Stephen Lawson
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Networks need automation — just ask the U.S. military
IT professionals are looking to software-defined networking to automate what are still complex and vulnerable systems controlled by human engineers. Major General Sarah Zabel knows where they’re coming from.Zabel is the vice director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which provides IT support for all U.S. combat operations. Soldiers, officers, drones, and the president all rely on DISA to stay connected. Its network is the epitome of a system that’s both a headache to manage and a prime hacking target.Zabel was a featured speaker on Tuesday at the Open Networking User Group conference, a Silicon Valley gathering of enterprise IT leaders who want to steer vendors toward technologies that meet their real needs. Members include large retailers, financial institutions, and manufacturers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Networks need automation — just ask the U.S. military
IT professionals are looking to software-defined networking to automate what are still complex and vulnerable systems controlled by human engineers. Major General Sarah Zabel knows where they’re coming from.Zabel is the vice director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which provides IT support for all U.S. combat operations. Soldiers, officers, drones, and the president all rely on DISA to stay connected. Its network is the epitome of a system that’s both a headache to manage and a prime hacking target.Zabel was a featured speaker on Tuesday at the Open Networking User Group conference, a Silicon Valley gathering of enterprise IT leaders who want to steer vendors toward technologies that meet their real needs. Members include large retailers, financial institutions, and manufacturers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Enterprise networkers have organized: Here are their demands
A user group for enterprise IT managers is taking on software-defined networking, calling for new technologies they say would better serve enterprise needs.On Tuesday, the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) announced initiatives behind four technologies that it says would help enterprises build and run their networks better.There’s no shortage of platforms and protocols for software-defined infrastructure, including things like OpenFlow, OpenStack and ONOS (Open Network Operating System). But they were developed around the needs of vendors and service providers more than of enterprises, ONUG founder Nick Lippis said. His group wants to push along a few more pieces that aren’t there yet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Enterprise networkers have organized: Here are their demands
A user group for enterprise IT managers is taking on software-defined networking, calling for new technologies they say would better serve enterprise needs.On Tuesday, the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) announced initiatives behind four technologies that it says would help enterprises build and run their networks better.There’s no shortage of platforms and protocols for software-defined infrastructure, including things like OpenFlow, OpenStack and ONOS (Open Network Operating System). But they were developed around the needs of vendors and service providers more than of enterprises, ONUG founder Nick Lippis said. His group wants to push along a few more pieces that aren’t there yet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Newer Wi-Fi’s faster, but it needs a fast wire behind it
The next time you want to complain about slow Wi-Fi, think about saving your vitriol for wires instead.So-called gigabit Wi-Fi, or 802.11ac, is slowly starting to show up in homes, buildings and public hotspots, but it’s not delivering a gigabit to smartphones, according to an analysis by research company OpenSignal. That’s partly because of how wireless works and how the newest technology is being rolled out, but it also reflects the performance of the wired networks that Wi-Fi taps into.OpenSignal used its free connection-monitoring app, running on thousands of smartphones, to learn what kinds of Wi-Fi networks users were on and what kind of speed they were getting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Newer Wi-Fi’s faster, but it needs a fast wire behind it
The next time you want to complain about slow Wi-Fi, think about saving your vitriol for wires instead.So-called gigabit Wi-Fi, or 802.11ac, is slowly starting to show up in homes, buildings and public hotspots, but it’s not delivering a gigabit to smartphones, according to an analysis by research company OpenSignal. That’s partly because of how wireless works and how the newest technology is being rolled out, but it also reflects the performance of the wired networks that Wi-Fi taps into.OpenSignal used its free connection-monitoring app, running on thousands of smartphones, to learn what kinds of Wi-Fi networks users were on and what kind of speed they were getting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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To go from IT to IoT, build on your skills
The Internet of Things is growing so fast, it’s an obvious place to look for career growth.IoT is already a reality at 29 percent of enterprises, according to a Gartner survey taken late last year. Fourteen percent said they would implement it this year, and 64 percent said they plan to use some form of IoT eventually.Yet, like a lot of IoT technology, jobs in this vast field are still evolving out of what's been in place for years. Instead of aiming for a whole new job, the best strategy may be to add some skills to the ones you already have.There will be plenty of new things to do in enterprises that adopt IoT systems, which can make companies more efficient and generate new sources of revenue. And some people are working on IoT full time. But for now, most companies heading in that direction are still scouting it out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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India has shot down Apple’s plan to sell refurbished iPhones
India reportedly has rejected Apple’s plan to sell refurbished iPhones in the country, a blow to the company’s hopes for growth there.The government turned down Apple’s application to import and sell the older, refreshed phones, Bloomberg reported, citing an unnamed official. Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.Apple looked to refurbished handsets as a way to attract more buyers in India. An earlier application was rejected last year by India’s Ministry of Environment.The company’s phone sales growth has been slowing in China, so it has been looking to India as its next big growth market. Apple had only three percent market share in India in the fourth quarter of last year, according to IDC. Samsung was the biggest phone seller, with 27 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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EMC’s latest VCE nodes aim to make clouds easy
One way to get enterprises and service providers to adopt cloud infrastructure is to make it easier to set up and use. That’s what EMC is doing with Neutrino, a new type of hardware-software node for the VCE VxRack platform.The VxRack System 1000 with Neutrino nodes can run any workload on any node in the rack, and on any of several cloud software stacks. If OpenStack is best for one job, Hadoop is best for another, and VMware Photon is ideal for a third application, each can run on the appropriate stack. As long as there’s capacity somewhere in the rack, it doesn’t matter where each is hosted.“It allows any of the hardware in the nodes to be provisioned to any software stack,” said Jeremy Burton, EMC’s president of products and marketing. This will help enterprises and service providers deliver IaaS (infrastructure as a service) to their users and customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Dell plus EMC has a name: Dell Technologies
Dell’s planned US$67 billion acquisition of EMC will create a broad collection of businesses called Dell Technologies.Under that umbrella, the pure Dell name will live on in the company’s client business, including its PCs, while its enterprise infrastructure division will be called Dell EMC, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell announced on Monday at EMC World in Las Vegas.Dell Technologies will be the only company selling everything from edge devices to core data centers and cloud infrastructure, a mission that rival HP backed away from when it split into Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc., Dell said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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EMC World kicks off with cloud backup and cheaper flash arrays
EMC is going back to basics -- but for a new generation of users -- on the first day of EMC World on Monday.This year’s annual user conference will be the last for EMC as an independent company, assuming Dell's pending US$67 billion acquisition goes through later this year as planned. Michael Dell will join EMC's Chairman and CEO on stage during the Monday keynote session.But EMC’s core storage business is likely to stay much the same in the short term, because it complements Dell, said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Peters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Take a peek inside Samsung’s vast developer conference
Take a peek inside Samsung’s vast developer conferenceImage by Stephen LawsonSamsung kicked off its massive developer conference in San Francisco this week, where it's trying to get developers excited about its latest software, services and hardwareTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IBM lines up all-flash storage to help power cognitive computing
IBM is expanding its flash storage lineup to power cloud data centers that carry out so-called cognitive computing.The company’s newest FlashSystem arrays, introduced Wednesday, combine its fast and relatively affordable FlashCore technology with a scale-out architecture designed to be easy to expand.Cognitive computing, which IBM defines as real-time data analysis for immediate, automated decision-making, is at the heart of much of IBM’s current technology push for enterprises and service providers. Its Watson technology is the star of the show but only the most visible part of what the company is doing in this space. An example of cognitive computing is a mobile operator analyzing information about phone call quality to make decisions on the fly about changes in the network, said Andy Walls, an IBM Fellow and CTO for flash systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Dell adopts Aerohive WLAN management for its wired switches
Ethernet switches and wireless LANs are just two ways to get on the same network in most enterprises, so it makes sense to manage them together if you can.Wi-Fi grew up as a separate realm from wired networks, with different monitoring and management tools, but these worlds have started to collide in the past few years. Among other things, wireless specialist Aruba added Ethernet switches to its architecture and Meraki took administration of both network components into the cloud. Rivals Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco Systems snapped up both of those companies.Now Dell has gotten into the game, not by acquisition but through a partnership with WLAN vendor Aerohive Networks. On Tuesday, the two companies are introducing a unified management tool called HiveManager NG.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Dell adopts Aerohive WLAN management for its wired switches
Ethernet switches and wireless LANs are just two ways to get on the same network in most enterprises, so it makes sense to manage them together if you can.Wi-Fi grew up as a separate realm from wired networks, with different monitoring and management tools, but these worlds have started to collide in the past few years. Among other things, wireless specialist Aruba added Ethernet switches to its architecture and Meraki took administration of both network components into the cloud. Rivals Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco Systems snapped up both of those companies.Now Dell has gotten into the game, not by acquisition but through a partnership with WLAN vendor Aerohive Networks. On Tuesday, the two companies are introducing a unified management tool called HiveManager NG.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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For the remotest IoT gear, cellular and satellite are coming together
Many enterprises are looking to the Internet of Things to monitor and control assets they can't physically reach. Building networks that can cover all those assets is one of the big challenges of industrial IoT.Cellular networks cover people well, at least in developed countries, but total land area not as well. LPWANs (low-power wide-area networks) are emerging as an alternative for reaching endpoints over longer distances, thanks to their lower speed and power levels and designs optimized for IoT. But for truly global connectivity, satellite is really the only game in town. (And, more importantly, far out of town.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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For the remotest IoT gear, cellular and satellite are coming together
Many enterprises are looking to the Internet of Things to monitor and control assets they can't physically reach. Building networks that can cover all those assets is one of the big challenges of industrial IoT.Cellular networks cover people well, at least in developed countries, but total land area not as well. LPWANs (low-power wide-area networks) are emerging as an alternative for reaching endpoints over longer distances, thanks to their lower speed and power levels and designs optimized for IoT. But for truly global connectivity, satellite is really the only game in town. (And, more importantly, far out of town.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Next up in IoT: The Internet of shirts and shoes
Some clothes already hang out on the Internet. Pharrell Williams’s hat has its own Twitter account, as does Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie. Your clothes could be next to get online identities, though it won't make them famous.IoT startup Evrythng is teaming up with packaging company Avery Dennison to give apparel and footwear products unique identities in Evrythng’s software right when they’re manufactured.The companies have high hopes for the Janela Smart Products Platform, seeing a potential to reach 10 billion products in the next three years. The system could put a simple form of IoT into the hands of millions of consumers who weren’t even shopping for technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Network woes? The cloud is coming to the rescue
Cloud computing is changing the game for one of the hardest problems in IT: running a network. Users are counting on fast, secure access more than ever, even as networks get more complex and threats more dangerous. Often, there’s a lot of data available about the state of a network and its performance, but more data by itself can't solve a problem. So startups are turning to the growing power of the cloud for answers. Nyansa, based in Silicon Valley, emerged from stealth mode on Monday with Voyance, a cloud-based SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering that analyzes inputs from wired and wireless LANs to gauge users' actual experiences on a network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Network woes? The cloud is coming to the rescue
Cloud computing is changing the game for one of the hardest problems in IT: running a network. Users are counting on fast, secure access more than ever, even as networks get more complex and threats more dangerous. Often, there’s a lot of data available about the state of a network and its performance, but more data by itself can't solve a problem. So startups are turning to the growing power of the cloud for answers. Nyansa, based in Silicon Valley, emerged from stealth mode on Monday with Voyance, a cloud-based SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering that analyzes inputs from wired and wireless LANs to gauge users' actual experiences on a network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here