Respondents to IHS Markit’s survey indicated they expect a 1.5x increase in the average number of physical servers in their data centers by 2019.
We recently partnered with DellEMC to bring you a new IDC whitepaper focused on one of the most critical and relevant considerations for today’s data center leaders and operators. In How Network Disaggregation Facilitates Datacenter and IT Modernization, IDC discusses how digital transformation and the prioritization and modernization of applications are putting pressure on business infrastructure, specifically the network, to modernize and optimize for the digital era.
In brief, the IT world has changed rapidly around the network, demanding automation, scalability and agility. But the network has remained unchanged — monolithic, stagnant and inflexible. The implications for businesses now are not just technological support but economical as well. An inflexible network becomes expensive to scale at the speed of customer expectations and business innovation. Business innovation puts pressure on data centers to offer extensive automation of the entire network life cycle, from provisioning and deployment to day-to-day management and upgrades.
With IT transformation initiatives taking place everywhere to support application needs, the time is now to leverage those initiatives to reassess network architectures and operational models. Network disaggregation is a key architectural step forward to help organizations meet these challenges by offering unprecedented flexibility and agility to support end-to-end Continue reading
On today's Weekly Show we talk about how to build a network automation framework. Scripting repeatable tasks is just the beginning. Guest Ken Celenza joins us to get into the details about automation principles, data models and schemas, testing code, and more.
The post Weekly Show 402: Building A Network Automation Framework appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The latest development in Yemen’s long-running civil war is playing out in the global routing table. The country’s Internet is now being partitioned along the conflict’s battle lines with the recent activation of a new telecom in government-controlled Aden.
The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels currently hold the nation’s capital Sana’a in the north, while Saudi-backed forces loyal to the president hold the port city of Aden in the south (illustrated in the map below from Al Jazeera). One advantage the Houthis enjoy while holding Sana’a is the ability to control Yemen’s national operator YemenNet. Last month, the Houthis cut fiber optic lines severing 80% of Internet service in Yemen.

In response to the loss of control of YemenNet, the government of President Hadi began plans to launch a new Yemeni telecom, AdenNet, that would provide service to Aden without relying on (or sending revenue to) the Houthi-controlled incumbent operator. Backed with funding from UAE and built using Huawei gear, AdenNet (AS204317) went live in the past week exclusively using transit from Saudi Telecom (AS39386), as depicted below in a view from Dyn Internet Intelligence.

The new Aden-based telecom Continue reading
The investment plans include producing equipment stateside to be closer to its customers, opening a new software development center, and hiring several hundred employees.
Oracle debuts another autonomous database cloud service; Facebook open sources its transport layer security library; and AWS rolls out serverless option for Amazon Aurora.
The security company that spun out of Alphabet’s secretive X research lab in January still hasn’t set a release date for its analytics platform.
In this Network Collective Short Take, Russ White takes a look at the impact of abstraction, complexity, and scale as they relate to the size and scope of attack surfaces presented to attackers.
The post Short Take – Give The Monkey A Smaller Club appeared first on Network Collective.
Globally, significant progress has been made in recent years with respect to Internet access, however, much more needs to be done. Presently, 54% of the global community is not connected to the Internet. In the Caribbean region, big disparities can be noted. As measured by Internet penetration rates, while countries such as Barbados (80%), Trinidad & Tobago (70%) are well connected, this is not the case in others such as Haiti (12%) and Guyana (40%).
The challenge in less-connected countries is mainly in their large rural communities. This is where the Internet Society’s ongoing work related to Community Networks (CNs) hopes to have some impact.
Smart strategies, utilizing the skills, knowledge, and authority of all stakeholders such as government, policy makers, the business community, operators, academia, and civil society entities need to be explored. While governments can play a key role, especially with respect to policies that foster network deployment in rural and underserved areas, telecoms operators are also very important. These operators have well-developed transport networks that can be used as backhaul for community networks developers, to get Internet access to rural communities. Conversations with members of the Internet ecosystem often do not include the operators that are Continue reading

You may have seen a tweet from me last week referencing a news story that Fortinet was now in the SD-WAN market:
It came as a shock to me because Fortinet wasn’t even on my radar as an SD-WAN vendor. I knew they were doing brisk business in the firewall and security space, but SD-WAN? What does it really mean?
Fortinet’s claim to be a player in the SD-WAN space brings the number of vendors doing SD-WAN to well over 50. That’s a lot of players. But how did the come out of left field to land a deal rumored to be over a million dollars for a space that they weren’t even really playing in six months ago?
Fortinet makes edge firewalls. They make decent edge firewalls. When I used to work for a VAR we used them quite a bit. We even used their smaller units as remote appliances to allow us to connect to remote networks and do managed maintenance services. At no time during that whole engagement Continue reading
The problems are behind us. Here is some self-abuse with a postmortem. As usual, RSS feeds fail to migrate cleanly.
The internet of things offers many potential benefits for a business, but companies need to consider deployment and management issues before taking the plunge.
Extreme had predicted the Brocade assets would generate over $230 million in annual revenue and that the Avaya assets would generate a minimum of $200 million in revenue in fiscal 2018.