Why training is more important than it has ever been.

What has networking in common with fashion? Answer, it moves in cycles. One year flares are in and you are looking good, and the next you find yourself behind the trend and struggling to keep up. In the early 80’s, the approach to networking solutions was based around a ‘centralised’ model. Remember IBM green machines: dumb terminals, 64k floppy disc drives? The ‘intelligence’ and ‘data resources’ of the network were mainframe centric, a centralised deployment. Since then we have been on a long and inexorable journey towards a ‘de-centralised’ model. Where intelligence, functionality and data resources have been increasingly pushed to the edge of the network and peripheral devices: high powered laptops, notebooks, PDAs, mobile phones etc. So what? I hear you say. Well there is a new word in town and it will have major implications, if not already. Move over ‘convergence’ and make way for ‘consolidation’. Due to advancements in data centre technology and increasing government legislation requiring companies to manage and secure all data for periods up to 5 years, consolidation of data resources in a central secure environment will be an ever increasing priority for most companies. What’s the point? Point is, as we consolidate data, what becomes more important? The NETWORK. The network is the enabler. Data centre and networking technologies are becoming interdependent. This is reflected in the fact that we see a lot of people attending Cisco courses who are primarily from a desktop background!! One last thought, Google are launching their own Notebook. It has no hardrives, no application support. It is just a browser that allows you to access applications and data that you have handed over to the Google cloud. Is this the return of the dumb terminal? Are we coming full cycle? Are flares back in fashion?

The internet will soon be running out of IP addresses, which means that we inevitably will have to move to IPv6 addresses very soon. There are supposedly 91 million addresses remaining, which might seem like a lot, but considering the number of devices coming online each day, these addresses will only suffice for around a month or two. After that, no new devices will be able to connect to the internet.
IPv6 “should” take over sometime in 2011.
A few popular services namely Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Akami have decided to test out IPv6 on the 8th of June this year along with the Internet Society, an organization which handles internet standards. The exercise is being done to eliminate any issues that might crop up during the worldwide transition to IPv6. IPv6 currently has provision for about four billion IPs. Moving to IPv6 will allow four billion times that number. Google has already been running an IPv6 server (http://ipv6.google.com) since 2008. During the test, sites such as Google and Youtube.com will run on a separate IPv6 server.
If you want to see if your device or system is IPv6 ready, visit http://www.test-ipv6.com