Versa Networks Powers Zayo Group’s SD-WAN Offering  

The CLEC says SD-WAN is just a subset of its WAN business.

MEC for Beginners: Saguna Looks to Ease Adoption with Starter Kit

MEC and CORD are seen as key pillars of next-gen network architectures.

An Explanation of the Meltdown/Spectre Bugs for a Non-Technical Audience

Last week the news of two significant computer bugs was announced. They've been dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. These bugs take advantage of very technical systems that modern CPUs have implemented to make computers extremely fast. Even highly technical people can find it difficult to wrap their heads around how these bugs work. But, using some analogies, it's possible to understand exactly what's going on with these bugs. If you've found yourself puzzled by exactly what's going on with these bugs, read on — this blog is for you.

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” — Yogi Berra

Late one afternoon walking through a forest near your home and navigating with the GPS you come to a fork in the path which you’ve taken many times before. Unfortunately, for some mysterious reason your GPS is not working and being a methodical person you like to follow it very carefully.

Cooling your heels waiting for GPS to start working again is annoying because you are losing time when you could be getting home. Instead of waiting, you decide to make an intelligent guess about which path is most likely based on past experience and set Continue reading

An Explanation of the Meltdown/Spectre Bugs for a Non-Technical Audience

Ways that Network Performance Management Has Evolved

SDxCentral's recent report highlights how big data, analytics, and convergence are impacting network and application monitoring.

History of Networking: Segment Routing

Preserving Our Future, One Bit at a Time

“Culture, any culture… depends on the quality of its record of knowledge.” — Don Waters, “‘Preserving Digital Information”

Our culture and society has been enriched by the creation and proliferation of the Internet. Information has become increasingly more accessible and has enabled so many of us to become active creators rather than passive consumers of content. With that, we’re experiencing an explosive growth of digital data, with 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day and that data needs a place to live.

Not only does our data need a place to live, but it needs a place to survive into the future. What happens if years from now, we are no longer able to access our photos, documents, music — essentially all the records of our lives? We will not only be forgotten, but we’ll be thrusting the future into a “digital dark age,” as Vint Cerf calls it.

In short: “More and more of our lives are bound to the ones and zeroes of bits residing on a cloud server, or mobile device. Those bits in turn are mediated by the software and hardware implements we use every day. The bitstreams are unintelligible, however, without Continue reading

How Chuck Robbins is turning Cisco around

Cisco’s CEO, Chuck Robbins, is a busy guy. I never see him not talking to a customer, partner, employee, analyst or some other person in the company’s ecosystem. Over the holiday break, I hope he took the time to put his feet up, light a cigar and reflect on what’s happened to the company he is leading over the past two years.If we roll the clock back to Jan. 1, 2016, the stock was at $23.79, which was the lowest price point since April of 2014, and many Cisco investors were skeptical of Cisco’s future prospects.Read also: Cisco CEO Robbins: Wait til you see what’s in our innovation pipeline A hefty amount of my business comes from my interactions with Wall Street, and two years ago, very few wanted to talk about Cisco. There were far more bears than bulls, and the feeling was that the cloud, software-defined networking (SDN) and other trends would slowly eat away at Cisco and it would go the way of Lucent, Nortel and so many other companies that were too stubborn to change their business models.To read this article in full, please click here

How Chuck Robbins is turning Cisco around

Cisco’s CEO, Chuck Robbins, is a busy guy. I never see him not talking to a customer, partner, employee, analyst or some other person in the company’s ecosystem. Over the holiday break, I hope he took the time to put his feet up, light a cigar and reflect on what’s happened to the company he is leading over the past two years.If we roll the clock back to Jan. 1, 2016, the stock was at $23.79, which was the lowest price point since April of 2014, and many Cisco investors were skeptical of Cisco’s future prospects.Read also: Cisco CEO Robbins: Wait til you see what’s in our innovation pipeline A hefty amount of my business comes from my interactions with Wall Street, and two years ago, very few wanted to talk about Cisco. There were far more bears than bulls, and the feeling was that the cloud, software-defined networking (SDN) and other trends would slowly eat away at Cisco and it would go the way of Lucent, Nortel and so many other companies that were too stubborn to change their business models.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Why wireless is the future of advanced metering infrastructure

As the new year roars into its full swing, innovators everywhere are beginning to ask themselves what technological advancements 2018 may have in store that could change the faces of our societies forever. Increasingly, tech analyst and investors eager to find and back the next big thing are looking to advancements in wireless capabilities, with many believing it to be the key to the future of our infrastructure.So how will wireless technology impact advanced metering infrastructure as we know it today, and what will the smart grids and smart cities of tomorrow look like thanks to this tech? A quick dive into recent advancements shows that a wireless world is just around the corner.To read this article in full, please click here

GHD Uses Riverbed SteelConnect to Link 100 Global Offices

Global professional services company GHD recently merged with Conestoga-Rovers and Associates (CRA), adding more than 3,000 employees in 100 offices, including 50 small sites. With this sudden growth, GHD needed a simple, cost-effective solution to add those new sites onto the company’s network. The answer was Riverbed SteelConnect, which has fueled stronger collaboration between its... Read more →

Worth Reading: 2018-2019 Data Center Technology Trends

DJI’s bounty problems and video surveillance programs | Salted Hash Ep 13

Host Steve Ragan unpacks the latest news about Chinese company DJI's bug bounty program, plus new developments in video surveillance and more, with Fahmida Rashid.

Is single tenancy the fix for the Meltdown flaw?

As the fallout continues over the Meltdown and Spectre exploits in Intel and now some ARM processors, the issue of what to do about it is coming front and center. Clearly there is no fixing a silicon problem; Intel will have to adjust future chips to deal with it. So, for now, we have the software fixes.Linux distros are rolling out fixes, and Microsoft has issue patches for Windows — although the threat to consumers is minimal. Apple has also issued a macOS fix.To read this article in full, please click here

Is single tenancy the fix for the Meltdown flaw?

As the fallout continues over the Meltdown and Spectre exploits in Intel and now some ARM processors, the issue of what to do about it is coming front and center. Clearly there is no fixing a silicon problem; Intel will have to adjust future chips to deal with it. So, for now, we have the software fixes.Linux distros are rolling out fixes, and Microsoft has issue patches for Windows — although the threat to consumers is minimal. Apple has also issued a macOS fix.To read this article in full, please click here

Is single tenancy the fix for the Meltdown flaw?

As the fallout continues over the Meltdown and Spectre exploits in Intel and now some ARM processors, the issue of what to do about it is coming front and center. Clearly there is no fixing a silicon problem; Intel will have to adjust future chips to deal with it. So, for now, we have the software fixes.Linux distros are rolling out fixes, and Microsoft has issue patches for Windows — although the threat to consumers is minimal. Apple has also issued a macOS fix.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Key differences between the IoT and Industrial IoT you should know

It’s only the beginning of 2018, but the Internet of Things (IoT) has already once again seized the media and the market’s attention spans. Tech investors, aspiring entrepreneurs, and avid consumers of digital gadgets and software are wondering what the new year has in store for the IoT, and the smartest amongst them are beginning to ask questions.Perhaps the number one question that’s plaguing the mind of IoT onlookers is how to discern broader IoT trends from industry-specific ones, and few have more questions than those betting on the future of industrial IoT. So, what are the key differences between the IoT and Industrial IoT in particular, and what common myths should you be aware of?To read this article in full, please click here

8 Ways Data Center Storage Will Change in 2018

BrandPost: Irresistible Appeal of Open Source

The telecom industry is racing toward a software-defined networking (SDN) world, but needs to go beyond traditional cooperation on standards to actually sharing software code, in order to keep pace with innovation.Telecom companies have always cooperated in development of standards. It’s essential for interoperability – otherwise each company’s customers would only be able to interact with its other customers. But there’s a difference between agreeing on standards and sharing software.“The telecommunications space has conventionally used proprietary hardware and software to deploy solutions from various vendors,” writes RCR Wireless staffer Nathan Cranford. “Using multiple vendors enabled telecom operators to open source some network functions, but not to the extent usually fastened to open source software.” But, he contends, “Open source software is indispensable to a faster, more malleable communications network.”To read this article in full, please click here

New Design on www.ipSpace.net

One of my readers sent me a polite email a while ago saying “your site is becoming like $majorVendor’s web site – every corner looks completely different based on when you made it”

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The worst part is that he was right, so I spent the last two weeks as a website janitor, mopping up broken markup, fixing CSS cracks, polishing old texts…