NETWORKING

System crashes. Outages. Downtime. These words send chills down the spines of network administrators. When business apps go down, business leaders are not happy. And the cost can be significant. Recent IDC survey data shows that enterprises experience two cloud service outages per year. IDC research conservatively puts the average cost of downtime for enterprises at $250,000/hour. Which means just four hours of downtime can cost an enterprise $1 million. To respond to failures as…

Texas is a state known for many things – extreme winter weather isn’t one of them. But there we were, with a week of weather that dipped well below our average temperatures into single digits. My mom and I sat in our car for three hours, trying to generate warmth, and put on our best Survivor impression as we watched the news of over 4 million Texans being impacted by this unprecedented winter storm. Texans…

If you don’t already work in a “smart building,” chances are that you will soon. By 2025, more than 75% of new construction will fit this category—and that’s not counting existing buildings. Connecting building systems like heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, physical access controls, and fire detection to the IP network can increase energy efficiency, health, comfort, and safety. But smart building networks need security protections. Attacks on a building controllers can shut down heating…

Intel today launched the third generation of its Xeon Scalable server-processor line with more than three dozen new chips built on its long-overdue 10-nanometer manufacturing process and featuring a host of specialized features for security and AI. The new chips were developed under the codename Ice Lake and were long in coming, due to the delays Intel had getting its manufacturing process down to 10nm. AMD, through its TSMC manufacturing partner, is at 7nm and…

Announces Participation in Upcoming Investor Events SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Arista Networks, Inc. (NYSE:ANET) will release its financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2021 after U.S. markets close on Tuesday, May 4th, 2021. The results will be included in a press release with accompanying financial information that will be posted on the Investor Relations section of the Arista website at https://investors.arista.com. Arista’s executive management team will host a conference call on May 4th,…

Out of the classroom and into the clouds For a long time, teaching has been confined to the four walls of a room, strictly associated with a teacher, accompanied by a whiteboard, and taught through textbooks. There is nothing wrong with the above scenario. On the contrary: it was a huge success in previous centuries. Particularly during the twentieth century, traditional education, science, and technology contributed to immense progress: one key example being that life…

From OS to Industry-leading Software Stack  Cisco Internetwork Operating System (IOS) was developed in the 1980s for the company’s first routers that had only 256 KB of memory and low CPU processing power. But what a difference a few decades make. Today Cisco IOS XE runs our entire enterprise networking portfolio ̶ ̶ 80+ different Cisco platforms for access, distribution, core, wireless, and WAN. There are, with a myriad of combinations of hardware and software and physical and virtual form factors.  Many people still call Cisco IOS XE an operating system. But it’s more appropriately described as…

After a bit of a break, the Security Stories podcast is back! Our guest this week is Dr. Christine Izuakor (@Stineology). She is the founder of Cyber Pop Up, which helps small businesses with their cybersecurity needs and strategies. Christine has thus far had a varied career. Transitioning from the corporate world to start up land, she became an author, CEO, and hacker along the way. Christine is someone very motivated by injustice, which we…

Delivering an optimal user experience for business-critical applications is a non-negotiable element for successful businesses. Architecting infrastructure that meets application and SLA requirements is vital to delivering the superior performance on which great user experiences rest. Today, this infrastructure is often built with the latest compute technology, high-performance flash storage arrays, and enterprise networking. Combining modern data protection and infrastructure is also key to availability, because pairing data protection with the right backup infrastructure can…

In the first part of this two-part blog series, we discussed five challenges that enterprise IT managers face when it comes to supporting multi-cloud connectivity of applications across the enterprise WAN. We highlighted the first two of the five key capabilities of an advanced SD-WAN platform that enable easier multi-cloud connectivity, which are SaaS optimization and Intelligent Internet Breakout. In this installment, we’ll discuss the three remaining capabilities of an advanced SD-WAN required to simplify and automate the…