Dell
Cisco a no show in 40G Ethernet market report
Market research firm Dell'Oro Group recently began tracking the 40G Ethernet market as 10G takes hold and grows, necessitating 40G uplinks, aggregation switches and core modules. And the market leaders are IBM and Extreme Networks. Read more
Security Market Boom?
If you pick up a copy of your local newspaper, you are likely to become depressed. There are protests like "Occupy Wall Street" going on throughout the U.S. as unemployment hovers around 9% nationally and is over 13% in some states like Nevada. Meanwhile, European powers are knee-deep in debt as they seek to bailout Greece and prepare for future problems in Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Read more
Cisco's End-to-End Data Center Fabric Announcement
In the past, Cisco trickled out new product announcements so as not to water down the impact of each component. Not anymore. This week, Cisco announced a multitude of new products and functionality across the Nexus product line.
From my perspective, Cisco's announcement should get a lot of attention from competitors and, more importantly, customers because: Read more
Enterasys OneFabric Makes Sense
Just what is a "network fabric?" Generally, the term is used to describe a low-latency, loss-less, converged, flat network architecture for data centers. That said, the term has been co-opted by marketing types so its hard to know what "network fabric" means anymore. Read more
Data Center Networking Demystified
As part of my job as an analyst, I talk to a lot of IT, networking, and security professionals. Based upon these conversations, I have no doubt that data center networking is going through a profound transition. Why? Simply stated, the old model of static inflexible physical networks can't keep up with new requirements like rapid provisioning, server virtualization mobility, low-latency, and massive scale. Read more
Nebula provides a "cloud-in-a-box"
Under the recently-completed Vivek Kundra era, the U.S. federal government became an aggressive proponent of cloud computing. Much of this was pure folly leading to wasteful IT assessments and check-box planning, but the feds did come up with a few model cloud computing projects. One of these, NASA Nebula, was a very successful cloud computing platform built on Open Source and used to support research and scientific computing requirements at NASA Ames. Read more
I Was Wrong About Self-Encrypting Hard Drives
A few years ago, the EVP of marketing at EMC gave me some grief about analyst predictions. He said something like, "if I bet on your predictions and you're incorrect, I spend millions of dollars on the wrong stuff and lose my job. All you have to do is change your PowerPoint slides and move on."
He was right. We analysts are always forecasting what will happen in 3-5 years but its rare that anyone looks back at these predictions and then calls us on it. Read more
Will Cisco ever regain those switching margins?
Should Cisco worry? In the same week that it pares its workforce by 16%, Cisco was also presented with two major events that could likely impact its switching business. Read more
Dell and Force 10: What it means
When Dario Zamarian joined Dell last September, the rumor was that he was there to help Dell acquire a networking company. For once in our industry, rumor is reality. Today Dell announced its plans to acquire data center networking expert Force 10 Networks. Read more
Checking In On Check Point
I attended the Check Point analyst event on Monday of this week in Chicago. It’s been a while since Check Point got the analysts together so there was plenty of catching up to do. Read more
Is Ethernet Storage On The Horizon?
There's been a lot of banter in the industry about storage-over-Ethernet over the past few months. It seems like every Ethernet switching vendor has added the words, "Fibre Channel and iSCSI," to their PowerPoint slides and now champion standards efforts like Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), Data Center Ethernet (DCE), or Data Center Bridging (DCB). All of these standards are designed to make Ethernet behave like a channel rather than a network and thus create a unified uber transport for the data center. Read more
Computer factories eat way more energy than running the devices they build
The main idea behind saving energy in the high-tech world has been to buy newer, more energy efficient devices, but researchers say maybe that's the wrong way to look at the issue, since as much as 70% of the energy a typical laptop will consume during its life span is used in manufacturing the computer. Read more
OpenStack Continues The Quest To Be "The Cloud Standard"
OpenStack took another step on its way to becoming the standard for cloud platforms today. Dell, Rackspace (via a new unit called Cloud Builders) and Equinix, one of the leading data center providers in the world have opened up OpenStack test environments in 3 data centers across the US. At these locations customers can sign up for free trials to test OpenStack. Read more
Ironically, Cloud Security Is Picking Up Steam
While the IT industry continues to pump millions of dollars into messaging cloud computing, most IT shops remain on the sidelines. For example, when ESG Research asked IT professionals to list their top initiatives for 2011, "increased use of cloud services" came in as the 12th most popular response -- below more pedestrian IT activities like "desktop/laptop PC replacement initiatives," and "data center consolidation." Why are many organizations eschewing the cloud? Read more
Major Dell revamp melds consumer and enterprise IT
Dell unveiled a major renovation of its enterprise-targeted laptop, desktop and workstation computers Tuesday but in doing so, combined the features that attract consumer users with the demands of enterprise IT. Included are enhancements in tools used for workplace collaboration such as with Microsoft’s SharePoint and Lync unified communications platforms. Read more
Breaking a few eggs: Fedora 15 changes network device naming
The Fedora Project is getting ready to break a lot of networking scripts that depend on the ethX naming convention — by being the first major distro to ship Consistent Network Device Naming. Read more
The Smart-Fat and Smart-Thin Edge of the Network
Take a look at ESG Research or other day and you'll see a number of simultaneous trends. Enterprises are consolidating data centers, packing them full of virtual servers, and hosting more and more web applications within them. This means massive traffic coming into and leaving data centers. Read more
Technology CEO Council's Lightweight Federal IT Recommendations
Submitted by joltsik on Wed, 11/03/10 - 11:11am.Have you heard of the Technology CEO Council? Neither had I until until recently. The council is made up of a strange mix of tech CEOs from organizations including Applied Materials, Dell, EMC, IBM, Intel, Micron and Motorola. Why this group and not Adobe, Cisco, HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Oracle, and Symantec? Beats me. Read more
Which Phone 7 devices should you let on your network?
I can’t help but roll my eyes when smartphone TV spots advertise watching big screen motion pictures on a five-inch screen. Really? “Avatar” on a smartphone? You think you’re going to convince me that I’m in a movie theater? In a pinch, maybe I would watch TV or movies on a smartphone, but I’m more interested about practical uses of a smartphone like for work. Read more
First Impressions from Oracle Open World
I'm here in San Francisco for Oracle Open World. Just arrived but I already have some first impressions.
1. There are signs, billboards, and brochures boasting about Oracle's commitment to integrated hardware and software. This is the ultimate irony to an industry old-timer like me as Oracle led the open systems charge in the 1990s, lambasting Digital Equipment and IBM for its autocratic systems control. I'll have to poke around for some old Oracle ads and compare them to its new integrated stack mantra. Read more
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Network World, Inc
The Connected Enterprise