Новости за 27.03.2018

The Internet of Things (IoT) is projected to grow significantly over the coming years. Research firm Gartner Inc. has estimated that 8.4 billion connected things were in use worldwide in 2017, up 31% from 2016, and expects the number to reach 20.4 billion by 2020.

As long as I have been an industry analyst, network engineers have tried to build multifunction boxes that are capable of addressing a wide range of network functions. These all-purpose network boxes have been lost to history as single-function platforms optimized for network performance (e.g., router or WAN optimization) dominated the market. The branch network is poised to benefit from the advances in software networking to collapse all network functions on to a single platform — the software-defined branch (SD-Branch). Читать дальше...

Pushing industrial control intelligence to the edge—closer to where manufacturing and production processes are happening—offers tremendous potential for increasing business efficiency and agility. Add in the ability to perform real-time analytics on the plant floor, and the possibilities for optimizing operations are endless.

Who doesn’t like to have choices?  Whether it’s our choice of coffee in the morning, our make of car, or which browser we use – we enjoy being able to pick what we think is right for us. And the availability of choice empowers us, according to Susan Weinschenk Ph.D in Psychology Today

The growth in cloud computing has shone a spotlight on data centers, which already consume at least 7 percent of the global electricity supply and growing, according to some estimates. This has led the IT industry to search for ways of making infrastructure more efficient, including some efforts that attempt to rethink the way computers and data centers are built in the first place.

There’s no question that Wi-Fi networks continue to grow in importance for most companies. Workers rely on it to do their jobs, students are being educated on mobile tablets, doctors are pulling up records at a patients' bedside, and millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices are now being connected to Wi-Fi. 

Composable infrastructure treats compute, storage, and network devices as pools of resources that can be provisioned as needed, depending on what different workloads require for optimum performance. It’s an emerging category of infrastructure that’s aimed at optimizing IT resources and improving business agility.

In our last two columns, we’ve focused our discussion on industry trends that are impacting storage architectures, as well as a few “broad stroke” architectures that may help businesses address the issues those trends created. For this month’s column (as well as more than a few future ones), I’d like to instead focus on solution strategies for improving and modernizing the storage architectures for today’s businesses.

The notion of disaggregation — separating the operating system and applications from the underlying hardware — has always been a conundrum for Cisco. In a nutshell, why would the company risk losing all of the millions of dollars in development and the key networking features tied up in current Cisco hardware and software packages?

The notion of disaggregation – separating the operating system and applications from the underlying hardware –  has always been a conundrum for Cisco.  In a nutshell, why would the company risk losing all of the millions of dollars in development and the key networking features tied up in current Cisco hardware and software packages?

Humans are far better at identifying data pattern changes audibly than they are graphically in two dimensions, researchers exploring a radical concept say. They think that servers full of big data would be far more understandable if the numbers were all moved off the computer screens or hardcopies and sonified, or converted into sound.

What is a smart city? The answer depends on whom you ask.

Solutions providers will tell you it’s smart parking, smart lighting or anything to do with technology. City officials may tell you it’s about conducting city business online, such as searching records or applying for permits. City residents may tell you it’s the ease of getting around, or about crime reduction.

Everyone is right. A smart city, built properly, will have different value for different stakeholders. They may not even think of their city as a “smart” city. Читать дальше...

Internal tests from a leading industry vendor have shown that fixes applied to servers running Linux or Windows Server aren’t as detrimental as initially thought, with many use cases seeing no impact at all.

Last month it was Catalyst 9000 switches, and this month its routers. Yes, my project engineering staff have had a surprising amount of inquiries regarding routers.

It’s not good enough to run cables and just hope they work, or simply say it’s all good if they provide a working network connection to the computer or device. You should double-check by testing or qualifying the cable runs before you call the job complete.

Rarely do I have a conversation about networking when the topic of software-defined WANs (SD-WANs) does not come up. It’s far and away the thing that network professionals care most about, even ahead of data center SDNs.