When Covid-19 reared its ugly head earlier this year it altered the way millions of corporate workers access enterprise resources. Now that it’s obvious those changes in many cases are going to be more permanent than originally thought, many customers and vendors are looking to support remote workers in ways not really expected in the past.“The Covid-19 pandemic brought about a huge experiment in widespread remote working,” said Gartner vice president Elisabeth Joyce, of a recent survey of 127 company leaders that found 47% said they intend to allow employees to work remotely full time going forward. “As business leaders plan and execute reopening of their workplaces, they are evaluating more permanent remote working arrangements as a way to meet employee expectations and to build more resilient business operations."To read this article in full, please click here
The Federal Communicatins Commission’s auction of priority access licenses (PAL) on Citizen’s Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum came to an end this week, raising more than $4.58 billion from bandwidth that could be used to support 5G wireless.
5G resources
What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones
How 5G frequency affects range and speed
Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t
Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling
5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul
CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises
The 271 qualified bidders chased 22,631 individual licenses – seven for each county in the U.S., each license representing a 10MHz-wide piece of spectrum in the 3.5GHz band.To read this article in full, please click here
For the most part the dire warnings about running out of internet addresses have ceased because, slowly but surely, migration from the world of Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) to IPv6 has begun, and software is in place to prevent the address apocalypse that many were predicting.But before we see where are and where we’re going with IPv6, let’s go back to the early days of internet addressing.[ Related: IPv6 deployment guide + How to plan your migration to IPv6 ]
What is IPv6 and why is it important?
IPv6 is the latest version of the Internet Protocol, which identifies devices across the internet so they can be located. Every device that uses the internet is identified through its own IP address in order for internet communication to work. In that respect, it’s just like the street addresses and zip codes you need to know in order to mail a letter.To read this article in full, please click here
The U.S. Department of Defense will turn over some of its 5G frequency spectrum in a bid to help U.S. carriers bring commercial 5G services to market faster.
5G resources
What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones
Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t
Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling
5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul
CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises
The DoD controls large portions of the mid-band 5G spectrum in the 3 GHz to 6 GHz range, which is used for military radar. Earlier this year, the White House and DoD formed "America's Mid-Band Initiative Team," or AMBIT, with the goal of making a contiguous, 100 MHz segment of mid-band spectrum available for use in 5G development by the end of the summer.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco has introduced an open-source project that it says could go a long way toward reducing the manual work involved in optimizing performance of Kubernetes-applications across SD-WANs.Cisco said it launched the Cloud-Native SD-WAN (CN-WAN) project to show how Kubernetes applications can be automatically mapped to SD-WAN with the result that the applications perform better over the WAN.More about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • How to pick an off-site data-backup method • SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it • What are the options for security SD-WAN?
“In many cases, enterprises deploy an SD-WAN to connect a Kubernetes cluster with users or workloads that consume cloud-native applications. In a typical enterprise, NetOps teams leverage their network expertise to program SD-WAN policies to optimize general connectivity to the Kubernetes hosted applications, with the goal to reduce latency, reduce packet loss, etc.” wrote John Apostolopoulos, vice president and CTO of Cisco’s intent-based networking group in a group blog.To read this article in full, please click here
Pluribus Networks has rolled out new software and analytics packages that take aim at customers looking to build and manage software-defined data-center fabrics.The packages include a new release of the company’s core network operating system, Netvisor One, and the accompanying Unum management software as well as a new version of its Insight Analytics platform. They're all designed to simplify the operations of large-scale traditional and distributed edge data centers, the company said.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Netvisor ONE is a virtualized NOS that provides Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking, distributed fabric intelligence. It virtualizes switch hardware and implements what the company calls an Adaptive Cloud Fabric. Adaptive Cloud Fabric operates without a controller and can be deployed across a single data center, or targeted to specific racks, pods, server farms or hyper-converged infrastructures, the company said. To read this article in full, please click here
Aiming to help customers support modern data-center networking technologies, Apstra has enriched its Intent-Based Networking software to include better operational features but also adds more connectivity for its third party support of Juniper and open source SONiC environments.The company’s core Apstra Operating System (AOS) was built from the ground up to support IBN in that once running it keeps a real-time repository of configuration, telemetry and validation information to constantly ensure the network is doing what the customer wants it to do.To read this article in full, please click here
ThousandEyes, a firm that monitors network infrastructure, measures the UK internet for Network World UK each week, covering Monday at 12:01 UTC through Sunday at 23:59 UTC.Click NEXT below to see the latest data.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Week of 10-16 January 2022
ISPs. Outages at UK internet service providers (ISPs) decreased 38% from 13 to 8. Globally, they were 173, up 15% from 150 the prior week.Cloud providers. In the UK, there were 0 cloud outages for the fifth week running. Globally, the number was 10, up 400% from 2 the prior week.To read this article in full, please click here
Equipment vendors and carriers have talked a great game about 5G's promise. Its ability to handle the high-density wireless environments created by IoT deployments and provide gigabit speeds to smartphones has been trumpeted from the rooftops.
5G resources
What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones
How 5G frequency affects range and speed
Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t
Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling
CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises
But it's important to realize that the most eye-catching capabilities of 5G technology aren't here yet, as many of them depend on the 5G New Radio (NR) technology operating at high, millimeter-wave frequencies, which isn't yet widely available. Nor are the vast majority of endpoints currently on the market able to communicate on those sorts of networks.To read this article in full, please click here
As COVID-19 continues to spread, forcing employees to work from home, the services of ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services a.k.a. unified communications as a service (UCaaS) providers are experiencing increased traffic.ThousandEyes is monitoring how these increases affect outages and the performance challenges these providers undergo. It will provide Network World a roundup of interesting events of the week in the delivery of these services, and Network World will provide a summary here. Stop back next week for another update, and see more details here.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware this week bolstered the on-premise and service-monitoring capabilities of its core cloud-management software with improved automation, Kubernetes and troubleshooting features.The features come in a new release of VMware’s vRealize Suite which is the company’s wide-ranging package of tools for helping customers manage virtual infrastructure and applications. Its features include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and DevOps tools such as Infrastructure as Code to provision, orchestrate, optimize and govern hybrid-cloud environments.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
“The overarching idea of vRealize is to help customers centrally control and govern cloud resources whether they be private, hybrid or SAAS and mitigate the risk of those rapidly growing virtual workloads,” said Ken Lee senior director of product marketing for VMware. To read this article in full, please click here
IBM on Monday took the wraps off its latest POWER RISC CPU family, optimized for enterprise hybrid-cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing, along with a number of other improvements.Power is the last of the Unix processors from the 1990s, when Sun Microsystems, HP, SGI, and IBM all had competing Unixes and RISC processors to go with them. Unix gave way to Linux and RISC gave way to x86, but IBM holds on.This is IBM's first 7-nanometer processor, and IBM claims it will deliver an up-to-three-times improvement in capacity and processor energy efficiency within the same power envelope as its POWER9 predecessor. The processor comes in a 15-core design (actually 16-cores but one is not used) and allows for single or dual chip models, so IBM can put two processors in the same form factor. Each core can have up to eight threads, and each socket supports up to 4TB of memory.To read this article in full, please click here
Process accounting is a method of recording and summarizing commands and processes. It's an option on Linux systems, but you have to enable it and use a particular command to view the details collected. This post covers the commands involved and offers some suggestions on making the views even more useful.To start, understand that process accounting is different than what you see when running the ps command. It shows details on commands that have completed –- not those that are currently running. It also shows a lot more details than you would see by looking at your users' command history files and keeps all the collected data in a single file on the system.To read this article in full, please click here
Unified communications vendor Avaya is rebranding its entire communications portfolio under the Avaya OneCloud name, effectively positioning itself as a cloud services provider.Avaya OneCloud spans the entire Avaya product line, which is focused on contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS), unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS), and communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS). Avaya offers a range of operational, consumption and commercial models that can be deployed on-premises as well as through Avaya's private and public cloud offerings."Global organizations increasingly rely on us as they adapt to a work-from-anywhere world, and we are delivering our offerings in a more impactful way," said Simon Harrison, Avaya senior vice president and chief marketing officer, in a statement. "Avaya OneCloud enables them to consume and deploy apps in the way they want, to achieve their ambitions and build their brands through improved experiences."To read this article in full, please click here
AWS has announced the availability of a new service that lets customers tap into and experiment with quantum computing simulators and access quantum hardware from D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti.The managed service, Amazon Braket, offers customers a development environment where they can explore and build quantum algorithms, test them on quantum circuit simulators, and run them on different quantum hardware technologies, AWS said in a statement about the service. The Braket service includes Jupyter notebooks that come pre-installed with the Amazon Braket SDK and example tutorials.To read this article in full, please click here
There is no sadder moment in the backup world than finding out the file or database you need to restore has never been backed up. Understanding how systems, directories, and databases are included in the backup system is the key to making sure this never happens to you.The first step toward this goal is making sure that servers and services you want backed up are registered with your backup-and-recovery system.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
For example, if you start using a new SaaS such as Salesforce, no backup system will automatically notice that addition and start backing it up for you. If you are fully virtualized on VMware, the systems will automatically notice if you add a new node to the configuration. But if you start using Hyper-V or KVM, no backup system will automatically notice there is a new hypervisor in the data center and start backing it up. And of course your backup system will not notice you installed a new physical server.To read this article in full, please click here
Simply stated, zero trust calls for verifying every user and device that tries to access the network and enforcing strict access-control and identity management that limits authorized users to accessing only those resources they need to do their jobs.Zero trust is an architecture, so there are many potential solutions available, but this is a look at those that fit in the realm of networking.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Least privilege
One broad principle of zero trust is least privilege, which is granting individuals access to just enough resources to carry out their jobs and nothing more. One way to accomplish this is network segmentation, which breaks the network into unconnected sections based on authentication, trust, user role, and topology. If implemented effectively, it can isolate a host on a segment and minimize its lateral or east–west communications, thereby limiting the "blast radius" of collateral damage if a host is compromised. Because hosts and applications can reach only the limited resources they are authorized to access, segmentation prevents attackers from gaining a foothold into the rest of the network.To read this article in full, please click here
Taking aim at helping enterprise customers support tons of remote workers, Juniper this week extended its family of Wi-Fi 6 wireless access points.The access points feature integration with the Juniper Mist Wi-Fi Assurance cloud service to help customers with automated WLAN configuration, anomaly detection, performance and service-level metrics to ultimately make wireless networks more predictable and reliable.
Learn about 5G and Wi-Fi 6To read this article in full, please click here
With the rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), are we getting to the point when computers will be smart enough to write their own code and be done with human coders? New research suggests we might be getting closer to that milestone.Researchers from MIT and Georgia Tech teamed with Intel to develop an AI engine, dubbed Machine Inferred Code Similarity (MISIM), that's designed to analyze software code and determine how it's similar to other code. What's most interesting is the potential for the system to learn what bits of code do, and then use that intelligence to change how software is written. Ultimately, a human could explain what it wants a software program to do, and then a machine programming (MP) system could come up with a coded app to accomplish it.To read this article in full, please click here