Key Points:
- Recently, Cisco held a Tech Talk focused on Cisco’s Silicon One and how the company believes you can converge a network without compromise. This means simplifying operations, maintaining security, and optimizing performance.
- The company invested many years and dollars to enable the convergence of routing and switching and plowed over a billion dollars into Silicon One. Cisco sees this as a fundamental industry shift.
-
Rakesh Chopra
,
思科
Fellow in the Common Hardware Group, likes to think about AI in two buckets. He sees the first bucket—using artificial intelligence to improve Cisco products and services—as a large part of Cisco’s revenue. However, as important as that is, the company's main focus is selling Cisco products to enable its customers to build AI networks.
- Since launching Silicon One, Cisco has been working hard to develop it into a viable alternative to the typical ASIC approach. With the rise of AI and its massive impact on networking, the company has pivoted swiftly to enable customers to utilize its converged networks to run taxing AI apps.
You already know that every day at Network Computing brings the how and why behind next-gen networks, data centers, storage systems, communications, and cloud architecture.
That means original reporting from our team of journalists and unique commentary you won’t see anywhere else! But in case you missed them, here are some of our other must-read favorites from this week:
Solving the Subsea Cable Issue
Key Points:
- Recent subsea cable cuts, while still not confirmed to be malicious acts, have highlighted a secondary issue. Namely, even if the cable cuts were accidental (as most are internationally), repairs are much more challenging in the region.
- The importance of the international subsea cable network cannot be understated. The cables carry about 95% of all global Internet traffic. Additionally, $10 trillion of financial transactions flow over them per day, according to Telegeography.
- Satellite data transmission services typically cost more to send data than if it is done over Internet subsea cables. Additionally, many satellite services have lower bandwidth compared to the subsea cables. And then there is the issue of latency.
- “Global internet traffic will continue to grow, and the only scalable way to support that traffic is via subsea cables,” says
Jason Carolan
, Chief Innovation Officer, at
Flexential
, a provider of data center and IT solutions, services, and consulting. He notes that capacity grows with each new deployment, shaving off additional milliseconds of latency with new routes.
Higher Ed's Digital Transformation
Key Points:
- Information technology teams at institutions of higher learning face unique network challenges based on lean budgets and lengthy evaluation and approval processes to upgrade any hardware or software components.
- At a more practical business level, universities and community colleges must provide a solid networking infrastructure to compete, or they could lose out on potential students and tuition to rival schools.
- Preserving continuous network uptime for students, faculty, and administrators is critical, but if their data remains unprotected, then everyone at the institution faces personal risk for identity theft. Even worse, successful cyberattacks may result in system-wide phishing scams or ransomware attacks that can financially devastate a school.
- There can be no way to make steady progress without measuring the effectiveness of how well a network is functioning. In the article above, Nolan presents several key performance indicators worth tracking.
Simplifying Infrastructure
Key Points:
- Complexity isn’t new. We have multiple generations of programming languages to prove that. The number of folks who understand and can harness the power of assembly language, for example, is dwindling.
- Stack Overflow’s 2023 survey found (a somewhat impressive) 5.43% of its 90000 respondents who have experience with assembly language. Compared to the 63.61% familiar with JavaScript or even the 49.28% experienced with Python, that number is small.
- Just as organizations ought to audit their application portfolios from time to time to reduce duplication and sprawl, they ought to do the same with infrastructure and app services.
- Call it centralization, call it consolidation, call it complexity reduction. Whatever you call it, eliminating complexity by standardizing with a platform approach is a much better way to put the brakes on the complexity cycle.
Dissecting Technical Debt
Key Points:
- The idea of technical debt was first introduced by Ward Cunningham, best known for devising the Agile methodology that breaks each project into phases and emphasizes continuous review and improvement cycles.
- In the context of network infrastructure, a running network is more urgent than an optimized network. New features may be added that make the network less optimal. Regular review of the infrastructure is like making interest payments on the technical debt incurred.
- An often-overlooked example of this growing debt is a failure to actively manage and optimize IP addresses and Domain Name System (DNS) configurations—the very pillars of corporate network communication.
- By conducting a systematic audit, companies may discover inefficiencies in their IPv4 address assignments, as well as stranded (unused) assets, and stale security and routing rules. Renumbering to clean up the network will help make it more efficient and may result in a windfall following the sale of unused addresses.
Latest Major Tech Layoff Announcements
Original Story by Jessica C. Davis, Updated by Brandon Taylor
Key Points:
- As COVID drove everyone online, tech companies hired like crazy. Now we are hitting the COVID tech bust as tech giants shed jobs by the thousands.
- Updated April 12, 2024 with layoff announcements from Hinge Health, Scaler, Checkr, Inc., and Apple.
- Check back regularly for updates to InformationWeek's IT job layoffs tracker.
REGISTER NOW!
“Network Observability in the Age of Cloud”
Live virtual event on April 18 - Presented by
Network Computing
On Thursday – April 18, beginning at 11am ET – tune into?our free virtual event! Our featured keynote speakers are
Arun DeSouza
- Managing Director at Profortis Solutions, and
Dr. Safi Mojidi, D.Sc.
- Founder & CEO at
Hacking the Workforce
. This live broadcast will moderated by?our colleague Dana Gardner - President & Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
“Network Observability in the Age of Cloud”
While observability is far from a new concept, observability in today’s enterprises that use hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures raises the stakes.
Companies must grapple with complexity, scaling, and security challenges as their systems architecture evolve.
This event will look at the challenges of managing modern infrastructures, the shortfalls of traditional monitoring, and the need to move to an observability strategy based on artificial intelligence and automation.
In this event we’ll discuss:
- The growing industry trend that sees enterprises migrating from monitoring to observability.
- Solutions that use AI to assist in managing alerts, correlating incidents, rapidly resolving problems, and proactively eliminating problems in the making.
- The role of technologies like AI that are being incorporated into observability solutions to take monitoring to new levels.
- How the use of AI-based observability solutions can help offload low-level monitoring tasks, speed the identification of root cause problems, prioritize alarms and alerts, and even automate incident responses in some cases.
This is just a taste of what’s going on. If you want the whole scoop, then register for one of our email newsletters,?but only if you’re going to read it.?We want to improve the sustainability of editorial operations, so we don’t want to send you newsletters that are just going to sit there unopened. If you're a subscriber already, please make sure Mimecast and other inbox bouncers know that we’re cool and they should let us through.
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