Riverbed acquires Aternity to get an end-user perspective

The IT management industry has been highly fragmented with great point products to monitor pieces of infrastructure. There are network management tools, application performance systems and a wealth of other products available to IT buyers.The problem with this model is the point products provide an incomplete view of what and end user might be experiencing. This leads to what I’ve referred to as “swivel chair management” where an engineer plunks himself down in the middle of several management consoles, watches all the activity and tries to correlate the data manually to understand when problems occur. This is difficult, if not impossible, to do because there is simply too much data to try to analyze manually.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thinking Out Loud: My Career Planning

On average I usually think about my career at least 1 time every year and do an honest and deep “career inventory taking”.  More often (sometimes 2-3 times a year) if my job or environment is changing a lot. Are the questions I ask myself each time the same?  No.  Why?  Well cause time has passed.  What do I mean by this?  This means that over the years what I’ve seen is that my 1 year plan, 3 year plan, 5 year plan and 10 year plans have changed as I have changed.

For example ~26 years ago (when I was 25 years old) my plan was to become CEO of IBM by the time I was 35.  LOL!   (But that is a whole other blog: What’s at the “Top” of Your Ladder?)   Obviously, between then (when I was 25) and now my annual “career planning inventory” questions and my focus on what I want as the “wins” in a job for me….. have radically changed.  

What do I mean by “my focus on what I want as the ‘wins’ in a job?”    Well, again, when I was Continue reading

Oracle to buy cloud provider NetSuite for $9.3 billion

Oracle has entered into an agreement to buy NetSuite, which provides cloud-based accounting, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and other business software packages, for US$9.3 billion.The NetSuite package of products is complementary to Oracle's cloud products and the companies' cloud packages will "coexist in the marketplace forever," Mark Hurd, Oracle's CEO, said in a press release.The deal will allow Oracle to serve a broader range of customers, including smaller businesses, and expand to more industries and more countries, the company said. Asked what additional advantages the deal brings, and Oracle spokeswoman said, "We are declining additional comment today."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle to buy cloud software provider NetSuite for $9.3 billion

Oracle has entered into an agreement to buy NetSuite, which provides cloud-based accounting, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and other business software packages, for US$9.3 billion. The NetSuite package of products is complementary to Oracle's cloud products and the companies' cloud packages will "coexist in the marketplace forever," Mark Hurd, Oracle's CEO, said in a press release. The deal will allow Oracle to serve a broader range of customers, including smaller businesses, and expand to more industries and more countries, the company said. Asked what additional advantages the deal brings, and Oracle spokeswoman said, "We are declining additional comment today."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microservices Gone Wild – Tech Dive Part 4

In this last post of my four-part series on microservices, I’ll look at some of the positive aspects of microservices, and how much simpler they can potentially make things once you overcome the up-front effort required to make them work.

Scalability

When a monolithic app needs to scale, how can that be achieved? Well, for example:

• More RAM (if the app is memory-bound)
• More or Faster CPUs (if the app is CPU-bound)
• More instances of the app (front with a load balancer)

These are all effective ways to scale the application. What if one function within the application could really use a performance boost, even though the others are working just fine? Using a load balancer to distribute work requests can mean that scaling up the ability for a single module to process concurrent requests can be as simple as spinning up a few more containers and sharing the load:

There’s some effort required to allow the main program to issue concurrent calls, but the benefits can be worthwhile. Plus, of course, each of our microservices may be called by other programs, or may call each other as necessary, so there may be more than just one source of activity. Continue reading

Riverbed buys end-user experience monitoring company Aternity

Network and application performance management company Riverbed announced this morning that it would acquire end-user experience monitoring firm Aternity for an undisclosed fee.Aternity, a privately held company headquartered in Westborough, Mass., was founded in 2004 as Gelion Networks. Its core technology, which is currently operating on 1.7 million global endpoints, is real end-user monitoring, which detects performance issues by analyzing user behavior. The idea, according to Riverbed, is to add Aternity’s technology into the company’s extensive existing lineup of monitoring and management capabilities.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Why Belgium leads the world in IPv6 adoption + White boxes are now ready for prime timeTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Riverbed buys end-user experience monitoring company Aternity

Network and application performance management company Riverbed announced this morning that it would acquire end-user experience monitoring firm Aternity for an undisclosed fee.Aternity, a privately held company headquartered in Westborough, Mass., was founded in 2004 as Gelion Networks. Its core technology, which is currently operating on 1.7 million global endpoints, is real end-user monitoring, which detects performance issues by analyzing user behavior. The idea, according to Riverbed, is to add Aternity’s technology into the company’s extensive existing lineup of monitoring and management capabilities.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Why Belgium leads the world in IPv6 adoption + White boxes are now ready for prime timeTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to attract a board-level cybersecurity expert

Suzanne Vautrinot’s impressive cybersecurity experience has been in high demand since she retired from the U.S. Air Force in October 2013. As a major general and commander, she helped create the Department of Defense's U.S. Cyber Command and led the Air Force's IT and online battle group.In the past year alone, she has fielded “more than a handful” of phone calls from company executives and recruiters who hope to attract her to their board of directors, but she doesn’t jump at every opportunity. She has turned down board positions “more than once” because she perceived that the company wasn’t committed to cybersecurity initiatives or that she wouldn’t be active in any board matters beyond security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

9 data security tips for cloud migration

New security challengesImage by Les HainesWhen migrating to a cloud-based environment, companies need to take a hard look at their needs and the security of their providers, as well as their own internal policies. Many companies don’t take time to consider the risks of simply sharing cloud space with other organizations, for example, or how to match cloud security policies to those of the data center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to manage the 7 biggest workplace fears

Workplace stress is common, and at some point in your life, it's likely you'll feel the pressure that can come from maintaining a career. Experiencing anxiety at work is ultimately bad for everyone. Consistent anxious feelings in the workplace can actually lead to underperformance and affect the relationship between employees and their co-workers and managers.Scott Steinberg, bestselling author of Make Change Work for You, cites research around the seven common types of fear people report feeling in the workplace. These fears not only stand in the way of professional development, but they hamper creativity, innovation and business growth as well, according to Steinberg.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security Sessions: Generational differences in security, privacy attitudes

In the latest episode of Security Sessions, CSO Editor-in-Chief Joan Goodchild chats with Ted Harrington of Independent Security Evaluators about how different generations (mainly millennials and Baby Boomers) view both security and privacy matters. These differences and attitudes can have a big effect on how companies train them on proper security procedures.

Enterprise Networks Bracing For Olympics

Rethinking Your IT Security Strategy

The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2016 (so far!)

Wacky storiesImage by Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/Beck Diefenbach/Stephen LamYes it's that time again…Time to search the old news-feed and find some of the most interesting and sometimes weird and wacky high-tech stories of the year. This time out we feature a look at everything from fireworks displays in space to Starship Enterprise remakes and mermaid robots – just to name a few cool stories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2016 (so far!)

Wacky storiesImage by Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/Beck Diefenbach/Stephen LamYes it's that time again…Time to search the old news-feed and find some of the most interesting and sometimes weird and wacky high-tech stories of the year. This time out we feature a look at everything from fireworks displays in space to Starship Enterprise remakes and mermaid robots – just to name a few cool stories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

General – The Future of Networking – Russ White

Hello my friends,

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the future of networking and the career paths in this domain. As you probably know I like to guide and mentor people and with everything going on in the industry it can be confusing to find your way and to know what skills to work on to stay ahead of the curve.

I decided to reach out to some of my friends to ask them of their vision of the role of the future networking engineer and how to prepare for the changes that we are now seeing. First out is my friend Russ White who is also the co-author of the book Unintended Features that we wrote together.

Daniel: What are the major skills that people in networking need to learn to stay ahead of the curve?

Russ: Some of these have never changed — for instance, communication and abstraction. Some skills have been more important forever, such as people skills and project manage, but they never seem to really rise to the top in terms of actual demand. I don’t think this is going to change much; companies say they want people skills, and then recruit based Continue reading

Networking in 1980s

Summer is a great time to do odd jobs that you always wanted to do but never found time for. One of mine: document the crazy stuff I’ve been doing decades ago. Starting point: how I got into networking in 1980s.

Smartphone market inches back to growth with Samsung holding lead

The smartphone market is showing signs of growth again, but barely, with shipments up nearly 1 percent year-on-year in the second quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. The research firm, which had reported a 3 percent drop in the market in the last quarter, said Wednesday that there are indications that the market had bottomed out in the first half of this year. Multiple new product launches from vendors including Samsung Electronics and Apple could see an improving  growth outlook for the second half of the year. Another research firm Canalys reported Tuesday that smartphone shipments had returned to modest growth in the second quarter after a disappointing first quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

First, Kill All The Servers

Cannibalize your own products or someone else will do it for you, as the old adage goes.

And so it is that Amazon Web Services, the largest provider of infrastructure services available on the public cloud, has been methodically building up a set of data and processing services that will allow customers to run functions against streams or lakes of data without ever setting up a server as we know it.

Just saying the words makes us a little woozy, with systems being the very foundation of the computing platforms that everyone deploys today to do the data processing that …

First, Kill All The Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Making Networking Great Again: Leveraging ifupdown2 in the Data Center

I love election season, mainly for all the great slogans. Every candidate is trying to find a way to catch the attention of the electorate in order to get their ideas across. If people don’t know the benefits of a new solution, they’ll be hard pressed to understand how much better life can be.

The same can be said for Linux networking when ifupdown2 came along. This article describes the improvements made to ifupdown2, but it doesn’t describe the excruciating pain of having to run the classic ifupdown. I feel obliged to join this campaign cycle to wholeheartedly endorse ifupdown2 and tell you about how it’s making networking great again.

I was recently simulating a data center environment with Vagrant to test scalable architectures. I was trying to leverage ECMP via the new Routing on the Host feature on an Ubuntu 14.04LTS server over a Cumulus Linux spine/leaf Clos network. One requirement for this feature to work is peering BGP between the Ubuntu server and the first-hop leaf. Sounds simple, right? I had already peered BGP throughout my entire Cumulus Linux switch network, and since Ubuntu is also a Debian-based distribution, it should have been a trivial task.

Read Continue reading