Big data is big business and one of the fastest growing areas of the ICT market. But why should you care about the network when you are planning you big data application deployments? As long as you have the right connectivity and ‘enough’ bandwidth then what more is there to consider? Well, quite a lot as it turns out.

Last week I was helping out at the Juniper Networks booth at VMWorld in Barcelona. It's the first time I've attended the event. It's big! I heard some 7000 people attended. I believe it!

A Juniper Networks EMEA Customer Case Study

In my role as a Customer Reference Manager at Juniper Networks, over and above how ‘cool’ technology is, of most importance to me are the benefits technology brings to our customers.  By actively listening to our customers we get an even deeper understanding of organisations’ goals and drivers, and see the role of technology in enabling them to meet objectives - often exceeding their original expectations.

One company I’ve had the pleasure of working with recently is TMX Atrium. TMX Atrium provides low latency connectivity to the financial services community across Europe and North America. This connectivity and access to over 300 data sources, enables their customers to deal and interact during trading hours. Secure, high-speed connectivity is at the heart of their business. Without it, they simply wouldn’t exist. If a packet is dropped across the network, then a client loses a trade and the consequences are clear; they are at risk of losing substantial amounts of money.

Traditional data center networks cast shadows in which security appliances must operate. Modern data centers don't just need new architectures to increase performance, they need them to increase the ability to apply and manage security services.

Ok, that’s a very flippant title I grant you, but it came to me after reading some research from Freeform Dynamics¹ about the perceptions of cloud security and the impact on an enteprises’ security posture as a result of the adoption of a cloud based IT service model.

This article will describe how a QFabric deal in Belgium by Securelink was secured. You will see who was the competition and what we think where the weaknesses and strengths of them.

Last week Juniper was the lead sponsor at Cloud Net, London, co-hosted by the Open Network Foundation. When it came to the role of SDN and OpenFlow, there was some lively debate. Here are my takeways, what were yours?

.An old and wise sales man once said to me that it is much easier to sell things that people can count. For many years I pondered on this and recently I realised that it actually means that people understand the need for things they can count. For example, if you need more storage you buy some more disks, if your computing is slowing buy more and bigger servers. The contribution of the network is basically limited to what you need to plug your servers into and so does not always equate to more equipment.

Neil Pound Pound argues that innovation is as much the province of users as it is of engineers and technologists. He then wonders why the UK public sector is not more adventurous in setting visionary goals to force the pace of innovation in the IT industry enabling more creative delivery of some public services.