Weekend Reads 032919

There’s a growing focus on automating data center operations, a trend driven by staffing challenges and the need for remote management of “lights out” edge data centers. Do you expect to see more automation? What are the most promising approaches in this area? —Data center Frontier

In this article, I will describe how we introduced IPv6 inside IBM’s own network over the past few years, and look at the challenges we encountered as well as what lies on the road ahead. —Andy Mindnich

If you want to see what real competition might look like at some point in the future of the server racket, look no further than the Ethernet switch market, where switch ASICs and the companies that build switches alike have to fight for every dollar and make it up in volume every year without pause. —Timothy Prickett Morgan

Misconceptions can be dangerous. This is especially true when they lead to network insecurity. In this post I’ll seek to set the record straight for several of the most common misconceptions about IPv6 security. —David Holder

Although the SRE job role is often defined as being about automation, the reality is that 59 percent of SREs agree there is too much toil (defined as manual, repetitive, tactical work that scales linearly) in their organization. —Lawrence Hecht

Earlier this month, Synergy released data that in 2018, hyperscale operators’ capex grew 48 percent to nearly $120 billion. In the fourth quarter of 2018 alone, it reached $32 billion — surpassing each of the previous three quarters of the year. —Ali Longwell

Earlier this month OneWeb launched six test satellites intended for an eventual satellite fleet intended to provide broadband. The six satellites were launched from a Soyuz launch vehicle from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. —Doug Dawson

[AMD] recently published a new document calling out Intel for performance bottlenecking in its Xeon server processors, and is recommending that data center engineers switch to AMD’s options for better prices and performance. —Arif Bacchus

Apple better hope there aren’t too many people like Ken Johnson, who’s hopped out of the video streaming pool and doesn’t miss it a bit. —Andrew Keshner

The first wave of cloud migration (Cloud 1.0) is coming to an end, with low-criticality applications being moved to public cloud vendors. The next wave is much more difficult – this is where organisations wish to migrate applications that are running their business to give them competitive advantage. —David Cumberworth

Researchers at cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab say that ASUS, one of the world’s largest computer makers, was used to unwittingly install a malicious backdoor on thousands of its customers’ computers last year after attackers compromised a server for the company’s live software update tool. —Kim Zetter

March 22, 2019, saw the completion of the final important step in the Key Signing Key (KSK) rollover — a process which began about a year and half ago. What may be less well known is that post rollover, and until just a couple days ago, Verisign was receiving a dramatically increasing number of root DNSKEY queries, to the tune of 75 times higher than previously observed, and accounting for ~7 percent of all transactions at the root servers we operate. —Duane Wessels

Blockchain does actually rely on trust, says Kevin. He tells us the story of the cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX, who claimed that millions of dollars in cryptocurrency were lost when their CEO passed away. While whole story was more complex, Kevin says, it reveals how much bitcoin transactions rely on many kinds of trust. —Nathan Matias

It seems that most of the mega trends that have flourished within the telecoms community during the last years have a couple of things in common: 1) they don’t work for the vendor community and 2) they have questionable value for service providers. But since they are fashionable, they keep on ruling both headlines and board room conversations. —Andreas Hegers

In the modern distributed computing world, which is getting ever more disaggregated and some might say discombobulated, as every day passes, the architecture of the network in the datacenter is arguably the most important factor in determining if applications will perform well or not. —Timothy Prickett Morgan