For network professionals looking to get the latest in training for new skills and certifications, there is no shortage of resources on the web, but how do you know which online offers are legitimate?
+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Cisco certifications target business professionals eyeing software roles +
One way is to go straight to Cisco. The company has a broad array of training tools available for a variety of different topics and price points, ranging from free to thousands of dollars.
Maybe April Fool's Day is the wrong day for this, but in all seriousness...
Today is my last day at Network World and IDG, where I’ve spent the past 25 years of a 30-year career in technology journalism. Indeed, today is technically my last day in technology journalism – I’m starting a new job in networking market research and analysis at 451 Research on Monday.
I think this might be the first story I wrote for Network World. My first story ever in technology journalism was a small, inside page filler for Electronic News on an Alcatel central office switch.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is developing an SD-WAN offering for service providers to host for their enterprise customers. The SD-WAN is based on HPE’s ContexNet technology obtained from last year’s acquisition of ConteXtream.
ContexNet is an OpenDaylight-based SDN controller for service providers implementing NFV infrastructures for virtualized network functions. HPE will ostensibly be competing with Versa Networks and other companies targeting service providers for VNF-based SD-WANs.
Cisco will soon unveil a container “stack” for developers of cloud applications and services, and expects to have one for enterprises over time as well.
The Cloud Native Platform will emerge in April, according to Yvette Kanouff, Cisco senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Solutions. It will be delivered as a SaaS model with continuous integration/continuous delivery, and include containerized automated infrastructure as its base, policy-based management and orchestration as a middle layer, and analytics, development tools, and initial hybrid cloud applications in its framework.
In an effort to save time, customers are increasingly awarding business straight to Cisco without going through months-long “bake-offs” to evaluate solutions from various vendors, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said this week during the company’s reseller partner conference. These customers would rather focus on company business operations than spend as long as three months evaluating trials of different vendor proposals to fulfill their IT requirements, he says.
And it’s becoming a trend, Robbins says.
“What we see is an increasing desire by the IT organizations to spend more time on strategic issues inside of the company relative to what technology does to the future of their business and business models,” Robbins said during a Q&A with reporters at the Cisco Partner Summit in San Diego. “They have tremendous confidence in our portfolio and what we bring, and we do see customers trying to move more aggressively in this fashion.
To the surprise of perhaps no one, Cisco maintained its dominant leadership share of enterprise and service provider switching and routing in the fourth quarter of 2015, according to Synergy Research. Cisco’s share was 56% of both the aggregate $11 billion market in Q4, and the $41 billion market for all of 2015.
Synergy Research Group Its share remained flat from 2014, when the aggregate market was $39.8 billion, Synergy found.
The OpenDaylight Project this week unveiled its fourth open source SDN platform release, which features enhancements in automation, resource optimization, and visibility and control.
OpenDaylight Beryllium improves on the performance, scalability and functionality of the three previous releases – Hydrogen, Helium and Lithium, OpenDaylight officials say. But Beryllium will also includes clustering and high availability, improved data handling, AMQP messaging for transport, abstraction and management extensions, and a new GUI.
VMware is closing the SDN gap with Cisco ever so slightly. Last fall saw Cisco with a 2:1 edge in customer adoption but the most recent numbers fall just a hair below 2:1.
Even though Cisco’s second fiscal 2016 quarter saw switching revenue decline 4% and data center revenue dip 3% due to a pause in customer spending, the company actually gained Nexus 9000 and ACI customers in the quarter.
Network functions virtualization (NFV) start-up RIFT.io, founded by former Cisco executives and engineers, this week announced general availability of a new release of its network service virtualization software. RIFT.ware 4.1 is an open source program for developing, deploying, managing and orchestrating virtual network functions (VNFs).
RIFT.io software is designed to allow enterprises to deploy virtualized network services on private and hybrid clouds, and aid in service providers' efforts to deploy NFV-enabled virtualized networks. Combining open source with industry standards reduces the time and cost associated with VNF development, RIFT.io says.
Cisco is recalling Ethernet switches that pose a potential fire hazard because of damage to the source wiring that can cause a short. The company issued a field notice last week on the situation, which affects its IE5000 industrial Ethernet switches.
From the field notice:
Potential damage to the source wiring can cause a short to the metal enclosure/barrier. This could lead to a potential electrical and/or fire safety hazard for the end user.
Cisco this week says it fortified its SAN switching lineup for the next 10 years. The company launched the MDS 9718 – or “the beast” as it was referred to internally -- a high port density, programmable director that’s ready for 32G.
The switch supports 10G, 16G, 40G today, and with future support for 32G Cisco claims it should be around for the next decade. FibreChannel tops out at 16G today.
It scales to 768 line rate 16G FibreChannel or 10G FibreChannel-over-Ethernet (FCoE) ports, or 384 40G FCoE. Brocade's DCX 8510, by contrast, supports up to 512 16G FC.
Pankaj Patel, Cisco executive vice president and chief development officer, and a 19-year veteran of the company, is leaving in the second half of the year.
Patel oversees Cisco’s 26,000 engineers. He came to the company during the 1996 StrataCom acquisition and recently was heralded by CEO Chuck Robbins for an engineering reorganization designed to streamline product development and delivery to customers.
Juniper Networks this week entered into a definitive agreement to acquire BTI Systems, a provider of cloud and metro networking systems and software to content, cloud and service providers.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
BTI will allow Juniper to accelerate delivery of packet optical transport systems for the data center interconnect and metro optical networking markets. The BTI products will be integrated with Juniper’s NorthStar Controller and network management features to enable end-to-end provisioning of services, said Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager, Juniper Development and Innovation, in this blog post.
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is all the rage in service provider environments, and NFV management has become an issue as a result. Two companies, HP Enterprise (HPE) and Affirmed Networks think they have solutions to address operational control of NFV deployments.
HPE last week rolled out HPE Service Director, which is positioned as an end-to-end service operations coordinator for hybrid physical/virtual networks -- like those in NFV/Virtualized Network Function (VNF) deployments. Service Director is said to enable OSS automation across those hybrid environments, something current OSS systems were not optimized for.
Cisco has invested in VeloCloud, a software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) start-up with a cloud offering for configuring and optimizing branch office networks. Cisco contributed to VeloCloud’s $27 million Series C round, led by March Capital Partners.
Cisco is one of two strategic investors. The second was not identified by VeloCloud.
SD-WAN is hot. There are several start-ups in the space, including Glue Networks, CloudGenix, Viptela, Talari and Versa. They, and Cisco, have sights set on Cisco’s installed base of branch routers, an opportunity Glue CEO Jeff Gray says is about $12 billion.
This might be up there with the cable connector boot that hit the reset button on Cisco switches…
For seven weeks, Cisco’s been shipping UCS servers with a default password unknown to its systems administration customers, the company said in a field notice posted yesterday. The Register was first to report on the situation.
The default password when initially configuring these servers is supposed to be “password.” But Cisco changed that to “Cisco1234” back in November, apparently without telling customers.
Cisco has disrupted another exploit kit that was emanating from Russian service providers. The company’s Talos security operation said it blacklisted several Class C subnets from provider Eurobyte that were serving the RIG exploit kit or scored negatively in web reputation.
RIG is an exploit kit that delivers malicious payloads to unsuspecting users. It redirects users to a landing page and the delivers the exploit payload – in this case, spambot variants -- via a GET request, according to this Talos blog post.
Cisco is reportedly preparing a hyperconvergence appliance through an OEM arrangement with start-up Springpath. According to CRN and The Register, Cisco has invested an undisclosed amount in Springpath as a prelude to the introduction of a hyperconvergence appliance combining Cisco’s UCS server platform with Springpath’s software, which enables compute, storage, networking and virtualization to run on an x86 server.
Cisco this week issued a security advisory on a vulnerability in its IOS XE software. IOS XE Release 16.1.1 could allow an attacker to cause an affected device to reload.
The vulnerability is due to incorrect processing of packets that have a source MAC address of 0000:0000:0000, the advisory states. An attacker could exploit it by sending a frame that has a source MAC address of all zeros to an affected device.
A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the device to reload. All products that run IOS XE Release 16.1.1 are vulnerable, the advisory states. Two of those products are Cisco’s Catalyst 3850 and 3650 series switches.
Padmasree Warrior, ex-CTO and strategy chief at Cisco Systems, has joined a Chinese electric car start-up competing with Tesla.
Warrior will be U.S. CEO and head of development for software and user experience at NextEV. NextEV is a designer and maker of electric vehicles, and a competitor of Elon Musk’s Tesla venture.
"I've always looked for opportunities to leverage technology to tackle big problems,” Warrior said in a statement. “Climate change and air quality are two of the most significant global challenges today. I believe that electric vehicles will play a major role in the overall solution. As the electric vehicle industry emerges, there is a tremendous opportunity to provide a user-centric transportation experience. By integrating advanced technologies in the mobile Internet era, NextEV will make electric vehicles an enjoyable experience in people's daily life.”
As litigation continues in the patent infringement case Cisco filed against Arista Networks, the defendant is developing “work arounds” for its customers should the courts rule in Cisco’s favor. Arista said during its Q3 earnings call on Nov. 5 that it has developed “design arounds” for each of the patents in question in the event of an adverse outcome.
From Marc Taxay, Arista vice president and general counsel:
Cisco published several security advisories and updates this week, most of which were classified medium severity. The most recent involves four OpenSSL vulnerabilities affecting multiple Cisco products.
The vulnerabilities were disclosed this week by the OpenSSL Project. They involve denial of service (DoS), memory leak, and cryptographic protection deficiencies.
A laundry list of Cisco products incorporate a version of the OpenSSL package affected by one or more vulnerabilities, the company says. They could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a DoS condition.
Cisco has taken its training certification tracker offline after a “limited” data breach earlier this week at Pearson VUE, which maintains the system for Cisco and other companies. In a blog post, Cisco says the breach exposed only the names, addresses, e-mail addresses and phone numbers of CCIE, CCNA, CCNP and other Cisco certification candidates.
Certification testing tools themselves have not been affected, according to the Cisco blog post:
More than half of the enterprise respondents in a Technology Business Research survey use public cloud services to support hybrid IT, brokerage and geographic expansion. Interoperability and business process improvements are desired goals, and if suppliers can deliver TBR estimates the public cloud market could reach $133 billion by 2018.
The firm surveyed 2,850 cloud strategists and buyers in large enterprises across North America, EMEA and APAC. Security, data ownership and privacy remain barriers for adoption.
Those are areas vendors and providers should work on, as well as offering built-in integrations for cloud and on-premises applications. Add lower cost and greater reliability, and you have the ingredients for that $100 billion-plus market. TBR says ecosystems of vendors with popular public cloud providers would fill in the gaps.
Brocade recently named Hadi Nahari vice president and security CTO, and SDN “All-Star” David Meyer as a Brocade Fellow. Meyer was a Cisco engineer back when SDN started generating significant interest.
Nahari is a 20 year industry veteran. Prior to joining Brocade, he was chief security architect of mobile and software platforms at NVIDIA. He also held principal security architect roles at PayPal, MontaVista Software, Motorola, NetScape and the U.S. Government.
Cisco this week updated its certification program reflect the changing skills sets needed as the industry moves to Internet of Things, cloud and network programmability. The company’s Cisco Certified Internet Expert (CCIE) Data Center and Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) Security have been “refreshed,” Cisco says, to reflect these new disciplines.
CCIE Data Center version 2.0 certifies skills needed to design, implement and troubleshoot modern data center infrastructure. Version 2.0 provides skills focused on end-to-end management of complex data centers aimed at policy-based infrastructure, advanced virtualization, orchestration and automation.
In addition to the company’s innovation strategy bend, some of the topics Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins discussed with us last week after the company’s Q1 earnings were Cisco’s increasing software revenue, the potential impact of the Dell/EMC merger, and the economic climate expected in Q2 and beyond. Software is becoming a larger mix of Cisco’s overall revenue thanks to more product offerings being delivered “as-a-service” from the cloud, and the company’s enterprise license agreements -- a single agreement that covers the purchase of software and subscription licenses for Cisco network infrastructure.
As soon as Ericsson and Cisco announced their strategic partnership on Monday, Juniper Networks’ stock plummeted. Juniper was down over 8% on Monday morning after Ericsson and Cisco disclosed their broad resale and patent licensing arrangement to address current and future needs of service providers and enterprises, and opportunities in the Internet of Things.
Ericsson and Juniper have a long history. Ericsson was an early funder of Juniper’s when the router company began operations almost 20 years ago. The companies entered into a joint development arrangement in 2000 that produced a routing node for mobile wireless operators, and have a distribution agreement around that and other complementary products.
Hyperconvergence wunderkind Nutanix this week said it lined up server titan Lenovo as an OEM reseller under a non-exclusive arrangement. Lenovo will offer Nutanix software on a new line of hyperconvergence appliances to debut next month.
Hyperconvergence integrates storage, server and virtualization into an appliance to reduce IT cost and simplify data center management, and offer a private cloud alternative to public cloud services. Nutanix is a leader in this space and has been rumored to be a potential acquisition target of Cisco’s.
Most data stored on client devices will move from PCs to elements such as smartphones and tablets by 2019, according to a Cisco study released this week on cloud traffic and services. Today, 73% of data stored on client devices is stored on PCs. But by 2019, 51% of it will move to non-PC devices, the Cisco study found.
Concurrent with this will be a fourfold growth in global cloud traffic from 2014-2019, and a tripling of global data center traffic. Driving this growth will be the cloud demands of mobile devices, popularity of public cloud services for business, and increasing virtualization and workload density in private clouds.