Industry bellwether Cisco revealed some important financial numbers this week – its revenues were $12.5 billion, up 4 percent for the third quarter year-over-year, with product revenue up 5 percent. But one of the of the more interesting tidbits is that the company said it was selling some 40 Catalyst 9000 systems a day in […]
Huawei is a 31-year old company that has been competing very successfully against Cisco – especially outside the U.S. – in telecommunications and enterprise networking. In fact, by some analysts’ accounts Cisco and Huawei are the two companies battling it out over the Ethernet-switching world these days. IDC says Cisco’s Ethernet switching share rose about 7 […]
“I am all about useful tools. One of my mottos is ‘the right tool for the right job.’” –Martha Stewart If your “right job” involves wrangling computer networks and figuring out how to do digital things effectively and efficiently or diagnosing why digital things aren’t working as they’re supposed to, you’ve got your hands full. […]
The internet of things already consists of nearly triple the number of devices as there are people in the world, and as more and more of these devices creep into enterprise networks it’s important to understand their requirements and how they differ from other IT gear. The major difference is that so far they are […]
It’s been a few months since VMware closed its acquisition of VeloCloud, a prominent SD-WAN provider. In that time, the two companies have worked to integrate their products, and recently they announced a unified strategy called the Virtual Cloud Network. The strategy fully supports the migration of applications and data out of the enterprise data […]
Spreading bad routing information to your neighbors on the internet isn’t just bad manners, it could be bad for business. That, at least, is the message that the Internet Society (ISOC) wants to spread, as it calls on internet exchange points (IXPs) to help eliminate the most common threats to the internet’s routing system. [ […]
Traditional networking architectures over the past two decades or so prescribe that the hub of the network be build around a specific location, such as a data center or a company’s headquarters building. This location houses most of the equipment for compute, storage, communications, and security, and this is where enterprise applications are traditionally hosted. […]
It was time to get a handle on BACnet traffic at Penn State. BACnet is a communications protocol for building automation and control (BAC) systems such as heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC), lighting, access control and fire detection. Penn State standardized on BACnet because of its openness. [ For more on IoT see tips […]
Remember this scene from the movie Shrek? The big ogre was explaining to Donkey that ogres are very complicated, and like onions, they have layers. Donkey, of course, didn’t like the analogy because not everyone likes onions and would have preferred cake as everyone likes cake, but he did seem to understand that ogres did indeed […]
If portions of enterprise data-center networks have no need to communicate directly with the internet, then why do we configure routers so every system on the network winds up with internet access by default? Part of the reason is that many enterprises use an internet perimeter firewall performing port address translation (PAT) with a default […]