Finding Your Network’s Weakest Link

High availability is the nirvana of network engineers. When everything is humming, monitoring screens are green, and no notifications are in their inbox, network managers can spend time dreaming about how big their Christmas bonuses might be this year. But an unforeseen problem can interrupt their dreams and pop their bubbles at any given moment. […]

Software Defined Networking: The Speed of Software

Imagine that you are a data packet. You have information to deliver, and you’re anxious to get started. Here you are at your source network device, and you look out on the vast network of switches, routers, and other machines. But where do you go? You look down and see that you’ve been given a […]

Does the Cloud Solve Problems?

There is something about that word cloud. We know that cloud is a catch-all term for the many services available on the internet. And there are particular benefits to be found in moving to the cloud, as we have previously discussed in this blog space. But the cloud is not some heavenly realm of digital […]

Unchanging Internet Concepts

Internet technology continues to change at a rapid pace, but the fundamentals are the same. Most networks are still using TCP/IP. Networks are designed and analyzed using protocol stacks. And data packet switching is still the lifeblood of the network. In this post, we take a look at some fundamental concepts in networking that the […]

Top External Monitoring Tools in 2020

What is external monitoring? In a general sense, it means regularly checking on something to find out what is happening. It’s a way to gather information. In a large network, it means observing and recording data from a wide variety of devices and applications. We should clarify that monitoring and management are not the same […]

What Is Load Balancing — And Do I Need It?

Unless your job encompasses application availability or delivery, you may not be aware of what load balancing is, what it does, or whether it is even a necessary component. As to the last part of that statement, the answer is simple:  It is absolutely necessary. In today’s demanding online world, load balancing helps to ensure […]

Hardware Application Delivery Controllers are Dead

There’s a big migration going on – people are moving away from hardware. Oh, hardware has its place. Some companies still like something they can touch, installing and upgrading and surveilling and maintaining it throughout their local data center. But for many managers, moving their IT workloads to a virtualized cloud environment seems to be […]

Network Failover Can Save Your Business

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, they say. You should always have a plan B. Companies spend millions on their data connections, but even the best of them can fail. And what happens when you don’t have adequate backup systems in place? Well, take a look at our survey of outages in 2018 […]

Network Availability is the Name of the Game

Your network is everything. At least it seems that way. You can offer the most wonderful services in the world, but if your customer can’t access them, you’re dead in the water. Let’s face it. Most businesses suffer when the internet goes down, or when critical network services are not available. You’ve probably experienced the […]

What is an Application Delivery Controller?

Just when you think you have a good handle on the key technologies on the market, they come up with something new. If you’ve been told that you need to look at putting in an application delivery controller (ADC), read on. Glorified Load Balancer? To get to the heart of the matter, we need to […]