to stay in the air, you’ve got to prepare for failure and design for resiliency. Only then do you make it to orbit.

Our Datanauts discussion today is with Tom Vachon, a Microsoft Cloud Solutions Architect who’s going to share design insights for hosting resilient apps on Azure.

While Tom is a Microsoft employee, this isn’t a sponsored show and Tom isn’t speaking for the company.

We start with a definition of application resilience and how it aligns with and differs from business continuity and disaster recovery. We also examine why you need to consider resiliency even when using the cloud.

In part two, Tom and the Datanauts drill into Azure’s resilience mechanisms including availability zones, availability sets, paired regions, and more. Tom shares his recommendations for when to use these mechanisms.

Part three considers the role of DNS in application resilience, addresses security issues, and examines monitoring and testing options.

Show Links:

Tom Vachon on Twitter

ThomasVachon.com

Azure Architecture Center – Microsoft

Azure For AWS Professionals – Microsoft

Availability Checklist – Microsoft

Resiliency Checklist – Microsoft

Resiliency Checklist For Specific Azure Services – Microsoft

The following is a transcript of the audio file you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s March 26, 2019, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with HammerSpace earlier this month. HammerSpace describes themselves as, “a storage and protocol agnostic cloud data control plane, abstracting data from the infrastructure for self-service hybrid cloud data management, driven by machine learning and metadata management to deliver Data-as-a-Service.”

That mouthful does a pretty good job at getting to the heart of HammerSpace, which is to layer policy on top of your existing storage, moving data around to wherever you need it to be automatically. And if that happens to include hybrid cloud, that’s just fine with HammerSpace.

Data-As-A-Microservice

In this briefing, HammerSpace announced the ability to provide a global namespace for persistent storage in Kubernetes environments. As containers were originally conceived to be stateless and ephemeral, that is you should be able to stand them up and tear them down at will with essentially zero application impact, the idea of persistent storage seemed a bit wrong. Why do we need persistent storage for stateless containers?

As container use cases have expanded, stateful containers have become normal, and the need for persistent storage has grown right along side. But presenting that storage to a container in an automated way hasn’t been all that easy.

HammerSpace has tackled this issue with what they are calling data-as-a-microservice. This is not a new type of K8s specific storage, which HammerSpace thinks is about the last thing the Kubernetes world needs. Therefore don’t think of this as being just about getting data to a container. More importantly, HammerSpace is trying to answer the question, “How do we get storage to evolving workloads?”

Data Is Declarative

The answer to this question is to make data declarative. That is, describe what is needed from storage, and it just happens. At least, from a devops perspective, it looks like “it just happens.” In other words, policy drives the automation without admins having to pay too much attention.

Once the policies are in place, snapshots are put where they are needed for access or resilience. You might be accessing storage that’s on prem. You might be accessing storage that was burst to public cloud if policy dictated. You can also turn off HammerSpace in the public cloud when you need to save some dollars in your cloud provider’s bill, although global de-dupe to reduce the amount of data transiting cloud is part of the package.

Of course, nothing here is actual magic. What’s really going on is that K8s is talking to HammerSpace DSX Data Services Nodes as well as the Container Storage Interface as presented by HammerSpace. Kubernetes workloads are getting local file type performance via NVMe-level IOPS even though they are talking to HammerSpace and not storage directly.

Use Cases

HammerSpace cited a couple of key use cases for this technology that will be familiar to folks who have run into stateful containers.

The first use case is databases. For example, noSQL, MySQL, Elastic, Redis, Cassandra, mongoDB, and MS SQL Server. HammerSpace described this scenario as helpful to folks who need low latency access for their builds to go fast.

The second was for transparent dev/test to production. For example, you could take a snapshot of data living on your on-premises NetApp, present it into the cloud read-write, a benefit of a Kubernetes global namespace according to HammerSpace.

For More Information

This is a complex product and announcement, and lots more to the…