We're all hearing a lot about SDN, but usually it's discussed in the future tense!  Customers and vendors are promising major management and virtualization benefits, all of which will eventually be delivered by SDN.  Well, the good news is that SDN is becoming much more real every day!  For example, Juniper has supported programmable network elements (switches and routers) that can communicate with an SDN Controller for over a year.  These have been successfully deployed in several large-scale enterprise and cloud networks.

The last bastion of proprietary networking is continuing to thrive within data centers. SANs based upon good old fashioned fibre channel still support 99% of the world’s storage resources. To their credit, fibre channel networks are extremely reliable, provide high performance, and are simple to administer. On the other hand, they are quite expensive (especially when compared to Ethernet), and they are truly isolated from the rest of the network.
 

We have all spent a lot of time talking about the perils of open-door BYOB policies.  The attached white paper by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) takes a quantitative look at the impact of BYOB on typical enterprises.  This paper discusses the challenges (especially security) created by all of the new mobile devices and the “de-perimeterization” of organizations.  And finally it recommends some architectural solutions for these security issues.  In particular, the paper addresses – at a high level – mobile device management solutions.

One problem that every network administrator has had to deal with at some point in their careers is securing their equipment from outside attacks that come from the internet.  A firewall is especailly vulnerable since it is the device that protects your network from all those attacks and probes.  One thing that is truly annoying is when you check your logs and find out that someone has been trying to log in to your firewall.  You'll see something like this: