As data volumes escalate, many organizations are looking for storage efficiencies — and they have found it with software-defined storage (SDS).
“For IT organizations undergoing digital transformation, SDS provides a good match for the capabilities needed — flexible IT agility; easier, more intuitive administration driven by the characteristics of autonomous storage management; and lower capital costs due to the use of commodity and off-the-shelf hardware,” said Eric Burgener, research director at IDC.
The analyst firm predicts the SDS market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 13.5% through 2021.To read this article in full, please click here
During its 35-year history, DNS has been largely known as the backbone of the internet, a powerful tool that enabled the internet’s infrastructure to develop into the distributed marvel it is. Even though it’s always been there, the way it is being used has changed. Now, a modern DNS deployment is also critical to a cybersecurity strategy and to deliver the scalability that growing enterprises need.Once considered solely the internet’s address book, DNS has become a favored target of cybercriminals and hackers who are constantly trying to either cause havoc to or extract valuable data (or cash) from unwitting enterprises worldwide. Because it’s at the center of everything, it’s no great surprise that 90 percent of all cyberattacks, such as DDoS attacks, ransomware, and data exfiltration, target DNS.To read this article in full, please click here
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Kacie Levy, Manager, Social Media
What if you could apply the collective knowledge of some of the world’s best and brightest optical minds to your network? Well, now you can with an incredible limited time offer from Ciena: The Optical Networking Super Bundle.As the famous saying goes, “Knowledge is power”, so what if you could get easy access to the necessary resources to make your optical knowledge your Superpower?To read this article in full, please click here
If there’s a downside to business growth, it’s typically the urgent need for IT resources to keep up with demand. But that obstacle cannot impede forward movement, especially when it comes to storing critical data.This was the challenge facing two companies. Their legacy storage systems couldn’t address demand for performance and capacity, causing rising IT costs and adding management complexity.Here’s how they tackled the scalability challenge and cleared the path for business growth. Scale With Room to GrowLUSH Fresh Handmade Cosmetics needed a makeover in the storage department. With 800 stores in 51 countries, the IT infrastructure was rapidly running out of capacity.To read this article in full, please click here
Improved visibility. Automated processes. And increased network capacity and service availability from any given WDM investment. These are the benefits of leveraging Ciena’s Liquid Spectrum™, which combines variable bit-rate coherent optics, a flexible grid reconfigurable photonic layer, and SDN control in an open architecture.Scale. Agility. Operational Simplicity. Your network can have it all. Requirements for the network are shifting, thanks to the content on networks today and changing consumption models. In this constantly evolving, on-demand world, the network still needs to scale for massive capacity growth, but it now also needs to be more agile and programmable to better respond and handle unpredictable traffic requirements associated with cloud connectivity and the proliferation of mobile devices.To read this article in full, please click here
Without upgrades and enhancements, nearly every company at some point reaches the natural limits of its IT infrastructure. That threshold seems to hit sooner rather than later when it comes to storage, thanks to escalating volumes of data and increasing workloads.To avoid capacity problems and ensure continued business growth, it’s critical to modernize storage infrastructure. Here’s how two different organizations reached that conclusion and the paths they took toward upgrading.A Lesson in ScaleMesa Community College (MCC) in Arizona enrolls more than 40,000 students each year. Like many organizations, its IT environment included multiple systems from multiple vendors, and the college has a lean IT staff to manage it all.To read this article in full, please click here
Executive summaryNetwork automation is an imperative if operators are to deliver services with sustainable levels of agility and profitability. Automation enables the network to adapt to events and demands rapidly and efficiently, and supports a new speed of digital business. However, operators cannot buy all the automation they need off-the-shelf: they need to build and/or customize it for their own purposes and environments. This means overcoming cultural, organizational and technical barriers, bridging the separate and often antagonistic roles IT and network departments play today in managing the physical network.Network virtualization and its emphasis on automation has started to break down technical barriers as IT, and network organizations increasingly need to work in each other’s domains. Network organizations are investigating software-defined networking (SDN) as a means of automating key manual interactions with network elements, and IT organizations are being asked to support network functions directly with data center/cloud components and associated automation. It is clearly desirable for the two departments to start sharing tools, knowledge, best practices, cloud-native software development and operations (DevOps) approaches as their roles converge. Operators that encourage this cross-domain fertilization accelerate the cultural change necessary to build an automated and adaptive network.To read this Continue reading
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Rick Seeto, VP and General Manager, Asia Pacific & Japan Sales at Ciena
Emerging Asia is one of the most culturally diverse regions in the world, with fast growing economies powered by a youthful population. The communication networks in these countries are often less burdened by legacy systems compared to developed countries, as they have started developing communications infrastructure relatively recently. To read this article in full, please click here
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Susan FriedmanMarketing Campaign Expert
Clear your calendar. Ciena’s Packet Networking Summer Camp is blasting off to space. Train like an astronaut with four out of this world webinar missions and three Ciena specialists.Ever wondered what it’s like to be part of a space exploration? So did we. That’s why we are taking Ciena’s successful Packet Networking Summer Camp series to space. Join Ciena’s network specialists for this series of fast-paced and information-packed 30-minute webinar missions to explore where no network has gone before. As a bonus, we’ve added a lightning round Q&A mission, so bring your questions to challenge our specialists. And, it’s all virtual, a perfect learning adventure. To read this article in full, please click here
The Cloud ImperativeEnterprise IT is increasingly a multi-cloud affair. With Gartner projecting that 85 percent of enterprises are currently using a multi-cloud strategy, it seems difficult to find an enterprise that doesn’t. IT leaders are like conductors – orchestrating SaaS, PaaS, and on-premises code and data in increasingly virtualized, software-defined environment. With the cloud taking center stage, what impacts does migration of workloads have on infrastructure overall?Migration Challenges for InfrastructureAs IT strives to be more responsive to both lines of business and development teams seeking to spin up new instances and environments, workloads often need to move – and rapidly. But workload mobility has a downside, namely an increasing demand on the shared services on- and off-premises.To read this article in full, please click here
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Brian Lavallée
Senior Director of Portfolio Marketing with global responsibility for Ciena’s 5G, Packet, and Submarine networking solutions.
5G is the hottest topic in the wireless industry these days, but as Ciena’s Brian Lavallee explains, it means a massive upgrade to wireline network infrastructure as well. That’s why today Ciena has unveiled new capabilities to help network operators prepare for 5G.To read this article in full, please click here
IT and business executives nearly always say data security is the No. 1 issue keeping them awake at night. The ramifications of a breach or attack loom large — whether it’s the potential of financial losses, brand damage, or loss of intellectual property.The concerns escalate when it comes to data stored in the cloud. As companies increasingly deploy either their own private clouds or a mix of private and public, they’re recognizing the need to pay greater attention to data protection. And with forecasts rising for the volume of data in cloud storage, it’s becoming a critical issue.To read this article in full, please click here
A Brief DNS HistoryDNS is the internet’s backbone, the ‘network before the network’. Originally designed to solve the problem of knowing how to route email between disparate internet hosts, DNS is now a 35-year old connection protocolat the heart of every network. However, there are inherent shortcomings. First, DNS is naïve – built for an internet without trust requirements as its designers could not have foreseen today’s threats. DNS was built to simply answer questions to establish a connection, and it’s good at that – but that also leaves it susceptible. For example, the support for recursive DNS requests, which query other servers repeatedly, are vulnerable to fake requests from a spoofed IP address leading to Amplifier attacks. DNS caches can be poisoned by viruses, causing domain lookups to go to the wrong IP address. And yet, DNS is an integral part of every email, every web access, and every internet transaction.To read this article in full, please click here
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Anup Changaroth, of Ciena’s CTO Office in APAC, highlights a few insights from Ciena’s recent six-country roadshow he participated in across the Asia-Pacific region.
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been on the road supporting our annual Ciena Drive Roadshows in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and finishing up with Hong Kong. We had the opportunity to share Ciena’s Adaptive Network vision with both customers and partners, as well as an opportunity to discuss with them their top priorities, challenges and investment plans.To read this article in full, please click here
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Byline: Helen XenosSenior Director, Portfolio Marketing
There is a new term that is increasingly cropping up in networking conversations: densification. Ciena’s Helen Xenos explains what this is and how it is elevating the end user experience.The term “network densification” is being used more often in relation to wireless network deployments, and more recently, “fiber densification” has become a hot a topic of discussion. So, what exactly is densification? To read this article in full, please click here
Network and security are notoriously siloed. That’s understandable as network operations are primarily responsible for ensuring reliable service quality and compute capabilities to run the enterprise, while security is focused on setting up barriers against intruders and cleaning up systems that have been infected. But with the continuing rise in cybersecurity threats, it’s increasingly clear that it’s open season on corporate networks and breaking down the traditional wall separating network and security teams is essential to defending the enterprise.Each team has evolved with different skill sets and different missions: one is expected to facilitate access from anywhere, the other is charged with blocking access to anybody who isn’t authorized. They utilize different tools and may work in separate network operations and security operations centers.To read this article in full, please click here
What is coherent optics?At its most basic, coherent optical transmission is a technique that uses modulation of the amplitude and phase of the light, as well as transmission across two polarizations, to enable the transport of considerably more information through a fiber optic cable. Using digital signal processing at both the transmitter and receiver, coherent optics also offers higher bit-rates, greater degrees of flexibility, simpler photonic line systems, and better optical performance. It’s a web-scale world. On-demand content, bandwidth-hungry mobile apps, high-definition video streaming, and new cloud-based IT applications are driving massive scale and unpredictable traffic patterns. Network capacities are increasing by 25% to 50% every year, and systems running at 10 Gb/s just cannot keep up with this kind of rapid scalability.To read this article in full, please click here
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Helen XenosSenior Director, Portfolio Marketing
The era of 400G was in full force at OFC (The Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition), and we took some time to celebrate this milestone. Here are what our customers have to say about their 400G success – and what it means for the industry.If you needed another leading indicator that 400G is the next big thing in optical networks, look no further than the OFC ’18 conference recently held in San Diego. The show was abuzz with vendor plans for new technologies that squeeze more bandwidth than ever down an optical channel. These 400G-capable coherent solutions offer better system performance and tunable capacity from 100G to 400G per wavelength. To read this article in full, please click here
Data sprawl is a problem. Most companies, regardless of industry or size, are trying to balance their need to store increasing volumes of data with the associated costs to their infrastructure.IDC expects continued growth in data, with an estimate that the world will generate 163 zettabytes by 2025. The massive build up is being driven by technologies including machine learning, AI, IoT, video streaming, and augmented and virtual reality. Add digital transformation efforts into the mix and the requirements for data storage become even greater.The straightforward answer is to the data sprawl problem is to add capacity. But that option is often made untenable by variables such as costs, next-generation workloads, increased amounts of unstructured data, and growth of the business and its locations.To read this article in full, please click here
Today’s networking challenges Network operators know it all too well: Streaming video, cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the evolution to 5G are putting massive pressure on today’s networks, requiring capacity increases by orders of magnitude and the ability to respond to even greater unpredictability in traffic patterns.The optical network sits at the heart of communications, interconnecting people, data centers, and an increasing number of devices across any distance, from across the street to across the ocean. Yet, for all the critical functions and agility they need to provide to meet today’s web-scale demands, most networks are weighed down with manual processes and hardware inflexibility.To read this article in full, please click here
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