NETWORKING

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…

The ps command is key to understanding what’s running on your Linux system and the resources that each process is using. It’s useful to know how to display the information that ps provides in whatever way helps you focus on the problem you’re trying to resolve. One aspect of this is being able to sort the output of the ps aux command by any column to highlight particular information, such as how much memory processes are…

It’s Monday morning. You’ve scheduled a call with key teams to prepare for a busy week. From around the world, your team joins one by one. Well, they try to anyway. Some can’t find the invitation link. Or can’t get the tool to launch. Others don’t receive a calendar notification. Several find that their mobile device can’t connect; a few join without audio or video. One person tries to join on the wrong platform and…

After its purchase of cloud storage automation specialist Spot for $450 million this past June, NetApp is releasing its first new product under the brand. Called Spot Storage, it’s a “storageless” solution that’s designed to enable automated administration of cloud-native, container-based applications. NetApp describes Spot Storage as a cloud-based, serverless offering for application-driven architectures that run microservices-based applications in Kubernetes containers. “Serverless computing” is a bit of a misnomer. Your application and data still reside…

Back in 2008, Domain Name System (DNS) server cache poisoning was a big deal. By redirecting the results from DNS with misleading Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, hackers could redirect your web browser from the safe site you wanted to a fake one loaded with malware. Fixes were discovered and DNS cache poisoning attacks became rare. Now, thanks to a discovery by the University of California at Riverside researchers, a new way has been found to…