NETWORKING

As any CIO with a digital transformation agenda can attest, success relies upon establishing clearly defined objectives for each step of the journey – with visibility into the entire IT infrastructure. Also critical is the ability to receive the right information at the right time to help achieve desired outcomes faster. This was especially true during the pandemic when, for example, Cisco enabled – within 10 days – 140,000 employees and partners to work from…

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…

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…

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.) PowerLight COO Bob Zak said he expects the systems…

5G 5G is fast cellular wireless technology for enterprise IoT, IIoT, and phones that can boost wireless throughput by a factor of 10. Network slicing can make efficient use of carriers’ wireless capacity to enable 5G virtual networks that exactly fit customer needs. O-RAN is a wireless-industry initiative for designing and building 5G radio access networks using software-defined technology and general-purpose, vendor-neutral hardware. Data Center Data centers are physical facilities that enterprises use to house…

There is a traditional saying in Spanish: “Todo entra por los ojos.” The literal translation is something like everything enters through the eyes. A better explanation is that smell, sight, taste, touch, and hearing are fundamental to how human beings experience life. The information provided by each sense is interpreted in our brains, used to perceive the environment, and interact with other people. But I digress. Going back to “everything enters through the eyes,” when we…

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…

In case you’re not a sports fan, a hat-trick is a term for three goals by a player in one game. Interestingly, the phrase comes from cricket, and was first used when a bowler took three wickets from three consecutive balls. The team would present a bowler with a hat to celebrate the achievement. Along similar lines, Cisco Secure Firewall celebrates three scores in 2021: Cisco was the only vendor recognized by Frost & Sullivan…

Applications are becoming the most visible aspect of an organization’s brand. The performance, usability, and reachability of branded apps are of utmost importance since they are a primary interface to customers. To keep up with evolving customer expectations, developers and operations teams are rapidly adopting design patterns using containers and microservices for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). In order to enable these innovations to deliver a competitive customer experience, IT relies more and more…

In our recent webinar—The Reality of Network as a Service—I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion with three of our Network as a Service leaders and delve into some of the top questions they are getting from IT leaders about NaaS.  The insights and stories they shared, helped clarify what NaaS is and what it isn’t and highlighted some of the big opportunities (and also some challenges) that lie ahead for organizations that…