Digital transformation is on every IT and business leader’s radar today. The path to it, though, may not be simple. While many industry pundits like to call out the likes of Uber and AirBnb, those digital natives didn’t have to worry about disrupting an existing business.To help mainstream businesses make that jump to a digital organization, Riverbed launched two new solutions at its Disrupt customer event last week in New York City.Enhanced network performance management
The first is a new version of its network and application performance management platform, SteelCentral, enabling IT staff to better understand digital experiences. This aligns with a new movement among the NPM/APM vendors to shift to digital experience management (DEM), providing visibility into customer or worker experience regardless of whether the infrastructure is on premises, in the public cloud or in a hybrid environment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As more organizations look to enable hybrid cloud computing, a big question remains: How do I connect my network to the cloud? This week Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services each released new products that make that process easier.Google’s Dedicated Interconnect is now generally available
Dedicated Interconnect is an important way for customers to connect to the public cloud. It allows organizations to connect their on-premises resources to a colocation facility and then that co-lo facility has a direct network connection to the public cloud. Public IaaS cloud providers like Google want to give their customers access to fast connections to their cloud, but they don’t want to connect to each individual customer’s site, so they’ve created this co-lo based Interconnect. Google runs the Interconnect and offers either a 99.9 or 99.99% service level agreement. Google is working with a handful of colocation vendors as the middle-man, including Equinix, Digital Realty and Infomart.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While the Internet of Things has enjoyed dizzying success when it comes to generating capital and public awareness for its furthered proliferation, several hurdles remain in its way. IoT-enthusiast familiar with its staggeringly quick development already know that the data distribution dilemma currently facing the IoT is perhaps its greatest obstacle towards future growth, yet few of them have solutions on how to go about solving this crisis.So, what exactly is the data distribution dilemma facing the IoT today, and what should governments, businesses, and private actors be doing to overcome this challenge? Solving the IoT’s data distribution nightmare will take serious investments and require new and better standards, but the cost of ignoring this growing predicament are too high to ignore.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The ThermoPro TP03A is an effective solution to achieve the most accurate temperature in a matter of seconds. With a simplistic yet practical design, and at the push of the button, the foldaway probe will pop open for quick an easy temperature reading, and when you're done taking the temperature measurement you can fold the probe back into the holding to ensure the probe is kept safe and clean. Stop overcooking or under-cooking your meat and perfect meat temperatures like a professional, ensuring the perfect temp every time you're grilling or cooking. It typically lists for $29.99 and is being discounted 65%, down to $10.49. Learn more or purchase the discounted ThermoPro TP03A Thermometer at Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Rack servers are data center workhorses – efficient, flexible and expandable. A rack lets IT pros fit many servers into a relatively small footprint, and typically it includes a cable-management system to keep the installation neat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
There seems to be a shift in our industry from wireless N to AC, as we have seen large leaps forward in bandwidth and client saturation handling. With more wireless options going in the workplace, widespread connectivity continues to rise and wireless requirements are becoming greater and greater.Now, with Wave 2 becoming more common, is AC really able to handle the tsunami-like wave of wireless internet requests to meet this growing demand?Also on Network World: REVIEW: Early Wave 2 Wi-Fi access points show promise
There's only one way to find out. We need to step out of the comfort zone provided by past wireless technologies and expand the idea of what wireless is capable of providing to meet these demands.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What if you could flip a switch and turn your stodgy old data center full of legacy apps into a cloud-enabled one capable of migrating apps and data to the public cloud with ease by containerizing your legacy apps?IBM says it has just such an offering in IBM Cloud Private, a platform focused on assisting private data centers looking for a relatively simple way to move into the cloud. The idea is to offer a consistent way of managing your application stack, regardless of where they reside. Also on Network World: IBM’s latest private cloud is built on Kubernetes, and is aimed at Microsoft
IBM Cloud Private takes middleware and other legacy applications, places them inside Kubernetes containers and transforms them into contemporary applications using Kubernetes container orchestration. The software itself is already containerized, including IBM tools and most major open source databases. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Car designers do it with wind tunnels. Architects do it models. But how do you test the design of a complex IoT system?It isn’t easy with potentially thousands of sensors sending millions of readings continuously. How do you check to make sure that your IoT design will work properly in real life? Check to make sure that different error conditions are handled properly, and corrective action taken on time?Simulated IoT devices can eliminate the guesswork from designing complex systems.Background
Dr. Michael Grieves at the University of Michigan first proposed the idea of a “digital twin”. A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical device to make sure that the design performs as intended. He defined Digital Twin Prototype (DTP) as an asset’s information. Such as a 3D model of the device, its Bill of Materials and Processes to fully describe the asset and how it should work. These digital proxies generate sensor readings and communicate just as their physical counterparts and help IoT designers with:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The recent news around VMware’s acquisition of SD-WAN provider VeloCloud is puzzling from a lot of angles but particularly in what it says about SD-WAN services.Let’s make a deal
VeloCloud is a leader, and some would say the leader, in the SD-WAN market. The company has been in the space since its founding in 2012 and has raised $84 million in private funding, according to CrunchBase. It claims around 1,000 enterprise customers (1,000).The VeloCloud acquisition will help VMware compete with Cisco, who acquired SD-WAN provider Viptela for $610 million in May. VeloCloud isn’t VMware’s first virtual networking acquisition. Back in 2012, the company acquired Nicira, which became the basis for its NSX network virtualization offering. Integrating the two technologies creates an interesting end-to-end solution. VeloCloud’s approach of coupling appliances with aspects of a cloud service, will play well with VMware’s premise-oriented strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What can you do to ensure your technical skills remain relevant and in demand even as technology evolves?For years, I've suggested that sysadmins and other technology professionals who want to stay ahead of the curve focus on:
Developing skills for the next wave of technology innovations
Routinely picking up some in-demand skills
Investing some of their time in side projects that may not pay off right away
While that still seems to be excellent advice, it appears a specific focus on the Internet of Things (IoT) should be added to the list. Earlier this year, Gartner predicted that 20.4 billion IoT devices will be connecting in 2020. That's just over two years from now, and that's a lot of devices. Srini Vemula, global product management leader at SenecaGlobal, believes this influx of new IoT devices will lead to tens of thousands of new jobs in the IoT economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
About to embark on deploying IPv6? First, you need to know some key differences in IPv6 address formats.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) does not have the explosive growth of the consumer internet. It’s a nitty-gritty, complicated, and sometimes downright boring business. It is too complex and diverse for explosive growth like the narrowly defined, one-size-fits-all iPhone. That said, the promise of rich returns on investment from new business models that are possible with IoT is very compelling.The only way to cut through the venture-driven IoT hype cycle is with conversations with builders and implementers at companies investing in IoT, such as Cisco’s co-innovation center chief, Maciej Kranz.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Public cloud or private cloud? Amazon or Azure? There once was a time when you could go to any bar in Las Vegas after a day of trade shows and hear people debating such topics, sometimes with great passion. But what has emerged more recently is the stance that you don’t have to choose one or the other, painting yourself into a figurative box of vendor lock-in. Instead, what more and more organizations are choosing is to not choose at all.Our friends at IDC call this Hybrid Cloud, but that terminology implies a single application using multiple clouds. It’s more accurate to say that organizations increasingly have a multiple cloud mindset. What does that mean? Choose the right cloud for the right job on an application-by-application basis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The rise of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) has been well documented over the past few years. The technology greatly reduces the operational overhead required to run workloads such as VDI and remote office/branch office workloads. The turnkey nature of HCI makes it easy to deploy and simple to operate while guaranteeing great performance. Recently, I ran across a company called Cohesity that brings the benefits of HCI to an area I had never considered it for — secondary storage. I understand that the topic of secondary storage may be boring, but it’s one of the biggest pain points for companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I spend most of my computing life in the Shell (command line, terminal or whatever you want to call it on your platform of choice). This can be a bit challenging, though, when I need to work with large groups of other people, especially in big enterprise companies that — well — use anything but the Shell.The problems that crop up are made worse when other people within your company use a different platform than you. I tend to use Linux. If I’m doing a lot of my daily work from a Linux terminal and the bulk of my co-workers use Windows 10 (entirely from the GUI side), things can get … problematic.Also on Network World: 11 pointless but awesome Linux terminal tricks
Luckily, over the past few years, I’ve figured out how to deal with these problems. I’ve found ways to make using a Linux (or other Unix-like systems) Shell much more doable within a non-Unix, corporate environment. These tools/tips apply equally well for SysAdmins working on a company’s servers as they do for developers or marketing people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What do the peaking colors of fall foliage, the nighttime appearance of the hunter’s moon, and escalating college football and NFL rivalries indicate? That autumn has officially arrived, and Thanksgiving is right around the corner.Thanksgiving is primarily associated with family and friends gathering together, enjoying an uncomfortable amount of turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie, and then lapsing into a tryptophan and sugar-induced state of semi-consciousness. While Americans may also associate Thanksgiving with the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians, the holiday actually spans cultures, continents and millennia. In ancient times, the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all feasted and paid tribute to their deities as an annual celebration of the harvest and its bounty.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM today announced a new version of its private cloud platform that supports the popular open source application container platform Kubernetes.IBM Cloud Private gives customers an option to deploy applications on to the private cloud software in three ways: Either through Kubernetes, through the container management platform Cloud Foundry, or through traditional virtual machines. IBM says the private cloud management software also allows customers to run other legacy apps in containers and connect them to off-premises resources.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What is hybrid cloud computing? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Telepresence has become a very intelligent business strategy, especially for companies that are spread across multiple sites or those with clients in many locations that they need to deal with on a fairly regular basis. Using what is in essence a fairly simple robot, anyone can transport himself to another location, move around through offices and interact face-to-face with people they might not otherwise ever meet. Granted they’re going to look something like large iPads held up by a couple metal rods riding on top of self-propelled vacuum cleaners, the experience is still surprisingly effective.I’ve recently had a chance to transport myself using one of the Beam presence systems built by Suitable Technologies. I sat in my office in the mountains in Virginia while being transported to an office suite in Palo Alto, California and interacted with two members of the staff. I had previously spoken with one of the same company’s customers at yet another location to get a feel for how they were using their Beams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While the public cloud continues to grow at the expense of on-premises data centers, not everything that moves to the cloud stays there. Some data comes back, for a variety of reasons. And while apps are moving to the cloud at a rapid clip, data is not.That’s the findings of a recent report by 451 Research commissioned by Schneider Electric, entitled “Customer Insight: Future-Proofing Your Colocation Business.” It finds, for example, that global operational square footage hosting cloud infrastructure will grow at a 16 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2017 to 2020, while the amount of on-premises enterprise data center capacity will drop four percentage points, from 77 to 73 percent in the same time period.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Imagine you are Clark Kent, CIO of a large organization in Metropolis, and current trends in network disaggregation continue. As such, you must now provide connectivity to three Azure data centers for Office 365; 20 AWS sites located all over the world for a host of outsourced IT applications; four corporate data centers (older applications); 10 Equinix data centers for outsourced private use; direct access to 25 additional cloud service offerings for security reasons, including UC services, Salesforce.com and Concur, to your 500 branch sites; and 30,000 telecommuting employees.Look up in the sky! It’s a WAN! No, it’s a SD-WAN! No, it’s... SuperWAN!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here