In my recent blogs, I have written about automation tying the network to other domains of IT, and how it’s a capability available today that you should start using.Machine learning is another hot topic. While the timeline is several years out for many machine learning applications in networking, it has the potential to be one of those rare technologies that comes along every few decades and fundamentally transforms how networks run.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If there’s one application that brings chills to the hearts of SD-WAN implementers it’s providing a predictable real-time voice service. So let’s talk about how SD-WANs might help.The problem with voice
We need to separate from the theory of voice and the reality of voice. The theory goes something like this. The Internet is fine for email and web browsing. It’s even pretty good for personal voice. But if I want to deliver a voice service, day-in-day out without a hiccup, then I run into a problem. Voice is a real-time protocol with strict tolerances around latency, loss and jitter. Exceed those tolerances and symptoms common to a poor voice service set in. Increased delays from traffic routing or lost packets disrupt voice calls. Outages and brownouts can cause calls to drop.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Thousand megabit broadband is a turning point for internet delivery speeds. Newer tech, such as virtual reality, and the incumbents, such as video streaming, will benefit. Right now, though, only about 17 percent of the U.S.’s population has access to those super-fast speeds, which are primarily delivered by fiber, according to Viavi Solution’s latest Gigabit Monitor report.Although Gigabit is kicking in, it’s not going to be particularly simple to implement at the networking level, internet metrics company Ookla said earlier this month. Upgraded, wired installs will likely handle the throughput better than existing, now commonly used Wi-Fi, among other things, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Thousand megabit broadband is a turning point for internet delivery speeds. Newer tech, such as virtual reality, and the incumbents, such as video streaming, will benefit. Right now, though, only about 17 percent of the U.S.’s population has access to those super-fast speeds, which are primarily delivered by fiber, according to Viavi Solution’s latest Gigabit Monitor report.Although Gigabit is kicking in, it’s not going to be particularly simple to implement at the networking level, internet metrics company Ookla said earlier this month. Upgraded, wired installs will likely handle the throughput better than existing, now commonly used Wi-Fi, among other things, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Linksys DPC3008 Cable Modem delivers high-speed broadband connectivity to your home and office with download speeds up to 340 Mbps and upload speeds up to 120 Mbps. The Gigabit Ethernet port provides high-speed network performance, while DOCSIS 3.0 support ensures you can connect directly to your existing cable broadband service. Comcast-certified, the DPC3008's simple setup allows you to get connected quickly and easily. It also allows you to stop paying monthly modem-rental fees. If you have broadband internet from Comcast or similar providers, you're probably paying a monthly fee to rent the cable modem, so do the math and you may find this one pays for itself in short time. The Linksys modem typically lists for $42.92, but with this deal you get it for 53% off, or just $19.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The carrier-led Small Cell Forum has revealed the names of the founding members of an Enterprise Advisory Council designed to help address the need for more wireless coverage to meet rising demand.The Forum — whose members include the likes of AT&T, Cisco and Huawei —had previously said it was forming such a council, but had not disclosed any member organization names. It also had said it was working with hotels and others in the hospitality industry to plot strategies for boosting cellular coverage to meet the needs of their customers (an industry, by the way, that hasn't always been very hospitable when it comes to wireless service, as seen in the Wi-Fi blocking schemes of some).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Effective network troubleshooting requires experience and a detailed understanding of a network’s design. And while many great network engineers possess both qualities, they still face the daunting challenge of manual data collection and analysis.The storage and backup industries have long been automated, yet, for the most part, automation has alluded the network, forcing engineering teams to troubleshoot and map networks manually. Estimates from a NetBrain poll indicate that network engineers spend 80% of their troubleshooting time collecting data and only 20% analyzing it. With the cost of downtime only getting more expensive, an opportunity to significantly reduce the time spent collecting data is critical.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A gamble on a relatively unknown technology four years ago is paying off for a logistics company, which is using the software to shave millions of dollars off its bandwidth connectivity costs. Today freight forwarding company JAS Global is leveraging a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) to run cloud applications, according to JAS CIO Mark Baker. Eventually, Baker hopes to use the SD-WAN as the backbone of a predictive analytics strategy to grow the business.SD-WANs allow companies to set up and manage networking functionality, including VPNs, WAN optimization, VoIP and firewalls, using software to program traffic routing typically conducted by routers and switches. Just as virtualization software disrupted the server market, SD-WANs are shaking the networking equipment market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
First of all, that used phone you’re thinking about buying – the one on Craigslist going for a ridiculously low price – is almost certainly stolen. You know that. We all know it.Yet if you’re intent on buying a used phone – and don’t want to buy a hot one – the wireless industry has just given you a new tool that will allow you to be reasonably confident that the phone hasn’t been reported stolen lost.From a CTIA press release:
CTIA, the U.S. wireless industry association, today announced the launch of a new tool www.stolenphonechecker.org to provide consumers with free one stop access to determine if a used or refurbished smartphone has been reported as stolen or lost.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This week, SD-WAN vendor Aryaka released its “2017 State of the WAN Report,” which summarizes a global study conducted by the vendor that looks at WAN trends across a number of verticals and across every region of the globe for 2016.The study was conducted by aggregating data from Aryaka’s customer base. The global SD-WAN vendor has analyzed connectivity to and from over 5,000 locations around the world across more than 550 enterprise organizations. The network data was rolled up and analyzed to see what’s happening on the enterprise WAN.RELATED: SD-WAN: What it is and why you will use it one day
Aryaka also provided a comparison with last year’s data set, which provides insight into how things have changed over the past 12 months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.Internet of Things applications have diverse connectivity requirements in terms of range, data throughput, energy efficiency and device cost. WiFi is often an obvious choice because in-building WiFi coverage is almost ubiquitous, but it is not always the appropriate choice. This article examines the role WiFi can play and two emerging IEEE standards, 802.11ah and 802.11ax.Data transfer requirements for IoT vary from small, intermittent payloads like utility meters to large amounts of continuous data such as real-time video surveillance. Range requirements can span from very short distances for wearables to several kilometers for weather and agriculture applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Is it possible that a writer at The Onion has previously toiled as a network engineer … or systems administrator? He or she at least did their homework to produce a “story” headlined: “Network Engineer Would Be Systems Manager If He Could Do It All Over Again.”From the “story.”
Reflecting wistfully on what he might have made of himself had he chosen a different profession, Dynatrend Solutions network engineer Alan Miller said Wednesday that he would be a systems manager if he had the chance to go back and do it all over again.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A conservative group took credit for a barrage of anti-net neutrality comments posted on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's website this week, but it denied generating fake activism.The Center for Individual Freedom said it did not use a bot to generate comments after news reports raised questions about the legitimacy of the posts. Between Monday and early Wednesday afternoon, the FCC had received more than 128,000 comments duplicating the language provided by CFIF.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When I saw that the creators of the Andrew File System (AFS) had been named recipients of the $35K ACM Software System Award, I said to myself "That's cool, I remember AFS from the days of companies like Sun Microsystems... just please don't ask me to explain what the heck it is."Don't ask my colleagues either. A quick walking-around-the-office survey of a half dozen of them turned up mostly blank stares at the mention of the Andrew File System, a technology developed in the early 1980s and named after Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon. But as the Association for Computing Machinery's award would indicate, AFS is indeed worth knowing about as a foundational technology that paved the way for widely used cloud computing techniques and applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ThousandEyes, a network intelligence company with the ability to monitor performance from hundreds of vantage points across the Internet, has insight into a variety of services across the globe, including public DNS service providers. In this article we’ll dive into our results from testing 10 of the most popular public DNS resolvers, with the goal of helping you make informed conclusions about your choice of provider. We observed a wide range of performance across different services, both globally and from region to region.The Domain Name System (DNS) is the internet’s system for converting alphabetic web addresses into numeric IP addresses. If a given service’s DNS records are unavailable, the service is effectively down and inaccessible to everyone. DNS can also have a substantial impact on page load time and web page performance. While it’s just the first step of many in the page load process (see the below image), any increase in DNS lookup time will directly increase load times. DNS lookup time, in turn, is directly affected by latency to the DNS server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Branch sites are ideal places to make networking simpler and less expensive. There's often little or no IT expertise there, and it's harder to justify costs because only a fraction of a company's business happens at a given branch.Yet the rise of software-defined WANs and branch offices, designed to scale back the expense and complexity of far-flung networks, has left some parts of the problem unsolved, according to SD-WAN startup Versa Networks.For one thing, replacing branch appliances for each function with applications running on one system may raise software compatibility issues that are even more complicated than wiring up several boxes. Also, swapping out private WAN links for lower-priced internet service can open branches up to some new security threats.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Verizon this week said it would begin offering x86-based servers with OpenStack software aimed at customers looking to support all manner of advanced cloud, software defined networking and network functions virtualization-based enterprises.+More on Network World: Extreme offers glimpse of integrated Avaya, Brocade technology future+According to Verizon, letting customers use a combination of off the shelf hardware over a distributed deployment of OpenStack will let them decouple hardware from software and frees them from proprietary hardware. OpenStack is developed by some 150 companies from AT&T to IBM and Red Hat to Cisco, Dell EMC and others. The open software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center, managed typically through a single dashboard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this week at its GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia announced a new video analytics platform, Metropolis, that promises to make cities safer and smarter and should eventually bring game-changing capabilities to other industries.The heart of Metropolis is deep learning enabled by Nvidia’s range of GPUs that provide the necessary horsepower for artificial intelligence to be performed on every video stream.+ Also on Network World: Smart city tech growing in the U.S. +
The GPU Technology Conference is the right place to show off advancements in something like video analytics, as it has become the flagship event to showcase how GPUs can literally change the world by enabling AI to do some things smarter and faster than people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Sun Microsystems said, "The network is the computer," it might have been talking about the Internet of Things, which was little more than an idea at the time. Today, more machines than ever are talking to other machines, and computing is being distributed across far-flung networks.Onetime Sun CEO Scott McNealy sees some of the legendary company's vision coming to fruition in an IoT "data bus" from a small Silicon Valley outfit called Real-Time Innovations. On Tuesday, McNealy became the first member of RTI's Advisory Board.RTI's data bus is middleware for delivering the right information at the right time to all the people and systems that need it. The software runs on meshed computing nodes that can be a small as a microcontroller, and it uses several kinds of network connections to make sure the data gets through.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Wi-Fi’s explosive growth is gaining even more momentum.Recently the Wi-Fi Alliance launched a certified program for “meter-level accuracy for indoor device location data” using its technology. Now, that location add-on tool is about to be joined by a kind of three-dimensional, Wi-Fi-derived holographic imaging. Both use the ubiquitous Wi-Fi data network we’ve come to know and love.Holographic Wi-Fi is a way to create three-dimensional images of spaces. It’s achieved by coupling Wi-Fi radio with graphical holograms.+ Also on Network World: Wi-Fi expanding to indoor location services +
Some uses for the technology could be tracking products as they’re manufactured and move along in the production process, as well as searching for victims buried in collapsed buildings, say researchers from the Technical University of Munich who are developing the system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here