In Intent-Based Networking – A Must for SDN, an article published on this site, Faisal Khan makes the very valid point that “SDN is about making networking more flexible and agile through programming network elements. [P]rogramming needs to be done in a standard way, [thus] standardizing the southbound protocol.” I can think of three potential southbound protocols that need […]
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Hyper-converged offerings are gaining popularity, and more vendors are entering the arena. Everything is software-defined; therefore, the technology cannot be separated like in a converged offering. This can bring a new challenge when it comes to monitoring. In the case of a converged offering, you still have your separate storage, compute, network, and hypervisor. Hyper-convergence […]
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SDN is about making networking more flexible and agile through programming network elements. Such programming needs to be done in a standard way. Hence, standardizing the southbound protocol that directly commands a network element to forward traffic is important. So is the northbound protocol through which different applications tell an SDN controller the WHAT […]
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Recently, I’ve been giving some thought to the roadblocks I discover when I attempt network automation and orchestration, and how those roadblocks impact the software-defined data center idea as a whole. As a result, I have a few suggestions for how to prepare a network – and the thought process – for the future. Thou […]
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In order to better combat software piracy, Microsoft introduced License Activation with Windows XP/Server 2003; however, activation was pretty much implied and automatic if you had volume license keys. When these keys, generated for individual organizations, inevitably leaked to the general public, Microsoft added activation on volume license keys with the release of Windows Vista […]
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Network virtualization, software defined network (SDN), and network function virtualization (NFV) have taken the communication industry by storm. They are no longer buzzwords; the industry is seriously focusing and converging on them. And why shouldn’t the industry focus on them? They are supposed to bring down OPEX and CAPEX by commoditizing the network elements. Commodity […]
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“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past” -unspecified “wise men” quoted by Niccolò Machiavelli With so many articles out there telling me how SDN will change the network as we know it, I’ve been thinking about what the future holds for networking. Thus if the wisdom reported by Machiavelli is to be […]
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According to the Verizon 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report, there have been 79,790 security incidents reported. This amounts to around 218 security incidents per day, or, roughly about 10 incidents an hour. Oh, and here’s the best part: 60% of the attackers are able to compromise an organization’s data within minutes. That’s MINUTES! These statistics […]
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So you’ve started planning your career using a VCDX skillset. Continuing on that same train of thought, I want to walk you through an additional concept that might help you decide what skills to develop next. In the last year, I’ve been preparing my organization for the new skills any infrastructure, network or storage admin […]
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The role of information technology inside of corporations is not new; it has existed for decades. With each passing year, we see an acceleration in the speed and complexity of changes to our roles as IT professionals. Industries as a whole tend to resist change. This makes sense because industries are made of corporations, those […]
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Retracing an intractable alert hairball today, I’m reminded of how critical, and often critically broken, alerting actually is in many environments. You can be a department of one with only a handful of systems sending occasional advisory messages, or a large IT team with hundreds of alerts of every variety, and you have the same […]
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One of the aspects of monitoring that IT professionals (and monitoring software developers in particular) think about a lot is “throttling.” How do you control the flow of data entering the system? How do you manage that same data once it’s been processed and needs to be logged in the database? How do you […]
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