Blog

Whether you’ve been in the IT, Network Monitoring, or Network Security industries for a short period or for a long period, you’ve probably been asked, “to SPAN or not to SPAN?" Today’s your lucky day because you will learn how to best answer this question both for yourself and for the next time a colleague or prospect asks you.

Improving the Internet: A Call to Action I took a seminar taught by a retired U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major with a PhD in Organizational Psychology.

When the founders of Gigamon first described their, as they called it, Data Access Switch, a lot of observers (including myself) thought it was a clever idea. We also thought it would be strictly a niche use case, likely to be absorbed into the incumbent vendors’ existing switch/routing product lines.

Reinventing the Internet is a Silly Idea The Internet carries with it many problems, and over the decades, a large number of people have discussed reinventing the Internet. Some of these efforts have had a significant impact on the networking world. For example, IPv6 was created to solve the problem with the growth in Internet-connected computers and other devices, as we were going to run out of IPv4 addresses. IPv6 is happening, but at a much slower pace than its proponents intende...

A Contrary View: The internet (ARPANET) was designed to be secure Every couple of years, the media is full of articles, conference discussions, and blog posts about reinventing the internet. There are some valid reasons for these conversations. However, the one that I hear often is the one that offers the vaguest explanation: “The internet wasn’t designed for today’s scale”, meaning that the internet, or more precisely, its predecessor ARPANET wasn’t designed for security.

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny I don’t mean that I sent one, I mean one that I received. In the 1970s, I worked for Honeywell Information Systems in technical marketing for the Multics operating system. Some of you may have heard about the system or studied it in college. It was a collaboration among AT&T Bell Laboratories, GE’s computer business (subsequently acquired by Honeywell) and MIT, with funding from ARPA (later renamed DARPA), to build a “C...

One of the healthy things about the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) movement has been that WAN and LAN network engineers are finding common ground.

When the legendary Admiral Grace Hopper would give a talk, she often handed out pieces of wire 11.8” in length, and educate her audience about the amount of time it took for electrons to traverse the length of the wire: 1/1,000,000,000 of a second, or, to round off a bit, electrons travel about one foot every nanosecond. In other words, it’s the same as the speed of light through free space.

Back on October 6 2016, one of my colleagues at Niagara wrote a post about the five reasons a Network TAP is better than a SPAN port. There is at least one other good reason. To explain it, I’ll start with a quote from a former CTO-tur...