Microsoft has released Windows Server 2019 to general availability, formally bringing to market the first major release of the Windows Server operating system in three years.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
ORLANDO – If you are a CIO or business leader an are having trouble moving forward on a new or existing digital business project, you should hack your current IT culture to get things moving.Digital business is accelerating, disrupting the way businesses and governments are doing business, said Mike Harris, executive vice president and global head of research for Gartner at the kickoff of Symposium/IT Expo the consulting firm’s annual strategyfest that this year drew over 9,000 CIOs and IT professionals for a look at the technologies and trends.To read this article in full, please click here
While computing, storage and programming have dramatically changed and become simpler and cheaper over the last 20 years, however, IP networking has not. IP networking is still stuck in the era of mid-1990s.Realistically, when I look at ways to upgrade or improve a network, the approach falls into two separate buckets. One is the tactical move and the other is strategic. For example, when I look at IPv6, I see this as a tactical move. There aren’t many business value-adds.In fact, there are opposites such as additional overheads and minimal internetworking QoS between IPv4 & v6 with zero application awareness and still a lack of security. Here, I do not intend to say that one should not upgrade to IPv6, it does give you more IP addresses (if you need them) and better multicast capabilities but it’s a tactical move.To read this article in full, please click here
Once again, IDC has thrown cold water on the notion that enterprises are looking to shut down their data centers and instead are looking to grow them. And a new form of IT spending is taking place.The latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC) found revenue from sales of IT infrastructure equipment grew 48.4 percent year over year in the second quarter of 2018 to $15.4 billion.Quarterly spending on public cloud IT infrastructure was $10.9 billion in the second quarter of 2018, a 58.9 percent year-over-year growth, while private cloud spending reached $4.6 billion, an increase of 28.2 percent year over year.[ Check out What is hybrid cloud computing and learn what you need to know about multi-cloud. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
By end of the year, IDC projects public cloud spending will account for 68.2 percent of total IT equipment spending, growing at an annual rate of 36.9 percent. That’s not surprising, though, as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc., buy servers in the tens of thousands of units.To read this article in full, please click here
Changes may be in the cards for the internet. Primarily, the global information system that we know as the World Wide Web could be up for some radical blockchain-concept re-thinking. It could take us back in time, but in a good way, according to some experts.Mass decentralization, which includes the shifting the control of data from corporations to individuals, is what they propose.“If you think of our existing web, it was originally designed to be decentralized, but over the years, we've come to see 90 percent of the traffic going through three or four different companies,” says Mitra Ardron, Technical Lead for Decentralization, at Internet Archive, which hosted the Decentralized Web Summit in San Francisco this summer. He was quoted on the conference’s website.To read this article in full, please click here
As WLAN access point and device vendors work toward product launches at the end of 2018, we will publish a series of blogs covering all aspects of 802.11ax technology. This first one introduces the motivation and main features of 802.11ax.Download our 802.11ax technical white paper.How to Improve Today’s Wi-Fi?When deciding how to improve Wi-Fi beyond the current release, 802.11ac, the IEEE and Wi-Fi Alliance surveyed Wi-Fi deployments and behavior in order to identify obstacles to wider use and causes of dissatisfaction among user communities. The conclusion was to focus more on performance under “typical” field conditions, a departure from previous upgrades that advanced peak data rates under “excellent” field conditions. With 802.11ax, peak performance and average and worst-case performance under real-world conditions will see improvements.To read this article in full, please click here
Juniper is positioning the company to be an evangelist for network automation by announcing applications, tools, labs and libraries that it says will hasten adoption the technology for businesses and network professionals.The inherent role of automation is to reduce the daily toil of repetitive tasks that lead to mistakes. It also provides guardrails to ensure service-level agreement guarantees. SLAs and reliability are not left to caffeine-powered individual heroics, but are achieved through well-trained automation heroes, also known as network reliability engineers (NRE), wrote Juniper's CTO and vice president, Bikash Koley, in a blog about the announcement. To read this article in full, please click here
The stagnant server market has heated up over the last few years, due in no small part to the advent of “white box” server vendors grabbing an increasing share of the cloud business.Enterprises have been reluctant to follow the lead of hyperscale data center vendors to off-brand server competitors, largely because of a lack of enterprise-grade service and maintenance options. But the economics are compelling.
More data center stories:
Efficient container use in data centers
Data center staff are aging faster than the equipment
How cloud providers' data-migration appliances stack up
Why NVMe? Users weigh benefits of NVMe-accelerated flash storage
“White box” is a reference to the off-brand PCs built by independent PC vendors, which used to dot the landscape and appeal to buyers who built their own PCs with a plain beige tower and no vendor label on the box. In the server market, “white box” refers to vendors that are not the big three: Dell EMC, HP Enterprise and Lenovo.To read this article in full, please click here
If you are a career networking professional – be it a network architect, engineer, manager— do you need to advance your skillset to include programming and other devops skills to better serve you and your company?To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
If you are a career networking professional – be it a network architect, engineer, manager— do you need to advance your skillset to include programming and other DevOps skills to better serve you and your company?To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
At this point, most people are aware that cameras may be watching them wherever they go in public — especially in retail establishments. But if a recent Walmart patent application becomes reality, watching your every move is far from the most intrusive way shoppers will be monitored.According to the patent, the idea is to put biometric sensors in shopping-cart handles. These sensors would track the shoppers’ heart rates, temperatures, grip strength, and stress levels, not to mention the cart’s weight, speed and idle time. Next, that info would be sent to a server where the data could be analyzed and compared against baselines obtained when the customer first grabbed the cart.To read this article in full, please click here
With wireless now the preferred, default, and increasingly only access in the majority of in-building, campus, metro-scale hotspot and wide-area settings, achieving optimal performance is a key objective for IT departments.Since radio-frequency (RF) propagation always involves a high degree of variability, it’s often difficult to predict the precise behavior of a given installation. Variables include operating conditions, user and application traffic demands, and the capabilities and settings of individual vendor products. When mobility, Wi-Fi testing and verification are also taken into consideration, performance evaluation can become very complex indeed.To read this article in full, please click here
Wi-Fi experts from Cisco, Aruba, Ekahau, Extreme Networks and Mist Systems talked with Craig Mathias, principal with advisory firm Farpoint Group, about Wi-Fi performance optimization. Based on those interviews, a few best practices for establishing and maintaining optimal WLAN performance clearly jump out.For more details see our feature: Experts offer tips for boosting Wi-Fi performance
Perform WiFi needs analysis
Start with an initial needs analysis, with a careful enumeration of requirements relating to throughput, applications and coverage. Experiment with potential equipment in the production freespace environment to establish a baseline for initial performance expectations and evaluation. Add in the impact of any planned or even anticipated infrastructure additions, new applications and growth in numbers of users and devices.To read this article in full, please click here
Just when we were all getting used to the IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi nomenclature that differentiates between generations of the technology, the industry’s Wi-Fi Alliance has gone and made it simpler and more digestible for the user on the street.As a result, starting this month what we know as 802.11ax is officially called Wi-Fi 6.[ Find out how 5G wireless could change networking as we know it and how to deal with networking IoT. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
The new, vastly simplified system also means that 802.11ac is now Wi-Fi 5, and 802.11n is Wi-Fi 4. The idea, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance, is to make matching endpoint and router capabilities a simpler matter for the rank-and-file user of Wi-Fi technology.To read this article in full, please click here
It is so nice to see a return of competition in the CPU space. For too long it had been a one-horse race, with Intel on its own and AMD willing to settle for good enough. Revitalized with the Zen architecture, AMD is taking it to Intel once again, and you are the winner.Both sides are proclaiming massive performance records, although in both cases they come with an asterisk next to them.Intel's announcement
In Intel’s case, it announced 95 new performance world records for its Intel Xeon Scalable processors using the most up-to-date benchmarks on hardware for major OEMs, including Dell, HPE, ASUS, and Super Micro, running SPECInt and SPECFP benchmarks as well as SAP HANA, ranging from single-socket systems up to eight-socket systems.To read this article in full, please click here
Juniper CEO Rami Rahim is shepherding a number of key transitions for the company. Juniper made a big bet on 400G Ethernet this summer, detailing how it plans to transition its wide-area network, data center and enterprise portfolio to 400G Ethernet. And earlier this year, Juniper released its Contrail Enterprise Multicloud software, an SDN controller that is the central component of its multicloud, intent-based networking strategy. Ahead of its NXTWORK annual customer and partner summit next week, Rahim talked with Network World’s Michael Cooney about trends and directions for the networking vendor, as Rahim aims to position Juniper more strongly against chief competitors such as Cisco, Arista, HPE, and Huawei.To read this article in full, please click here
If you weren’t in Amsterdam last week, you missed an extremely exciting conference – the Open Networking Summit Europe 2018. This Linux Foundation event drew more than 700 networking, development and operations leaders and enterprise users from open source service providers, cloud companies, and more.Chief among the conference themes was the idea that open networking is the "new norm," with lots of vendors attesting to how this theme is playing out in the IT industry. The conference drew both business and technical leaders focused on networking beyond software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) with deep technical tracks and opportunities for attendees to learn from peers across the industry.To read this article in full, please click here
If you weren’t in Amsterdam last week, you missed an extremely exciting conference – the Open Networking Summit Europe 2018. This Linux Foundation event drew more than 700 networking, development and operations leaders and enterprise users from open source service providers, cloud companies, and more.Chief among the conference themes was the idea that open source networking is the "new norm," with lots of vendors attesting to how this theme is playing out in the IT industry. Dan Kohn who leads the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation cites cost savings, improved resilience and higher development velocity for both bug fixes and the rolling out of new features for this change. Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking at The Linux Foundation used the term "open-sourcification" in his keynote.To read this article in full, please click here
It was about 20 years ago when I plugged my first Ethernet cable into a switch. It was for our new chief executive officer. Little did she know that she was about to share her traffic with most others on the first floor. At that time being a network engineer, I had five floors to be looked after.Having a few virtual LANs (VLANs) per floor was a common design practice in those traditional days. Essentially, a couple of broadcast domains per floor were deemed OK. With the VLAN-based approach, we used to give access to different people on the same subnet. Even though people worked at different levels but if in the same subnet, they were all treated the same.To read this article in full, please click here