Dell has made a tremendous amount of noise in the media over the past few months caused by the ripple effect of its acquisition of EMC. Whether one thinks the merger is a good idea or not, it’s a fact that the merger will have a significant impact on the storage and server industries.Today, Dell announced plans that will bolster its position in networking. The move to become a digital organization is a trend that’s now being felt across almost all companies in every vertical. The building blocks of digital are technologies such as cloud, mobile, big data and analytics. What do these have in common? They’re all network-centric, meaning the network plays a key role in the shift to a digital enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The technology industry has gone through several waves of innovation since the birth of computing. The industry kicked off with mainframes, which eventually gave way to client/server, which eventually evolved into branch office computing. Today, we are in the midst of the transition to a cloud-first world.Each of these waves brought with it new networking tools and technologies. The devices that we used to build local LANs were not the same ones we used to build WANs.This trend of requiring new tools is also true for the transition to the cloud. Organizations are rapidly shifting to Wi-Fi to enable mobile devices to connect to cloud services and embracing software-defined WANs (SD-WAN) to give the network the necessary levels of agility required to meet the demands of a cloud-first world. Unfortunately, most of these technologies have been built independent of one another, making management of the end-to-end network in a cloud-centric business very difficult.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Extorting money from companies under the threat of launching distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) against their online properties has proven lucrative for cybercriminals. So much so that one group has managed to earn over $100,000 without any evidence that it's even capable of mounting attacks.Since early March, hundreds of businesses have received threatening emails from a group calling itself the Armada Collective, asking to be paid between 10 and 50 bitcoins -- US$4,600 to $23,000 -- as a "protection fee" or face DDoS attacks exceeding 1Tbps.While many of them did not comply, some did; the group's bitcoin wallet address shows incoming payments of over $100,000 in total. Yet none of the companies who declined to pay the protection fee were attacked, website protection firm CloudFlare found.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ethernet switches and wireless LANs are just two ways to get on the same network in most enterprises, so it makes sense to manage them together if you can.Wi-Fi grew up as a separate realm from wired networks, with different monitoring and management tools, but these worlds have started to collide in the past few years. Among other things, wireless specialist Aruba added Ethernet switches to its architecture and Meraki took administration of both network components into the cloud. Rivals Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco Systems snapped up both of those companies.Now Dell has gotten into the game, not by acquisition but through a partnership with WLAN vendor Aerohive Networks. On Tuesday, the two companies are introducing a unified management tool called HiveManager NG.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Our next installment of “Geek-themed Meme of the Week” comes courtesy of the Twitter account of INE, Inc., and will be familiar to all network professionals. INE via Twitter
How familiar? https://twitter.com/SDNgeek/status/723644359099322369
If you’d like to catch up on past “Geek-Themed Memes of the Week,” you can find the archive here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Many enterprises are looking to the Internet of Things to monitor and control assets they can't physically reach. Building networks that can cover all those assets is one of the big challenges of industrial IoT.Cellular networks cover people well, at least in developed countries, but total land area not as well. LPWANs (low-power wide-area networks) are emerging as an alternative for reaching endpoints over longer distances, thanks to their lower speed and power levels and designs optimized for IoT. But for truly global connectivity, satellite is really the only game in town. (And, more importantly, far out of town.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In its first 27 years of existence we saw the introduction of six Ethernet rates – 10Mbps, 100Mbps, 1Gbps, 10Gbps 40Gbps and 100Gbps. And the Ethernet community is now working feverously to introduce six new rates -- 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps, 25Gbps 50Gbps, 200Gbps and 400Gbps-- in the next three years. Higher Ethernet rates used to be introduced when industry bandwidth requirements drove the need for speed. Butwith Ethernet’s success, it soon became apparent that one new advance could satisfy the requirements of each Ethernet application space. This was clearly illustrated nearly 10 years ago when it was recognized that computing and networking were growing at different rates. This led to 40Gbps being selected as the next rate for servers beyond 10Gbps, while 100Gbps was selected as the next networking rate. 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.The single location contact/call center of years past would have had little need for Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology. But today’s call/contact centers for customer service, technical support, outgoing call banks and other use cases are almost always multi-location and usually global, and the right SD-WAN solution can improve reliability and the customer experience while lowering costs.Call centers were among the first adopters of VoIP, at least within the call center network, and they have historically used MPLS in the WAN, very often dual MPLS networks. While the latter is expensive, the approach has been needed to maintain reliability and call quality.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The software framework that powers the network connections on many GNU/Linux systems just got its second major update in less than a year and a half, with the version 1.2 release of NetworkManager.Version 1.2 brings several improvements to NetworkManager, including better security and usability for Wi-Fi. The changes should make the list of available access points more responsive and manageable, save energy on mobile devices and laptops, and even improve privacy by MAC address randomization, according to an official announcement. LuisalvaradoxWikipedia
An earlier version of NetworkManagerTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems has released patches to fix serious denial-of-service flaws in its Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) software, Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software and the Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol (SRTP) library that's used in many products.The Cisco WLC software contains two denial-of-service vulnerabilities, one of which is rated critical and could be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker through specially crafted HTTP requests sent to the device. This can cause a buffer overflow condition that, in addition to a device reload, might also allow for execution of arbitrary code on the device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you believed the vendors, you'd think Wi-Fi was simple: Turn on your computer or other device, hop on the Internet and you're set to go.But as we all know, life isn't quite that easy. Your home or office network can have dead spots where devices can't seem to connect, or where the connections get slow or flaky. Public hotspots can make you prey for hackers and snoopers. And when you are at a hotspot, you might need to share your connection with your other devices, including smartphones and tablets.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: How to use public Wi-Fi hotspots safely
While there is no way to immediately solve all the problems associated with wireless connectivity, there are applications that can make things better -- and many of them are free. I've rounded up nine free pieces of Windows software that can go a long way toward helping you solve your Wi-Fi issues at home, in your office or on the go.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This year's IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize, known as the most honored award for papers in the networking communications field, goes to a Korean team for its breakthrough research on offloading data traffic from cellular networks to Wi-Fi.The award recognizes the work of Professor Kyunghan Lee from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST); Prof. Yi Yung, Prof. Chong Song, and Dr. Joohyun Lee of Electrical and Computer Engineering at KAIST; and Executive Vice President Injong Rhee of Samsung Electronics, Mobile Division.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A key issue raised by labor unions in their weeklong strike against Verizon is the offshoring of work. The unions say Verizon has plans to send more jobs overseas. Verizon isn't saying what it is doing in this respect, but there is a paper trail of documents filed by its employees that point to offshoring.The union contends that Verizon wants, in a labor contract, to shift more jobs to contractors. Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers are on strike."They want the ability to contract work -- as much as 50% -- the great majority of that is offshore," said Marilyn Irwin, president of the Washington area Communications Workers of America Local 2108. CWA is one of the unions involved in the strike.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
HPE/Aruba is said to be planning to acquire the intellectual property of failing startup Rasa Networks within the next 2 to 4 weeks, according to sources close to the matter.The transaction could see between $5 million and $10 million change hands, the sources added, noting that it’s not a full buyout of the company, but merely a deal for Rasa’s IP and, potentially, one or two of the company’s data scientists.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Don’t buy into hybrid cloud headache hype, GE’s cloud guru says + Meet a handheld server with a 13-terabyte SSDTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
No one laughed more than I did when the Internet stepped up and voted overwhelmingly to name a British research ship Boaty McBoatface. The suggested moniker still made me giggle days later.But now comes word that the officials tasked with actually naming the ship are not that big on Boaty. From a story in the Guardian:
However, Jo Johnson, the science minister, signaled the government was preparing to activate its get-out clause. “The new royal research ship will be sailing into the world’s iciest waters to address global challenges that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, including global warming, the melting of polar ice and rising sea levels,” he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When it comes to performing ongoing maintenance, stomping out crises, or scoping new projects, most administrators either execute tasks manually or write a script to automate the process. But the really smart ones look for a capable tool to do the job.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Google won approval last week to begin testing innovative 3.5 GHz wireless capabilities by using antennas on light poles and other structures in eight areas of Kansas City, Mo.It will be the first large-scale test of its kind in the nation, following a framework created by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) a year ago for the new Citizens Broadband Radio Service, which uses 3.5GHz spectrum and allows for dynamic spectrum sharing.+ ALSO: Kansas City presses on with emerging 'smart city' corridor (with video) +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For today only, Amazon is featuring deals on highly rated surge protectors from Belkin that will save you up to 64%. Use the links below to see which model is right for your application:
Belkin 12 Outlet Home/Office Surge Protector with 10-Foot cord and Phone/Ethernet/Coaxial Protection plus Extended Cord. Price: $49.99 $17.98 (save 64%)
Belkin 3-Outlet SurgePlus Mini Travel Swivel Charger Surge Protector with Dual USB Ports (2.1 AMP / 10 Watt)Price: $29.99 $13.99 (save 53%)
Belkin SurgePlus 6-Outlet Wall Mount Surge Protector with Dual USB Ports (2.1 AMP / 10 Watt)Price: $24.99 $13.99 (save 44%)
Belkin 6-Outlet Home/Office Surge Protector with 2.5-Foot Cord & Straight PlugPrice: $12.99 $5.49 (save 58%)
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon is currently featuring deals on highly rated surge protectors from Belkin that will save you up to 48%. Use the links below to see which model is right for your application:
Belkin 12 Outlet Home/Office Surge Protector with 10-Foot cord and Phone/Ethernet/Coaxial Protection plus Extended Cord. Price: $49.99 $25.88 (save 48%)
Belkin 3-Outlet SurgePlus Mini Travel Swivel Charger Surge Protector with Dual USB Ports (2.1 AMP / 10 Watt)Price: $29.99 $18.00 (save 40%)
Belkin SurgePlus 6-Outlet Wall Mount Surge Protector with Dual USB Ports (2.1 AMP / 10 Watt)Price: $24.99 $20.99 (save 16%)
Belkin 6-Outlet Home/Office Surge Protector with 2.5-Foot Cord & Straight PlugPrice: $12.99 $7.99 (save 38%)
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud computing is changing the game for one of the hardest problems in IT: running a network.
Users are counting on fast, secure access more than ever, even as networks get more complex and threats more dangerous. Often, there’s a lot of data available about the state of a network and its performance, but more data by itself can't solve a problem. So startups are turning to the growing power of the cloud for answers.
Nyansa, based in Silicon Valley, emerged from stealth mode on Monday with Voyance, a cloud-based SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering that analyzes inputs from wired and wireless LANs to gauge users' actual experiences on a network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here