Digital transformation is on every IT and business leader’s radar today. The path to it, though, may not be simple. While many industry pundits like to call out the likes of Uber and AirBnb, those digital natives didn’t have to worry about disrupting an existing business.To help mainstream businesses make that jump to a digital organization, Riverbed launched two new solutions at its Disrupt customer event last week in New York City.Enhanced network performance management
The first is a new version of its network and application performance management platform, SteelCentral, enabling IT staff to better understand digital experiences. This aligns with a new movement among the NPM/APM vendors to shift to digital experience management (DEM), providing visibility into customer or worker experience regardless of whether the infrastructure is on premises, in the public cloud or in a hybrid environment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Digital transformation is on every IT and business leader’s radar today. The path to it, though, may not be simple. While many industry pundits like to call out the likes of Uber and AirBnb, those digital natives didn’t have to worry about disrupting an existing business.To help mainstream businesses make that jump to a digital organization, Riverbed launched two new solutions at its Disrupt customer event last week in New York City.Enhanced network performance management
The first is a new version of its network and application performance management platform, SteelCentral, enabling IT staff to better understand digital experiences. This aligns with a new movement among the NPM/APM vendors to shift to digital experience management (DEM), providing visibility into customer or worker experience regardless of whether the infrastructure is on premises, in the public cloud or in a hybrid environment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As more organizations look to enable hybrid cloud computing, a big question remains: How do I connect my network to the cloud? This week Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services each released new products that make that process easier.Google’s Dedicated Interconnect is now generally available
Dedicated Interconnect is an important way for customers to connect to the public cloud. It allows organizations to connect their on-premises resources to a colocation facility and then that co-lo facility has a direct network connection to the public cloud. Public IaaS cloud providers like Google want to give their customers access to fast connections to their cloud, but they don’t want to connect to each individual customer’s site, so they’ve created this co-lo based Interconnect. Google runs the Interconnect and offers either a 99.9 or 99.99% service level agreement. Google is working with a handful of colocation vendors as the middle-man, including Equinix, Digital Realty and Infomart.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Learn about the latest networking technology, SD-WAN, which uses policy-based rules to orchestrate applications routing in the cloud. Jerry Kennelly, CEO of Riverbed, describes the functionality and benefits.
There seems to be a shift in our industry from wireless N to AC, as we have seen large leaps forward in bandwidth and client saturation handling. With more wireless options going in the workplace, widespread connectivity continues to rise and wireless requirements are becoming greater and greater.Now, with Wave 2 becoming more common, is AC really able to handle the tsunami-like wave of wireless internet requests to meet this growing demand?Also on Network World: REVIEW: Early Wave 2 Wi-Fi access points show promise
There's only one way to find out. We need to step out of the comfort zone provided by past wireless technologies and expand the idea of what wireless is capable of providing to meet these demands.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IPv6 has been gaining traction since it was developed in the late 1990s, and enterprises that are implementing it now are considered to be among the early majority – meaning widespread adoption is well underway – so if you haven’t already begun, you need to start planning IPv6 deployment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
VMWare announced on November 2 that it intends to acquire VeloCloud Networks. The value of the proposed acquisition has not yet been announced, and VMWare expects it to close in Q4 of its FY18 which ends on February 2, 2018.This acquisition appears to be receiving a more positive message overall in the market than Cisco’s acquisition of Viptela earlier this year. In Viptela’s case, being acquired by Cisco immediately raised questions about where this product would fit alongside the existing IWAN and Meraki products, its impact on the ecosystem of IWAN-related products (Glue Networks, LiveAction, etc.) and what the final product mix would look like. Many of these questions have subsequently been answered, but the immediate reaction was one of uncertainty and concern.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The recent news around VMware’s acquisition of SD-WAN provider VeloCloud is puzzling from a lot of angles but particularly in what it says about SD-WAN services.Let’s make a deal
VeloCloud is a leader, and some would say the leader, in the SD-WAN market. The company has been in the space since its founding in 2012 and has raised $84 million in private funding, according to CrunchBase. It claims around 1,000 enterprise customers (1,000).The VeloCloud acquisition will help VMware compete with Cisco, who acquired SD-WAN provider Viptela for $610 million in May. VeloCloud isn’t VMware’s first virtual networking acquisition. Back in 2012, the company acquired Nicira, which became the basis for its NSX network virtualization offering. Integrating the two technologies creates an interesting end-to-end solution. VeloCloud’s approach of coupling appliances with aspects of a cloud service, will play well with VMware’s premise-oriented strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
VMware today announced plans to acquire VeloCloud, one of the leading companies in the fast-growing software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) market.SD-WAN represents a new way to manage network connectivity to branch and remote offices using software-defined networking principles. Software-based SD-WAN offerings from companies like VeloCloud can aggregate multiple types of connections, including broadband, MPLS and cellular, to create more reliable connections that are often less expensive than a pure MPLS use. Research firm IDC predicts SD-WAN will be a more than $1 billion market this year, and grow at 69% to more than $8 billion by 2021.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
About to embark on deploying IPv6? First, you need to know some key differences in IPv6 address formats.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
As enterprises finalize budgets for 2018, a common question in IT departments is how to budget for the implementation of SD-WAN technology. The fact that these conversations are even happening is noteworthy in itself; this is a technology that has gone from being a curiosity 18 months ago to a top-5 initiative for many IT teams in recent months.There are many variations between SD-WAN vendors and service providers on what the technology offers, how it’s paid for, and how the business case stacks up. Here are a few items to consider:For most enterprises, SD-WAN savings are based on transport savings
One of the headline benefits of SD-WAN that attract most enterprises is the prospect of significant savings. This can mean many things, but the bulk of these savings typically comes from replacing private MPLS connectivity with Internet-based services, and using SD-WAN to glue these together. Internet “may” be poorer quality (more on that later), and may not have performance guarantees, but the path performance tracking and steering capabilities of SD-WAN can work around these limitations. This may be the case, but it isn’t universal:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In my last column, I wrote about how the standard computing platform is being reimagined by reconfigurable computing and how hyper-scale cloud companies are leading the way with the use of SmartNICs and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Now, let’s look at why FPGAs are so powerful in this context, the major challenge of working with FPGAs, and how vendors and companies are addressing the challenge.Why FPGAs?
What is it about FPGAs that makes them so different and yet so powerful compared to CPUs? One of the main reasons is that they are completely reconfigurable. Unlike ASICs, such as CPUs, the logic in the FPGA is not static but can be rearranged to support whatever workload you want to support. With an ASIC, you need to commit to a certain feature set up front, as this cannot be changed once the chip is produced. With an FPGA, you need to commit to the capabilities that the FPGA will provide with respect to available logic gates and Look-Up Tables (or LUTs), which are the tables that define how logic gates are combined to support a given function. But, what the FPGA does is entirely up to the FPGA solution developer Continue reading
Extreme Networks today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Brocade’s data center switching, routing and analytics business, completing one of the most remarkable and unlikely turnaround stories in tech history.In the technology industry, rising from the ashes is very rare. Once a vendor, no matter how big, starts to slide, it generally has a bad outcome. Consider all the giants in networking alone that went from 800-pound gorillas to a puff of smoke seemingly overnight. Names including Lucent, Nortel, 3Com, Cabletron, Marconi and Fore Systems, once seemingly mighty powers that could never be toppled, are now all gone. Some vendors have avoided that fate by going private to revamp the company without the pressure of meeting Wall Street expectations every quarter. Recent examples of this are Polycom, Riverbed, Dell and Solar Winds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An overview of events
The essence of IT Operations Management for the last 30 years (ever since the advent of distributed systems in the mid 1980’s) has been to understand what is “normal” and what is “abnormal” and to then alert on the anomalies. Events are anomalies.Now events come from an incredible variety of sources. Every element of the entire stack (disks, storage arrays, network devices, servers, load balancers, firewalls, systems software, middleware and services and applications) are capable of sending events.Events tend to come in two broad forms. Hard faults and alarms related to failures in the environment (this disk drive has failed, this port on this switch has failed, this database server is down), and alerts that come from violations of thresholds set by humans on various monitoring systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Imagine you are Clark Kent, CIO of a large organization in Metropolis, and current trends in network disaggregation continue. As such, you must now provide connectivity to three Azure data centers for Office 365; 20 AWS sites located all over the world for a host of outsourced IT applications; four corporate data centers (older applications); 10 Equinix data centers for outsourced private use; direct access to 25 additional cloud service offerings for security reasons, including UC services, Salesforce.com and Concur, to your 500 branch sites; and 30,000 telecommuting employees.Look up in the sky! It’s a WAN! No, it’s a SD-WAN! No, it’s... SuperWAN!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
reimagine /riːɪˈmadʒɪn/To reinterpret something imaginatively – in other words, in a creative and innovative way
The word “reimagine” is one of those words loved by marketing people and often loathed by engineers. But, in the context of this column, I think it is appropriate. The word “reimagine” should be close to every engineer’s heart, as it is at the essence of what we all love: solving problems in a creative and innovative way.Over the last decade or two, we have witnessed a great deal of creativity and innovation in how we build networks and deliver communication services. We have witnessed the rise of Ethernet and IP and how these two protocols laid the foundation for a common networking paradigm that we take for granted today. We have witnessed the rise of the IP-based internet and how every imaginable service has been dramatically affected. We have witnessed the rise of cloud computing and how this has, in a sense, completed the disruption that the introduction of the internet first promised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Remember when Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) was all the rage? That’s the concept of workers being able to bring their own mobile phones and tablets into the workplace and use them for business-related functions. That quickly evolved into bring your own applications, where workers or lines of business would go get their own apps via the cloud.Also on Network World: 7 must-have network tools
So, what else can non-technical people go get on their own? How about a network? That may seem a bit farfetched, as I’ve never seen an application developer bring a router into the office. But that’s exactly what Tempered Networks is enabling with the introduction of Bring Your Own Network (BYON). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco and Google have teamed up on a hybrid cloud partnership that will allow IT managers and application developers to use Cisco tools to manage their on-premises environments and link it up with Google’s public IaaS cloud.It’s the latest partnership for Google’s cloud since former VMware CEO Diane Greene took over management of the company’s cloud operations. Google has inked similar pacts with VMware and hyperconverged infrastructure vendor Nutanix.For Cisco though, the deal with Google marks an evolution in the company’s cloud strategy, one that has gone through many iterations in recent years.A closer look
Since the dawn of the hyper-scale IaaS public cloud movement, Cisco has pivoted its cloud strategy a handful of times. The company initially made an effort to build an Intercloud, a network of its partner providers running Cisco gear that would be interconnected and allow customers to shift workloads around. In the face of massive growth from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, that strategy went by the wayside.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Understanding user experience is becoming critically important to the success of all companies. I’ve interviewed dozens of business leaders on their digital transformation initiatives, and I can sort them into two larger buckets: increasing workforce productivity and improving customer experience. Those may seem somewhat unrelated, other than they used digital technologies, but there is another point of commonality and it’s that applications play a key role.Also on Network World: 7 must-have network tools
By 2020, customer experience will be the #1 brand differentiator, topping price, product, or any other metric you can think of. While a web or mobile app experience isn’t the only thing that creates a good or bad experience, it’s often the first touch point for customers — and a bad one could drive them away.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The APC Back-UPS BE600M1 provides instant battery power to your critical electronics when the power goes out, keeping you connected and available both personally and professionally. Designed specifically to enhance the features that matter most to you, including more runtime, more battery backup outlets, and a USB port for charging convenience, the BE600M1 is also smaller and lighter than the previous model. APC's BE600M1 offers guaranteed surge and lightning protection for attached devices. When the power goes out, the APC BE600M1 will power critical devices including home networking equipment; allowing you to maintain your internet connection. This allows you to work productively, avoid the loss of valuable data, and safely shut down equipment. It currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 4,400 people on Amazon (read reviews), where its list price of $74.99 has been reduced 23% to $57.49.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here