Self Service: The most understated reason why SDNs will rock your world

As I noted previously, two surveys give different pictures about SDNs. My take: every enterprise will adopt SDNs, but lower hardware prices will not be the biggest reason. Here’s why:

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SDNs: Love 'em or Leave 'em?

Are Software Defined Networks (SDN) on your short list yet? Two recent surveys suggest it depends on where you work. I say that given our recent experiences with SDN, within five years and everyone will adopt or have definitive plans to adopt SDN technology. Here’s why:

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VMware's Nicira acquisition represents new threats and new opportunities for network managers

Perhaps you’re like a lot of us in IT. You’ve come up through the ranks, mastered subnetting and routing, understood the interaction between loss, latency and bandwidth, and learned the intricacies of Spanning Tree. And perhaps you’ve also avoided all that virtualization stuff, leaving it to the server team to worry about virtual machines and virtual processors. Well, I have news for you. If you value your job - if you want a career - you’d better start learning about virtualization.

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Beyond Dropbox: Security is only part of the cloud's problem

Microsoft might want you to “Take it to the Cloud” but a whole lot of people are wishing they had stayed on the ground. The recent news that Dropbox accounts may be exposed, again, to attack should raise alarms for any IT manager considering cloud services. Security, though, is not the only issue facing cloud buyers.

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Concurrent Connections: The Secret to Buying Scalable IT Gear

IT folk love numbers, so it’s somewhat understandable that many buyers may be swept away by the gigabits of WAN capacity a device can saturate and forget about another equally important measurement - connection counts. The number of concurrent connections has grown and continues to grow due to the shift towards Web applications, coupled with the characteristics of mainstream business applications. As such, it’s even more important that equipment connecting to the WAN can accommodate that growth.

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Big Data and your network

With all the talk about big data, we hear comparatively little about the challenges it’ll pose for the WAN. So it was particularly interesting to hear what one university learned when they ran Hadoop over their WAN.

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How to More than Triple Your WAN Performance - Without WAN Optimization

We’ve heard about a lot of benefits driving SDNs, but this week we found about a new one of particular importance to anyone building multi-site networks: Google is using an SDN to improve its WAN investment by more than three times.

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VMware: Make Your Networks 10x Simpler to Manage

An important message came out of EMCWorld last week that should interest anyone looking to run a major data network. Both EMC and VMWare drew attention to the importance of making our networks simpler to run and manage. If organizations are going to build truly massive networks efficiently, reducing the time it takes to deploy and manage resources is essential. The big question now is whether network and infrastructure vendors are going to follow suit.

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The Four Lies of Networking

Big Data and networking in general are all about numbers and statistics. We talk about our Petabytes of data, the number of packets per second and the Mbytes replicated in an hour. We want to know about the uptime percentages of our services and the time to repair on our circuits. We’re sold on loss ratios and round trip times.

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Are you Touchy About your Appliances?

Us guys, we like our things – our cars, computers, gadgets, you name it. We like tangible stuff that we can touch and hold, none of this touchy, feely stuff. So what’s the deal then with the future of our network gear? Are we destined for “manly” physical appliances or are we going for those “pansy” virtual appliances?

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Big Data Gets a New Big Standard

One of the more interesting challenges data center architects are going to face over the next year is how to support “big data” initiatives. It’s one thing to maintain a 5 terabyte database; it’s a different story to collect, move, and manage that data.

That why I found it so interesting that the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) just announced the formation of a Data Services Workgroup. The workgroup is being chartered to document the most urgent requirements facing IT in their management of data towards competitive opportunities, with big data being their first focus.

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IBM Research Study: Server Consolidation Won’t Help Nearly Half-the-Time

IBM Research just released a large-scale performance survey of several thousand data center servers over the past two years. The research shows that, on average, today’s servers’ biggest performance challenges are in-memory and disk utilization and not in processor usage, and that in about half the cases server consolidation will not make sense.

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Calculating Bandwidth for your WAN

There was an interesting discussion over in one of the Cisco forums on how to calculate your WAN speed. Those of you who read my last post know that packet loss, latency, and bandwidth all play into throughput calculations.

But that still doesn’t tell you how much to dimension your network if you’re replicating or backing up a database or running interactive traffic. One poster, JosephDoherty, had some great insight that I thought you might like:

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Why My Mama Runs Faster Than Your App

You know the drill. The request comes down to run XYZ app between offices. You run it on the LAN and, of course, it all looks fine, but when you put it on the WAN, performance drops to about as fast Rich Eisen’s 40-yard dash time. Now you need to explain the problem to your users and come up with a solution. Let me save you the trouble. Here are the top five reasons your users’ apps won’t run on the WAN – and some suggestions on what to do about it.

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Will the iPad and Android Tablets Save Business Continuity?

Hurricane season is fast approaching and IT pros are once again called to evaluate their business continuity plans. A major challenge will be how to continue to provide user access in the face of office closure. The emergence of HTML 5 could ultimately help address this challenge, but application and networking challenges must first be solved.

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