Long-term storage—archiving—requires a very different approach than backup and recovery where throughput and deduplication are the main concerns. Archiving calls for storing data for long periods without becoming corrupted, so when it is retrieved, it is exactly what got stored 10 or 20 years ago.For most organizations that reach a certain size, standardized linear tape open (LTO) magnetic tape is the best choice. But for those that cannot justify the cost or believe tape is a thing of the past, there are three viable alternatives: object storage in the cloud, on-premises disk storage, and optical media.To read this article in full, please click here
By: Nav Chander, Head of Service Provider SD-WAN/SASE Product Marketing.Since the early days of the global COVID-19 pandemic, enterprise IT staff have been working hard to keep corporate networks on pace with the changing requirements of the business, as most application resources would no longer be serving centralized groups. This meant updating cloud, networking, and security infrastructure to adapt to the new realities of hybrid work. To achieve these aims, enterprise IT teams have reexamined technology pillars that start with the letter S: SD-WAN, SASE, and now Security Service Edge (SSE), to support these cloud-first digital transformations enterprises demand.To read this article in full, please click here
Your network vendor has probably already told you that network as a service or NaaS would improve your network and bottom line. They’ve probably told you that they offer a NaaS strategy. The first statement is true, and the second is fast becoming irrelevant, because the fact is that you have a better, vendor-independent, NaaS option already. It’s called the internet.The definition for NaaS that’s recently taken hold is financial more than technical—NaaS is a strategy for expensing network technology rather than building networks from capital purchases. Some vendor NaaS is little more than the equivalent of an auto lease, which lets companies expense cars rather than make capital purchases. Others could add in management services or usage pricing. Is this really NaaS? Uber is driving-as-a-service, not auto leasing. If we want network-as-a-service, we have to look at something that’s really a service.To read this article in full, please click here
IT vendors typically race to deliver incremental improvements to existing product lines, but occasionally a truly disruptive technology comes along. One of those disruptive technologies, which is beginning to find its way into enterprise data centers, is High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM).HBM is significantly faster than incumbent memory chip technologies, uses less power and takes up less space. It is becoming particularly popular for resource-intensive applications such as high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI).To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco is prepping its high-end data-center Nexus switch family for high-speed Ethernet that will better support high-bandwidth applications such as AI and cloud-native. The vendor rolled out five new Nexus data-center switches that include improved support for 100/400Gb Ethernet networks, but its flagship box—the 9800—now includes a migration path to support 800GbE requirements.
[ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
The new modular data-center switch product family with 14.4Tb/s fully encrypted bandwidth per slot. The Cisco Nexus 9800 Series features eight-slot and four-slot chassis that can scale from 57Tb/s to 115Tb/s with a combination of various first-generation line cards and fabric modules. Each line card slot can support 400GbE or 100GbE or 10/25/50GbE ports. The eight-slot option could support up to 288 400GbE ports, well above the current 9000’s 32-port capacity.To read this article in full, please click here
IT process automation sells itself: automating tasks is not only cheaper than paying a human to perform repetitive activities, but it’s also more efficient and predictable.While it’s possible to develop automation tools in-house with enterprise staff, that can be challenging, so ultimately, to embrace automation in a big way, it may be necessary to enlist commercial software tools.
[ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
Some tasks are simpler to automate than others—managing IT systems, provisioning physical and virtual machines, managing server configuration, identifying policy drift—and many IT systems are now built with features that make it easier to move along the path toward automation without seeking commercial platforms.To read this article in full, please click here
Digital infrastructure outages have gotten more and more expensive over the course of the past several years, according to a report from the Uptime Institute. Meanwhile, the total number of major outages has remained the same—meaning that, on average, an increasingly large amount of money is getting spent on recovering from each disruption.The proportion of individual outages resulting in losses of over $100,000 is increasing, according to the report, up to 47% of all outages in 2021 from 40% in the previous year. The institute said that, while it doesn't calculate an average overall cost per outage, overall trends are toward more costs being incurred by the average outage.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco is taking a big step toward cloud-management of both its Catalyst campus and Nexus data center equipment.At the Cisco Live customer event this week, the company rolled out two cloud-based management services that provide more options for enterprises to support hybrid workforces.
[ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
Catalyst management in the cloud
The first service, Cloud Management for Cisco Catalyst, lets customers manage and troubleshoot Catalyst 9000 switching and wireless campus and branch devices from the company’s cloud-based Meraki dashboard, which can manage and troubleshoot a wide variety of devices and networks from a single screen. According to Cisco, Catalyst customers can run a CLI command with information about their organization, and it will move management of that device over to the Meraki cloud.To read this article in full, please click here
France-based IT company Atos has announced plans to restructure in the wake of the sudden resignation of its CEO, Rodolphe Belmer. The plan to split its operations and sell assets saw the company's shares fall by more than 25% Tuesday.The potential separation will see Atos split up into two publicly listed entities: SpinCo will include company's Evidian subsidiary, bringing together Atos' big data and security (BDS) business units, and overseen by Philippe Oliva; TFCo will house Atos' legacy Tech Foundations unit and be managed by Nourdine Bihmane.To read this article in full, please click here
Wireless equipment manufacturer Qualcomm Monday announced that it had finalized a deal to acquire Israel-based Cellwize, a maker of radio access network (RAN) management technology that uses AI-based automation to streamline the deployment of 5G infrastructure.In particular, the company's offerings aim to simplify the process of designing and deploying 5G networks for both mobile operators and enterprises looking to set up private 5G networks of their own, by automating the deployment of access points, simplifying site deployments, and more.To read this article in full, please click here
Pure Storage announced updates to its AIRI//S line of AI-ready infrastructure, which it co-developed with Nvidia.The two vendors launched AIRI in 2018, claiming it was the first AI-oriented reference architecture that simplified the process of building an AI infrastructure by connecting compute with storage. AIRI is essentially a combination of Pure’s scale-out FlashBlade//S and Nvidia’s DGX ultra-dense GPU box. Pure provided the storage, and Nvidia provided the compute.This latest move, unveiled at the Pure//Accelerate techfest22 conference in Los Angeles, is quite an advancement, however.The new release of AIRI//S is powered by Nvidia DGX A100 systems, featuring end-to-end networking provided by Nvidia’s Quantum InfiniBand and Spectrum networking. A DGX A100 system comes with eight Ampere-generation A100 GPUs and up to ten ConnectX-6 network adapters from Mellanox.To read this article in full, please click here
Dynamic host-configuration protocol (DHCP) has a lot of benefits, including saving time by assigning IP addresses and other attributes to networked devices rather than IT pros having to do it manually.Sometimes, though, problems arise that eat up time in a different way. This is one such case affecting Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 9600 Layer 3 chassis switches used as distribution switches for our network, with different groups of buildings linked to them.
[ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]To read this article in full, please click here
As mixed cloud environments take hold and enterprises combine hosted infrastructure with private cloud and on-premises IT, networking professionals need to stay up on the latest developments in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud technologies. A good way to do that is by earning certifications.There are plenty of certifications to choose from – which has its advantages and disadvantages. There’s no one prominent hybrid cloud or multi-cloud certification, most of them are vendor specific, and some of them overlap in terms of what they cover. That means network pros have to choose wisely when they're considering which certifications to pursue.To read this article in full, please click here
Extreme Networks has extended its Universal Switch family and added an SD-WAN subscription package to provide more flexible enterprise networking options.At the Extreme Connect user conference the company added a new top-end switch—the 5720—to its Universal Switch familty, a wired or wireless switch that can be managed from the ExtremeCloud IQ (XIQ) cloud-based console. XIQ offers a variety of wired and wireless management, analytics, location tracking, security and IoT support. It supports cloud providers including AWS, GCP, and Azure.As with other Universal Switches, the 5720, which ships in July, lets customers pick and choose wired or wireless where they need it, or upgrade software to both new and legacy equipment, said Nabil Bukhari, chief product officer and chief technology officer of Extreme Networks. The universal hardware products can be deployed across a wired or wireless edge, aggregation, and wiring-closet environments.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco and Kyndryl have partnered to help enterprise customers implement a broad range of technologies from private 5G to data-center gear to edge devices.Under the partnership the companies will also provide software-defined networking (SDN), and secure multi-network wide area network (WAN) technology delivered as services, the vendors stated.
[ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]To read this article in full, please click here
The first true exascale supercomputer, Frontier, is now the fastest in the world, toppling Fugaku, which held the title for the past two years, according to the latest TOPP500 list of the best performing supercomputers.An exascale computer is one that can perform 1018 (one quintillion) floating point operations per second (1 exaFLOPS), and Frontier, installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, weighed in at 1.12 exaFLOPS.
[ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
Frontier also captured the title of most energy efficient supercomputer, generating 62.68 GFLOP per watt.To read this article in full, please click here
Changing the IP address of a Linux system from dynamic to static is not difficult, but requires a little care and a set of commands that you likely rarely use. This post provides a bash script that will run through the process, collect the needed information and then issue the commands required to make the changes while asking as little as possible from the person running it.The bulk of the script focusses on making sure that the correct settings are used. For example, it collects the 36-charater universally unique identifier (UUID) from the system so that you never have to type it in or copy and paste it into place.
[ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]To read this article in full, please click here
The pandemic has accelerated the development of better ways to serve and secure remote workers, which make it a good time to rexamine VPNS.Recently VPNs have received technical boosts with the addition of protocol options that improve functionality far ahead of where they were when first invented. At the same time, new security architectures zero trust network access (ZTNA), secure access service edge (SASE), and security service edge (SSE) are making inroads into what had been the domain of remote-access VPNs.To read this article in full, please click here
Broadcom's planned acquisition of VMware could open opportunities to reach enterprise and telco companies alike with innovative technology. The question is whether Broadcom will let VMware further develop tools for 5G, software-defined networking (SDN), and other technologies.Semiconductor manufacturer and infrastructure software vendor Broadcom confirmed Thursday that it has reached an agreement to buy VMware in a deal worth roughly $61 billion in stock and cash, subject to closing conditions, including regulatory and shareholder approval.To read this article in full, please click here