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During the week of May 5th, EMC held its fast-growing user conference in Las Vegas, while just down the strip the Interop 2013 event was also underway.  Lacking an ability to clone myself, I did my best to attend both, in the process actively supporting the local contingent of taxi drivers and putting in more [...]

This year’s theme for CAWorld 2013 was “Go Big: IT with Impact.”  So I thought what the heck – let’s go big.  I stepped back and took a much broader look across the CA Technologies portfolio than I normally would.  Usually, I focus on the network management solutions, which live primarily within CA’s Service Assurance [...]

For the third year in a row, I will resist the temptation to predict the future of network management, and instead will recommend key focus points that network engineering, management, and operations professionals should keep in mind looking ahead. Last year’s resolutions dealt with cloud, converged infrastructure, VDI, application awareness, and making the shift from [...]

Few would disagree that the greatest disruptive shockwave the networking sector has seen in many years is SDN, or Software-Defined Networks.  It has the potential to turn traditional networking best practices upside down and to revolutionize the way we plan, deploy, and operate networks.  SDN is perceived by some as a huge threat and by [...]

(Author’s note:  Thanks to Tracy Corbo for contributions to this post!) I’ve just returned from Interop in New York, and it seemed like every other sentence spoken there included “SDN.” The networking community is abuzz with talk about Software Defined Networks (SDN), but what does this really mean, in terms of what we should expect [...]

A lot of my coverage over the past couple of years has been focused on the increasingly interesting mix of applications that get delivered over enterprise networks and the impact that has on how networks are being planned and operated. This cocktail has become increasingly volatile, as latency-insensitive traffic loads are mixed with a growing [...]

In keeping with my nascent tradition of not predicting trends, I’ll instead propose a number of focal points that network engineering and operations professionals should keep in mind in the coming New Year of 2012.  2011 resolutions were around application-awareness, connecting with the network security team, assessing the impact of videoconferencing, embracing automation, and improving service [...]

Thanksgiving is a time of gathering and community, and for many of us a primary task, beyond the obvious food, and football traditions, will be to reach out and connect with extended family that can’t be with us in person.  For my family, it will be Skype video chat when possible and phone calls when [...]

(Editors Note:  Today’s post is by EMA Senior Analyst Tracy Corbo) Finally freed from the demands of crunching together data for our just-released ADC/LB radar report, it was a good time to check in on the WAN optimization front and see what has been transpiring over the last couple of months. What I found was [...]

For network managers, there was great news coming with the VMware vSphere 5.0 release, in the form of enhancements to the Virtual Distributed Switch (vDS.) In a particular, the vDS now supports Port Mirroring (commonly known as SPAN) in addition to (finally!) formally offering NetFlow support. This should go a long way in helping with [...]