IDG Contributor Network: When evaluating SD-WAN, look beyond the features table

Like many IT products, SD-WAN products can sound insanely alike. Sit through presentations and read through the literature and then ask yourself what’s the practical difference between each vendor’s implementation? It can be difficult question to answer even for people in the business of answering those questions.A common approach for an initial cut in an evaluation process is to reduce the product list by focusing on features. By creating a table of specific product specifications, assigning a weighted scoring, many of my customer have come up with a score and by extension a tool for eliminating some products from their selection process.Such an approach while valuable in some respects, is insufficient even for an initial cut. There are too many elements to a purchase that are not measured by a features table. Or, there might be important unfamiliar features that you forget to include in the table.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: When evaluating SD-WAN, look beyond the features table

Like many IT products, SD-WAN products can sound insanely alike. Sit through presentations and read through the literature and then ask yourself what’s the practical difference between each vendor’s implementation? It can be difficult question to answer even for people in the business of answering those questions.A common approach for an initial cut in an evaluation process is to reduce the product list by focusing on features. By creating a table of specific product specifications, assigning a weighted scoring, many of my customer have come up with a score and by extension a tool for eliminating some products from their selection process.Such an approach while valuable in some respects, is insufficient even for an initial cut. There are too many elements to a purchase that are not measured by a features table. Or, there might be important unfamiliar features that you forget to include in the table.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arista Any Cloud Networking – Our Next Frontier

Arista Any Cloud Networking - Our Next Frontier

The modern cloud networking world is vastly different from traditional enterprise IT, and the gap is getting wider everyday. How does one truly scale across millions of machines and workloads globally? A decade ago, Arista pioneered the new software driven networking era and the same challenges now exist not only across the LAN intra-datacenters but also inter-datacenters via wide area networks (WANS). Although we have never promoted “SD-LAN” nor understood the “SD-WAN” hype, Arista has redefined software driven networking and pioneered the convergence between LANs and WANS.

Arista Any Cloud Networking – Our Next Frontier

Arista Any Cloud Networking - Our Next Frontier

The modern cloud networking world is vastly different from traditional enterprise IT, and the gap is getting wider everyday. How does one truly scale across millions of machines and workloads globally? A decade ago, Arista pioneered the new software driven networking era and the same challenges now exist not only across the LAN intra-datacenters but also inter-datacenters via wide area networks (WANS). Although we have never promoted “SD-LAN” nor understood the “SD-WAN” hype, Arista has redefined software driven networking and pioneered the convergence between LANs and WANS.

REVIEW: Mojo wireless intrusion prevention system

Network managers don't need a primer on the threats that could befall their networks, from man-in-the-middle threats from rogue APs to the global ransomware epidemic. It's a bad situation that shows no signs of improving any time soon. It's not surprising, then, that Wireless Intrusion Prevention Systems are becoming increasingly popular.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Start Your Network Automation Journey by Mastering Fundamentals

If you’re a long-time reader of my blog you probably know that I believe in learning the fundamentals before trying to do anything else (like Google-and-Paste spaghetti wall approach), so you could imagine my delight when I got this feedback from an engineer watching (free) Network Programmability 101 webinar:

I was expecting a technical webinar, so I was a little bit disappointed at first with a “meta” webinar, but as I got through I was more than happy; learning such a meta sphere or getting to know other mindsets is very useful for me. The webinar pushed me to think outside of my little world and to open my mind.

That's exactly what I'm trying to achieve with the high-level webinars. So glad to hear it worked ;))

Read more ...

Troubleshooting with Docker Swarm + NetQ

Say you are a network engineer, and you recently were told your company will be building applications using a distributed/microservices architecture with containers moving forward. You know how important this is for the developers — it gives them tremendous flexibility to develop and deploy money making applications. However, what does this mean for the network? It can be much more technically challenging to plan, operate, and manage a network with containers than a traditional network. The containers may need to talk with each other and to the outside world, and you won’t even know IF they exist, let alone WHERE they exist! Yet, the network engineer is responsible for the containers connectivity and high availability.

Since the containers are deployed inside a host — on a virtual ethernet network — they can be invisible to network engineers. Orchestration tools such as Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos or Kubernetes make it very easy to spin up and take down containers from various hosts on a network – and may even do this without human intervention. Many containers are also ephemeral and the traffic patterns between the servers hosting containers can be very dynamic and constantly shifting throughout the network.

troubleshooting with Docker Swarm

Cumulus Networks understands Continue reading

The Power9 Rollout Begins With Summit And Sierra

At the end of July, Oak Ridge National Laboratories started receiving the first racks of servers that will eventually be expanded to become the “Summit” supercomputer, the long-awaited replacement to the “Titan” hybrid CPU-GPU system that was built by Cray and installed back in the fall of 2012. So, technically speaking, IBM has begun shipping its Power9-based “Witherspoon” system, the kicker to the Power8-based “Minksy” machine that Big Blue unveiled in September 2016 as a precursor and a testbed for the Power9 iron.

Given that IBM is shipping Summit nodes to Oak Ridge and has also started shipping similar (but …

The Power9 Rollout Begins With Summit And Sierra was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Microsoft launches data security technology for Windows Server, Azure

Data is at its greatest risk of being compromised when it is being used, when moving from a secure database around the servers or apps in memory. So, Microsoft is launching a new technology for Windows Server and Azure that protects the data while it’s being processed. Microsoft claims the service, called Azure confidential computing, makes it the first public cloud provider to offer encryption of data while in use. Encrypting data while it is being manipulated is pretty CPU-intensive, and there is no word on the performance impact of this service. “Despite advanced cybersecurity controls and mitigations, some customers are reluctant to move their most sensitive data to the cloud for fear of attacks against their data when it is in use,” Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure CTO, wrote in a company blog post. “With confidential computing, they can move the data to Azure knowing that it is safe not only at rest, but also in use from [various] threats.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft launches data security technology for Windows Server, Azure

Data is at its greatest risk of being compromised when it is being used, when moving from a secure database around the servers or apps in memory. So, Microsoft is launching a new technology for Windows Server and Azure that protects the data while it’s being processed. Microsoft claims the service, called Azure confidential computing, makes it the first public cloud provider to offer encryption of data while in use. Encrypting data while it is being manipulated is pretty CPU-intensive, and there is no word on the performance impact of this service. “Despite advanced cybersecurity controls and mitigations, some customers are reluctant to move their most sensitive data to the cloud for fear of attacks against their data when it is in use,” Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure CTO, wrote in a company blog post. “With confidential computing, they can move the data to Azure knowing that it is safe not only at rest, but also in use from [various] threats.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: Finally: Easy, Remote IT For SMBs

Setting up and managing an IT infrastructure isn’t what most small and mid-sized business owners signed up for when they opened their doors. At least not voluntarily. After all, IT is an intimidating field filled with fragmented components, esoteric expertise, and expensive hardware. That may be why the most powerful network solutions have felt out of reach for small businesses, only approachable by larger enterprises with deeper pockets.Whether they have the resources or not, though, every business is a digital business in today’s economy. They all rely on a functional IT framework on some scale. And for the 83% of small businesses that don’t have any dedicated IT staff, the ultimate responsibility of running the company network often falls to the person with the most at stake: the business owner. So too do the related concerns of cybersecurity, network reliability, malfunctioning equipment, employee access, and so on.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Finally: Easy, Remote IT For SMBs

Setting up and managing an IT infrastructure isn’t what most small and mid-sized business owners signed up for when they opened their doors. At least not voluntarily. After all, IT is an intimidating field filled with fragmented components, esoteric expertise, and expensive hardware. That may be why the most powerful network solutions have felt out of reach for small businesses, only approachable by larger enterprises with deeper pockets.Whether they have the resources or not, though, every business is a digital business in today’s economy. They all rely on a functional IT framework on some scale. And for the 83% of small businesses that don’t have any dedicated IT staff, the ultimate responsibility of running the company network often falls to the person with the most at stake: the business owner. So too do the related concerns of cybersecurity, network reliability, malfunctioning equipment, employee access, and so on.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Hyperconvergence and silos

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) promises benefits in several dimensions: streamlining deployments across compute, storage and networking; scaling linearly as needs grow; and unifying and simplifying management. When examining prospective HCI solutions, it’s important to ensure this set of promises is fulfilled, but more importantly that checking those boxes with HCI doesn’t create new IT silos. A careful examination of what causes these silos makes it much easier to identify a solution that blends seamlessly into your architecture and chips away at IT silos, while at the same time ushering in the simplicity and ease that HCI promises. —Kaustubh Das @ The Data Center Journal

The post Worth Reading: Hyperconvergence and silos appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Always test remote app performance with a WAN emulator

Many organizations deploy new applications for their remote site users without testing it on a WAN. Not testing these applications across a simulated WAN increases the possibility of performance issues during the early stages of usage because you have no idea how the application will perform once latency or jitter come in between the communication path of the client and server. If the application uses large amounts of bandwidth that causes congestion, then it can negatively affect the performance of other applications that share the bandwidth. A WAN emulator can enable you to measure the average bandwidth that an application may use before you deploy it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Always test remote app performance with a WAN emulator

Many organizations deploy new applications for their remote site users without testing it on a WAN. Not testing these applications across a simulated WAN increases the possibility of performance issues during the early stages of usage because you have no idea how the application will perform once latency or jitter come in between the communication path of the client and server. If the application uses large amounts of bandwidth that causes congestion, then it can negatively affect the performance of other applications that share the bandwidth. A WAN emulator can enable you to measure the average bandwidth that an application may use before you deploy it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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