NETWORKING

The Millennial generation is becoming a driving force behind the circular economy of used IT equipment. IT shops have typically bought used gear if they needed to replace old equipment and couldn’t get parts from the vendor. But the idea of buying a low-mileage server with one or two years of use wasn’t very popular. Companies typically bought new. But that’s changing. IT shops of all sizes are increasingly buying used gear, both brand name…

For many decades, the data warehouse was the go-to technology for storing large amounts of data for querying and data mining. This should not be confused with the venerable database, which has a different mode of operation and use. The data lake arrived at the same time as the advent of Big Data. The concept was coined in 2010 by James Dixon, founder of Pentaho (now a part of Hitachi Vantara), in a blog post…

Xilinx may be in the middle of an acquisition by AMD, but the partnerships and deals continue. Most recently, Samsung and Xilinx have partnered to deliver the SmartSSD CSD flash drive, a compute-on-storage SSD device that uses a Xilinx FPGA to offload the processing work. The SmartSSD CSD is a standard 2.5-inch (U.2) form factor solid state drive that looks like the standard SATA drive found in desktops and laptops but has a PCI Express…

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between November 6 and November 13. As with previous roundups, this post isn’t meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we’ve observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics, indicators of compromise, and discussing how our customers are automatically protected from these threats. As a reminder, the information provided for the following threats in this post is non-exhaustive and…

At Partner Summit Digital 2020, Cisco announced the NEW Cisco Partner Program – a unified program framework constructed around the roles partners play with customers, instead of how they transact with Cisco. The Cisco Partner Program is anchored to four roles: Integrator, Provider, Developer, and Advisor. As we continue to invest in partner led managed and as-a-service offers,  the Provide role will be the pivotal channel for delivering managed business outcomes to customers of all sizes. What…

There’s a new addition to Cisco’s Single-Lambda 100G series of QSFP28 optics that provides 10km reach. It’s called 100G LR and is the blue one shown here: In this blog series we’ve touted Single-Lambda 100G optics and how it enables network operators to migrate more easily to 400G optics and to future 100G optics in a low-cost 100G form factor. It started with the 2km reach 100G FR. Then we introduced the 500m reach 100G…

Back when network management was booming in the early 90’s, the whole idea seemed straightforward. System administrators would speak of endpoints on the network as being “under management” or conversely “unmanaged.” There seemed to be a place for everything and looking back now at those times, enterprises seemed so simple compared to today. Maybe simple is not the right term, maybe they just seemed more orderly compared to the modern network landscape. At some point,…

Building the bridge to practical knowledge Students finishing their academic curriculum often notice a gap between what they have learned at school, and the reality of what is required from them in the real world.  Building workplace skills requires practice and ongoing, personalised feedback to fuel improvement, which is difficult to manage equitably in large classrooms. With distance learning becoming the new norm, this is proving even more difficult. How can instructors ensure that students…

It’s November in the Northern Rockies and the snow has begun to fall. Skiers all over the world are getting excited for the forthcoming dumps of powder. Gear is getting dusted off and tuned while ski mountains are grappling with their own variant of business resilience: ways to keep their mountains open and their pass holders safe amid the pandemic. This permeates their entire business, as it’s not just the ski hills, but the lodges,…

After you’ve worked in technology for a while, you discover that all those jokes about buzzword bingo are based on reality. For those of us who work with words, translation of tech jargon into plain English is something we deal with almost every day. One of my least favorite buzzwords is future-proof. Fortunately, the Cisco branding folks don’t like it either, and according to the style guide, we’re not supposed to use it. Instead we…