The recent T-Mobile data breach, reportedly facilitated by attackers gaining access to an unprotected router and from there into the network, could have been prevented through the use of network automation.IDS, IPS, SASE, and other newer technologies get a lot more attention, but automation is critical to modern network security. Here’s a look at how automation should be used to enhance network security.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprise looking to buy data-center switches face longer lead times and lack of stock over the course of the next year or so as demand continues to substantially outpace supply, according to a report from the Dell’Oro Group.Sameh Boujelbene, leader of the analyst firm’s campus and data-center research team, said that one canary in the coal mine was Broadcom’s announcement earlier this year that 90% of its total chip output for 2021 had been spoken for as early as March. That’s the result not just of material shortages that have affected the semiconductor market as a whole, but of human behaviors that arose in response.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years Whether they’re smaller enterprises or big hyperscalers building out capacity, IT decision makers tend to rush into pre-orders whenever headlines about shortages appear, Boujelbene said, and Dell’Oro projects that will true in 2022.To read this article in full, please click here
After a big year of change in everything from its ownership and executive suite to its cloud and network offerings, VMware is girding for battle in the challenges ahead.At the company’s VMworld 2021 conference (Oct. 5-7) many of the technologies the company provides—from multicloud connectivity and cloud management to NSX networking, security,and other digital-transformation tools—will be front-and-center in over 900 sessions.To read this article in full, please click here
The thing about MPLS is that it’s a technique, not a service — so it can deliver anything from IP VPNs to metro Ethernet. It's expensive, so with the advent of SD-WAN enterprises are trying to figure how to optimize its use vs. less expensive connections like the internetDid you ever order something online from a distant retailer and then track the package as it makes strange and seemingly illogical stops all over the country.That’s similar to the way IP routing on the Internet works. When an internet router receives an IP packet, that packet carries no information beyond a destination IP address. There is no instruction on how that packet should get to its destination or how it should be treated along the way.To read this article in full, please click here
Palo Alto Networks has rolled out a Wi-Fi based package that the company says provides remote workers with enterprise-class security features.Called Okyo Garde, the bundle incuds Wi-Fi-6-based hardware and mobile application-security software that includes threat-intelligence updates, and sells the hardware and software to enterprises as a customizable subscription. The package also offers malware and ransomware prevention, phishing protection, infected device detection, and suspicious-activity monitoring and control, the company said.Linux security: Cmd provides visibility, control over user activity Workers’ homes are becoming enterprise “branches of one” with multiple devices without IT teams or a deep set of cybersecurity protections, yet they face the same threat landscape as any enterprise, said Mario Queiroz, executive vice president of Palo Alto Networks. Threat actors may even see them as more vulnerable and therefore attractive entry points into the corporate network, Queiroz said.To read this article in full, please click here
SD-WAN resources What is SD-WAN and what does it mean for networking, security, cloud? 10 SD-WAN features you're probably not using but should be SD-WAN may be the key to smart network services SD-WAN and analytics: A marriage made for the new normal Native SD-WAN monitoring tools are not enough, survey says Why is it that we always seem to think that we can adopt a technology that has seriously revolutionary pieces by just buying it and hooking it up? This, despite the undeniable fact that everything in tech is getting more sophisticated, more complex? Software-defined WAN is a technology like that, and because all SD-WANs aren’t the same, or even close to the same, you’ll have to do some digging to make SD-WAN your own.To read this article in full, please click here
Although it’s tempting to just deploy more access points (APs) when expanding your Wi-Fi network, there are many considerations to take in account first in order to get a high-performing result without overspending. Wi-Fi resources Test and review of 4 Wi-Fi 6 routers: Who’s the fastest? How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you Five questions to answer before deploying Wi-Fi 6 Wi-Fi 6E: When it’s coming and what it’s good for Step one is to clearly understand what you are trying to achieve, then analyze the current setup so you know how well the network serves the coverage area, and only then go about designing and deploying the APs.To read this article in full, please click here
Western Digital has announced a new disk drive architecture that combines flash memory with high-density hard-disk drives plus a small CPU to manage everything.If this sounds familiar, it is. Several years ago there was an effort by WD and other hard-disk drive (HDD) makers to build hybrid hard drives, with small flash drives acting as a cache for the hard disk, but those efforts failed, said Ravi Pendekanti, senior vice president of HDD product management and marketing at WD.Now see how AI can boost data-center availability and efficiency “There was a huge pitfall in those [drives],” he told me. The drives didn’t know what kind of data they had, so they didn’t know that hot data was frequently accessed and should be written on to the flash drive, while warm or cold that wasn’t accessed as much should be written to the disk.To read this article in full, please click here
Self-driving cars must possess the ability to recognize road conditions, make decisions and take appropriate action, all in real time. This requires on-board artificial intelligence (AI) that ensures vehicles are able to “learn,” along with super-fast processing power.Tesla unveiled a custom AI chip back in 2019 and soon began manufacturing cars with it. Now Tesla has unveiled a second internally designed semiconductor to power the company’s Dojo supercomputer.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years The D1, according to Tesla, features 362teraFLOPS of processing power. This means it can perform 362 trillion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), Tesla says.To read this article in full, please click here
The Linux set command allows you to change the value of shell options or to display the names and values of shell variables. Rarely used, it is a bash builtin, but is quite a bit more complicated than most builtins.If you use the command without any arguments, you will get a list of all the settings—the names and values of all shell variables and functions. Watch out though! You’ll end up with a torrent of output flowing down your screen. There are just short of 3,000 lines of output on my Fedora system:$ set | wc -l 2954 The top of the list looks like what you see below, but the output gets considerably more complicated as you move through it.To read this article in full, please click here
The traditional data center is built on a three-tier infrastructure with discreet blocks of compute, storage and network resources allocated to support specific applications. In a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), the three tiers are combined into a single building block called a node. Multiple nodes can be clustered together to form a pool of resources that can be managed through a software layer. Hyperconverged-infrastructure resources 8 reasons to consider HCI for your data center How to backup HCI Making the right choice: HCI hardware or software? HCI: It’s not just for specific workloads anymore Instead of a server with 50 cores, 128GB RAM and 1TB of storage, you can have 500 cores with 1.2TB RAM and 10TB of storage across 10 nodes, presented as a pool of resources to mix and match into services that deliver the specific performance characteristics and back-end resources needed for the job at hand. Configuration can be done on the fly, through an easy-to-access interface that lets you build or scale your solution.To read this article in full, please click here
Wi-Fi has been with us since 1997, predating Google, the iPhone, and robotic vacuum cleaners. It’s basically a legacy technology! Wi-Fi resources Test and review of 4 Wi-Fi 6 routers: Who’s the fastest? How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you Five questions to answer before deploying Wi-Fi 6 Wi-Fi 6E: When it’s coming and what it’s good for Despite its maturity, Wi-Fi is always evolving to meet the needs of consumers and enterprises. There have been eight versions of the Wi-Fi network protocol, with the latest (Wi-Fi 6 or, to use its “street name,” 802.11ax) being released in 2019. Each iteration has been faster and more reliable than its predecessor, a comforting trend. Three-and-a-half generations (Wi-Fi 4, Wi-Fi 5, and Wi-Fi 6 and 6E) currently are in use.To read this article in full, please click here
As part of its Architecture Day, Intel spent a lot of time discussing its next generation PC microprocessor microarchitecture, Alder Lake, which marks a radical change for Intel. The question for us in the data center is will the design make its way to the server? If past is prologue, then yes, in time.Alder Lake is due later this fall in three versions: desktop, mobile, and ultra portable. It will come with up to 16 cores and 24 threads and support for PCI Express 5 and DDR5 memory plus other features.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" Here’s where it gets interesting. The desktop part with 16 cores is actually a split between eight performance cores—P-Cores—and eight efficiency cores—E-Cores. The mobile and ultra-mobile parts also use this dual-core design but with fewer cores. The P-Core is for compute tasks, while the E-Core is assigned background tasks like email syncing and antivirus checks. This is hardly a new idea. Arm has done this for years with its big.LITTLE core designs.To read this article in full, please click here
During a recent training exercise in a non-production environment, I built a Cisco ISE virtual server using VMware vSphere and succeeded troubleshooting an issue, which demonstrates the value of this type of exercise. It also shows how important it is for network engineers to have clear priorities and keep their eye on the goals set for the task at hand.In this exercise, the build of the virtual server gave me the option of using one of two datastores that we’ll call Datastore One and Datastore Two. It also provided the option of choosing from multiple ESXI host machines to launch the virtual server on, and we’ll designate them with letters such as Host A, Host B, etc. Some of the hosts could associate only with Datastore One, and the rest could associate only with Datastore Two.To read this article in full, please click here
Hard disk giant Western Digital and Japan-based Kioxia Holdings are said to be in advanced talks to merge in a deal that could be valued at over $20 billion.Citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal said a deal could be reached as soon as mid-September. It would be a stock transaction and current WD CEO David Goeckeler would be CEO of the combined company.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years This is not the first time there has been talk of a potential merger for Kioxia. In March, the Journal reported that both Western Digital and memory manufacturer Micron were looking at a possible acquisition of Kioxia in a deal that might have been valued at about $30 billion.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM has introduced a new CPU for its Z Series mainframe that’s designed for transactions like banking, training, insurance, customer interactions, and fraud detection.The Telum processor was unveiled at the annual Hot Chips conference and has been in development for three years to provide high-volume, real-time inferencing needed for artificial intelligence.The Telum design is very different from its System z15 predecessor. It features 8 CPU cores, on-chip workload accelerators, and 32MB of what IBM calls Level 2 semi-private cache. The L2 cache is called semi-private because it is used to build a shared virtual 256MB L3 connection between the cores on the chip. This is a 1.5x growth in cache size over the z15.To read this article in full, please click here
So what’s firewall as a service? Firewall as a service, or FWaaS, relies on technology in the cloud. A user or application connects to the FWaaS via the internet, and the service applies domain rules, URL filtering, and other security that physical firewall appliances use. The idea is to replace the multitude of hardware firewalls you’d need to secure all of your business’ traffic from all of its different operational sites with secure internet connections to the service.What’s wrong with firewall appliances? Possibly nothing. Physical firewalls are still quite popular, particularly for businesses without a lot of different locations and without a lot of remote workers. They even have some advantages over FWaaS, like different cost profiles. On-prem firewalls are a capex expenditure up-front but tend to be cheaper over time. They also have lower latency.To read this article in full, please click here
We hear a lot about private 5G, meaning 5G networks deployed and owned by individual enterprises. A lot online, anyway; of 177 enterprises I've talked with this year, only three said they even knew how to build a private 5G network, and these three learned by doing it. The three discovered an important, but usually unrecognized, question, which is, “What do I it run on?” 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed 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 One reason private 5G gets a lot of attention is that vendors have to talk about something, and one choice is to say something exciting and, well, maybe less than factual. The other is to say something factual and utterly uninteresting. Guess which gets said? The three enterprises that built private 5G networks had to educate themselves with a material from a variety of sources, including the O-RAN alliance, and one of the three characterized this as learning another language, with a dozen or Continue reading
Comcast is certainly serious about boosting its corporate networking business. Or the cord cutters are really causing some damage. Maybe both. Either way, Comcast Business just announced plans to acquire privately-held Masergy Communications, an SD-WAN and cloud-based security specialist.Comcast is a public company, but Masergy is not, so terms of the deal were not disclosed. Masergy was acquired by private equity firm Berkshire Partners in 2016.To read this article in full, please click here
Our initial look at Intel’s Architecture Day focused on the new Xeons and IPU processors. Now we’ll get into the fine details, as well as look at other upcoming technologies.Sapphire Rapids Intel’s upcoming next-generation Xeon is codenamed Sapphire Rapids and promises a radical new design and gains in performance. One of its key differentiators is its modular SoC design. The chip has multiple tiles that appears to the system as a monolithic CPU and all of the tiles communicate with each other, so every thread has full access to all resources on all tiles.To read this article in full, please click here