It’s natural for IT shops to replicate their current hardware and architecture when it’s time to refresh networking equipment. But refresh cycles provide a valuable opportunity to rethink — and improve — long-standing practices. Software-defined WAN applies software-defined networking principles over the WAN, redefining the management paradigm by operating the WAN as a holistic system…

What do Black Friday, PlayStation 5 and the newest iPhone have in common? They’re examples of events that drive a ton of traffic into stores — and onto the back-end IT systems of retailers. That flood of data can be a big problem or a big opportunity, depending on what you do before those events…

Today, enterprise networking is at a very interesting and dynamic state. With the availability of LAN bandwidth speeds of 40GB and 100GB in the data center, virtual switching technologies with all links forwarding traffic, creative new Quality of Service (QoS) configurations, application optimization, intelligent path control and the addition of automated orchestration, the possibilities today…

Most IT leaders are looking for the next angle or the do-more-with-less approach to spending money. Telecom services are one of the larger operational expenses on a company’s balance sheet. Customers have been looking for ways to creatively add bandwidth and cut costs. The market has responded, albeit slowly. Back around the year 2000, some…

Imagine you run a retail business and your customers are ready to check out with their credit card and your cashier has to tell them, “I’m sorry but our system is down.”  This downtime generally results in one of three consequences: 

I recently had the opportunity to participate in an amazing panel interview sponsored by CDW in partnership with Riverbed, produced by CIO magazine and held at the Foreign Cinema in the Mission District of San Francisco. There were 26 very bright attendees from various levels of information technology. The focus of the event was WAN…