The big problem with a DDoS, especially one like Mirai, is how to discern real users in all that volume. If you simply “cut the hardline” and shut the network off, the DDoS was effectively successful, bringing you offline and disrupting business. Mirai made this particularly difficult, with it’s glut of IoT devices directed at the target. An effective solution needs to be able to keep your network running, and identify legitimate traffic from the noise. Enter Big Switch Networks’ BigSecure Architecture.

I saw Barefoot Networks at Networking Field Day last week. And the primary takeaway I got was how hard it is to design a standard network switch, and ASICs in general. What I never realized was the latency involved in this process, which is kind of funny for networking equipment. They laid out the problem as enterprise customers go to the network equipment companies and ask for a feature. If it’s a big customer or enough people ask for it, the equipment folks need to go to their software team to see how they are going to implement this, then go to their ASIC team to have this designed into their hardware. After all this time (often several years), the equipment maker then produces the switch. This equipment is now many years delayed from when that feature was needed, which is now locked into the hardware, and enters a completely different networking landscape. Barefoot Networks totally rethinks this idea.

Comparison can also be a powerful tool. When framed against your peers, it can show you how something is relatively performing. In enterprise IT, it’s easy to get caught up in absolute metrics. We all have targets of how many IOPS we need, or how much latency is too much. But comparative metrics are also important. It would be nice to know if with an identical network setup, someone is getting substantially better performance overall. If nothing else, this give you an idea of where to start looks when problems come up. Most network monitoring and analytics focus on raw numbers without a comparison context. Nyansa’s Voyance solution puts it front and center.

Abstraction as a tool is nothing new. But a new trend I’m seeing from recent events is combining it with intentionality. This moves the abstraction from a tool to overview complexity, and into the ability to manage and direct it. At Networking Field Day this week, I saw such an implementation from Anuta Networks and their NCX network orchestration solution

This is a ranking of the “best” novelty MacBook Pro Touch Bar apps. They’re all special in my heart.

In a move that could shake up the backup market down the road, StorageCraft announced the acquisition of the storage appliance company Exablox. Exablox is no stranger to Gestalt IT or Tech Field Day, and has been around for more than a little while. The combination of the two could make a compelling combined solution. The companies aren’t exactly strangers, they’ve had an OEM agreement in place since last October.

Diablo Technologies doesn’t think RAM is bad. Quite the opposite, they think we don’t have access to enough of it. As everyone from the Fortune 500 enterprise to Hyperscale corporations turn increasingly to Big Data, RAM is at a premium. Diablo’s solution to this is called Memory1. This takes abundant flash storage and make it byte addressable. With this, they are able to provide 128GB DDR4 flash memory DIMMs, with the implication being that a standard dual-socket x86 server now has system memory in the terabyte range.

What if you took cloud storage management and brought it on-prem? At Tech Field Day, I saw a presentations proposing just that. But these solution required a pretty large upfront block buy-in. This takes away management headaches, but doesn’t give you the dynamic provisioning the cloud allows. What you would need is on-prem storage as a service. Zadara Storage is offering just that, and more.

It’s time for Gestalt News once again! This week in servers:
– DR Troopers: Quorum onQ 4.0
– AMD: The Last Decade
Plus Sysadmin Chatbots, The “Why” of HCI, API’s, privacy, and patent trolls!

I hope Jon Langemak doesn’t feel too bad. I’ve never tried out TMUX before either. He’s been running it through its paces and likes what he sees. After reading his walkthrough, I’ll definitely give it a try as well. If you’re joining Jon and myself in the “Never Heard of TMUX” Club, let me fill you in. TMUX lets you share a terminal session with another user. Perhaps more usefully (at least for me), its a robust terminal session manager, with support for numerous concurrent panes within a given window.