IT professionals are used to change. But we’re living in extremely unusual times. Work from home is likely to extend well into 2021, edge applications are exploding, the move to cloud and cloud-native applications continues, new connectivity options like 5G and Wi-Fi 6 are emerging, and most companies are undergoing a digital transformation.
Keeping up with these changes and the slew of new products and services introduced to support them is a daunting task. Here is a brief list of some networking and infrastructure news of the week to help you navigate the choices.
Cisco announced two new cloud-managed sensor solutions that help businesses simplify asset and facility monitoring across their organizations, from indoor IT closets to outdoor Operation Technology (OT) spaces at scale. Specifically, the new cloud-managed solutions help improve business resiliency with greater visibility into physical spaces for IT and Operational Technology (OT) environments. The new solutions include:
Masergy announced SD-WAN Work From Anywhere solutions. The new offerings extend Masergy’s Managed SD-WAN Secure solutions to the remote workforce, supporting their network connections with built-in security, dual-link redundancy, load balancing, and dynamic traffic steering capabilities. SD-WAN Secure Home for executives and power users includes a lightweight Fortinet Secure SD-WAN device, built-in next-generation firewall and routing, and secure access service edge (SASE) cybersecurity capabilities. Available in November, SD-WAN On the Go for mobile users is a multi-platform software client and VPN that uses IPsec tunnels and next-generation endpoint protection for secure remote access to the corporate network. It also provides mobile users SASE-based secure connectivity anywhere.
Heficed is launching Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) communities onto its infrastructure stack. The feature, which is in great demand, will let users identify optimal paths and adjust traffic routes accordingly, introducing more flexibility and speed in the context of network management. The feature is being rolled out a few months past the 30-year BGP anniversary, when the routing protocol was first published. Although the cyberspace has come a long way since then, BGP has retained its role as a vital piece in the Internet’s infrastructure.
AEWIN announced it has collaborated with Altran, part of Capgemini, to enable SD-WAN functionality on universal customer premise equipment (uCPE) platforms for companies of all sizes. Through this collaboration, Altran’s SD-WAN uCPE operating system (OS) leverages AEWIN’s uCPE Whitebox Hardware Solution, a general-purpose platform that integrates computing, storage, and networking on an off-the-shelf server to provide various network services as virtual functions to any site on the network. Altran’s uCPE solution is pre-integrated with vRouter and firewall virtual network functions (VNFs) and Altran Orchestrator, as well as a cloud-native OS that supports containerized, low-resource footprint workloads.
Quobyte Inc. announced details of its latest version of the Data Center File System, a deploy-anywhere, scale-out storage solution with new security features, and a new policy engine. Version 3.0 of the Quobyte Data Center File System builds on its previous offer with additional multi-tenancy, 360 security, and self-service features. Additional new features of Quobyte 3.0 include a multi-cluster data mover with bi-directional sync, policy-based data tiering between clusters and recoding; and more native drivers, including HDFS and MPI-IO, which provide the benefits of lower latency and less memory bandwidth by bypassing the kernel.
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