The Hub and Spoke!

Nearly half of respondents (49%) from the Asia Pacific (APAC) region suffered an unrecoverable data event in the last three years with 40% of these respondents experiencing a greater direct loss of revenue from tech-related disruptions, according to the findings of an IDC whitepaper commissioned by Zerto, State of IT Resilience.   The IDC research surveyed 500 senior-level IT and business managers from over 10 unique industries and companies of all sizes and geographies about the challenges to achieve IT resiliency and its importance to digital transformation and included respondents from Australia and Singapore.   While the majority of businesses surveyed have a cloud, digital transformation or modernisation project already planned for the next two years, these same businesses rate themselves as immature on resilience objectives.   This gap highlights the current demands on IT teams who are being tasked with cloud and modernisation projects even as they struggle to keep

In the past the networking division of a System Integrator sold hardware first and software second. The majority of network switches at layer two were developed using FPGAs with proprietary hardware with CPUs used to develop layer three solutions. Any bundled software was poorly architectured and typically served either as element management or some type of network management. The basis of how it all works has been around since the seventies . All the has happened is that networking has become more complex and simplicity is required . Read the article over at LinkedIn here .

Are you in IT support and tired of wasting time and money on support calls that waste your time because they are related to a simple power connection fault the customer can sort out themselves? Now you don’t have to worry with the new next generation Netshield Inline GSM Power Monitor. Read about it over at Netsheild here .

  With the growing adoption of public cloud services by enterprises and ever-evolving IT options and priorities – including the growth of mobility and IoT – demand drivers for leased data center space have changed, and will continue to do so.  To better understand enterprises plans and challenges, Vertiv and 451 Research polled more than 700 IT decision makers from various sized companies across the US, Western Europe, China, and India.  The result quantifies the continued shift in IT workloads from on-premise facilities to cloud and colocation and also provides insight into how organizations are making decisions regarding moving capacity off premises. In addition, it reveals surprising insights into the impact IoT is already having, and is expected to have, on IT resources. Access the report at Vertiv over here .

I’ve been working in IT service management (ITSM) for many years now, and I’ve made my share of mistakes along the way. So I thought it’d be nice to share some of the things that I’ve learned from my mistakes in the hope that they’ll help others avoid them. Here are the top 6 things that Stuart Rance wish he’d known when he started in ITSM:

Incidences of IT downtime or severe service degradation have increased in the past year, an Uptime Institute survey of operators and IT practitioners reveals. Louise Frampton reports over at Mission Critical Power here .

Depending on where you live, you probably see spiders starting to emerge from their hiding spots at some point in the summer. By fall, they tend to be fairly active because they’re seeking warmth – which is why you may find yourself suddenly face to face with an eight-legged visitor some night when you get up to use the bathroom. Don’t panic, though – most spiders are harmless, and people have learned to co-exist with them for thousands of years. Read the article over at ThoughCo here .

Like other modern SD-WAN technologies -- including Cisco and VMware -- Nuage goes beyond first-generation SD-WAN, which connected the branch to the central data center. That resulted in a phenomenon sometimes called "tromboning," where traffic from the branch intended for the public cloud has to go to the data center and back to the branch to be secured and managed through network policies. With modern SD-WAN, the branch, data center and public cloud platforms can connect directly as needed, without wasteful side-trips in the middle.  Read the article over at Light Reading here .

Carriers are rolling out new low-power, narrow-band networks for the Internet of Things. Here are 5 reasons why, and one big potential issue with this strategy.

In fact, the company, which provides Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks, says one could use a hybrid that includes an unlicensed LPWA network along with a licensed, cellular LTE narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) or LTE Cat M1 network solution instead. That way you can support cheap, unlicensed IoT short messaging close up, as is offered by Sigfox and others, and then offload the sensor traffic to more expensive, licensed LTE cellular mobile networks as the devices move off home base, such as what happens in asset tracking, Sigfox says. Read the article over at Network World here .

SD-WAN, short for Software-Defined Wide Area Network, is a cloud-based system that allows businesses a highly improved WAN experience through changes in the configuration at which WAN routers work.   To simplify, SD-WAN is a simple, cost-effective and highly flexible technology that’s fast replacing conventional WAN solutions by enhancing the performance of applications based in the office premises and in the cloud. Here are 5 reasons why businesses globally are opening up to SD-WAN, which is rapidly redefining the way branch offices connect with the head office and with each other.

When your organization embraces red teaming, you will need resources to get it right. Here are over 20 resources, from discussions to training to tools, to help do just that.

There are different teams in charge of improving the performance within an organization. To address the importance of groups concerning cybersecurity known to have three primary terminologies of technical teams; Red, Blue, and Purple teams. Read the article over at peerlyst here .

Software-defined WAN is hot, but there are misconceptions about the technology. We cut through the hype.   Software-defined WAN has received a lot of buzz of late, for good reason: After all, its slogan is essentially “No more MPLS."  That's enough to catch most IT pros' attention. However, one should look beyond slogans to see what the technology can actually deliver.   I've spent a lot of time talking with different SD-WAN vendors to know more about the technology, their products and capabilities. I do see a lot of benefits of this technology, but at the same time I see a lot of marketing mixed with the technical stuff, promising the moon to customers.   This blog, therefore, aims to clear up some misconceptions and myths about SD-WAN.   But before we dig deeper, let's define what SD-WAN is. SD-WAN makes it possible to bond multiple WAN connections -- Internet, MPLS or any other transport pipe --  effectively making the best use of bandwidth and reduc

Way before anyone else had a 64 bit browser, a little known derivative of Firefox, known as Waterfox was available that had been compiled in 64 bits. It supports all the Firefox addons, of which one of my staple ones in DownThemAll . What is neat about the Addon is its ability to adjust the number of segments for a download. So instead of a single segment, a person is able to adjust to using multiple segments and this dramatically improves download speeds! An example is the Intel WiFi driver for Windows at well over 120MB. Slow as a normal download but chop-chop using the DownThemAll Addon in Waterfox. Read the article over at LinkedIn here .

I have previously written about focusing on the business requirements of software defined wide area networking (SDWAN) and here we will list the functional specifications. Read the article over at LinkedIn here .

In my days at iBurst we using a number of Cisco P-cubes to prevent congestion on the wireless towers. The iBurst connection was able to squeeze approximately a measly 1 Mb/s out of a modem and any excessive use of P2P, especially bittorrent , on the towers would kill the user experience. The solution was manged by someone we called the ninja, so called because one moment he would be at his desk and the next gone. We always thought he has secret routes through the air conditioning ducts of the building. Like many Cisco products the P-cubes have been flushed into the abyss of Cisco acquisition discards with the current market leader in the sector being Sandvine . Read the article on LinkedIn over here .

I wrote about SDWAN and genchi genbutsu a while ago. This is what I wrote: Here is where the Japanese concept of genchi genbutsu plays a role. It's the concept of you need to go and see. I have previously written about it here . You need to develop and design products based on being at the coalface and actually seeing the problems, not hearing about them secondhand. You need your own eyeballs and not a report given to you by an intermediary. Only then do you provide added value and actually solve the real problems. Here I was referring to the people designing SDWAN products but the actual products should actually also subscribe to the same methodology.  Let me explain over at LinkedIn here .

Microsoft Azure started patching a glaring hole in its availability strategy last September, when it started previewing in-region Availability Zones. Its rivals Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud had already been using the multi-zone strategy for some time.   Earlier this month – almost exactly one year later – came a confirmation that multi-zone cloud regions were a good idea that couldn’t be stronger. Lightning during a powerful storm caused a voltage swell in the utility feeds powering one of the Azure data centers in San Antonio, Texas, that overwhelmed the facility’s surge suppressors, knocking out its cooling systems. The “load-dependent thermal buffer” baked into the cooling system for such occasions was eventually depleted. Air temperature inside rose, triggering automatic shutdown of hardware. Read the article over at DataCenter Knowledge here .

Legacy WANs are unfit for the digital era. The public Internet continues to be plagued by congestion and reliability problems caused by exponential traffic growth, bandwidth-intensive applications, and expanding network complexities. MPLS was designed before the cloud and brings along with it high costs, inflexibility, and long deployment times. These deficiencies have given rise to a technology known as SD-WAN. Read the blog post over at Packet Pushers here .

The business landscape is unpredictable. Don’t let your network hold you back. Forward-thinking organizations with multiple sites are quickly realizing the benefits that SD-WAN can offer in addressing the necessity for flexible, scalable and cost-efficient networking.  Let us look at four drivers for SD-WAN that are helping enterprises get ahead of the competition over at orange here .

The NPM-R10-RM is the heart of the entire system. It connects to an ethernet-based TCP/IP network and accepts SNMPv1 or SNMPv2 queries to permit monitoring of mains status , battery voltages, Charge and Load currents with internal isolated current sensors,relay and alarm statuses and temperature. Read about the product over at Micro Instruments here .

We hate – no, we actually we loathe – arriving home to find the power out and we’re sure you do as well but Netshield could rid us of that hate quite soon.   The Simple Single Phase GSM Power Monitor PH1 from Netshield might have a long and convoluted name but its as simple as putting a plug into a socket, because that’s how it works.   Simply plug the PH1 into a South African three-prong plug socket and hey presto you never have to worry about arriving home to a powerless home again. Of course, there is a bit more to it than that. Read the article over at hypertext here .

Why would any one want to change from legacy wide area networking to software defined wide area networking (SDWAN)? See the above infographic for more details about the technology. There needs to be a business reason for it and not a technical one. Techies, the type who don't create documentation , tend to solve problems bottom up. The technology is chosen first, then there is a retrofit of underlying processes to fit with that technology, and finally the business is coerced to wave the wand at the newly acquired widgets. This engagement model is the reason why so many projects around technology fail to deliver on the business value. Simply put the problem that is being solved is not one underpinning business. Read the article over at LinkedIn here .

Seems like everybody is talking about the Internet of Things (IoT)—the good, the bad and the alarming along the lines of. “It’s the beginning of machines taking over the world.” The IoT is when everyday products such as refrigerators, watches, speakers and more connect to the internet and to one another. The Internet of Things is already transforming our homes and workplaces. Read the article over at Forbes here .

Open-source Zabbix monitoring software has the granularity enterprises need but requires a lot of manual configuration and has some limits on exportable reports. Read the article over at Network World here . 

Should you build or buy software? A question asked by many-a-DevOps engineer and IT manager. And for good reason – getting your monitoring solution right can make or break your customer experience – and therefore, directly affect your retention rates and revenue. Read the blog post over at Catchpoint here .

The free and open-source network monitoring software Nagios Core has a long and strong reputation, providing the base for other monitoring suites - Icinga, Naemon and OP5 among them – and a history dating back to 2002 when it launched under the name NetSaint. Read the article over at Network World here .

The primates' penchant for relaxing in geysers in central Japan has long puzzled researchers, who assumed that they just did so to stay warm.  A new study by researchers from Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute and Wildlife Research Center has discovered that the macaques who bathe in the hot springs at Nagano Prefecture's Jigokudani Valley do so in part to keep their stress levels in check. Read the article over at Sputnik here .

This business plan was created by Billy Connolly.  What can go wrong with this bit of genius?

This article provides electrical safety tips and strategies that can help to prevent arc flash incidents at industrial plants.   Arc flashes cause massive electrical explosions, emitting large amounts of heat and light. They release hot gases and concentrated radiant energy that can melt metal, damage property, cause severe burns and result in fatalities or death.  In this article, we explore seven steps to mitigate arc flashes and discuss how to complete an arc flash analysis. Read the article over at ee publishers here .

Software-defined networking is the future of telephony, and it’s going to save companies money. Read the article over at Brainstorm here .

As a CEO, balancing your company’s immediate needs with its long-term growth is both paramount and challenging – especially if your business is a startup. Challenging questions arise, such as whether you should invest aggressively in long-term initiatives or take the less expensive and more conservative approach. The “build versus buy” decision, for example, is a significant one that many companies face when addressing their software needs. Read the article over at Forbes here .

In this episode of the podcast, Duncan McLeod interviews Grant Bodley, CEO of Dimension Data in the Middle East and Africa.   Bodley talks about how Dimension Data is doing in the region, how it’s weathering the tough economic environment and where the opportunities lie in the local IT services sector.   The CEO, who took the reins three years ago from Derek Wilcocks, discusses the IT outsourcing market, the demands that corporate clients are putting on IT service providers and where the industry is headed. Listen to the podcast over at TechCentral here .

Some things never change: application performance issues.   Flashback to twelve years ago when I was working at Mercury Interactive on their managed service for application performance management ( APM ). That year, Italy won the World Cup (again) and Enron went down in flames. It was cutting edge at the time to use synthetic monitoring to measure response time for the end-to-end transaction from fixed Points-of-Presence (PoPs) globally. We talked about things like moving from reactive to proactive modes when managing application performance issues and the difficulty in finding the needle in the haystack. Read the article over at Riverbed here .

Sometimes it’s a beautiful combination of laugh-inducing and cringeworthy as we look back on the start of our careers in IT. University and College students starting this September will have grown up entirely post-Y2K. Having grown up in enterprise IT through the 90s, I bet that you can share these things that will make you smile a little. Feel free to drop in here with your own fun memories of technology in your career!

I have previously written about " How to improve your continuity by thousands of times " and the underpinning themes in the article also apply to software defined wide area networking (SD-WAN). Two broadband links of poorer quality than a single MPLS will statistically have a better uptime. This is one of the fundamental use cases of SDWAN which makes resilience and redundancy happen in a simplistic manner. Read the article over at LinkedIn here .

Simply committing to SD-WAN security isn't enough. It's also necessary to create defenses the right way and avoid some common mistakes. Read the article over at Network Computing over here .