The combination of heated competition and high customer expectations is feeding the demand for greater operational agility in every organization. Employees must have the ability to transform massive amounts of data into actionable insight while delivering the superior service customers demand. That calls for a more responsive, reliable IT infrastructure—but organizations also need to minimize delays, costs, and downtime while they make that infrastructure more agile.Although IT teams are under pressure to respond promptly and cost-effectively to changes in both the market and the IT environment, it's impossible to predict new demands from the lines of business, new competitive threats, or how much bandwidth to allocate for applications that don't yet exist. All you really know is that you must prepare your infrastructure for any possibility.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Portions of this post were originally posted on the Puppet blog, and are republished here with Puppet's permission.Change is constant and necessary in IT, even if it’s an uphill battle. Fortunately, you can purposefully drive change through collaboration, automation and DevOps practices.
In a recent Puppet-sponsored webinar, we discussed the complexity and accelerating rate of change in IT, and how it impacts user expectations and tool evolution.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IDC recently made a strong case for enterprise adoption of hybrid network-based IP virtual private network (VPN) services that combine Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)-enabled VPNs for larger sites and IPSec network-based VPNs for smaller locations.
Many enterprises rely on MPLS for high-performance, critical communications. With an ability to support multiple protocols and to direct traffic more speedily from point to point, such as between data centers and major office hubs, MPLS has been a preferred option for knitting together enterprise virtual private networks (VPNs) over wide area networks (WANs).
But, as enterprises have decentralized their workforces, they have adopted IPSec VPNs to accommodate remote and mobile workers using a variety of devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Moving fast is a fundamental requirement in today’s business environment; flexibility and responsiveness are essential. New Zealand manufacturer Fisher & Paykel is leveraging new networking technologies to help it keep up with market changes.
“We have large manufacturing sites in five countries; we sell in over 50; and distribute around the world,” says Jon White, general manager of IT for Fisher & Paykel, which has been manufacturing high quality appliances since 1934.
“Technology helps us where we have distributed design centers, so we can allow people to collaborate on designs, and also make sure we that we reduce costs,” says White.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you want to have a digital business, you need a modern network. Just follow the steps in this blog series.
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If your organization has adopted a DevOps initiative, you’re likely already seeing improvements in culture and processes. Maybe you’ve automated manual tasks, built a continuous delivery pipeline, and improved collaboration between Dev and Ops. Team morale has gone up, and the number of 3 AM calls has gone down. You’re doing really well compared to many other organizations.Of course, DevOps is not one-and-done; it’s an ongoing journey. There’s always a way to achieve greater control, predictability and flexibility.Continuous Improvement is a new ebook by Puppet for anyone who's already tackled the fundamental DevOps practices and wants to go further. You’ll learn tips on improving cross-departmental collaboration, holding internal events like workshops and hackathons, and building in metrics and transparency to hold everyone accountable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While the move toward truly digital environments provides IT with an exciting opportunity to contribute to the organization’s future, it also increases the workload on IT infrastructure. And when resources are taxed, mistakes are made. Unfortunately, the process of building storage environments capable of satisfying the demands of the new digital economy isn’t exempt.Some mistakes are understandable, painless, and easy to correct. But others can be harmful enough to put your company on the path to failure – especially if left unaddressed. Here are three prime examples of common storage mistakes and how you can avoid them.Mistake 1: Undervaluing the role visibility plays in today’s digital environment.
When always-on performance is a prerequisite, failing to embrace visibility tools means that you are essentially operating in the dark and surviving on chance. Dynamic visibility tools combined with a Fibre Channel-based storage fabric can give you the ability to rapidly troubleshoot current or looming problem areas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Portions of this post were originally posted on the Puppet blog, and are republished here with Puppet's permission.Enterprise companies turn to the cloud for lots of reasons: to quickly and economically provide development and testing environments; to burst at times of peak customer demand; and to generally be able to make changes faster and more flexibly.Whatever you think you may need from the cloud — and whatever concerns and reservations you may have — others have been there.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Every year, the processing power of the CPUs that drive our computing and gaming devices increases, enabling them to ingest, process, and churn out more data faster. When you look at the increases over time, as the folks at Expert Exchange did in 2015, the progress is nothing short of mind-boggling.
They found that an Apple iPhone 5 had 2.7 times the processing power of a 1985 Cray-2 supercomputer. And a pair of 2015 Nintendo gaming systems had about the same processing power as the computer that guided Apollo 11 to the moon.
We see it in the new models of workstations, PCs and laptops that come out every year, or even every six months – each one faster and smaller than the last. But, as IDC Research Director Linn Huang points out, the same is not true for the wired Ethernet ports on those machines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Digital transformation is making a significant impact on the enterprise. Organizations in all industries are realizing the need to enhance the customer experience through IoT, social media, big data, and mobility. Not only are each of these opportunities transforming IT’s role within the enterprise, they are ultimately changing how organizations operate.To keep pace, numerous organizations are integrating flash storage into their infrastructure for many of their newest applications. But while flash is easy to deploy in satellite applications, integrating this valuable data back into the legacy storage infrastructure can be harder than expected. Aggressive deployment can be problematic, and enterprise networks often struggle to keep up with the higher performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Originally posted on the Puppet blog, and republished here with Puppet's permission.We’re often so focused on crafting code that we forget the reason why: to deliver a better experience for our users and help our business grow. Let's take a step back and look at how continuous delivery can help your organization reach its goals. And when you’re done here, make sure to get even more details on continuous delivery in the full ebook.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Portions of this post were originally posted on the Puppet blog, and are republished here with Puppet's permission.Puppet is pleased to announce our sixth annual State of DevOps survey. It's the biggest, most in-depth survey of IT professionals in the industry. Just as we have for the past few years, we've created the survey in collaboration with the principals of DevOps Research & Assessment (DORA): Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the last several years we’ve seen a major shift in the data center where organizations are moving to cloud, whether private or public. More and more, customers are leveraging software as a service (SaaS) applications and cloud services from providers such as AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure and others. This, has shifted enterprise data traffic patterns as fewer and fewer apps reside within the walls of corporate data centers.
This major shift in the app consumption model is having a huge impact on organizations and infrastructure. In this recent article “How Amazon Web Services is luring banks to the cloud”, we see that some companies already have completely moved to public cloud. An interesting fact is that while many organizations have stringent regulatory compliance requirements, they still have made the move to cloud. This tells us two things – the maturity of using public cloud services and the trust these organizations have in using public cloud is high. Again, it is all about speed and agility – without compromising performance, security and reliability.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Originally posted on the Puppet blog, and republished here with Puppet's permission.Interested to see how DevOps salary trends are changing? Download Puppet’s DevOps Salary Report, which offers analysis about DevOps salaries from the 4,600-plus people we surveyed for the 2016 State of DevOps Report. By the way, if you haven't read the State of DevOps report yet, it's a compelling dive into how much better DevOps organizations are doing, compared with their peers — and how they achieve such excellent results.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you’re looking at deploying 802.11ac Wi-Fi access point (AP) technology, as most companies have already, you may want to consider upgrading the speed of your wired connection between your APs and your wiring-closet Ethernet switch to avoid the kind of network saturation that puts a damper on worker productivity.
The 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard now accounts for 67.1% of dependent wireless AP shipments and more than 80% of revenue, “setting the stage for near obsolescence of the 802.11n standard by 2018 in the mainstream enterprise segment,” according to the research firm IDC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The “Third Network” is a term coined by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) to communicate a concept that combines the performance and security assurances of Carrier Ethernet (CE 2.0) and the agility and ubiquity of the Internet. “It gives unprecedented levels of network control to for new and evolving types of cloud-centric applications and control for network connectivity services within current network architectures as well as emerging SDN and NFV implementations,” says MEF.
Top awards
Each year, MEF confers Excellence Awards to recognize service, application, technology, and professional excellence and innovation in the global Third Network. For 2016, AT&T was honored to receive five awards.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Originally posted on the Puppet blog, and republished here with Puppet's permission.What is continuous delivery? How is it different from continuous deployment? How does it relate to DevOps? We get these questions a lot, we even created a handbook for continuous delivery.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Originally posted on the Puppet blog, and republished here with Puppet's permission.In technology, we get used to the idea that change is coming at us all the time, faster and faster. Or at least, we should get used to that idea, and even more important, we should prepare ourselves, our teams and our entire organizations for that rapid pace of change.
That's why we created The CIO's Guide to DevOps: to help executives responsible for IT navigate the recent wave of change, dubbed digital transformation. Now that digital technology drives everything, every company, nonprofit, university and government agency that wants to stay relevant must become really good at developing and delivering software quickly, with great agility. That need is what's driving adoption of DevOps principles and practices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Organizations from the Fortune 100 to the 28 million small businesses in the United States are embracing mobility, Big Data, social media and cloud computing. This digital transformation in turn is placing crushing capacity demands on enterprise and small and mid-sized business networks.And while these “third-platform” technologies promise agility and speed, for many SMBs, the promise of faster business is too often stifled by legacy network infrastructure. The problem is the Wi-Fi networks many organizations depend on have sped past the capacity of ubiquitous Ethernet cabling to handle the high speeds needed for today’s digital business. Wireless Access Points (APs) today can transfer data faster than the Ethernet cables and network switch can support.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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