Sean Michael Kerner

Year after year, global internet traffic has gone up, with no apparent end in sight. The staggering amount of volume growth in the internet is summarized by Cisco in its recent Visual Networking Index (VNI). According to the VNI, from 1984 until 2018, 4.7 zettabytes of IP traffic traversed the internet. By 2022, five years […]

While x86 still largely dominates traditional server and cloud computing, the same cannot be said for network switching. Data center network switches often rely on application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to deliver the required performance, which is where Barefoot Networks and its Tofino ASICs fit in. The new Tofino 2 ASIC provides up to 12.8 Tb/s […]

Networking in the public Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud is about to get a lot easier and faster. There are multiple ways that organizations connect to and across the AWS cloud network, with the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) among the most popular. With a VPC, an organization is able to isolate their use of […]

BERLIN — The next generation of wireless networks known as 5G is being enabled at AT&T through a series of open source efforts, including the OpenStack cloud platform. At the OpenStack Summit in Berlin, Germany, executives from AT&T discussed how they are building out 5G networks and also demonstrated a live 5G phone call running […]

The 802.11ax Wi-Fi standard, which is being branded as Wi-Fi 6 by the Wi-Fi Alliance, is now making its way into enterprise deployments. Among the first vendors to announce Wi-Fi 6 gear is the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Aruba business unit, which announced new hardware and software on Nov. 13. Among the new hardware is […]

The cloud is typically thought of as being just about elastic compute resources. But all those resources are still connected across disparate availability zones, geographic regions and end users, via a network. A study released by network monitoring firm ThousandEyes on Nov. 8 reveals new insights into how the big three public cloud providers, Amazon […]

Most people think of Ubuntu as primarily a Linux server and cloud technology effort. Ubuntu also has some networking capabilities that it develops on its own, including the Fan container networking project. There are multiple open source software-defined networking (SDN) efforts in the market today that are more well known than Fan, including the Tungsten […]

Over the last five years or so, the telecom industry has been transformed through the use of network functions virtualization (NFV) and vrtual network functions (VNFs). At the same time, in the enterprise application space, cloud-native technologies, led by the Kubernetes container orchestration system, have transformed the way applications are built and delivered. At the […]

The idea of a mesh deployment, an approach where multiple nodes of a network work together to enable better coverage and connectivity, is not new for networking. However, for Wi-Fi networks, especially consumer access points, Wi-Fi mesh has been a new area where multiple vendors, including Google, Linksys and others, have all announced products in […]

At the beginning of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) era, the OpenFlow protocol, backed by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), was at the core. Now, the ONF is now aiming to usher in a new era of SDN with Stratum. On March 12, the ONF announced the formation of the Stratum project with the audacious […]

Few areas (if any) of the networking market today are growing faster than SD-WAN. Cisco is now aiming to help advance SD-WAN with new analytics capabilities to help organizations gain better visibility. Among the new offerings announced by Cisco is SD-WAN vAnalytics, which is based on technologies originally built by Viptela. Cisco acquired Viptela for […]

As of Dec. 27, network visibility vendor Gigamon is no longer a publicly traded company. Private equity firm Elliot Management announced on Dec. 27 that it has closed its acquisition of Gigamon that was first announced on Oct. 26. The $1.6 billion deal paid $38.50 for each Gigamon (NYSE:GIMO) share. “As a private company, we […]