Forrester analyst Andre Kindness says a lot of clients ask him how they should think about software-defined networking (SDN), which has been heralded for years as the next great thing in the industry.SDN – which is an architecture approach, not a specific product - has traditionally been thought of as virtualizing data center networks. This typically means separating the management of the control plane of network devices from the underlying data plane that forwards network traffic. Using a sof…

Bluetooth is about to get some significant new mesh networking capabilities -- and the best bit is, you may not need new hardware to benefit from them.Mesh networking will make it simpler to connect sensors across industrial sites, or to create smart home or building automation networks. Rather than wasting energy shouting to be heard by a distant gateway, devices will be able to whisper to their neighbors, asking them to pass messages.It will offer a new way for devices to join the Internet of…

Identifying and pinpointing potential network failures and performance issues has long been a matter of educated guesswork, but an emerging generation of predictive analytics tools promises to bring greater accuracy to network reliably forecasts, allowing staff to address and remedy specific issues even before they can even begin affecting network operations.Predictive analytics is a game-changer, giving CIOs the ability to literally look into the future. "There is a growing need for networks t…

It's not the server -- it's the system. That's the word from Cisco as it rolls out its new, M5 generation Unified Computing System rack and blade servers, triggered by Intel's release of the Xeon Scalable Processor platform.Cisco's new servers use the Xeon Scalable processors -- unveiled Tuesday in New York -- to fuel performance as well as increase server density and throughput.  But the value in the UCS product family lies in how the hardware works with configuration management and optimizati…

Hyperconvergence is an IT framework that combines storage, computing and networking into a single system in an effort to reduce data center complexity and increase scalability. Hyperconverged platforms include a hypervisor for virtualized computing, software-defined storage, and virtualized networking, and they typically run on standard, off-the-shelf servers. Multiple nodes can be clustered together to create pools of shared compute and storage resources, designed for convenient consumption. T…

Make no mistake: Intel's Xeon Processor Scalable Family, based on the company's Skylake architecture, is about much more than revving up CPU performance. The new processor line is essentially a platform for computing, memory and storage designed to let data centers -- groaning under the weight of cloud traffic, ever-expanding databases and machine-learning data sets -- optimize workloads and curb operational costs.In order to expand the market for its silicon and maintain its de facto processor…

What’s the difference between SDN and NFV? | ITworld Thank youYour message has been sent.SorryThere was an error emailing this page. Credit: Thinkstock ");});try{$("div.lazyload_blox_ad").lazyLoadAd({threshold:0,forceLoad:false,onLoad:false,onComplete:false,timeout:1500,debug:false,xray:false});}catch(exception){console.log("error loading lazyload_ad "+exception);}}); SDN, NFV & VNF are among the alphabet soup of terms in the networking industry that have emerged in rece…

MU-MIMO enables multiple client stations to receive unique but simultaneous transmissions from a single access point (AP).Until this advance, each associated station had to wait its turn via the normal contention process and subject to whatever vendor class/quality-of-service mechanisms might be implemented, available, and applied in a given installation.Importantly, most clients, and especially highly mobile clients like handsets and tablets, are typically limited to only one or two MIMO stre…

If you don’t know what DreamWorks is, you probably haven’t been to the movies for a couple decades. It’s a digital film studio that turns out critically acclaimed CGI animated movies like Shrek, Madagascar, and Kung Fu Panda, averaging about two a year since the turn of the century, and a major contributor to the cause of keeping kids occupied for a couple of hours.The creation of CGI movies is enormously demanding from a network standpoint. Animation and rendering require very low input latenc…

To help ring in the 2017 New Year, CNN wanted to do a live shot from a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, but had an issue: “They were concerned about being out at sea, would they have the ability to live-stream?” says Royal Caribbean’s CIO Mike Giresi.The answer was yes, and the live-shot went off without a hitch, in part because the ship’s Cisco network gear was programmable to prioritize the video trafficAs an early implementer, Royal Caribbean has found benefits from regarding Cisco’s programmabl…