Sunday, January 10, 2021

Network predictions 2021: Cisco's Scott Harrell

 by Scott Harrell, SVP and GM, Intent-Based Networking Group at Cisco

Connected Workplaces for the Return to Work

In 2021, workers will increasingly return to the workplace, but it will be very different for everyone, depending on city, region or country policies, among other factors. For those workers who will return to the office full time, new networking standards, procedures, and space reconfiguration will need to be in place to create a safe work environment. 

Reconfiguring the workplace will be essential to adapt to new health safeguards and new working styles. Monitoring space usage and density can help limit the number of people inside the office and adhere to good safety practices while maximizing in-person productivity and regaining office camaraderie. 

In 2021 and beyond, the office will need to be utilized for moments that matter. It’s likely that video conferencing will replace in-person, group conference room meetings. To ensure higher efficiency, video to every device and desktop, remote or in person, will require rethinking Wi-Fi coverage and capacity. 

Next Gen Wireless Will Enable Business Processes to be Reinvented 

5G and Wi-Fi 6 are being deployed across the globe. History has shown every new generation of wireless drives new use cases and rapid innovation. The combination of 5G and Wi-Fi 6 will provide fast, low-latency connections anywhere, with no need for manual network selection or authentication. This foundation becomes an accelerant for the deployment of other next generation technologies and will quicken disruptions across industries. 

In 2020, IT teams proved they can move amazingly fast as they restructured their infrastructure to facilitate moving workers to a home office. In 2021, they will look to apply the same speed to deploy next generation wirelessly ubiquitously across their offices. Video communications will be a primary driver of Wi-Fi 6 deployments as organizations look to enable video to every desktop to mimic the rich video-powered meeting style employees have gotten used to from home. Additionally, the increased speed, capacity, security, and availability enabled by 5G and Wi-Fi 6 will create a richer platform for innovation, and we’ll see entirely new business models start to develop by leveraging these capabilities.

Smart Buildings to Improve Energy Efficiency and Safety 

In the coming years, the U.S. – along with other world governments – will demand and promote smarter, safer, and more energy-efficient buildings for both new construction and existing structures. Next year, we expect companies to add more sensors and IoT devices to current networks to not only improve energy efficiency and safety within buildings, but to provide more connectivity. 

With the addition of new devices and sensors comes increased Wi-Fi congestion and interference within the smart building systems. The availability of more spectrum with Wi-Fi 6e will help IT adapt to the increases in device density and streaming applications, with private 5G filling in the spaces where Wi-Fi is impractical. 

Unmanaged Devices Will Increasingly Be Used for Cyberattacks

In 2020, as many as 20.4 billion IoT devices came online. As IoT devices continue to grow, we can expect that they will increasingly be used for cyberattacks. In 2019 alone, the number of cyberattacks on IoT devices surged by more than 300%.

Industrial IoT and OT systems need additional protection to keep critical infrastructure running even while under attack. To prevent attacks from spreading, industries will use end-point analytics to identify IoT and other endpoints and add them to security groups using intelligent segmentation to automatically quarantine devices when unusual behavior is detected.

Automated and Secure Interconnections

While new applications will be primarily built as cloud-native, the business case often does not justify re-platforming existing applications. Therefore, a hybrid environment will exist for the foreseeable future. Network and data center automation will be key in 2021 as businesses need to provision infrastructure and run a continuous development pipeline to orchestrate multiple public cloud and hybrid environments. Infrastructure teams want to retain control over the IT environment and choose which APIs they expose to development teams. The goal in 2021 will be to build an automated and secure interconnect between on-premises and cloud data centers for ease of provisioning and monitoring at scale in a hybrid environment.

Accelerating Day2 Operations

As more IoT devices, cloud services, hybrid workstyles, and personal devices become the norm in the workplace, IT must be able to manage the increasing complexity even as expectations for uptime and availability grow in parallel. Therefore, in 2021 we can expect the need for advanced network analytics will continue to accelerate but also begin to be utilized by more and more teams within IT. AIOps teams will drive the rapid rise in the utilization of these tools within and across NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps teams. These tools will enable the effective upskilling of first and second-line support, empower end users with increased visibility and self-remediation capabilities, and provide disparate teams with shared perspectives and common sources of truth. 

Common sources of truth can be exceptionally powerful. To enable this, sharing data and linking automation workflows across systems will become increasingly common. This will enable rapid resolution of issues across teams. The ability to link the automation layer with the analytics layer will enable IT to begin to move increasingly in machine time versus human time. 

Security has been and will continue to be a key driver for the transition to machine time. Detected threats need to be acted on rapidly and pervasively across the infrastructure. Since attackers are already leveraging large scale automation to attack businesses, IT must increasingly do the same in their response, bridging detection via SecOps with automation via NetOps to counteract the range of constantly evolving threats. For example, linking identity services and management resources with security detection tools creates dynamic access control and segmentation policies that limit fast-spreading malware as the systems detect and respond in real time — all without human intervention. 

These changes will of course benefit the line of business, the workforce, and customers. But they will also provide welcome help to the overstretched and under-appreciated professionals staffing help desks and maintaining critical infrastructure across the world.

Acacia calls off merger with Cisco


Acacia Communications terminated its merger agreement with Cisco Systems, Inc., effective immediately. 

The company said it was not able to obtain approval from the Chinese government’s State Administration for Market Regulation within the timeframe contemplated by the merger agreement.

Acacia also advised that Cisco may dispute Acacia’s right to have terminated the merger agreement. 

http://ir.acacia-inc.com/news-releases/news-release-details/acacia-communications-terminates-merger-agreement

Cisco to acquire Acacia for Coherent Optics

Cisco agreed to acquire Acacia Communications for $70.00 per share in cash, or for approximately $2.6 billion on a fully diluted basis, net of cash and marketable securities. The deal is expected to close during the second half of Cisco's FY2020. Acacia employees will join Cisco's Optical Systems and Optics business within the networking and security business under David Goeckeler.

Acacia, which is headquartered in Maynard, Massachusetts and is publicly traded ((NASDAQ: ACIA), develops, manufactures and sells high-speed coherent optical interconnect products, including digital signal processing / photonic integrated circuit modules, and transceivers.



http://ir.acacia-inc.com/static-files/3364e03b-6e70-4933-8c93-84b6fe4c74df

Nikhef and SURF activate 400G between Amsterdam and CERN

Nikhef and SURF activated their first 400G connection between Amsterdam and CERN in Switzerland, a distance of 1650 kilometres. This connection builds on the successful pilot project in the Randstad conurbation in 2020.

CERN plans to bring back the LHC particle accelerator slowly over the course of 2021, reaching full production status by 2022. The data generated by the LHC will then be distributed worldwide via Nikhef. 

https://www.surf.nl/en/news/new-400-gbit-dataline-tested-for-future-cern-link

Researchers in China test quantum communications

Researchers in China are testing Quantum key distribution (QKD) over a large-scale fibre network consisting of more than 700 fibre QKD links and two high-speed satellite-to-ground free-space QKD links.

The research is led by Jianwei Pan, Yuao Chen, Chengzhi Peng from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei.

An article on the topic is published in Nature.

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-world-quantum-network.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03093-8

Lenovo's Smart Glasses powered by Qualcomm

Lenovo will introduce a family of "ThinkReality A3" lightweight smart glasses designed for business applications.

The ThinkReality A3 tethers to a PC or select Motorola smartphones1 via a USB-C cable. The smart glasses are powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 Platform and can provide stereoscopic 1080p displays presenting the user with up to 5 virtual displays. An 8MP RGB camera provides 1080p video for remote expert use cases while the dual fish-eye cameras provide room-scale tracking.

“The A3 is a next generation augmented reality solution – light, powerful and versatile. The smart glasses are part of a comprehensive integrated digital solution from Lenovo that includes the advanced AR device, ThinkReality software, and Motorola mobile phones. Whether working in virtual spaces or supporting remote assistance, the ThinkReality A3 enhances workers’ abilities to do more wherever they are,” said Jon Pershke, Lenovo Vice President of Strategy and Emerging Business, Intelligent Device Group.


MaxLinear selected for Wi-Fi 6E test bed

Wi-Fi Alliance has selected the MaxLinear WAV664 as an official Wi-Fi 6E test bed device. 

The WAV664 delivers speeds up to 4.8Gbps in the 6GHz band enabling routers and gateways to deliver multi-gigabit Wi-Fi speeds and provide higher-quality user experiences for applications in Ultra HD, 4k and 8k video streaming especially in dense environments. In addition, the WAV664 SoC supports up to 256 clients simultaneously and optimizes transmission on each device for enhanced total network efficiency allowing access points to meet the accelerating demand for high bandwidth and low latency.

Wi-Fi 6E is a new certification from Wi-Fi Alliance for Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 devices that support the new 6GHz spectrum. Wi-Fi 6E certification enables worldwide interoperability of Wi-Fi 6E devices. The 6GHz band adds 1.2GHz of spectrum, a threefold increase in capacity over combined spectrum available in 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. It enables support of up to seven contiguous 160MHz channels for bandwidth-intensive applications. Wi-Fi 6E enables better user experience with reduced latency for gaming, video conferencing and time sensitive applications while improving the aggregate network performance.

“As the unencumbered 6GHz spectrum becomes available, MaxLinear is proud to be an ecosystem enabler of this new Wi-Fi technology,” said Doron Tal, General Manager of Broadband Access at MaxLinear. “As part of the WAV600 series of products, the WAV664 is the next advanced building block that enables the full potential of high data rates and low latency our customers need to extend their solutions into new applications.”

RIP: Narinder Kapany, father of fiber optics

Dr. Narinder Singh Kapany, who is credited with introducing the term "fiber optics" in a 1960 article in Scientific American, died on Thursday, December 3, at age 94.

Over a long career, Kapany earned over 120 patents instrumental in fiber-optics communications, lasers, biomedical instrumentation, solar energy, and pollution monitoring. He was a Regents Professor at UC Santa Cruz from 1977 to 1983. In 2008, he was honored with the UC Santa Cruz Foundation’s Fiat Lux Award in recognition of his outstanding achievement, dedication, and service in support of the university’s programs and goals.

Kapany founded Optics Technology Inc., taking it public in 1967, as well as Kaptron, which was later acquired by AMP Inc.

https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/12/narinder-kapany-in-memoriam.html

http://www.sikhfoundation.org/dr-narinder-s-kapany-120320/