Virtualized network services will be game changer for enterprise IT
An old colleague of mine, Current Analysis’ Brian Washburn, hit it right last week when he blogged about how virtualized services will be a game changer for managed network service providers. The same is true for enterprise IT...
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:To hear proponents tell it, Software Defined...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.For the most part,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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....
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...
