During the pandemic, many employees transitioned to working remotely or in hybrid environments. Now, many of these same individuals want to continue doing their jobs with work-from-anywhere (WFA) flexibility.

Often organizations are happy and willing to accommodate their hybrid work team members, but they face a mounting security challenge. The problem is that many IT departments are hard-pressed to offer employees WFA flexibility because they cannot support them with consistent, high-quality security.

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Searching for the best provider for SD-WAN, SASE, MPLS, content delivery network (CDN), 5G or any other network service can be a difficult, frustrating, and tedious process.

There are so many providers, so many options, so much confusion and possibilities for future regret. What's the best way to move forward?

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Arista Networks has a new high-end data-center switch as well as several smaller ones designed to provide more configuration and upgrade choices to fit the specific needs of individual organizations.

“Different customer use cases and application deployments within a single organization have differing requirements. Each deployment needs a right-sized solution—few applications need 400G of bandwidth per server today, but many organizations need to do the groundwork for the move away from 10/25G,” wrote Martin Hull, vice president of Cloud Titans and Platform Product Management with Arista in a blog about the new systems.

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Data-center giant Equinix has found a low-tech solution to high data-center electric bills: turn up the thermostat.

Guidance from the American Society of Heat, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) recommends a temperature range for data-center servers from 59°F (15°C) to as high as 89°F (31.6°C). Equinix is looking at setting the temperature at 80°F (26.6°C), up from the current setting of 73°F (22.7°C).

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A joint effort by immersion cooling firm Iceotope and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, found cooling hard drives with a dielectric liquid is safe and a more effective means of cooling than using fans.

Hyperscalers like Meta deploy thousands of HDDs in their data centers, and while the heat given off on an individual basis is tiny, it adds up, especially since the drives are in constant use and are close together. The drives are stored in server racks that hold nothing but dozens of hard drives and are referred to as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks).

A JBOD can overheat without cooling, which up to now has been done with fans, but some drives were further away from fans than others, causing uneven cooling.

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The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services (a.k.a. unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS)) is an indication of how well served businesses are via the internet.

ThousandEyes is monitoring how these providers are handling the performance challenges they face. It will provide Network World a roundup of interesting events of the week in the delivery of these services, and Network World will provide a summary here. Stop back next week for another update, and see more details here.

Backup and recovery systems are at risk for two types of ransomware attacks: encryption and exfiltration – and most on-premises backup servers are wide open to both. This makes backup systems themselves the primary target of some ransomware groups, and warrants special attention.

Hackers understand that backup servers are often under-protected and administered by junior personnel that are less well versed in information security. And it seems no one wants to do something about it lest they become the new backup expert responsible for the server. This is an age-old problem that can allow backup systems to pass under the radar of sound processes that protect most servers.

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Whether you’re managing a network at work or just watching out for your home systems, it’s important to understand your network connections--how you communicate with public systems and those on the local network. This article covers some of the most important commands available on Linux to help you get a clear understanding of your local network and how it reaches outside.

While the links provided include important tips on using network commands, some include commands that have been deprecated in favor of newer commands. Some of the most important commands to know today include ip a, ip neigh, ping, tracepath, dig, tcpdump and whois.

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Sometimes, budget pressures mean you just have to cut costs. Sometimes, cutting costs in one area can give you some financial elbow room to fund something in another. A fifth of all CIOs tell me that they have a mandate to cut network costs in 2023, and another third say they’d be open to doing that if they could fund something else with the savings. Most admit that they don’t have a really good idea of how to accomplish their goal without creating a risk that would potentially overwhelm benefits.

Cutting CAPEX is popular in theory.  Of 87 enterprises with cost-cutting interest, 55 said they thought their capital budgets would be an attractive place to start. That’s not changed much over the last five years, but what has changed is how enterprises think they could cut CAPEX. It used to be that they believed cost reductions could be achieved with new technologies like hosted router software or white-box devices, but this year they reported concerns that integration costs and risks were too high.

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The need to surf the internet freely without restrictions or being noticed created the necessity for proxies. So, what is a proxy? To put it in simple terms, a proxy is a device that provides a gateway between users and the web. Therefore, it helps prevent cyber attackers from gaining access to a private network.

A proxy is a computer, referred to as an intermediary because it channels traffic between end-users and the web content they visit online. In data gathering, proxies enable you to access data from websites without being detected, increasing the success rate of extracting valuable information.

Top 10 Best Residential Proxy Service Providers

Several residential proxy providers claim to provide the ultimate security for your web activities and enable you to browse anonymously. However, some providers' services don't come close to what they claim to provide. Having stated that, the following providers will give you value for your money. If you need a reliable residential proxy, they will come to the rescue.

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Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a network architecture that combines software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and security functionality into a unified cloud service that promises simplified WAN deployments, improved efficiency and security, and application-specific bandwidth policies.

First outlined by Gartner in 2019, SASE (pronounced “sassy”) has quickly evolved from a niche, security-first SD-WAN alternative into a popular WAN sector that analysts project will grow to become a $10-billion-plus market within the next couple of years.

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At a network operations center (NOC), getting a flood of helpdesk requests full of complaints from users at every corner of a large distributed network is a sure way to ruin everybody's day. For IT staff, the goal isn’t just to keep the network up and running, it’s to keep it running well. Slowdowns, wireless problems, DHCP issues, DNS issues, VLAN configurations, and security and password issues all keep users from getting their work done. And then nobody is happy.

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Intel has a new program called Intel On Demand that will allow customers of its new Xeon Scalable Processors to unlock specialty processing engines for an extra fee.

Intel has not disclosed what it will cost to access the On Demand features, which are activated through Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi), a newly added function using authentication keys to activate the additional features.

For most customers, the standard Xeon core is all they need. But some may want the specialty processing engines included in the latest Xeon generation, codenamed Sapphire Rapids. The chips are available now to OEMs but will have a formal launch Jan. 10, 2023.

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Two networking technologies – secure access service edge (SASE) and wireless— lead a  list of six core trends that will impact enterprise infrastructure and operations activity in 2023, according to new research revealed by Gartner analysts at its IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference this week.

Implementing SASE, a term coined by Gartner, has been ongoing but is expected to grow substantially in the next year. Gartner forecasts that worldwide SASE spending will hit $9.2 billion in 2023, a 39% increase from 2022.

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The coming year could be a very big one for the open-source network operating system SONiC as it garners start-up support and increasing interest from major networking vendors.

The Linux-based Software for Open Networking in the Cloud decouples network software from the underlying hardware and lets it run on hundreds of switches and ASICs from multiple vendors while supporting a full suite of network features such as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), remote direct memory access (RDMA), QoS, and Ethernet/IP. 

It was developed and then open-sourced by Microsoft, which in April turned the project over to the Linux Foundation and its 450,000 developers. The vendor community supporting SONiC has been growing, too, and includes Dell, Arista, Nokia, Alibaba, Comcast, Cisco, Broadcom, Juniper Apstra, Edgecore, Innovium, Nvidia-Mellanox, Celetica and VMware.

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In today challenging business and economic environment, everybody's looking for a deal. Yet there is one "bargain" that network managers should avoid at all costs – low-priced network devices that turn out to be counterfeit.

No competent network manager would intentionally purchase a faux network component, but that doesn't mean it never happens. "If signs of counterfeit parts were obvious, this issue would probably be resolved quickly," says John Loucaides, senior vice president of strategy at security technology provider Eclypsium.

Virtually every type of network device is shadowed by one or more unauthorized doppelgängers. Fake drop-in replacements are particularly prevalent. "This enables a wide variety of cheaper parts to be used in a non-obvious way, maximizing the benefit of providing a counterfeit device," Loucaides says. Sometimes, however, only a single component within a device is counterfeited. "Given a financial motive, this is likely the most expensive part being substituted for a cheaper part," he says.

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Just a few weeks ago Gartner analysts said that sustainability and issues around it  would transcend all of the strategic technology trends for 2023.

This week at its IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference Gartner described how corporate data centers might make sustainability a practical reality.

“IT leaders must avoid wasting value through the premature replacement of IT infrastructure,” said Philip Dawson, vice president and analyst at Gartner, at the conference. “They can do that by using real-time health analytics to maximize the useful life of data-center assets.”

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Cloud services and hosting provider Rackspace Technology acknowledged Tuesday that a recent incident that took most of its Hosted Exchange email server business offline was the product of a ransomware attack. The company shut the service down last Friday.

It was not initially clear what had caused the outage, but Rackspace quickly moved to shift Exchange customers over to Microsoft 365, as this part of the company’s infrastructure was apparently unaffected.

Rackspace offers migration to Microsoft 365

Rackspace said today that there is “no timeline” for restoration of Exchange service, but it is offering Exchange users technical assistance and free access to Microsoft 365 as a substitute, though it acknowledged that migration is unlikely to be a simple process for every user. Rackspace said that, while the migration is in progress, customers can forward emails sent to their Hosted Exchange inboxes to an external server, as a temporary workaround.

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The job of a network engineer just keeps getting more complicated. Mission critical applications are competing for bandwidth. The sheer number of devices is exploding, driven by IoT. And the network itself if being extended to the cloud, the edge and to the home office.  

And then there’s cybersecurity to worry about. Attacks are on the rise across the board, and attackers are constantly looking for vulnerabilities or backdoors, upping the need for solid and secure networking to act as an early warning system for cybersecurity defenses.

Thankfully, there are many great tools available to help network engineers complete their never-ending tasks. And many of them are available for free. Here’s our list of 12 killer network tools that won’t break the bank. 

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Automation represents perhaps the clearest embodiment of Benjamin Franklin’s legendary “time is money” aphorism -- and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven networks are one area where it’s relatively easy to see the near-term benefits that give new meaning to Franklin’s simple phrase.

Network automation simplifies operations for network teams and reduces configuration errors. So, it stands to reason that greater automation through AI will deliver a more predictable and reliable network that seemingly can speed up time while saving lots of money. We turned to the CIO Experts Network of IT professionals and industry analysts to collect their views on AI-driven networks and how the technology is likely to change the lives of network teams.

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Business spending on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is growing by leaps and bounds as organizations strive to improve efficiency, simplify, and automate processes, and build more proactive capabilities. Global spending on AI-centric systems is on track to surpass $300 billion in 2026, with the U.S. accounting for more than 50% of the total, according to IDC forecasts. But the success of these investments may ultimately hinge on trust.

A National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) study points out that “determining that the AI system is trustworthy because it meets its system requirements won’t ensure widespread adoption of AI. It is the user, the human affected by the AI, who ultimately places their trust in the system.”

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday suffered an outage at one of its four regions in the US, just days after the close of its annual re:Invent conference where it announced a multitude of new and updated services.

The outage, which according to the company lasted for about 75 minutes between 11:34 AM and 12:51 PM Pacific Time, resulted in internet connectivity issues to and from the US-East 2 region.

The loss in connectivity for certain instances at the Ohio region, which was identified by AWS around 12:26, also saw several people taking to Twitter to complain about it.

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You might not be challenged very often to convert numbers from one numbering system to another but, when you are, you can do it with either of two fairly easy commands on the Linux command line.

Converting in your head can be taxing, especially for longer numbers. While the decimal numbering system allows any digit in a number to have any of ten values (0-9), digits in hexadecimal numbers can have 16 (0-F), digits in octal numbers only eight (0-7) and digits in binary numbers only two (0-1).

And, whether you like it or not, from time to time you are likely to run into numbers displayed in hex or octal, and knowing how to convert them from one number base to another can come in handy.

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By now you’ve probably heard about Mastodon, the open-source microblogging platform that’s been gaining popularity since Elon Musk took over Twitter.

A major feature of the platform is it’s de-centralized, distributed architecture that provides resilience, but a downside is that it can cause congestion and increase latency for the unprepared.

Here’s how Mastodon works. Its servers (instances) operate semi-independently of each other, and users register with servers geared toward communities that interest them. But users can follow and interact with others from across the Fediverse—users hosted on other Mastodon instances as well as other services utilizing the open-source ActivityPub protocol from the Worldwide Web Consortium.

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I’ll start with an understatement: The pandemic has profoundly affected edge computing.

For over two years, edge computing has accelerated growth at the distributed edge due to the rise in remote work and the changing demand for various applications.

For example, I learned that there is a limit on the WiFi bandwidth at home – something I hadn’t even thought about until my family relied on our Internet at home 24/7.

Edge computing is about moving into unconventional spaces for critical digital infrastructure. Whether on a manufacturing floor (industrial edge computing), an outdoor location, or a retail stock room – the rack becomes the data center.

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One of the biggest complaints consumers have about the in-store retail experience is long checkout lines. As a result, consumer interest in technologies that allow them to bypass checkout lines is high. In the article “Self-Checkout is Changing the Retail Landscape,” digital analyst firm eMarketer cites a survey that found 71% of consumers were interested in scan-and-go apps and 61% were interested in unmanned stores.

Based on that data, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that ResearchandMarkets.com forecasts a 10.2% compound annual growth rate for the self-checkout market between 2020 and 2025.

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