A Reboot for VMware?

August 31, 2016 | 364 views

What do you do when you are a company that once held a dominant position in a lucrative market like IT but the technology revolution you started has passed you by? If you’re VMware, you roll with the changes. It was basic server virtualization, after all, that led to the cloud, software-defined infrastructure, containers and the mobile, Big Data and IoT architectures they now support. But like IBM, Microsoft and countless other technology leaders before and since, the world doesn’t sit still just because an old problem has been solved – the focus shifts immediately to the new problems that the new working environment presents.

Spotlight

Vultr

Vultr is an ultra-reliable cloud platform that is within close proximity to the world’s developers. We’ve perfected the art and science of cloud infrastructure with our wide array of cloud, bare metal, and storage products, building one of the largest independent cloud computing providers in the process. From the team that created Choopa.com and GameServers.com, Vultr tackles complex hosting situations and delivers industry-leading performance and reliability while building out one of the largest, most available worldwide networks. Now take advantage of the Vultr Marketplace, allowing 1-click installations of popular apps, games, and operating systems, and the Vultr Kubernetes Engine, providing automated management of Kubernetes clusters so you can operate with confidence and easily scale.

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Virtual Desktop Strategies, Server Hypervisors

Virtualization can transform your company’s IT infrastructure

Article | April 27, 2023

For many companies in today’s highly competitive, rapidly digitizing world, data center transformation is not merely a one-time project – it’s a constant challenge. No corporate IT leader should be content merely to revamp their data infrastructure once, then call it a day. Instead, they should always be looking for ways to make their approach to data more dynamic and easier to scale. Ideally, they’d do so in a way that maximizes resource utilization while minimizing costs. Luckily, that’s exactly the idea behind virtualization, which involves creating a new infrastructure that’s capable of rapidly scaling and facilitating workload development. IT leaders are quickly coming to realize that with virtualization in their toolbox, they’re able to make their operations more agile than ever, and without increasing costs. This is why over 80% of enterprise server workloads today are running on virtual machines, and the market for data center virtualization is expected to reach a total value of $10 billion by 2023.

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Virtual Desktop Strategies

Best Practices for vSphere 6.7 Tagging

Article | July 26, 2022

vSphere Tags were introduced in version 5.1 as a way to organize inventory objects such as VMs, Hosts, Datastores, etc., a much-needed feature for helping search for or group objects within vSphere. A Tag is basically a label that can be applied to vSphere inventory objects. When an administrator creates a tag, it is then assigned to a tag category. Categories allow the grouping of related tags. When a Category is created, you can specify associations of object types (such as; VM or Datastore) as well as whether more than one tag in a category can be applied to an object (ex; One Tag or Many Tags).

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Virtual Desktop Tools

How to automate the creation multiple routable VLANs on single L2 network using VyOS

Article | August 12, 2022

My personal homelab has a very simple network topology, everything is connected to a single flat network. This has served me well over the years, but sometimes it can prevent me from deploying more complex scenarios. Most recently while working with NSX-T and Project Pacific, I had a need for additional VLANs which my home router does not support. There are a number of software solutions that can be used including the popular pfSense, which I have used before. Over the Winter break, a colleague introduced me to VyOS, which is another popular software firewall and router solution. I had not heard of VyOS before but later realized it was derived from Vyatta, which I had heard of, but development of that solution had stopped and VyOS is now the open source version of that software. Having never played with VyoS before, I thought this might be a good learning opopournity and started to dabble with VyOS over the holiday.

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Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Remote/Branch Offices & Edge Computing

Article | February 10, 2020

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is playing a significant role in building an enterprise multi-cloud environment. The benefits are well documented – you can learn more about them in a new white paper developed in collaboration with ViON, Fujitsu, and Nutanix, “Simplifying Multi-Cloud and Securing Mission Progress.” In addition to driving a cloud foundation, hyperconverged infrastructure is driving other use cases. In our first blog, we examined the impact that HCI can have in a disaster recovery solution. In this installment, we’ll discuss how HCI is changing the dynamics for remote offices and edge computing.

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Spotlight

Vultr

Vultr is an ultra-reliable cloud platform that is within close proximity to the world’s developers. We’ve perfected the art and science of cloud infrastructure with our wide array of cloud, bare metal, and storage products, building one of the largest independent cloud computing providers in the process. From the team that created Choopa.com and GameServers.com, Vultr tackles complex hosting situations and delivers industry-leading performance and reliability while building out one of the largest, most available worldwide networks. Now take advantage of the Vultr Marketplace, allowing 1-click installations of popular apps, games, and operating systems, and the Vultr Kubernetes Engine, providing automated management of Kubernetes clusters so you can operate with confidence and easily scale.

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Virtual Desktop Tools, Virtual Desktop Strategies, Server Virtualization

Netskope Delivers the Next Evolution in Digital Experience Management for SASE with Proactive DEM

PR Newswire | September 01, 2023

Netskope, a leader in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), today announced the launch of Proactive Digital Experience Management (DEM) for SASE, elevating best practice from the current reactive monitoring tools to proactive user experience management. Proactive DEM provides experience management capabilities across the entire SASE architecture, including Netskope Intelligent SSE, Netskope Borderless SD-WAN and Netskope NewEdge global infrastructure. Digital Experience Management technology has become increasingly crucial amid digital business transformation, with organizations seeking to enhance customer experiences and improve employee engagement. With hybrid work and cloud infrastructure now the norm globally, organizations have struggled to ensure consistent and optimized experiences alongside stringent security requirements. Gartner predicts that "by 2026, at least 60% of I&O leaders will use DEM to measure application, services and endpoint performance from the user's viewpoint, up from less than 20% in 2021." However, monitoring applications, services, and networks is only part of a modern DEM experience, and so Netskope Proactive DEM goes beyond observation, providing Machine Learning (ML)-driven functionality to anticipate, and automatically remediate, problems. Sanjay Beri, CEO and co-founder of Netskope commented, "Ensuring a constantly optimized experience is essential for organizations looking to support the best productivity returns for hybrid workers and modern cloud infrastructure, but monitoring alone is not enough. Customers have told us of the challenges they face managing a multi-vendor cloud ecosystem and so we have yet again innovated beyond industry standards, providing experience management that can both monitor and proactively remediate." For issue identification, Netskope Proactive DEM uniquely combines Synthetic Monitoring with Real User monitoring, creating SMART monitoring (Synthetic Monitoring Augmentation for Real Traffic). This enables full end-to-end 'hop-by-hop' visibility of data, and the proactive identification of experience-impacting events. SMART monitoring enables organizations to anticipate potential events that might impact upon network and application experience. While most SASE vendors rely on "gray cloud" infrastructure - built on public cloud - which limits their ability to granularly identify and control any issues, Proactive DEM leverages Netskope NewEdge - the industry's largest private cloud infrastructure - to deliver 360 visibility and control of end-to-end user experience while providing mitigation of issues, including using various self-healing mechanisms, before the user recognizes their experience has degraded. About Netskope Netskope, a global SASE leader, helps organizations apply zero trust principles and AI/ML innovations to protect data and defend against cyber threats. Fast and easy to use, the Netskope platform provides optimized access and real-time security for people, devices, and data anywhere they go. Netskope helps customers reduce risk, accelerate performance, and get unrivaled visibility into any cloud, web, and private application activity. Thousands of customers trust Netskope and its powerful NewEdge network to address evolving threats, new risks, technology shifts, organizational and network changes, and new regulatory requirements.

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Virtual Desktop Tools, Server Hypervisors

Meter Partners with Cloudflare to Launch DNS Security

Business Wire | August 31, 2023

Meter, Inc., a leader in Network as a Service (NaaS) for businesses, today announced DNS Security, built in partnership with Cloudflare, the security, performance, and reliability company. Meter DNS Security is now widely available for all Meter Network customers, expanding Meter’s existing NaaS offering and saving teams both time and money, while also improving overall network performance and security, powered by Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform. “With the number of devices on a network expected to triple by 2030, modern businesses and organizations demand enterprise network controls to ensure safety and peak performance for business critical functions,” said Anil Varanasi, CEO and co-founder of Meter. “Meter DNS Security is the latest example of how we’re continuing to offer our customers enterprise level networks end-to-end. Through our partnership with Cloudflare, we’re enhancing our capabilities to meet the needs of IT professionals at industrial warehouses, educational institutions, security firms, and more.” Meter DNS Security eliminates the hassle of having multiple vendors, by providing content filtering at several layers to all customers within the Meter Dashboard in partnership with one of the best providers in the world. “We’re proud to have Meter leveraging Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform in a new way, offering our DNS filtering feature natively built into their Meter Dashboard,” said John Graham-Cumming, CTO, Cloudflare. “By building on Cloudflare's platform, Meter enables customers to manage their team’s operations at scale, as well as effectively enforce global corporate policies across diverse corporate spaces, such as offices, schools, and warehouses.” In addition to the ease and scalability of Meter DNS Security, users are ensuring security through enhanced compliance by blocking access to known malicious websites and bad actors. The integration and partnership with Cloudflare provides customers with faster DNS response times, while optimizing network performance by limiting access to high-bandwidth websites and services. Real world examples of this process include, but are not limited to: Ensuring a safe browsing environment at schools by filtering out age inappropriate content Optimizing network performance for warehouses by filtering high bandwidth activities like video streaming Maintaining high security and compliance standards by filtering malicious or illegal content “Tishman Speyer has successfully partnered with Meter to streamline the networking and Wi-Fi experience for our customers,” said Simon Okunev, Managing Director and Chief Information Officer, Tishman Speyer. “The addition of Meter’s DNS Security feature, powered by Cloudflare, will further benefit our customers by providing an additional layer of security.” About Cloudflare Cloudflare, Inc. is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare’s suite of products protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was awarded by Reuters Events for Global Responsible Business in 2020, named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2021, and ranked among Newsweek's Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022.

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Server Hypervisors, Vsphere

Napatech Leverages Latest Intel Agilex® FPGA to Launch Industry's first 400Gbps SmartNIC Solutions

prnewswire | August 29, 2023

Napatech™ (OSLO: NAPA.OL), a leading provider of programmable Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) and Infrastructure Processing Units (IPU) used in cloud, enterprise and telecom datacenter networks, today announced the availability of the Napatech's first 400Gbps programmable SmartNIC solutions, leveraging the latest Intel Agilex® 7 FPGAs to deliver best-in-class performance for applications in security, cloud services, network monitoring and recording. Enterprises and OEMs providing high-performance solutions for network monitoring and recording require NICs with a performance level that matches the high PCI Express (PCIe) bandwidth available in the latest servers such as those based on 4th Gen Intel Xeon® Scalable Processors. The new Napatech NT400 SmartNIC platform, based on the Intel® FPGA SmartNIC N6000-PL Platform, addresses this need through a PCIe Gen 4 16-lane host interface which enables full-duplex 2x100Gbps traffic between network ports and host applications. Similarly, for applications like the 5G packet core in telecom infrastructure that require high-bandwidth inline processing of network data, the NT400 platform sustains a total 400G of traffic over tens of millions of flows. The NT400 programmable SmartNIC platform includes two QSFP56 network ports, supporting up to 2x200G traffic with the flexibility to configure 10G, 25G, 40G, 50G, 100G and 200G network links. The SmartNIC hardware is complemented by Napatech's portfolio of production-grade software packages, including Link-Capture™ for use cases such as network monitoring and recording, Link-Virtualization™ that provides a virtualized data plane for cloud services and Link-Inline™ for inline applications such as 5G User Plane Function (UPF). These integrated solutions deliver a true "IT experience" whereby the user just installs the card and the software, immediately achieving seamless acceleration of their application with no requirement to directly program the SmartNIC itself. At the core of the NT400 platform is the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA F-Tile chiplet, which incorporates a configurable, hardened Ethernet protocol stack for supporting rates from 10G to 400G. Napatech chose the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA for a host of reasons, including scalability options that allow support for five different configurations that meet various price, performance, power and feature goals, tailored to specific customer applications and use cases. The F-Tile features are critical in enabling the NT400 to operate within the space and power limitations of standard servers deployed in network appliances, data centers and edge locations. "As the networking landscape continues to evolve, SmartNICs emerge as the predominant growth catalyst in the expansive NIC market, poised to reach $3.3 billion annually by 2025" said Manoj Sukumaran, Principal Analyst for Datacenter Compute and Networking at Omdia. "High bandwidth programmable Ethernet adapters require very fine optimization in hardware and software to ensure deterministic and predictable processing time and making them suitable for real-time networking applications. Napatech is among the very few vendors who could provide highly optimized SmartNICs and software solutions leveraging FPGAs from vendors like Intel, and deliver highly efficient network offload capabilities" he added. "The NT400 platform represents the latest generation within our portfolio of SmartNIC solutions," said Jarrod Siket, Chief Marketing Officer at Napatech. "We will deliver multiple SKUs based on this platform, providing products with memory configurations as well features like time synchronization and management ports that are precisely tuned to the requirements of our customers' applications, all packaged with the applicable production-grade software." "We are delighted to see Napatech choose the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA for their leading-edge SmartNIC solutions," said Mike Fitton, Vice President Programmable Solutions Group and General Manager, Network Business Division at Intel. "The combination of our FPGAs, which deliver high performance, and power efficiency plus a rich feature set for the most demanding applications, together with Napatech's production-grade hardware and software, helps ensure that customers can deliver leading solutions for a wide range of enterprise and telecom applications." About Napatech Napatech is the leading supplier of SmartNIC solutions used in cloud, enterprise, and telecom datacenters. Through commercial-grade software suites integrated with high-performance hardware, Napatech accelerates network infrastructure and security workloads to deliver best-in-class system-level performance while maximizing the availability of server compute resources for applications and services.

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Virtual Desktop Tools, Virtual Desktop Strategies, Server Virtualization

Netskope Delivers the Next Evolution in Digital Experience Management for SASE with Proactive DEM

PR Newswire | September 01, 2023

Netskope, a leader in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), today announced the launch of Proactive Digital Experience Management (DEM) for SASE, elevating best practice from the current reactive monitoring tools to proactive user experience management. Proactive DEM provides experience management capabilities across the entire SASE architecture, including Netskope Intelligent SSE, Netskope Borderless SD-WAN and Netskope NewEdge global infrastructure. Digital Experience Management technology has become increasingly crucial amid digital business transformation, with organizations seeking to enhance customer experiences and improve employee engagement. With hybrid work and cloud infrastructure now the norm globally, organizations have struggled to ensure consistent and optimized experiences alongside stringent security requirements. Gartner predicts that "by 2026, at least 60% of I&O leaders will use DEM to measure application, services and endpoint performance from the user's viewpoint, up from less than 20% in 2021." However, monitoring applications, services, and networks is only part of a modern DEM experience, and so Netskope Proactive DEM goes beyond observation, providing Machine Learning (ML)-driven functionality to anticipate, and automatically remediate, problems. Sanjay Beri, CEO and co-founder of Netskope commented, "Ensuring a constantly optimized experience is essential for organizations looking to support the best productivity returns for hybrid workers and modern cloud infrastructure, but monitoring alone is not enough. Customers have told us of the challenges they face managing a multi-vendor cloud ecosystem and so we have yet again innovated beyond industry standards, providing experience management that can both monitor and proactively remediate." For issue identification, Netskope Proactive DEM uniquely combines Synthetic Monitoring with Real User monitoring, creating SMART monitoring (Synthetic Monitoring Augmentation for Real Traffic). This enables full end-to-end 'hop-by-hop' visibility of data, and the proactive identification of experience-impacting events. SMART monitoring enables organizations to anticipate potential events that might impact upon network and application experience. While most SASE vendors rely on "gray cloud" infrastructure - built on public cloud - which limits their ability to granularly identify and control any issues, Proactive DEM leverages Netskope NewEdge - the industry's largest private cloud infrastructure - to deliver 360 visibility and control of end-to-end user experience while providing mitigation of issues, including using various self-healing mechanisms, before the user recognizes their experience has degraded. About Netskope Netskope, a global SASE leader, helps organizations apply zero trust principles and AI/ML innovations to protect data and defend against cyber threats. Fast and easy to use, the Netskope platform provides optimized access and real-time security for people, devices, and data anywhere they go. Netskope helps customers reduce risk, accelerate performance, and get unrivaled visibility into any cloud, web, and private application activity. Thousands of customers trust Netskope and its powerful NewEdge network to address evolving threats, new risks, technology shifts, organizational and network changes, and new regulatory requirements.

Read More

Virtual Desktop Tools, Server Hypervisors

Meter Partners with Cloudflare to Launch DNS Security

Business Wire | August 31, 2023

Meter, Inc., a leader in Network as a Service (NaaS) for businesses, today announced DNS Security, built in partnership with Cloudflare, the security, performance, and reliability company. Meter DNS Security is now widely available for all Meter Network customers, expanding Meter’s existing NaaS offering and saving teams both time and money, while also improving overall network performance and security, powered by Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform. “With the number of devices on a network expected to triple by 2030, modern businesses and organizations demand enterprise network controls to ensure safety and peak performance for business critical functions,” said Anil Varanasi, CEO and co-founder of Meter. “Meter DNS Security is the latest example of how we’re continuing to offer our customers enterprise level networks end-to-end. Through our partnership with Cloudflare, we’re enhancing our capabilities to meet the needs of IT professionals at industrial warehouses, educational institutions, security firms, and more.” Meter DNS Security eliminates the hassle of having multiple vendors, by providing content filtering at several layers to all customers within the Meter Dashboard in partnership with one of the best providers in the world. “We’re proud to have Meter leveraging Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform in a new way, offering our DNS filtering feature natively built into their Meter Dashboard,” said John Graham-Cumming, CTO, Cloudflare. “By building on Cloudflare's platform, Meter enables customers to manage their team’s operations at scale, as well as effectively enforce global corporate policies across diverse corporate spaces, such as offices, schools, and warehouses.” In addition to the ease and scalability of Meter DNS Security, users are ensuring security through enhanced compliance by blocking access to known malicious websites and bad actors. The integration and partnership with Cloudflare provides customers with faster DNS response times, while optimizing network performance by limiting access to high-bandwidth websites and services. Real world examples of this process include, but are not limited to: Ensuring a safe browsing environment at schools by filtering out age inappropriate content Optimizing network performance for warehouses by filtering high bandwidth activities like video streaming Maintaining high security and compliance standards by filtering malicious or illegal content “Tishman Speyer has successfully partnered with Meter to streamline the networking and Wi-Fi experience for our customers,” said Simon Okunev, Managing Director and Chief Information Officer, Tishman Speyer. “The addition of Meter’s DNS Security feature, powered by Cloudflare, will further benefit our customers by providing an additional layer of security.” About Cloudflare Cloudflare, Inc. is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare’s suite of products protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was awarded by Reuters Events for Global Responsible Business in 2020, named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2021, and ranked among Newsweek's Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022.

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Server Hypervisors, Vsphere

Napatech Leverages Latest Intel Agilex® FPGA to Launch Industry's first 400Gbps SmartNIC Solutions

prnewswire | August 29, 2023

Napatech™ (OSLO: NAPA.OL), a leading provider of programmable Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) and Infrastructure Processing Units (IPU) used in cloud, enterprise and telecom datacenter networks, today announced the availability of the Napatech's first 400Gbps programmable SmartNIC solutions, leveraging the latest Intel Agilex® 7 FPGAs to deliver best-in-class performance for applications in security, cloud services, network monitoring and recording. Enterprises and OEMs providing high-performance solutions for network monitoring and recording require NICs with a performance level that matches the high PCI Express (PCIe) bandwidth available in the latest servers such as those based on 4th Gen Intel Xeon® Scalable Processors. The new Napatech NT400 SmartNIC platform, based on the Intel® FPGA SmartNIC N6000-PL Platform, addresses this need through a PCIe Gen 4 16-lane host interface which enables full-duplex 2x100Gbps traffic between network ports and host applications. Similarly, for applications like the 5G packet core in telecom infrastructure that require high-bandwidth inline processing of network data, the NT400 platform sustains a total 400G of traffic over tens of millions of flows. The NT400 programmable SmartNIC platform includes two QSFP56 network ports, supporting up to 2x200G traffic with the flexibility to configure 10G, 25G, 40G, 50G, 100G and 200G network links. The SmartNIC hardware is complemented by Napatech's portfolio of production-grade software packages, including Link-Capture™ for use cases such as network monitoring and recording, Link-Virtualization™ that provides a virtualized data plane for cloud services and Link-Inline™ for inline applications such as 5G User Plane Function (UPF). These integrated solutions deliver a true "IT experience" whereby the user just installs the card and the software, immediately achieving seamless acceleration of their application with no requirement to directly program the SmartNIC itself. At the core of the NT400 platform is the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA F-Tile chiplet, which incorporates a configurable, hardened Ethernet protocol stack for supporting rates from 10G to 400G. Napatech chose the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA for a host of reasons, including scalability options that allow support for five different configurations that meet various price, performance, power and feature goals, tailored to specific customer applications and use cases. The F-Tile features are critical in enabling the NT400 to operate within the space and power limitations of standard servers deployed in network appliances, data centers and edge locations. "As the networking landscape continues to evolve, SmartNICs emerge as the predominant growth catalyst in the expansive NIC market, poised to reach $3.3 billion annually by 2025" said Manoj Sukumaran, Principal Analyst for Datacenter Compute and Networking at Omdia. "High bandwidth programmable Ethernet adapters require very fine optimization in hardware and software to ensure deterministic and predictable processing time and making them suitable for real-time networking applications. Napatech is among the very few vendors who could provide highly optimized SmartNICs and software solutions leveraging FPGAs from vendors like Intel, and deliver highly efficient network offload capabilities" he added. "The NT400 platform represents the latest generation within our portfolio of SmartNIC solutions," said Jarrod Siket, Chief Marketing Officer at Napatech. "We will deliver multiple SKUs based on this platform, providing products with memory configurations as well features like time synchronization and management ports that are precisely tuned to the requirements of our customers' applications, all packaged with the applicable production-grade software." "We are delighted to see Napatech choose the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA for their leading-edge SmartNIC solutions," said Mike Fitton, Vice President Programmable Solutions Group and General Manager, Network Business Division at Intel. "The combination of our FPGAs, which deliver high performance, and power efficiency plus a rich feature set for the most demanding applications, together with Napatech's production-grade hardware and software, helps ensure that customers can deliver leading solutions for a wide range of enterprise and telecom applications." About Napatech Napatech is the leading supplier of SmartNIC solutions used in cloud, enterprise, and telecom datacenters. Through commercial-grade software suites integrated with high-performance hardware, Napatech accelerates network infrastructure and security workloads to deliver best-in-class system-level performance while maximizing the availability of server compute resources for applications and services.

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