The working definition of a Network Operations Center (NOC) varies with each customer we talk with; however, the one point which remains unified is that the NOC should be the main point of visibility for key functions that combine to provide business services. The level at which a NOC ‘product’ is interactive depends on individual customer goals and requirements. Major equipment vendors trying to increase revenue are delving into management and visibility solutions with acquisitions and mergers,...

The Growing Impact of Social Networking Trends on Lawful Interception Lawful Interception (LI) is the legal process by which a communications network operator or Service Provider (SP) gives authorized officials access to the communications of individuals or organizations. With security threats mushrooming in new directions, LI is more than ever a priority and major focus of Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs). Regulations such as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), mandate...

There are many famous debates in history: dogs vs cats, vanilla vs chocolate & Coke vs Pepsi just to name a few. In the IT world, one of the more common debates is “single platform vs point solution”. That is, when it comes to the best way to monitor and manage a network, is it better to have a single management platform that can do multiple things, or would it be better to have an array of tools that are each specialized for a job? The choice can be thought of as being between Multitaskers ...

Viavi Solutions Launches GigaStor Software Edition for Virtual and Cloud Environments Solution Delivers Fast and Accurate Troubleshooting and Assurance in Next Generation Network Architecture (NASDAQ: VIAV) Viavi Solutions Inc. (“Viavi”) today announced it is expanding its portfolio of software-defined network test and monitoring solutions with the new GigaStor Software Edition to manage performance and user experience in virtual and cloud environments. The new software configurations, which Via...

For high school students, the short break in between classes is no relaxing matter. They have only a few minutes to get from one classroom to the next. If a student needs to pick up their books for the next class and must stop at their locker, this makes the trip even more challenging. Those few minutes in between classes can get hectic with hundreds of students flooding the hallways sharing the common goal of reaching their next destination on time. Most students are even unaware of how much ti...

One of the major issues that IT organizations have with any form of external cloud computing is that they don’t have much visibility into what is occurring within any of those environments. To help address that specific issue, Ixia created its Net Tool Optimizer, which makes use of virtual and physical taps to provide visibility into cloud computing environments. Now via the latest upgrade to that software, Ixia is providing support for both virtual and physical networks while doubling the numbe...

Remember the “good old days” when everyone that worked got in their car and drove to a big office building every day? And any application that a user needed was housed completely within the walls of the corporate datacenter? And partners / customers had to dial a phone to get a price or place an order? Well, if you are as old as I am, you may remember those days – but for the vast majority you reading this, you may think of what I just described as being about as common as a black and white TV. ...

The production department in any company typically runs hand in hand with the company’s overall success. If the manufactures cannot produce goods fast enough then the company’s customer satisfaction will plummet if demand is not met in a timely fashion. The speed in which these manufacturers can produce a product relies heavily on their time management skills. If a manufacturer is not efficient in his or her time management then they will simply fall behind schedule. Emerging technologies has pr...

Flexible, Fail-Safe Inline Security Boosts Agility, Availability, and Resilience While Reducing Network Costs As networks deliver more services and carry ever-higher volumes of multiprotocol traffic, data rates continue to soar. Voice, data, and streaming video now travel on one wire, raising security and compliance issues. Today’s intense threat landscape demands multiple proactive security systems throughout the network for a strong, layered security posture. These proactive devices include fi...

Oh. My. God. This time it IS the network! How to prevent - or recover from - a network disaster Join Jason Farrer, Sales Engineer with Infosim® Inc. for a Webinar and Live Demo on “How to prevent – or recover from – a network disaster”.   This Webinar will provide insight into: Why is it important to provide for a network disaster? How to deal with network disaster scenarios [Live Demo] How to prevent network corruption & enhance network security Watch Now! A recording of this...

Much like monitoring the heath of your body, monitoring the health of your IT systems can get complicated. There are potentially hundreds of data points that you could monitor, but I am often asked by customers to help them decide what they should monitor. This is mostly due to there being so many available KPI options that can be implemented. However, once you begin to monitor a particular KPI, then to some degree you are implicitly stating that this KPI must be important (since I am monitoring...

Bell Canada claims it is the first in North America to roll out commercial tri-band LTE Advanced (LTE-A) network technology, giving customers in Toronto, Hamilton, Oakville and Halifax access to mobile data downlink speeds up to a theoretical maximum 290Mbps from 21 August 2015, when the new Samsung Galaxy S6 edge+ and Galaxy Note5 smartphones become available. Expected average mobile data speeds are 12Mbps to 87Mbps. Bell will expand its new tri-band 290Mbps LTE-A network – based on 700MHz, 210...

Hospital examination rooms, the ER and the various operating rooms are always filled with patients looking to recover from their ailments or diseases, recovering all the way to full health. Hospitals and their employees provide the place and care for these patients to become full operational people. The need to go to several different areas of the hospital facility throughout the day, to get examined or x-rays performed, is necessary in order to heal the ailments. Most of these patients, however...

Blind spots are a long-established threat to virtual data centers. They are inherent to virtual machine (VM) usage and technology due to the nature of VMs, lack of visibility for inter- and intra-VM data monitoring, the typical practices around the use of VM’s, and the use of multiple hypervisors in enterprise environments. Virtual machines by their nature hide inter- and intra-VM traffic. This is because the traffic stays within in a very small geographic area. As I mentioned in a previous blog...

Release 5.3.2 includes improved 'AUTO' configuration options for Layer-3 traffic and Wifi-Capacity plugin. Some initial HotSpot 2.0-R2 support. Improved 802.11 AC stability and features. Do better job of cleaning up stuck NFS mounts. Support 4.0.4 kernel and Fedora-21 to support the latest hardware and OS features. This release provides Linux 4.0 kernel support, HotSpot 2.0-r2 authentication, and improves 802.11AC support. Release 5.3.2 (July 31, 2015) New Features & Improvements Layer-3: Su...

Whether it is the middle of the day, or the middle of the night nobody who is in charge of a network wants to get "that call". There is a major problem and the network is down. It usually starts with one or two complaints “hey, I can’t open my email” or “something is wrong with my web browser” but those few complaints suddenly turn into many and you suddenly you know there is a real problem. What you may not know, is what to do next. In this blog post, I will examine some basic troubleshooting s...

Delivers industry’s first visibility solution that includes stateful SSL decryption to improve application performance and security forensics Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA), a leading provider of application performance and security resilience solutions, announced it has extended its Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) Processor™ to include stateful, bi-directional SSL decryption capability for application monitoring and security analytics tools. Stateful SSL decryption provides complete session info...

Canada’s fourth largest cellular operator by subscribers Wind Mobile has won approval from the telecoms ministry Industry Canada to transfer its unused AWS (1700MHz/2100MHz) spectrum licences in the Prairie provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan to the two regions’ respective incumbent telcos Manitoba Telecom Services (MTS Allstream) and SaskTel, which will each add the frequencies to their existing 4G LTE bandwidth. SaskTel CEO Ron Styles said in a press release: ‘Our 4G LTE network in the nine...

Network discovery is the process of identifying devices attached to a network. It establishes the current state and health of your IT infrastructure. It’s essential for every business due to the fact that without the visibility into your entire environment you can’t successfully accomplish even the basics of network management tasks. When looking into why Network Discovery is critical to IT success there are three key factors to take into consideration. 1. Discovering the Current State & Hea...

One of the most fundamental best practices of any IT organization is to have a backup strategy and system in place for critical systems and devices. This is clearly needed for any disaster recovery situation and most IT departments have definitive plans and even practiced methodologies set in place for such an occurrence. However what many IT pros don’t always consider is how useful it is to have backups for reasons other than DR and the fact that for most network devices (and especially ro...