Ciena’s Blue Planet team have won numerous accolades during this past year’s networking industry’s award season. I’m pleased to share the news about another recent award, won alongside our partner DGIT Systems, that recognizes the business impact our combined work is having on service providers’ business and operational agility. Ciena We earned our latest recognition from the TM Forum at the organization’s TM Forum Live! Asia event held in Singapore this past December. There, the Ciena Blue Planet team and DGIT were awarded Outstanding Catalyst for Business Impact for a collaborative proof-of-concept titled “Partnering Platforms for MEF Services.” The Catalyst demonstration, which was championed by Telstra, Vodafone Group and Orange, showcased the use of open APIs to automate the activation of inter-carrier Ethernet services.To read this article in full, please click here
The role of Wi-Fi has changed in most companies and is no longer something that’s merely convenient. Rather, it’s critical to a business’s ability to ensure its customer are happy and workers are productive.Given the growing importance of Wi-Fi, it’s essential vendors make products that are easy to set up, particularly for small businesses where the technical acumen of the person setting the product up is likely to be low.HPE had inquires as to the importance of having the product be easy to setup and manage, and I said that I felt it was the most important attribute. In fact, I chose the solution for my house — which includes four indoor access points (APs), one outdoor AP, and a 48 port Ethernet switch — based on how easy the product was to operate. I'm very technical, but I really can't be bothered to fiddle around with doing things in a CLI.To read this article in full, please click here
As data centers are called upon to handle an explosion of unstructured data fed into a variety of cutting-edge applications, the future for FPGAs looks bright.That’s because FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays, are essentially chips that can be programmed, after manufacturing, to act as custom accelerators for workloads including machine-learning, complex data analysis, video encoding, and genomics – applications that have far-reaching consequences for communications, networking, health care, the entertainment industry and many other businesses.Such applications lend themselves to parallel processing, an important feature of FPGAs, which can also be reconfigured on the fly to handle new features as the nature of these workloads evolve.To read this article in full, please click here
As data centers are called upon to handle an explosion of unstructured data fed into a variety of cutting-edge applications, the future for FPGAs looks bright.That’s because FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays, are essentially chips that can be programmed, after manufacturing, to act as custom accelerators for workloads including machine-learning, complex data analysis, video encoding, and genomics – applications that have far-reaching consequences for communications, networking, health care, the entertainment industry and many other businesses.[ 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. ] Such applications lend themselves to parallel processing, an important feature of FPGAs, which can also be reconfigured on the fly to handle new features as the nature of these workloads evolve.To read this article in full, please click here
Hyperconvergence is winning over enterprises that are drawn to its potential to ease management, streamline the deployment of new workloads, and optimize infrastructure costs.As much as 20 percent of business-critical applications currently deployed on three-tier IT infrastructure will transition to hyperconverged infrastructure by 2020, predicts Gartner, which recently gave the technology its own magic quadrant.[ Check out our What is hyperconvergence? and learn whether your network and team are up to hyperconverged storage. ] The magic quadrant is Gartner’s signature format for tech market analysis, and in prior years, the research firm tackled hyperconvergence as part of its integrated-systems research.To read this article in full, please click here
Digital transformation is ushering in what the organizers of this year’s Pacific Telecommunications Council’s (PTC) 2018 global conference called “a new decade of connections.” The global trends driving digital include greater technology use, urbanization, data sovereignty, cybersecurity and global trade of digital services, as reported in the Global Interconnection Index, a market study published by Equinix. These macro trends are behind the creation of increasing amounts of data coming from new sources, such as digital media, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), big data and security analytics, augmented/virtual reality and the Internet of Things (IoT).To read this article in full, please click here
Remember this scene from the movie Shrek? The big ogre was explaining to Donkey that ogres are very complicated, and like onions, they have layers. Donkey, of course, didn’t like the analogy because not everyone likes onions and would have preferred cake as everyone likes cake, but he did seem to understand that ogres did indeed have layers after it was explained to him. Orges and onions have layers, but what else does? Or at least should? Security for SD-WANs — but that may not seem obvious to everyone.Also read: The case for securing the SD-WAN | Sign up: Get the latest tech news sent directly to your in-box This week SD-WAN provider, Aryaka, which is now neck and neck with VeloCloud/VMware in market share, according to IHS Markit, announced Passport, a multi-layered security platform and ecosystem that provides best-of-breed security at every level of a software-defined WAN (SD-WAN).To read this article in full, please click here
The industrial internet of things is growingImage by Peter Sayer/IDGWhen we talk about the internet of things, consumer applications too often get the lion’s share of the attention. But there are also a growing number of industrial applications for IoT technologies, from building better mousetraps to preventing theft of manhole covers.To read this article in full, please click here
The Internet of Things (IoT) has transformed how industries operate and how people interact with one another. We have seen an impressive array of new IoT deployments from an explosion of smart city applications across the U.S., to sensors implanted in the horns of critically-endangered rhinos in Africa. The evolution of IoT has connected devices at record speed and provided useful business intelligence to solve complex, real-world problems.IoT devices outnumbered the world’s population for the first time this year. In a recent report, worldwide spending for IoT in 2017 is estimated to have grown 16.7% reaching $800 billion with an expected total of $1.4 trillion per year by 2021. The proliferation of IoT devices can be attributed to the fact that it is now much cheaper and easier to gather information from sensors.To read this article in full, please click here
You would think that modern farms would be fertile ground for the Internet of Things (IoT). And in many ways, you’d be right: Smart tractors and other farm equipment, coupled with GPS-equipped smart sensors tracking everything temperature to moisture to soil acidity, mean the IoT can help today’s high-tech farmers plant and harvest more efficiently than ever before.Who benefits from IoT on the farm? But if you believe a recent expose in Motherboard, all is not well down on the IoT farm. It turns out that many of the benefits of IoT — and the big data it generates — in agriculture fall not to the farmers, but to the so-called BigAg equipment makers and seed and fertilizer companies.To read this article in full, please click here
A recent blog post about the negative impact of a 1990s server room talked about downtime and its tremendous impact on any organization. It is now incumbent upon the IT team to do all it can to ensure that IT systems—and the infrastructure that supports them—are as reliable as possible. The spread of digital systems to every aspect of the business makes any service interruption a serious problem for all employees and many of your customers.Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) depend on their servers, storage, and network equipment to keep the company running, but failures do occur. In many cases, these outages result not from the equipment itself, but the racks, cooling, and power infrastructure on which this equipment depends. Based on research from the Institute, cooling and power failures that result from outmoded rack or data center infrastructure cause more than one-third of all unplanned outages. However, an outage is more than just an interruption in business operations; it can result in substantial data loss. To read this article in full, please click here
The M&A activity in the chip business isn’t restricted to the big guys snapping up promising startups. The titans are talking marriage, but really, there should be no merger between any of the three giants that are Intel, Broadcom, and Qualcomm.On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Intel was closely watching Broadcom’s hostile bid for Qualcomm in the hopes that Broadcom would fail so it could buy Broadcom. The deal would be valued at an insane $170 billion.Intel issued a denial over the weekend, saying it was only looking to assimilate and absorb several recent acquisitions.The White House steps in, stops Broadcom-Qualcomm merger Meanwhile, the Broadcom-Qualcomm talks persisted despite Qualcomm’s resistance to the idea until Monday, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order blocking the merger, citing national security concerns. I didn’t think he could do that.To read this article in full, please click here
What do you do if you’re struggling with infrastructure and stability? Maybe you’re a startup with no time for infrastructure. Maybe you’re a business that is reluctant to invest, with an IT gap that is hard to close. The stress, the worry and the escalation calls can keep you up at night – and then beat you down the next day.To regain your balance, first take a deep breath. Then consider these 11 steps to help you better align the people, processes and technology around your IT infrastructure: Reduce IT complexity. In a recent survey of 800 CIOs, more than three out of four say increased IT complexity could make it impossible to manage digital performance. Indeed, a single web transaction may now cross an average of 35 different technology systems, up from 22 five years ago. Is that sustainable? If you’re unable to handle your current level of complexity, review your operations, peel back the layers and make sure you’re building from a solid foundation. Delegate. Assign members of your team to key activities. Make sure they are enabled and understand they have authority to solve problems. It sounds simple, but many entry-level IT professionals worry that Continue reading
AvaⓇ Robotics, a startup with strong technical ties to iRobot, has just announced its telepresence robot. Her name is Ava and she’s likely to win a lot of hearts. For one thing, Ava is quite perceptive, using video technology from Cisco and integrating with Cisco Spark (which provides tools for team messaging, online meetings, and white boarding). Ava is also quite friendly. She allows her users to participate in remote meetings, wander down hallways at other facilities while chatting with colleagues, and enjoy face to face discussions with people who may physically be thousands of miles away.Telepresence robots provide a lot of benefits to companies that are spread across many locations – especially those spanning continents -- or with staff who work from home. They make work relationships considerably more productive -- even for individuals who may have never met in person. Carrying on casual conversations and checking remote data centers and manufacturing facilities (sometimes safer than being there in person) can make huge differences in how staffs coordinate and get important work done.To read this article in full, please click here
As the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon continues to grow, Microsoft has responded by contributing two new editions of Windows 10 – Core and Enterprise – that are aimed at radically different parts of the devices and systems market.Here's how Windows 10 IoT is used today, and where it might be going in the future.Windows 10 IoT Core The Core edition is a barebones Windows kernel that has been stripped down significantly in order to run on low-power hardware. It is not a full version of Windows, but it is enough to light up the hardware and run whatever application is being designed for that board. This version of Windows 10 has no shell and essentially supports only universal apps – those coded to run in the managed environment of the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and NOT traditional x86 or x64 apps. This OS version supports a maximum of 256MB of RAM and 2GB of device storage and can run on the x86 chip platform or the ARM platform for low-power devices.To read this article in full, please click here
The ip command has a lot to tell you about the configuration and state of your network connections, but what do all those words and numbers mean? Let’s take a deep dive in and see what all the displayed values are trying to tell you.When you use the ip a (or ip addr) command to get information on all the network interfaces on your system, you're going to see something like this:$ ip a 1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000 link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00 inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever inet6 ::1/128 scope host valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 2: enp0s25: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP group default qlen 1000 link/ether 00:1e:4f:c8:43:fc brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 192.168.0.24/24 brd 192.168.0.255 scope global dynamic enp0s25 valid_lft 57295sec preferred_lft 57295sec inet6 fe80::2c8e:1de0:a862:14fd/64 scope link valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever The two interfaces on this system — the loopback (lo) and network (enp0s25) — are displayed along with a lot of stats. The "lo" interface is clearly the loopback. We can see the loopback IPv4 address (127.0.0.1) and the loopback Continue reading
It’s no secret that enterprises are looking at SD-WAN as the means for evolving their networks. The technology improves on MPLS with better agility, more capacity increased resiliency and, of course, cost savings. Those advantages are in much need; just ask anyone who’s runs an MPLS network. They’ll tell you about its high costs, long provisioning times, and susceptibility to last-mile failures.But keep listening and MPLS customers are also bound to talk about the technology’s rock-solid reliability. They’ll hate the price and delays, but they’ll love their SLA-backed performance and how the MPLS provider takes care of everything — the last mile connectivity, managing the backbone, consolidated billing and more.To read this article in full, please click here
Voice is becoming a pervasive way to manage and interact with everyday tech devices, going from initial adoption in phones and smart speakers toward smartwatches, cars, laptops, home appliances and much more.Cloud platforms take most of the praise for enabling voice assistant services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant or Microsoft Cortana – neglecting due credit to the increasing role that edge computing plays in enabling voice interfaces. A substantial amount of processing and analysis occur on devices themselves to allow users to interface with them by simply talking.Keyword detection Voice-enabled devices are not constantly recording audio and sending it to the cloud to determine if someone is giving them an instruction. That would not only be a privacy concern, but also a waste of energy, computing and network resources. Having to send all words to the cloud and back also introduces latency and slows the responsiveness of the system. Today’s voice interfaces typically use keyword or “wake-word” detection, dedicating a small portion of edge computing resources (i.e. computing done on the device itself or “at the edge”) to process microphone signals while the rest of the system remains idle. This is a power-efficient approach particularly important Continue reading
Marvell Semiconductor is the first semiconductor to ship networking chips supporting the 802.3cd standard that will pump up Ethernet ports to 400Gbps max.The 802.3cd standard is designed to eventually replace the current physical Ethernet ports, which run at 25Gbps to 100Gpbs, with ports that will run at 50Gbps, 200Gbps, and 400Gbps.And Marvell is the first chip vendor out of the gate with support for the standard in its Alaska C 88X7120 transceivers. The chips aren’t fully cooked, but they are sampling to customers. Sampling is to semiconductors what beta testing is to software.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco this week took the wraps off new software packages it claims will help customers manage their biggest networking blind spot: the software-defined wide area network or SD-WAN.The SD-WAN is typically made of diverse networks and technologies that many times are outside the control of IT. Add to that the increased use of multi-cloud services and other advances, and the traditional complexity of the WAN has been increased, Cisco stated.+RELATED: SD-WAN: What it is and why you'll use it some day; How to negotiate a Cisco Enterprise Agreement that works for you+To read this article in full, please click here