There’s a trend emerging among many Internet-based companies that I find intriguing: they are creating their own edge delivery networks. Why? So that they can service their applications via these networks to enable greater resilience and performance for their users.Rather than the standard, garden-variety content delivery networks (CDNs), these edge delivery networks are tailored specifically for the applications they’ve been built to service. In some cases, this means the edge networks leverage highly specific connectivity to regional internet service providers or between application facilities; in other cases, it means placing specialized hardware tuned to specific needs of the application in delivery facilities around the world. And most importantly, these networks are operating application-specific software and configurations that are customized beyond what’s possible in general-purpose, shared networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you ask a group of 10 people what SD-WAN is, there’s a good chance you will get 10 different answers. So, which one is right? Well, that depends on your perspective. If you take all the marketing and jargon out of the equation it will be something like this: Continue reading
Almost everywhere I travel these days I hear someone talking about making their city a "smart city." I personally put the most faith in those initiatives that have determined what they want "smart" to accomplish whether it be zero net water consumption, becoming energy neutral for the public infrastructure, reduction in commute times or improving services like refuse collection. Defining and agreeing to measurable goals is a key milestone in a city’s journey to becoming "Smart."Another key milestone is making sure that the basic connectivity infrastructure, what we usually call "the network" is up to the task. A useful “smart city” requires that the city services be connected and automated wherever possible via a strong, resilient, secure network. And while progress has certainly been made – one only has to look at what Barcelona has achieved since the “smart city” ideal was first envisioned – it’s clear there’s still a lot of work to do to get this right the first time. There’s a sense of urgency from governments and vendors alike to get smart city solutions up and running, and in that rush those solutions are often proprietary and, with no standards in place, we risk Continue reading
Founded in 1971, City Furniture got its start when Kevin Koenig and his brothers constructed wood bed frames in a garage. They started with a single showroom, Waterbed City, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but have now grown to 27 locations across the state and operate under the brands of City Furniture and Ashley Furniture HomeStore brands. The company currently has an older Cisco 802.11g Wi-Fi network that it uses for bar code scanning and inventory management and was reaching the end of its life. City Furniture had big plans to digitize the company by moving its point-of-sale (POS) operations and capabilities to Wi-Fi-enabled tablets so the employees could transact business from anywhere in the store. Also, it wanted to use VoIP to take calls from iPads anywhere in the showroom, as well as access radio apps. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this week, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) announced the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) standards have been extended to include mesh network features. It is clear that the Internet of Things (IoT) is the intended market. The SIG says:
Bluetooth Mesh is “ideally suited for building automation, sensor networks and other IoT solutions where tens, hundreds, or thousands of devices need to reliably and securely communicate with one another.”
Mesh networks are not new. It is a network topology in which each node relays data for the network. All mesh nodes cooperate in the distribution of data in the network. The IoT-purpose-built Zigbee—a low-power, low-bandwidth ad hoc network—is a mesh network. Dating to 2002, Aruba Networks was founded to build Wi-Fi mesh networks. In 2014, student protesters in Hong Kong used mobile app FireChat to turn the crowd’s smartphones into a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mesh network so authorities could not interrupt protester’s coordinating conversations by blocking 3G and 4G network access. Bluetooth Mesh has some very desirable features:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intent-based networking pioneer Apstra announced today that it has entered into a distribution agreement with Tokyo Electron Device (TED) for the Japanese market.For those who don’t know Apstra, the company came to market with an intent-based networking solution for the data center in June 2016. Since then, Cisco’s “Network Intuitive” launch, which was all about intent-based networking, has made intent-based networking a household term (at least for households with Cisco engineers in them). Cisco’s solution is focused at the campus and Apstra at the data center, but the two companies are working with the same vision of automating network operations using intent rather than manual processes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Forrester analyst Andre Kindness says a lot of clients ask him how they should think about software-defined networking (SDN), which has been heralded for years as the next great thing in the industry.SDN – which is an architecture approach, not a specific product - has traditionally been thought of as virtualizing data center networks. This typically means separating the management of the control plane of network devices from the underlying data plane that forwards network traffic. Using a software-defined system to control this disaggregation brings many benefits, including increased network management flexibility and being able to more easily implement fine-grained security policies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Forrester analyst Andre Kindness says a lot of clients ask him how they should think about software-defined networking (SDN), which has been heralded for years as the next great thing in the industry.SDN – which is an architecture approach, not a specific product - has traditionally been thought of as virtualizing data center networks. This typically means separating the management of the control plane of network devices from the underlying data plane that forwards network traffic. Using a software-defined system to control this disaggregation brings many benefits, including increased network management flexibility and being able to more easily implement fine-grained security policies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bluetooth is about to get some significant new mesh networking capabilities -- and the best bit is, you may not need new hardware to benefit from them.Mesh networking will make it simpler to connect sensors across industrial sites, or to create smart home or building automation networks. Rather than wasting energy shouting to be heard by a distant gateway, devices will be able to whisper to their neighbors, asking them to pass messages.It will offer a new way for devices to join the Internet of Things. Once a building has a mesh network to control lighting, say, other devices can use it as wireless infrastructure for other applications such as asset tracking and wayfinding, said Martin Woolley, technical program manager at Bluetooth SIG, the organization behind the Bluetooth standard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After I read Brian Bailey’s IoT semiconductor design article, IoT Myth Busting, I thought of Prince’s song 1999, in particular, the line:
“So tonight I'm gonna party like it's nineteen ninety-nine.”
Without a lot of irrational exuberance, we won’t see IoT edge and fog networks soon
Most IoT applications are prototypes and proof of concepts (PoC) designed to justify enterprise budget increases and follow-on venture investment rounds. Unless we return to and party like it is 1999 when telecoms over-invested in capacity ahead of demand, the telecom carriers are not going to build the new fog and edge networks that IoT needs to grow ahead of demand. At this stage, we would have to see a return of the irrational exuberance, a term coined by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, used to describe the over investment and over valuation during the dot-com bubble.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The most secure form of network ever created has been successfully real-world-tested in China, said a publication there yesterday.Quantum entanglement—the tech that drives quantum networks—is a part of quantum-key distribution (QKD). Roughly, it gains its supposedly unhackable nature because the subatomic particles that make up the data impact each other all at the same time, regardless of where they are in the transmission.That means that because all of the cryptographic keys are intertwined, it’s possible to see at any time if bits have been corrupted. That includes being stolen or erased. Any disruption becomes transparent and throws an error. One can’t hack the system, experts say.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's not the server -- it's the system. That's the word from Cisco as it rolls out its new, M5 generation Unified Computing System rack and blade servers, triggered by Intel's release of the Xeon Scalable Processor platform.Cisco's new servers use the Xeon Scalable processors -- unveiled Tuesday in New York -- to fuel performance as well as increase server density and throughput. But the value in the UCS product family lies in how the hardware works with configuration management and optimization software to make data centers run at peak efficiency, company officials say.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hyperconvergence is an IT framework that combines storage, computing and networking into a single system in an effort to reduce data center complexity and increase scalability. Hyperconverged platforms include a hypervisor for virtualized computing, software-defined storage, and virtualized networking, and they typically run on standard, off-the-shelf servers. Multiple nodes can be clustered together to create pools of shared compute and storage resources, designed for convenient consumption. The use of commodity hardware, supported by a single vendor, yields an infrastructure that's designed to be more flexible and simpler to manage than traditional enterprise storage infrastructure. For IT leaders who are embarking on data center modernization projects, hyperconvergence can provide the agility of public cloud infrastructure without relinquishing control of hardware on their own premises.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Make no mistake: Intel's Xeon Processor Scalable Family, based on the company's Skylake architecture, is about much more than revving up CPU performance. The new processor line is essentially a platform for computing, memory and storage designed to let data centers -- groaning under the weight of cloud traffic, ever-expanding databases and machine-learning data sets -- optimize workloads and curb operational costs.In order to expand the market for its silicon and maintain its de facto processor monopoly in the data center, Intel is even starting to encroach on server-maker turf by offering what it calls Select Solutions, generally referred to in the industry as engineered systems -- packages of hardware and software tuned to specific applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The next step in the evolution of wireless WAN communications - known as 5G - is about to hit the front pages, and for good reason: it will complete the evolution of cellular from wireline augmentation to wireline replacement, and strategically from mobile-first to mobile-only.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The next step in the evolution of wireless WAN communications - known as 5G - is about to hit the front pages, and for good reason: it will complete the evolution of cellular from wireline augmentation to wireline replacement, and strategically from mobile-first to mobile-only.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The next step in the evolution of wireless WAN communications - known as 5G - is about to hit the front pages, and for good reason: it will complete the evolution of cellular from wireline augmentation to wireline replacement, and strategically from mobile-first to mobile-only.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
SDN, NFV & VNF are among the alphabet soup of terms in the networking industry that have emerged in recent years.Software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV) and the related virtual network functions (VNF) are important trends. But Forrester analyst Andre Kindness says vague terminology from vendors has created a complicated marketplace for end users evaluating next-generation networking technology. “Few I&O pros understand (these new acronyms), and this confusion has resulted in many making poor networking investments,” he says.So what’s the difference between SDN, NFV and VNF?SDN: Software defined networking To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The IoT in the commercial sector might better be called the Internet of Prototypes, the IoP.Few of the components for building the ubiquitous IoT that the future holds are available today. The best way to envision the future is by prototyping. Prototypes of mission-critical or high-ROI applications will tease money out of research budgets to build them. All the prototypes will lead to a greater understanding, and when the cost of the problem matches the development investment the prototypes will become products. With cost reduction and standardization, products could become generalized extensible platforms.+ Also on Network World: How industrial IoT is making steel production smarter +
MIT built a fitting prototype that could, with further development, scale into a platform. A multidisciplinary team from the MIT Design Lab led by MIT Media Lab researcher Guillermo Bernal won best research paper at the Petra Conference last month for the team’s work applying IoT and wearables to industrial safety. The sophisticated and purpose-built prototype at the center of the research makes the paper “Safety++. Designing IoT and Wearable Systems for Industrial Safety through a User-Centered Design Approach” extremely tangible and predictive about how the IoT will unfold.To Continue reading