In rejecting a $335 million damage award to Cisco, a California jury gave Arista Networks a key verdict in part of the expansive patent infringement lawsuit the two networking companies are fighting over.While the jury found Arista had copied some of Cisco Command Line Interface it declined to award in damages. The jury also found that Arista did not infringe the single patent remaining in the case as well as Cisco’s asserted copyrights in its user manuals.+More on Network World: Cisco Talos: Zeus spawn “Floki bot” malware gaining use, cyber-underworld notoriety+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
How AWS has disrupted companies and sectorsImage by ThinkstockWhen Amazon.com launched Amazon Web Services a decade ago no one could have imagined that the business, viewed largely as a sideshow geared to serve the ecommerce company’s e-tailing interests, would become a significant player in corporate computing. But as CIO.com noted last week, AWS’ public cloud software, now a $13 billion business, has become a serious contender in the enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM and NASA have had one of the longest, most successful relationships in the high-tech world and it looks like the future holds much the same.While the relationship has its roots in the very beginnings of the space program as well as large-scale computing, its current incarnation in many cases revolves around the cognitive computing specialties found in IBM’s Watson system. The forthcoming movie Hidden Figures in fact shows some of the earliest IBM and NASA computing interactions. Hidden Figures follows a group of African-American female mathematicians who calculated flight trajectories on IBM computers for John Glenn's first orbital flight in 1962.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for energy secretary, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, will also have charge of the nation’s largest supercomputers. These systems are used to investigate “national challenges,” which includes climate change. But Perry is a climate change skeptic, as is Trump, and believes the science is unsettled.Perry’s skepticism about the science of climate change may be a problem for the department he's been tapped to run; the Department of Energy (DOE) considers climate a major research focus.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 26 crazy and scary things the TSA has found on travelers
“DOE plays an important role in climate change research -- a very large role,” said Cliff Mass, a professor of meteorology at the University of Washington.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s an all-too familiar scene: The start of a new financial quarter signals yet another opportunity for CFOs and CIOs to debate the fate of proposed network equipment purchases, upgrades and support. If these two stakeholders are to come together to maximize the return on every IT dollar spent, it’s crucial they have a clear understanding of the shared IT value equation. For many, this is capex and opex through the lens of deferring or lowering capital expenditures without increasing operational costs.
This approach typically includes a “sweat the assets” strategy for extending the useful life of stable network routers and switches. But first, you need to know exactly what’s deployed and supported under current maintenance contracts. Relying solely on OEMs to provide a full accounting of your network assets is akin to flying blind. Don’t get me wrong: While there’s great value in tools such as Cisco’s Smart Collector for discovering and gathering device-related data from all the Cisco gear in your network, it’s a place to start—not stop. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In my previous post, I previewed what we should expect to see from Cisco in 2017. While I think Cisco is in a strong position next year, I don’t expect Cisco’s competitors to sit around and let it take share. Below are the market segments where I think we’ll see the most activity and which vendors are likely to be the most disruptive.Collaboration
Hard-charging Microsoft has turned its unified communications (UC) focus to the cloud with its Skype For Business Voice available as part of the Office 365 suite. One can argue who has better voice or video, but Microsoft’s real strength is in how easy it is to purchase and start using voice, including PSTN calling. Microsoft also announced its Team product, which directly competes with Cisco’s Spark product, so the collaboration battle will be drawn on many fronts. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In recent years, Microsoft has made enormous efforts to get people to migrate off products that had reached their end of life. In 2014, it was Windows XP. In 2015, it was Windows Server 2003. This year it was SQL Server 2005. So, knowing what the company went through to make people migrate makes this latest bit of news somewhat baffling. Microsoft has quietly announced the addition of a third tier to its product lifecycle, expanding the lifespan of both Windows Server and SQL Server by an additional six years. Microsoft usually offers two tiers of lifecycle support covering a 10-year lifespan. The first five years, known as Mainstream support, include new features as well as security and non-security updates. The last five years, covering Extended support, has security and non-security updates, but no new features are added to the product. After that, all support ceases. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Every day we are reminded that we live in a digital age. We read the news on our smart phones. We read books on our Kindles. We do our banking online. Yet we’re still drowning in paper.
In 2016, humans created more than half a billion tons of paper, and U.S. offices use more than 12.1 trillion sheets of paper a year. It’s no wonder that more than a quarter of all landfill waste is paper. Not only is this an environmental tragedy, but it is also a monument to inefficiency because paper does not give enterprises the business intelligence and insight they need to succeed. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Market research and advisory firm Ovum estimates the big data market will grow from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $9.4 billion by 2020. As the market grows, enterprise challenges are shifting, skills requirements are changing, and the vendor landscape is morphing. The coming year promises to be a busy one for big data pros. Here are some predictions from industry watchers and technology players.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
If you’ve been following this blog, you may have seen me mention mainframes are popular with banks and financial institutions. In reading that again and again, you may have thought to yourself, “So what?” After all, banks are notoriously hidebound and slow to adopt new ideas (there’s a reason Mary Poppins’ Mr. Banks worked for the bank of London and not a toymaker to represent being conservative and slow to change.)And slow to change though the banks may be, what they most certainly are not is impractical. Banks don’t just love mainframes because that’s what they’ve always used. They love mainframes because they’re the right tool for the job: a tool with power.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekImage by BrocadeOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.BlueData EPIC on AWSImage by Blue DataTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A US trade judge ruled today that Arista Networks infringed on two Cisco switch patents – the second important victory the networking giant has won against Arista in their ongoing legal confrontation since it began in 2014.U.S. International Trade Commission Judge MaryJoan McNamara issued the so-called “initial determination” on the case which now must be reviewed by the ITC. In the end should the ITC find against Arista its switches could once again be banned from import into the US. The ITC you may recall ruled against Arista in another part of this case and between June and August the company could not import those products. In November Arista announced that US Customs has given it permission to resume importing its networking gear in the United States.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco’s Talos security group this week warned that a variant of trojan monster Zeus has begun to garner a following in the cyber-underworld as a hard-to-detect attack mechanism.“[Floki bot] is based on the same codebase that was used by the infamous Zeus trojan, the source code of which was leaked in 2011. Rather than simply copying the features that were present within the Zeus trojan ‘as-is’, Floki Bot claims to feature several new capabilities making it an attractive tool for criminals,” Talos wrote.+More on Network World: 20 years ago: Hot sci/tech images from 1996+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I’ve built my career in a field where trader voice technology has only improved incrementally over the past 40 years. After decades of building legacy technology, my co-founders and I set out to disrupt the industry we had helped build.Despite years of leading technology teams and large-scale product launches, I was presented with a unique opportunity to start from the ground up. I had to start from scratch with a new set of technology, build a team, create architecture that was future-proof, scalable, secure and compliant, and take on the task of educating our customers and my team about why WebRTC and the Amazon Cloud was the right technology for our stack. It was daunting task, but also a common set of circumstances for a modern startup CTO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ransomware is evil, and it continues to prey upon thousands of businesses every year. Most infections are fairly quiet affairs: A small business gets infected, almost always by some employee opening an email attachment he or she mistakes as legitimate but that really contains the payload of a virus. Then several undetected hours later, all of the business' files -- at least those the employee had access to, which in a lot of businesses without good security and permissions policies is all of the files -- are encrypted, and demands for payment of a ransom in Bitcoin are made in exchange for the decryption key.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Microsoft researchers have shared their annual predictions of what they believe will be the big advancements in technology within the next 10 years. The predictions were made by 17 different researchers at the company, covering 10 different areas.Predictions are always a dicey thing. Stewart Alsop will never live down his prediction that "the last mainframe will be unplugged on March 15, 1996." Twenty years later, IBM still sells its z Series mainframe. Oops. Still, the Microsoft wizards have some interesting predictions. And for this year's list, Microsoft's prognosticators are all women. Microsoft is celebrating Computer Science Education Week around the globe, with special emphasis on women and girls, given the fact women account for only 20 percent of computer science graduates in 34 of the countries which are members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) yet are half the population. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Despite the fact there’s no such thing as a free lunch, you can download the eight virtual appliances discussed in this article for free. That doesn’t mean you can use any of these in a high-end production environment, but it doesn’t mean you can’t either. Some even have paid and supported versions should you choose to go that route.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
If an AI could rule a world, would you trust it to manage your IT systems? German software company Arago is hoping you will.The developer of IT automation system Hiro (short for Human Intelligence Robotically Optimized) has been teaching its software how to play Freeciv, an open source computer strategy game inspired by Sid Meier's Civilization series of games, and in the process is learning to make IT management more fun.Hiro is an AI-based automation system that usually sits on top of other IT service management tools. Unlike script-based systems, it learns from its users how best to manage a company's IT systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With its enormous capacity, a new 14TB drive from Western Digital is unlike any seen before and is now being shipped to customers for testing.It's the highest-capacity hard drive developed yet, beating 12TB hard drives from WD and Seagate. It's a larger capacity version of the 12TB HGST Ultrastar He12 PMR hard drive, which also is shipping for testing.Hard drives ruled when it came to capacity, but this year were overtaken by flash-based SSDs. The 14TB drive, though setting a record for hard drives, comes nowhere close in capacity to Seagate's 60TB SSD, which was shown at the Flash Memory Summit in August.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this year Brocade announced its Workflow Composer (http://www.networkworld.com/article/3075335/network-management/brocade-workflow-composer-enables-it-to-move-with-digital-speed.html) platform, powered by StackStorm to automate data center processes and bring DevOps like automation and continuous innovation to the network. This week Brocade expanded its portfolio with a number of new automation suites for Workflow Composer and a line of new switches with increased flexibility and programmability capabilities. The combination of Workflow Composer and the new hardware enables Brocade customers to increase the level of network agility at a workflow level or down at the individual switch. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here