Network packet brokers (NPB) have played a key role in helping organizations manage their management and security tools. The tool space has exploded, and there is literally a tool for almost everything. Cybersecurity, probes, network performance management, forensics, application performance, and other tools have become highly specialized, causing companies to experience something called “tool sprawl” where connecting a large number of tools into the infrastructure creates a big complex mesh of connections.Ideally, every tool would receive information from every network device, enabling it to have a complete view of what’s happening, who is accessing what, where they are coming in from, and when events occurred.To read this article in full, please click here
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), whose customers include Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and Broadcom, was hit with a WannaCry infection last weekend that knocked out production for a few days and will cost the firm millions of dollars.Most chip companies are fabless, meaning they don’t make their own chips. It’s a massively expensive process, as Intel has learned. Most, like the aforementioned firms, simply design the chips and farm out the manufacturing process, and TSMC is by far the biggest player in that field.CEO C.C. Wei told Bloomberg that TSMC wasn’t targeted by a hacker; it was an infected production tool provided by an unidentified vendor that was brought into the company. The company is overhauling its procedures after encountering a virus more complex than initially thought, he said.To read this article in full, please click here
Nutanix, maker of hyperconverged systems for building on-premises cloud-like environments, has agreed to buy Frame, a supplier of desktop apps as a service.Nutanix already supports virtual desktop infrastructure; adding Frame expands on the offering because Frame specializes in high-performance, specialized apps, rather than just a generic Windows or Linux desktop.Frame, also known as Mainframe2, was founded as a cloud workstation platform, providing desktop applications as a service but with the considerable scale from the server. Clients can get the performance of a super-powered desktop workstation from their laptop thanks to streaming of compute-intensive apps from the cloud to a browser.To read this article in full, please click here
It’s in our phones, TVs, toasters, cars, watches, toothbrushes – even in the soles of our shoes. The internet is everywhere. Right?Well, no. About 47 percent of the global population of 7.6 billion people doesn’t have internet access, as tough as that is for those of us in internet-rich locales to imagine. But companies are working on ways to bridge this digital divide, and systems based on low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites are becoming a big part of the conversation.The benefits of satellite internet are obvious in places where land-based network infrastructure doesn’t exist. But while systems based on high-orbit satellites need only minimal ground equipment to reach remote places, a range of complications – including cost, speed and performance – prevent them from being a global solution. LEO systems aim to get past the problems by getting closer to earth.To read this article in full, please click here
When most people encounter headlines about high-profile cloud outages, they think about the cloud vendor's name, or how the negative publicity might affect stock prices. I think about the people behind the scenes—the ones tasked with fixing the problem and getting customer systems back up and running.Despite their best efforts, the occasional outage is inevitable. The internet is a volatile place, and nobody is completely immune to this danger. Fortunately, there are some straightforward steps businesses can take to guard against the possibility of unplanned downtime.Here are four ways to avoid cloud outages while improving security and performance in the process:To read this article in full, please click here
Perimeter-based firewalls
When I stepped into the field of networking, everything was static and security was based on perimeter-level firewalling. It was common to have two perimeter-based firewalls; internal and external to the wide area network (WAN). Such layout was good enough in those days.I remember the time when connected devices were corporate-owned. Everything was hard-wired and I used to define the access control policies on a port-by-port and VLAN-by-VLAN basis. There were numerous manual end-to-end policy configurations, which were not only time consuming but also error-prone.There was a complete lack of visibility and global policy throughout the network and every morning, I relied on the multi router traffic grapher (MRTG) to manual inspect the traffic spikes indicating variations from baselines. Once something was plugged in, it was “there for life”. Have you ever heard of the 20-year-old PC that no one knows where it is but it still replies to ping? In contrast, we now live in an entirely different world. The perimeter has dissolved, resulting in perimeter-level firewalling alone to be insufficient.To read this article in full, please click here
Ciena
Kacie Levy, Manager, Social Media
What if you could apply the collective knowledge of some of the world’s best and brightest optical minds to your network? Well, now you can with an incredible limited time offer from Ciena: The Optical Networking Super Bundle.As the famous saying goes, “Knowledge is power”, so what if you could get easy access to the necessary resources to make your optical knowledge your Superpower?To read this article in full, please click here
The pervasiveness of Arm-based silicon – it’s everywhere from cars to signage to smartphones to supercomputers – makes the company a natural fit for an internet of things platform like the one it just announced.The Pelion IoT Platform's main selling point is its universality – the company boasts that it’s able to handle “any device, any data, any cloud” – in a marketplace overflowing with vertical-specific solutions. (GE and Siemens make industrial IoT products, other companies make platforms designed specifically to work well in healthcare, fleet management, or agricultural environments, and so on.)[ Check out our corporate guide to addressing IoT security. ]
Pelion can sit on an edge device, in a data center, or even in an endpoint, integrating devices into a working ecosystem, although the focus is on the edge.To read this article in full, please click here
As distributed resources from wired, wireless, cloud and Internet of Things networks grow, the need for a more intelligent network edge is growing with it.Network World’s 8th annual State of the Network survey shows the growing importance of edge networking, finding that 56% of respondents have plans for edge computing in their organizations. [ Related: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ]
Typically, edge networking entails sending data to a local device that includes compute, storage and network connectivity in a small form factor. Data is processed at the edge, and all or a portion of it is sent to the central processing or storage repository in a corporate data center or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud.To read this article in full, please click here
We’ve all heard the promises about how the Internet of Things (IoT) is perfectly positioned to provide healthcare, entertainment, and a wide variety of other services to the aging populations of many industrialized nations. The need is real because the population of countries like Japan, Italy, Greece, and Germany are getting older fast, resulting in a dearth of youngsters able (and willing, of course) to take care of their parents’ generation.The idea — bolstered by a European Commission on the topic — is that autonomous devices, robots, built-in sensors, medical and fitness wearables, voice-activated assistants, specially tuned smart homes, and other IoT innovations will fill in the gaps, helping meet the needs of seniors without requiring legions of younger workers. But when I saw a recent CNBC story about Google’s Nest home automation unit exploring the senior citizen market, it made me laugh out loud.To read this article in full, please click here
If you are SSD shopping for your servers, you might want to wait a little because a market research firm that follows this sector said conditions are ripe for price drops in the coming months.DRAMeXchange, a division of market research firm TrendForce, forecasts that the average selling prices (ASP) of NAND Flash will drop by around 10 percent quarter over quarter respectively in the third and fourth quarters of 2018.Usually Q3 is the time of peak demand as OEMs ramp up manufacturing for the Christmas holiday, but the growth of the end-market demand has been weaker than anticipated. At the same time, the supply of 3D-NAND Flash continues to expand.To read this article in full, please click here
The joint Google and Cisco Kubernetes platform for enterprise customers should appear before the end of the year, and things are getting warm between the two companies ahead of that highly anticipated release.Cisco and Google last October teamed up to develop a Kubernetes hybrid-cloud offering. Kubernetes, originally designed by Google, is an open-source-based system for developing and orchestrating containerized applications.RELATED: How to make hybrid cloud workThe Cisco/Google combination – which is currently being tested by an early access enterprise customer, according to Google – will let IT managers and application developers use Cisco tools to manage their on-premises environments and link it up with Google’s public IaaS cloud which offers orchestration, security and ties to a vast developer community.To read this article in full, please click here
If you’ve been around the tech industry long enough, recent market events held an eerie familiarity.When Facebook badly missed its numbers for the quarter ended June 30, 2018, the company’s stock took an unprecedented pummeling, losing 20 percent of its value and tanking many other tech stock along with it. Watching the carnage, it was hard not to think back to the spring of 2000 when Microsoft lost its antitrust case, losing 15 percent of its value in a single day and signaling the end of the dot.com boom and the beginning of a historic bust.But something is different this time.To read this article in full, please click here
We all know and appreciate DNS as the domain name system that maps names like Networkworld.com to the IP address that a browser actually connects to in order to get content from a website. DNS is obviously a foundational piece of the internet. However, the technology is a bit stale and needs a refresh to keep up with the times.Legacy DNS is a simple protocol. It is essentially a phonebook that maps a domain name to an IP address. Most commercial DNS products or services in the market today are based on an open-source software product called BIND put out by the Internet Software Consortium. The name BIND stands for “Berkeley Internet Name Daemon” because the software originated in the early 1980s at the University of California at Berkeley. Not much about the DNS protocol has changed since then.To read this article in full, please click here
Google is taking two steps – one in hardware and one in software – to bring its analytics and machine learning capabilities to edge networks and even to individual internet-of-things devices to better deal with the data generated by a growing number of IoT devices, the company said at its Cloud Next technology conference.The first step is Google extending the features of its Cloud IoT software platform to edge networking. The second is a tiny chip that could be integrated in IoT devices themselves and process the data they collect before transmitting it.[ Check out our corporate guide to addressing IoT security. ]
Edge computing – which describes an architecture where a specialized computer sits very near to the IoT endpoints themselves to perform analysis and data processing from those endpoints, as opposed to sending that information all the way back to the data center – is very much the up-and-coming model for IoT deployment, particularly in use cases that have strict requirements around latency.To read this article in full, please click here
Disaster recovery (DR) has several meanings. If you’re an IT or networking professional, you probably see it in operational terms: a redundant system designed to meet technical specifications, such as recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs.) But there are other ways to look at it, and it helps to see your IT ops role in a broader context.A CEO is likely to see DR as a part of a business continuity plan. A marketing or PR executive will think of DR in terms of messaging and response to the market during a DR event. Product and department leaders might want DR to be part of a digital transformation. This range of views indicates that DR has a broader strategic value.To read this article in full, please click here
As agility becomes a primary competitive advantage for the modern business, I’m seeing more enterprises adopt new technologies for quicker innovation and faster time to value. Public cloud, containers, microservices and serverless computing help you increase speed of execution and increase organizational flexibility, because the ability to react quickly is now part of the customer experience. In the era of digital transformation, speed has clearly become a competitive differentiator.For the last twenty years, technology companies catering to the needs of IT operations and service management teams, have been trying to support this need for speed. Their challenge? The underlying technology, processes and customer expectations are constantly shifting. Standard IT operations management (ITOM) has been focused on system health and uptime in an increasingly dynamic environment. Meanwhile, IT service management (ITSM) approaches have been built around the process of managing tickets and remediating individual incidents. Historically, these two teams have acted separately within the core of the enterprise IT team.To read this article in full, please click here
One of the early knocks on Google’s cloud services is that it assumed a pure cloud play for every customer and had virtually nothing for supporting on-premises systems. While that might work for smaller businesses looking to shut down their data center and move to the cloud, those customers were in the minority.At this week's Google Cloud Next '18 show, Google reversed course and acknowledged the on-premises market with the announcement of the Cloud Services Platform, an integrated suite of cloud services designed for organizations with workloads that are staying on premises.To read this article in full, please click here
Kubernetes is one of the most important innovations to hit Linux in decades — and one that's making big changes in how critical services are being deployed. It’s not an operating system, an app, or a container, but a container-specific management environment — and it's making applications and services remarkably more manageable.You can think of Kubernetes as a portable cloud platform, as a container platform, or as a microservices platform that takes advantage of both the simplicity of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and the flexibility of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Regardless of how you define it, what you get by investing your time and technology in Kubernetes will be some very impressive options for:To read this article in full, please click here
Improved visibility. Automated processes. And increased network capacity and service availability from any given WDM investment. These are the benefits of leveraging Ciena’s Liquid Spectrum™, which combines variable bit-rate coherent optics, a flexible grid reconfigurable photonic layer, and SDN control in an open architecture.Scale. Agility. Operational Simplicity. Your network can have it all. Requirements for the network are shifting, thanks to the content on networks today and changing consumption models. In this constantly evolving, on-demand world, the network still needs to scale for massive capacity growth, but it now also needs to be more agile and programmable to better respond and handle unpredictable traffic requirements associated with cloud connectivity and the proliferation of mobile devices.To read this article in full, please click here