NETWORKING

Hank Preston recently wrote a great blog post on using NetBox as a Single Source of Truth to drive Cisco NSO.  The approaches described in this post are part of a larger project that he and I are working on to reshape the data center infrastructure that powers the labs found in many Cisco learning courses.  We’re doing it with an automation-first, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach. While working on some of the tasks in…

Financial Services Bank, Insurance & Wealth industry participants are actively addressing how to balance and deliver a safe return to work, with the right balance between a Secure Remote Workforce and Trusted Workplace to ensure business resiliency for all types of work, independent of work locations. Chris Bottger, Cisco Americas Workplace Experience Strategist indicates Employee Engagement continues to be a challenge as FinServ employers assess a Safe Return to Office strategy. Studies, like those from…

In all too many places, your internet choices consist of one cable internet provider or one DSL provider. If you’re lucky, you may get fiber as a choice too. Then, there’s Atlanta. Here in most of the metro area, you actually have real choices! No! Really! Before jumping into this comparison you should keep in mind that, just like everywhere else, the advertised prices are not the same as what you’ll pay. The “list” price…

In all too many places, your internet choices consist of one cable internet provider or one DSL provider. If you’re lucky, you may get fiber as a choice too. Then, there’s Atlanta. Here in most of the metro area, you actually have real choices! No! Really! Before jumping into this comparison you should keep in mind that, just like everywhere else, the advertised prices are not the same as what you’ll pay. The “list” price…

OK, so Nashville Tennesee isn’t Chattanooga, which, with its EPB Fiber Optics‘ 10 Gigabit per second (Gbps), has the fastest community internet in the country. But Nashville has far more choices than the single fiber-optic Internet Service Provider (ISP), one cable internet provider, or one DSL ISP that many cities and towns are stuck with today. No, Nashville has lots of hot internet choices as well as hot country music venues.  But before diving into…

(Image: Shutterstock) When I first started using the Internet, it wasn’t that far removed from its Arpanet ancestor. When I was at school, I could connect with it at a blazing fast 10 Megabits per second (Mbps) over Ethernet. From home or on the road I could only hook up at 300 bits per second (BPS) using both a TI Silent 700 paper terminal with its acoustic coupler or from a CP/M computer using a…

This blog is a joint collaboration between Ravi Balakrishnan (Cisco) and Payal Singh (F5) This article will focus on automation support by BIG-IP and Cisco ACI and how automation tools, specifically Ansible, can be used to automate different use cases. Before getting into the weeds let’s discuss and understand BIG-IP’s and Cisco ACI’s automation strategies. BIG-IP automation strategy BIG-IP automation strategy is simple-abstract as much complexity as possible from the user, give an easy button…

Whether you read papers published by Xerox PARC in the 1970’s, or the latest Wikipedia entry on MAC address, you’ll certainly be familiar with the description of a MAC address being a globally unique identifier of a Network Interface Card (NIC). In layman’s terms, a MAC address can safely be used to identify a device on a network. Or can it? Over the years we learned about the fun things you could do by arbitrarily…

Business users looking for an upgrade to the very latest Wi-Fi standard, also known as Wi-Fi 6E, now have the option of Aruba’s new AP 635, the company announced this morning. Wi-Fi 6E works much the same as Wi-Fi 6, sharing that standard’s improved ability to handle dense client environments, high throughput, and advanced multi-user and multi-antenna functionality. The new feature is the ability to use the 6GHz spectrum that the FCC opened in April…

Ampere, the chip startup building Arm-based server processors and led by former Intel exec Renee James, has updated its product roadmap and announced new customers. The biggest news is that the company is designing its own custom cores for release in 2022. Ampere Altra processors are already on the market but use the Neoverse core from Arm. When it introduces the next generation Ampere built on a 5nm process next year, it will be with…