Arista violated 3 Cisco patents: ITC

The International Trade Commission has made an initial determination that Arista Networks infringed on three Cisco patents in its switches, the latest development in a 13-month-old suit.The ITC said Arista violated patents associated with a central database for managing configuration data (SysDB) and private VLANs. As part of its 2014 suit alleging patent and copyright infringement, Cisco sought an injunction on Arista product from the ITC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Protecting IP or Market Share?

It's tough times on Tasman Drive.  Struggling to apply old technology to the new world of cloud computing, Cisco is potentially facing the largest loss of data center market share in its history.  We can understand why Cisco would take the battle from the marketplace to the courtroom.  What surprises us is the length that Cisco has gone to misrepresent our actions and the nature of the litigation in order to justify their assault.

Q&A: As prices fall, flash memory is eating the world

Western Digital in October announced plans to acquire SanDisk for some $19 billion in a deal that -- once finalized -- will marry leaders in the traditional hard drive and the emerging flash memory markets. Sumit Sadana, SanDisk's chief strategy officer and general manager of its Enterprise Solutions unit, spoke recently with IDG Chief Content Officer John Gallant to share insights on the merger and to explore the evolving role of flash in corporate data centers. What continues to hold enterprise back with flash? Just the price perception issue?Is the cloud a threat to your consumer device business? More and more, consumers use the cloud for photos or other things that they're saving. Is it such that the better the cloud opportunities get, the weaker the consumer opportunity gets?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Public Cloud Is a ‘Natural’ for Us, Says Google CEO

Google (Alphabet) saw a strong Q4.

Network Break 72: Arista Vs. Cisco; Slack Backlash

On today's Network Break we dig into Arista's antitrust lawsuit against Cisco, debate about chat use and abuse, evaluate security advice from the NSA, diagnose Wall Street's Apple freakout, and more!

The post Network Break 72: Arista Vs. Cisco; Slack Backlash appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Network Break 72: Arista Vs. Cisco; Slack Backlash

On today's Network Break we dig into Arista's antitrust lawsuit against Cisco, debate about chat use and abuse, evaluate security advice from the NSA, diagnose Wall Street's Apple freakout, and more!

The post Network Break 72: Arista Vs. Cisco; Slack Backlash appeared first on Packet Pushers.

IDG Contributor Network: Next frontier: Aquatic IoT

Underwater communications networks are excruciatingly slow, and that's hampering oil and gas exploration and scuba communications, among other businesses.The communications technology needs upgrading to more closely match high-speed, through-air radio networks, say experts.One answer may be to adapt software-defined radios and couple them with special underwater acoustic modems, according to electrical engineers at the University of Buffalo.Radio too slow Sound-waves—like those used by whales and dolphins—as opposed to radio-waves, are the best media for communicating underwater, the scientists say.Traditional radio methods don't work properly. The problem is that radio doesn't function well underwater. Commercial underwater modems are slow, and voice solutions are limited by distance and clarity, the scientists say.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Featured NetCracker Blog: Which Virtualization Standard is Right for You?

In this featured NetCracker article, a light is shone on the standards and protocols network operators must undertake to deliver new virtualized services.

Worth Reading: Disaggregation at LinkedIn

Disaggregation has been on the top of my mind a good bit recently, partially because of our work at LinkedIn around this topic. Zaid has just posted a piece on the LinkedIn Engineering Blog about Project Falco, which is our internal disaggregation project for our data centers. Just a little taste to convince you to jump over there and read this one, because I think this sort of thing will have a major impact in the networking industry over the next three to five years.

Pigeon is a 3.2Tbps switching platform that can be used as a leaf or spine switch. Pigeon is our first foray into active switch software development. We are not venturing into developing our own switch because we aspire to become experts in the switching and routing space, but because we want control of our destiny. We continue to be supportive of our commercial vendors and work with them in a decoupling model.

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Comcast targets first markets it will offer gigabit over copper cable service

Comcast announced today that Atlanta and Nashville would be its first two markets to offer DOCSIS 3.1 technology, in “early 2016,” and that Chicago, Detroit and Miami would join them in the second half of the year.DOCSIS 3.1 is a new wired cable Internet standard, which gives Comcast the ability to offer gigabit speeds over existing copper cable. The latest version of the standard uses smaller subcarrier channels that use considerably less bandwidth than those of DOCSIS 3.0, bonding those subchannels together for greater efficiency. The company said that it tested the technology last month in its home market of Philadelphia.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: 'Big bets' cost Google parent Alphabet $3.6 billion in losses last year + Microsoft starts recommended update roll-out for Windows 10To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDN shifts from configuration to analytics

Two SDN vendors have enhanced their offerings to improve visibility into virtual networks.Midokura this week unveiled an upgrade of its Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) network virtualization software to provide visibility into encapsulated traffic in OpenStack clouds. And Pluribus Networks rolled out software designed to provide an operational view of the data center network for insight into application performance and troubleshooting, and enhancing forensic analysis and security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security flaws found in Fisher-Price smart teddy bear and kid’s GPS tracker watch

The Internet of Things increasingly includes “smart toys,” but no parent knowingly purchases a toy for their child that potentially risks the safety and privacy of their family. Those risks are caused by security flaws found in the Internet-connected toys. Unlike “dumb” toys, hackers could exploit “smart” toy vulnerabilities and potentially harvest a child’s name, birthdate, location and more.This time, Rapid7 revealed security flaws in Fisher-Price’s Smart Toy, an Internet-connected stuffed bear, and in the hereO GPS watch, a wearable location-tracking device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA’s big rocket will carry 13 cool tiny satellites

NASA today said the first voyage of its heavy-lift rocket will include 13 tiny satellites or cubesats that will conduct a variety of experiments from taking a closer look at the moon to evaluating space weather.NASA’s rocket – the Space Launch System (SLS) – along with an unmanned Orion spacecraft are expected to launch in 2018. The heart of the mission is to test the rockets but also to evaluate the Orion spacecraft which is the first spacecraft built for astronauts destined for deep space since NASA’s Apollo missions and ultimately is destined for deep space travel.More on Network World: Quick look: NASA Orion’s critical test missionTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

We Are Number Two!

In my old IT life I once took a meeting with a networking company. They were trying to sell me on their hardware and get me to partner with them as a reseller. They were telling me how they were the number two switching vendor in the world by port count. I thought that was a pretty bold claim, especially when I didn’t remember seeing their switches at any of my deployments. When I challenged this assertion, I was told, “Well, we’re really big in Europe.” Before I could stop my mouth from working, I sarcastically replied, “So is David Hasselhoff.” Needless to say, we didn’t take this vendor on as a partner.

I tell this story often when I go to conferences and it gets laughs. As I think more and more about it the thought dawns on me that I have never really met the third best networking vendor in the market. We all know who number one is right now. Cisco has a huge market share and even though it has eroded somewhat in the past few years they still have a comfortable lead on their competitors. The step down into the next tier of Continue reading

EMC Partners With Versa for VNF Managed Services

This is EMC’s third NFV partnership is so many weeks.

Worth Reading: What They’re Not Telling You About Global Deduplication

When it comes to endpoint backup, is global deduplication a valuable differentiator? Not if data security and recovery are your primary objectives. Backup vendors that promote global deduplication say it minimizes the amount of data that must be stored and provides faster upload speeds. What they don’t say is how data security and recovery are sacrificed to achieve these “benefits.” -via csa

The post Worth Reading: What They’re Not Telling You About Global Deduplication appeared first on 'net work.

KulCloud DemoFriday Q&A + Video: PRISM – Scale Up Your OpenStack Cloud with Scale Out On-Demand Network Disaggregation

KulCloud's Dipjyoti Saikia and Nikhil Malik discussed the primary use cases where PRISM can play a defining role. Read the full Q&A here!

Fitness trackers are leaking lots of your data, study finds

Some of the more popular sports wearables don't just let you track your fitness, they let other people track you.That's what Canadian researchers found when they studied fitness-tracking devices from eight manufacturers, along with their companion mobile apps.All the devices studied except for the Apple Watch transmitted a persistent, unique Bluetooth identifier, allowing them to be tracked by the beacons increasingly being used by retail stores and shopping malls to recognize and profile their customers.The revealing devices, the Basis Peak, Fitbit Charge HR, Garmin Vivosmart, Jawbone Up 2, Mio Fuse, Withings Pulse O2 and Xiaomi Mi Band, all make it possible for their wearers to be tracked using Bluetooth even when the device is not paired with or connected to a smartphone, the researchers said. Only the Apple device used a feature of the Bluetooth LE standard to generate changing MAC addresses to prevent tracking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Technology ‘net 0x1339ECA: 2015 Measured and Plumbed

One of the great things about APNIC is the amount of information about the state of the Internet Geoff Huston puts out each year. He’s recently posted two studies on the state of BGP and the state of IPv4 addresses as of 2015; they’re both well worth reading in full, but here are several key takeaways of particular interest.

BGP in 2015
Addressing in 2015

First, the size of the global (DFZ) table has crossed 512,000 routes. While the actual table size varies by your view of the network (BGP is a path vector protocol, which has many of the same attributes as a distance-vector protocol, including multiple views of the network), this is the first time the route view servers have actually crossed that number. Why is 512,000 a magic number? If there are 512,000 routes, there are likely 512,000 FIB entries (unless there’s some sort of FIB compression involved), and there are a number of older boxes that cannot support 512,000 routes in their FIB.

Second, the DFZ has been growing at a rate of about 7%-8% per year for a number of years. Given the number of new devices being added to the Internet, how can this Continue reading

Google fixes critical Wi-Fi and media-processing flaws in Android

Google has patched thirteen new vulnerabilities in Android, two of which could allow attackers to take control of Android devices located on the same Wi-Fi network, if they have Broadcom chips.The two critical vulnerabilities are located in the Broadcom Wi-Fi driver and can be exploited by sending specially crafted wireless control packets to the affected devices. These messages could corrupt the kernel's memory and allow for the execution of arbitrary code in the kernel -- the highest privileged area of the operating system.These flaws are critical because the attack doesn't require any user interaction, can be exploited remotely and can lead to a complete device compromise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here