NETWORKING

Delivering an optimal user experience for business-critical applications is a non-negotiable element for successful businesses. Architecting infrastructure that meets application and SLA requirements is vital to delivering the superior performance on which great user experiences rest. Today, this infrastructure is often built with the latest compute technology, high-performance flash storage arrays, and enterprise networking. Combining modern data protection and infrastructure is also key to availability, because pairing data protection with the right backup infrastructure can…

In the first part of this two-part blog series, we discussed five challenges that enterprise IT managers face when it comes to supporting multi-cloud connectivity of applications across the enterprise WAN. We highlighted the first two of the five key capabilities of an advanced SD-WAN platform that enable easier multi-cloud connectivity, which are SaaS optimization and Intelligent Internet Breakout. In this installment, we’ll discuss the three remaining capabilities of an advanced SD-WAN required to simplify and automate the…

I recently had a virtual chat with PacketFabric CEO, Dave Ward. If you’re not familiar with PacketFabric, you will be soon. They are quickly becoming an industry mover and shaker in the Network-as-a-Service and next-gen Service Provider (ngSP) space. They’re also a customer of ours, having recently deployed the Cisco 8000 with our new 400G solutions. What follows, is an excerpt from our chat: Kevin Wollenweber, Cisco: PacketFabric is really different from the traditional Service…

In Part 1 of my blog series, I gently introduced the concept of congestion and proposed an analogy between a storage area network and the highway system. In this Part 2, I will now provide some scenarios to compare. Congestion scenarios on highway system Given the above highway system analogy, consider two basic cases for congestion: Highway Scenario 1: A new shopping center opens nearby a particular exit and sends out a reasonable number of…

I did not sleep well last night. My rest was disturbed by oneiric memories of old situations where I wasted multiple hours in a queue, locked in my car under the sun and without an option to reach the nearby exit. Unpleasant feelings, I have to admit. Maybe not so different from what happens to storage network administrators when application users complain of poor performance and have the habit to finger point the network team….

We just wrapped up our virtual world tour of Cisco Live 2021. Teams from across Cisco presented more than 450 sessions and demonstrations on the best of Cisco’s technologies to a worldwide audience of over a hundred thousand viewers. Many people watched the online events from the comfort and safety of their home offices. Many other viewers were fortunate enough to have returned to their sanitized office and campus workplaces and participated from there with…

I still remember the day. It was a Friday in March 2020, just shortly after the world had changed. We stood in line, waiting to enter the drug store. After a walk home, with mixed feelings, we took the pregnancy test – positive. Wow. We’re becoming parents!   It was a good feeling, but not without fear or concern.   Still, we knew that there was no perfect time to become a dad or a mum. Either…

Time has buzzed by – especially if you are a Cisco honeybee. Last year, we installed beehives near our Research Triangle Park campus, in partnership with Bee Downtown and the RTP Foundation, to support the growing pollinator population in North Carolina, advance honeybee education across the region, and contribute toward the largest pollinator corridor in the country. Along with 100,000+ honeybees, our install was complete with signage, fencing, and three hand-painted hive boxes. Since then,…

In more than one conversation with large enterprise clients, we’ve heard the networking and infrastructure leaders responsible for managing the organization’s global WAN jokingly refer to themselves as the “Chief Hairpinning Officer” or CHO. At first blush, this provides a laugh. But there’s more than a bit of truth to this statement when you consider how much of networking professionals’ time, energy, and budget has traditionally been spent managing complex network routing decisions. These decisions…

Nearly all the US IT jobs lost in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic have come back, with IT employment enjoying eight straight months of growth. Of course, some of the replacement jobs were in IT specialties other than the jobs lost, as there has been a steady trend of declining data center and telecommunications positions in favor of software development jobs; that was true, even before the pandemic. At its worst, more than 100,000 IT…