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Archive for the ‘Good Reads’ Category

What Matters Most in 2010

Monday, January 4th, 2010

With New Year come new resolutions, and an opportunity to take stock, examine your organization’s needs and explore new solutions.
Network World came out with an article called the “5 must-have IT Management technologies for 2010” that looks at some new solution categories that will help manage the ever increasing complexity in IT. Topping the list, [...]

Great Article on New Network Engineer Skill Requirements

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Shamus does it again! Great article on the changing requirments for those considering a career in network engineering. Best quote was from Chris Silva, a Forrester research analyst – “For the network engineer, it’s no longer, ‘I opened up port-whatever for your application. It’s having visibility into the network, whether through doing custom development of [...]

University flees fire with network in a box

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

This story on Network World is just bizarre enough that I have to mention it. I think it’s the blade servers in a cardboard box and getaway car imagery that got to me.
Of course, for any enterprise shop this would never happen, as there would be redundant sites and systems in place for an event [...]

Cisco Predicts IP Traffic to Increase 5-Fold by 2013

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

A Cisco research presented some interesting data today, predicting a Global IP traffic surge fueled by Video.  By 2013, annual global IP traffic will reach two-thirds of a zettabyte (or 667 exabytes). (A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes.) Somehow I just love that word – zettabyte.
What does this mean for service provider capacity management? I [...]

Monitoring the Cloud

Monday, May 18th, 2009

We all knew it was coming, and Amazon EC2 is taking baby steps today with the new Cloud Watch announcement. CPU load, Disk I/O rates, and Network I/O rates are your very bare minimum metrics for monitoring purposes, but it’s a start. As cloud providers and users both get more sophisticated, we’ll expect to see [...]

5% Decline in Internet Traffic Due to Google Outage? Scary!

Friday, May 15th, 2009

Just saw this while perusing Google News, Information Week reports an overall 5% decline in internet traffic Thu morning due to some Google issues. 5%? Wow, I mean I know they practically run the internet, but 5%?
Their VP of Ops explains that a “routing error had sent some of the company’s Web traffic to Asia, [...]

The Growing 10 GbE Trend

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

Network World reports there were 4 vendor announcements on 10 GbE solutions this week, from Brocade, Extreme Networks, 3Com and Force10 respectively. Demand is driven by application growth, massive virtualization deployments and hunger for more storage. In fact, the article claims that 10 GbE is expected to peak in 2009, as vendors readies for the [...]

Chicken Little Monday

Monday, May 11th, 2009

On Network World today, the Robot Fight Club and this article on “The Internet Sky is Falling” has been dueling all morning for Most Read supremacy.
Although a lot of the reader comments derided the author for the alarmist tone of the article, I think some of its main points are valid. Just like that Brown [...]

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility – Management Challenges Due to Virtualization

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

It’s no surprise to any of our reader that Virtualization brings unique challenges for application and network performance management, it’s a topic that was covered in a previous post.
This week, Network World came out with an article based on a Network Instruments survey on this very topic. 442 IT professionals were surveyed, and highlights of [...]

The Big Internet Brown Out of 2012?

Friday, May 1st, 2009

Forget the 2012 Mayan calendar apocalypse, IT has something more real to worry about that year. My co-worker Dave brought this to my attention: a Times Online article cites a Nemertes Research report that warns about the web reaching a critical point in terms of bandwidth. The hypothesis is that high-bandwidth content sites like Youtube [...]