

Network Break
Packet Pushers
Network Break keeps you informed with fast, focused analysis of IT news, products, tech trends, and business outcomes. Blending sharp commentary with a touch of humor, hosts Drew Conry-Murray & Johna Till Johnson sift through the weekly landslide of press announcements, product launches, financial reports, and marketing decks to find the stories worth talking about. You come away with the information and context to make smart decisions in your organization and career … all in the span of a (longish) coffee break.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Oct 18, 2021 • 56min
Network Break 355: Azure Brags About DDoS Protection; Marvell Hitches Ride With Dent Network OS
Today on the Network Break, we discuss Marvell's choice of the Dent network OS for its Prestera silicon, Microsoft shares details about how its Azure cloud service thwarted a 2.4Tbps DDoS attack, a researcher shares details on snooping data from a copper patch lead, and other tech tidbits.

Oct 12, 2021 • 1h 6min
Network Break 354: VMworld’s Constipation, Facebook Footgun, Marvell 5nm DPUs
This week on Network Break, VMware disgorges a slew of announcements at VMworld 2021, Facebook shoots itself in the foot with BGP and DNS bullets, Marvell announces new silicon for Data Processing Units (DPUs), and more tech news analysis.

Oct 4, 2021 • 54min
Network Break 353: New Juniper Chassis Tops 400G; Akamai Spends Big Money On Microsegmentation
This week's Network Break talks about a new data center chassis from Juniper, why Akamai spent $600 million to buy security company Guardicore, what happened to Zoom's big acquisition of a contact center company, and more tech news.

Sep 27, 2021 • 49min
Network Break 352: Nokia Announces 800G Routing Silicon; Pica8 Enticingly Prices Its Campus Controller, Switches
This week's Network Break podcast discusses Nokia's new beefed-up routing silicon, how Pica8 is pursuing campus switching with a controller/switch pricing bundle, and the latest critical security patches from Cisco. We also look at the latest ransomware attacks against US agricultural companies, a MacOS bug, and more tech news.

Sep 20, 2021 • 53min
Network Break 351: Juniper’s Wired Campus Fabric Challenges Cisco; More Azure Holes Revealed
Today's Network Break podcast discusses Juniper's new wired campus effort and how it leverages Mist Cloud for to help automate its campus fabric, a new set of Azure vulnerabilities, robust SD-WAN growth with the biggest players reaping most of the rewards, free space optics for hard-to-wire regions, and more tech news.

Sep 13, 2021 • 31min
Network Break 350: Intel Pledges Billions For European Chip Factories; Facebook Reveals New Data Center Design
This week's Network Break podcast wonders what Intel wants in return for a multi-year, multi-billion pledge to build European chip factories, marvels at Facebook's newly revealed data center designs, analyzes Comcast's Masergy acquisition, and more.

Sep 7, 2021 • 32min
Network Break 349: T-Mobile Fails To Protect Millions Of Customer Records; Ciena Buys Vyatta Router
Today's Network Break podcast opines on why Ciena acquired the Vyatta router from AT&T (and why AT&T wanted to sell), how T-Mobile failed current and former customers via a breach that exposed sensitive details on millions of people, financial results from HPE and Dell Technologies, and more.

Aug 30, 2021 • 54min
Network Break 348: Ransomware Bedevils Cyber Insurance; TSMC To Raise Chip Prices
This week's Network Break examines how ransomware has insurers rethinking premiums and coverage limits, discusses the pros and cons of ISPs sharing flow records with security companies, digs into Arista's efforts to tackle the router market, pontificates on TSMC chip price hikes, and more tech news analysis.

Aug 23, 2021 • 55min
Network Break 347: Cisco Acquires Container App Monitor; Intel Unwraps Mount Evans IPU
It's the Network Break! This week we analyze Cisco's $500 million acquisition of a container-based and serverless application monitor, Intel's announcement of Mount Evans, an Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) for network and storage offload, and more tech news. Guest analyst Johna Till Johnson, CEO and founder of Nemertes Research, joins Greg Ferro.

Aug 16, 2021 • 43min
Network Break 346: Extreme Gets SDWAN, Huawei Struggles and SpaceX Swarms
The world of virtual donuts is supply constrained. Extreme Networks finally gets SDWAN buying Ipanema from Infovista at a bargain price. Research firms that does the numbers Dell'oro pitches that Education and Government markets will be spending big on WiFi6E - we aren't so sure that campus spending will be big just some spending but Dell'oro told us that government economic stimulus is the driver. Most will focus on distributed work.
Huawei posted 29% revenue reduction as the trade sanctions impact their overall business. A reminder that political solutions are slow if you have to make plans. And in space networking, SpaceX acquires pico-satellite company Swarm for IOT networking.