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10 Gig The fastest Ethernet speed yet achieved, although products that claim 10G speeds are not yet shipping, nor is the standard that extends Ethernet to this speed finalized. Ethernet was originally a 10M-bit LAN technology. As it has scaled so wide, 10G has become primarily a service provider technology, though many believe it will be adopted by large enterprises as well.

802.11a wireless LAN standard The IETF's next incarnation of a wireless LAN standard that operates in the 5-GHz unlicensed radio frequency and supports speeds of up to 54M bit/sec. It will face competition in the form of the European HiperLAN II standard, the IETF's own next-generation 2.5-GHz standard 802.11g, and Bluetooth.

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Anti-DDoS A new genre of security software that claims to prevent distributed denial-of-service attacks.

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Collaboration Collaboration is a vague, buzzy term for when people in diverse locations use computers to work together. Whiteboards, which allow people to view and annotate a file simultaneously, are a premier example of collaboration. The term has been extended to mean any method by which a workgroup uses computers to accomplish a task.

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DDoS attacks Distributed denial-of-service attacks are heinous security attacks in which the hacker plants malicious code on numerous, scattered and usually unwitting, servers. Those servers, known as "zombies," then flood a single IP address with packets so it is driven offline, unable to handle the volume.

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E-business applications More than e-commerce, these are core business applications that run over IP networks, frequently the Web.

Enterprise portals Front-end software that gives users a single interface by which they can find and view intranet pages, Internet pages, run legacy applications, view pushed data, and collaborate.

Enum An IETF standard finalized in October 2000 that allows an end user to type a telephone number into a Web browser and access a listing of Internet resources for that number, such as addresses for IP telephony, e-mail or Web sites.

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Gig E Short for Gigabit Ethernet, it refers to Ethernet networks that operate at gigabit speeds or faster. Sometimes it is used interchangeably with optical Ethernet, since optical networking equipment is the foundation for most Gigabit Ethernet services.

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InfiniBand A PC I/O architecture championed by a slate of industry heavyweights, InfiniBand operates at speeds of up to 2.5G bit/sec. Rather than slots on a motherboard, InfiniBand uses host and target adapters. This allows devices to be farther from one another, among other advantages. Version 1.0 of the specification was released about a year ago.

IP storage Not to be left out of the IP revolution, data storage systems can now be built and communicate with this sublimely popular networking protocol.

IP telephony A network, service or software that enables an IP network, particularly the Internet, to transmit voice calls.

IP VPNs An IP virtual private network is a form of VPN that delivers IP services over a public infrastructure, typically the Internet, but also frame relay.

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Managed network services The new catch phrase for outsourcing. It refers to hiring a service provider for any portion of your WAN needs, while also turning over troubleshooting, break/fix and other management tasks.

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Optical Ethernet services High-speed Ethernet services, typically a service provider's metropolitan-area network, achieved by the use of optical networking equipment.

Optical networking The use of light as the underlying medium by which data is transferred from one machine to another.

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P2P A comeback king if ever there was one. Before client/server, server farms and VLANs, PCs shared data directly with one another. Today's peer-to-peer networking can be used to swap music files or for collaboration, but the client-as-server construct remains.

P2P networking A comeback king if ever there was one. Before client/server, server farms and VLANs, PCs shared data directly with one another. Today's peer-to-peer networking can be used to swap music files or for collaboration, but the client-as-server construct remains.

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SANs Short for storage-area networks. As companies become more reliant on computers, they create almost unimaginable amounts of data. A storage-area network clusters storage systems together into its own network segment, which can scale better while improving access to data than when each server is allocated its own finite storage resources.

SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol is the message protocol that allows Web services to talk. Version 1.1 was released in April 2000 by IBM and Microsoft, and is now under the wing of the World Wide Web Consortium's XML Protocol Working Group. In July, the group issued working draft Version 1.2.

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TOE Short for TCP Offload Engines, this technology relieves the server CPU from I/O tasks of transferring data between the disk drive and requesting devices, shifting these tasks to the network adapter or storage controller.

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UDDI Universal Description, Discovery and Integration is a universal repository for locating Web services. Version 2 was released in June; the third and final version is due next year. Creators Microsoft, IBM and Ariba are already running test implementations.

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WAP Wireless Application Protocol is an emerging suite of standards that allows Web sites and applications to be accessed via cell phones. It basically plunks Web sites into their own separate infrastructure parallel to the 'Net. For that reason, some say WAP will die before it ever really lives, but it already works reasonably well and is gaining support.

Web services The middleware that enables and simplifies Web application-to-application connectivity. Web services differ from other forms of middleware in that they are based on XML standards. In theory, these standards will create hub-and-spoke configurations, rather than the so-called spaghetti code that results from point-to-point connectivity.

Wireless Internet access devices Once called personal digital assistants, this faction sports a wireless modem and ISP access. The category includes cell phones that have added data access and personal information management features.

Wireless Internet access services Wireless networks have been around for decades, actually, but as they now tie into the Internet and support new devices, they deserve fresh nomenclature.

Wireless LANs This is perhaps one of the longest-running emerging technologies ever to grace the infrastructure world. Several competing protocols that promise high speed and low cost have made wireless LANs reverberate enough again to be back in the buzz.

WSDL Web Service Description Language is a protocol that allows a Web service to describe what it can do, what messages it accepts, and what response it returns. It was submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium in January.

 

XML Extensible Markup Language is a language that, like HTML, standardizes the way information is presented to be platform independent, yet allows its tags to be customized and defined by the applications using them. It is the cornerstone of e-business application middleware.

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