Zeus Kerravala
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Zeus Kerravala
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Startup Nyansa helps companies quantify the impact of application performance
Understanding the impact of an IT outage is a fairly standardized process. Take how much revenue the company generates, break it down to an hourly amount and, as they say in the UK, “Bob’s your Uncle”. However, IT outages aren’t nearly as common as they used to be a decade or more ago. Businesses build their infrastructure with so much redundancy that the concept of an outage is rare. I believe most companies could go into their data center and flick any piece of equipment off and not one user would notice.The bigger problems today are related to “brown out” situations, where things are working but not quite right. A user tries to make a call from a VoIP phone and the call is choppy or attempts to input some information into a CRM system and the interface is slow. These are much more difficult problems to quantify the impact of. Last year I asked a number of IT leaders if they were aware of how much productivity was lost due to poor application performance and most either took a shot in the dark or admitted they had no idea. As best as I can tell, the number is Continue reading
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Startup Nyansa helps companies quantify the impact of application performance
Understanding the impact of an IT outage is a fairly standardized process. Take how much revenue the company generates, break it down to an hourly amount and, as they say in the UK, “Bob’s your Uncle”. However, IT outages aren’t nearly as common as they used to be a decade or more ago. Businesses build their infrastructure with so much redundancy that the concept of an outage is rare. I believe most companies could go into their data center and flick any piece of equipment off and not one user would notice.The bigger problems today are related to “brown out” situations, where things are working but not quite right. A user tries to make a call from a VoIP phone and the call is choppy or attempts to input some information into a CRM system and the interface is slow. These are much more difficult problems to quantify the impact of. Last year I asked a number of IT leaders if they were aware of how much productivity was lost due to poor application performance and most either took a shot in the dark or admitted they had no idea. As best as I can tell, the number is Continue reading
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Avaya Surge protects the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is hitting a tipping point. While there has been a fair amount of IoT chatter and hype over the past few years, deployments have been limited to the traditional machine to machine (M2M) verticals such as oil and gas, mining and manufacturing. Over the past couple of years, though, more verticals have been looking to connect more non-traditional IoT devices.The reason I think we’re at this tipping point is because businesses aren’t referring to these deployments as “IoT” but rather it’s becoming normal operations to connect more and more devices. + Also on Network World: The Internet of Things security threat + Healthcare has rapidly been connecting patient devices, retailers are making point-of-sale systems “smart,” hotels are looking to improve the guest experience, and sports and entertainment venues are connecting more devices. While these verticals may seem different, the commonality of IoT initiatives is that when everything is connected, you can change the way the business interacts with customers, students, patients, patrons, employees or other constituents that interact with the organization. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Avaya Surge protects the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is hitting a tipping point. While there has been a fair amount of IoT chatter and hype over the past few years, deployments have been limited to the traditional machine to machine (M2M) verticals such as oil and gas, mining and manufacturing. Over the past couple of years, though, more verticals have been looking to connect more non-traditional IoT devices.The reason I think we’re at this tipping point is because businesses aren’t referring to these deployments as “IoT” but rather it’s becoming normal operations to connect more and more devices. + Also on Network World: The Internet of Things security threat + Healthcare has rapidly been connecting patient devices, retailers are making point-of-sale systems “smart,” hotels are looking to improve the guest experience, and sports and entertainment venues are connecting more devices. While these verticals may seem different, the commonality of IoT initiatives is that when everything is connected, you can change the way the business interacts with customers, students, patients, patrons, employees or other constituents that interact with the organization. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Extreme, NRG Stadium score big with Super Bowl Wi-Fi performance
Super Bowl LI will be remembered for a number of things. The Patriots had the largest comeback in Super Bowl history. Like all Atlanta sports teams, the Falcons choked when it mattered most. Also, Tom Brady won his fifth Super Bowl to cement his place as the second greatest QB of all time, behind the illustrious Joe Montana. More importantly though, Super Bowl LI was the most connected and engaged sporting event to date, as the fans in NRG Stadium in Houston appeared to be very busy using their phones to take pictures, Tweet, Facebook, send messages and other activities. A year ago, I wrote a post about how the network performed for Super Bowl 50, so I thought it would be worth looking at how things changed between then and now. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Extreme, NRG Stadium score big with Super Bowl Wi-Fi performance
Super Bowl LI will be remembered for a number of things. The Patriots had the largest comeback in Super Bowl history. Like all Atlanta sports teams, the Falcons choked when it mattered most. Also, Tom Brady won his fifth Super Bowl to cement his place as the second greatest QB of all time, behind the illustrious Joe Montana. More importantly though, Super Bowl LI was the most connected and engaged sporting event to date, as the fans in NRG Stadium in Houston appeared to be very busy using their phones to take pictures, Tweet, Facebook, send messages and other activities. A year ago, I wrote a post about how the network performed for Super Bowl 50, so I thought it would be worth looking at how things changed between then and now. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Avaya powers the hockey Mecca: Montreal Canadiens’ Bell Centre
In the sports world there is no team more revered by its city than the Montreal Canadiens. With all due respect to Green Back Packer, New York Yankee or New England Patriots fans, you don’t know the absolute die-hard devotion of a Canadiens supporter. The team has also had an unparalleled level of success in North American sports with 24 Stanley Cup Championships and an equal number of players in the recently released NHL's top 100 players of all time. The home of this storied franchise is the Bell Centre in downtown Montreal. When one walks into the building, its easy to understand what “Canadiens tradition” means, as there are reminders of the legends who played for this franchise and the promise of future greatness, which is why the fans come out in droves no matter what. Through success and failure, good times and bad, the seats always sell out. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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ZeroStack uses machine learning to create self-driving clouds
Cloud mania continues to grow as businesses move more and more workloads to platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). But while public cloud hype is stealing all the headlines, private data centers are quietly plodding along and growing, as well. There is so much data growth today that businesses have to invest in both public clouds and private data centers, hence the high adoption rate of “hybrid” environments. + Also on Network World: The cloud continues to rise—and fast + The landscape for public cloud services is set—Azure and Amazon have won that battle—but private data centers are in a state of change. The legacy model of buying best-of-breed components and cobbling the technology together to build a private cloud is a long, complex process that just can’t keep up with the needs of a digital organization. Turnkey private clouds are becoming increasingly popular because they give businesses an Amazon-like experience but in a private cloud model, so the data and infrastructure stays in the company data center. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners bets on Aryaka and SD-WAN
This week, global software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) provider Aryaka announced its series D financing round. The round was led by two new investors, Third Point Ventures and Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners (DTCP), displaying strong endorsement of the company’s global SD-WAN platform. Existing investors participated in the round, too, demonstrating its belief in the potential of SD-WAN and Aryaka. SD-WANs have been seen by some to be the death knell for traditional service providers offering MPLS and IP VPN, and until now, no investment in the technology has been made by a major telecommunications company. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners bets on Aryaka and SD-WAN
This week, global software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) provider Aryaka announced its series D financing round. The round was led by two new investors, Third Point Ventures and Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners (DTCP), displaying strong endorsement of the company’s global SD-WAN platform. Existing investors participated in the round, too, demonstrating its belief in the potential of SD-WAN and Aryaka. SD-WANs have been seen by some to be the death knell for traditional service providers offering MPLS and IP VPN, and until now, no investment in the technology has been made by a major telecommunications company. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Arista enables visibility at cloud speed
You can’t manage what you can’t see. That phrase that has been used over and over again with network managers as they look to get a better handle on the goings on in their networks. The problem is pervasive visibility is hard. Collecting information from multiple systems, rolling it up into an aggregated view and then trying to do some kind of manual machine learning on it is next to impossible. I suppose if Mr. Spock were running the network, things might be OK. But the last time I checked, the U.S. wasn’t accepting H1-Bs from Vulcan, so humans will have to do. + Also on Network World: Cloud monitoring: Users review 5 top tools + The need for visibility has created a rising tide in the network packet broker market, and most of these do a fine job in the enterprise space, but the RISC-based processers that some of them use do not operate at cloud speeds when there are multiple 100 Gig-E connections that need to be tapped. I want to be clear that I’m making distinction between an enterprise monitoring cloud traffic and an actual cloud provider monitoring its internal traffic. The latter is Continue reading
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Arista enables visibility at cloud speed
You can’t manage what you can’t see. That phrase that has been used over and over again with network managers as they look to get a better handle on the goings on in their networks. The problem is pervasive visibility is hard. Collecting information from multiple systems, rolling it up into an aggregated view and then trying to do some kind of manual machine learning on it is next to impossible. I suppose if Mr. Spock were running the network, things might be OK. But the last time I checked, the U.S. wasn’t accepting H1-Bs from Vulcan, so humans will have to do. + Also on Network World: Cloud monitoring: Users review 5 top tools + The need for visibility has created a rising tide in the network packet broker market, and most of these do a fine job in the enterprise space, but the RISC-based processers that some of them use do not operate at cloud speeds when there are multiple 100 Gig-E connections that need to be tapped. I want to be clear that I’m making distinction between an enterprise monitoring cloud traffic and an actual cloud provider monitoring its internal traffic. The latter is Continue reading
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Juniper heads to the clouds with Unite
Not to state the obvious, but the cloud has been growing in popularity over the past decade. However, contrary to much of the rhetoric I hear about today, the cloud is not going to kill of private data centers any time soon. The explosion in data has driven growth in both private data centers and public clouds.Underscoring that point is that almost all the IT leaders I speak to plan to do some kind of hybrid cloud where they leverage the strengths of both.The cloud is a new compute model, but what’s different about it from other compute paradigms before it is that it is highly network centric. Everyone loves the cloud. It’s great, it’s elastic and a bunch of other things. But it won’t provide the results companies are looking for without the right network underneath it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Juniper heads to the clouds with Unite
Not to state the obvious, but the cloud has been growing in popularity over the past decade. However, contrary to much of the rhetoric I hear about today, the cloud is not going to kill of private data centers any time soon. The explosion in data has driven growth in both private data centers and public clouds.Underscoring that point is that almost all the IT leaders I speak to plan to do some kind of hybrid cloud where they leverage the strengths of both.The cloud is a new compute model, but what’s different about it from other compute paradigms before it is that it is highly network centric. Everyone loves the cloud. It’s great, it’s elastic and a bunch of other things. But it won’t provide the results companies are looking for without the right network underneath it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Cisco unveils Tetration 2.0, focuses on application security
The middle of last year, Cisco held an event in New York to release its newest product, Tetration. The product moved Cisco into the analytics market, with the information being used to help customers better understand application performance and improve data center security. This week, Cisco announced the next version of Tetration Analytics, which is focused at providing security at the application layer. Cisco also released some new deployment options to make it easier for customers to get started with Tetration. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Cisco unveils Tetration 2.0, focuses on application security
The middle of last year, Cisco held an event in New York to release its newest product, Tetration. The product moved Cisco into the analytics market, with the information being used to help customers better understand application performance and improve data center security. This week, Cisco announced the next version of Tetration Analytics, which is focused at providing security at the application layer. Cisco also released some new deployment options to make it easier for customers to get started with Tetration. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Illumio extends its segmentation to the network and cloud
Data centers have become increasingly dynamic and distributed, which is why there has been a rise in technologies such as virtual machines, containers and hyperconverged systems.Security has been slow to evolve to meet the needs of the new world, but thanks to innovative start-ups such as Illumio, security is starting to change and is able to meet the demands of digital organizations. One of the big advancements in data center security has been the rise of segmentation tools. In actuality, coarse-grained segmentation has been around for decades in the form of firewalls, VLANs and ACLs, but companies like Illumio and VMware have extended the paradigm to applications, workloads and users. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Illumio extends its segmentation to the network and cloud
Data centers have become increasingly dynamic and distributed, which is why there has been a rise in technologies such as virtual machines, containers and hyperconverged systems.Security has been slow to evolve to meet the needs of the new world, but thanks to innovative start-ups such as Illumio, security is starting to change and is able to meet the demands of digital organizations. One of the big advancements in data center security has been the rise of segmentation tools. In actuality, coarse-grained segmentation has been around for decades in the form of firewalls, VLANs and ACLs, but companies like Illumio and VMware have extended the paradigm to applications, workloads and users. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Aerohive looks to disrupt enterprise Wi-Fi with a low price point
Wi-Fi has become a critical component of digital enterprises. The wireless network connects workers, customers, Internet of Things (Iot) endpoints and virtually everything else to the company network. In addition to connectivity, the data that is generated by wireless traffic can be analyzed and used to provide the business with new insights on customer or user behavior. Choosing the right vendor for Wi-Fi infrastructure can be a conundrum for businesses. The choices available are either a low price point that carries a basic feature set or one with an enterprise-class set of functions with a much higher cost, meaning a compromise is always required. With most solutions, if a customer chooses the low-cost option, there’s no upgrade path to a more feature-rich solution other than ripping out the old stuff and putting in a whole new set of infrastructure. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Cisco’s AppDynamics purchase: A big price tag that could have big dividends
Cisco made some big news earlier this week with the launch of its new Spark Board at its Collaboration Event. Not to be content with one piece of big news, on the same day Cisco announced it had entered an agreement to acquire AppDynamics on the eve of its initial public offering (IPO). The $3.7 billion that Cisco paid was a hefty premium over the $2.0 billion figure put on the IPO. With all the acquisitions Cisco has made, it’s fair to say the company is well experienced in this area. So, it must have seen something interesting in AppDynamics to plunk down that much money for a company that did about $150 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2016. Most of Cisco’s massive war chest is overseas, which is why many of its big price tag purchases have been for companies headquartered outside the U.S., making this even more intriguing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here