One of the most essential functions of any SD-WAN solution is its ability to maintain optimal connections to critical applications and resources even when primary internet connections fail or become unreliable. Public internet connections over fixed lines like cable or DSL can be unreliable, creating a bottleneck and single choke point in case of an outage. That’s why many SD-WAN solutions provide LTE and 5G failover options to help maintain optimal user experience. Cellular or wireless SD-WAN options provide faster and more flexible broadband at the enterprise edge, helping ensure reliable, high-performance connectivity while keeping costs far below those of MPLS and other interconnect provider options.
When the coronavirus pandemic forced shutdowns across the world, industries faced a disaster unlike ever before. Facilities and IT systems were operational, yet people could not physically access them. According to a 2021 McKinsey survey, Industry 4.0 technologies were a lifesaver, with 94% of respondents saying they helped keep operations running and more than half (56%) reporting they were critical to doing so.
COVID-19 put Industry 4.0 and digital transformation into third gear, while preparing enterprises for the post-pandemic era. However, these technologies depend on connectivity, and legacy solutions such as wired connections or WiFi are not up to the challenge.
The Murray School District in suburban Salt Lake City is using private LTE to keep 6,000 students connected to their classrooms, as mandated remote schooling continues through the COVID pandemic’s late stages.
The district had been looking for a private LTE system to provide reliable connectivity for homework and remote classes since 2016, having identified a real digital divide in its student body. Home Wi-Fi or public cellular data connections didn’t always provide enough bandwidth to handle live and recorded video, particularly in households where several students and their parents might be trying to connect at the same time.
The private LTE network didn’t pan out until recently, however, after the formerly restricted citizens broadband radio service (CBRS) became more widely available in January 2020. Before that, licensing sufficient broadband spectrum was far too expensive for a suburban school district, according to Jason Eyre, CTO of the Murray schools.
Cost-efficiencies. Scalability. Mobility. Flexibility. These attributes of the cloud were driving adoption by organizations in every industry even before Covid-19 hit. Then, with challenges such as strained supply chains, stay-at-home orders, and an emerging new hybrid work reality, cloud adoption went into overdrive, spurred by renewed digital transformation priorities.
In response to the pandemic, 61% of IT leaders planned to accelerate their digital transformation efforts, according to the 2020 IDG/CIO Covid-19 Impact study. The cloud is a vital part of those efforts. And as cloud deployments have grown, another important and interrelated strategy for continued transformation has emerged: edge computing.
NetApp used its virtual NetApp Insight 2021 conference as the launchpad for several new technologies and enhancements to existing products, as well as to announce an acquisition. All are meant to bolster the on-prem storage supplier’s cloud offerings.
First up, NetApp introduced ONTAP 9.10 Enterprise Data Management software, which includes upgrades that protect against ransomware and enhanced detection and recovery capabilities. The new software also features expanded data management capabilities and NVMe/TCP support.
NVMe traditionally works over a network fabric, but there are bottlenecks – namely, you have to build the fabric. NVMe/TCP allows the same storage devices to be shared among data centers through the Internet protocol over the existing network.
Among the greatest component shortages bedeviling everyone is that of GPUs, both from Nvidia and AMD. GPUs are used in Bitcoin farming, and with massive farms around the world gobbling up every GPU card, getting one is nigh impossible or prohibitively expense.
So customers need to squeeze every last cycle out of the GPUs they have in service. An Israeli company called Run:AI claims it has a fix with a pair of technologies that pool GPU resources and maximize their use.
The technologies are called Thin GPU Provisioning and Job Swapping. Not the most creative of names but they describe what the two do in tandem to automate the allocation and utilization of GPUs.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is everywhere, and its use is growing fast. Local governments use IoT to build smart cities and to create intelligent businesses. Industry analysts estimate that over 30 billion IoT devices will be connected worldwide by 2025, a sharp jump from the 13.8 billion units in 2021*.
Manufacturing companies have the highest IoT spend to date of industries while the health care market continues to experience the highest IoT growth. The promise of analytical data insights to yield greater efficiencies and enhanced customer satisfaction fuels IoT growth. The top use cases driving IoT growth are self-optimizing production, predictive maintenance, and automated inventory management.
Graphcore, the British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning, has greatly increased the performance of its massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) servers.
Graphcore sells its AI-oriented chips in rack-mounted designs called IPU-PODs. Up until now, the maximum per cabinet has been 64 units (in the IPU-POD64). The newest racks are twice and four times as large: the IPU-POD128 and IPU-POD256.
Optical media is the longest lasting medium currently in production. It can reliably hold onto your data for 50-100 years without power or cooling, and without the worry of magnetic degradation.
Using recordable optical media such as DVD-R is perfectly suitable for long-term archiving because it is write-once, read-many, meaning it is physically immutable—cannot be changed—so the data on it is tamper-proof.
It seems, then, that optical media might dominate archived storage, but it doesn’t. To explore why, first let’s take a look at the technology.
The growing impact of hybrid work is resulting in a reassessment of the IT network infrastructure including the ability to glean analytic details from remote workers and ensure collaboration assets are working properly.
Going forward, organizations should expect Cisco products that will help to further lock down networks and support application-monitoring and collaboration environments for hybrid workers, Todd Nightingale, the company’s executive vice president and general manager for enterprise networking cloud told Network World head of his keynote at this week’s Cisco WebexOne 2021 virtual conference.
The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services (a.k.a. unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS)) is an indication of how well served businesses are via the internet.
ThousandEyes is monitoring how these providers are handling the performance challenges they face. It will provide Network World a roundup of interesting events of the week in the delivery of these services, and Network World will provide a summary here. Stop back next week for another update, and see more details here.
Open RAN is a push for industry standards in the design of gear that’s used in the radio-access segment of telecom cellular networks and is particularly relevant to the buildout of 5G infrastructure.
Radio-access networks (RAN) serve to connect the base stations that transmit and receive traffic to from endpoints like cell phones and laptops and provide the link toward the carrier core network.
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solves many problems that historically have plagued data center managers – clutter, management complexity, and high upgrade and maintenance costs created by multiple Ethernet boxes, servers, and storage arrays. Hyperconvergence removes those elements by combining data center functions into a single node.
As such, HCI is ideal for unstaffed edge computing sites, which can number in the thousands as part of a single network. As companies deploy edge environments, IT managers are coming to managed service providers (MSPs) and IT solution providers with questions along these lines: “My CIO wants me to deploy a standalone edge micro data center at each of our branch locations by the end of this month. How can I possibly install and maintain these sites located across such a wide territory?”
Expect the unexpected – that’s just one of the core premises IT leaders need to embrace in the next few years, according to Gartner's top strategic predictions for 2022 and beyond.
IT leaders need to be able to move in multiple strategic directions at once, said Daryl Plummer, distinguished research vice president and Gartner Fellow, to the virtual audience at the firm’s IT Symposium/Xpo Americas, held this week.
“Resilience, opportunity and risk have always been components of good business strategy, but today these issues hold new meaning,” Plummer said. “This year’s predictions embody how resilience must be built in more non-traditional ways, from talent to business modularity, while opportunity and risk must be viewed with a greater sense of urgency.”
Edge computing is shaping up as the most practical way to manage the growing volume of data being generated by remote sources such as IoT and 5G devices.
A key benefit of edge computing is that it provides greater computation, network access, and storage capabilities closer to the source of the data, allowing organizations to reduce latency. As a result, enterprise are embracing the model: Gartner estimates that 50% of enterprise data will be generated at the edge by 2023, and PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts the global market for edge data centers will reach $13.5 billion in 2024, up from $4 billion in 2017.
With IT budgets growing at the fastest rate in 10 years, worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.5 trillion in 2022, an increase of 5.5% from 2021, according to the latest Gartner forecasts.
All IT spending segments—from data-center systems to communications services—are forecast to grow next year, according to Gartner.
Enterprise software is likely to have the highest growth in 2022 at 11.5%, driven by infrastructure software spending. Global spending on devices grew over 15% as remote work, telehealth and remote learning took hold, and Gartner expects 2022 will continue that growth as enterprises upgrade devices and/or invest in multiple devices to support the hybrid work setting. “Enterprises will increasingly build new technologies and software, rather than buy and implement them, leading to overall slower spending levels in 2022 compared to 2021,” said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.
The maximum transmission unit (MTU) is the largest number of bytes an individual datagram can have without either being fragmented into smaller datagrams or being dropped along the path between its source and its destination.
For Ethernet frames—and many other types of packets—that number is 1500 bytes, and it generally meets the requirements of traffic that can cross the public internet intact.
So, if 2000-byte Ethernet packets arrive at a router, it will split their payloads in two and repackage them into two packets that are each smaller than 1500 bytes and so meet the MTU.
It can take years for a CPU to go from design to silicon, so Arm is helping developers get a jump on things by putting virtual models of its chip designs in the cloud. The virtual models will allow developers to write and test applications before the actual silicon ships.
Dubbed Arm Total Solutions for IoT, the project is a full-stack solution intended for Internet of Things applications and use cases. Arm says the early access for developers, OEMs and service providers, as well as the reduction in product design cycles, could accelerate deployments by up to two years.
Arm doesn’t make chips the way Intel and AMD do. It makes designs and licenses them to more than 800 OEMs, which are responsible for everything from embedded devices to servers. Once Arm releases the basic chip design to its partners, the partners then add their own IP to differentiate from the competition, which takes time.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise company Aruba is taking the wraps of a new flagship data-center switch aimed at helping to better control and secure hybrid-cloud traffic in the enterprise.
The Aruba CX 10000 Series switch is a top-of-rack, L2/3 data-center box with 3.2Tbps of switching capacity, 48 ports of line rate 10/25GbE and six 40/100GbE ports, the company says. But its most intriguing component is an integrated Elba programmable data processing unit (DPU) from Pensando that helps eliminate the need for separate appliances for security and load balancing, for example.
Pensando is a startup lead by a crew of ex-Cisco stars including its chairmen of the board, former Cisco CEO John Chambers. Others leaders of the company include former Cisco engineering icons Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani, collectively known as MPLS based on their first initials. The MPLS group has founded a number of companies that were spun back into Cisco during Chamber’s time as CEO including Andiamo Systems for SAN switching, Nuova Systems for data-center switching and Insieme Networks for software-defined networking systems.
As organizations become less centralized they face new security challenges that require new ways of addressing threats that will change the basic fabric of network security, according to Gartner analysts.
A persistent challenge adapting to these changes is the skills gap--finding IT pros with the technical know-how to meet evolving security issues, Peter Firstbrook, Gartner vice president and anayst told attendees at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2021 Americas.
“Cybersecurity teams are being asked to secure countless forms of digital transformation and other new technologies, and if they don’t have those skilled practitioners they move toward managed or cloud-delivered services where they might not have as much control as they’d like,” Firstbrook said.
The xargs command on Linux can make it easier to build and execute commands. If you want to run the same command for a group of files or users, xargs can often make that process easier. Here's a very simple example of xargs that creates or updates the update time on some files.
$ echo file1 file2 file3 | xargs touch $ ls -l total 0 -rw-r--r--. 1 shs shs 0 Oct 15 12:41 file1 -rw-r--r--. 1 shs shs 0 Oct 15 12:41 file2 -rw-r--r--. 1 shs shs 0 Oct 15 12:41 file3
The command below is similar, but creates a file with blanks in its name because the -d specifies the input termination character.
Digital investments, be they in AI, cloud, security, or engineering, will be among the top technology drivers for 2022, according to Gartner’s annual forecast of what it expects will be leading strategic IT trends.
“It is an overarching drive for organizations to do more with and scale the digital environments they have been rapidly developing during the pandemic,” said David Groombridge, research vice president at Gartner. “Most of these trends define technologies that together show how businesses will reconnect with partners and consumers to create scalable, resilient technical foundations for the future.” Gartner unwrapped its forecast at its virtual IT Symposium/Xpo Americas this week.
Laser-powered 5G base stations could become an operational reality in a few years using technology from Seattle-based PowerLight Technologies.
In trials, PowerLight’s system transmitted “hundreds of watts over hundreds of meters through the air” to power up a 5G cellular base station, according to Ericsson, which ran the demo in cooperation with PowerLight using an Ericsson Streetmacro 6701 base station. (It consumes a maximum of 300W.)
Four years after Intel first introduced Loihi, the company’s first neuromorphic chip, the company has released its second generation processor, which Intel says will provide faster processing, greater resource density, and improved power efficiency.
CPUs are often called the brains of the computer but aren’t, really, since they process only a handful of tasks at once in a serial manner, nothing like what the brain does automatically to keep you alive. Neuromorphic computing attempts to replicate the functions of the brain by performing numerous tasks simultaneously, with emphasis on perception and decision making
Neuromorphic chips mimic neurological functions through computational “neurons” that communicate with one another. The first generation of Loihi chips had around 128,000 of those digital neurons; the Loihi 2 has more than a million.
A new auction for enormously valuable mid-band spectrum and a rollback of availability for a different piece of it illustrates the uneven progress of 5G rollouts in the U.S. and represents a challenge for enterprises looking to take advantage of 5G technology.
The mid-band is valuable because it’s in a “Goldilocks” zone of the wireless spectrum—its frequencies are high enough to support higher throughput, while also being low enough to propagate effectively across relatively large areas.
To find a brief definition of the networking term you are looking for user your browser's "Find" feature then follow links to a fuller explanation.
5G
5G is fast cellular wireless technology for enterprise IoT, IIoT, and phones that can boost wireless throughput by a factor of 10.
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Network slicing
Network slicing can make efficient use of carriers’ wireless capacity to enable 5G virtual networks that exactly fit customer needs.
Microsoft has just made the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) available in the Microsoft Store for Windows 11 systems. WSL is the application that allows Windows users to run a GNU/Linux environment directly on Windows without the overhead of a virtual machine or dual-boot setup.
One good aspect is that it installs as a separate app, decoupled from the OS. This means that users can update the app without having to wait for Windows OS updates to become available.
The app in the Microsoft Store is not a new version of WSL. It’s still WSL 2, but is a preview version that was added as an option for end users to get the latest features faster and more conveniently. The binaries will no longer be part of the Windows image.
Thanks to a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing new details have emerged about Kyndryl, the IBM spin-off of its managed-infrastructure services unit into a separately traded public company.
Kyndryl does exactly what the managed-infrastructure services unit of IBM’s Global Technology Services segment does: manage enterprises IT infrastructure, whether it comes from IBM or another vendor. That’s a challenge for Kyndryl because it has to deal with the trend toward cloud services and against on-premises infrastructure.
The split is expected to be complete by the end of 2021, and when it was announced last year, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said IBM will focus on open hybrid-cloud and AI capabilities while Kyndryl would focus on modernizing customer infrastructure.
Incidents of cyber-attacks against IT networks are intensifying globally. The recent spate of ransomware attacks on the American oil pipeline system and the global meat supply chain highlights both the vulnerabilities that exist in our IT infrastructure, as well as the devastating impact these cyber breaches can have even when that breach might seem relatively innocuous. In the case of the Colonial Pipeline hack, the attack reportedly only reached the front-end business IT systems, not the IT and operations technology (OT) that actually control the pipeline itself. But, nonetheless, the attack resulted in shutting down the entire pipeline for a period of time causing alarming gas shortages up and down much of the East Coast of the United States. Long lines and panic buying became the norm for days.
Organizations have often relied on multiple vendors to connect and secure their branch offices. Through a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach, they may have installed a number of disparate WAN edge appliances including routers, firewalls, and WAN optimization devices. As a result, network installations are often complex and difficult to manage. These installations are no longer optimized for the digital era. The network security perimeter is dissolving as more and more applications and workloads are hosted in the cloud and more employees connect from anywhere. However, organizations sometimes don’t know where to start to transform their network and security architectures. They may also be tied to multi-year contracts that prevent them from moving their current architecture to a cloud-first SASE architecture.