Mitigate Supply-Chain Attacks With Microsegmentation And ZTNA

This article originally appeared on Packet Pushers Ignition on January 12, 2021. In broad terms, the SolarWinds attack is a standard (though well-executed) supply-chain compromise that breaches a trusted source of software, hardware, or services to gain entry into an organization’s internal infrastructure. Once inside, it spreads to other systems, installs additional tools, compromises user […]

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VMware And NVIDIA Focus On The Far Edge To Host Network Services On SmartNICs

This post originally appeared on the Packet Pushers’ Ignition site on October 19, 2020. The network edge is desirable new territory for software and hardware vendors. The objective is to get compute, networking, storage, and security features as close as possible to data sources and data-hungry applications. VMware and NVIDIA have launched new initiatives to […]

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Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) Puts Compute, Networking Services Closer To Applications

The following post originally appeared on the Packet Pushers’ Ignition site on November 13, 2020. 5G has long been declared the future of mobile networks by both tech analysts and the popular press, but scratch the surface and IT pros will find that behind all the hype and headlines lies a massive redesign of network […]

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Marvell’s Building Blocks For Carrier Edge, 5G Networking

This article was originally posted on the Packet Pushers Ignition site on December 17, 2020. 5G and edge computing are mainstays of almost every tech company’s growth strategy, but their combined potential for market disruption is acute among network equipment vendors, carriers, and related component suppliers. Both trends have been brewing for years, but have […]

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Chiplets: The First Step To Integrated Silicon Photonics For Faster Interconnects At Lower Cost

Merchant silicon applies Moore’s Law to Ethernet switching with astounding results, well documented by tech luminary Andy Bechtolsheim almost four years ago. Since then, switch chips have doubled their throughput to 25.6 Tbps, powering products with up to 64 400GbE interfaces. The problem arises when trying to transmit electrical signals off chip because the power […]

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Could Open Base Station SoCs Unleash A New Era In Mobile Infrastructure?

This article was originally published in Packet Pushers Ignition on March 23, 2021. Just as nature abhors a vacuum and seeks to fill it with any available matter, business abhors a single-source solution to wide scale problems. Competitors rush to fill the vacuum of choice with alternative, interchangeable products. The IT market typically fosters competition […]

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DPU-Based Smart Interfaces And The Future Of Network Functions And Security At The Edge

This article was originally posted on Packet Pushers Ignition on April 26, 2021. Data center virtualization exacerbated problems for network security designs that relied on a handful of appliance-based (whether physical or virtual) control points, which typically focused on external threats. With advanced persistent threats (APTs) that focus on compromising internal systems, security strategies must […]

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Simplifying Multi-Cloud Networking: Stateless, Competitors See Opportunity In NaaS

This article was originally posted on Packet Pushers Ignition on May 12, 2021. To business executives and the IT subordinates seeking to appease them, being a cloud-first company is no longer enough. Now they feel compelled to be multi-cloud, on the premise that if one is good, two or more are better. Multi-cloud adherents believe […]

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VaporIO Brings Infrastructure, Networking On-Demand For Dynamic Edge Services, And VMware Is Interested

This article was originally posted on the Packet Pushers Ignition site on June 15, 2021. There’s a growing need at the provider edge to let customers provision services closer to users and data sources. What do I mean by the ‘provider edge’? In the case of application infrastructure with low-latency connectivity for mobile, industrial, and […]

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Marvell’s OCTEON 10 Challenges All Comers For DPU Supremacy

This article was originally posted on the Packet Pushers Ignition site on July 9, 2021. The ascendance of Software Defined Networking (SDN) has catalyzed a renaissance in specialized hardware designed to accelerate and offload workloads from general-purpose CPUs. Decoupling network transport and services via software-defined abstraction layers lets a new generation of programmable networking hardware […]

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Carriers Are Scaling Backbones With Merchant Silicon & Disaggregated, Distributed Networking

This post originally appeared on the Packet Pushers’ Ignition site on August 20, 2021. For both individuals and businesses, the past 18-months have vastly increased their reliance on the Internet to access cloud services, online retail and entertainment venues and each other via high-definition video conferences. In the period from just before the initial SARS-CoV-2 […]

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An Application-Layer Approach To Multi-Cloud Network Fabrics

This post was originally published on the Packet Pushers’ Ignition site on September 21, 2021. It sounds trite to say that enterprise IT environments are multi-cloud, but the extent of cloud heterogeneity might shock those not paying attention. A recent survey found that 44 percent of organizations had more than half of their workloads deployed […]

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Putting A Dent In Open-Source Switches: NOS/Device-Driver Combo Gains Traction

The DENT network OS has been designed with edge use cases in mind.

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Marvell’s Silicon Strategy: Optimized Components For Different Workloads

Marvell has been rapidly building itself into a diversified supplier of IT infrastructure components. Through a combination of organic growth and recent acquisitions, Marvell has expanded its quarterly revenue by almost 70 percent over the past two years to more than $3.9 billion over the last four quarters. 2021 sales were greatly aided by two […]

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SD-WAN At Home? The Obstacles And Issues

As remote work becomes the norm, SD-WAN might seem like a good fit to support remote employees, but current offerings all have their drawbacks.

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Vapor IO Realizes Open Grid Vision With INZONE 5G Edge Services

One of the defining characteristics of edge applications is the need for low latency to absorb and analyze data from connected devices deployed in locations such as retail stores, manufacturing facilities, distribution centers, and municipal infrastructure. Until recently, most chatter about “the edge” has been vague, often conflating the extension of cloud service delivery to […]

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The Future of Merchant Silicon and Network Virtualization

The threat of white box switches has cast a shadow over big network equipment vendors for years, as the combination of Moore’s Law and economies of scale provides merchant switch silicon an overwhelming price/performance advantage over proprietary platforms.