NETWORKING

John Hodson had been on the job for less than three months when the unthinkable happened. With the pandemic grinding the Western United States to a standstill, the new head of IT for Cheetah, a wholesale food supplier in the Bay Area, had to lay off staff and relinquish the company’s managed IT services. “The restaurant industry basically shut down,” says Hodson. “We went from explosive business growth to extreme contraction in a matter of…

When you think of cloud-based businesses, telecommunications companies may not be the first ones to spring to your mind. They should be. Telecom, thanks to software-defined networking (SDN) and Network functions virtualization (NFV), runs on the cloud. Now, Canonical, best known for Ubuntu Linux, has won a significant customer for its Charmed OpenStack: Leading Russian telecom MTS. With over 80 million mobile subscribers, MTS is a serious player, and the company needed a serious cloud…

I’ve written before about how Cisco Silicon One changes the paradigm of energy consumption and why that matters to the environment and how we’re dramatically more efficient than other 12.8T silicon. As the father of two young children, this is something I spend a considerable amount of my free time fretting over. As an engineer at Cisco, I feel fortunate that I can help control the continued rise of carbon emissions by developing products that…

Dr Anastasia Volkova, CEO of Flurosat This blog comes from Dr Anastasia Volkova, CEO of Flurosat, an Australian agricultural technology company on a mission to commercialize agricultural science for the benefit of people and the environment. Anastasia is a TEDx Speaker, an Amelia Earhart Fellow, and one of 2020’s MIT 35 Under 35 Innovators. She will present at Cisco’s Women Rock-IT event on November 12. Click here to pre-register for and watch this event. The…

A data center is a physical facility that enterprises use to house their business-critical applications and information. As they evolve, it’s important to think long-term about how to maintain their reliability and security. What is a data center? Data centers are often referred to as a singular thing, but in actuality they are composed of a number of technical elements. These can be broken down into three categories: Compute: The memory and processing power to…

The underlying technologies that support a cutting-edge enterprise telecom solution like software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) are indeed complex. But that doesn’t mean your deployment of the networking solution in itself has to be labyrinthine and unmanageable. By working alongside a versatile managed services provider (MSP) and with proven third-party vendors, you can ensure that your organization enjoys all of the advantages of SD-WAN’s major network performance enhancements. Simultaneously, observing industry-recommended best practices will keep you from getting bogged…

Each packet crossing TCP/IP networks is homing in on an IP address that identifies the device that sent it but also contains information so it can be successfully routed where it needs to go. IP address defined An IP address is a number used to label any device connected to a network on which the Internet Protocol is used as the medium for communication. Internet Protocol is where the IP in IP address comes from;…

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of a new GPU-powered instance called Amazon P4d that is based on Nvidia’s new Ampere architecture, and the two firms are making big performance claims. AWS has offered GPU-powered instances for a decade now, the most current generation called P3. AWS and Nvidia are both claiming that P4d instances offer three times faster performance, up to 60% lower cost, and 2.5 times more GPU memory for…

Have you heard the one about 5G? Wait, which one? You know. The one about 5G where it replaces 4G and makes all our phones amazingly fast all the time? Or the one where the FCC is going to finally deliver ultrafast internet to rural communities using 5G? Or maybe you live in shady Facebook groups, and have heard the one about how 5G is making everyone sick? Just about every curious reader of current…

The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services (a.k.a. unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS)) is an indication of how well served businesses are via the internet. ThousandEyes is monitoring how these providers are handling the performance challenges they face. It will provide Network World a roundup of interesting events of the week in the delivery of these services, and Network World will provide a summary here. Stop back next week for another update,…