Virtual Appliances and the Networking Team
Over the last few years there has been a lot of progress made towards virtualizing a decent amount of the traditional, network-centric appliances that used to be just hardware based. Why are some companies still resistant to this software-based approach? Is it because that’s the way it has always been, or is it inherent to the networking geeks who may be less virtualization-savvy than some of their cohorts in the other technology silos? It reminds me of the days when VoIP was first being introduced and the subsequent lack of acceptance that some of the old-school, traditional telephony engineers fueled. Some of them accepted it and others retired. The point is though that it makes sense and those who accept it will be much the better for it. Read More »
Bandwidth: It’s Not the Size That Counts…
When you hear someone refer to the speed of an Internet connection, you typically hear it measured by how many Megabits per second (Mbps) it is. When in reality, the amount of Megabits you move per second only provides a small contribution to the perceived “speed” of a connection and the remote user experience. Read More »
Why Go with the MIMO?
Over the last few years there has been a lot of talk about the benefits of 802.11n and one of the key benefits this new standard gives us: MIMO. MIMO stands for Multiple-Input Multiple-Output. This directly relates to the amount of antennas an access point has – and the important thing to remember is that there is a distinction between a transmitting antenna vs. a receiving antenna. Confused yet? It gets worse. The numbers don’t have to match up. Depending on the Access Point (AP), there can be many combinations – starting with 1×1 (transmit is first) to 2×1 to 2×2 and all the way up to 4×4 – though I am unaware of any 4x4s out there. Read More »
Network Utilization, KPIs and the Truth
Recently, I came across a question posed on our website asking how to effectively measure network utilization. On a high-level that answer seems easy, but in reality there is more to it. One should certainly measure bandwidth, and for the sake of this conversation we are talking WAN bandwidth, from both inbound and outbound perspectives. While this snapshot could help from an immediate remediation perspective, it is only a snapshot. If you didn’t run the command at the exact correct moment you might have missed something. Actually, we probably already did. Read More »
Power Over Ethernet, PoE Plus and the Weather Channel
In light of the recent weather conditions, I thought I would write up a short take for Journey to the Cloud on Power over Ethernet (PoE). Over the last decade there have been several variations of PoE – starting with the proprietary (heard this story before) and moving to a standards-based solution. This doesn’t mean that the confusion has gone away. Read More »
Get Your HAT On: High Availability Thinking
High Availability (HA) in today’s campus networks has quickly changed from a want-to-have to a must-have. As more and more real-time applications are now being converged onto our data infrastructure, the dependencies on that environment are dramatically increasing. Read More »
