Being hired as the resident IoT data scientist can come with a lot of pressure. Oftentimes the only one on the team with the unique ability to turn data into business intelligence, data scientists are responsible for making key IoT decisions, setting plans, ensuring execution and meeting deliverables. On top of this, there can be a number of stumbling blocks out of the gate that make it hard to reach goals. Being aware of these challenges not only helps put a data scientist on the shortest route to success, it makes it easier to identify where and when more help will be needed.

Here are some of the most challenging requirements data scientists face when starting an IoT project:

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Projects involving virtualization, cloud architectures, advanced networking and cutting-edge digital technologies are critical to pushing a company into the future. As a result, missteps can be costly. Take a good idea on paper, execute it poorly, and your desire to create value will end up squandering value.

Given the complexity of IT transformation projects, there are many ways to get them wrong. If you've ever been called upon to assist companies stuck in the middle of such projects (as has our team, many times) it’s easy enough to identify several sure-fire ways to derail them – and corresponding ways to keep them on track. Here are five:

1. Trivialize the effort required

Have you ever sat in a meeting and heard an executive dismiss the difficulty of a project? "That sounds easy!," he or she might say. Whether it’s a desire for the project to be completed, a lack of knowledge about the details, the planning fallacy or some other error, following that lead is a good way to set yourself up for failure.

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Forced to keep pace with rapidly emerging business requirements, networks are changing faster than ever. The business-facing side of networking is under continuous pressure to do more, in more places, faster. Challenging as it is, the network-to-business interaction is simpler than what is going on behind the scenes, as network professionals transform almost every area of their networks to meet new demands.

New technologies such as cloud, NFV and SDN are turning traditional networks into hybrid ones. In fact, Gartner predicts that cloud infrastructure services will grow 35.9 percent in 2018, and IDC predicts that SD-WAN adoption will grow at a 40.4 percent CAGR from 2017 to 2022. These numbers imply a great deal of change in networks, change that introduces significant risk of service disruption from minor – a few inconvenienced users – to major – significant outages visible to customers and executives. Reducing the risk during significant transitions is critical. That’s where network performance management and diagnostics (NPMD) products play a significant role.

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The edge is top-of-mind for many IT and OT professionals across a wide range of industries and sectors. This interest is driven by the need to use data more effectively to maintain operations, optimize performance and increase uptime.

Existing IT and OT infrastructures typically don’t collect, store and analyze data at the edge. They instead either send this data to the cloud or to enterprise-level computing systems for storage and analysis, the domain of IT personnel.

A better solution, specifically for applications where access to data needs to happen quickly, is to perform data collection, storage and analysis at the edge using technologies designed to perform these specific tasks. The benefits of this approach include reduced latency, improved data security and more efficient use of bandwidth.

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The first of the upcoming 5G network technologies won’t provide significant reliability gains over existing wireless, such as 4G LTE, according to a developer involved in 5G.

Additionally, the millisecond levels of latency that the new 5G wireless will attempt to offer—when some of it is commercially launched, possibly later this year—isn’t going to be enough of an advantage for a society that’s now completely data-driven and needs near-instant, microsecond connectivity.

“Ultra-reliability will be basically not there,” Ari Pouttu, professor for Dependable Wireless at the University of Oulu, told me during a visit to the university in Finland. 5G’s principal benefits over current wireless platforms are touted as latency reduction and improved reliability by marketers who are pitching the still-to-be-released technology.

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To get up and running on a self-service, big-data analytics platform efficiently, many data-center and network managers these days would likely think about using a cloud service. But not so fast – there is some debate about whether the public cloud is the way to go for certain big-data analytics.

For some big-data applications, the public cloud may be more expensive in the long run, and because of latency issues, slower than on-site private cloud solutions. In addition, having data storage reside on premises often makes sense due to regulatory and security considerations.

With all this in mind, Dell EMC has teamed up with BlueData, the provider of a container-based software platform for AI and big-data workloads, to offer Ready Solutions for Big Data, a big data as a service (BDaaS) package for on-premises data centers. The offering brings together Dell EMC servers, storage, networking and services along with BlueData software, all optimized for big-data analytics.

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Application and network engineers see the world differently. Unfortunately, these differences often result in resentment, with each party keeping score. Recently, application engineers have encroached on networking in a much bigger way. Sadly, if technical history repeats itself, we will revisit many of the long-ago problems again as application engineers rediscover the wisdom held by networking engineers.

There are many areas of network engineering and application engineering where there is no overlap or contention. However, the number of overlapping areas is increasing as the roles of network and application engineers expand and evolve.

Application engineers will try to do anything they can with code. I’ve spoken to many network engineers who struggle to support multi-cast. When I ask them why they are using multi-cast, they nearly always say, “the application engineers chose it, because it's in the Unix Network Programming book.” The Berkley Socket programming interface permits using multi-cast. The application engineers then provide lost packet recovery techniques to deliver files and real-time media using unicast and multicast. The Berkeley Socket does not easily support VLANs. Thus VLANs have always been the sole property of the network engineer. Linux kernel network programming capabilities in recent years become much more capable, allowing engineers to use Berkeley Packet Filters (BPF) and Openflow (vSwitch) along with the traditional IP Filters to get new layers of network programmability. Open Stack neutron plug-ins are providing dynamic endpoint reachability through APIs. The overlapping areas are increasing. The general programmability and “how-to” that is being exposed by public clouds is appealing to application engineers.

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This month marks the 20th anniversary of Nmap, the open-source network mapping tool that became the standard used by many IT professionals, but that can be a bit much if you only need to do general network maintenance and are intimidated by its command-line interface.

There are alternatives – not many – that range in technical sophistication from tools with GUIs that can ease you into performing the essentials of network maintenance to more advanced software that is similar to Nmap itself.

Like Nmap, all these network tools are free.

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Enterprises are investing in their networks at an accelerating rate. As legacy IT on-premises infrastructure gives way to hybrid cloud and virtualized environments, and an escalating data tsunami drives data center expansions, increasing investments of time and money are raising the stakes ever higher. Unfortunately, end users’ expectations for service are growing as well, piling additional demands onto network operators and engineers who are already wrestling with network migration challenges.

Yet despite the fact that the enterprise networking environment is rapidly changing, IT support teams are still using the same network performance metrics to monitor their networks and evaluate whether or not service delivery is up to par. The problem is that they’re using a one-dimensional tool to measure a subjective experience that tool was not designed to even understand, much less aid in troubleshooting.  It’s kind of like trying to tighten a screw with a hammer.

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Vapor IO, the edge computing specialist that builds mini data centers for deployment at locations such as cell phone towers, has secured Series C financing, which the company says will help accelerate the deployment of its Kinetic Edge Platform as a national network for edge colocation.

Vapor IO has been all about developing a model for a distributed network of edge colocation sites, with micro modular data centers in containers about the size of a shipping container. The company had been working with Crown Castle, the nation’s largest provider of shared wireless infrastructure, on an edge collaboration project under the name Project Volutus.

Vapor IO has now acquired the assets of Project Volutus from Crown Castle and will offer it under the brand name The Kinetic Edge. It uses both wired and wireless connections to create a low-latency network of its colocation sites, allowing cloud providers, wireless carriers and web-scale companies to deliver cloud-based edge computing applications via its data centers.

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Cisco has introduced its first Unified Compute System (UCS) server designed specifically to handle artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads. The Cisco UCS C480 ML is designed specifically for data scientists to perform AI and ML at every stage of the lifecycle.

It’s not like Cisco whipped up all kinds of special sauce for this server; it’s just a lot of very high-end components. The UCS C480 ML M5 rack server is a 4U device with the latest Intel Xeon processors and 8 Nvidia Tesla V100-32G GPUs with NVLink interconnects.

The top-of-the-line configuration features two Xeon processors, up to 128GB of DDR4 RAM, 24 SATA hard drives or SSDs, six NVMe SSD drives, and four x100G Virtual Interface Cards (VICs). The UCS C480 ML M5 is designed to work with Cisco's various servers and HyperFlex systems with GPUs.

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Some people love to use the expression “before it was cool”. In hindsight, it can be applied to almost anything that gains acclaim. According to this Reddit thread, for example, Facebook was already cool when it was still known simply as “The Facebook” way back in 2004. My point: the “before it was cool” expression is really about when something’s value or significance is recognized very early on, and this can certainly be applied to many of the technological advancements we see today. Connecting devices, or instrumenting machinery with some form of connectivity, to capture data and provide control, was a used in many industries, before the term ‘Internet of Things’ or ‘IoT’ became cool and all pervasive.

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Today, it seems like every business is migrating to the cloud. And it’s true – nearly three in four businesses are using cloud solutions to augment traditional networking practices, with no signs of slowing down. The cloud’s potential has captured the attention of business leaders across nearly every industry, thanks to its promise of speed, scale and control. In fact, nine out of ten companies rely on the cloud to accelerate digital transformation and drive business growth.

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There is tremendous interest from industrial enterprises to understand the nuances of the two most debated IoT data communications protocols: MQTT and LWM2M. MQTT and LWM2M are protocols that create a standard way to get device data to systems, platforms, applications, and other devices.

Let’s talk a little about each protocol and when it’s best used in an enterprise IoT deployment.

MQTT and when to use it

Message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) is an ISO standard which describes a publish/subscribe (pub/sub) messaging protocol. Nearly all IoT platforms support MQTT communication, making it the de facto standard for device-to-platform IoT communication.

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Ciena

In our final post in this 3-part series covering one hero’s journey on the road to streamlined enterprise networking operations, Ciena’s Chris Sweetapple describes how Our Hero embraces business Ethernet to shed complexity and simplify operations, creating a network that grows with the business.

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The OpenStack Foundation has announced the general availability of the 18th iteration of its cloud platform, called OpenStack Rocky. The major new functionalities to the platform are faster upgrades and enhanced support for bare metal infrastructure.

Bare-metal cloud is a term for cloud services that come with zero software. When you rent an instance on Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure, you get a virtualized environment that is run on a hypervisor and shared with another, unknown user. This often causes performance issues, since you never know what kind of neighbor you will get each time.

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The rise of the cloud settled the age-old debate about whether IT teams should choose an array of exceptional technologies from various providers, or a fully integrated stack of (mostly unexceptional) applications from a single vendor.

Thanks to cloud computing, you can have the very best applications—and the very best clouds—for the IT tasks at hand. And you don't have to deal with the headache of investing heavily in infrastructure and building it yourself.

Here's a quick look at five ways the cloud and related technologies enable your IT team to launch, integrate, scale, and secure the full spectrum of applications.

1. You can pick the best cloud for the job

While businesses may end up running most applications in a single cloud, there are lots of reasons to diversify and adopt a multi-cloud strategy. The major cloud infrastructure providers have individual strengths—and a well-planned multi-cloud strategy enables you to pick the cloud platform that offers the best combination of technical features, pricing, and performance for each application.  Some examples of workloads that may be better running on one hyper-scale cloud over another could be enterprise business applications, big data or high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

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Cloud has undoubtedly become a key component of successful business in recent years, especially when you consider the race to digitally transform. Across the globe, companies are moving their applications and services to the cloud and are consequently reaping the benefits of lower capex and opex as a result.

However, with this process, cloud migration is only a beginning for any organization’s digital transformation (DX) journey. If harnessed correctly, cloud is a pillar of innovation for DX, and can be a driving force for new business models and use cases that – even a few years ago – weren’t possible. No one knows this better than devops teams; these teams hold the line when it comes to continuous delivery and deployment, and it therefore stands to reason that devops play a crucial role in the digital transformation journey. In practice however, the decision makers in charge of cloud strategies are rarely those in the bowels of the ship.

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In the second post of this 3-part series we unravel one hero’s journey on the road to streamlined enterprise networking operations. Ciena’s Chris Sweetapple follows Our Hero’s adventures as he realizes the opportunities of high-bandwidth business Ethernet.

In episode 1 our hero, stuck in a tangle of outdated networking equipment, services and complexity, realizes that with business Ethernet as his WAN technology of choice, he can complement the existing network set-up and connect his branch offices, while handling massive volumes of traffic concurrently using high speed (up to 100G) high-performance Ethernet connectivity.

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High-quality, reliable network hardware and data center cabling are requirements for a high-performing technology infrastructure and for a successful IT team that helps drive more business. It’s the life cycle for your network.

However, in these days of shrinking budgets and rising demands, CIOs, IT professionals and buyers are being pressured to do more while reducing costs. How can this be done?

Having the right approach when it comes to network hardware and data-center cabling is a powerful way to enable your IT organization to do a lot more while optimizing your budget.

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Turning a list of names, addresses and related information into a Google map is a lot easier than you might think. The effort required depends, as you might imagine, on the information that you starting with. But if the format is fairly consistent, it’s relatively easy to massage the information into a form that can be uploaded into a format that works.

First, what you can expect

Once you’ve loaded a list of names and addresses into a Google map, you will be able view the location of each person and set up your map such that clicking on any of the map markers displays the information collected for that address.

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Cybercrime damage is projected to reach $6 trillion annually by 2021. That’s creating lots of demand for security protection—estimated at over $1 trillion cumulatively between 2017 and 2021. As a result, an estimated 1,200 vendors are competing to provide enterprise-class cybersecurity products, so how do you go about choosing which solution to use?

There’s no doubt, cyberthreats are real—according to the Online Trust Alliance (OTA), the number of cyber incidents targeting businesses almost doubled from 82,000 in 2016 to 159,700 in 2017, and due to non-reporting of many incidents, the actual number for 2017 could well have exceeded 360,000.

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Cisco’s announcement earlier this month that it will add the Viptela SD-WAN technology to the IOS XE software running the ISR/ASR routers will be a mixed blessing for enterprises.

On the one hand, it brings SD-WAN migration closer to Cisco customers. On the other hand, two preliminary indicators —  one-on-one conversations and Cisco’s refusal to participate in an SD-WAN test —  suggest enterprises should expect reduced throughput if they enable the SD-WAN capabilities on their routers.

Cisco’s easy migration to SD-WAN

By including the SD-WAN code with IOS XE, Cisco will provide a migration path for the more than one million ISR/ASR edge routers in the field. There’s been a lot of conversation as to whether or not SD-WAN is going to kill the router performance. Delivering SD-WAN code on the ISRs is Cisco’s answer: routers are here to stay but they’ll morph into SD-WAN appliances.

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Over the last few years, I have been sprawled in so many technologies that I have forgotten where my roots began in the world of data center. Therefore, I decided to delve deeper into what’s prevalent and headed straight to Ivan Pepelnjak's Ethernet VPN (EVPN) webinar hosted by Dinesh Dutt.

I knew of the distinguished Dinesh since he was the chief scientist at Cumulus Networks, and for me, he is a leader in this field. Before reading his book on EVPN, I decided to give Dinesh a call to exchange our views about the beginning of EVPN. We talked about the practicalities and limitations of the data center. Here is an excerpt from our discussion.

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Welcome to Agility City! Let me set the scene.

In the castle, the Wonderful Wizard orchestrates networks in beautiful and powerful ways. Point-to-point tunnel connections are heralded as “architectural wonders,” which decades ago were called bridges with disdain.

Meanwhile, The Wicked Witch of the West brews a primordial potion of complexity that is hidden behind curtains of automated provisioning. Packets of information are heavily laden with unnecessary information and double encryption.

It almost makes you want Dorothy Gale to appear and click her ruby slippers - “There's no place like home. There's no place like home.” If only we start talking about true networking and not orchestration of bridges.

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Every project management tool seeks to do the same instrumental thing: keep teams connected, on task and on deadline to get major initiatives done. But the market is getting pretty crowded, and for good reason — no platform seems to have gotten the right feel for what people need to see, and how that information should be displayed so that it’s both actionable/relevant, and contextualized.

That’s why monday.com is worth a shot. The platform is based off a simple, but powerful idea: that as humans, we like to feel like we’re contributing to part of a greater/effort good — an idea that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle as we focus on the details of getting stuff done. So projects are put onto a task board (think of it like a digital whiteboard), where everyone can have the same level of visibility into anyone else who’s contributing set of tasks. That transparency breaks down the silos between teams that cause communication errors and costly project mistakes — and it’s a beautiful, simple way to connect people to the processes that drive forward big business initiatives.

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One of the most basic things to understand in backup and recovery is the concept of backup levels and what they mean.

Without a proper understanding of what they are and how they work, companies can adopt bad practices that range from wasted bandwidth and storage to actually missing important data on their backups. Understanding these concepts is also crucial when selecting new data-protection products or services.

Full backup

A full backup contains all data in the entire system. A full backup of the C:\ drive in Windows contains every file on the C: drive. A full backup of a Windows system should contain a copy of every file on every drive on the machine or VM (e.g. C:\, D:\, F:\, etc.). The same goes for a full backup of a UNIX or Linux machine; it contains every file on every file system on the machine (e.g./, /home, /opt, etc.).

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