It’s been a little over a year since Chuck Robbins took the reins at Cisco from the venerated John Chambers. In that time, the face and pace of the IT realm has transformed -- from Dell buying EMC and HP splitting up to the swift rise of IoT and harsh impact of security challenges. Robbins has embraced this rapid change and, he says in this wide-ranging interview, moved the company forward with relentless speed to address everything from hyperconvergence to application-centric infrastructures. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Engineers at Stanford University have invented a new technology that would give broadband customers more control over their pipes and, they say, possibly put an end to a stale net neutrality debate in the U.S.The new technology, called Network Cookies, would allow broadband customers to decide which parts of their network traffic get priority delivery and which parts are less time sensitive. A broadband customer could then decide video from Netflix should get preferential treatment over email messages, for example.The technology could put an end to the current net neutrality debate focused on whether broadband providers are allowed to prioritize some network traffic and block or degrade other traffic, said the researchers, Professors Nick McKeown and Sachin Katti and electrical engineering grad student Yiannis Yiakoumis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems has patched a vulnerability similar to one exploited by a cyberespionage group believed to be linked to the U.S. National Security Agency.The vulnerability affects networking devices running Cisco's IOS, IOS XE and IOS XR operating systems that process IKEv1 (Internet Key Exchange version 1) packets. When exploited, it allows remote unauthenticated attackers to extract contents from a device's memory, potentially leading to the exposure of sensitive and confidential information.IKE is a key exchange protocol used by several popular features including LAN-to-LAN VPN (Virtual Private Network), remote access VPN, Dynamic Multipoint VPN (DMVPN) and Group Domain of Interpretation (GDOI). It is likely to be enabled on many Cisco devices in enterprise environments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There are many factors to consider when a technology vendor decides to pull the trigger on an acquisition. Things such as impact to channel, customer reaction, product rationalization and other issues must be thought out.However, sometimes an acquisition seems to be a great fit and the decision is “black and white,” meaning it’s crystal clear with no shades of grey. This appears to have been the case for Extreme Networks, which earlier this week scooped up the wireless LAN (WLAN) business from Zebra Technologies for $55 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The following statement was made by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler before the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation of the United States Senate during a hearing on "Oversight of the Federal Communications Commission" on Sept. 15.Chairman Thune, Ranking Member Nelson, and Members of the Committee, thank you for this opportunity to discuss our work at the Federal Communications Commission. Since we last met six months ago, the Commission has continued to make strong progress on our policy agenda. While I am pleased with this progress, our work is far from done. With each passing day, communications technology grows more important to our economy and quality of life. That means there’s no letting up at the Commission. We must continue to promote core values like universal access, public safety, consumer protection, and competition at the same bold pace we have consistently maintained. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The challenges as the head of IT for a major international law firm with 700 attorneys, 1,500 total employees and 20 separate offices around the world aren’t exactly small, but Baker Donelson CIO John D. Green is up to the task – even when that task changes a little every day.Different parts of Baker Donelson’s sprawling practice have different needs, said Green, who sat down with Network World Tuesday at Riverbed’s Disrupt event in New York. The real estate practice, tax, and patent and trademark practices, among others, have their own software, all of which Donelson has to support.MORE: Riverbed upgrades set sights on the SD-WAN edge, cloud integrationTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brocade this week rolled out a big data center router its says will handle and help manage the massive amounts of traffic expected to cross enterprise networks in the not-to-distant future.The Brocade SLX 9850 expands the Brocade data center routing family and supports 15x more total capacity than the current Brocade MLXe box via a 230Tbps non-blocking chassis fabric capacity for 10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.+More on Network World: Brocade CEO says they've built an easy button for IP networks, are benefiting from SDN/NFV+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Government Accountability Office has said that the internet domain name system is unlikely to be government property, ahead of the planned transfer by month end of the oversight of key technical functions supporting the internet, including the domain name system, to an independent multistakeholder body."It is unlikely that either the authoritative root zone file—the public 'address book' for the top level of the Internet domain name system—or the Internet domain name system as a whole" is U.S. government property, the GAO said in a legal opinion provided to legislators.The report by the Congressional watchdog comes ahead of a hearing on the issue Wednesday chaired by Republican Senator Ted Cruz from Texas. The Republicans are intent on blocking the transfer of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions, currently being operated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) under a contract with the Department of Commerce, which expires on Sept. 30.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At Riverbed’s Disrupt event in New York’s upscale Conrad Hotel today, the company announced new products designed to help customers move their enterprise network more fully into the cloud arena.At the heart of the announcements, Version 2.0 of Riverbed’s SteelConnect software-defined WAN product which adds router capabilities to the gateway hardware for the first time, letting users replace legacy routers.Version 2.0 also integrates SteelCentral – the company’s application performance management system - features into the SteelConnect front end, and introduces two new gateway models, which feature up to 10Gbps of throughput capability.SteelConnect, which was initially launched earlier this year, is Riverbed’s ambitious attempt to broaden its presence in the network management arena. In addition to its SD-WAN management capabilities, SteelConnect lets IT departments manage cloud and LAN deployments from the same interface.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Riverbed Technology is well known as the de facto standard for WAN optimization and pioneered that market. Maybe there were a few vendors with solutions out before Riverbed, but it was the company that defined and evangelized that market.However, the WAN market changed and over the past few years. The industry has seen the meteoric rise in software-defined WANs (SD-WAN), and Riverbed had fallen behind many of the startups in the space.Over the past year, Riverbed has been aggressively rebuilding its portfolio, including the acquisition of Ocedo, to better align with SD-WAN and has come roaring back. At its Disrupt event this week, the company made a number of announcements, indicating just how far the company has come in the last 24 months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. government's plan to end its oversight of the internet's domain name system should move forward as promised, despite last-minute efforts by some Republican lawmakers to derail the process, a coalition of tech companies and trade groups said.The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) should end its supervision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Oct. 1 as planned, said a letter signed by Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon and more than 20 other companies and trade groups.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The term “software-defined” has been applied to a number of technologies, including networking, WAN, security, storage and data center. One area it has yet to be associated with is the local area network (LAN). But what exactly does “software-defined” mean and should it extend to the LAN? Just because something runs in software, it doesn’t make it any different than running in hardware.That’s just one component of being software-defined. Other factors including having centralized control, being programmable and agile, and providing visibility to gain new insights. Most important, a software-defined system should be able to automate configuration changes as the applications’ needs change. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Aruba, a division of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, announced software today that's designed to help companies speed up secure integration of mobile devices and Internet of Things objects into their networks.Called Aruba Mobile First Platform, the software is based on application programming interfaces (APIs) for use by third-party developers and developer teams inside companies to help them boost automation with IoT devices and allow mobile workers to be more efficient.Mobile First is built on Aruba OS 8.0, the company's new operating system, which is deployed as a virtual machine on a server appliance.Also, Aruba announced enhancements to its existing Aruba ClearPass software for Mobile First to make it easier for IT security teams to integrate cloud-hosted services into ClearPass. This means customers can more easily build software workflows for Enterprise Mobility Management packages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Getting really good Wi-Fi coverage is hard in most buildings unless you can place your access point in the center of the building and the building doesn’t have lots of metal in it to distort and attenuate the signal. A cheap solution is to use a range extender to improve the reach of your Wi-Fi but, unfortunately, many of these products use a single radio to repeat the signal which results in reduced bandwidth. There is, however, a better way: Eero, a company that’s been shipping their eponymously named product for just over a year, have the best solution I’ve tested so far. The eero system (I must note here that the company and devices are named after the architect Eero Saarinen, famous for his clean, sophisticated design aesthetic, and Eero writes the device’s name in the style of e.e. cummings: all lower case, thus “eero”) creates a mesh network, each node having two radios so that they can send and receive simultaneously using adaptive routing to maximize throughput. The product really is nicely designed with the same kind of polished look and feel that characterizes Apple’s products (in fact, the design strikes me a much like the Continue reading
A new version of the Bluetooth wireless spec will be coming to devices soon, giving users faster connectivity among devices over longer distances.The new version, Bluetooth 5, is a big upgrade over Bluetooth 4.2, the current specification. In a clear line of sight, the range of Bluetooth 5 could stretch to 400 meters, said analysts at The Linley Group in a research note this week. That means users could connect a smartphone to a Bluetooth speaker that may not even be visible.Final Bluetooth 5 specifications will be disclosed by the end of this year or early next year, the Linley analysts said.In a typical, realistic setting, Bluetooth 5 will offer a range of up to 120 meters, which is four times that of Bluetooth 4.2, and be two times faster, with data transfer rates of 2Mbps, said Chuck Sabin, director for business strategy at the Bluetooth-Special Interest Group, which sets the standards for Bluetooth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Republican lawmakers are making a last-ditch bid to thwart the proposed transfer by the U.S. of internet governance to a multistakeholder body, by calling on the government to reconsider its plans to put the transition into effect by month end.Raising fears that control of the internet could pass to authoritarian regimes, the legislators wrote in a letter Thursday to Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker that there were unresolved issues, such as the ability to ensure that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers would in fact follow its own bylaws after the transfer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Cisco executive wheels keep churning. Today the person in charge of Cisco’s enterprise engineering organizations Robert Soderbery said he has left the company via a post on LinkedIn. More on Network World: Cisco: IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte level in 2016+ Soderbery wrote: “It has been a fascinating time to be at Cisco and there are many experiences I take away with me. It was an incredibly diverse set of challenges, from the incessant battle with the likes of HP and Huawei for market share, to creating new products, businesses and even markets. My colleagues and I were fortunate to be early movers in IoT and the digital transition, which led to new businesses in new industries for Cisco; manufacturing, transportation, utilities and smart cities. In October of 2012 I met the Meraki [a company Cisco acquired in 2012] founding team and realized that the amazing company they built, when combined with the power of Cisco, would be something very special, which indeed turned out to be true. And of course the more recent work in networking innovation with Cisco Digital Network Architecture, and driving the transition to a software centric architecture has been exciting Continue reading
A decade ago, security meant a big firewall at a single ingress point. All devices and applications were under IT’s tight control, so they did not create significant security risks. Today, everything has changed. The rise of cloud computing, BYOD, shadow IT, WiFi devices, software defined everything and other trends have blown up the tightly controlled model and created a rather chaotic system. Adding to the challenge is that attackers are getting smarter and targeting IoT systems and end users directly, which often bypasses the security technology. This is why some security experts say there are two types of organizations, those that have been breached and know about it and those that have been breached and don’t know about it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A decade ago, security meant a big firewall at a single ingress point. All devices and applications were under IT’s tight control, so they did not create significant security risks. Today, everything has changed. The rise of cloud computing, BYOD, shadow IT, WiFi devices, software defined everything and other trends have blown up the tightly controlled model and created a rather chaotic system. Adding to the challenge is that attackers are getting smarter and targeting IoT systems and end users directly, which often bypasses the security technology. This is why some security experts say there are two types of organizations, those that have been breached and know about it and those that have been breached and don’t know about it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over the past few years most organizations have significantly increased their reliance on the Internet, primarily due to the outsourcing of utility applications like email, unified communications, ERP, CRM, etc. to SaaS providers. Cloud-based applications provide IT organizations with an agile and cost effective means for expanding the range of services they provide and delivering new productivity tools requested by teams, departments or lines of business.Despite this growing adoption of cloud services, many enterprises have resisted connecting their remote offices directly to application providers over the public Internet. This is due to the fact that direct access at every branch introduces compliance issues. The only way to mitigate these is by creating extensive security policies at each location. Imagine having 3,000 sites with each requiring its own set of policies that need to be set-up and maintained. This is the definition of a management nightmare.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here