WAN speak

How Do I Love Mobility ? Let Me Count The Ways…

Clive Longbottom — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:11:29 +0000

Let’s do a quick calculation. How many employees do you have, rounded up to the nearest 100? What percentage of them are mobile? Have they sourced their own devices through BYOD? Do you use VPN access through to a private data center? Hang on… what has the last question got to do with all this? [...]

The Changing Role of the IT Professional

Jim Metzler — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:10:42 +0000

Over the last few months, I have moderated three software-defined networking (SDN) seminars that were produced by Network World. In each seminar a number of speakers spoke at length about the potential for SDN to automate the vast majority of configuration changes that are now done in a largely manual fashion, and in every session [...]

$250M in Riverbed Steelhead Refresh Targeted by Silver Peak

Tony Thompson — Wed, 15 May 2013 13:15:51 +0000

According to an April 2013 report by Baird Equity Research, “[Riverbed] management has cited a $250 million install base of 20 series product that goes end-of-life early next year. We see this as important product refresh opportunity for the company in its core market.” Silver Peak also recognizes this as a critical opportunity and has [...]

It’s Time For Interop To Go Back To The Future

Zeus Kerravala — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:17:24 +0000

I’ve been an analyst now for a little over a decade. Prior to my role as an analyst, though, I held many technical positions, including a long stint as a networking engineer. When I was an engineer, my favorite trade shows were Cisco Networkers and Networld + Interop. The value of Networkers was to get [...]

A Pox* On (Too Many) SDN Standards

Steve Wexler — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:24:45 +0000

What if you created a standards group that everybody wanted to participate in? I’m not saying that OpenDaylight Project represents all — or even the majority — of SDN stakeholders, but its current lineup of industry heavyweights will probably do for now. Announced on April 8, it is intended to ‘accelerate adoption, foster new innovation [...]

It’s Time for SDN Marketers to Step on the Gas

Zeus Kerravala — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:18:46 +0000

There’s no networking topic I get more end-user inquiry on than software-defined networks (SDN). The types of questions I get are all over the map, making it difficult to get a good feel for what purchase intentions are. To get a better handle on what we might see in the way of SDNs investments over [...]

5 Ways BYOD Could Threaten Your Network

Bryan Betts — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:34:48 +0000

If you are concerned about having mobile devices on your network, and about BYOD in particular, you are not alone — and you are right to worry. Mobile devices face a variety of threats, depending on the platform. Here are five of the most important, in no particular order. 1. Theft or loss: theft is [...]

Navigating VDI Network Hurdles

Marc Goodman — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:03:46 +0000

The majority of today’s data center initiatives have one thing in common: data is becoming more centralized, while users are increasingly more distributed. This places an increased emphasis on the network, making every data center vulnerable to bandwidth, latency, and service quality challenges that impact all applications. However, don’t fret, because there are methods to [...]

Is Krzanich the Right Choice for CEO of Intel?

Zeus Kerravala — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:05:42 +0000

Roll back the clock to November 20th — on that day, Intel CEO, Paul Otelinni stated that he was retiring from his four-decade-long tenure at Intel, the last eight of which were as the company’s CEO. After six months of searching, Brian Krzanich has emerged as the winner and will officially sit in Captain Kirk’s [...]

SDN: Lots of Smoke. Any fire?

Jim Metzler — Tue, 07 May 2013 13:04:07 +0000

In a previous blog post I discussed the growing trend away from hardware specific solutions and towards solutions that feature software running on generic hardware. That trend took off several years ago with the introduction of server virtualization. In today’s environment it is difficult to read a trade magazine or go to a conference and [...]