Zeus Kerravala, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Zeus Kerravala

Author Archives: Zeus Kerravala

Ixia’s Flex Tap Secure+ protects against injection breaches

We’ve probably all used the phrase “too much of anything is a bad thing.” Too much ice cream makes you fat, too many cats and you get called crazy, and too much NFL football on Sunday gets you banned to the doghouse by your wife. + Also on Network World: Network World annual State of the Network survey results + In IT, too much network traffic is certainly a bad thing. We need networks and rely on them to access cloud applications, call people on via videoconferencing and do a whole bunch of other tasks. However, too much traffic and the network becomes unusable and a source of frustration for workers. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco goes crazy with collaboration

Remember the Prince song Let’s Go Crazy? “Are we gonna let de-elevator bring us down? Oh, no let’s go! Let’s go crazy, let’s get nuts.” The famed singer and poet sang about not letting others bring you down. Instead, go crazy and get yourself out that downward spiral—at least that’s my interpretation.+ Also on Network World: Cisco CEO Robbins: Wait til you see what’s in our innovation pipeline + Cisco collaboration has gone through a similar trend. A few years ago the Cisco Collaboration Business Unit was in a free fall, and people were pointing to Microsoft, Google and startups such as Slack as being Cisco killers. Since then, the company has punched back and completely turned the business around to the point where it has now seen something like 12 consecutive quarters of growth. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Adapting the network for the rise of containers

They say necessity is the mother of invention. That statement has been true in networking for decades now, as many of the innovations in the network have been driven by changes in compute.For example, Ethernet became the de facto standard to consolidate all of the various LAN protocols that once existed. Another example is the virtual switch. That was invented to solve the hair pinning problem associated with moving traffic between two virtual machines on the same host.+ Also on Network World: Which is cheaper: Containers or virtual machines? + There’s another major compute shift going on that will drive the need for network evolution, and that’s the rise of containers. If you’re not familiar with containers, think of them as a lightweight runtime environment that includes an application and all of its dependencies, including configuration files, binaries and libraries. Containers are similar to virtual machines except they share a single operating system and kernel, so it’s much lighter weight. A VM can be a few to tens of gigabytes in size,where a container is likely to be just a few megabytes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ServiceNow enables businesses to embrace the cloud

The cloud has been mainstream now for over a decade, but adoption has been spotty as businesses experimented and learned what kind of benefits it can provide. Over the past couple of years, digital transformation has become a top initiative for business leaders, causing IT executives to look for ways to be more agile and dynamic. This has increased the adoption of cloud as not just a cheaper alternative to traditional, on-premises computing but rather a strategic alternative that can pay big dividends. We are rapidly approaching a cloud “tipping point” where there will be more workloads and applications in the cloud than in an organization’s private data center. This week ServiceNow, a company that has enabled many organizations to make the shift to cloud, announced some interesting survey data, as well as a new solution for businesses that are thinking cloud-first. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Who is most likely to buy Avaya’s networking business?

Earlier this year Forbes posted an article speculating that Avaya’s private equity firm, Silver Lake was exploring a sale of the company or at least parts of it. Private equity companies typically hold its portfolio companies for three to five years and then divest themselves of it through an IPO or a sale to another organization. The Avaya situation is somewhat of a rarity because it’s coming up on 10 years since Silver Lake took ownership of it.Avaya is a strong company with good products that has been trying to transform itself into more of a software and services company, but it is saddled with debt. A sale of its contact center and/or networking business could help offset that debt and put the rest of Avaya in a much better position.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GuardiCore helps security teams see into apps and networks before they segment

The digital business era has brought with it a number of new tools and technologies, such as software-defined networking (SDN), Internet of Things (IoT), mobility and the cloud. These innovations enable businesses to increase their level of dynamism and be more distributed, but they also increase the complexity of securing the business. Old-school security methods and tools do not work in an environment where the perimeter is eroding and resources are becoming more virtual and cloud-centric.+ Also on Network World: Always be prepared: Monitor, analyze and test your security + To combat this, security professionals have embraced the concept of segmentation. The number of segmentation providers has exploded over the past few years, including VMware repositioning its NSX network virtualization product as a micro-segmentation solution. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GuardiCore helps security teams see into apps and networks before they segment

Riverbed searches for the IT Holy Grail

There’s a historical fable about the Holy Grail. Various cultures have different versions, but it’s described as some kind of dish or chalice with miraculous powers that gives the wielder eternal youth, riches or some other wonderful thing. Many people throughout history have spent their lives looking for the Holy Grail, but they never found it because it is, after all, a myth. The world of IT has it’s own Holy Grail and that’s being able to understand how the infrastructure is performing through the lens of the user. In theory, one should be able to monitor the application and use that as a proxy for user experience. In theory, this makes sense and seems easy, but practically speaking it’s extremely difficult to do because the “end user experience” can be impacted by the application, device, network, databases, service or a number of other factors. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wi-Fi troubleshooting remains a challenge for most organizations

Bring your own device (BYOD), digital transformation and other trends have raised the bar on Wi-Fi. A decade or so ago, Wi-Fi was a “nice to have” for most organizations, and users understood the tradeoff: high-quality, consistent access through the wired connection or freedom of movement coupled with spotty quality with wireless access.+ Also on Network World: Wi-Fi speeds will triple, get more range with MegaMimo 2.0 +Today, that’s not the case. Wi-Fi is the primary network and a mission-critical resource for most companies, as many devices today do not even have a wired option. Users need high-quality, consistent and secure wireless connectivity to do their jobs. When Wi-Fi isn’t working, it isn’t just internal employees who are affected. Student’s can’t do research, shoppers can’t purchase goods, clinicians can treat patients and IoT devices can’t connect. Poor Wi-Fi is no longer simply an inconvenience; it means lost customers, degraded teaching experiences, lost revenue and brand damage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pradeep’s Principle: Give up on Moore’s Law and embrace automation

It’s arguable that Juniper Networks has been the most successful competitor to Cisco over the past 20 years, and co-founder and CTO Pradeep Sindhu’s vision is the main reason why. Included in that vision is Pradeep’s Principle, which is based on the thesis that we are seeing the end of Moore’s Law. If you’re not familiar with that law, in 1965 Intel co-founder Gordon Moore surmised that the number of transistors per square inch on an integrated circuit would double every year, effectively giving us twice the processing capacity in the same time frame. Sindhu isn’t the only person to say Moore’s Law is coming to an end. Earlier this year, a post on ARS Technica UK made a similar observation. Sindhu extended this thesis to storage and packet switching and stated that the rate of growth for all of these elements has slowed down.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Avaya takes network management to the cloud

Historically, most non-networking professionals have considered the network to be the “pipes” or “plumbing” of the organization—something you needed, but low value.Over time, though, the network has steadily increased in value. In today’s digital era, where everything is connected and more applications and services are moving to the cloud, the network has increased significantly in value. It connects employees, customers and guests, and it is the last line of defense for securing the business.Because of the increased business value, how networks are managed must change. The legacy process of touching every device in every location is laborious and filled with errors. The 2016 ZK Research Network Purchase Intention Study showed that the highest cause (35 percent) of network downtime is due to human error from manual configuration. Traditional management is also very slow. Turning up a new location or even making simple changes often required a network engineer to be on site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wi-Fi connectivity the tip of the technology iceberg for K-12 schools

It’s been about two years since the FCC modernized E-Rate, which is the funding program for K-12 schools to buy technology. Prior to the revamp of the program, E-Rate funded a number of legacy technologies, such as modems, broadband and pagers.E-Rate has now shifted to helping schools build better in-building experiences, with much of the funding directed at Wi-Fi. There’s a certain degree of urgency for schools to get Wi-Fi deployed (I’ll get into the reasons in a bit), but when making a Wi-Fi purchase, K-12 decision makers need to consider more than just connectivity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco diversifies its internal innovation practices

Late last year, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins significantly restructured the company and was quoted as saying the company would no longer be using “spin-ins” to drive innovation. Based on conversations with Robbins and other members of Cisco’s executive team, I believe the media took his comments out of context. There are no immediate plans for another spin-in, but he hasn’t closed to the door to them either.Robbins reiterated these points in Michael Cooney’s post, Cisco CEO: Spin-in technologies aren’t dead at Cisco, in which he stated Cisco would consider that model if it made sense. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco diversifies its internal innovation practices

Dell-EMC positioned to take the lead in the HCI space

It seems the topic of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) comes ups in almost every conversation I have with IT leaders regarding their data center modernization plans.A few weeks ago at VMworld, VCE—the converged systems group of EMC, now Dell Technologies—hosted an analyst breakfast, and as expected, HCI was a significant part of the discussion. Since then, I’ve had some time to talk to businesses about HCI and to noodle on the open discussion that we (the analysts) had with the head of VCE, Chad Sakac. I believe VCE's products and the way they go to market positions the combined Dell-EMC extremely well in the HCI marketDuring the breakfast and in a pre-call with the analysts, Sakac said the products in the HCI portfolio (VxRack and VxRail) greatly exceeded internal expectations. Moving forward, I see the strong momentum continuing, with VCE eventually becoming the market leader in HCI for the following reasons: To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell-EMC positioned to take the lead in the HCI space

Extreme becomes major WLAN player with Zebra buy

There are many factors to consider when a technology vendor decides to pull the trigger on an acquisition. Things such as impact to channel, customer reaction, product rationalization and other issues must be thought out.However, sometimes an acquisition seems to be a great fit and the decision is “black and white,” meaning it’s crystal clear with no shades of grey. This appears to have been the case for Extreme Networks, which earlier this week scooped up the wireless LAN (WLAN) business from Zebra Technologies for $55 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Extreme becomes major WLAN player with Zebra buy

Riverbed’s back with a beefed-up SD-WAN solution

Riverbed Technology is well known as the de facto standard for WAN optimization and pioneered that market. Maybe there were a few vendors with solutions out before Riverbed, but it was the company that defined and evangelized that market.However, the WAN market changed and over the past few years. The industry has seen the meteoric rise in software-defined WANs (SD-WAN), and Riverbed had fallen behind many of the startups in the space.Over the past year, Riverbed has been aggressively rebuilding its portfolio, including the acquisition of Ocedo, to better align with SD-WAN and has come roaring back. At its Disrupt event this week, the company made a number of announcements, indicating just how far the company has come in the last 24 months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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