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
“Any sufficiently popular, or important, computer technology will be mercilessly mocked 20 years later.” I call that Lunduke’s Theory of Computer Mockery. (Yes, I named it after myself. Because… why not?)The more important the technology, the more ruthlessly and brutally it will be mocked. It helps if the technology was, itself, a bit flawed when new. But even when a piece of tech is well received initially, 20 years later it will be fully brutalized. Let’s take a look at some examples: Windows 95
Would you use Windows 95 in 2017? Of course not. Would you make fun of it without regard for its feelings? Of course you would. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Smaller players in the IT hardware space can often be overlooked because dominant players cast such a long shadow. So as someone who roots for the underdog, I do enjoy shining a little light on an overlooked bit of news.Fujitsu is not the first name in data center hardware here in the U.S. Its primary place of business is its native Japan. For example, it built the RIKEN supercomputer, one of the 10 fastest in the world. But it has some good hardware offerings, such as its Primergy and Primequest server line. Well, now the company has partnered with NetApp to offer them converged and hyperconverged systems.Also on Network World: Hyperconvergence: What’s all the hype about?
Converged and hyperconverged infrastructure (CI/HCI) is a fancy way of saying tightly integrated systems that combine compute, networking and storage into pre-tested and pre-configured stacks for a single turnkey solution rather than buying and assembling one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When people doubt that an election will be conducted fairly, their trust in the outcome and their leaders naturally erodes. That’s the challenge posed by electronic voting machines. Technology holds the promise of letting people vote more easily and remotely. But, they’re also prone to hacking and manipulation. How can trust be restored in voting machines and election results?Voting demands the ultimate IoT machine (to borrow a line from BMW). The integrity of these machines with their combination of sensors, security and data analysis produce the results that impact every aspect of all our lives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As smart cities continue to depart the realm of fiction and instead become a staple of life in the 21st century, eager entrepreneurs and aspirational scientist alike are increasingly turning to smart grids to power these cities of the future. Designing the infrastructure which enables smart cities is anything but easy, however, and many people today seem entirely unfamiliar with even the basic concept of a smart grid.So, what exactly is a smart grid, and how are they increasingly shaping how America’s smart cities are taking form? Anyone who hopes to understand the cities of tomorrow should keep these facts in mind as they picture tomorrow’s cityscapes in their minds.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)
I don’t envy corporate IT teams today. For every automation or convergence that’s made your jobs easier, you’ve been handed dozens of difficult cybersecurity concerns upon which the fate of your company rests (no pressure).When my team at Wyse introduced thin clients 22 years ago, it was a different world. What’s interesting to see is that, while Server-based computing and Digital workspaces (I’ll refer to them as VDI for ease of reading) has fallen in and out of popularity over the past few years, organizations need it today more than ever.Modern security use cases for VDI
There are several use cases for VDI that didn’t exist until the modern era of workforce transformation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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
What can you do to ensure your technical skills remain relevant and in demand even as technology evolves?For years, I've been suggesting that sysadmins and other technology professionals who want to stay ahead of the curve focus on:
developing skills for the next wave of technology innovations
routinely picking up some in-demand skills
investing some of their time in side projects that may not pay off right away
While this still seems to be excellent advice, it appears that a specific focus on IoT should be added to the list. Earlier this year, Gartner predicted that 20.4 billion IoT devices will be connecting in 2020. That's just over two years from now and that's a lot of devices. Srini Vemula, global product management leader at SenecaGlobal, believes that this influx of new IoT devices will lead to tens of thousands of new jobs in the IoT economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The demise of retail grocery stores might be just around the corner.The founders of Russian grocery delivery company Instamart claim to have signed non-binding memoranda with consumer goods giant Unilever, major Dutch dairy co-op FrieslandCampina, and U.S. food products manufacturer Mars, among others. INS’s objective is to build a blockchain-based food-supply network to connect manufacturers with consumers — thus bypassing retailers and wholesalers altogether. Massive consumer price cuts are promised.Also on Network World: Blockchain: You’ve got questions; we’ve got answers
“INS is a decentralized ecosystem that enables consumers to buy directly from grocery manufacturers, bypassing retailers and wholesalers, at prices up to 30 percent lower than in supermarkets,” the company says in its press release. The firm will be releasing a token sale at the end of this month — the first stage of its launch planned for Q4 2018.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
Take a look at your desktop computer. What operating system is it currently running? Now take a look in your data center — at all of your servers. What operating system are they running? Linux? Microsoft Windows? Mac OS X? You could be running any of those three — or one of countless others. But here’s the crazy part: That’s not the only operating system you’re running. If you have a modern Intel CPU (released in the last few years) with Intel’s Management Engine built in, you’ve got another complete operating system running that you might not have had any clue was in there: MINIX. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In mid-October, Cisco announced the launch of its Aironet Developer Platform (ADP), a third-party development platform based on the Aironet 3800 series access points (AP). While there was no mention of IoT in the announcement, this is a stealth IoT opportunity. While Cisco’s Kinetic and Jasper IoT platforms reside in the cloud, ADP focuses on the edge within the enterprise. The ability to manage the “internal edge” and integrate with the Kinetic platform is significant. Throw in the DevNet developer community, a large existing base of Aironet APs, and suddenly Cisco customers are doing IoT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud Wi-Fi vendor Aerohive Networks has signed an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) agreement with Dell EMC to distribute its Wi-Fi hardware and its HiveManager NG Cloud Management Platform.In addition to product distribution, the relationship includes joint sales, marketing, support and services. It will also bring together Aerohive’s innovative products with the massive power and scale of the Dell EMC channel and services.Also on Network World: 9 tips for speeding up your business Wi-Fi
Dell and Aerohive have a relationship that goes back to 2015 when Dell become a global reseller partner for Aerohive’s products. The following year, the two companies collaborated and enabled HiveManager NG to manage Dell’s N-series wired switches, as well as the Aerohive APs, giving customers a true “single pane of glass.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As businesses turn to the cloud as a primary resource in driving competitive advantage, migrating to this new environment should be undertaken in a deliberate and systematic manner. Although the promise of higher reliability coupled with a lower cost may lure businesses to the cloud, 41% of businesses find themselves poorly prepared for the migration and end up moving applications back to colocation facilities. For enterprises seeking to ensure success in their migration, and even those considering making the switch, the validation of cloud applications should be of primary concern.Developing cloud applications or migrating to a cloud environment means adding a lot of variable conditions between client and server. Applications that perform adequately on a corporate headquarters’ local network are often sluggish, slow, or downright unresponsive once deployed. WAN conditions, such as bandwidth constraints, latency, jitter and packet loss, can bring an application to a screeching halt once deployed within a cloud environment where distance is taken into consideration. In fact, 47% of businesses returning to traditional colocation cite latency as the biggest contributing factor to their leaving the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AMD has staged quite the comeback with its Zen architecture, sold under the Ryzen brand for desktops and Epyc brand for server processors. After years as an also-ran, the Zen architecture is showing true competitiveness with Intel’s best, and at a far cheaper price tag.AMD just introduced its Epyc server processor line as the successor to its Opteron brand, but it is already reportedly working on the next wave of chips. Canard PC Hardware, a French hardware site with a good track record of accuracy, claims to have obtained specifications for AMD's next generation of Epyc processors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One general rule of thumb I have with respect to technology deployments is that the solution to a problem should be simpler than the original problem itself. Unfortunately, we often forget that in IT and have significantly more problems after implementing a solution than we did before. Virtualization is a great example of this. Early in the rise of VMware, server admins would often tell me that the number of virtual machines and complexity was significantly higher than it was pre-server consolidation. Eventually, the good folks at VMware built vCenter, and it brought some manageability to large VMware shops.Also on Network World: 6 steps for a future-ready cloud storage strategy
The same thing can be said for cloud computing. Many businesses adopt cloud so they can simplify and speed up development cycles. If all the company did was shift all of their on-premises data, compute cycles and development tools to a single cloud provider, it might indeed make things simpler.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tech Data may walk softly in terms of public perception – the Florida-based company isn’t exactly a household name – but it carries a big stick in the IT industry. It’s one of the biggest distributors and resellers out there, partnering with the majority of the biggest names in technology and boasting net sales of more than $26 billion in its last full financial year.Yet even major players like Tech Data have to bend to the new realities of the technology industry. We caught up with Michelle Curtis, director of IoT solutions at Tech Data, at a Microsoft IoT event in Boston on Monday.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: After virtualization and cloud, what’s left on premises? + Internet of things definitions: A handy guide to essential IoT termsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The society-wide adoption of the Internet of Things into our everyday business and cultural lives has left many company’s scrambling to find the best fit for the IoT in their businesses. Most of them have encountered serious trouble; choosing which IoT platform is right for you is no easy job, and the complexities of your decision can sometimes seem overwhelming.Considering an open source IoT solution to your company’s problems can help alleviate some of the burdens brought on by this decision. A quick review of how open source IoT solutions stand to benefit you without breaking the bank shows why this route may be the go-to option for IoT practitioners in the future.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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