NETWORKING

It’s taken me a lifetime of inventing and reinventing myself to become a patent-pending inventor at Cisco. A lifetime of starting over, of trying new things, of failing forward. I was born in Vietnam. My father was a special intelligence officer for the Republic of Vietnam Navy, a branch of the South Vietnamese military. My mother was a nurse. Like many who were forced to flee to other parts of the world after the Fall…

I spent the first few years of my networking career avoiding scripting.  Even though I had studied programming in college, I liked getting my hands dirty with CLI and didn’t see the need to make life complicated by messing with code.  Then, when I came back to Cisco in 2015, I was assigned to work on programmability and I was forced to learn about APIs, Python, Ansible, and a host of other tools that network…

There’s never a dull moment in the enterprise SSD market. Among the latest developments are three new products from Samsung, Micron and Kioxia. Here are the highlights. Samsung’s new computational storage drive Samsung unveiled a second generation of its SmartSSD, an SSD with a Xilinx FPGA and some memory for doing computational storage. Computational storage is the process of processing data where it lies rather than moving it around the network. It’s a new concept…

Welcome back everyone to the second part of the “Using CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure configuration and management” blog series. As you might remember from the previous blog, the pipeline we are building is using GitLab CE, pyATS, Ansible, and Cisco CML. In this blog, we will install GitLab CE and get it ready for the next steps. Installing GitLab CE For my environment I have used the GitLab CE and GitLab runner Docker images on…

How much computing power should we put at the edge of the network? In the past when networks weren’t supposed to be very smart, it wasn’t even a question. The answer was none. But now that it’s possible to bring often substantial amounts of computational equipment right to the very edge of the network, the right answer isn’t always so easy. The arguments in favor are simple. When packets travel shorter distances, response time is…

Axis Security, a provider of cybersecurity services focused on zero trust, has announced a set of new features on Atmos ZTNA (zero trust network access), the software-defined network access module within its cloud-native SSE (security service edge) platform, Atmos. Additionally, the company has revealed a suite of tools to help companies migrate from traditional ZTNA to Atmos’ ZTNA service. “ZTNA 1.0 lacked support for legacy network protocols, few even failing to inspect private traffic,” says…

While key network vendors continue to report good financial results, all of the players report continued supply-chain issues and increased order backlogs—challenges that show little sign of abating before the end 2023. Arista supply issues A good example is Arista Networks, which reported its first billion dollar quarter in its history despite the “challenges of an uncertain supply-chain environment,” Jayshree Ullal, Arista President and CEO said during the firm’s Q2 financial call this week. Ullal…

In many ways, the seed was planted on a chilly late-November night in 2019. That’s when more than 300 Cisco employees swapped their comfortable beds for the cold, hard pavement of the company’s San Jose, California headquarters parking lot. The Sleep Out event was designed to raise both awareness and critical funds to ensure Covenant House can provide food, shelter, clothing, and essential services to homeless young people. Youth homelessness is especially acute right in…

Cisco continues to deliver on its promise of innovation in our Cisco DNA software for Switching subscription. By deploying the latest innovations in Cisco DNA software for Switching along with Cisco DNA Center, you can unlock the full power of your Catalyst switches in a user-friendly way. It’s no question that Cisco DNA Center is the most powerful management platform for your Catalyst devices over any third-party network management system. What’s new? ThousandEyes integration (Application…

A clear shift is occurring in IT. Customers today buy outcomes and expect experiences, but IT alone can’t deliver on these expectations. IT organizations need to work, together, with partners. In fact, we like to say we’ve entered an era where successful companies work with a strong ecosystem of partners to bring solutions to market that deliver exactly what customers want and  companies need. And as successful companies focus their limited resources on further differentiating…