IDG Contributor Network: Internet testing results: why fixing the internet middle mile is essential for SD-WAN performance

It’s no secret that the public Internet is a quagmire of latency and packet loss problems. No wonder, many of clients are reluctant to trust Internet-based SD-WANs with VoIP and business-critical applications. After all, how can an SD-WAN running over Internet provide a predictable user experience if the underlying transport is so unpredictable?To answer that question, SD-WAN Experts recently evaluated the performance and stability of long-distance Internet connections. Our goal: to determine the source of the Internet's performance problems by measuring variability and latency in the last and middle miles.What we found was by swapping out the Internet core for a managed middle mile makes an enormous difference. Case in point is Amazon. The latency and variation between our AWS workloads was significantly better across Amazon’s network than the public Internet (see figure). Why that’s the case and how we tested is explained below and in greater depth from this post on our site.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Internet testing results: why fixing the internet middle mile is essential for SD-WAN performance

It’s no secret that the public Internet is a quagmire of latency and packet loss problems. No wonder, many of clients are reluctant to trust Internet-based SD-WANs with VoIP and business-critical applications. After all, how can an SD-WAN running over Internet provide a predictable user experience if the underlying transport is so unpredictable?To answer that question, SD-WAN Experts recently evaluated the performance and stability of long-distance Internet connections. Our goal: to determine the source of the Internet's performance problems by measuring variability and latency in the last and middle miles.What we found was by swapping out the Internet core for a managed middle mile makes an enormous difference. Case in point is Amazon. The latency and variation between our AWS workloads was significantly better across Amazon’s network than the public Internet (see figure). Why that’s the case and how we tested is explained below and in greater depth from this post on our site.To read this article in full, please click here

The Virtual Cloud Network Demystified

Introduction

Welcome to Summer 2018!  It’s been nearly one month now since our CEO Pat Gelsinger announced the Virtual Cloud Network vision at Dell Technologies world in Las Vegas.  Essentially the reveal (in my personal opinion) was focused on raising awareness that VMware has now delivered to the market what many of you have heard for quite some time now as “the vision” for networking and security, whereas NSX has become an integral part of many various parts of your business:

Enter stage left, the Virtual Cloud Network.  VCN builds upon the fundamentals you’re already familiar with from NSX—these include (but are not limited to) integrated security, consistent connectivity, and inherit automation, but really focuses on tying together an end-to-end architecture that allows our customers to deliver applications and services everywhere.  Our customers have asked and we have listened… the demand for any infrastructure, any cloud, any transport, any device, and any application has drastically changed the landscape and technologies associated with building/architecting and having a modern enterprise network.

We’ve been quite busy over the past month with lots of interest coming from partners and customers wondering what this really means.  Well today the wait Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: The FBI Has Fewer Unopened Encrypted Devices Than Reported

Going dark with encryption: The U.S. FBI, for years now, has complained about its inability to access encrypted information held on the smartphones and other devices owned by criminal suspects. But the agency may have been overstating this so-called “going dark” problem, the Washington Post reported this week. A programming error at the FBI led the agency to report that it has seized about 7,800 mobile devices that it cannot open, but the actual number may be less than 2,000, the story says.

AI as Big Brother: Artificial intelligence is being used to track down criminals by combing through data faster than humans can, reports The Telegraph. The story features AI startup Senzing, an IBM spinoff. Meanwhile, the government of China is increasingly using AI to assist its Great Firewall program, says Internet of Business.

A bad year for security: This year is shaping up to be a terrible year for cybersecurity, due in part to poor Internet of Things security, reports Security Boulevard. In addition to the IoT concerns, 85 percent security executives surveyed worry their countries will experience a crucial infrastructure attack in the next five years.

Banking on blockchain and AI: Banks’ use of blockchain, AI, Continue reading

We’ve Added a CCIE Security v5 Technology Course to Our Video Library!

Check out our latest edition to the INE Library – CCIE Security v5 Technologies: IKEv1 IPsec VPN. This is the latest installment of our CCIE Security v5 technologies series, and focuses on Internet Key Exchange version 1 (IKEv1), Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) and related topics.

 


About this Course:

This course is taught by Piotr Kaluzny and is 2 hours and 27 minutes long. This course is part of a thirty video series covering the CCIE Security v5 Blueprint.


What You’ll Learn:

The course starts with a discussion of basic VPN concepts, followed by a detailed overview of the protocols and hands-on demonstrations. This course also serves as an introduction to more advanced VPN technologies, such as DMVPN or GETVPN.

You can view this course by visiting our streaming site or by purchasing the course at ine.com.

Copying and renaming files on Linux

Linux users have for many decades been using simple cp and mv commands to copy and rename files. These commands are some of the first that most of us learned and are used every day by possibly millions of people. But there are other techniques, handy variations, and another command for renaming files that offers some unique options.First, let’s think about why might you want to copy a file. You might need the same file in another location or you might want a copy because you’re going to edit the file and want to be sure you have a handy backup just in case you need to revert to the original file. The obvious way to do that is to use a command like “cp myfile myfile-orig”.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The evolution of storage from on-premises to cloud

Anyone that has kept up with this column knows I tend to focus on one storage architecture more than any other – the hybrid-cloud storage architecture. That’s because I truly believe in its ability to meet the challenges of today’s IT storage – ever-expanding data, multiple sites, a need for flexibility and scale, while simultaneously meeting specific performance demands. For this month’s column, I thought we would take a look at how we got to this point and see if this evolution informs where we might go in the near future.Early days – pre-NAS The very earliest business storage systems were designed for a world long-gone. One in which a business would be expected to manage maybe thousands of files. Even the largest enterprise would have a storage system to support hundreds of concurrent users, no more. These legacy systems had regularly scheduled down time for maintenance, but it was not unusual to not have access for unscheduled reasons.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The evolution of storage from on-premise to cloud

Anyone that has kept up with this column knows I tend to focus on one storage architecture more than any other – the hybrid-cloud storage architecture. That’s because I truly believe in its ability to meet the challenges of today’s IT storage – ever-expanding data, multiple sites, a need for flexibility and scale, while simultaneously meeting specific performance demands. For this month’s column, I thought we would take a look at how we got to this point and see if this evolution informs where we might go in the near future.Early days – pre-NAS The very earliest business storage systems were designed for a world long-gone. One in which a business would be expected to manage maybe thousands of files. Even the largest enterprise would have a storage system to support hundreds of concurrent users, no more. These legacy systems had regularly scheduled down time for maintenance, but it was not unusual to not have access for unscheduled reasons.To read this article in full, please click here