Data Center Management Best Practices
The use of an integrated best practices approach to data center management involves efficient management of resources while still minimizing the costs of all the different interrelated competing factors that require attention. More ...
ISP Multihoming Explained
Multihoming is essentially a method whereby a company can connect to more than one ISP at the same time. The concept was born out of the need to protect Internet access in the event of either an ISP link failure or an ISP internal failure. More ...
Beginners Guide to Fiber Optic Bit Error Ratio (BER) Measurement
Bit error ratio (BER) measurement is the fundamental measurement of the quality of the fiber optic communication system. It measures the system's probability that transmitted bits will be correctly received as logic ones and zeros. More ...
The Secret of Maintaining Your Fiber Optic Network
During fiber optic network installation, maintenance, or restoration, it is also often necessary to identify a specific fiber without disrupting live service. This battery powered instrument looks like a long handheld bar and is called fiber identifier or live fiber identifier. More ...
Understanding the Basics of All-Optical Switching
All-optical switching is a process by which light in the form of digital communication signals is routed from one transmission channel to another without intermediate conversion to another format. More ...
How to Set up a Private Network
A private network is one which does not connect directly to the internet, but does allow you to connect to other computers that are on the same physical network. More ...
What Are Fiber Optic Attenuators?
A fiber optic attenuator, also called an optical attenuator, simulates the loss the would be caused by a long length of fiber. For a fiber optic receiver, too much light can overload it and degrade the bit error ratio. More ...
Data Center Networking
In recent years, companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have built massive data centers, each housing tens to hundreds of thousands of hosts, and concurrently supporting many distinct cloud applications. Each data center has its own data center network that interconnects its hosts and interconnects the data center with the Internet. More ...
Transparent Bridging and MAC Address Filtering
A bridge uses a database to send frames across network segments. The database is a list of nodes MAC addresses and their locations on the network. To send a frame between two segments a bridge reads a frame's destination MAC address and decides to either forward or filter. More ...
Network Broadcast Storms
When a switch receives a broadcast frame the switch floods the frame out all switch ports other than the port on which the frame was received. Because a layer 2 frame does not have a TTL (Time to live) field, a broadcast frame endlessly circulates through the Layer 2 topology. More ...
How In-Row Cooling Increases Data Center Efficiency
Increased data center densities enable operators to meet the demands of cloud and hyper-scale environments. As more power is consumed per rack, however, heat becomes a big problem. Most modern data centers have adopted some sort of aisle-containment solution to minimize the mixing of hot and cold air. More ...
Proxy Servers
With a proxy server, instead of connecting directly to a server that can fulfill a requested resource, such as a file or web page, the client directs the request to the proxy server, which evaluates the request and performs the required network transactions. More ...
Troubleshooting Your Optical Fiber Networks - Introduction to OTDR
In fiber optic networks, OTDR (Optical Time Domain Reflectometer) is an opto-electronic instrument used to characterize an optical fiber. An OTDR may be used for estimating the fiber's length and overall attenuation, including splice and mated-connector losses. It may also be used to locate faults, such as breaks. More ...
