Recent Blog Posts

IT - a job for life? Possibly... just finished a meeting with an old IT mate, Mike Silvey of Moogsoft, and we were talking about how all the recent networking reinvention bollox has basically ...

An in-depth look at the latest trends and technologies in enterprise networking.

This week I have to host a panel debate on "stress testing cloud applications and infrastructure" at Netevents in Rome (I know - it's tough, but someone's got to do it...). One of the areas to ...

NetMan/Security vendor, and now part of the Thoma Bravo empire (watch out China!) SolarWinds, AKA SW, has sent us a timely reminder that this leap year has resulted in Feb having an extra Monday - ...

Having recently finished some testing with Cirba on its SDI (Software Defined Infrastructure) approach to compute and storage resource management and app deployment, it's been interesting to be ...

Much of the talk on this blog recently has involved the world of acquisitions. And so it goes on. A recent meeting with Phil and Jim from the UK and US arms of Netscout respectively focused ...

The IT world has gone acquisition bonkers. Dell is paying as much for EMC as any football club would do to secure the combined services of Messi and Ronaldo. Well almost... Meantime, a couple of ...

I remember writing a column for a long since deceased IT publication, where I was discussing the rebirth of the mainframe as a network server, I remember it, not simply for the content, but more ...

I recently had the "pleasure" of visiting Milton Keynes; the railway station was packed with what were surely tourists - some mistake here? Admittedly, all looking in a hurry to get back to ...

So, we went from hardware to software, and then software to virtual, the idea being not only that everything is more efficient, but also easier to scale and manage. Kind of VLANs part two? Or more ...

Been doing a few catch-ups with old vendor friends recently; one was Brocade - and more of this next month - which has a REAL SDN/NFV story - and another was NetScout; networking monitoring!!!! ...

So - HP has just announced it is acquiring Aruba Networks; basically the 2nd-3rd stab at buying a wireless solution after Colubris and effectively inheriting additional WLAN tech with the 3Com ...

Within the general misty definition of "Cloud", sometimes something pokes through the veil of ether-precipitation that says "I'm new and I make sense". And typically, it's not a variation on that ...

I was at a Gartner event in Barcelona last week, where Computer Associates were playing host.Not only was there the amusement of the excellent and straight-talking EMEA CTO Bjarne Rasmussen ...

Been researching an article for CW's very own Cliff Saran while, by chance, also speaking with a number of IT investors - the research being on networking innovations; oh and, by another chance, ...

"Cloud" and "WLAN" or "WiFi" are not, to date, IT terms that are typically seen in tandem, but Tallac Systems, a new venture for a number of ex HP er, yes - let's say it - veterans (I reckon I can ...

IT and networking reinvents itself partially or wholly every few years, and here we are again now - distributed, virtualised, cloud (private and public) based, hybrid networks... So where does this ...

Interesting how some elements of IT seem to be around forever without being cracked. I remember working with a couple of UK start-ups in the 90s on network, server and application capacity planning ...

Just finished some testing at test equipment partner Spirent's offices in glamorous Crawley with client Voipex - some fab results on VoIP optimization so watch this space for the forthcoming report ...

Network management is the proverbial bus syndrome - nothing shows up forever and then there's a whole queue of them - in this case interesting technologies, but here's the really interesting one ...

IT doesn't so much go round in circles as overlapping rings - think the Olympic sign. That's to say, it does repeat itself but with additions and a slightly changed working environment each ...

So - there's been all this talk about Big Data and how it's replaced classic transactional processing in many application instances.This much is true - what hasn't been discussed much, however, is ...

So here we are, already several weeks into 2013 and is there anything new to report on the networking front?Not really - currently the same stories as we've been hearing for the past year or two - ...

Thus it has always been so - HP networking, AKA ProCurve in the "old days", has been a success in spite of its "parent" company and, today, amidst the doom and gloom financial results the company ...

Some of you may have seen earlier blogs, and even the Broadband-Testing report, on our recently acquired US client Talari Networks, whose technology basically lets you combine multiple broadband ...

Following on from last week's OD of SDN at Netevents, we have some proper, physical (ironically) SDN presence in the launch of an SDN controller from HP. This complete the story I covered this ...

Such was the count at the end of Day 1 of Netevents Portugal. Thirteen "paradigm's" and two "paradigm shifts". Surprisingly there were no "out of the boxes" and only one "granularity" reference. It ...

Bem Vindo from the Algarve, at the latest Netevents symposium.One of my favourite topics in networking (and IT in general) is how often we revisit old "recipes". In the same way that prawn cocktail ...

Just a quickie update to all you vendors with mega technology out there re: the Tech Trailblazer awards wot I blogged about earlier this summer.Entry levels have proved (as did Top Gear) that you ...

One of the problems we've faced in trying to maximise throughput in the past has not been at the network - say WAN - level, but what happens once you get that (big) data off the network and try to ...