Durham County goes Cisco for enterprise network ops and security proficiency

The government in Durham County, N.C., was spending hours and hours manually provisioning its network and keeping security policies current, so it decided two and a half years ago to upgrade for the sake of efficiency and security.Since then, the government’s IT staff of four has migrated its traditional point-to-point network to a more modern enterprise featuring the software-defined technologies of Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and DNA Center that support its 2,100 enterprise end users and online services for 315,000 county residents.  [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data center network ]
As a result, time spend on certain manual chores has plummeted, freeing up staff time for forward-looking projects.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story) READ MORE HERE…

Read more

SDNs and NFV are complementary and core components of modernized networks

The terms software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are often used interchangeably, which is incorrect.  In a sense, the two are tied together as companies start using NFV as part of their SDN plans but that doesn’t have to be the case.Enterprises could maintain their current network architecture and shift to NFV or they could roll out an SDN and never leverage the benefits of NFV, so it’s important to understand what each is and the benefits of both.[ For more on SDN see where SDN is going and learn the difference between SDN and NFV. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
What is software-defined Networking
SDNs are a fundamentally different way to think about networks.  Technically, SDNs can be defined as the separation of the management, control and data-forwarding planes of networks.  Many people, including technical individuals read that definition and say, “So what?”, but the separation of these planes has a profound impact on networks and enables things that have never been done before.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

Read more