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Category Archives for "Network World LAN & WAN"

IDG Contributor Network: What companies need to know about interconnection to succeed at digital business

What is interconnection, and why does it matter?Interconnection is the deployment of IT traffic exchange points that integrate direct, private connections between counterparties. Interconnection is best achieved hosted in carrier-neutral data center campuses, where distributed IT components are collocated. In an age when reams of information race around the world with the click of a finger and massive transactions routinely occur several times faster than the blink of an eye, interconnection powers digital business.Interconnection is much more than successfully connecting Point A to Point B. Telephone wires pulled off that kind of simple connectivity ages ago. Today’s enterprise-grade interconnection has some key characteristics that can help take digital business to the next level:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mist’s wireless network lets companies personalize the user experience

The Wi-Fi networks of today were architected more than a decade ago. That even predates the iPhone, which ushered in the era of mobility. These old Wi-Fi architectures aren’t ready to handle the vast number of mobile devices that want to connect to wireless networks today.What’s more, these networks aren’t able to put any focus on what users experience when they are connected.The old generation of Wi-Fi networks are a hindrance to businesses that want to increase customer engagement over ubiquitous mobile devices. For example, restaurants and retail stores would like to capture customers’ attention by offering real-time discounts or coupons when customers enter or walk by the establishment. Doing so requires the use of several technologies that old wireless networks just can’t support at scale.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco’s DevNet extends the value of its intent-based networking

Earlier this month, Cisco held a media and press event to launch its intent-based networking solution. To no surprise, its user event, Cisco Live 2017 was all about the network as Cisco looks to get customers to think more broadly about the role of the network in digital transformation.Brandon Butler did a great follow-up post to mine that talked about why intent-based networking is a big deal. He called out a number of benefits, including streamlined operations and better security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DreamWorks: The animation studio’s powerful network

If you don’t know what DreamWorks is, you probably haven’t been to the movies for a couple decades. It’s a digital film studio that turns out critically acclaimed CGI animated movies like Shrek, Madagascar, and Kung Fu Panda, averaging about two a year since the turn of the century, and a major contributor to the cause of keeping kids occupied for a couple of hours.The creation of CGI movies is enormously demanding from a network standpoint. Animation and rendering require very low input latency and create huge files that have to be readily available, which poses technological challenges to the DreamWorks networking team.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: What Cisco's new programmable switches mean for you + Trend: Colocation facilities provide tools to manage data center infrastructureTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How do you troubleshoot UCaaS problems? Put a ThousandEyes on it

Cisco Live kicked off this week in Las Vegas. The annual event is where Cisco shows off its latest and greatest innovations, such as the intent-based networking system Cisco announced last week.However, it’s also a forum for many of Cisco’s technology partners to show off their wares in the World of Solutions Expo Hall. One of the more interesting vendors there was ThousandEyes, which demonstrated their network monitoring solution, as well as their new Unified Communications monitoring and management capabilities that provide visibility into the performance and connectivity across Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), on premises and hybrid VoIP deployments. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What Cisco’s new programmable switches mean for you

To help ring in the 2017 New Year, CNN wanted to do a live shot from a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, but had an issue: “They were concerned about being out at sea, would they have the ability to live-stream?” says Royal Caribbean’s CIO Mike Giresi.The answer was yes, and the live-shot went off without a hitch, in part because the ship’s Cisco network gear was programmable to prioritize the video trafficAs an early implementer, Royal Caribbean has found benefits from regarding Cisco’s programmable infrastructure as a flexible asset that can be driven by software. “There are huge advantages to looking at the network as a software layer,” Giresi says. “It gives us the ability to create products, drive an experience and deliver services that are integrated with the infrastructure.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PitchBook moves to a microservices infrastructure – scaling the business through scalable tech

PitchBook is a data company. Its reason for being is to provide a platform that tracks a plethora of different aspects of both private and public markets. Want to know about what’s happening in venture capital, private equity or M&A? Chances are PitchBook can give you the answer. The company is a subsidiary of Morningstar and has offices in Seattle, New York, and London.But here’s the thing, though. PitchBook was founded in 2007 when cloud computing was pretty much just beginning and there was no real awareness of what it meant. In those days, enterprise IT agility meant leveraging virtualization to gain efficiencies. Now don’t get me wrong, moving from a paradigm of racking and stacking physical servers to being able to spin up virtual servers at will is a big deal, it’s just that since 2007, there has been massive further innovation in the infrastructure space.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper’s Cloud-Grade networking aims to deliver network agility

There should be no question in anyone’s mind that the cloud era has arrived. Businesses are adopting the cloud at an unprecedented rate and by 2020, the number of cloud workloads will be on par with the number of on-premises ones.Businesses of all sizes are turning to the cloud to help them become digital by increasing the level of agility. To be an agile business, though, the entire network stack—from the network through applications must be agile.+ Also on Network World: Juniper heads to the clouds with Unite + However, organizations are also more cost conscious than ever, so whatever solution is deployed must save money in addition to making the network more dynamic. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Time to consider a move to IPv6

Organizations should consider migrating their network infrastructure and devices over to IPv6. It may be a challenge to persuade leadership to prioritize it over other projects such as cloud computing or big data migrations, but it is essential to start planning for a migration.Many service providers, such as Comcast, Verizon and AT&T, have already started using IPv6 addresses and are presently encouraging other organizations across the United States to do the same. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has encouraged organizations to move forward with these migrations for over a decade, and with more devices connecting to the internet, the need has increased. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What is intent-based networking?

Cisco this week jumped head first into the intent-based networking market, saying the technology that uses machine learning and advanced automation to control networks could be a major shift in how networks are managed.But what exactly is intent-based networking?+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Why Cisco’s new intent-based networking could be a big deal +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apcela advises how to build a hybrid IT platform for better performance and stronger security

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. To state the obvious, enterprises are moving their applications to the cloud, and this movement is happening at an accelerating pace. Many technology chiefs are working under a “cloud-first policy,” which means that if an application can be deployed as a service, then that should be the first choice for the way to go.While the applications themselves are moving to the cloud, the application delivery infrastructure is still stuck in the enterprise data center. Under the existing network architecture that most enterprises still have today, all traffic comes back to the enterprise data center before going out to the cloud. The on-premises data center is where the switching and routing, security, and application delivery controllers reside. This infrastructure is architected for a bygone era when applications were all in the data center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6 things you need to know about virtual private networks

A virtual private network is a secure tunnel between two or more computers on the internet, allowing them to access each other as if on a local network. In the past, VPNs were mainly used by companies to securely link remote branches together or connect roaming employees to the office network, but today they're an important service for consumers too, protecting them from attacks when they connect to public wireless networks. Given their importance, here's what you need to know about VPNs:VPNs are good for your privacy and securityOpen wireless networks pose a serious risk to users, because attackers sitting on the same networks can use various techniques to sniff web traffic and even hijack accounts on websites that don't use the HTTPS security protocol. In addition, some Wi-Fi network operators intentionally inject ads into web traffic, and these could lead to unwanted tracking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Cisco’s new intent-based networking could be a big deal

Scentsy, a $500 million manufacturer and seller of wickless candles, got an early look at what Cisco and some analysts are saying could be the next big thing in the network industry: Intent-based networking.“I think this could be a pretty big shift in terms of the paradigm of network management,” says Kevin Tompkins, network architect at the company. “We’re getting away from managing individual devices and into having a central, globally managed policy, all controlled from one place that pervades through the network.”+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Cisco brings intent based networking to the end-to-end network +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco brings intent-based networking to the end-to-end network

Becoming a digital business is of paramount importance to IT and business leaders today. Becoming digital means being able to move with speed and adapt to market trends faster than the competition. This might sound simple – just work faster, but in practicality becoming a fast-moving organization is very difficult as legacy IT processes can limit an organization's ability to operate quickly. Many parts of IT have evolved to increase business agility such as application development, which has embraced DevOps. However, the network has largely stood still.There has been some great innovation in the area of software defined networking (SDN) that has made network operations more efficient but this hasn’t fundamentally changed the way networks operate. Today most organizations are managing their networks using traditional processes that are largely reactive in nature and manually intensive. As we move into a world where literally everything will be connected, network operations will get crushed under the weight of having to perform more tasks faster to keep up with the needs of the business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arista’s new solutions sets the standard for cloud scale

When it comes to the cloud's impact on the network, there are two things I hear over and over again that I disagree with. The first is that the cloud commoditizes the network. This actually dovetails into the second fallacy where some believe that merchant silicon based products offer no differentiation and “good enough” will become the norm where price is the only way to compete.  I do believe the cloud will have a negative effect on many technologies, such as spinning disks (not flash) and rack mount servers, but the network does not fall into this category.With the cloud, the network matters more than ever. In fact, the network will be one of the competitive differentiators for cloud providers and enterprises building out their own private or hybrid clouds. A good enough network means a good enough cloud experience, where a high quality, agile network enables greater cloud performance. Don’t get me wrong, the network needs to change from the monolithic, hardware centric solutions available today to something more agile with the ability to scale up and out at “cloud speed” but it’s more important than ever.To read this article in full or to leave a Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: When SD-WAN is more than SD-WAN

As the SD-WAN market has matured, one thing has become very clear: SD-WAN will not exist on its own. The technology is merging with other networking technologies, ultimately becoming a feature of a much larger bundle. While it may be too early to say what this “new thing” will be, the rough contours are emerging.Predominantly, we’re seeing security and SD-WANs merge. Just consider some of the activity: Velocloud recently announced its SD-WAN Security Technology Partner Program to integrate with other security vendor’s products. Viptela (soon to be Cisco), Silver Peak, Velocloud and others have long (well, long in the SD-WAN sense) touted integration with security vendors using service chaining. Cato Networks built its own integrated security and networking stack in the cloud. Masergy bundles SD-WAN (Silver Peak and its own technology) with third-party security services in the cloud. But what’s missing in many of these integrated offerings is the completeness of the edge solution. Companies need more than just an SD-WAN in branch offices. They need firewall, IPS, anti-malware, URL filtering and anti-virus for security. Internally, networking calls for Active Directory, DHCP, DNS, and print services. Externally, the edge may need WAN optimization, bandwidth management, QOS, traffic balancing, Continue reading

Aryaka brings benefits of software defined to remote and mobile workers

It seems over the past few years the world has gone software defined crazy. We have software-defined networks, security, data centers, WANs, storage and almost anything else one can think of. However, the one area that seems to have been forgotten about is the remote and mobile worker, as the benefits of software-defined haven’t reached the billions of employees that work from their homes, road, hotels, airports and coffee shops. Considering the primary value proposition of most software-defined things is to improve application performance, it seems odd that no vendor has found a way to bring these benefits to an audience that comprises nearly 40 percent of the workforce today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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