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Category Archives for "Networking"

The Free Range Routing Project turns one: A year in review, and what to expect next

Today, we’re celebrating the one year anniversary of FRR: The Free Range Routing project, a project we at Cumulus Networks set out to collaborate on with innovators in the industry to help shape the future of web-scale networking. With FRRouting (FRR), the community has built on the foundations of Quagga and taken huge steps forward to build the most full-featured, high-performance open routing stack available — making engineers’ lives significantly easier in the process. Now, FRR is the easiest and quickest way for the community to contribute to the future of routing.

To honor its success and growth, we’d like to highlight a few key moments in time since the project began…

Increased adoption and contribution

As we set out to expand the technology, we knew we needed a team of industry leaders. Companies like 6WIND, Architecture Technology Corporation, LabN Consulting, NetDEF (OpenSourceRouting) and Orange were some of the first to collaborate with us at Cumulus Networks on the project’s mission.

At Cumulus, we knew that FRR was going to be a game-changer for our own customers, so we too adopted FRR on Cumulus Linux. Now, all 1,000+ of our customers are benefiting from a more flexible infrastructure.

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IDG Contributor Network: Best practices for IoT security

The Internet of Things (IoT) is projected to grow significantly over the coming years. Research firm Gartner Inc. has estimated that 8.4 billion connected things were in use worldwide in 2017, up 31% from 2016, and expects the number to reach 20.4 billion by 2020.This growth is being driven by the promise of increased insight, enhanced customer satisfaction, and greater efficiency. These benefits are made possible as sensor data from devices and the power of Internet-based cloud services converge. One of the key concerns related to the successful adoption of the IoT is having sufficiently strong security mechanisms in place throughout the ecosystem—to mitigate the increased security risks of connecting devices to the Internet.To read this article in full, please click here

SD-Branch market expected to reach $3 billion by 2022

As long as I have been an industry analyst, network engineers have tried to build multifunction boxes that are capable of addressing a wide range of network functions. These all-purpose network boxes have been lost to history as single-function platforms optimized for network performance (e.g., router or WAN optimization) dominated the market. The branch network is poised to benefit from the advances in software networking to collapse all network functions on to a single platform — the software-defined branch (SD-Branch).A total addressable market (TAM) analysis of the SD-Branch market starts with understanding the total spend on branch networking hardware and software. Worldwide spending on routers, WAN optimization, SD-WAN, network security, Wi-Fi, and ethernet switches at branch locations is approximately $15 billion, according to Doyle Research. (Disclosure: I’m the principal analyst at Doyle Research.)To read this article in full, please click here

SD-Branch market expected to reach $3 billion by 2022

As long as I have been an industry analyst, network engineers have tried to build multifunction boxes that are capable of addressing a wide range of network functions. These all-purpose network boxes have been lost to history as single-function platforms optimized for network performance (e.g., router or WAN optimization) dominated the market. The branch network is poised to benefit from the advances in software networking to collapse all network functions on to a single platform — the software-defined branch (SD-Branch).A total addressable market (TAM) analysis of the SD-Branch market starts with understanding the total spend on branch networking hardware and software. Worldwide spending on routers, WAN optimization, SD-WAN, network security, Wi-Fi, and ethernet switches at branch locations is approximately $15 billion, according to Doyle Research. (Disclosure: I’m the principal analyst at Doyle Research.)To read this article in full, please click here

Just One Bit

I'm never surprised by the ability of an IETF Working Group to obsess over what to any outside observer would appear to be a completely trivial matter. Even so, I was impressed to see a large-scale discussion emerge over a single bit in a transport protocol being standardized by the IETF.

IDG Contributor Network: Overcoming barriers: An evolutionary approach to edge computing

Pushing industrial control intelligence to the edge—closer to where manufacturing and production processes are happening—offers tremendous potential for increasing business efficiency and agility. Add in the ability to perform real-time analytics on the plant floor, and the possibilities for optimizing operations are endless.This is not lost on operational technology (OT) professionals. According to a recent market report by ARC Advisory Group, 91 percent of industrial automation users surveyed said that having better systems and connectivity at the edge will improve real-time decision making. Early adopters are moving aggressively to push intelligence to the edge as part of a larger Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) strategy. So why isn’t everyone jumping on the edge computing bandwagon?To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Network services and the value of choice

Who doesn’t like to have choices?  Whether it’s our choice of coffee in the morning, our make of car, or which browser we use – we enjoy being able to pick what we think is right for us. And the availability of choice empowers us, according to Susan Weinschenk Ph.D in Psychology TodayDATA SHEETSelect Support data SheetTo read this article in full, please click here

How server disaggregation could make cloud data centers more efficient

The growth in cloud computing has shone a spotlight on data centers, which already consume at least 7 percent of the global electricity supply and growing, according to some estimates. This has led the IT industry to search for ways of making infrastructure more efficient, including some efforts that attempt to rethink the way computers and data centers are built in the first place.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

How server disaggregation could make cloud data centers more efficient

The growth in cloud computing has shone a spotlight on data centers, which already consume at least 7 percent of the global electricity supply and growing, according to some estimates. This has led the IT industry to search for ways of making infrastructure more efficient, including some efforts that attempt to rethink the way computers and data centers are built in the first place.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

AI can be a game changer for WI-Fi management

There’s no question that Wi-Fi networks continue to grow in importance for most companies. Workers rely on it to do their jobs, students are being educated on mobile tablets, doctors are pulling up records at a patients' bedside, and millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices are now being connected to Wi-Fi. Wireless is no longer the connection of convenience — it’s mission critical, and a poor-performing wireless network means a key process is likely to fail. [ Find out whether MU-MIMO can really boost Wi-Fi capacity and learn why you need MU-MIMO in your wireless routers . | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Wi-Fi troubleshooting a continued source of pain for network engineers   If the wireless network is so critical, why aren’t there better Wi-Fi troubleshooting tools? A recent ZK Research survey about Wi-Fi troubleshooting uncovered how difficult this. Some interesting data points from the survey:To read this article in full, please click here

AI can be a game changer for WI-Fi management

There’s no question that Wi-Fi networks continue to grow in importance for most companies. Workers rely on it to do their jobs, students are being educated on mobile tablets, doctors are pulling up records at a patients' bedside, and millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices are now being connected to Wi-Fi. Wireless is no longer the connection of convenience — it’s mission critical, and a poor-performing wireless network means a key process is likely to fail. [ Find out whether MU-MIMO can really boost Wi-Fi capacity and learn why you need MU-MIMO in your wireless routers . | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Wi-Fi troubleshooting a continued source of pain for network engineers   If the wireless network is so critical, why aren’t there better Wi-Fi troubleshooting tools? A recent ZK Research survey about Wi-Fi troubleshooting uncovered how difficult this. Some interesting data points from the survey:To read this article in full, please click here

What is composable infrastructure?

Composable infrastructure treats compute, storage, and network devices as pools of resources that can be provisioned as needed, depending on what different workloads require for optimum performance. It’s an emerging category of infrastructure that’s aimed at optimizing IT resources and improving business agility.The approach is like a public cloud in that resource capacity is requested and provisioned from shared capacity – except composable infrastructure sits on-premises in an enterprise data center.[ Check out REVIEW: VMware’s vSAN 6.6 and hear IDC’s top 10 data center predictions . | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] IT resources are treated as services, and the composable aspect refers to the ability to make those resources available on the fly, depending on the needs of different physical, virtual and containerized applications. A management layer is designed to discover and access the pools of compute and storage, ensuring that the right resources are in the right place at the right time.To read this article in full, please click here