Hewlett Packard Enterprise is turning to lights and lasers in thin fiber optics as a way to move data at blazing speeds between computers, replacing thicker and slower copper wires.A motherboard with an optical module, shown by HPE at its recent Discover show, could transfer data at a staggering 1.2 terabits per second. That's enough for the transfer of a full day's worth of HD video in one second.The data transfer speed is much quicker than any existing networking and connector technology based on copper wires today. It could replace copper Ethernet cables that are widely used in data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. The Bay Club Company is an operator of private clubs that blend fitness, swimming and tennis. Today the company has 24 clubs across California, but it's growth path could potentially double that by the end of 2017. The Bay Club's expansion strategy includes acquiring smaller clubs and bringing them into the portfolio.IT director Mark Street is charged with bringing the acquired clubs into the Bay Club network as quickly as possible. That connection is essential in order for the club, from a technology point of view, to begin operating and feeling like a Bay Club. Street says it would take 60 to 90 days to bring a new club onto the traditional corporate backbone, but his goal is to be able to fully integrate a new club within a week to help The Bay Club and its members benefit from the new acquisition faster.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Residents of Baltimore who dialed 911 were unable to reach emergency dispatchers for more than two hours Tuesday evening and Verizon is laying the blame on a call-routing error.From the Baltimore Sun:
Officials at Verizon — the service provider for the city's 911 system — said the phone company received an automated alert at 7:48 p.m. reporting that 911 calls were failing. Verizon spokesman John O'Malley said the company eventually determined that emergency calls were mistakenly routed to an empty back-up call center in the city.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Three models of Cisco wireless VPN firewalls and routers from the small business RV series contain a critical unpatched vulnerability that attackers can exploit remotely to take control of devices.
The vulnerability is located in the Web-based management interface of the Cisco RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall, RV130W Wireless-N Multifunction VPN Router and RV215W Wireless-N VPN Router.
It can be easily exploited if the affected devices are configured for remote management since attackers only need to send an unauthenticated HTTP request with custom user data. This will result in remote code execution as root, the highest privileged account on the system, and can lead to a complete compromise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's the issue that won't die: A Senate committee has voted to weaken the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules.The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee voted Wednesday to approve a bill that would exempt small broadband providers from rules requiring them to provide their customers with information about network performance, network management practices, and other issues.The rules are intended to give broadband customers data about actual speeds, compared to advertised speeds, and potentially controversial congestion management practices.The Senate bill, the Small Business Broadband Deployment Act, would still ensure "meaningful transparency for consumers" because older FCC rules requiring some disclosure of network management practices remain in place, said Senator John Thune, a South Dakota Republican and committee chairman.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a sea of vulnerabilities clamoring for attention, it’s almost impossible to know which IT security issues to address first. Vendor advisories provide a tried-and-true means for keeping on top of known attack vectors. But there’s a more expedient option: Eavesdrop on attackers themselves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Deeper understandingTetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics. The system promises to give IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources as well as simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security montoring. (Read the full story to Cisco's new platform.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two years in the making, Cisco today rolled out a turnkey, full-rack appliance that promises to do just about everything it takes to control a data center -- from easing IT operations and controlling security to application monitoring.The platform, Cisco Tetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics and machine learning to offer IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources. The system will dramatically simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security monitoring, said Yogesh Kaushik, Cisco senior director of product management, Tetration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Previously, I discussed the benefits of using regional performance hubs to support new data patterns associated with the increasing use of cloud applications such as Salesforce.com and Office365.Just as business applications have transitioned to an “as a service” model, so will many network-based functions such as firewalls, IPS, IDS, etc. using network function virtualization (NFV). Although there hasn’t much been public discourse yet on WAN Optimization as a service, it is ideally suited for being “NFV-ed.”+ Also on Network World: Reinventing the WAN +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Innovation Everywhere ChallengeImage by CiscoNearly half of Cisco’s 74,000-member workforce got involved in the company’s recently completed Innovation Everywhere Challenge, designed to spark startup-like activity among its ranks. More than 1,100 ideas were submitted and 3 winners were selected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Innovate Everywhere ChallengeImage by CiscoNearly half of Cisco’s 74,000-member workforce got involved in the company’s recently completed Innovate Everywhere Challenge, designed to spark startup-like activity among its ranks. More than 1,100 ideas were submitted and 3 winners were selected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Networking has undergone radical changes in the past few years, and two startup launches this week show the revolution isn’t over yet.Barefoot Networks is making what it calls a fully programmable switch platform. It came out of stealth mode on Tuesday, the same day 128 Technology emerged claiming a new approach to routing. Both say they’re rethinking principles that haven’t changed since the 1990s.Now is a good time to shake up networking, because IT itself is changing shape, says Nemertes Research analyst John Burke.“Everybody pretty much wants and needs their IT services to work continuously and scalably,” Burke said. Enterprises need shorter communication delays, a way to scale networks up or down without months of preparation, and a distributed architecture to prevent breakdowns from one hardware failure. It’s happening because many enterprise applications just can’t stop working without dire consequences.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Radical new ideas are hitting network technology these days.On Tuesday, one new startup promised to make switches fully programmable. Another, routing software company 128 Technology, said it would fix the Internet.What 128 is proposing is a fundamentally different approach to routing, one that the company says will make networking simpler and more secure.The Internet was designed just to send packets from a source to a destination, but it’s evolved into a platform for delivering content and services among large, private networks. These complex tasks call for capabilities beyond basic routing, like security and knowing about the state of a session, said Andy Ory, 128’s CEO. He was the founder of Acme Packet, a session border controller company Oracle acquired in 2013. His new company is named after Route 128, the famed Massachusetts tech corridor where its headquarters is located.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For a giant 30-plus-year-old company, Cisco has a reputation for keeping things fresh via spin-ins, buyouts and venture investments. But late last year, the vendor launched the Innovate Everywhere Challenge just to make sure it wasn’t overlooking any great new ideas among its 74,000 employees.
“We have phenomenal innovation programs for engineers, IT people, marketing people and sales, but what we’ve never really done is mix them up across functions and geographies,” says Cisco Director of Innovation Strategy & Programs Alex Goryachev, who counts Napster, Liquid Audio, IBM and Pfizer among his previous employers. “If you think about a true startup you have to have a great engineer, a great marketing/PR person, a business person, a finance person and a product person.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ericsson is preparing to lay off between 3,000 and 4,000 staff this summer, according to Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.
Thousands more may have to go at the network equipment manufacturer as management look for additional cost savings of 10 billion Swedish kronor (US$1.2 billion), the newspaper said, citing anonymous sources.
Ericsson had around 115,000 staff in April, 17,000 of them in Sweden
A spokeswoman declined to discuss Tuesday's news report, saying the company does not comment on rumors and speculation.
Ericsson is facing increasing competition from a more focused Nokia, which swallowed its Franco-American rival, Alcatel-Lucent, earlier this year, and especially from Chinese vendors such as Huawei Technologies or ZTE. It's a critical time for wireless infrastructure vendors and their carrier customers, as they taper off investment in fourth-generation networks in preparation for the next, still largely undefined, generation of technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple and Cisco Systems have fleshed out their plans to make iOS devices work better in enterprises and said the new capabilities will arrive in the fall.Voice calls on Cisco’s Spark collaboration app will act like regular phone calls, IT departments will be able to give Cisco apps priority on iOS devices, and iPhone calls will run over corporate networks. These are some of the ways the two companies’ technologies will mesh in enterprises.Cisco announced the coming features on Monday after Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote. They’ll ship in a version of Cisco Spark updated for iOS 10. Apple also touched on the news at WWDC as one of very few enterprise announcements at the show.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cybersecurity would seem to be a top priority for enterprises, but there are still breaches and apparent gaps in their defenses and the way that companies respond to attacks.In separate announcements on Monday, both AT&T and Samsung drew attention to the dilemma. They recommended new enterprise security assessments that build on the services already offered by both companies.Samsung announced a new partnership with Booz Allen Hamilton to help enterprises find and address gaps in their mobile security. This approach includes a two-day, on-site mobile security assessment for each client, using a model based on security standards from the bodies like the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, among others.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's open season on wireless carriers' silly and confusing commercials.Sure, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint & T-Mobile have been the butt of jokes for some time now, and justifiably so, for the flimflam they spew about their amazing speeds and bargain pricing. SNL, for example, skewered Verizon a few years back in a skit that depicted all the jargon spewed by Verizon as "an old person's nightmare."Comedy Central's Amy Schumer more recently sent up those mobile phone ads that feature perky young women interacting with customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
No, the Internet has not become a series of bridges; it remains a series of tubes.The Internet is like the Verrazano Bridge in that there are moves afoot – ill-advised moves -- to change how each entity is represented through the written word.In the case of the Internet, the influential Associated Press and its indefatigable style disciples have already decreed that the word Internet should no longer be capitalized. Many news organizations and journalists are meekly complying by demoting the Internet to the internet. As you can see, I am refusing to fall in line.Meanwhile, in New York City, nitpicky petitioners are demanding that the Verrazano Bridge – North America’s longest such span – be renamed the Verrazzano Bridge. OK, fine, renaming may be oversating the case; they’re actually demanding the addition of a second “z” in Verrazano, despite the fact that it’s been spelled with only one since the bridge opened in 1964.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's not every day I come across positive sentiments about Comcast, so I thought I'd share this example that I stumbled upon in a local blog focused on, of all things, ghost stories.Author Liz Sower writes realistic but fictional accounts of the paranormal at "Ghosts in the Burbs," and she caught my eye with this recent headline: Xfinity vs. Verizon. I thought for sure she was going to dive into haunted DSL or eerie broadband experiences.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here