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Category Archives for "Networking"

Here comes bare metal and NFV for the enterprise

Two hardware vendors this week unveiled products to bring commodity switching and network functions virtualization (NFV) to enterprises through service providers.Bare metal switch supplier Pica8 this week rolled out a Power-over-Ethernet switches to be sold into enterprises by service providers as managed service customer premises equipment (CPE). And Ciena announced availability of the 3938vi Service Virtualization Switch, an Ethernet CPE platform with virtualized network function (VNF) integration. Pica8 The offerings address a desire by service providers, like AT&T, to sell bare metal white box switches into the customer premises for cost, flexibility, performance and SDN programmability advantages, and to offer service as VNFs on that hardware. Pica8 says this market – bare metal as CPE – is six months old and that this week’s PoE offerings are merely the latest in an existing CPE portfolio to onboard enterprises to the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IMT-2020 is the future of mobile — but you can keep calling it 5G

There’s finally something real to 5G: a name.The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has decided to call the next-generation cellular system IMT-2020. That name may have a hard time catching up with “5G,” a tag that’s been applied to just about every future mobile technology in the works: Googling “5G mobile” brings up 12.9 million results. But it’s a clear sign of progress toward the concrete. Where there’s a bureaucratic-sounding numeric acronym, can a formal standard be far behind?The ITU now has an answer to that question, too. It’s set a timeline that calls for the standard to be finished in 2020. Hence the name, which follows in the footsteps of IMT-2000 (3G) and IMT-Advanced (4G).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US, UK spies said to attack security software

Spies working for the U.S. National Security Agency and its British counterpart found anti-virus and security software a hindrance to their intelligence gathering processes, and worked to thwart it, according to a report Monday in The Intercept.The efforts, revealed through documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, focused on vendors including Moscow-based security software developer Kaspersky Labs, which claims over 400 million customers worldwide.The NSA and the U.K.-based Government Communications Headquarters monitored web and email traffic between Kasperksy’s software and its servers, the report said, and obtained sensitive customer information in the process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Privacy group complains about Uber data collection

Uber Technologies’ new data collection policy, allowing the ride-hailing company to access a user’s location even when the smartphone app is not actively in use, violates the privacy rights and personal safety of U.S. customers, according to a complaint filed Monday by a privacy group.With upcoming changes to its privacy policy, Uber “will claim the right to collect personal contact information and detailed location data of American consumers, even when they are not using the service,” the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote in a complaint to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.EPIC also objected to Uber’s plans to access the information from users’ phones’ address books and send out promotional materials to contacts listed there.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cavium wins ‘SDN Idol’ award at Open Networking Summit 2015

This week the fifth Open Networking Summit was held in Santa Clara, the heart of Silicon Valley. As in years past, the event held an "SDN Idol" competition where several vendors entered an SDN-related product for a set of judges to vote on to create a set of finalists. The four finalists then demonstrated their entries at the event and a final winner was chosen.In addition to myself, the judges included Jim Smith, GM of Mohr Davidow Ventures, Tom Anschutz, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff for AT&T, and Geng Lin, CTO of Corporate Networks for Google. The judging criteria involved understanding the business value, technology value, and differentiation against the competition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Twitter looking for a ‘full-time’ CEO, deflating Dorsey’s candidacy

A week and a half after Dick Costolo announced that he would be stepping down from the CEO role at Twitter, the company’s board of directors has sent a shot across the bow of one of the expected front-runner candidates to take the social network’s top job.The social micro-blogging company’s search committee will only consider CEO candidates “who are in a position to make a full-time commitment to Twitter,” the board said.That would seem to rule out Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder who currently works as the CEO of Square and will be filling in as interim CEO of Twitter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware and Docker Deliver Greater Speeds through the Right Controls

This post was co-authored by Guido Appenzeller, CTSO of Networking and Security (@appenz), and Scott Lowe, Engineering DockerArchitect, Networking and Security Business Unit (@scott_lowe)

In today’s business environment, companies are being asked to go faster than ever before: faster time to market, faster response to customers, faster reactions to market shifts. Having a good idea isn’t enough; companies not only need to have a good idea, but they need get it to market fast, and quickly iterate on improvements to that idea. Speed is a competitive advantage.

The phenomenal success of the open source Docker project is a reflection of the pressure on companies to go faster. Companies across all industries have recognized that successful development teams can be a competitive differentiator. However, developers needed a way to simplify and accelerate the development and deployment of applications and code, and found Docker was one way to help accomplish that. Docker has won a place in the hearts and minds of many developers for its ability to help simplify the development and deployment of many different types of applications.

At the same time, companies face a bewildering array of security threats. Security and compliance remain as important as Continue reading

NASA: “Wild” technology will transform aviation

It’s not often you see a button-down organization like NASA call something “wild” but that’s what the space agency is calling six concepts – ranging from adding artificial intelligence to unmanned aircraft to using electricity for propulsion -- it has picked to study to revolutionize the aviation world.+More on Network World: Hot stuff: The coolest drones+The project, known as Convergent Aeronautics Solutions (CAS) is looking to develop what NASA called “something truly historic – the buzzword is ‘transformative’ – and help crack tomorrow's biggest challenges in aviation related to fuel use, the environment, and managing global growth in air traffic.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network Break 41

Take a Network Break! Grab a coffee, a doughnut and then join us for an analysis of the latest IT news, vendor moves and new product announcements. We’ll separate the signal from the noise–or at least make some noise of our own. Sponsor: Sonus Networks This week’s show was sponsored by Sonus Networks. Sonus wants […]

The post Network Break 41 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Osaka, Japan: CloudFlare’s 35th data center

Move over Jurassic World, the long awaited sequel to our Tokyo deployment is here. Our Osaka data center is our 2nd in Japan, 5th in Asia (following deployments in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, and Seoul), and 35th globally. This latest deployment serves not only Osaka, Japan's second largest city, but also Nagoya, the 3rd largest, and the entire Keihanshin metropolitan area including Kyoto and Kobe. This means faster application delivery to the area's 30 million inhabitants, and full redundancy of traffic with our Tokyo facility. CloudFlare is now mere milliseconds away from all 110 million Internet users in Japan.

The Internet in Asia

Even though Asia is home to many of the most technologically advanced nations in the world, the delivery of Internet traffic across the region is hardly seamless. Many of the incumbent telecommunications providers in the region (e.g. NTT, Tata, PCCW, Hinet, Singtel, among many others) do not interconnect with one another locally. This is another way of saying that traffic is routed poorly in the region. Traffic sent from one network in Japan, for example, may have to pass through an entirely different country or, in some instances, even the United States, Continue reading

Even among poor, mobile Web is big in Africa

Eighty-seven million people in Nigeria browse the Internet on mobile phones, according to figures from the country’s telecom regulator that confirm that even among low-income people, the mobile Web is big in Africa.Nigeria is Africa’s largest telecom market by investment and subscription, followed by South Africa and Kenya. A just-released report from the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) on April Internet usage backs up findings from other sources showing that mobile Web use is widespread, including for people in low-income households, many of them living below the poverty line.About 25 percent of the people who use mobile phones to browse the Web in Nigeria, more than 22 million users, are from low-income households, according to an NCC official.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Researchers: Graphene could help increase chip speed by 30%

Here's another use for graphene—wrap transistor wires with it and boost computer chip speeds.Scientists have discovered that replacing tantalum nitride, the existing wire sheathing material between transistors, with graphene allows chips to exchange data faster.It's yet another use for this super-material. I've written about graphene before in a post titled "Materials breakthrough promises smaller chips."Thin graphite material If you're unfamiliar with this breakthrough material, graphene is the world's most conductive substance. It's better than copper.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Researchers: Graphene could help increase chip speed by 30%

Here's another use for graphene—wrap transistor wires with it and boost computer chip speeds.Scientists have discovered that replacing tantalum nitride, the existing wire sheathing material between transistors, with graphene allows chips to exchange data faster.It's yet another use for this super-material. I've written about graphene before in a post titled "Materials breakthrough promises smaller chips."Thin graphite material If you're unfamiliar with this breakthrough material, graphene is the world's most conductive substance. It's better than copper.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A case for compromise on Uber’s ‘contractor’ legal dispute

Uber ought to be on top of the world. The "ride-sharing" app has already raised more than $5 billion and is worth an estimated $50 billion. Just as important, it has reached the stage of ubiquity where people use its name as a verb: "Forget driving, we'll just Uber over to the event."And yet, a dark cloud is shadowing Uber's future, along with that of many other companies riding the wave of the so-called "sharing economy." Many of those companies' business models are built around workers classified as contractors, not employees, but it seems increasingly clear that no matter how convenient for Uber and its ilk, that classification is unlikely to stand up to judicial scrutiny. At least not without major changes in the law and the way these sharing-economy companies do business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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