Industry veteran Tom Gillis, who left VMware in December, has returned to Cisco in a new but familiar role: senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Security Business Group. From 2007 to 2011, Gillis was vice president and general manager of Cisco’s then-called Security Technology Group, which focused on developing network, content and identity management products.After that, Gillis founded cloud computing firm Bracket Computing, which was acquired by VMware in May 2018.Gillis ran VMware's $2 billion networking and security business from that point until this past December, and he was responsible for a number of its core products, including VMware's NSX networking and network/edge software products. To read this article in full, please click here
I’ve predicted that virtual networks will be hot in 2023, but that begs the question of what exactly a “virtual network” is. One definition says, “not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so”, and that surely makes you wonder how businesses would be willing to commit to such a thing. Truth is, they already have, but I think it’s time to look closely at the concept of virtual networks, and to categorize what exactly is going on there. Why look at something that isn’t real and only appears to be? We’ll see.I could offer a lot of discussions on the early days of virtual network evolution here, but they’re probably as useless as a debate on where your lap goes when you stand up, an example of worthless effort I recall from a childhood book. Instead, let’s look at virtual networks from two directions—the user and the application—and see how those two directions are shaping virtual network technology, increasing its importance, and converging on a new network model overall.To read this article in full, please click here
The past three years have been an unprecedented period of disruption in the semiconductor industry. The Covid pandemic and ensuing lockdowns shut down manufacturing, there were interruptions in shipping, and then the war in Ukraine adversely impacted supplies of critical raw materials.The first half of 2022 saw 46% more supply chain disruptions than the first half of 2021, according to a research report released this fall by Resilinc, a supply chain resiliency company.To read this article in full, please click here
If networks are to deliver the full power of AI they will need a combination of high-performance connectivity and no packet lossThe concern is that today’s traditional network interconnects cannot provide the required scale and bandwidth to keep up with AI requests, said Martin Hull, vice president of Cloud Titans and Platform Product Management with Arista Networks. Historically, the only option to connect processor cores and memory have been proprietary interconnects such as InfiniBand, PCI Express and other protocols that connect compute clusters with offloads but for the most part that won’t work with AI and its workload requirements.Arista AI Spine
To address these concerns, Arista is developing a technology it calls AI Spine, which calls for switches with deep packet buffers and networking software that provides real-time monitoring to manage the buffers and efficiently control traffic.To read this article in full, please click here
Managing directories on Linux is easy, but the process gets more complex when you need to create, empty or remove large, complex directory structures. This post will take you from the most basic commands to some fairly complex ones that can help make the process easier.mkdir
The mkdir command can create a single directory like this:$ mkdir newdir
It can also create a complex directory and subdirectory structure with a command like the one below. The -p argument tells the command to create the base directory if it doesn't already exist.Each group of directory names that appears in the command shown – like {1,2,3} and {docs,script} – will result in a series of subdirectories being created at that level.To read this article in full, please click here
While the Biden administration’s ban on exports of certain chip technology to China is targeted at China’s military and industrial use, enterprises across the world will find their supply chains disrupted.
Geopolitical tensions among the US, China, and Taiwan are forcing a notable change to server manufacturing, according to Asian market research firm TrendForce, which predicts that core parts of the server supply chain will eventually shift to southeast Asia and the Americas. According to TrendForce’s research, Taiwan-based original design manufacturers (ODM) currently account for about 90% of global server motherboard production. A notable exception is Supermicro, which has a 1.5 million square-foot factory in Fremont, California. It also has an 800,000 square-foot facility in Taiwan.Ever since the start of the trade dispute between the US and China beginning in 2018, server ODMs began looking at moving their production lines from mainland China to Taiwan. Then, due to the explosion in construction of data centers across the Asia-Pacific region, motherboard makers began looking at southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Thailand for capacity expansion.To read this article in full, please click here
VPNs date back to the 1990s when the public internet lacked almost any form of security, and the technology was developed to provide secure and cost-effective connections across this insecure landscape.VPNs have become widely deployed across enterprise networks and experienced a surge during the pandemic, when companies had to scramble to provide secure remote access to employees who were suddenly working from home.VPNs remain popular today, but they are also slowly but surely being supplanted by more flexible, more secure, more granular alternatives, such as SD-WAN, Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA), and SASE, a cloud-based service that includes SD-WAN, ZTNA and other security features.To read this article in full, please click here
The year highlighted how vulnerable the technology sector is to the vagaries of geopolitics and the macroeconomy, as IT giants laid off workers, regulators cracked down on tech rule-breakers, nations negotiated data security regulations, the US-China chip war widened, and the Ukraine war disrupted business as usual.
What’s the single most important thing that enterprises should know about networking in 2023? Forget all that speeds-and-feeds crap you hear from vendors. The answer is that networking is now, and forever, linked to business applications, and those applications are linked now to the way that we use the Internet and the cloud. We’re changing how we distribute and deliver business value via networking, and so network technology will inevitably change too, and this is a good time to look at what to expect.Growth in Internet dependence
First, the Internet is going to get a lot better because it’s going to get a lot more important. It’s not just that the top-end capacities offered will be raised, in many cases above 2 Gbps. Every day, literally, people do more online, and get more interactive, dynamic, interesting, websites to visit and content to consume. Internet availability has been quietly increasing, and in 2023 there will be a significant forward leap there, in large part because people who rely on something get really upset when it’s not working.To read this article in full, please click here
The ss command is used to dump socket statistics on Linux systems. It serves as a replacement for the netstat command and is often used for troubleshooting network problems.What is a socket?
To make the best use of the ss command, it’s important to understand what a socket is. A socket is a type of pseudo file (i.e., not an actual file) that represents a network connection. A socket identifies both the remote host and the port that it connects to so that data can be sent between the systems. Sockets are similar to pipes except that pipes only facilitate connections between processes on the same system where sockets work on the same or different systems. Unlike pipes, sockets also provide bidirectional communication.To read this article in full, please click here
A month after the UK’s Competition Market’s Authority (CMA) announced it was investigating Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of VMware, European antitrust regulators have launched its own probe into the $61 billion deal.In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is five months into its own investigation of the deal.Meanwhile, the EU Commision said in a statement published on December 20 that it “is particularly concerned that the transaction would allow Broadcom to restrict competition in the market for certain hardware components which interoperate with VMware's software.”To read this article in full, please click here
HPE has announced new features for its GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, including Kubernetes support and workload-optimized instances.HPE launched GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise in June. It's an automated private cloud offering for enterprises looking to deploy both traditional workloads and cloud-native applications inside their data centers. The service includes virtual machines, bare metal workloads, and containers, all running on GreenLake’s on-premises consumption model.Among the new services HPE announced is the option to deploy Kubernetes container services through Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere. Customers can now run the same container runtimes on-premises that they use in the public cloud, with a consistent experience across both public and private clouds.To read this article in full, please click here
If not deployed properly, today’s whiz-bang network management tools wind up making more work for network admins rather than saving them time and reducing their overload.Wait, labor saving devices don’t save labor? Not really, at least when it comes to freeing up time for more important or rewarding activities.It’s not unlike the "labor saving appliance" revolution in the American home, especially in the post-WW2 era.I’m referring, of course, to Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s classic history of technology book, More Work for Mother, which explored in depth how various supposedly labor-saving advances in household technology did not reduce the amount of time those women who kept house spent on housekeeping. On the contrary, because they mainly mechanized or automated work previously done by servants, children, or (occasionally) men, these tech advances shifted women’s efforts from organizing such work to doing it. At the same time, with some kinds of work around food preparation and clothes washing, they also brought back “in-house” work that had been effectively outsourced to commercial laundries, bakeries, etc.To read this article in full, please click here
Hybrid and multicloud initiatives will continue to shape enterprise IT in 2023, and the impact on data-center networking will be felt across key areas including security, management, and operations. Network teams are investing in technologies such as SD-WAN and SASE, expanding automation initiatives, and focusing on skills development as more workloads and applications span cloud environments.“The most important core trend in data centers is the recognition that the hybrid cloud model – which combines current transaction processing and database activities with a cloud-hosted front-end element for the user interface – is the model that will dominate over time,” said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. and a Network World columnist. The industry is seeing a slow modernization of data center applications to support the hybrid-cloud model, Nolle says, “and included in that is greater componentization of those applications, a larger amount of horizontal traffic, and a greater need to manage security within the hosted parts of the application.”To read this article in full, please click here
The cyberthreat landscape weighs heavily on the minds of business and IT leaders — and for good reason. Statista reports that in this year’s third quarter alone, nearly 15 million data records were exposed worldwide.The risk of data breaches places intense pressure on IT and security teams to ensure corporate networks are not only protected, but also kept up to date. That’s a tall order given the increasingly complex network architectures that mix on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In addition, hybrid workforces have created multiple paths for data and apps traffic that must be secured.To read this article in full, please click here
Sixty-two percent of organizations are planning to guarantee flexible work options to remain competitive in the marketplace, according to Foundry’s 2022 Future of Work Study. That’s causing some concerns around effective collaboration, IT staff and employee burnout, and the ability to maintain secure systems and processes.But a network driven by artificial intelligence (AI) can help address these issues. Technologies including automation, machine learning, and natural language processing are used to gather data, analyze it, and then deliver insights or proactive recommendations for a more efficient, robust, and secure network.To read this article in full, please click here
Arista Networks has a new high-end data-center switch as well as several smaller ones designed to provide more configuration and upgrade choices to fit the specific needs of individual organizations.“Different customer use cases and application deployments within a single organization have differing requirements. Each deployment needs a right-sized solution—few applications need 400G of bandwidth per server today, but many organizations need to do the groundwork for the move away from 10/25G,” wrote Martin Hull, vice president of Cloud Titans and Platform Product Management with Arista in a blog about the new systems.To read this article in full, please click here
Arista Networks has a new high-end data-center switch as well as several smaller ones designed to provide more configuration and upgrade choices to fit the specific needs of individual organizations.“Different customer use cases and application deployments within a single organization have differing requirements. Each deployment needs a right-sized solution—few applications need 400G of bandwidth per server today, but many organizations need to do the groundwork for the move away from 10/25G,” wrote Martin Hull, vice president of Cloud Titans and Platform Product Management with Arista in a blog about the new systems.To read this article in full, please click here