Want to buy SAP software? There’s an app (store) for that

It’s simple for consumers to get apps whenever the mood strikes them, but in enterprises it’s typically a different story. Borrowing a page from successful consumer app stores, SAP has launched SAP Store, hoping to make software purchases just as easy on the business side.Unveiled Tuesday at Sapphire Now in Orlando, the SAP Store is a key part of the digital-business push SAP has made at the conference. Its goal is to allow enterprise users to buy software from SAP without the need for a purchase order, invoice or lengthy request-for-proposal process.Built on SAP’s own Hybris Commerce Suite and available across devices, the store offers a one-click online agreement and transparent pricing. Individuals can configure their new applications—usually in a few hours or less, SAP says—without needing help from their IT department or outside consultants.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Could IPv6 Drown My Wireless Network?

IPv6WiFi

By now, the transition to adopt IPv6 networks is in full swing. Registrars are running out of prefixes and new users overseas are getting v6-only allocations for new circuits. Mobile providers are going v6-only and transition mechanisms are in place to ease the migration. You can hear about some of these topics in this recent roundtable recorded at Interop last week:

One of the converstaions that I had with Ed Horley (@EHorley) during Interop opened my eyes to another problem that we will soon be facing with IPv6 and legacy technology. Only this time, it’s not because of a numbering scheme. It’s because of old hardware.

Rate Limited

Technology always marches on. Things that seemed magical to us just five years ago are now antiquated and slow. That’s the problem with the original 802.11 specification. It supported wireless data rates at a paltry 1 Mbps and 2 Mbps. When 802.11b was released, it raised the rates to 5.5 Mbps and 11 Mbps. Those faster data rates, combined with a larger coverage area, helped 802.11b become commercially successful.

Now, we have 802.11n with data rates in the hundreds of Mbps. We also have 802. Continue reading

Anticipating IoT traffic growth? Why a colo, not the cloud, might be in your future

The Internet of Things is coming, and drastic traffic growth is going to blow your network sky-high. Should you scale up your on-premises data center? No. Should you move to the cloud? No. The best strategy, according to a speaker at the Interop 2015 conference, is to move your servers, applications, and data into your own servers in a top-tier colocation facility.That’s not the advice you’d expect to hear in 2015, when the industry message is relentlessly cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud – and when the Interop expert speaker, Jason Mendenhall, carries the business card title of Executive Vice President, Cloud. However, when you realize that Mr. Mendenhall works for Switch’s massive 1.6 million square foot colocation center in Las Vegas, his bias toward colos becomes clear.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft said to be considering a bid for Salesforce

Less than a week after rumors surfaced that Salesforce.com is fielding buyout offers, Microsoft is reportedly considering throwing its hat in the ring.Although Microsoft isn’t in talks with Salesforce and a deal isn’t imminent, Microsoft is evaluating making a bid for the cloud CRM provider after it was approached by another potential buyer, Bloomberg reported Tuesday afternoon.Salesforce is working with two investment banks to decide how to respond to acquisition offers, and its options range from rejecting all bids to working out a deal, according to Bloomberg, whose information comes from anonymous sources.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lessons from Tax Day 2015: How the tax sites fared

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Every April millions upon millions of taxpayers rush to file state and federal taxes before the 15th, and as with every other aspect of day-to-day life, filing taxes has become digital. The IRS website alone receives three to four times as much traffic in early spring as it does in the off-season, and this gigantic spike is indicative of what most tax-related websites experience at this time of year.

+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Yikes: 10,000 IRS impersonation scam calls are placed every week  +

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lawmakers want to protect the online freedom to Yelp

If the waiter was rude, your hotel room dirty or the plumber sloppy, you should be able to say so online without fear of getting slapped with a lawsuit.So said a group of lawmakers who want to make it illegal for U.S. businesses to use contracts to preemptively muzzle customers so they can’t post negative reviews.Four members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced legislation last week that would render non-disparagement clauses in consumer contracts unenforceable. The bill, the Consumer Review Freedom Act, comes after consumer uproar when geek toy company KlearGear.com tried to charge a Utah couple a US$3,500 fee for a negative review they wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA: The fine art of space “traffic” control around Mars

Around Mars the space traffic really isn’t all that bad – five spacecraft vying for hundreds of miles or open cosmos around the planet – but serious space traffic control is still necessary to prevent a collision.NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) which controls the airspace around the red planet this week said it implemented formal collision-avoidance technology that will keep the current and future orbiters a safe distance from each other and warn the scientists if two orbiters approach each other too closely.+More on Network World: Graphene is hot, hot, hot+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco packing lots into new Catalyst Ethernet switch

Cisco next month will unveil an Ethernet switch designed for campus aggregation but in a space saving form factor that’s smaller than previous models.The Catalyst 6840-X is a 2RU device featuring up to 40 10G Ethernet ports and two 40G uplinks. It will include all of the software feature sets of the Catalyst 6800 line, which was introduced two years ago, and the 12+-year-old Catalyst 6500. The Catalyst 6840-X comes in four configurations: 16x10G, 32x10G, 24x10G with two 40G uplinks, and 40x10G with two 40G uplinks. All switches are Layer 2/3 IPv4/v6 devices with MPLS, VPLS, 256K IPv4 routes, 512K NetFlow flows, large buffers, TrustSec Security Group Tags, MACSec, LISP and support for Catalyst 6800 Instant Access switch clients.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco packing lots into new Catalyst Ethernet switch

Cisco next month will unveil an Ethernet switch designed for campus aggregation but in a space saving form factor that’s smaller than previous models.The Catalyst 6840-X is a 2RU device featuring up to 40 10G Ethernet ports and two 40G uplinks. It will include all of the software feature sets of the Catalyst 6800 line, which was introduced two years ago, and the 12+-year-old Catalyst 6500. The Catalyst 6840-X comes in four configurations: 16x10G, 32x10G, 24x10G with two 40G uplinks, and 40x10G with two 40G uplinks. All switches are Layer 2/3 IPv4/v6 devices with MPLS, VPLS, 256K IPv4 routes, 512K NetFlow flows, large buffers, TrustSec Security Group Tags, MACSec, LISP and support for Catalyst 6800 Instant Access switch clients.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EMC hopes to extend ViPR Controller’s reach with open-source release

EMC will release its ViPR Controller storage automation and control software as an open-source project, letting third parties develop their own services and applications on top of it and possibly make ViPR work with more parts of enterprise storage environments.The open-source release, called Project CoprHD, is set to go up on GitHub next month. It will be licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 so vendors, developers and others can contribute to the code. Project CoprHD will have essentially all the capabilities of ViPR Controller, which EMC will continue to sell in a commercial version that includes service and support.ViPR Controller is intended to turn multiple storage systems from EMC and other vendors into a single virtual pool and automate the provisioning of data capacity to applications based on policies. Among other things, it can work with most storage platforms from EMC, plus major hardware and software products from several other vendors, including HP, NetApp, HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) and Microsoft, according to EMC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sprint hangs on to third-largest carrier position ahead of T-Mobile

Sprint held on -- barely -- as the nation's third-largest carrier in the first quarter of 2015, with T-Mobile continuing in fourth place.Sprint said today it had 57.1 million total connections to its network, compared to 56.8 million for T-Mobile, as reported last week.T-Mobile was expected to edge ahead of Sprint, given T-Mobile's aggressive growth in the past year.Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure said in a conference call that T-Mobile CEO John Legere had spoken "prematurely" in statements he made last week about T-Mobile's improvement compared to Sprint.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 12 most powerful Internet of Things companies Claure called out Sprint's addition of 1.2 million net customer in the quarter, up from 967,000 in the prior quarter, and net losses of 383,000 in the same quarter in 2014. He said those additions were the highest in nearly three years, while churn (losses) among postpaid customers dropped to 1.84% and network performance improved, "all of which will position the company for profitable growth."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel’s 18-core Xeon chips tuned for machine learning, analytics

Smaller servers are taking over data centers, but Intel believes the future is also bright for powerful big-iron servers, thanks to companies’ embrace of machine learning, which requires a lot of horsepower to process complex algorithms and large data sets.With its new top-line Xeon E7 v3 server chips based on the Haswell microarchitecture, Intel hopes to capitalize on the demand for this type of server. With up to 18 CPU cores, the chips are Intel’s fastest, and designed for databases, ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems and analytics related to machine learning.Complex machine learning models can’t be distributed over the cloud or a set of smaller hyperscale servers in a data center. Instead, a more powerful cluster of servers is needed to run deep-learning systems, where the larger number of cores could power more precise analysis of oceans of data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

French lawmakers take first step toward gathering all communications metadata

French lawmakers have taken a first step toward allowing real-time surveillance of Internet and mobile phone use in France.Following attacks on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a supermarket in Paris in January, the government rushed out a bill that will allow French intelligence services to collect communications metadata on the entire country’s phone calls and Internet traffic, in some cases installing their own equipment on operators’ networks. On Tuesday, the French National Assembly approved the bill by 438 votes to 86.The proposed surveillance measures have encountered opposition from many quarters: Internet service providers, civil liberties groups, and even an association of motorcyclists, concerned about the potential for government monitoring of lobby groups.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

French lawmakers take first step toward gathering all communications metadata

French lawmakers have taken a first step toward allowing real-time surveillance of Internet and mobile phone use in France.Following attacks on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a supermarket in Paris in January, the government rushed out a bill that will allow French intelligence services to collect communications metadata on the entire country’s phone calls and Internet traffic, in some cases installing their own equipment on operators’ networks. On Tuesday, the French National Assembly approved the bill by 438 votes to 86.The proposed surveillance measures have encountered opposition from many quarters: Internet service providers, civil liberties groups, and even an association of motorcyclists, concerned about the potential for government monitoring of lobby groups.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Understanding NPV: Part 1 of a 2-part Series

N-Port Virtualization (NPV), and N-port ID Virtualization (NPIV) have been around for quite some time now. Enhancements have been made to the traditional NPV and NPIV implementations, making it more convenient for unified fabric topologies (which is what we will be discussing today). This blog, part 1 in a 2-part series, will be discussing the ‘fcoe-npv’ implementation of NPV/NPIV, while the next blog will be focused on the traditional implementation.

NPV and NPIV were created as a method in which we could add additional switches (i.e. port density), to a given fabric, without consuming additional domain-id’s, or adding to the administrative burden of a growing SAN (managing zoning, domain-id’s, principle switch elections, FSPF routing, etc…). A lot of this concern stemmed from the fact that the Fibre Channel standard limits us to 239 usable domain id’s. Essentially 8-bits, or the most significant byte in the Fibre Channel ID (FCID), is reserved for this domain-id. This byte is what is used within FSPF protocol to route traffic throughout a Fibre Channel fabric. While this gives us 256 addresses, only 239 are usable, as some are reserved. Beyond this, many vendors restrict us too a much smaller number of domain-id’s on Continue reading

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