REI is a very well-known company in the outdoor gear space. They have 153 stores all over the world and are a respected leader in retail. They’re also a trailblazer in adoption of SD-WAN, as their recent plan to roll out Viptela SD-WAN appliances to their stores demonstrated. In a presentation for FutureWAN 18, Adam Burton, Rich Russell, and Mayra Guia detailed their reasons for moving to SD-WAN to increase stability and ease of use, standardize on protocols, and gain visibility and reporting into their wide network of retail stores.
SD-WAN: Steering Apps In The Right Direction
Do your SaaS-based applications currently get steered in the most optimal way possible? If they do, is this a time consuming and manual effort? Or is there currently an automation expert who is crafting all of the components together to optimally direct the traffic? Chances are that the answer to these previous questions is “NO”. And if your answer is “YES” then are you already utilizing SD-WAN? If the answer is again “NO” then I encourage you to read on.
Moving To The Cloud – Network Nightmare or Dream?
It’s not exactly news that enterprise businesses are moving workloads to the cloud; pretty much any analyst firm you poke will agree that cloud adoption will keep increasing in 2018, whether as IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service) or Saas (Software As A Service), and maybe even a little PaaS (Platform As A Service) . While the benefits and risks of the cloud itself are fairly well established at this point, enterprises are still struggling to adjust to the new demands being made of the WAN (Wide Area Network). This post examines some of the challenges introduced by IaaS and SaaS, and looks at ways to improve the user experience, both during service migration and after the workload is fully moved to the cloud.
SD-WAN: When the Solution Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts
This is post 3 of 9 in the series “FutureWAN 18 Tech Talks” Sometimes the combination of single parts create together something that is greater and enables us to reach a breaking point. A moment of true gestalt. Imagine if there were a self driving electric car waiting for you on every corner. At this […]
Spectre, Meltdown, and Flexible Scaleout
The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks illustrate the problematic nature of modern computing systems. While the earlier Rowhammer attack could read or attack one process running in a virtual environment from another process running on the same processor, the Meltdown and Spectre attacks are of a completely different class, enabling a process to read large amounts of information from another process’ memory space. This is because inside each hosts, CPU makers have embraced a scale up approach. But what would happen with a more scale out approach to the architecture?
As SD-WAN Enters Mainstream, Security Features Transform the WAN
As the features of SD-WAN mature, a new wave of organizations are looking to implement SD-WAN technology. Organizations are finding the security capabilities of SD-WAN incorporated with features likes transport independence, intelligent traffic steering, and built-in redundancy are too compelling to ignore for their next WAN refresh.
SD-WAN as a Service: Meeting Businesses at the Business Level
Do enterprise organizations care what they’re plugging into so long as they get secure, reliable, fast, and cheap public WAN connectivity? In most cases, I don’t think they do. Whether it’s traditional MPLS terminating right at the branch or the latest SD-WAN device, what’s important isn’t the type of technology, but the business requirements the technology meets.
Congruity360: A Confluence of Services
In this post, we look at how Congruity360 manages to establish themselves as a new company in the enterprise IT landscape by leveraging an impressive legacy of managed service offerings.
Congruity360 Opens a Historic Data Center
Congruity360 takes reusing legacy infrastructure very serious, building their new Fall River, MA data center from a historical cotton mill in the city. The granite structure provided an ideal place to build their state of the art facility. We were treated to a tour of the facility at its grand opening, and spoke to the mayor of Fall River, Jasiel Correia II, about what it means to the city.
The Great Congruity360 Data Migration
In our first post, I gave an overview of Congruity360’s corporate history and portfolio. The company has an impressive suite of managed services for organizations to leverage, providing vital business needs with a minimum of IT hassle. At Storage Field Day last week, the company zeroed in on one particular offering, one that’s increasingly relevant to modern enterprises: data migration.