Enterprise applications are subjected to intense but unpredictable loads. Ensuring consistent application delivery, in line with Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees, requires sophisticated load balancing and related capabilities for clustering, performance management and so forth. Application Delivery Controllers perform these tasks, helping application owners deliver a reliable, fast application user experience.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
"I am all about useful tools. One of my mottos is 'the right tool for the right job.'" –Martha StewartIf your "right job" involves wrangling computer networks and figuring out how to do digital things effectively and efficiently or diagnosing why digital things aren't working as they're supposed to, you've got your hands full. Not only does your job evolve incredibly quickly becoming evermore complex, but whatever tools you use need frequent updating and/or replacing to keep pace, and that's what we're here for; to help in your quest for the right tools.[ Don’t miss customer reviews of top remote access tools and see the most powerful IoT companies . | Get daily insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
We've done several roundups of free network tools in the past, and since the last one, technology has, if anything, sped up even more. To help you keep up, we've compiled a new shortlist of seven of the most useful tools that you should add to your toolbox.To read this article in full, please click here
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of time” is the opening to the famous Charles Dickens book, A Tale of Two Cities. It's also described Extreme’s financial performance over the past year.Earlier this year the company stock was trading a hair over $15 per share. Today, after it came up light on its fiscal third-quarter financial results, the stock plunged over 25 percent in after-hours trading and now stands at $8.40, a little over half of its 52-week high. This could change when the market opens, depending on investor sentiment.[ Check out our hands-on reviews: 5 top hardware-based Wi-Fi test tools and Mojo wireless intrusion prevention system. ]
Extreme is now the largest enterprise network pure play
In actuality, saying it’s the worst of times is a bit overly dramatic, as a few years ago, most industry experts thought Extreme Networks was dying a slow death. In 2015, Ed Meyercord took over as CEO and he and the company's chief marketing, development and product operations officer, Norman Rice, embarked on a plan to acquire underappreciated assets from companies where networking wasn’t the primary business. Rolling up these assets would help Extreme get its Continue reading
You simply can’t take advantage of all that SD-WAN has to offer without giving branch offices local Internet access and you can’t give them local Internet access without securing them. SD-WAN for all its strengths does not provide robust edge security. Yes, data is encrypted in transit. And, yes, some SD-WAN appliances come with basic stateful firewalling capabilities. But with attacks coming at layer-7, branches require a next-generation firewall (NGFW) and updated IPS/IDS capabilities to protect locations — not a basic firewall. For all intents and purposes, branch SD-WAN needs layer-7 security, which is why you see so many SD-WAN vendors striking partnerships with security vendors or some building security into their appliances.To read this article in full, please click here
Arista Networks has arguably been the most disruptive data center network vendor in the past 10 years. The company built a product specifically designed for the rise of software-defined networking (SDN) and made “spline” a household word, assuming you live in a house full of network engineers. If you don’t eat, live, and breathe networking and you’re not familiar with a spline, it’s a single-tier network optimized for the era of cloud computing.The rise of east-west traffic gave birth to the concept of a two-tier leaf-spine network, but Arista further simplified that down into a single tier. By collapsing the leaf and spine into a single tier, Arista is able to scale its network out rapidly simply by adding more switches to the spline — making it theoretically infinitely scalable. Arista took this model and applied it to data center interconnect, routing, and other use cases related to data centers.To read this article in full, please click here
For more than 25 years structured cabling systems for voice and data applications have been standardized as 4-pair, balanced UTP, ScTP or Sc/FTP cable that now supports up to 40 Gb/s on 30 meters of category 8. The driving force has been requirements for ever more bandwidth to meet a variety of customer needs.Suddenly, interest in building automation, “smart” systems and the “Internet of Things” (IoT) is changing the scope of the next generation of cabling systems. Sensors for lighting, HVAC, occupancy, access control and other smart systems require very little bandwidth compared to typical data applications. A sensor transmits just a few bytes of data when polled by a controller or triggered by an external event. To read this article in full, please click here
download
Getting grounded in IoT networking and security
The internet of things already consists of nearly triple the number of devices as there are people in the world, and as more and more of these devices creep into enterprise networks it’s important to understand their requirements and how they differ from other IT gear.To read this article in full, please click here
Over the years, we have embraced new technologies to find improved ways to build systems. As a result, today's infrastructures have undergone significant evolution. To keep pace with the arrival of new technologies, legacy is often combined with the new, but they do not always mesh well. Such fusion between ultra-modern and conventional has created drag in the overall solution, thereby, spawning tension between past and future in how things are secured.The multi-tenant shared infrastructure of the cloud, container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, and new architectures like microservices and serverless, while technically remarkable, increase complexity. Complexity is the number one enemy of security. Therefore, to be effectively aligned with adoption of these technologies, a new approach to security is required that does not depend on shifting infrastructure as the control point.To read this article in full, please click here
Research conducted by market research firm IHS Markit found that 74 percent of firms surveyed had SD-WAN lab trials in 2017, and many of them plan to move into production this year.The report, titled “The WAN Strategies North America” (pdf, registration required), found security is the number one network concern by a wide margin and the top reason to invest in new infrastructure, as companies must fend off the constant threat of cyber attacks.There are other reasons, as well, such as traffic growth, company expansion, adoption of the Internet of things (IoT), the need for greater control over the WAN, and the need to put WAN costs on a sustainable path.To read this article in full, please click here
HPE is rolling out the next generation of its Nimble Storage platform, overhauled to better meet the ever-increasing performance demands on data-center workloads, including real-time web analytics, business intelligence, and mission-critical enterprise resource applications.The new HPE Nimble Storage All Flash arrays as well as Nimble Adaptive Flash arrays for hybrid implementations (mixing solid state drives and hard disk drives, for example), are generally available from May 7 and have both been engineered to support NVMe (non-volatile memory express), an extremely fast communications protocol and controller designed to move data to and from SSDs via the PCIe bus standard. NVMe SSDs are expected to offer two orders of magnitude speed improvement over prior SSDs.To read this article in full, please click here
It’s been a few months since VMware closed its acquisition of VeloCloud, a prominent SD-WAN provider. In that time, the two companies have worked to integrate their products, and recently they announced a unified strategy called the Virtual Cloud Network.The strategy fully supports the migration of applications and data out of the enterprise data center to the cloud and to branches — and with IoT, pretty much anything can be considered a branch today, as VeloCloud claims to have a customer with ocean-going ships as branches. The result is that many enterprises are in a position where their applications are everywhere, and their data is everywhere. This has profound implications on the network that needs to support all of this.To read this article in full, please click here
With any new network monitoring and management software, the first step is to assess your existing inventory. Do this by allowing the software to discover all your devices. Your new software may alert you to things you didn’t know you had. Network monitoring and management tooling may be smart enough to propose ways to improve your system: it might suggest new configurations or highlight bottlenecks. Your last step is to let the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps flow and inform you about day-to-day network usage.One blessing of the OSI model is that it has enabled innovation at the individual layers. These layers are abstracted from one another, which prevents accidentally injecting dependencies into other layers. The curse of the OSI model is that it has socially separated the people who work at the individual layers from one another—someone working at one layer may never think of someone else working at a different layer. It’s a recurring problem in network monitoring and management, in general.To read this article in full, please click here
It’s May, and that means all the April showers we had will soon bring spring flowers. April and May are also busy conference months, as many vendors host customer, partner, or analyst events. This week, it was Dell’s turn as the company held its first-ever Dell Technologies World. Dell has obviously had other user events before, including Dell World and Dell-EMC World, but the naming of this one is indicative of how Dell is now one company and there’s better product and go-to-market integration between Dell, EMC and VMware.VMware introduces Virtual Cloud Network
As expected, much of the news at the show revolved around Dell Technologies compute products. But the network got some love, as well, when VMware announced its Virtual Cloud Network, which is the coming together of many of its network assets, including NSX and VeloCloud. The Virtual Cloud Network can be thought as an agile network and security overlay that acts as a “fabric” for digital businesses that connect apps, data, and users to each other regardless of where they are located.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco lost a key warrior in its battle to become a monster software player this week as Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and head of the $5 billion Application Group, said he would be leaving the company effective May 3 to become CEO of cloud startup Five9.“During Trollope’s tenure, his team reinvented Cisco’s Collaboration business, pivoting to a SaaS model and making design, simplicity and exponential improvement the guiding principles of product development,” Five9 wrote in describing its new CEO’s pedigree.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprise networks certainly aren’t new. They’ve been around for decades and have historically been considered a tactical resource or even a commodity that most business leaders didn’t give a second thought to or really even understand.It’s my belief, though, that the network should be considered a strategic resource that can create competitive differentiation. In fact, for as long as I’ve been analyst, it’s been my thesis that compute changes have continually driven network evolution and have made it more and more important.The network is now a strategic business asset
As the industry has gone from mainframes to minicomputers to client-server to the cloud era, a couple of things have happened. The first is that the cost of computing has continued to fall through the floor. When I started my career, just a few megabytes of storage could cost thousands of dollars. Today, I can buy terabytes of cloud-based storage for just a few dollars per month.To read this article in full, please click here
The term multicloud is one of the more overused terms in IT circles today. At its most basic level, any customer that uses more than one cloud service could be considered multicloud. But that’s not really multicloud, that’s just using multiple clouds. True multicloud should enable businesses to use some combination of private and public clouds, but operationally it would look like a single cloud domain. There’s not one well-defined path to multicloud. In fact, there shouldn’t be. Every business is different, which means everyone needs options. Some will migrate quickly, some slowly, some will forklift upgrade hardware, and others will sweat their assets. The problem with options is that they add to complexity, and that has become public enemy number one of network operations. Network professionals need to worry about managing the underlay, managing overlay, maintaining policies, automating processes, and other factors to make multi-cloud a reality.To read this article in full, please click here
Throughout my early years as a consultant, when asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) was the rage and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) was still at the outset, I handled numerous roles as a network architect alongside various carriers. During that period, I experienced first-hand problems that the new technologies posed to them.The lack of true end-to-end automation made our daily tasks run into the night. Bespoke network designs due to the shortfall of appropriate documentation resulted in one that person knows all. The provisioning teams never fully understood the design. The copy-and-paste implementation approach is error-prone, leaving teams blindfolded when something went wrong.To read this article in full, please click here
If the recent WAN Summit in New York where I moderated a panel on last-mile access (more on that later) was any indication, the SD-WAN market is shifting towards a service-delivery model where sufficient network security and predictability are baked into the SD-WAN so the service can replace MPLS.In session and private conversations, topics related to secure SD-WAN services kept popping up. The challenges of today’s managed services. The impact of the cloud. The need for SLAs in SD-WAN services. How encryption complicates visibility and, by extension, enterprise security. These and other issues point to the change and challenges facing SD-WAN services.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) in just the last week or so has taken over the top spot for year-to-date performance among the 30 equities comprising the Dow Jones industrial average, with its shares having risen nearly 20 percent in 2018. That’s a big deal. How did it happen? What pushed Cisco beyond its best-known-router reputation to being a top performer on the DOW?A little history about Cisco
Cisco has been around for nearly as long as I've been working on Unix and Linux systems. Founded in December 1984 by two Stanford University computer scientists and clearly named after San Francisco, its logo clearly depicts the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge and its line of products have kept it a major player in routers and switches. In fact, Cisco was on top of the tech world before the dot.com meltdown. Then it plunged with the rest of the tech sector.To read this article in full, please click here
Last week, Cisco made a number of product announcements that deliver the benefits of its intent-based networking (IBN) solution to Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. Network World's Michael Cooney did a great job summarizing all the product announcements, so I won’t rehash that information, but I did want to discuss the importance of IBN to IoT.The importance of IBN to IoT
IBN is something that has been theorized for almost a decade, but solutions only became available recently. The reason why there has been a lag between vision and product is that network engineers didn’t really need IBN to run their networks until recently. Environments were closed, applications were on premises, and everything was under the tight control of the IT organization.To read this article in full, please click here