As enterprises continue to rapidly migrate applications and infrastructure to the cloud, SD-WAN technologies are quickly gaining traction. Industry analyst firm IDC estimates that 80 percent of business is transacted from branch and remote offices, which is driving enterprises to deploy SD-WAN solutions to provide secure and direct branch connectivity to the cloud while lowering overall WAN costs.The Silver Peak® Unity EdgeConnect™ SD-WAN solution has been engineered from the ground up for the cloud. Microsoft’s recent announcement of the Azure Virtual WAN service comes in response to customer demand to optimize branch connectivity to their IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud services. By integrating with the Azure Virtual WAN service, Silver Peak enables enterprises to easily connect branch sites and users to Azure services and Microsoft’s global IP backbone.To read this article in full, please click here
Despite the goal of keeping Web communications private, flaws in the design and implementation of Transport Layer Security have led to breaches, but the latest version – TLS 1.3 – is an overhaul that strengthens and streamlines the crypto protocol.What is TLS?
TLS is a cryptographic protocol that provides end-to-end communications security over networks and is widely used for internet communications and online transactions. It is an IETF standard intended to prevent eavesdropping, tampering and message forgery. Common applications that employ TLS include Web browsers, instant messaging, e-mail and voice over IP.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco and Amazon Web Services will soon offer enterprise customers an integrated platform that promises to help them more simply build, secure and connect Kubernetes clusters across private data centers and the AWS cloud.The new package, Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS combines Cisco, AWS and open source technologies to simplify complexity and helps eliminate challenges for customers who use Kubernetes to enable deploying applications across on-premises and the AWS cloud in a secure, consistent manner said David Cope, senior director of Cisco Cloud Platform & Solutions Group (CPSG).[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.]
“The significance of Amazon teaming with Cisco means more integration between product lines from AWS and Cisco, thus reducing the integration costs notably on the security and management fronts for joint customers," said Stephen Elliot, program vice president with IDC. “It also provides customers with some ideas on how to migrate workloads from private to public clouds.”To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will soon offer enterprise customers an integrated platform that promises to help them more simply build, secure, and connect Kubernetes clusters across private data centers and the AWS cloud.The new package, Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS, combines Cisco, AWS and open-source technologies to simplify complexity and helps eliminate challenges for customers who use Kubernetes to enable deploying applications on premises and across the AWS cloud in a secure, consistent manner said David Cope, senior director of Cisco Cloud Platform & Solutions Group (CPSG).[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.]
“The significance of Amazon teaming with Cisco means more integration between product lines from AWS and Cisco, thus reducing the integration costs notably on the security and management fronts for joint customers," said Stephen Elliot, program vice president with IDC. “It also provides customers with some ideas on how to migrate workloads from private to public clouds.”To read this article in full, please click here
Most IT professionals select cloud providers based on price or proximity to users, but network performance should also be considered. Because as we see in a new report from ThousandEyes, the underlying network architecture of the big cloud providers can have a significant impact on performance. And performance varies widely among cloud service providers.In its first annual public cloud benchmark report, ThousandEyes compared the global network performance of the “big three” public cloud providers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. The network management company looked at network performance (latency, packet loss, jitter) and connectivity architecture. It also measured user-to-cloud connectivity from 27 cities around the globe to 55 AWS, Azure, and GCP regions and measured the inter-AZ and inter-region connectivity within all three cloud provider networks. In addition, they measured inter-region connectivity between all 55 regions on a multi-cloud basis.To read this article in full, please click here
Most IT professionals select cloud providers based on price or proximity to users, but network performance should also be considered. Because as we see in a new report from ThousandEyes, the underlying network architecture of the big cloud providers can have a significant impact on performance. And performance varies widely among cloud service providers.In its first annual public cloud benchmark report, ThousandEyes compared the global network performance of the “big three” public cloud providers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. The network management company looked at network performance (latency, packet loss, jitter) and connectivity architecture. It also measured user-to-cloud connectivity from 27 cities around the globe to 55 AWS, Azure, and GCP regions and measured the inter-AZ and inter-region connectivity within all three cloud provider networks. In addition, they measured inter-region connectivity between all 55 regions on a multi-cloud basis.To read this article in full, please click here
There’s no doubt that AMD’s graphics business has kept the company afloat when its CPU business stunk. More than once I saw quarterly numbers that showed all the profitability was coming from the GPU side of the market.The split between it and Nvidia is about 2:1, according to Steam analytics. Nvidia just has tremendous momentum and hasn’t lost it. And it allowed the company to branch out into artificial intelligence (AI) so thoroughly that gaming has almost become secondary to the firm. Not that they are leaving gamers hanging; they just aren’t the top priority any more.With AMD on the upswing on the CPU side, the company has decided to finally stop ceding the whole data center to Nvidia. And this week it introduced two new GPUs with the data center and HPC/AI workloads in mind.To read this article in full, please click here
Only 11 days have passed since the announcement about IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat. Yet industry analysts are busily projecting the effects that this notable acquisition will have on the future of Red Hat.Having had a chance to compare notes with Richard Slater, principal consultant and DevOps/SRE Leader at Amido (an independent, vendor-agnostic technical consultancy focused on cloud native technology and located in London), I feel compelled to toss some reflections and a few hopes into the mix.To read this article in full, please click here
It’s important for data scientists to work together with IT departments and engineers to extract the most value from data gathered by IoT deployments, according to IDC’s 2019 predictions about the IoT.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Cloud-assisted driving, remote surgery, touch-sensitive VR, and most important for the global economy, a massive jump in industrial productivity, are all on the way and have one thing in common: the continuing evolution of network infrastructure toward 5G.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
The Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) will drive adoption of private 5G networks, some are saying.In fact, automakers BMW; Daimler, which makes Mercedes vehicles; and Volkswagen have told the German spectrum manager BNA (Federal Network Agency) that they are “interested in operating local 5G networks,” Markus Fasse and Stephan Scheuer wrote in a recent Handelsblatt Global article.[ Read also: How enterprises can prep for 5G | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters ]
Separately, network equipment vendor Qualcomm says it’s working on 5G NR technologies for private, industrial IoT networks.To read this article in full, please click here
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) revealed the Zen 2 architecture for its family of both desktop/laptop and server microprocessors that it plans to launch in 2019, with a promise of twice the performance throughput over the previous generation. The news came at a briefing in San Francisco that saw a number of AMD announcements.Zen is the core architecture. On the desktop and notebooks, it’s sold under the Ryzen brand name. For servers, it’s sold under the Epyc brand. The next generation of Epyc, code-named Rome, is due next year.Zen made AMD competitive with Intel once again after the disastrous line of subpar processors named after heavy equipment (Bulldozer, Piledriver, Steamroller). With Zen 2, AMD hopes to surpass Intel in all aspects of performance.To read this article in full, please click here
I do love seeing the chip market get competitive again. Intel has formally announced a new class of Xeon Scalable processors, code-named “Cascade Lake-AP” or Cascade Lake Advanced Performance, that in many ways leapfrogs the best AMD has to offer.The news comes ahead of the Supercomputing 18 show and was likely done to avoid being drowned out in the upcoming news. It also comes one day ahead of an AMD announcement, which should be hitting the wires as you read this. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.The Cascade Lake-AP processors come with up to 48 cores and support for 12 channels of DDR4 memory, a big leap over the old design and a leap over AMD’s Epyc server processors, as well. Intel’s current top-of-the-line processor, the Xeon Platinum 8180, has only 28 cores and six memory channels, while the AMD Epyc has 32 cores and eight memory channels.To read this article in full, please click here
The U.S. Supreme Court has officially ended the court fight over the repealed net neutrality rules that required internet providers to treat all online traffic equally.On Nov. 5, 2018, the court rejected appeals from the telecommunications industry seeking to throw out a lower court ruling in favor of the net neutrality rules. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under President Donald Trump has rolled back the rules, but the industry also wanted to completely remove the lower court’s ruling off the books.The Supreme Court's decision is a victory for advocates of net neutrality rules, as supporters hope this will push Congress to enact new net neutrality laws or encourage other states to follow California’s lead by instituting their own requirements.To read this article in full, please click here
As if the end of the year doesn’t present enough challenges for IT professionals, now there is the added concern coming from the Trump administration regarding the tariffs that were imposed on China back on Sept. 24.Companies including Cisco, Dell, HPE, and Juniper Networks all called for networking and server equipment to be dropped from the tariff regulations, but they were unable to persuade the U.S. government to do that.“By raising the cost of networking products, the proposed duties would impede the development and adoption of cloud-based services and infrastructure,” the group told trade regulators before the tariff was imposed, according to Reuters.To read this article in full, please click here
Network certifications typically serve as a litmus test of a network professional’s knowledge of technologies that most company already use. Increasingly, however, network professionals are looking beyond what is, and they’re getting a leg up on certifications that will set them apart from their peers in the near future.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
On Oct. 26, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) — part of the Department of Energy — unveiled the latest supercomputer. It's named Sierra and is now the third-fastest supercomputer in the world.Sierra runs at 125 petaflops (peak performance) and will primarily be used by the NNSA for modeling and simulations as part of its core mission of ensuring the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S.'s nuclear stockpile. It will be used by three separate nuclear security labs — Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Sandia National Laboratories, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. And it's running none other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).To read this article in full, please click here
There are three types of applications; applications that manage the business, applications that run the business and miscellaneous apps.A security breach or performance related issue for an application that runs the business would undoubtedly impact the top-line revenue. For example, an issue in a hotel booking system would directly affect the top-line revenue as opposed to an outage in Office 365.It is a general assumption that cloud deployments would suffer from business-impacting performance issues due to the network. The objective is to have applications within 25ms (one-way) of the users who use them. However, too many network architectures backhaul the traffic to traverse from a private to the public internetwork.To read this article in full, please click here
When Oracle consumed Sun Microsystems in January 2010, founder Larry Ellison promised new hiring and new investment in the hardware line, plus a plan to offer fully integrated, turnkey systems.By and large, he kept that promise. Oracle dispensed with the commodity server market in favor of high-end, decked-out servers such as Exadata and Exalogic fully loaded with Oracle software, which included Java.Earlier this year, word leaked that the company had gutted its Solaris Unix and Sparc processor development, but after eight years of spinning its wheels, no one could say Oracle had been impatient. It had invested rather heavily in Sparc for a long time, but the writing was on the wall.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco is bringing high-speed Ethernet to the data center with four new switches it says will ultimately become the foundation of highdensity, intent-based networks.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)