Networking
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What is “Vendor Neutral”?
What does it mean to be Vendor Neutral? To be Vendor Neutral, or Vendor Neutrality, seems like it should mean no specific preference to any certain vendor or no bias towards any certain particular vendors, or not favoring one vendor over another. Indeed, vendor neutral means a “product or specification that is not proprietary and controlled by one company. Open source software was conceived to avoid allegiance to a single vendor”[14]. PC Mag encyclopedia goes on to make note, “However, an ‘open system’ is not entirely vendor neutral as the foundation platform may be controlled by one company”.
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What is a Tier 1 network?
What is a Tier 1 network? A Tier 1 network is “an IP (Internet Protocol) network that can reach every other network on the Internet solely via settlement-free interconnection”[2] (that is, they can reach the entire internet via settlement-free peering). You can think of Tier 1 networks as having a kind of “golden VIP pass” with each other, and each Tier 1 network can exchange traffic with other Tier 1 networks without paying any fees for the exchange of traffic in either direction. (This contrasts with some Tier 2 networks and all Tier 3 networks which must pay to transmit traffic on other networks.) Universally recognized Tier 1 networks include…
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What is a data center? And Why Are They So Important??
Many people may have heard the term “data center” but most don’t really know what that means. Nonetheless, these data centers are incredibly important to our everyday way of life. What is a data center? Data centers are these vast, huge, sometimes-sprawling buildings dedicated to holding the back-end computer systems, machinery and associated components needed to help run what we consumers know of as “the internet”. In a way these data centers are “the cloud” that we think of when we say our info is “stored out there…in the cloud”, and these data centers can use as much electricity as a small town. What is colocation? A colocation data center…
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What is “the cloud”? #Cloud #CloudComputing #CloudNetworking
The cloud. Conjures up all kinds of memories of looking toward the sky and gazing at these constantly evolving, ephemeral, floating objects. In the tech world some terms are flexible and can be a bit tricky, or hard to contain to one concrete definition. The “cloud” is a network “out there”. Indeed the very internet itself can be the cloud in some ways. Many consumers quickly warmed up to cloud with the easy adoption of web-based email like “Gmail” which is essentially “email in the cloud”. Instead of being stored on our local machines, we became used to storing our email with Google in their “cloud”. But a “cloud” has…
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Integrating Security Into Networking From The Ground Up…
This industry insight article from GCN discusses how moving forward, the convergence of security and networking will be needed to work together from an integrated perspective. As more of the workforce continues remote-work, the potential for attacks/threats/malicious actors increases and heightened security will continue to be of critical importance. Secure access service edge (SASE) and software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) technologies are designed to merge security and networking into a single, integrated solution that can rapidly and easily scale and adapt to expanding environments and requirements. These forward-leaning capabilities help agencies better plan for the future while ensuring security remains a top priority even amid ongoing changes. Traditional security solutions no…
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‘Welcome To The Edge!!!’–What Is Edge Computing???
[Note: This is an evolving, continuously updating post for my research purposes to learn more about SASE, or Secure Access Service Edge. First, I’m laying the groundwork for what ‘edge computing’ is.] Edge Computing The term ‘edge’ is all the rage these days. From a infrastructure-centric point of view, “Edge computing is at it’s essence cloud principles applied at the network edge close to the user“[3]. It can include: Virtualization (Compute virtualization, Storage virtualization, Networking virtualization) Resources On Demand API Driven Approach Automated LCM Life-Cycle management Use of Commodity hardware [3] These are some of the powerful core cloud basic principles that make the network edge highly flexible and programmable.…
