Inside Cisco's private Cloud
Do private Clouds work? You bet they do, says Cisco, which has more than two years of experience under its belt with its Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services (CITEIS) Cloud.
Stories by John Dix
Call centers as social media hubs
Contact centers are changing rapidly with the arrival of cloud technology and the ability to interact with customers over new social channels, including Twitter. The transformation has implications for everything from how companies deal with customers to the role agents play and how internal groups are best organized. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with the CEO of LiveOps, Marty Beard, for his take on where we stand and where we're headed.
Capital letter 'S,' 'D,' 'N' will never happen: VMware exec
Rack and stack that network and then walk away and leave it alone. VMware's NSX technology will provide all the control necessary going forward, says Steve Mullaney, senior vice president and general manager of VMware's Networking & Security Business Unit.
University of Florida gets 100Gbps link to Internet2, upgrades campus research net to 200Gbps
The University of Florida is just putting the wraps on a remarkable year of IT upgrades. The school, which has a 2,000-acre campus and more than 900 buildings, installed a new supercomputer in a new data center, installed a 100Gbps link to Inernet2, and upgraded its Campus Research Network from 20G to 200Gbps while adding support for Software Defined Networking (SDN). Network World Editor in Chief John Dix got the lowdown on all of the developments from Erik Deumens, director of research computing.
Where we stand with SDN
One gauge of industry progress on the software-defined networking front is the momentum of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), the user-lead group that is spelling out the core SDN standards and championing the cause.
A Q&A with the Chair of the Open Networking Foundation's Migration Group
For an inside look at the goals, expectations and plans of the ONF's recently created Migration Group and how it hopes to help companies make the transition to SDN, Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up via e-mail with the chair of the group, Justin Joubine Dustzadeh, CTO & VP of Technology Strategy, Networks, Huawei.
SDN user group focuses on use cases
The recent Open Networking User Group (ONUG) meeting in New York City attracted 400 participants, some of whom attended in-depth tutorial sessions about software defined networking (SDN) on day one, and others that stayed for the members-only closed door sessions on day two (vendors and press excluded). Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with Nick Lippis, who co-founded the SDN user group with representatives from Fidelity Investments, for his assessment of what was learned.
ExtraHop mines the network to glean operations intelligence
Jesse Rothstein, who was the lead architect of F5's flagship product line, founded ExtraHop in 2007 to develop products to derive IT operations intelligence from data gleaned from the network. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Rothstein for an update on the company and what it has learned about things like virtual packet loss (hint: it can be the bane of highly virtualized environments).
Solving the customer experience riddle: A Q&A with two experts
Riddle this: All your core performance metrics are glowing green, but customers on the other end of the network are still cursing your service. How can IT get to the root of the problem?
Planning for SDN
In our first Network World Spotlight, "Understanding SDN" we spelled out the basics. Here we catch you up on the status of the movement and begin to lay out how you get there from here, examining basic planning, what to look for in an SDN controller, and discussing what the Open Networking Foundation hopes to achieve with its new Migration Group.
You can't make it run better if you don't know where the problem lies
Riverbed Technology is best known for its WAN optimization tools, but the company has branched out over the years through multiple acquisitions. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with Eric Wolford, president of the company's Products Group, to see how the company is trying to help customers squeeze more efficiency out of their IT resources.
Cloud computing causing rethinking of disaster recovery
Cloud computing gives organisations the opportunity to rethink many traditional IT practices, but it may be a particularly good fit for disaster recovery and business continuity.
SDN: The user view
It is still early days in the emergence of software defined networking, so there aren't many users around to share their experiences and expectations, but there are a few. Network World's editor in chief tracked down Steve Wallace, executive director of InCNTRE, Indiana University's Indiana Center for Network Translational Research and Education, which is already using the technology in a production environment. The school is also playing a role in the tech's evolution.
The promise of software defined networking
If you aren't intimately familiar with software defined networking, don't fret. Only 10 per cent of 450 IT practitioners at a recent Network World event raised their hands when asked if they understand SDN. But if the emerging technology lives up to its promise to redefine networking as we know it, there is no time like the present to dig in and learn more.
Google making steady progress in the enterprise
Google Enterprise is making inroads on many fronts, winning converts to everything from its productivity tools to its cloud offerings. We recently caught up with President of Google Enterprise, Amit Singh, for a progress report and to discuss what comes next.