More than 100,000 attendees from around the world recently descended on Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona. They were able to witness many new and exciting communications technologies, including IoT, 5G, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning and SD-WAN.MWC also provided an opportunity to showcase how service providers are expanding their existing services footprint with tiered managed SD-WAN services. By leveraging existing Long Term Evolution (LTE) infrastructures, service providers are now offering new mobility-based 4G LTE managed SD-WAN services. In fact, Silver Peak and TPx Communications announced a new strategic agreement at MWC that underscores how TPx plans to expand their managed SD-WAN services into global markets with 4G LTE as one of the key underlying transport network choices for their global customers.To read this article in full, please click here
The increasing adoption of SaaS and IaaS applications and infrastructure has been a catalyst for the rapid adoption of SD-WAN architectures. Directly connecting users to SaaS/IaaS instances from branch offices using lower cost internet services to augment (or even replace) MPLS provides the highest performance and user experience.But, since all web traffic is not created equal, active use of internet connections demands a new approach to security.At the same time, it’s simply not tenable to deploy an expensive, next-generation firewall at every branch. Therefore, a more intelligent, application-driven security model is enabled by more advanced SD-WAN solutions, such as Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect. These solutions place just the right amount of inspection at the branch and enable easy, cost-effective service chaining to more advanced – and more expensive – security services deployed in the cloud or in the enterprise data center.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco is well known for many things. It’s the world’s largest networking vendor, it has typically been the bell weather for IT spending, as it’s often predicted upticks or downticks in spending before other vendors, and its ability to catch market transitions has been remarkable, which is why it has a market leading position in so many technology areas adjacent to the network.I’ve always felt that one of the more under-appreciated attributes of Cisco is the work its corporate social responsibility (CSR) group does in trying to solve some of the globe’s biggest problems. Cisco has been very active at the World Economic Forum held annually in Davos, Switzerland, where world leaders, celebrities, and business leaders gather to discuss issues such as ending hunger and creating greater equality.To read this article in full, please click here
Troubleshooting WiFi problems has been the bane of the network engineer’s existence for nearly a decade. So often these problems go undiagnosed that clients have even since stopped reporting them. Bad WiFi chalked up as just part of everyday life.Yet the role enterprise WLAN plays has literally become a critical part of an ever-growing ecosystem of both end user and IoT devices. Add to that the technology advancements in 802.11 and the task of maintaining a reliable WiFi network has become nearly out of reach of the average WLAN engineer. To solve this conundrum WLAN vendors, have a long history of attempting to solve the problem with hardware sensors and detailed active site surveys.To read this article in full, please click here
Few of us think about filters until we take our car in for its 50,000-mile service. Looking at the service invoice, there’s an air filter, oil filter, fuel filter, cabin air filter, transmission filter…Sheesh, how many filters does this thing have?!We may also think about them at family dinners. All of us have at least one relative who could use a filter. I’m looking at you, Aunt Sondra.But most of the time, filters are out of sight, out of mind. Most people are gobsmacked when they discover we carry a dozen or more around in our pockets – and they’re not for pocket lint, Snapchat or Instagram.The basics of RF filters
Filters, like antennas, are an increasingly important part of the networking mix.To read this article in full, please click here
The market for IoT security products is set to grow sharply, as the general IoT market becomes ever more ubiquitous, according to a report released this month by Gartner Research. While there are numerous drivers behind the increased demand for IoT security, a growing sense that regulatory compliance will shortly become an issue is one of the most pressing.The report lists security as the top barrier to success for IoT initiatives, according to a survey on IoT adoption conducted by Gartner. A big part of the problem, the report said, is that businesses often don’t have full control over which devices and software are being used at each level of a given IoT project.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week introduced new servers optimized for artificial intelligence, and the two had one thing in common: Nvidia technology.HPE this week announced Gen10 of its HPE Apollo 6500 platform, running Intel Skylake processors and up to eight Pascal or Volta Nvidia GPUs connected by NVLink, Nvidia’s high-speed interconnect.A fully loaded V100s server will get you 66 peak double-precision teraflops of performance, which HPE says is three times the performance of the previous generation.The Apollo 6500 Gen10 platform is aimed at deep-learning workloads and traditional HPC use cases. The NVLink technology is up to 10 times faster than PCI Express Gen 3 interconnects.To read this article in full, please click here
A decade ago, if I had asked a network manager to consider using broadband to connect branch offices, he would have looked at me as if I had a second head. Times and opinions change, though, and broadband is now as viable as MPLS or any other network service.The catalyst for this has been the rise of software-defined WANs (SD-WANs). Their multipath capabilities and network optimization make it possible to use broadband for business connectivity, and organizations of all sizes have been jumping aboard this trend. One of the challenges that remain, though, is that not all connections or types of broadband are created equal.Not all broadband is created equal
A network manager at a business with branches located nationwide recently told me that his company's preferred broadband type has been cable, but he has been surprised by the variability in the resulting bandwidth by location and time of day. For example, in one large metro area, he is purchasing 50MB of bandwidth, more than adequate for most branches. During the mornings he often sees throughput of 100MB or more. Later in the day, however, when kids get home from school and the Xboxes and Netflix subscriptions start Continue reading
As CTO of a large regional hospital system, I know that the network is vital to everything. I consider the network in the same critical category as electricity, oxygen, and water. It needs to be available 24x7x365 to support Concord Hospital’s half a million patients and over 5,000 network users across our 30 locations.Because we don’t do anything on paper, the network can never go down. Extreme Fabric Connect has solved that problem for us. It provides a secure, self-healing, highly-available network to serve our patients effectively in our complex paperless environment. All the Benefits of MPLS, None of the HeadachesWe decided to upgrade our network from Split Multi-Link Trunking to Fabric Connect to get the self-networking benefits of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) without the complexity. Fabric Connect is like having a carrier-class MPLS network, where you can put any network anywhere and only the right people can see it.To read this article in full, please click here
Fundamental to harnessing the full potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the need for decisions to be made in real time, and it’s in addressing this that discussions have turned to the subject of edge computing over recent years.Before the data generated by myriad of connected IoT devices is sent to the centralized cloud, edge computing sees it stored and processed locally, in distributed micro-clouds at the edge of the network, closer to where the devices are placed, and the data produced. Doing so cuts down on the need for data traffic to be back-hauled to and from a remote data center, thus making it ideal for supporting the real time data delivery required by the IoT.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco and Verizon teamed up recently to show off the content-aware technology they say will seriously improve the performance and security of networks of the future, including 5G wireless and IoT environments.Cisco has long been a proponent of the technology known as Information Centric Networking (ICN), which lets applications request data by a name that is based on its content rather than its location (IP address).
[ 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. ]
Cisco says that by using such technology the network can locate and retrieve data dynamically from any source – an important feature for future mobile and IoT environments. As for improving security, Cisco says the technology secures and authenticates the data itself, rather than setting up point-to-point connections to authenticated hosts.To read this article in full, please click here
Is it only me who finds it just a bit dubious that carriers are advocating SD-WAN? SD-WAN was practically invented to get away from the clutches of carriers, and now we're supposed to trust them to be the stewards of WAN transformation?Carriers lost that privilege when their business model grew out-of-step with how we do business. We grew tired of being charged double Internet prices for MPLS capacity. In an era of self-service, carriers were still making us wait to troubleshoot problems. And we were astonished that new MPLS circuits could take weeks, even months, to bring into a new site when you could often get started with broadband in a matter of days and upgrade to DIA when ready.To read this article in full, please click here
The wildfire growth of IoT is arguably the most important trend happening in technology today, but the ease with which bad actors can exploit its manifold security vulnerabilities has been demonstrated many times in just the past couple of years.Despite the generally laissez-faire stance the U.S. takes toward regulating technology companies, the severity of the threat – IoT security issues affect healthcare, infrastructure, transportation and many other crucial parts of society – has some calling for regulation of the IoT.The hands-off approachGiven the speed at which technology, particularly around IoT, develops these days, from drawing board to prototype to production, plenty of people would argue that it’s impossible for a regulatory regime to keep pace.To read this article in full, please click here
Because Microsoft has shifted to a more gradual upgrade of Windows Server, many of the features that will become available with Windows Server 2019 have already been in use in live corporate networks, and here are half a dozen of the best.[ Check out REVIEW: VMware’s vSAN 6.6 and hear IDC’s top 10 data center predictions . | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
Enterprise-grade hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)
With the release of Windows Server 2019, Microsoft rolls up three years of updates for its HCI platform. That’s because the gradual upgrade schedule Microsoft now uses includes what it calls Semi-Annual Channel releases – incremental upgrades as they become available. Then every couple of years it creates a major release called the Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) version that includes the upgrades from the preceding Semi-Annual Channel releases.To read this article in full, please click here
As more and more enterprises move to hybrid cloud, there are some interesting relationships among enterprises, Internet and cloud exchanges, and colocation providers to satisfy IT strategies through hybrid clouds. In its Strategic Roadmap for Data Center Infrastructure, Gartner notes that “by 2019, 80% of enterprises will have an IT strategy that includes multiple Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers.” This is up from only 10% in 2015, while “by the end of 2018, 10% of enterprises will close their on-premises data centers entirely.”To read this article in full, please click here
Broadband data-over-light, sent through lighting fixtures commonly seen in commercial buildings, moves a step closer to possible mass adoption through an apparently functioning smart-office installation in Paris.Li-Fi uses light waves for data communications, as opposed to Wi-Fi, which uses microwave radio. Li-Fi has 10,000 times Wi-Fi radio’s RF spectrum, experts say. The pilot installation by Philips is at a French real-estate company’s office.Philips Lighting, the giant lighting-system maker, says it is now offering Li-Fi modems installed within its existing LED luminaires, such as its downlighters. A luminaire is the building-industry term for a complete lighting fixture.To read this article in full, please click here
The concept of intent-based networks (IBN) has been around for the better part of half a decade, but it’s really only come into its down in the past couple of years. The vision of a “self-driving” network had appeal but was largely science fiction.However, over the past couple of years, we have seen this vision turn into reality with several networking vendors coming to market with products that work. Many of the use cases are still fairly basic, but the foundation has now been laid and intent is where the new battleground for networking vendors will be fought.To read this article in full, please click here
It wasn’t that long ago that Amazon CTO Werner Vogels routinely said that any strategy that included on-premises data centers and the public cloud was really just a path to public cloud. Yet today, AWS touts architectures that include both.Microsoft has gone a step further with Azure Stack so that the public cloud vs. data center experience is as seamless as possible for its customers. Google, meanwhile, continues to invest in technologies that admit that some services will stay in private data centers (but you might as well make nice APIs for them, while also making it easier for on-premises business logic to consume public cloud services).To read this article in full, please click here
IBM’s Watson has earned fame besting Jeopardy! champions. But now the artificial intelligence (AI) platform is rolling out Watson Assistant, designed to “help bridge the information and data sharing gap between people and things.”Announced this morning at the IBM THINK 2018 conference in Las Vegas, an IBM spokesperson described Watson Assistant in an email as “an AI assistant for enterprises that can be accessed via voice or text interaction. Watson Assistant is helping businesses transform their customer experiences by bringing together data on all the places and things consumers interact with daily.” Watson Assistant is designed to be embedded in a wide variety of things, from cars to conference rooms, retail stores to banks.To read this article in full, please click here
The last command provides an easy way to review recent logins on a Linux system. It also has some useful options –- such as looking for logins for one particular user or looking for logins in an older wtmp file.The last command with no arguments will easily show you all recent logins. It pulls the information from the current wtmp (/var/log/wtmp) file and shows the logins in reverse sequential order (newest first).$ last
shs pts/1 192.168.0.15 Mon Mar 19 17:48 still logged in
shs tty2 /dev/tty2 Mon Mar 19 17:37 still logged in
shs pts/2 192.168.0.15 Mon Mar 19 17:22 - 17:23 (00:00)
jdoe pts/3 192.168.0.15 Mon Mar 19 16:51 - 17:22 (00:31)
To look for logins for just one particular user, supply their username as an argument.To read this article in full, please click here