Network World

Author Archives: Network World

Best-of-breed networking: There’s an opportunity for white boxes in the WAN

Everyone wants the best network, so they say, but as usual with “bestness” goals, there’s not much agreement on how to achieve it. Do you go for best-of-breed in your equipment, or maybe for three vendors per product area, or maybe open white-box networks? A bit over three-quarters of enterprises said in 2020 that open networks and white boxes would give them best of breed options, but what’s happened since then seems like a blast from the past, vendor-wise.Let’s start with an interesting truth. Well over 95% of established enterprises who can look back to the origins of their networks say that they started off with a single-vendor network. Enterprises who launched within the last five years (which are very few) account for almost all those who didn’t start off with one vendor. If you think about it, this is logical, because starting off with networking is daunting enough without adding in the complication of network integration and the management of multiple sources of technology.To read this article in full, please click here

When does SD-WAN make sense?

This is an important question, with a simple answer: it depends. And the main thing it depends on is, why an organization wants an SD-WAN in the first place. Answering that goes a long way to answering the size question.The baseline assumption is that the IT department sees a need for the organization to have a iprivate WAN, rather than every site communicating solely over the public internet.This is not a trivial assumption any more. As little as a decade ago, it was standard to have a private WAN for even two or three locations, since they would most likely be sharing back-end services of some sort from a common data center. Today, no such assumption can be made. Many companies grow to have many sites without needing private connectivity among them because everything they do is hosted in one or another external cloud. And, as some organizations migrate services out of data centers, they find that they need private WAN links at fewer sites or only at their data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel delays next GPU Max until 2025

A significant change to Intel's high performance computing roadmap gives competitors AMD and Nvidia plenty of time to grab market share.Intel has a pair of processors called CPU Max and GPU Max. Both feature high bandwidth memory (HBM) on the die which greatly increases performance. The successor to the GPU Max, known as Rialto Bridge, was due later this year or early next year.Instead, Intel cancelled Rialto Bridge, and its successor – Falcon Shores – isn't coming until 2025. Longer term, Intel plans to have one processor, called an XPU, that will combine CPU and GPU cores on one die, but that will come after Falcon Shores.To read this article in full, please click here

What is power over Ethernet (PoE)?

Power over Ethernet (or PoE) is the delivery of electrical power to networked devices over the same Ethernet cabling that connects them to the LAN. This simplifies the devices themselves by eliminating the need for an electric plug and power converter, and makes it unnecessary to have separate AC electric wiring and sockets installed near each device.Many enterprises have come to rely on PoE to bring electricity over existing data cables to Wi-Fi access points, firewalls, IP phones, and other infrastructure throughout their networks.To read this article in full, please click here

Saving commands to a file using Ctrl-x-e

One very interesting trick that you may not know is that you can type a line of text (presumably a command) on the Linux command line and immediately save it to a file by pressing just three keys. The editor that will open up will depend on your $EDITOR setting that you can view using the command shown below:$ echo $EDITOR nano If you prefer to use a different editor, use a command like this before typing or moving back to the command that you want to save:$ export EDITOR=vi And don't forget to save this change to your .bashrc (or other start-up file) if you want to make this change permanent. For example:To read this article in full, please click here

Aruba to prioritize SASE, private 5G, data-center networking

Aruba Networks plans to prioritize development of a short list of key networking technologies – including data-center switching, private 5G, and secure access service edge (SASE) – that it finds are top of mind for enterprise customers.Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s network subsidiary is fresh off a successful first quarter that saw revenue climb 31% year over year. Aruba general manager Phil Mottram attributes the record revenue in large part to the company’s Intelligent Edge strategy, which includes technologies to help customers adopt and manage network and application resources.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware overhauls Workspace One for better performance

VMware has revamped its Workspace One mobile and virtual desktop platform by boosting performance, making it more service-oriented and easy to manage.Workspace One is VMware’s endpoint-management package for delivering, managing and securing application access to any device across the a cloud or distributed on-premises enterprise. The highly-integrated suite includes device management, single sign-on, remote access control, endpoint security, analytics, automation and virtualization.The changing way workers are using and accessing applications from multiple devices prompted the over-arching need to change Workspace One and how its services are delivered.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper aims at simplifying campus fabric deployment

Juniper Networks is looking to ease complicated campus networking by automatically configuring and helping manage Ethernet VPN-Virtual Extensible XLAN (EVPN/VXLAN) deployments.Juniper also expanded its EX family of switches aimed at campus distribution deployments and low-density data-center top-of-rack environments, according to Jeff Aaron, vice president of enterprise marketing for Juniper.Juniper has rolled out a process called campus fabric workflow, under its subscription-based Wired Assurance program. Campus fabric workflow can help customers deploy common standards-based campus fabrics, such as EVPN multihoming, EVPN core/distribution and IP Clos for VLAN extensions with an easy process that lets them pick their desired topology, assign devices/roles and push configurations, Aaron said.To read this article in full, please click here

Fortinet adds new security, management features to its SASE platform

UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL TUESDAY, MARCH 7 AT 9AM ETFortinet has added features that broaden the range of management and security tools for its secure access service edge (SASE) package.The company has added a feature to its Secure Private Access that ties SASE resources together with SD-WAN-based applications through a Fortinet SD-WAN hub located in a nearby point-of-presence (PoP). The idea is to support larger hybrid environments and simplify anywhere access to corporate applications, said Nirav Shah, vice president of products with Fortinet.To read this article in full, please click here

Artificial intelligence helps solve networking problems

With the public release of ChatGPT and Microsoft’s $10-billion investment into OpenAI, artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly gaining mainstream acceptance. For enterprise networking professionals, this means there is a very real possibility that AI traffic will affect their networks in major ways, both positive and negative.As AI becomes a core feature in mission-critical software, how should network teams and networking professionals adjust to stay ahead of the trend?Andrew Coward, GM of Software Defined Networking at IBM, argues that the enterprise has already lost control of its networks. The shift to the cloud has left the traditional enterprise network stranded, and AI and automation are required if enterprises hope to regain control.To read this article in full, please click here

Building your personal Linux cheat sheets

Linux man pages can be overwhelming to people who are just learning how to work on the command line, but here we'll look at a way to quickly prepare a cheat sheet for a series of commands. These cheat sheets will tell new Linux users enough to get started and know what man page to read when they want to know more.To get started, we’ll take a look at series of commands that any Linux newbie would need to learn:alias cmp export less tail whereis apropos comm grep more tar who cat dd head passwd top whoami chmod df kill pwd unzip zip chown diff killall sort whatis Next, we use a series of commands that will provide short descriptions of these commands. These are help -d, whatis, and a man command that selects only the command description from the man pages.To read this article in full, please click here

IDC: Add used IT gear to the mix to stretch budgets, support sustainability

Reducing e-waste and extending the useful life of IT gear are top recycling drivers, according to an IDC survey.The most commonly cited motivation was to reduce e-waste, with more than half those surveyed in Latin America, Western Europe, and Asia-Pacific, citing it, and with US respondents falling just shy of 50%. The IDC Spotlight survey results of 540 respondents was conducted in February 2023 and written by IDC Research Vice President, Flexible Consumption and Financing Strategies for IT Infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here

Royal Caribbean adopts Zero Trust on land and sea

The name Royal Caribbean conjures up images of luxury cruise ships, top-notch entertainment, fine dining, sandy beaches, breathtaking sunsets, tall tropical beverages.“Our mission is to create fabulous vacations with great experiences and great memories for our crew and our guests,” says John Maya, vice president of operational excellence at Miami-based Royal Caribbean Group.Beyond the glitz and glamour, however, Royal Caribbean has the same internal systems as any company in the travel/hospitality industry – corporate offices, sales, marketing, reservations, call centers, baggage handling, etc.Maya describes his IT infrastructure as hybrid cloud, with some resources hosted on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, but also some core systems, such as the mission critical reservations application, running on an IBM AS-400 server in an Equinix data center in Virginia.To read this article in full, please click here

What is Multicloud?

An organization takes a multicloud approach when it uses cloud services from more than one provider. That might seem obvious from the name—it's multiple clouds, after all—but the reasons for choosing a multicloud approach can be as varied as the cloud platforms themselves.Because "cloud" has become such a broad and all-encompassing category, a multicloud environment might include, say, Microsoft 365 SaaS for productivity apps, Google Drive for storage, and Amazon AWS for compute services.On the other hand, organizations might have a reason to turn to multiple cloud providers for the same function or purpose. And public cloud services are so cheap and easy to get started with that large organizations (or organizations that don't have tight centralized control over IT) might find themselves in a multicloud situation without ever intending to.To read this article in full, please click here

MWC analysis: Conditions are ripe for cloud providers to drive faster network services.

Big challenges don’t usually suddenly explode on the scene. There are little symptoms, warning signs that signal developing issues. One place to look for them is a trade show, because there are a lot of buyers and sellers collected in one place. The Mobile World Congress (MWC) that just ended is a good example, because it validated some little signals that networking might be facing a big challenge. Back in 2007, Australia created a National Broadband Network (NBN) as a national infrastructure project because access infrastructure was too expensive to support competition and reasonable consumer prices. At MWC, Telecom Italia said that retail pricing pressure and exploding data consumption meant it was “facing a perfect storm.”  Ericsson said that the 200 operators in Europe need to consolidate significantly in order to be financially efficient and stable. Last year, because consumer willingness to pay for broadband hasn’t grown and their appetite for bandwidth has exploded, European Union operators have asked the union to approve subsidies to them from big tech. Stories spread through MWC that the EU favored the subsidies, called the fair share. An EU regulator suggested that fair-share policies were essential to assure gigabit connectivity by 2030.  Continue reading

Looking up words and terms with the Linux dict command

If you’re sitting at your Linux computer and feeling curious about some word or term, you don’t have to jump up and grab a dictionary. Instead, you can install the dict command and you’ll probably be amazed by the wealth of information that will be available to you on the command line.You will be able to find multiple definitions for nearly any term you ask about, often with considerable depth. Just looking up the word “seven”, I was provided with four definitions. They included references to the Pleiades (a star cluster that is also known as the "Seven Sisters"), a mention of the seven wonders of the world, scriptural references to the number seven, a note about how many days are in a week, and an explanation that seven is one greater than six.To read this article in full, please click here

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