Stephen Lawson, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Stephen Lawson

Author Archives: Stephen Lawson

Cisco says it’ll make IoT safe because it owns the network

Cisco Systems is making a play for the fundamental process of putting IoT devices online, promising greater ease of use and security as enterprises prepare to deploy potentially millions of connected objects.Thanks to a dominant position in Internet Protocol networks, Cisco can do what no other company can: Change networks that were not designed for IoT in order to pave the way for a proliferation of devices, said Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of the IoT & Applications Group.“The internet as we know it today, and the network that you operate, will not work for the internet of things,” Trollope said in a keynote presentation at the Cisco Partner Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday. “We can solve that problem because we own the network.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco pits modular storage servers against public clouds

Cisco Systems is finding its way into storage through its successful server business. On Tuesday, it’s introducing modular systems that can be deployed with many different combinations of computing and storage capacity.Though it’s not Cisco’s first foray into storage, the UCS S3260 Storage Server offers a density and a freedom of configuration that stands out against other systems, even competing on cost with public cloud services, the company says.The server was announced at the Cisco Partner Summit in San Francisco. It’s the first entry in Cisco’s S-Series, a line of systems designed to serve both enterprises and companies that provide cloud services to others.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco pits modular storage servers against public clouds

To solve IoT security, look at the big picture, ARM says

The recent DDoS attacks launched from IoT devices demonstrate that the internet of things spans all parts of IT and that most companies deploying it still need a lot of help.That's the message from ARM, the chip design company behind nearly every smartphone and a big chunk of IoT, at its annual TechCon event this week in Silicon Valley.Small, low-power devices like sensors and security cameras are the most visible part of IoT, and they’re right in ARM’s wheelhouse as the dominant force in low-power chips. But on Wednesday, the company highlighted a cloud-based SaaS offering rather than chips or edge devices themselves. IoT depends on back-end capabilities as much as edge devices, and the company wants to play a role in all of it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

To solve IoT security, look at the big picture, ARM says

Intel wants to make its IoT chips see, think, and act

Rolling out the internet of things means using devices as our eyes and ears and even asking them to make decisions for us. The chips at the heart of those devices play critical roles, and on Tuesday some of them got better at their jobs.While ARM introduced two minuscule processor architectures with security features borrowed from larger chips, Intel unveiled its Atom E3900 chips with improved computer vision and industrial-grade timing.The E3900s are designed for a wide range of applications, including manufacturing and surveillance, and they’ll soon be joined by a version specifically for vehicles, called the A3900.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ARM builds up security in the tiniest IoT chips

IoT is making devices smaller, smarter, and – we hope – safer. It’s not easy to make all those things happen at once, but chips that can help are starting to emerge.On Tuesday at ARM TechCon in Silicon Valley, ARM will introduce processors that are just a fraction of a millimeter across and incorporate the company’s TrustZone technology. TrustZone is hardware-based security built into SoC (system on chip) processors to establish a root of trust.It’s designed to prevent devices from being hacked and taken over by intruders, a danger that’s been in the news since the discovery of the Mirai botnet, which recently took over thousands of IP cameras to mount denial-of-service attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ARM builds up security in the tiniest IoT chips

For cordless VR and more, WiGig may be worth the wait

The stars are finally aligned for WiGig, an ultra-fast, short-range wireless network that took a long time to become a reality.On Monday, the Wi-Fi Alliance launched a certification process for WiGig products, which will go as fast as 8Gbps (bits per second) and could include virtual-reality headsets and high-speed office Wi-Fi zones.The technology was announced in 2009 and is based on a standard, IEEE 802.11ad, that’s now available in some shipping products. But the official WiGig logo will assure buyers that networks and devices from different vendors can work together out of the box. That’s a crucial issue for almost anyone investing in network gear.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

For cordless VR and more, WiGig may be worth the wait

Cisco revs up storage connections for data centers and WANs

Data is piling up, and storage keeps getting faster thanks to flash, so the networks that link it all together need to keep up, too.Both traditional Fibre Channel and more general-use protocols used in storage keep steadily ratcheting up performance. On Wednesday, Cisco Systems is boosting the speed of long-distance storage links for disaster recovery and business continuity. It’s also introducing higher speeds for IP (Internet Protocol) storage networks in data centers and enhancing its software to simplify storage management.Fibre Channel hangs on as the glue that binds together SANs (storage area networks) because it’s dependable and secure, said 451 Research analyst Steven Hill. A majority of large enterprise installations use it even though typically cheaper IP-based systems like iSCSI have been around for years, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco revs up storage connections for data centers and WANs

Facebook’s 100-gigabit switch design is out in the open

Facebook’s bid to open up networking is moving up into nosebleed territory for data centers. The company’s 100-gigabit switch design has been accepted by the Open Compute Project, a step that should help to foster an open ecosystem of hardware and software on high-speed networking gear.The 32-port Wedge 100 is the follow-on to Facebook’s Wedge 40, introduced about two years ago and now in use in practically all of the company’s data centers, said Omar Baldonado, director of software engineering on Facebook’s networking team. Mostly, it’s a faster version of that switch, upping the port speed to 100Gbps (bits per second) from 40Gbps. But Facebook also added some features to make service easier, like a cover that can be removed without tools and LED status lights to check the condition of a the cooling fans from a distance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook’s 100-gigabit switch design is out in the open

Qualcomm’s 5G preview: high frequencies, 5-gigabit speed

5G networks will be five times as fast as the quickest LTE technology by using the highest cellular frequencies ever, according to Qualcomm, which provided a glimpse of its next-generation modem plans on Tuesday.The X50 modem won’t ship until the first half of 2018, and 5G networks aren’t expected to go commercial until 2020. But Qualcomm will have a lot to say about the new technology at its 4G/5G Summit in Hong Kong on Tuesday. At the same event, it’s announcing plans around its gigabit-speed X16 LTE modem.The X50 will offer download speeds as high as 5Gbps (bits per second), where networks support them, using millimeter-wave frequencies and futuristic techniques for beaming signals to devices, according to slides prepared for the 4G/5G Summit. Qualcomm shared the materials in advance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Connected cameras will get smarter with new Qualcomm chips

While most of IT is consolidating around the cloud, in some ways the internet of things is moving the other direction. Vendors are putting more computing power in devices near the edges of networks, like sensor modules and gateways.That's because it can be faster and less expensive to do filtering and analytics where the data is collected than to send it all the way to a distant data center. In some cases, this can reduce communications costs and help IoT respond to events more quickly.Connected cameras are among the hardest-working IoT devices, sometimes streaming high-definition video around the clock for surveillance and streaming entertainment. They’re the target of chip and software enhancements that Qualcomm is introducing on Tuesday. The company is announcing these offerings along with other advances at its 4G/5G Summit in Hong Kong.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Application tie-ins are taking center stage in collaboration

Combining different forms of collaboration in one platform is only part of the battle when it comes to helping co-workers connect. There’s also integration with productivity applications so that employees don’t have to constantly switch between screens.Cisco Systems scored a win in this area last month when it made a deal to bring its Spark and WebEx systems into Salesforce. But Avaya, an enterprise networking company that lacks Cisco’s heft and high-profile partnerships, says this is where it can stand out in workplace communication. On Monday, it announced an all-in-one collaboration platform called Avaya Equinox, plus an open SDK (software development kit) for making other applications work with it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Note7 will cost Samsung another $3 billion in profit

The fallout from the Note7 debacle, which is expected to take a big chunk out of Samsung’s third-quarter profit, will keep hurting its business into next year, the company said. The fourth-quarter impact on Samsung Electronics' operating profit will be "in the mid-2 trillion won range," the company said in a press release early Friday. Using the midpoint of 2.5 trillion South Korean won, that would be about US$2.2 billion. The damage will continue in the first quarter of next year, with an impact of about 1 trillion won, Samsung said. The company announced Tuesday it had permanently stopped production of the Note7. It had launched a recall of the phone just weeks after it went on sale because of fires and explosions that destroyed some of the devices. Then, some replacement units it sent out as part of the recall had the same problem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM’s Cleversafe storage platform is becoming a cloud service

If dispersing data among storage nodes can make it more secure and less prone to loss, wouldn’t spreading it across far-flung cloud data centers make it even more so?If so, IBM has the right idea with its Cloud Object Storage service, which uses SecureSlice object storage technology that it acquired by buying Cleversafe last year.The storage-as-a-service offering becomes generally available on Thursday. It lets enterprises use both on-premises gear and the IBM Cloud to store unstructured data objects, which can include things like videos, photos and genomic sequencing data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

« Previous 1 … 6 7 8 9 10 … 22 Next »