Ciena
Chris Sweetapple, Consultant, Managed Service Providers
In the first installment of this 3-part series, we begin the story of one hero’s road to streamlined enterprise networking operations. Ciena’s Chris Sweetapple details Our Hero’s journey as he navigates the convoluted tangle of enterprise networking.Our hero, responsible for running his enterprise network, is hopelessly stuck in an enormous tangle of network complexity. He needs the best connectivity for collaboration, applications and cloud access. But he knows that the networking technology he has today won’t cope with the demands of tomorrow. The business depends on online transactions, connections to multiple data centers and real-time data. Failover, backup, load balancing and stringent security are essential.To read this article in full, please click here
In a world with vastly increasing amounts of data and dependency on the Internet, digital transformation is now paramount to the long-term survival of enterprises. But what will digital transformation in the years ahead involve? A crucial component for companies will be ensuring they have enough interconnection bandwidth to handle business demands in the future.Interconnection bandwidth is the ability to support direct private data exchange across a variety of hubs and interconnection points within a network, bypassing the public Internet. These private connections are important because they offer scalability, security, and direct connections to copartners and service providers that companies cannot get otherwise.To read this article in full, please click here
IoT is being weaponized. The same sensors, networks and real-time data analysis used monitoring classrooms can morph into weapons for targeted killing. How do such malicious drones operate and what can be done to protest against their airborne threat?Background
Here are three data-points of weaponized drones.
The recent assassination attempt on the President of Venezuela with drones. “Aug 4, 2018. CARACAS, Venezuela — A drone attack caused pandemonium at a military ceremony where President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela was speaking on Saturday, sending National Guard troops scurrying in what administration officials called an assassination attempt.”
The use of drones to shoot down incendiary kites in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. ”IDF reservists to help; troops able to shoot down flying objects 40 seconds from detection”
Slaugtherbots. “A video by the Future of Life Institute and Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at Berkeley presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria.”
How do they work?
Drones are aerial IoT devices. They’re mounted with sensors that relay their location, altitude and other sensor readings such as images to a back-end system or Continue reading
One way of looking at IoT deployments is this – a large array of not-particularly-sophisticated endpoints, mindlessly sending individual data points like temperature and pressure levels to either an edge device somewhere on a factory floor, or all the way out to a cloud back-end or data center.And that’s largely correct, in many cases, but it’s increasingly not the whole story – IoT endpoints are getting closer and closer to the ability to do their own analysis, leading to simpler architectures and more responsive systems. It’s not the right fit for every use case, but there are types of IoT implementation that are already putting the responsibility for the customizing their own metrics on the devices themselves, and more that could be a fit for such an architecture.To read this article in full, please click here
The semiconductor world is buzzing over the news that custom semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries, the foundry born when AMD divested itself of its fabrication facilities, announced the sudden decision to drop its 7nm FinFET development program and restructure its R&D teams around “enhanced portfolio initiatives.”For now, GlobalFoundries will stick to 12 and 14nm manufacturing. All told, approximately 5 percent (of roughly 18,000 employees) will lose their jobs. But it also sets back AMD, a GlobalFoundries customer, in its bid to get ahead of Intel, which has struggled for two years to get to 10nm and won’t get there until 2020.“The vast majority of today’s fabless customers are looking to get more value out of each technology generation to leverage the substantial investments required to design into each technology node. Essentially, these nodes are transitioning to design platforms serving multiple waves of applications, giving each node greater longevity. This industry dynamic has resulted in fewer fabless clients designing into the outer limits of Moore’s Law,” said Thomas Caulfield, who was named CEO of GlobalFoundries last March, in a statement.To read this article in full, please click here
What is rapidly aging and largely male? If you said the heavy metal music scene, you wouldn’t be wrong (c’est moi), but that’s not the answer in this instance. It’s data center staffing.In its recent report on data center efficiency, Uptime Institute focused primarily on outages and the improvement in power efficiency, but there were other interesting findings, such as this:Data center staff are getting older on average, and women show no interest in the job.[ Now read: 20 hot jobs ambitious IT pros should shoot for ]
New skills needed for hybrid IT environments
According to the report, there is a growing need for new skills in an increasingly hybrid IT environment. New skills, such as overseeing and managing SLAs for off-premises workloads, are needed, but people don’t have them. Just 35 percent of survey respondents reported that they did not have any of the hiring or staffing issues identified by Uptime.To read this article in full, please click here
Ciena
Daniele Loffreda, Senior Advisor, Industry Marketing
The evolution toward a more holistic, personalized health maintenance program will create an explosion of data putting more pressure on our communication networks. Is your network healthy enough to make the sharing of this information possible? Ciena’s Daniele Loffreda discusses.In the past, an annual visit to our primary care doctor was considered common practice. But in today's era of personalized, precision medicine, the annual checkup may not be as necessary for otherwise healthy adults. In fact, research conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration suggests that yearly visits in the absence of symptoms are not beneficial. According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, patients in the United States visit their physicians for annual checkups more than 44 million times per year despite having no medical issues or concerns.To read this article in full, please click here
Starting in 2019, NASA will begin using laser communications technology to "enable greater return of science data from space." The reason is laser is more bandwidth-friendly than classic radio for data delivery, plus it's more secure, NASA says in a newly released explainer of its plans.Laser signals from space will be much harder to hack than old-school radio because the signal is more concentrated, the agency says on its website. Plus, the higher frequencies provide more bandwidth — important for space data crunching. And laser equipment is lighter, allowing for longer missions, among other benefits.To read this article in full, please click here
Companies are slowly migrating toward controller-based architectures, so as a network IT professional, it pays well to keep your skills relevant as new technology is adopted. For network engineers and technicians with at least a year of networking experience under their belts, earning a Cisco Certified Network Professional certification may help achieve this. This Complete Cisco Network Certification Training Bundle features guides to help you ace your next certification exam for $59.To read this article in full, please click here
Network firewalls were created to block unauthorized content and code from the network while ensuring the unimpeded flow of data packets vital to the operations of the enterprise. But they were designed to intercept external incursion, not prevent security issues inside the network.“As server virtualization has increased in popularity, the amount of traffic moving laterally across the data center (East-West) has dwarfed traditional client-server traffic, which moves in and out (North-South),” industry analyst Zeus Kerravala writes in Network World. “This is playing havoc with data center managers as they attempt to meet the demands of this era of IT.”To read this article in full, please click here
What’s the silliest, dumbest, most ridiculous Internet of Things (IoT) application you can think of? Smart toothbrushes? Internet-connected toilets? Digital notepads in the shower?Well, forget all that. Heck, you can even forget the "smart" Air Dresser wardrobe that Samsung announced earlier this month. (If you’re wondering, this digital closet is said to automatically "air" — whatever that means — steam, dry, and purify clothes so they don’t, you know, stink.)IBM has just patented an IoT device concept so incredibly inane that it makes all those earlier attempts to trivialize the IoT seem like cures for cancer. What could possibly be so ill-conceived as to make a smart hairbrush look, well, smart?To read this article in full, please click here
VMworld 2018Image by Getty ImagesVMworld 2018 kicks off this week in Las Vegas, where VMware and its partners are digging into virtualization, SDN, hyperconvergence, AI, containers, and more. As the show gets underway, here are some of the new products being announced and displayed at VMworld 2018.To read this article in full, please click here
If you still live in a world of the script-driven approach for both service provider and enterprise networks, you are going to reach limits. There is only so far you can go alone. It creates a gap that lacks modeling and database at a higher layer. Production-grade service provider and enterprise networks require a production-grade automation framework. In today's environment, the network infrastructure acts as the core centerpiece, providing critical connection points. Over time, the role of infrastructure has expanded substantially. In the present day, it largely influences the critical business functions for both the service provider and enterprise environments. To read this article in full, please click here
VMware is expanding its security range with a new version of its virtualization software that has security integrated into the hypervisor.“Our flagship VMware vSphere product now has AppDefense built right in,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told the audience at VMworld 2018, which kicked off this week in Las Vegas. “Platinum will enable virtualization teams – you – to give an enormous contribution to the security profile of your enterprise.”[See our review of VMware’s vSAN 6.6 and check out IDC’s top 10 data center predictions. Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters]
Announced one year ago, AppDefense is VMware’s data-center endpoint-security product, designed to protect applications running in virtualized environments. AppDefense uses machine learning and behavioral analytics to understand how an application is supposed to behave, and it detects threats by monitoring for changes to the application’s intended state.To read this article in full, please click here
Ciena
Daniele Loffreda, Senior Advisor, Industry Marketing
New innovations stemming from artificial intelligence, machine learning and connected health are changing the way medical professionals treat their patients. Doctors are having to adapt to take advantage of these developments – but has their network adapted to support them?Two newborns are delivered on the same day by the same doctor in the same hospital. The truth is, the decisions their respective parents are about to make can have an enormous impact on their daughters’ health and quality of life for the next several decades. To read this article in full, please click here
To the surprise of many not living it every day, a robust, resilient, and reliable network is one of the most important drivers behind success in today’s business world. Organizations must continuously improve their network infrastructure to better meet organizational requirements and offer the experiences their customers expect. Recent changes in the network market mean this continuous improvement needs to go beyond optimizations and extend all the way to re-architecting the network.The forces driving network re-architecture are twofold: new demands on the network, and innovations in network technology and solutions. These new demands on the network stem from enterprise-wide digital transformation initiatives such as cloud, SD-WAN, machine learning and AI, IoT, edge computing, and more. While these new requirements offer a host of business benefits, they’re also introducing disruptive complexity to the network, driving the need to simplify and accelerate the way all IT services are delivered today.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell EMC has launched a new line of high-performance servers called the PowerEdge MX that the company said is designed to support a wide variety of traditional and emerging data center workloads, such as artificial intelligence.PowerEdge MX offers the first modular infrastructure architecture designed to easily adapt to future technologies and offers what Dell calls “server disaggregation.” What that means is customers can tailor configurations to their needs from shared pools of disaggregated resources, which can be changed as needed. If a company needs more or less compute, it can reprovision that resource on the fly to avoid overprovisioning and wasted assets.To read this article in full, please click here
Network traffic, by nature, is often unbalanced. For example, a client that requests a video on demand may receive ten times more bandwidth than it sends for that service. Likewise, most web applications are very one-sided, with the bulk of the traffic being from server to client. The opposite is true for many backup applications, where the bulk of the traffic originates at the client and terminates at the server.The United States is like your network – suffering from a trade imbalance. For every packet we ship to a foreign network, we are receiving four or five in return. Just as there are barriers to trade, we apply barriers to our inbound traffic. The barrier for most of us is the actual size of our Internet service interface. Packets queue up and drop at our carrier’s equipment prior to even being seen by our equipment. If you purchase a 50Meg download speed, any packets that arrive at a faster rate (even for a sub-second of time) will be dropped without prejudice. This is a barrier, restriction and tariff on your services that limit your business. The only solution – buy more bandwidth!To read this article in full, please Continue reading
Deploying private internet of things LTE networks using open-access, about-to-be-released, shared spectrum is getting closer to the starting gate, according to the CBRS Alliance, which has just announced the inception of eight global test labs for its OnGo equipment certifications. Enterprises will be able to use their own, in-building, dedicated equipment for the cellular-like systems on new frequencies.As a sign “of market readiness, OnGo access points from several member companies have already started the testing process,” CBRS Alliance says in the release on its website. OnGo is CBRS Alliance’s moniker for the mobile broadband-like CBRS LTE shared-spectrum equipment.To read this article in full, please click here
Whether users are looking to stabilize cloud-connected resources, better manage remote networks or simply upgrade a timeworn wide area environment, software-defined-WAN (SD-WAN) technologies are what’s on the purchasing menu.The proof lies in the fact that this segment of the networking market will hit $4.5 billion and grow at a 40.4% compound annual growth rate from 2017 to 2022. In 2017 alone, SD-WAN infrastructure revenues increased 83.3% in 2017 to reach $833 million, according to IDC's recent SD-WAN Infrastructure Forecast. [ Click here to find out more about SD-WAN and why you’ll use it one day and learn about WANs and where they’re headed. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
A related report from researchers at the Dell’Oro Group predicts revenue from SD-WAN software components, including controller and virtual network functions, will grow almost twice as fast as the hardware components. Over the next five years, SD-WAN software revenue will grow at a 41% compounded annual growth rate, compared to 21% for hardware.To read this article in full, please click here