Wi-Fi standards and speeds explained, compared

In the world of wireless, the term Wi-Fi is synonymous with wireless access, even though the term Wi-Fi itself (and the Wi-Fi Alliance) is a group dedicated to interoperability between different wireless LAN products and technologies.The standards themselves are part of the 802.11 family of standards, courtesy of the IEEE. With terms such as “802.11b” (pronounced “Eight-O-Two-Eleven-Bee”, ignore the “dot”) and “802.11ac”, the alphabet soup of standards that began in the late 1990s continues to see improvements in throughput and range as we race to the future to get faster network access.Along the way, improvements are being made by adopting new frequencies for wireless data delivery, as well as range improvements and reduced power consumption, to help support initiatives like “The Internet of Things” and virtual reality.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel Stacks Up Xeons Against AMD Epyc Systems

Apparently, it’s Rivalry Week in the compute section of the datacenter here at The Next Platform. There are a slew of vendors ramping up their processors and their ecosystems to do battle for 2018 budget dollars, and many of them are talking up the performance and bang for the buck of their architectures.

We have just discussed the “Vulcan” variant of the ThunderX2 processor from Cavium and how that company thinks it ranks against the new “Skylake” Xeon SP processors from Intel, which made their debut in July. AMD was talking up its Epyc processors at the recent SC17 …

Intel Stacks Up Xeons Against AMD Epyc Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

We Want to Hear from SD-WAN Customers

Sue Marek: Editor-in-Chief at SDxCentral We’ve all heard the tales of how software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) can dramatically change the ways taht enterprises connect their branch offices and save companies thousands of dollars. But who better to tell those stories than the IT executives at those enterprises that are working with the technology every day?  We’d love to be able... Read more →

Worth Reading: Assessing Cloud Vendors

When it comes to evaluating new vendors, it can be challenging to know how best to communicate the requirements of your vendor assessment process and ultimately select the right partner to help your business move forward — while at the same time avoiding the risk of a third-party security incident. After all, 63 percent of data breaches are linked to third parties in some way. In fact, we all recently learned about how an Equifax vendor was serving up malicious code on their website in a newly discovered security incident. —Nick Sorenson @ the Cloud Security Alliance

Assessing The Tradeoffs Of NVM-Express Storage At Scale

NVM-Express isn’t new. Development on the interface, which provides lean and mean access to non-volatile memory, first came to light a decade ago, with technical work starting two years later through a work group that comprised more than 90 tech vendors. The first NVM-Express specification came out in 2011, and now the technology is going mainstream.

How quickly and pervasively remains to be seen. NVM-Express promises significant boosts in performance to SSDs while driving down the latency, which would be a boon to HPC organizations and the wider world of enterprises as prices for SSDs continue to fall and adoption …

Assessing The Tradeoffs Of NVM-Express Storage At Scale was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: Resiliency in the age of cloud services

Resilient application architectures have evolved dramatically over the years. In the age of monolithic applications, with static application deployments in large datacenter setups, resiliency required depth and redundancy in individual deployments. It needed always-on scale to meet the maximum expected workload, along with redundant connectivity and power.Within a monolithic application environment, individual components – like servers – were expected to fail, and organizations built deployments with component-level redundancy as a result. For example, they created multiple database servers in a primary/secondary config or multiple application servers in an active/active config.To read this article in full, please click here

‘Net Neutrality Reader

There is a lot of talk about the “end of ‘net neutrality” because of the recent announcements made by the United State Federal Communications Commission (FCC). With so much out there, it is often important to sit down and read a few pieces together to gain a better sense of different sides of the issue, rather than reading one or two articles and considering yourself “well informed.” This post provides a starting point for those interested in pursuing the issue a little more deeply.

The latest episodes in this unfortunate techno-religious proclivity are now emerging. One involves an especially egregious hyperbolic excess of the Internet Wars known as Net Neutrality. The winning internet protocol religious faction, having infused the Washington political system with their Templar Knights in 2009, baked their commandments into the embarrassing December 2010 Report & Order of the FCC as “preserving the free and open internet.” “Today the Commission takes an important step to preserve the Internet as an open platform for innovation, investment, job creation, economic growth, competition, and free expression.” Nevermind that they never actually defined “the Internet.” They simply believed that whatever it was, the FCC as a federal government Continue reading

Cavium Is Truly A Contender With One-Two Arm Server Punch

It has been two years since chip maker Cavium rolled out its ThunderX Arm server processor roadmap and gave us the first glimpse of its second-generation ThunderX2 processors. A lot has changed in that time, and Cavium is now sitting in the cat-bird seat of the Arm server market at just the moment that it is merging with rival chipmaker Marvell.

Timing is everything in this IT racket, and Cavium certainly has been fortunate in this regard.

Thanks largely to Avago Technologies buying Broadcom in May 2015 for a stunning $37 billion and then at the end of 2016 losing …

Cavium Is Truly A Contender With One-Two Arm Server Punch was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: Automation advancements bring netops and devops teams into the future

Recently we’ve watched netops and devops teams struggle to navigate complex networks, regulate change management, meet competitive deadlines, and break through the barriers posed by siloed IT structures. They are plagued with challenges that make the thought of five-nine SLAs a farfetched dream. The top priority in these tough times is implementing a system that helps them achieve their goals faster, without compromising quality. That’s we’re seeing automation come in.Automation is no longer a new concept. It is an essential part of every application lifecycle, from the development stage to the final deployment. Gone are the days when users, to copy a file, would open the command prompt, navigate to the directory, then manually identify the file’s final location and specify the command with the right syntax.  This process was not only incredibly tedious – it was extremely error-prone. Now, users can simply drag and drop files to copy them. The functionality remains the same, but automation does the heavy lifting instead of the user.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Automation advancements bring netops and devops teams into the future

Recently we’ve watched netops and devops teams struggle to navigate complex networks, regulate change management, meet competitive deadlines, and break through the barriers posed by siloed IT structures. They are plagued with challenges that make the thought of five-nine SLAs a farfetched dream. The top priority in these tough times is implementing a system that helps them achieve their goals faster, without compromising quality. That’s we’re seeing automation come in.Automation is no longer a new concept. It is an essential part of every application lifecycle, from the development stage to the final deployment. Gone are the days when users, to copy a file, would open the command prompt, navigate to the directory, then manually identify the file’s final location and specify the command with the right syntax.  This process was not only incredibly tedious – it was extremely error-prone. Now, users can simply drag and drop files to copy them. The functionality remains the same, but automation does the heavy lifting instead of the user.To read this article in full, please click here

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