I never really believed the rumors about HP buying Brocade. No disrespect to Brocade, I just thought that HP's interest was really in Ethernet and IP networking and not Fibre Channel.
Will another company acquire Brocade? I can't think of any obvious takers. The financial analyst rumor that Juniper would buy Brocade were ridiculous and obviously spread by someone who doesn't know Juniper. IBM and Dell? I don't think either company is gung-ho to get back into the networking game. Besides, both companies already have a Brocade OEM relationship in place.
Layer 8 Extra: 15 genius algorithms that aren't boring
Researchers at IBM say they have created smart software that that translates text between English and 11 other languages including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Arabic. Read more
Video conference users have for the most part been free of the hassles of trying to figure out how to interoperate products from different vendors, thanks to early and widespread adoption of H.323 signaling protocols and H.261 and H.264 video encapsulation, both sets of protocols well defined by the ITU. Read more
With this year being the operating system's 40th anniversary, UNIX steward organization The Open Group is conducting a photo contest featuring replicas of the iconic UNIX "Live Free or Die" license plate.
From the press release: Read more
I was in New York last Wednesday, 11/18 for a one-day whirlwind tour of the Interop show floor. Sorry to say I did not have time to attend the keynote presentations, but my schedule only afforded enough time to catch up with the twenty or so management vendors who were exhibiting. Little did I know that I would be forced to live the day as one of the unfortunate - the "have-nots" - the "Internet unconnecteds"... Read more
Google's laying it all out on the table with Chrome OS. My editor posted an excellent article about Chrome OS and we're already expecting a Chrome OS update from Google. Despite the distraction of a bank robbery and shooting in our city last week, I managed to dig my paws into Chrome OS to try and really understand what Google's up to. Read more
Another interesting question came up in a recent SQL Server Business Intelligence class: "Can I perform a UNION in MDX similar to SQL?". There is a UNION operator but it's not quite the same, so we had to think outside of the box for this one...
The question came from a student who was trying to switch a complex report from running against the relational Data Warehouse to produce the same results against the multi-dimensional cube. Read more
After speaking at a recent event of IT executives, one asked how IT staffs can get senior management to consider implementing telecommuting. Common at more conservative, established companies, it’s tough to convince the powers that be that telecommuting will provide value to the company.
We have seen this problem with a number of companies, and there are a few ways to get the senior executives to realize a virtual, anytime, anywhere workplace is not only the way of the future, it’s already here and successfully implemented at many companies—and indeed, their competitors. Read more
Half of companies are deploying or planning to evaluating telepresence. Typical deployments are limited; only a handful of rooms located in large office locations. But with the mean price of a room deployment hovering around $250,000, plus on-going costs for bandwidth and management, how can organizations justify such an expense, especially in light of shrinking or flat IT budgets? The answer is simply that executives perceive a great deal of value in meeting via telepresence versus room-based, desktop, or audio conferences. Read more
We wrapped up the Mobile Business Conference at Interop last week with three excellent sessions from Lisa Phifer on mobile management, both technical and operational. Among many other topics, Lisa mentioned the concept of personal liability, wherein employees use their personal cell phones for company business. This is already a common phenomenon, I know, but there are a good number of operational, practical, and financial concerns inherent here. Read more
Android is a free and open platform. Device manufacturers can take the platform and put it on their own devices. Software developers can write applications for Android without concern about being blocked from publishing as they can always choose to self-distribute their applications. However, this freedom comes as a price. A price the end-users often end up paying: a fragmented platform with a fragmented market. Read more
Get the real scoop of what Cisco's new term borderless networks is all about, learn how to use some of the mainstream hacking tools, and understand how you can use what you probably already have to better defend your network. Cisco's techwise TV show just released a new video that I thought was worth mentioning. Here is their description; "The idea was to really narrow down the control points that still remain when your network is no longer identified by a physical entity or easily defined presence if you will. Read more
So another set of common questions I get is “Do I need to run Outlook 2010 after I migrate to Exchange 2010?” or “What don’t I get if I’m still on Outlook 2007 in an Exchange 2010 environment” or “Can I still use Outlook 2003 against Exchange 2010?” or “Which Outlook 2010 features work against an old Exchange 2003/2007 Environment?” Here are answers to these and Read more
An interesting question came up in a recent class regarding testing SSIS in Visual Studio: "How can we capture the information in the Progress tab after a debug session?". My immediate reaction was to implement package logging but the answer lay elsewhere... Read more
I just returned from the 13th annual KM World conference this week and listened to a really interesting keynote from Andrew McAfee (the "king of Enterprise 2.0" according to KM guru Tom Davenport). McAfee summed up his talk with a list of basically how to get it Enterprise 2.0 wrong: Read more
In the jostling to grab the headlines for next-gen 100Gbps Ethernet, Juniper this week unveiled its second offering: a 10x10G Ethernet physical interface card (PIC) for its T1600 core router. Read more
Google's IPv6 development team has built support for next-generation Internet standards into the Chrome operating system and the Android platform for mobile devices. Now the team has set its sights on YouTube, which is its top priority. Read more
In January 2008, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) instituted a security initiative called the Federal Desktop Core Configuration or FDCC. FDCC is comprised of about 300 settings on Windows PCs. The objective is to create a standard federal desktop configuration that eases operations and improves security. All Federal agencies were required to implement FDCC settings by February 4, 2008.
Two more “gotchas” for SIP trunking adoption: Lack of usable fax services and E-911. Fax over IP has always been the thorn in the side of VOIP. While standards such as the International Telecommunications Union T.38 enable fax over IP between IP enabled fax machines and PSTN gateways, support for fax has not yet materialized in the SIP trunking market. Even though fax volumes continue to decline, fax is still a key requirement for contracts. Read more
Cisco's recent introduction of WebEx Mail, a Software-as-a-Service offering meant to replace on-premise Microsoft Exchange servers highlights the continued momentum behind hosted applications to reduce operating costs and complexity. Sixty percent of companies are adopting some form of SaaS, with customer resource management leading the way. IT leaders are also increasingly looking at SaaS-based offerings for computing platforms, disaster recovery, application performance and management, and security and data leak prevention. Read more
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