Network Computing

1. HP and Cisco Take Different Paths To SDN Friday, 3 February 2012, 4:00 pm
   News that Cisco Systems may release proprietary networking products implementing software-defined networking (SDN) technology, but not necessarily based on the emerging OpenFlow protocol, has executives at rival HP complaining about another Cisco vendor lock-in play. At a news event at HP Thursday, at which the company announced OpenFlow capability available for 16 HP networking product lines, exe. […]
2. Semantic Technology Key To Mastering Data Growth, Analysis Friday, 3 February 2012, 2:00 pm
   As big data stores continue to grow and require additional management, enterprises are faced with the task of managing their explosive data growth while also trying to find the best way to analyze that data. According to the recent InformationWeek “Database Discontent” report, a top item on IT departments’ 2012 to-do list is handling big data in a way that allows for change over time.
3. OASIS Targets Cloud Portability Thursday, 2 February 2012, 6:00 pm
   The Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee recently formed by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), the not-for-profit open standards consortium, along with several IT vendors and consumer groups, will be good for facilitating cloud portability, industry observers say. The goal of TOSCA is to enable deploy. […]
4. CommVault Simpana Adds Mobility, Backup Capabilities Thursday, 2 February 2012, 4:00 pm
   CommVault Systems has enhanced version 9 of its Simpana data management software, which it first announced in October 2010. Major new features in the software include OnePass, which will back up server data, archive it, and report on it simultaneously. The company said the process could take less than half the time of separate processes.
5. Why I Like Juniper’s QFabric (And A Mea Culpa) Thursday, 2 February 2012, 2:00 pm
   While I was visiting Juniper in early December, I got a chance to sit down with the QFabric folks to discuss some of issues with QFabric and what I saw as a proprietary—with all the badness that word implies—product set in search of a reason. While QFabric is proprietary because of how the components are interconnected, I came away with the impression that the overall design and capacity looks. […]
6. Cisco Expands 40, 100 GbE Switching Portfolios Thursday, 2 February 2012, 2:00 pm
   Cisco Systems is introducing new switches with 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) capabilities, which are the coming new standards for switching speeds on networks. The 40GbE capacity is now available on its Catalyst 6500 switching line for campus networks, while 100GbE is available on the Nexus 7000 line for data center and service provider networks. The company also announced two new fixed-config. […]
7. RightNow To Help Oracle Create Raving Fans Wednesday, 1 February 2012, 10:57 am
   Oracle plans to integrate RightNow’s customer experience software into its existing software portfolio to not just improve customer satisfaction, but turn consumers into advocates for a company’s brand. In an hour-long web cast on Tuesday, Oracle executives explained how RightNow tools used by approximately 2,000 companies on their web sites, in contact centers and through social media, will suppl. […]
8. Governments Missing Out On Virtualization Savings Tuesday, 31 January 2012, 7:34 pm
   Government agencies need to overcome funding uncertainties and other major barriers in order to realize savings from virtualizing their servers and desktops, according to a new study by MeriTalk. The report, “Virtualization Vacuum: The 2012 Government Virtualization Study,” surveyed government IT decision makers. One of the key findings is that 82% of federal and 77% of state and local IT professi. […]
9. Brocade ADX 12.4 Improves App Delivery Tuesday, 31 January 2012, 3:00 pm
   Brocade introduced a new application delivery controller that enables service providers to manage application delivery in a way that servers or endpoint devices no longer can. A key feature of the Brocade ADX 12.4 is what the company calls an OpenScript Engine, which enables enterprise service providers to build customized versions of network applications using the open-source Perl programming lan. […]
10. HP Storage Tech Day Tuesday, 31 January 2012, 2:45 pm
    Last week I joined a dozen or so fellow bloggers and storage industry gadflies for a storage field day at HP’s Fort Collins, Colo., facility. Much like the more ecumenical Gestalt IT Tech Field Days run by our own Stephen Foskett, HP Tech Days let vendors show off their shiny new products while the street-wise delegates asked tough questions and took no marketing speak for an answer.
11. Numara Acquisition Opens Up Midmarket To BMC SaaS Tuesday, 31 January 2012, 2:10 pm
    BMC Software, a developer of business service management (BSM) software with more than 15,000 customers, has acquired Numara Software, a provider of integrated IT management solutions for the midmarket, with over 13,000 customers, for an undisclosed sum.
12. Riverbed Virtualizes Cascade Tuesday, 31 January 2012, 2:00 pm
    As use of IT grows in enterprises, so, too, do demands on networks to deliver more capacity and speed and to be able to prioritize traffic. Video gets priority over a simple email, but a VoIP call gets priority over video if the video in question is something frivolous on YouTube. The need to manage the growth and increasing complexity of networks is driving demand for network performance manageme. […]
13. 5 Basic Switch Settings You Must Know Monday, 30 January 2012, 2:00 pm
    There are five configurations a network administrator should apply to a newly provisioned switch or router. Although application of these configurations may seem like common sense, 90% of devices I see are missing at least one of these settings, and about 75% are missing two or more. Use this checklist as an action item to verify your existing devices have these settings, at minimum, and integrate. […]
14. Prepare The Mobile Ship For Ludicrous Speed! Sunday, 29 January 2012, 5:30 pm
    Thinking back on the 1987 movie “Spaceballs,” I picture a comical Dark Helmet standing on the bridge of his ship. In my mind, he holds a smartphone and contemplates the latest buzz on mobile network speeds, fresh from the International Telecommunications Union. As he ponders the 100-Mbps data speeds soon to be delivered by his preferred carrier, he utters the order, “Prepare for ludicrous speed,”. […]
15. Virtualization, Cloud Having Little Impact On Databases Sunday, 29 January 2012, 4:00 pm
    Cloud computing has taken center stage during the last two years as the hot enterprise technology, but in the database realm, the public cloud and off-site hosted database services still represent too many unknown factors to truly have mass adoption. According to the co-author of the InformationWeek “State of Database Technology” report, the public cloud is so far having very little impact on ente. […]
16. How NetFlow Keeps Networks Running, People Alive Sunday, 29 January 2012, 1:51 pm
    In all the technical discussions about network routers, switches, throughput, packets and the alphabet soup of acronyms that apply, it may be easy to forget that network downtime can have life-or-death consequences. For two NetFlow users, the requirements for the network monitoring technology were less dire, but the results were still compelling.
17. Scale Computing: New Twists To Scale-Out Storage For The Mid-Market Friday, 27 January 2012, 8:30 pm
    Startup Scale Computing delivers scale-out, unified storage for the mid-market, meaning users can access SAN/NAS resources from the same, scalable pool of disk storage. Scale Computing is by no means alone in doing this, but the company goes beyond just delivering storage in a box to delivering a data center in a storage box. And that is very interesting.
18. Forecast: 10GbE To Be The Top-Selling Ethernet Switch By 2016 Friday, 27 January 2012, 5:07 pm
    Sales of 10-Gbit per second (Gbps) Ethernet switches are expected to reach $13 billion by 2016 and will constitute nearly half of a total $28 billion Ethernet switch market by then, a forecast from the research firm Dell’Oro Group states. And even as data center operators upgrade from 1-Gbit Ethernet switches to 10-Gbit Ethernet to handle exponentially larger volumes of network data traffic, sales. […]
19. VMware Simplifies, Automates Virtual/Cloud Management Friday, 27 January 2012, 3:30 pm
    VMware is expanding its management portfolio with vCenter Operations Management Suite by integrating with VMware vCenter Capacity IQ and VMware vCenter Configuration Manager for improved performance, capacity and configuration management. VMware revamped its virtualization management suite last October, adding the VMware vFabric Application Management and VMware IT Business Management tools. The n. […]
20. Enterasys Addresses Wired-Wireless Pain Thursday, 26 January 2012, 3:00 pm
    Network equipment vendor Enterasys is tackling the growing problem of managing wired and wireless devices with the latest addition to its suite of fabric network management technology, the OneFabric Edge Architecture. The combined wired-wireless management fabric relieves a number of network management headaches, especially in situations where the wired network is often managed by one vendor and t. […]
21. Sourcefire Uses Big Data Analytics To Stop Malware Wednesday, 25 January 2012, 8:15 pm
    Cyber security vendor Sourcefire’s latest product uses big data analytics methods to search data to discover patterns in malware attacks and intervene to stop them. The release of FireAMP comes the same week that Cisco Systems released its fourth-quarter 2011 Global Threat Report that details how pervasive the malware threat is to networks. Cisco reports that in the fourth quarter, enterprise user. […]
22. Alas, Poor Virtensys, I Knew Virtual I/O Horatio Wednesday, 25 January 2012, 3:00 pm
    I must admit I was one of those folks who was intrigued by the idea of I/O virtualization. I led sessions at conferences exploring the various ways one could connect servers and peripherals to each other. The very idea that I could share expensive resources like RAID controllers and network connections from a shared pool seemed like a path to the flexibility I always wanted. Apparently, most of yo. […]
23. Intel Makes Exascale Bet on InfinBand-Based Supercomputing Wednesday, 25 January 2012, 3:00 pm
    Intel, which played a key role in the creation of the InfiniBand high-speed networking standard a decade ago, has come full circle and bought the IB assets of Qlogic, one of the two remaining companies still actively pushing the technology. While $125 million is chump change for a company that netted $3.4 billion in profits last quarter, Intel says the acquisition will enhance its networking portf. […]
24. F5 Networks ‘Fixes’ Data Center Security Tuesday, 24 January 2012, 4:00 pm
    Arguing that multiple point appliances intended to secure a network only add to complexity without providing the intended protection, F5 Networks is introducing what it calls a Data Center Firewall to combine multiple security solutions into one appliance. The appliance, called BIG-IP model 11050 and carrying a starting price of $129,995, delivers such security features as dynamic threat defense,. […]
25. Research Finds Outstanding Issues Could Derail Win 8 Migration Tuesday, 24 January 2012, 2:06 pm
    Migration to Windows 8 won’t be a sure thing, with a number of issues remaining to be addressed before Microsoft can expect the majority of its users to migrate to the new version of the operating system. A new survey from InformationWeek Analytics, “Research: Windows 8,” finds that the migration strategy appears to be predicated on people migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 8, when it’s clear tha. […]
26. IBM And NEC Leverage OpenFlow For High-Performance Networking Tuesday, 24 January 2012, 2:01 pm
    IBM and NEC are collaborating on high-performance OpenFlow deployments. OpenFlow, developed at Stanford University, has enjoyed acceptance in university networks because an OpenFlow network can run alongside the campus production network without impacting it. In 2011, OpenFlow broke out of its education niche into the mainstream with announcements from Big Switch, Fulcrum and NEC. IBM’s and NEC’s. […]
27. Rise Of HTML5 Brings With It Security Risks Tuesday, 24 January 2012, 1:30 pm
    HTML5 is the new “it” protocol on the Internet. Among other things, it is an alternative to Adobe’s Flash for displaying content through a Web browser. No less an industry authority than the late Steve Jobs declared in 2010 that browsers on Apple devices such as the iPad would support HTML5 and not Flash. But as HTML5 gains wider adoption, some of its security flaws are beginning to get noticed, i. […]
28. Meraki Ups The Cloud-Based Networking Ante Monday, 23 January 2012, 3:10 pm
    Mainstream network players and those chasing them are out to erase the lines between wireless and wired networking. As the network edge gets redefined and the cloud makes its presence felt in LAN and WLAN spaces, announcements like Meraki’s latest update are getting to be more commonplace–and exciting. With a number of interesting product updates to share, Meraki is starting 2012 with a bang.
29. Thought Experiment–Forget ROI Monday, 23 January 2012, 2:50 pm
    Boys and girls, today’s homework assignment is a thought experiment. I want you all to put yourselves in the shoes of the CXO team making a decision to move to private cloud. There is, of course, one catch: You may not factor in ROI. We’re dropping ROI because it clouds the subject (bad pun intended.) Let’s skip the why-should-I-do-this-experiment; I’d of course default to,”Because I told you so.”
30. Dell Moves Ahead Fluidly in Storage Friday, 20 January 2012, 5:32 pm
    The IT industry is always adapting to new trends, from client-server and the PC revolution of the ’80s and ’90s to cloud computing and big data today. These trends inspire successful new vendor entrants, but they can also be problematic for established IT vendors. Over time, some leaders don’t adapt and die (see Digital Equipment Corporation), while others swoon and survive in a reduced state by b. […]
31. Freeware Increases RJ Lee’s Management Efficiency Friday, 20 January 2012, 5:00 pm
    Faced with rapid growth and increases in the amount and complexity of data and its IT operations, RJ Lee Group went looking for a way to simplify its computing infrastructure. The company selected Spiceworks as an alternative to adding staff or spending a lot of money on network and system management software.
32. Atlantis VDI Ups IOPS Performance By 10 To 20 Times Friday, 20 January 2012, 2:00 pm
    Atlantis Computing has announced Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI, a virtual desktop infrastructure product that makes use of server-based blade storage that it claims eliminates storage for Citrix and VMware virtual desktop operating system images. This means that users can reduce the capital expenses associated with VDI to less than $200 per desktop while providing boot times of 12 seconds. The compan. […]
33. Amazon EC2 Reaches Out To Windows Developers Thursday, 19 January 2012, 5:45 pm
    Amazon EC2 is upping the ante with Microsoft’s competitive cloud platform, Azure, by matching its free offer of up to 750 hours per month, for up to a year, of developer time for Windows Server 2003 R2, 2008 and 2008 R2 editions. As part of its AWS Free Usage Tier, customers can select from a range of pre-configured Amazon Machine Images with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and, once running, con. […]
34. Microsoft System Center 2012 Revealed Thursday, 19 January 2012, 2:45 pm
    Microsoft’s System Center 2012, which we discussed in Microsoft’s System Center 2012: Building A Private Cloud, is the latest attempt by a big vendor to bring private cloud to the masses. While there are many improvements to System Center, building a private cloud using anyone’s software is far from easy. At Microsoft’s private cloud reviewers’ workshop, we got a peek at the sausage factory. There. […]
35. Thales and Infoblox Address Weak DNSSEC Demand Thursday, 19 January 2012, 2:00 pm
    Information systems and communications security vendor Thales has integrated its nShield hardware security module (HSM) with the Infoblox DNS platform to provide customers with simple deployment of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), a security protocol designed to protect the Internet from attacks like cache poisoning.