Will Dell Networking Wither Away?

The behemoth merger of Dell and EMC is nearing conclusion. The first week of August is the target date for the final wrap up of all the financial and legal parts of the acquisition. After that is done, the long task of analyzing product lines and finding a way to reduce complexity and product sprawl begins. We’ve already seen the spin out of Quest and Sonicwall into a separate entity to raise cash for the final stretch of the acquisition. No doubt other storage and compute products are going to face a go/no go decision in the future. But one product line which is in real danger of disappearing is networking.

Whither Whitebox?

The first indicator of the problems with Dell and networking comes from whitebox switching. Dell released OS 10 earlier this year as a way to capitalize on the growing market of free operating systems running on commodity hardware. Right now, OS 10 can run on Dell equipment. In the future, they are hoping to spread it out to whitebox devices. That assumes that soon you’ll see Dell branded OSes running on switches purchased from non-Dell sources booting with ONIE.

Once OS 10 pushes forward, what does that Continue reading

Cloud computing slows energy demand, U.S. says

Ten years ago, power usage at data centers was growing at an unsustainable rate, soaring 24% from 2005 to 2010. But a shift to virtualization, cloud computing and improved data center management is reducing energy demand.According to a new study, data center energy use is expected to increase just 4% from 2014 to 2020, despite growing demand for computing resources.Total data center electricity usage in the U.S., which includes powering servers, storage, networking and the infrastructure to support it, was at 70 billion kWh (kilowatt hours) in 2014, representing 1.8% of total U.S. electricity consumption.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Whatever happened to Green IT? Based on current trends, data centers are expected to consume approximately 73 billion kWh in 2020, becoming nearly flat over the next four years. "Growth in data center energy consumption has slowed drastically since the previous decade," according to a study by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "However, demand for computations and the amount of productivity performed by data centers continues to rise at substantial rates."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud computing slows energy demand, U.S. says

Ten years ago, power usage at data centers was growing at an unsustainable rate, soaring 24% from 2005 to 2010. But a shift to virtualization, cloud computing and improved data center management is reducing energy demand.According to a new study, data center energy use is expected to increase just 4% from 2014 to 2020, despite growing demand for computing resources.Total data center electricity usage in the U.S., which includes powering servers, storage, networking and the infrastructure to support it, was at 70 billion kWh (kilowatt hours) in 2014, representing 1.8% of total U.S. electricity consumption.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Whatever happened to Green IT? Based on current trends, data centers are expected to consume approximately 73 billion kWh in 2020, becoming nearly flat over the next four years. "Growth in data center energy consumption has slowed drastically since the previous decade," according to a study by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "However, demand for computations and the amount of productivity performed by data centers continues to rise at substantial rates."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lightning strikes Outlook in latest Salesforce-Microsoft integration

Microsoft's Outlook.com is used by some 400 million users around the world, so it's only natural that Salesforce wants its own software to play nicely with it. On Tuesday, the CRM giant announced a big step in that direction.The latest in a series of integrations resulting from the two-year-old partnership between Salesforce and Microsoft, Lightning for Outlook is an add-in that promises to let salespeople tailor their inboxes with smooth access to customer relationship management (CRM) data whenever they need it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Backblaze wants to eliminate tape-based storage

Online backup company Backblaze made waves last year when it announced a beta test last year of B2, a new public cloud storage service that would be cheaper than competing offerings from Amazon and Microsoft. B2 has now exited beta with some new features that may make it more appealing to business users. It now has a service level agreement guaranteeing 99.9 percent uptime for all data stored within it, matching the baseline offerings from Amazon Web Services’ S3 and Microsoft Azure’s Blob Storage service. In addition, users can now purchase expanded support from Backblaze, which will give them guaranteed rapid responses to support questions and – at the highest level – access to a phone number for around-the-clock support.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Fully cashless society by 2036, study projects

Londoners are counting the years until cashless technologies take over. A significant three-quarters of the urban dwellers there think bank notes and coins are on the way out.The people there reckon those traditional instruments will be completely gone in 20 years, according to a survey conducted by London & Partners, a mayor-funded publicity company.The study of 2,000 U.K. consumers ties in with a London mayoral push for the city to become a financial technology (fintech) hub.“Financial technology companies will change the nature of money, shake the foundations of central banking and deliver nothing less than a democratic revolution for all who use financial services,” Mark Carney, The Governor of the Bank of England said, in the London & Partners press release for the survey.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

11 ways to fight off ransomware

Reinventing malwareImage by MartialArtsNomad.comJust like evolution from viruses, to botnets and malware families that we’ve seen over the past decade, bad actors continue to find new ways of reinventing old threats. Today, the top trend in modern malware is the proliferation of ransomware. Ransomware has come a long way from the non-encrypting lockscreen FBI scare warnings like Reveton. In 2016, there has been a constant flow of new ransomware families popping up, like Locky, Cerber, Madeba and Maktub, and this is only expected to pick up steam over the summer. Ransomware is very damaging. Nick Bilogorskiy , senior director threat operations at Cyphort, shares seven tips to help fend off ransomware attacks. More tips are provided near the end of the slideshow by Alert Logic. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

8 biggest email pet peeves

8 biggest email pet peevesImage by ThinkstockEmail is both an incredible workplace communication tool and the bane of most knowledge workers' existence. While it can definitely enhance productivity and communication, the written word often has the potential to misconstrue messages, introduce unnecessary stakeholders into the conversation and generally make your work life more stressful. Based on a survey of 2,000 U.S. knowledge workers who use email, corporate intranet provider Igloo Software has compiled a list of the eight biggest email pet peeves. 1. SpamImage by ThinkstockTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 steps for securing the IoT using Aruba ClearPass

Historically the Internet of Things (IoT) has been much more hype than substance. Sure, there have been a few verticals such as oil and gas and mining that have embraced the trend, but those vertical have been active in IoT since it was known as machine to machine (M2M).Now, however, we sit on the precipice of IoT exploding. I’ve seen projections that by 2025, anywhere from 50 billion to 200 billion new devices will be added to the network. Which is right? Doesn’t really matter. The main point is that we’re going to see a lot devices connected over the next 10 years, and businesses need to be ready. + Also on Network World: Experts to IoT makers: Bake in security +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Scale-Out Storage: How Does It Work?

Information Modeling For Networking Interoperability

FBI expansion of surveillance powers meets obstacle

A move in the Senate to provide enhanced surveillance powers to the FBI through the use of National Security Letters met a hurdle Monday after Senator Ron Wyden placed a hold on the 2017 Intelligence Authorization bill over the controversial provisions.Wyden’s hold is a a measure by which a senator or group of senators can prevent a motion from reaching a vote.Tech companies and industry and civil rights groups are opposed to what is seen as a wider push by the Senate to increase the scope of the NSLs, which would allow the government to collect Internet records such as browsing history, email metadata, and location information through administrative orders and without court approval.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FBI expansion of surveillance powers meets obstacle

A move in the Senate to provide enhanced surveillance powers to the FBI through the use of National Security Letters met a hurdle Monday after Senator Ron Wyden placed a hold on the 2017 Intelligence Authorization bill over the controversial provisions.Wyden’s hold is a a measure by which a senator or group of senators can prevent a motion from reaching a vote.Tech companies and industry and civil rights groups are opposed to what is seen as a wider push by the Senate to increase the scope of the NSLs, which would allow the government to collect Internet records such as browsing history, email metadata, and location information through administrative orders and without court approval.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tensions rise over LTE using Wi-Fi channels

The fight over LTE networks sharing channels with Wi-Fi appears to be heating up.The Wi-Fi Alliance says that by September there will be a way to test whether an LTE device can get along with Wi-Fi. But Qualcomm, one of the biggest backers of LTE-U (LTE-Unlicensed), is demanding those tests immediately.The latest disagreement arose after a workshop held last Wednesday, the latest in a series aimed at crafting a test plan for coexistence between the two technologies. That test plan, which is designed for new products that use LTE in unlicensed bands, will be finished and verified by late September, WFA said.That's at least a month later than some earlier forecasts. Test development has taken a long time because it's an unprecedented project and the tests still need to be validated, WFA marketing vice president Kevin Robinson said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tensions rise over LTE using Wi-Fi channels

The fight over LTE networks sharing channels with Wi-Fi appears to be heating up.The Wi-Fi Alliance says that by September there will be a way to test whether an LTE device can get along with Wi-Fi. But Qualcomm, one of the biggest backers of LTE-U (LTE-Unlicensed), is demanding those tests immediately.The latest disagreement arose after a workshop held last Wednesday, the latest in a series aimed at crafting a test plan for coexistence between the two technologies. That test plan, which is designed for new products that use LTE in unlicensed bands, will be finished and verified by late September, WFA said.That's at least a month later than some earlier forecasts. Test development has taken a long time because it's an unprecedented project and the tests still need to be validated, WFA marketing vice president Kevin Robinson said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Manual URL Filtering in Firepower

A few days ago, someone asked me the following two questions–

1. Is a URL filtering license required to manually filter sites in Firepower?
2. Are wildcards supported as filtering criteria?

The short answer to the first question is simply no. There is no requirement for a term-based URL filtering license to do manual filtering. The URL license enables filtering AND logging based on web categories and risks levels. If this license is not installed and attached to a Firepower device, any policy containing those elements cannot be deployed. However, URL filtering rules that contain only manual URLs can be applied and do function properly.

The second question requires a slightly longer answer. With URL filtering, Firepower considers the protocol, fqdn, path and filename. For example, the following is a URL for the article I wrote last Thursday.

http://www.packetu.com/2016/06/23/accessing-asa-cli-firepower-threat-defence/

For filtering purposes, any substring of the URL will match. So any of the following will block the above page.

packetu
www.packetu.com
6
http
w.packetu.com/2016/06/23/accessing

Obviously, care must be taken to make sure a rule isn’t overly broad. Very few people want to just filter “http” or “6”. Also worth noting, the URLs appear to be case desensitized and logged in lower case. Continue reading

Read Arista’s CEO customer letter on Cisco patent infringement verdict

Arista’s President & CEO Jayshree Ullal issued a letter to customers who may have been worried over the impact of last week’s US International Trade Commission ruling that the company had infringed on three Cisco patents.The ITC on June 23rd issued a limited exclusion order and cease and desist order that will forbid Arista from importing products (with these specific infringed features) into the U.S., Ullal wrote.“We recently released a new version of EOS (4.16.6M) that we believe addresses the ITC’s infringement findings in this case. This new version of EOS is now available for download and will be shipped as the default image on all of new products in the near future. Consistent with the standard practice in the ITC, we plan to request regulatory approvals of our new software to clarify that our products fully comply with the ITC’s orders,” Ullal wroteTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Read Arista’s CEO customer letter on Cisco patent infringement verdict

Arista’s President & CEO Jayshree Ullal issued a letter to customers who may have been worried over the impact of last week’s US International Trade Commission ruling that the company had infringed on three Cisco patents.The ITC on June 23rd issued a limited exclusion order and cease and desist order that will forbid Arista from importing products (with these specific infringed features) into the U.S., Ullal wrote.“We recently released a new version of EOS (4.16.6M) that we believe addresses the ITC’s infringement findings in this case. This new version of EOS is now available for download and will be shipped as the default image on all of new products in the near future. Consistent with the standard practice in the ITC, we plan to request regulatory approvals of our new software to clarify that our products fully comply with the ITC’s orders,” Ullal wroteTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Read Arista’s CEO customer letter on Cisco patent infringement verdict

Arista’s President & CEO Jayshree Ullal issued a letter to customers who may have been worried over the impact of last week’s US International Trade Commission ruling that the company had infringed on three Cisco patents.The ITC on June 23rd issued a limited exclusion order and cease and desist order that will forbid Arista from importing products (with these specific infringed features) into the U.S., Ullal wrote.“We recently released a new version of EOS (4.16.6M) that we believe addresses the ITC’s infringement findings in this case. This new version of EOS is now available for download and will be shipped as the default image on all of new products in the near future. Consistent with the standard practice in the ITC, we plan to request regulatory approvals of our new software to clarify that our products fully comply with the ITC’s orders,” Ullal wroteTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

First 5G Radio Spec Will be Available in June 2018, 3GPP says

5G RAN standard will include full control plane capability for the standalone version.