Are you getting the most out of your next-generation firewall? Probably not if you take to heart recent research from SafeBreach.SafeBreach, a relative newcomer to the security arena — it was founded in 2014 — sells premise and service packages that continually run network breach simulations that help customers locate and remediate security problems.RELATED:
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Specifically the company deploys software probes distributed throughout customers’ networks, and attempts to establish connections among devices and network segments just as a hacker would do in attacking your data. These breach attempts are defined by SafeBreach’s Hacker’s Playbook, a library of known attack methods that uncover network security weaknesses and how these vulnerabilities might be exploited.To read this article in full, please click here
Next-gen, intelligent, flexible, automated, agile, optimized, programmable, elastic.Our industry has been using these words for years to describe the end game for networks. With Ciena’s recent 25-year anniversary, we’ve been spending quite a bit of time looking back at the early days – and it seems like the entire industry has been using these aspirational network descriptions for as long as there have been networks.Maybe 2018 is the year “aspirational” starts to become “actuality.”Like no other time in our industry’s history, a collection of technologies and advancements is bringing the long-desired goal of more automated network closer to reality.To read this article in full, please click here
Lenovo has introduced a new high-density server “tray” for high-performance computing (HPC) environments with the newest generation of water cooling technology it co-developed with a German HPC firm.Unlike your typical water-cooled system, where the water is chilled almost to a drinkable state, the ThinkSystem SD650 high-density server tray — so called because of its design and shape — is designed to operate using warm water, up to 50°C, or 122°F.Read also: Data center cooling market set to explode in the coming years
There is a mindset that CPUs have to be chilled as though they were cold cuts, when Intel says they can handle much higher temperatures. Xeons can handle temps of up to 75°C without becoming unstable or crashing.To read this article in full, please click here
My new iPhone X actually recognizes me! This is an example of Smart Technology.Most of us are expecting a revolution of products and services that have embedded intelligence or smarts. Medical diagnostic support is being aided by computer intelligence with the goal to improve the physician’s understanding of the patient to improve the diagnosis, therapies and resulting patient outcomes without adding more burden on the clinician. Look at cars – now, autonomous self-driving vehicles have the potential to alleviate congestion and improve the environment in ways we couldn’t imagine.To perform facial recognition, the iPhone X must understand the language of faces. This includes attributes of faces, such as shape of eyes, noses, cheekbones, and jaw. It’s safe to say that any smart system needs to understand the language of its purpose. Self-driving cars must understand the language of driving which includes maps, roads, signs, speed limits, weather, and traffic signals. Smart medical diagnostics need to understand the language of medicine, including possible diagnosis and probabilities.To read this article in full, please click here
Wide area networks (WANs) were not designed for the load that most enterprises need them to handle today. Demand for data across the distributed enterprise is growing exponentially; virtually all enterprises are using cloud technology in some form; and the Internet of Things is growing expanding the scope of networks far beyond servers, PCs, tablets and smartphones. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that many are eagerly turning to software-defined WANs (SD-WANs) to deal with those growing needs.SD-WANs reflected the ongoing movement to software-defined IT assets and increasing reliance on virtualization to make those assets available where and when needed. But few organizations have the fortitude—or budget—to rip and replace core pieces of their existing infrastructure, such as MPLS, which provides Class of Service prioritization and Quality of Service management.To read this article in full, please click here
Most enterprises rely on a combination of MPLS and IPsec to implement virtual private networks (VPNs) across the organization’s wide area network (WAN). But the emergence of mobile devices and cloud-based applications, along with enormous growth in data volumes, has them scrambling for more flexible, more cost-effective options. Many expect software-defined network (SDN) technologies, and in particular SD-WANs, to provide the solution, but sorting through all the options can be a challenge.Backed by venture capital, SD-WAN appliance vendors have been popping up all over the place. But appliance-based point solutions represent somewhat of a do-it-yourself scenario, and it’s important to understand whether they’ll inhibit or enhance what an enterprise can gain from SD-WAN deployment.To read this article in full, please click here
Digital technology is driving fundamental changes in the educational process. As digital devices and the internet become an integral part of students’ lives, schools are finding they must support new learning solutions. Digital learning is a new constant in the school day.New digital solutions and technologies such as virtual/augmented reality, digital whiteboards, distance learning, personalized learning, artificial intelligence, and gamification are creating new demands on schools’ IT capabilities and infrastructure. And as these and other exciting new technologies come into regular use, many schools find they need to upgrade their server room into an “always-on,” flexible, and cost-efficient data center designed to support 21st century learning.To read this article in full, please click here
Performance is critical when evaluating data center intrusion-prevention systems (DCIPS), which face significantly higher traffic volumes than traditional IPSes.A typical IPS is deployed at the corporate network perimeter to protect end-user activity, while a DCIPS sits inline, inside the data center perimeter, to protect data-center servers and the applications that run on them. That requires a DCIPS to keep pace with traffic from potentially hundreds of thousands of users who are accessing large applications in a server farm, says NSS Labs, which recently tested five DCIPS products in the areas of security, performance and total cost of ownership.To read this article in full, please click here
Earlier this week, Juniper Networks announced a bevvy of new networking products. (Note: Juniper Networks is a client of ZK Research.) In his blog post about the products, Andy Patrizio did an effective job covering the basics of the news. But left out some important points, and I wanted to make sure those got called out, including Juniper's tagline “multi-cloud ready." Hybrid, multi-cloud is inevitable
As I’ve pointed out in many of my posts, hybrid multi-cloud environments are inevitable for most organizations. Small businesses may be able to build an IT strategy that is all public cloud, but any large company is going to choose a mix of private and public clouds.To read this article in full, please click here
As we begin 2018, enterprises continue to accelerate their migration of workloads to public cloud service providers (AWS, Azure and Google), often as part of an overall digital transformation (DT) and cloud-first IT strategy. This is not surprising as IDC predicts that by the end of this year, nearly 80% of workloads will be processed in cloud data centers.To read this article in full, please click here
Network-attached storage (NAS) is a category of file-level storage that’s connected to a network and enables data access and file sharing across a heterogeneous client and server environment.“Ideally, NAS is platform- and OS-independent, appears to any application as another server, can be brought online without shutting down the network and requires no changes to other enterprise servers,” says research firm Gartner in its definition of NAS.
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NAS history: the evolution of network-attached storage
NAS evolved from file servers used in the 1980s to provide access to files for network clients. NAS devices typically consist of bundled hardware and software with a built-in operating system, and they typically use industry-standard network protocols such as SMB and NFS for remote file service and data sharing and TCP/IP for data transfer. In an enterprise setting, NAS can allow IT teams to streamline data storage and retrieval while consolidating their server and storage infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here
Earlier this month, Cisco updated its Global Cloud Index (GCI), giving rise to a number of news stories that were filled with doom and gloom for corporate IT departments. (Note: Cisco is a client of ZK Research.)For example, one of the articles stated that based on the GCI, cloud computing would virtually replace traditional data centers within three years. While it's true public clouds are growing, private clouds are also increasing. It's a multi-cloud era, as Cisco's Kip Compton writes.To read this article in full, please click here
Zwanger-Pesiri Radiology's journey from MPLS to SD-WAN networking began last spring when Joseph Funaro sat down to review carrier contracts that were up for renewal and realized that he could not only save his company money, but also improve network resiliency and his users' application experience.With 24 outpatient radiology clinics throughout the greater New York metro area requesting or transmitting a terabyte of imaging records a day and requiring access to more than 1.2 petabytes of stored patient data, Zwanger-Pesiri, the largest outpatient medical imaging center in the country by volume, depends on its WAN to provide timely, effective patient service.To read this article in full, please click here
Beyond the record-setting day of total offense generated in the Philadelphia Eagles' thrilling 41-33 win over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 52, there was also a record 16.31 terabytes of Wi-Fi data used during the game, the most ever reported for a single-day, single-building event.While you probably won't have to worry about having almost 70,000 people show up at your building for the day, there are plenty of lessons for any big-building owner or operator to learn from how U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis prepared for its "super" wireless stress test, and how you might better prepare for your own big-demand wireless days, whenever they might arrive.To read this article in full, please click here
Wi-Fi is quite fickle. The contention between Wi-Fi devices and the dynamic communication medium of the airwaves makes it a sensitive technology with many settings and situations that can slow it down.And even if you aren’t using high-bandwidth devices and applications, faster Wi-Fi is always better.+RELATED: REVIEW: 5 top hardware-based Wi-Fi test tools; 802.11: Wi-Fi standards and speeds explained+To read this article in full, please click here
All too often, IT teams make the mistake of thinking about Internet access as a commodity, failing to consider how well connected a provider is with the rest of the Internet. Picking the right Internet service, especially internationally, can be extremely important when evaluating SD-WAN solutions from companies like Aryaka, Cato Networks, Cisco (Viptela or Meraki), Open Systems, Silver Peak, Versa or VMware (Velocloud).To better understand why looking at the quality of an Internet service is so important, I gathered global pricing and configuration information from my friends at GlobalInternet, a global aggregator of Internet access connections. Here’s what we found.To read this article in full, please click here
My project engineering staff has been getting more and more information requests for Cisco’s new line of Catalyst 9000 switches, especially the 9300 switch. That has me wondering why.Cisco touts the Catalyst 9300 Series as the next generation of the industry's most widely deployed stackable switching platform that’s built for security, the Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud computing. It’s part of a line of network switches that form the foundation for Cisco's Software-Defined Access, its leading enterprise architecture.One reason for the increased interest could be Cisco’s recently announced new intent-based networking system. Cisco believes that by adopting an intent-based approach, networks will be able to deliver a solution that introduces an onslaught of applications and devices that provide greater efficiency and address new security threats.To read this article in full, please click here
If you check the processes running on your Linux systems, you might be curious about one called "kerneloops". And that’s “kernel oops”, not “kerne loops” just in case you didn’t parse that correctly. Put very bluntly, an “oops” is a deviation from correct behavior on the part of the Linux kernel. Did you do something wrong? Probably not. But something did. And the process that did something wrong has probably at least just been summarily knocked off the CPU. At worst, the kernel may have panicked and abruptly shut the system down.For the record, “oops” is NOT an acronym. It doesn’t stand for something like “object-oriented programming and systems” or “out of procedural specs”; it actually means “oops” like you just dropped your glass of wine or stepped on your cat. Oops! The plural of "oops" os "oopses".To read this article in full, please click here
SD-WAN is quickly approaching mainstream adoption by enterprises; Ovum’s research finds that about one-third of enterprises are trialing or using the technology. Once service providers gain SD-WAN experience, they also find the technology a versatile tool for their broader platform, services, and architecture plans.Interoute, a pan-European and global operator of network and cloud services, provides an example. At the beginning of 2017, the company updated its Enterprise Digital Platform – an evolution of the operator’s edge, core, and cloud offerings designed to fit together and accelerate enterprises’ end-to-end performance – with fully featured SD-WAN as an integral component. The provider’s platform offers customers commercial and service-level flexibility through a mix of on- and off-net, public internet, and private IP sites to a common fabric, and it optimizes performance of application delivery, including optional WAN optimization.To read this article in full, please click here
Intel has launched its brand-new lineup of Xeon processors designed specifically for edge computing needs, where space, heat, and power are all of greater concern than in a traditional data center design.The Xeon D-2100 processors are the successor to the 1000-D series that Intel introduced last year. They are high-powered SoCs with anywhere from four to 18 Skylake-generation cores and sport the full range of Skylake features, including VT-X/VT-d for virtualization, RAS features and the entire TXT, AVX-512, TSX Instruction sets.Also read: What is edge computing and how it’s changing the network
The platform supports up to 512 GB of memory, up to 32 PCI Express 3.0 lanes and up to 20 Flexible High Speed I/O. TDP ranges from 60 to 100 watts, slightly lower than the traditional Xeon design. All told, there are six processors in the Xeon D-2100 family, ranging from four cores to 18 and from 2.3Ghz to 2.8Ghz in speed.To read this article in full, please click here