Even before the tight labor market that emerged in the later stages of the pandemic, enterprise network operations teams were struggling to hire personnel, especially people with advanced technical skills. It’s safe to say the pandemic has only exacerbated the situation.Over the last six years, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has observed a significant decline in the effectiveness of network operations teams. EMA’s ongoing, biennial Network Management Megatrends research asks NetOps professionals to assess the success of their teams every two years. In 2016, 49% were fully successful. In 2022, only 27% reported total success. EMA believes that the current IT job market is partly to blame.To read this article in full, please click here
Last month, software tools vendor Atlassian suffered a major network outage that lasted two weeks and affected more than 400 of their over 200,000 customers. The outage took down several of their products, including Jira, Confluence, Atlassian Access, Opsgenie, and Statuspage. While only a few customers were affected for the full two weeks, the outage was significant in terms of the depth of problems uncovered by the company’s engineers and the lengths they had to go to find and fix the problems.The outage was the result of a series of unfortunate internal errors by Atlassian’s own staff, and not the result of a cyberattack or malware. In the end, no customer lost more than a few minutes’ worth of data transactions, and the vast majority of customers didn’t see any downtime whatsoever.To read this article in full, please click here
The winners of a critical FCC auction for midband spectrum that ended last November have received their official grants of license to use the airwaves for which they spent a total of $22.4 billion, the FCC announced Wednesday.A total of 4,041 licenses were issued to 23 different bidders, according to the commission. Licensees hoping to use the spectrum for 5G rollouts still have to reimburse incumbent non-federal users of the band, which had been in use for radiolocation purposes, and the FCC said that further details about those costs would be laid out in a subsequent filing.Auction 110 saw the government sell off 100MHz of spectrum in the midband — around the 3.45GHz range — divided into 10 10MHz blocks for each Partial Economic Area or PEA that the FCC adopted in 2014. (There are 416 PEAs covering the US, meaning that 119 specific licenses were not sold in the auction.)To read this article in full, please click here
Nemertes recently looked at how organizations with larger networks—specifically Cisco-heavy networks—implemented network automation. The results were a bit surprising in that less than 20% use Cisco’s flagship DNA Center network controller and management dashboard that can automate provisioning and change management.On the other hand more than 40% roll their own automation solution using various forms of imperative scripting or programming (mostly Python), and about 50% engage a different model instead of or in addition: declarative automation.To read this article in full, please click here
Both strace and ltrace are powerful command-line tools for debugging and troubleshooting programs on Linux: Strace captures and records all system calls made by a process as well as the signals received, while ltrace does the same for library calls.If a program acts differently than you expect, you can use these tools to see “behind the curtain” and maybe get some clues as to what is going on.
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Be forewarned, though. When you use either of these commands, you will end up with a lot of output to look through. Still, that can tell you quite a bit about how a process is working and sometimes give you important insights.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco says it is working on a service to let enterprises proactively avert network problems and increase performance.The company says it has built a predictive analytics engine it will offer via software-as-a-service (SaaS) to help network operators quickly and accurately predict network issues and prevent problems before they happen.
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“The future of connectivity will rely on self-healing networks that can learn, predict and plan,” Chuck Robbins, Cisco chair and CEO said in a statement. “Our research for predictive networks has been tested and developed with customers, and early adopters [including Phillips 66, Schneider Electric and the Adecco Group] are seeing major benefits saving them time and money.”To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco is encouraging users of its popular Catalyst 2960X/2960XR switches to upgrade their IOS operating systems in an effort to combat counterfeiting.Because of the pervasiveness of these switches on the gray market, it’s imperative that customers enable the latest software release – IOS release 15.2(7)E4 or later – to validate the authenticity, security, and performance of their Catalyst 2960X/2960XR 24/48 port Gigabit Ethernet switches, Cisco stated in a notice to customers. To read this article in full, please click here
By this time, you’ve probably read so many stories about enterprises adopting private 5G networks that you feel like a student who finds out they’re not one of the cool kids. Can you ever hold your head up in a tech conference and admit you’re not running private 5G yet?Take heart! Maybe you’re not supposed to be. The best wireless network technology for an enterprise depends on four things: devices, spread, privacy, and mission.5G is a cellular network technology used almost exclusively by telcos, but you can buy equipment to build your own 5G network, and even get hosted 5G from cloud providers like Amazon. You can use open spectrum so you don’t need to bid at an auction for a license. There’s a lot of excitement about private 5G, but in that excitement it’s easy to forget that you could have adopted private 4G/LTE long ago, and that Wi-Fi is still the most popular wireless technology of all. You’ve got to look at the four factors just mentioned to decide whether you want to read about private 5G or adopt it.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 the network, with different groups of buildings linked to them.
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Supply chain issues continue to drive networking equipment prices up and impact delivery schedules but despite them, Extreme Networks reported solid product revenue this week.Extreme said its Q3 results were its fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit product revenue growth—$285.5 million, up 13% year-over-year—driven by sales in its cloud, universal-switching platforms, and Wi-Fi 6E access points. Competitor Juniper Networks reported solid results this week, too, saying it had a fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit year over year growth in cloud, but also enterprise business growth of nearly 20% year over year.Wi-Fi 6E: When it’s coming, what it’s good for
While Extreme's results are solid, its backlog of orders is growing substantially, up $130 million just in Q3, with a total backlog of $425 million, largely due to industry-wide semiconductor supply-chain issues. More than half of that consists of the company's latest generation products, according to Extreme's presideint and CEO Ed Meyercord.To read this article in full, please click here
Gartner projects that global spending on public cloud services will come in at $494.6 billion this year due to both growth in cloud-native infrastructure services and the trend towards hybrid work scenarios driven by the pandemic as well.That’s a 20.4% increase over the $410.9 billion in sales in 2021, just shy of the 21.2% growth to $599.8 billion that Gartner projects for 2023.
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Because of the maturation of core cloud services, companies are past the tire-kicking stage and shifting their focus to capabilities that can affect digital business and enterprise operations.To read this article in full, please click here
Google Cloud has launched a new media and content delivery network (CDN) platform called Media CDN that allows large media and streaming customers to tap into Google’s global YouTube network.The new platform blends the same infrastructure as the Google-owned video streaming service, with Google Cloud’s existing Cloud CDN portfolio. Customers will have access to a range of APIs and automation tools, while pre-aggregated metrics and playback tracing will allow users to monitor performance across the entire infrastructure stack. The platform also offers integrations with Google Cloud’s operations suite and other observability tools such as Grafana and ElasticSearch.To read this article in full, please click here
Wordle—the online game that gives you six tries to guess a five-letter word—has gone viral recently, and while it’s fun, it can also be pretty hard. So, as a bash-scripting enthusiast, I figured I'd see if I could come up with a script that would help me cheat.The game itself is fairly simple. After you enter a five-letter guess, the game indicates which of its letters are not in the mystery word by setting them off on a gray background, which ones are in the word but in the wrong location (orange background), and which ones are in the word and located in the right place (green background). Each guess must be a known English word, no capitals, no punctuation.To read this article in full, please click here
By: Sylvia Hooks, CMO at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.Big ideas come from inspired people who believe they have a better way. Over the course of the past year, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, scoured the globe to meet those inspired people. We call them “digital revolutionaries,” those who have incorporated Aruba’s technological capabilities to reimagine a world of new possibilities, whether to improve personal experiences or to achieve specific business priorities.Aruba now brings those stories to you with the Digital Revolutionaries ebook.To read this article in full, please click here
What do router networks and a preschool have in common? A lot more than you think. Read on for the answer.To the average enterprise, “network” means “router network”. It’s not that there aren’t other things in the network, but that the whole of enterprise networking is about building IP connectivity. We’ve invented a bunch of terms to describe the elements of our IP networks, and it seems like we’re adding new ones every day. As we do, a growing number of enterprises are finding that they don’t know as much about their networks’ operation as they need to; they don’t have “observability”.
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A storage area network (SAN) is a dedicated, high-speed network that provides access to block-level storage. SANs were adopted to improve application availability and performance by segregating storage traffic from the rest of the LAN. SANs enable enterprises to more easily allocate and manage storage resources, achieving better efficiency. “Instead of having isolated storage capacities across different servers, you can share a pool of capacity across a bunch of different workloads and carve it up as you need. It’s easier to protect, it’s easier to manage,” says Scott Sinclair, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell will offer new "validated" designs — a term used for edge devices that have been tested for compatibility in a range of important capabilities in a particular field — for retail edge computing deployments and the manufacturing sector later this year, according to an announcement issued today.The idea behind both the retail and manufacturing validated designs is to provide a central infrastructure stack for the numerous individual applications that might be in use in any given location. For retail, that can range from inventory tracking systems and smart labels on shelves, to connected point-of-sale terminals, all the way up through numerous smart vision capabilities.To read this article in full, please click here
IT management software provider SolarWinds has launched Hybrid Cloud Observability to help organizations address issues across cloud and hybrid environments.The software and services package can monitor network performance, servers and applications; analyze logs; manage IP addresses; track user devices; and manage network quality to support real-time IP applications including VoIP and video, the company says.
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With all these capabilities brought together on a common interface, Hybrid Cloud Observability can simplify optimizing performance, improving availability, and reducing the time to fix problems it spots, the company says.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco and DISH Wireless are teaming with Duke University and the Internet2 research network to pilot a neutral host network for higher education institutions using Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) shared spectrum.CBRS is a band of radio-frequency spectrum from 3.5GHz to 3.7GHz that the Federal Communications Commission has designated for sharing among three tiers of users: incumbent users, priority licensees, and generally authorized/lightly licensed.
Private 5G resources
Private 5G as a service is now a thing
Cisco details delivery of its private 5G services
Tips on how to implement private 5G, from enterprises that already have
Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t
Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling
5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul
CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises
Neutral host networks typically let public and private entities use the same network, which is then managed by the enterprise itself or by one of the providers. In this case, the neutral host network will integrate Duke University’s private network, which uses Cisco’s Private 5G as a service platform, and Internet2’s national research and education network with DISH Wireless’ 5G network.To read this article in full, please click here
Why is it that over 90% of enterprises tell me that they expect to spend more on security over the next three years, and almost 60% say they expect to spend less on networking? We obviously think that network technology is getting more efficient, more competitive. Why isn’t that the case for security? The short answer is that enterprises have been chasing acronyms and not solutions.Acronym-chasing comes about because by nature, security is hard to plan for. The average network expert finds out there’s an issue because some higher-up reads or hears about a breach. Maybe they do a quick search, and they find out that what they really need is SASE. Or maybe they need SSE, which we’re told is SASE without SD-WAN. In any event, what happens is that there’s pressure to add this new thing on, and that creates another layer of protection...maybe. Complication and cost? Surely.To read this article in full, please click here