The world of IT cabling has changed dramatically over the years from the early vendor specific cabling methods to today’s Structured Cabling environments.  It used to be only copper, then came various varieties of fibre optic cables, and WiFi, wireless and laser and free-space optical connectivity among others.  Even copper as a structured cabling component […]

The network world is constantly changing.  Hardware developments bring developments in software, which in turn bring further advances in hardware and so-on.  Similarly, the complexity of networks has increased.  The core, distribution, access layers model is giving way to Spine and Leaf, and Software Defined Network Access (“SDNA”) is redefining the way we configure and […]

In two years or so, we can expect 400Gb fibre broadband speeds in the data centre and we hear that terabyte speeds have been achieved in lab tests. An apparently entirely unconnected statistic is that there will be over 6Billion new smartphone users worldwide in the next four years. Think about it though, more smartphone […]

Changing a network design is not something you do every day. It can cost time, money and a great deal of effort.  Often network managers shy away from a redesign until forced to do so.  Changing the network structure means changing your physical and logical equipment and configurations, your management procedures, your management metrics and […]

Like most jobs, that of a network engineer has good bits and bad bits.   They will differ slightly between that of an IT Support Engineer and that of a network engineer, but there are a few in common. Here are five things that all network engineers hate: Indecisive customers Design engineers particularly hate this one […]

Back in the day, before Windows, we had DOS, a basic command line interface.   We kicked-off our applications from the DOS command line, used tools to manage our computer environment, and became able, if not adept in changing things to make the computer run better. The came Windows.  Simply put, Windows is a graphical interface […]

Networks are the foundation of all things in IT.  According to one pundit, “If information is the lifeblood of an organisation, then the physical network is the veins and arteries through which it flows”. The concept is very simple.  Connect devices and route information between them. Today, network cabling methods are those of ethernet cabling, […]

Nowadays, the IT network and its performance is an essential component of the performance of the overall organisation.  If the organisation is providing network based services, network performance is critical to the success or otherwise of the organisation.  As a result, the choice and application of network tools to manage network performance and to detect […]

Within the realm of IT installation and configuration, WAN optimisation is rather an ambiguous terminology. Nonetheless, it provokes an impression of a process meant to attain cost-effectiveness in the delivery of data throughout an organisation. Even as every expert has a nuanced definition of the term; WAN optimisation revolves around the utilisation of hardware, software and creating strategies […]

Giant technological advancements create problems which need solving. For instance, computing technology is rapidly moving from mainframes to PCs and minicomputers creating a constriction in data movements between and within computers. In fact, the uncharted territory of cloud computing and virtualisation creates all manner of logjams on external and internal networks. Technologies companies want everything […]