Internet architecture doesn't need continuous paths between endpoints, says NASA in an announcement that may one day change the way the internet is envisioned.The U.S. government space agency says Delay or Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) — something it’s been working on for disruption-prone space internet applications — doesn’t need continuous network connectivity, unlike traditional internet.Importantly, it says the delay and fault-tolerant technology could be used down on Earth, too. The networking protocol suite concept would be particularly well suited to internet in remote locations, it says in a press release, related to demonstrations of the technology.To read this article in full, please click here
Without upgrades and enhancements, nearly every company at some point reaches the natural limits of its IT infrastructure. That threshold seems to hit sooner rather than later when it comes to storage, thanks to escalating volumes of data and increasing workloads.To avoid capacity problems and ensure continued business growth, it’s critical to modernize storage infrastructure. Here’s how two different organizations reached that conclusion and the paths they took toward upgrading.A Lesson in ScaleMesa Community College (MCC) in Arizona enrolls more than 40,000 students each year. Like many organizations, its IT environment included multiple systems from multiple vendors, and the college has a lean IT staff to manage it all.To read this article in full, please click here
As consumer IoT devices inevitably find their way into the workplace, IT pros need to isolate them from the rest of the enterprise network, perhaps on a network of their own, so they don’t become backdoors exploitable by attackers, according to the head of the Online Trust Alliance.Jeff Wilbur, the director of the alliance, which is an initiative within the larger Internet Society, says that it is better to embrace employees’ internet-of-things devices and allow them to be used safely than to ban them and risk their unauthorized, unprotected use that could undermine network security.To read this article in full, please click here
Executive summaryNetwork automation is an imperative if operators are to deliver services with sustainable levels of agility and profitability. Automation enables the network to adapt to events and demands rapidly and efficiently, and supports a new speed of digital business. However, operators cannot buy all the automation they need off-the-shelf: they need to build and/or customize it for their own purposes and environments. This means overcoming cultural, organizational and technical barriers, bridging the separate and often antagonistic roles IT and network departments play today in managing the physical network.Network virtualization and its emphasis on automation has started to break down technical barriers as IT, and network organizations increasingly need to work in each other’s domains. Network organizations are investigating software-defined networking (SDN) as a means of automating key manual interactions with network elements, and IT organizations are being asked to support network functions directly with data center/cloud components and associated automation. It is clearly desirable for the two departments to start sharing tools, knowledge, best practices, cloud-native software development and operations (DevOps) approaches as their roles converge. Operators that encourage this cross-domain fertilization accelerate the cultural change necessary to build an automated and adaptive network.To read this Continue reading
The Internet as we have all known it mirrors the design of old mainframes with dumb terminals: The data path is almost entirely geared toward data coming down the network from a central location. It doesn’t matter if it’s your iPhone or a green text terminal, the fast pipe has always been down, with relatively little data sent up.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Five years ago, Q2 had 240 servers. Today it has 8,500 servers. The company spent $150 million over the last five years building out its infrastructure, where it now hosts more than 4 petabytes of user data.“We’ve grown from 1.2 million users to 11.5 million users and reduced downtime to one-fifth of what it was during that same period,” says Lou Senko, CIO of Q2, which provides a digital banking platform for banks and credit unions. [ Related: How to plan a software-defined data-center network.]
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Q2’s cloud-based platform is aimed at helping smaller, community-based financial institutions compete with giants such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup. “Local financial institutions have to compete against some big, big players,” Senko says. “It’s our technology that levels the playing field in the digital world.”To read this article in full, please click here
The electromagnetic spectrum is the highway over which wireless operates, with multiple lanes capable of carrying traffic at different speeds. Higher frequencies – and thus shorter wavelengths – are able to move more information per unit of time.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Though I no longer actively participate in it as a pioneering player in the networking space I have always kept a watchful eye on the market and I am seeing yet another disruptive force known as SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide-Area Networking) finally gaining momentum.For starters, SD-WAN is an extension of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). As the term implies, SDN aims to automate (virtualize) various network functions that are currently touch-heavy.[ Related: SD-WAN: What it is and why you will use it one day ]
Network architects talk about separating the control plane from the data plane ad nauseum but that is just the starting point. The ability to virtualize numerous network functions from a central location and thus create an abstraction layer in a manner that is custom-tailored for each enterprise – and, by extension, perhaps for each user - has been the Holy Grail of networking for years if not decades. Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corporation and a longtime proponent of all things SDN, is spot on when he states that: "SD-WAN is absolutely critical, because it is the vehicle most likely to bring true virtualization to networking. Without virtualization in the network, virtualization in the Continue reading
Amazon Web Services has denied publicly and privately to Cisco that it is targeting Cisco’s bread-and-butter network switching market after a report emerged a few days ago claiming AWS was intending to do just that.A report in The Information last Friday said AWS was preparing to enter the network switching market, using off-brand “white box” products powered by open-source software. The news quickly made the rounds on Monday, when everyone started paying attention (including me), and the result was a big hit to Cisco’s stock.To read this article in full, please click here
Adoption of hybrid IT for delivery of applications across legacy enterprise data centers, and increasingly cloud SaaS and IaaS platforms, is rendering traditional network architectures obsolete. Numerous analysts and articles have predicted the coming obsolescence of hub and spoke MPLS networks anchored on legacy enterprise data centers. While few have detailed what to do about it, a growing number of enterprises are taking matters into their own hands. Those in the know are leveraging communication hubs, sometimes also referred to as cloud hubs, to bridge the gap between their legacy data center environments and the cloud.The growing challenge of SaaS application performance
As enterprises accelerate their move to cloud, including the growing trend toward cloud office suites, such as Office 365 and Google Suite, where users expect LAN-like performance, challenges are mounting. According to Microsoft, Office 365 is growing at 43 percent, and as of the end of 2017 was boasting 120 million active users. A 2017 survey by TechValidate noted that despite increasing both firewall and network bandwidth capacity, nearly 70 percent of companies experienced weekly network-related performance issues after deploying Office 365. Gartner’s 2018 Strategic Roadmap for Networking, released earlier this year, noted that nearly all enterprises Continue reading
By 2033, over 4,000 miles of underground fiber will be beneath sea water, and hundreds of data centers will be affected, reseachers at University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon say. The conduits carrying the internet cables and the cables themselves are not designed for it — they’re water-resistant but not waterproof. That means global communications will get disrupted if action isn’t taken to mitigate the risk, the experts say.New York, Miami, and Seattle are the three major U.S. conurbations that the group says are most susceptible to metro-area cable inundation. However, the effects would ripple through the internet. And Los Angeles would be hit in its long-haul installations.To read this article in full, please click here
Ciena
Susan FriedmanMarketing Campaign Expert
Clear your calendar. Ciena’s Packet Networking Summer Camp is blasting off to space. Train like an astronaut with four out of this world webinar missions and three Ciena specialists.Ever wondered what it’s like to be part of a space exploration? So did we. That’s why we are taking Ciena’s successful Packet Networking Summer Camp series to space. Join Ciena’s network specialists for this series of fast-paced and information-packed 30-minute webinar missions to explore where no network has gone before. As a bonus, we’ve added a lightning round Q&A mission, so bring your questions to challenge our specialists. And, it’s all virtual, a perfect learning adventure. To read this article in full, please click here
The EU General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, came into force on May 25. With every organization with customers and suppliers in the European Union now accountable for the way in which they handle or process personal data, much work has been done to ensure compliance by the deadline. As a result, all levels of a business are now concentrated on meeting the requirements of the new regulation, throwing the issue of data protection into focus like never before.When you consider how big and complex IT networks have become in recent times, however, it has become almost impossible to detect just when and how a security breach or network failure might occur. Unsurprisingly, network security and information assurance are crucial to GDPR compliance, with the regulation stating that measures must be put in place to mitigate the risk associated with assuring information integrity and availability in the face of threats such as malicious code or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.To read this article in full, please click here
With more enterprises adopting multi-cloud and hybrid cloud computing strategies, it's more important than ever to avoid getting locked into just one cloud provider's tools and technologies. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments offer many benefits. They include the ability to pick and choose which cloud vendor's add-on services are right for your business, as well as the ability to implement best-of-breed solutions when the time is right. Multi-cloud also adds redundancy and security because all of your proverbial eggs are not in one basket.Despite the trend toward multi-cloud, however, there are still plenty of ways to find yourself locked in. Here's a quick look at six common ways enterprises get locked into using one provider, along with some advice on how businesses can keep cloud implementations open and interoperable. To read this article in full, please click here
On one of the biggest shopping days of the year for Amazon.com the company’s web site crapped out intermittently for hours yesterday.Instead of Prime Day purchases, many customers just got error messages and pictures of the dogs of Amazon, along with a message from Amazon that read: "Sorry, we're experiencing unusually heavy traffic. Please try again in a few seconds. Your items are still waiting in your cart," or “"Uh-Oh. Something went wrong on our end." [ Related: How to plan a software-defined data-center network.]
Prime Day started at 3PM ET and the problems emerged almost immediately after. Around 5 p.m., Amazon tweeted acknowledgement of the problem stating: “Some customers are having difficulty shopping and we are working to resolve this issue quickly. Many are shopping successfully – in the first hour of Prime day in the US, customers have ordered more items compared to the first hour last year.”To read this article in full, please click here
The Cloud ImperativeEnterprise IT is increasingly a multi-cloud affair. With Gartner projecting that 85 percent of enterprises are currently using a multi-cloud strategy, it seems difficult to find an enterprise that doesn’t. IT leaders are like conductors – orchestrating SaaS, PaaS, and on-premises code and data in increasingly virtualized, software-defined environment. With the cloud taking center stage, what impacts does migration of workloads have on infrastructure overall?Migration Challenges for InfrastructureAs IT strives to be more responsive to both lines of business and development teams seeking to spin up new instances and environments, workloads often need to move – and rapidly. But workload mobility has a downside, namely an increasing demand on the shared services on- and off-premises.To read this article in full, please click here
As more and more businesses adopt cloud services, seizing on the latest software tools and development methodologies, the lines between them are blurring. What really distinguishes one business from the next is its data.Much of the intrinsic value of a business resides in its data, but we’re not just talking about customer and product data, there’s also supply chain data, competitor data, and many other types of information that might fall under the big data umbrella. Beyond that there are a multitude of smaller pieces of data, from employee records to HVAC system logins, that are rarely considered, but are necessary for the smooth running of any organization. And don’t forget about source code. Your developers are using cloud-based repositories for version control of application code. It also needs to be protected.To read this article in full, please click here
Extreme Networks is contending for greater influence from the data center to the network edge, but it has some obstacles to overcome.The company is still grappling with how to best integrate, use and effectively sell the technologies it has acquired from Avaya and Brocade in the past year, as well as incorporate and develop its own products to do battle in the cloud, mobile and edge computing environments of the future. Remember, too, that Extreme bought wireless player Zebra Technologies in 2016 for $55 million.[ Now see: The hidden cause of slow internet and how to fix it.]
In terms of results that Wall Street watches, Extreme Networks grew revenue 76% to $262 million in its recent fiscal third quarter. According to Extreme, those gains were fueled mostly by growth from its acquisitions and around an 8% growth in its own products. To read this article in full, please click here
Once again research is showing that rumors of the demise of the data center are greatly exaggerated. One study shows across-the-board growth in IT spending, while a second predicts that the financial services sector is really set to explode.Market research firm IHS Markit surveyed IT managers at 151 North American organizations and found that most of them expect to at least double the amount of physical servers in their data centers by 2019.“We are seeing a continuation of the enterprise DC growth phase signaled by last year’s respondents and confirmed by respondents to this study. Enterprises are transforming their on-premises DC to a cloud architecture, making the enterprise DC a first-class citizen as enterprises build their multi-clouds,” wrote Clifford Grossner, senior research director in the cloud and data center research practice at IHS Markit.To read this article in full, please click here
As networks become more software-driven, they generate vastly greater amounts of data, which provides some challenges: adhering to compliance and customer privacy guidelines, while harvesting the massive amounts of data—it is physically impossible for humans to tackle the sheer volume that is created. But the vast amounts of data also provide an opportunity for businesses: leveraging analytics and machine learning to gather insights that can help network management move from reactive to proactive to assurance. This doesn’t just mean a massive shift in technology because the human element won’t simply go away. Instead, by combining human intellect and creativity with the computing power AI offers, innovative design and management techniques will be developed to build self-improving intelligent algorithms. The algorithms allow networks to operate in a way that far outweighs networks of the past.To read this article in full, please click here