Data Center

Mac users - who ARE these people?

Jeff Caruso — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:06:30 -0400

Microsoft has reportedly hired Jerry Seinfeld to bring in a big gun against Apple's stream of "Mac vs. PC" ads. Seinfeld will be paid $10 million, according to the reports, as part of a $300 million campaign.

Putting the Mr. T in IT

Adam Gaffin — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:42:41 -0400

Jerry Seinfeld? Pfft. Check out this celebrity endorsement for Hitachi Data Systems:

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Memory virtualization

NewDataCenter — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:48:22 -0400

Credit Suisse was a very early server virtualization devotee, as I mentioned in my earlier post. That means virtualization comes into play at just about every layer of the IT infrastructure. Next up, quite possibly, is memory, said Steve Yatko, managing director of Credit Suisse's Global Research and Development Group, in a recent interview. Ideally, Credit Suisse would like to uncouple the processor and memory so that they can scale for an application workload independently. This is particularly important in development and testing, which could really benefit from an unprecedented amount of consolidation on a physical box and that independence of scale, he said.

"Memory is probably going to be one of the last key areas that we tackle as an underutilized resource as we go after a modular compute fabric. So we basically would have compute, memory and I/O bricks all scaling independently in a modular way and building a new system that is a composite architecture."

For more on how virtualization is coloring enterprise IT, go to our special New Data Center package.

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cloud computing

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:24:05 -0400

Should be labeled, "For advanced users."

Better Software on the Market

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 10:13:31 -0400

There is an add-on to Microsoft's SMS 2003 and SCCM enterprise management platform that will allow enterprise level IT shops to meet the power consumption needs of the future. SMS Companion (or SCCM Companion) is a product designed and sold by SMSExpert and is a superior to ANYTHING else on the market. We have put it through rigirous testing and have discovered its ability will far surpass anything else that is currently available.

I LOVE THIS COMPUTER!!! i dont have it yet...

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:30:44 -0400

I LOVE THIS COMPUTER!!! i dont have it yet...but i know i'm psychic and i know i will like it lots. i just know i will!!

IBM Blade Servers

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:14:44 -0400

ITO Solutions, Inc is selling IBM Blade Servers. http://www.itosolutions.net

VMware sees the value of working with Microsoft

Microsoft Subnet — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:40:20 -0400

VMware can't pretend it has got the wherewithal to face down a direct attack by Microsoft and survive. So it has done the smartest move available -- cooperation. Earlier this week Microsoft said it was revamping its licensing fees for products on virtualized servers but would not support products running on VMware. That, coupled with VMware's other missteps, obviously put the pressure on VMware to come to Microsoft's table. But why shouldn't VMware join the other hypervisors and get its hypervisor certified by Microsoft as compatible with Microsoft server products? Leaving itself out of that party only gives users even more reason to check out Hyper-V or Citrix Xen. They have plenty of reasons already given the price of the younger hypervisors.

Credit Suisse: virtualization in a services model

NewDataCenter — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:21:22 -0400

My continuing series showcasing virtualization insight from virtualization pros today focuses in on Credit Suisse.

This global financial services firm is one of those companies that recognized early on that virtualization would be transformational for its business. By 2002, IT managers understood that virtualization wasn't just a core technology, said Steve Yatko, managing director of Credit Suisse's Global Research and Development Group, in a recent interview. "We started to see that virtualization was beginning to build more of an ecosystem and a landscape shift across many different facets of technology and business capability. We saw it transcending into a paradigm shift allowing us to enter what we would consider a whole new era of computing, namely service-oriented computing."

With that understanding, Credit Suisse approaches virtualization not only as the layer that allows for the orchestration of capacity across servers and desktops, storage, memory, I/O and networking in general, he says, but also as a way to enable a virtual workforce, virtual applications and secure virtual access for internal and external users.

Essentially, Yatko said, Credit Suisse approached virtualization in a services model. "The goal was to leverage virtualization to build a much higher level of abstraction from the bits and bytes, the LUNs, the packet sizes, into something that could really talk about the business capabilities users needed to achieve and how much money they were essentially willing to afford for those capabilities."

Read about Yatko's must-have virtualization tool choices.

Get more information on how virtualization is coloring your world in our special New Data Center report.

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Big Blue Blow Out

Schratboy — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:41:32 -0400

Sure, IBM is spending $300 million. They'll recover this in 5 months from their large government and enterprise customers who've become addicted to crappy services and over-pricing...and who won't ever get fired for buying IBM.

Adam Powers CTO of Lancope: Top 5 uses of NetFlow

Brad Reese — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:05:48 -0400

Picking the mind of an extremely talented technologist is the objective of this new blog series. The following Q&A with Adam Powers of Lancope is the first of a multi-part series on the Top 5 Uses of NetFlow. For the first story, Adam Powers - CTO of Lancope, has answered the questions of yours truly below to discuss NetFlow Event Logging and how it compares to Syslog.

Section I: NetFlow Event Logging 1. What types of messages used in Syslog do you feel will move to NetFlow? High speed structured events such as firewall logs primarily. NetFlow Event Logging (NEL) is found in Cisco’s newest high speed firewall technologies such as the new ASR-1000 and the venerable ASA 5000 series. Let’s take a look at the ASR-1000 as an example. The ASR offers an integrated, zone-based IOS firewall capable of speeds in excess of 2Gbps. At these rates, firewall state table session setup and teardowns occur at incredibly high rates. Customers with even trivial logging requirements will find that traditional syslog incurs a significant load on the ASR-1000’s route processor. Cisco’s ASR (Aggregated Services Router) is designed to run advanced services at the network’s edge. It follows that customers would want to use the route processor’s available horsepower to accommodate those advanced services rather than spend its time manufacturing and sending syslog. When using NetFlow Event Logging in the ASR, firewall logging is pushed down into hardware freeing the Route Processor to perform higher order tasks. The creation of hardware-based NetFlow v9 is much less expensive than the creation of software-based syslog. Unfortunately NEL technology is relatively new and support for it is sparse at best. Customers wanting to reap the benefits of NEL will find that very few if any syslog aggregation and collection technologies simply do not support NEL. Working with Cisco engineers, Lancope has introduced a simple 1U appliance called the NEL Gateway to address this issue. The StealthWatch NEL Gateway leverages Lancope’s knowledge of high speed NetFlow processing to create a simple protocol gateway that converts the high speed NEL events into C3PL compliant syslog messages suitable for export to most any traditional syslog collector. Each 1U NEL Gateway appliance can process up to 40,000 firewall events per second, translating them into equivalent syslog messages and forwarding them to one or more syslog collectors using the original source IP of the sending ASR. The diagram below provides a overview of how the ASR and the NEL Gateway work together... Within the ASR-1000, the following firewall event types are exported over NEL and translated into syslog by the NEL Gateway: The screenshot below shows the status page for the NEL Gateway. Note the counts shown on a per record type basis. One last important note: Due to the efficiency of NetFlow v9, NEL is up to 18x more efficient in terms of bandwidth generated through logging. Given an Ethernet MTU of 1500 up to 18 NEL events are packed into a single NEL UDP datagram.

Section II: Flexible NetFlow 2. When does Lancope plan to have flexible NetFlow phase 2 implemented? Lancope has already begun to support additional key and non-key fields provided in v9. Our next major improvement to Flexible NetFlow support should arrive in the Q1 timeframe of 09. This release is being timed in conjunction with some very interesting Flexible NetFlow enhancements we’re not even allowed to discuss as of yet. The trouble with Flexible NetFlow has been that there were too few real benefits provided by FNF (Flexible NetFlow) over TNF (traditional NetFlow). That is changing very rapidly thanks to new key/non-key’s being added to FNF. 3. What types of cache messages (normal, immediate, permanent) do you plan to accept initially and when? The StealthWatch NetFlow collector has a minimum set of fields required to operate. As long as the Flexible NetFlow exporter sends at least the minimum set the cache mechanism and cache timers can be configured any way the customer desires. The minimum required fields for the StealthWatch flow collector include: FIRST_SWITCHED LAST_SWITCHED IN_BYTES IN_PKTS SRC_INT_ID DST_INT_ID PROTOCOL L4_SRC_PORT L4_DST_PORT SRC_ADDR_IPV4/IPv6 (IPv6 support added in 5.8 release) DST_ADDR_IPV4/IPv6 For those customers wanting to reduce the amount of bandwidth consumed by NetFlow to an absolute minimum, creating a flow template with these the set above will result in a very efficient NetFlow export. Immediate and permanent cache settings can be used with the current release of StealthWatch so long as they include the fields listed above. Automated cache configuration via SNMP PUTs are a bit further out. The jury is still out on how useful automation of cache creation will be in an real-world environment. 4. Will you be archiving these different caches where applicable and rolling up the data into 10, 30, 1 hour etc. intervals? Definitely. This is already in the product. The StealthWatch System provides a retention management system that allows the operator to specify how long they would like to keep various statistics derived through NetFlow analysis. StealthWatch tracks interface utilization statistics from 1 minute up to 1 day resolution. Statistics are "rolled up" over time in accordance with the retention policy configured within the system. The screenshot below gives you an idea of how this retention manager works... 5. Will you be triggering and sending the SNMP sets necessary to setup the different caches above? Lancope is researching the usefulness of automated cache creation but has held off on a firm date commitment for this kind of functionality. Instead we’re focusing our engineering efforts on the newer key/non-key fields provided by FNF. We’re interested in how we can use them and what additional fields we might persuade Cisco to add in the future. As FNF gets more real field use we’ll get a better understanding for how automated cache creation should work.

What questions would YOU like Adam Powers to answer? http://www.BradReese.Com Search 26,983 current Cisco Job openings worldwide.


	JDSU 4th Quarter 2008: Expect strong outperformance for its advanced optical technologies (AOT) segment
	CCIE water cooler gossip: CCIE agent musical chair game?
	CCIE water cooler gossip: CCIE agent rules of the road?
	Brocade 3rd Quarter 2008 results: Cisco long-term threat to Brocade's Fibre Channel switching franchise
	CCIE water cooler gossip: Is a rosy future in the forecast for sitting CCIEs?
	Brad Reese on Cisco Story Archives

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Business Driven Virtual Data Center Strategy

Tony and Sheppard — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:22:40 -0400

Virtualization has many advocates and is the latest IT bandwagon rallying cry. The approaches to virtualization have taken two distinct paths. The supply side path is usually undertaken by IT operations in an attempt to mask hardware differences and minimize complexity; this approach does not go far enough. The other path involves a business demand driven approach. The demand driven approach needs to be taken to ensure that virtualization is executed in a strategic manner.

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Calling Zambia

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:21:07 -0400

Government has to do something about it quickly. It is becoming frustrating as one has to spend the whole in trying to talk to family and friends. When are we going to have a free and fair market. Let Levy's legacy live on....

gateway fees

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:12:31 -0400

Its ridilous for Dora Siliya and her companions to keep on hiking fees.Its is already expensive to call Zambia worse to call within Zambia. When are we going to be a free country?

ASUG

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:36:48 -0400

How many ASUG members are actually happy with this move? Does anyone know?

Cisco still foggy about cloud services

Mitchell Ashley — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:56:46 -0400

NWW Cisco Subnet has a post about bloggers writing prolifically about Cisco and cloud services. Setting the Cisco WebEx acquisition aside for the moment, Cisco could and probably will offer some type of software-as-a-service or cloud software service themselves. I would expect the best SaaS opportunities to come in the VoIP market before it shows up anywhere else for Cisco. That said . . .

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Youku

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:49:42 -0400

What codec do they encode with?

The Explosion in DBMS Choice: Database options in a cost-conscious world

CurtMonash — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 04:41:31 -0400

If there’s one central theme to my blog DBMS2, it’s that modern DBMS alternatives should in many cases be used instead of the traditional market leaders. So it was only a matter of time before somebody sponsored a white paper on that subject. The paper, sponsored by EnterpriseDB, is now posted along with my other recent white papers. Its abstract is reproduced below.

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Education

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 03:57:14 -0400
TRUE EDUCATORS / GUIDES are best for life Page No.18 (tenth line) If you think like Christ, you will be Christ or if you think Like Buddha you will be Buddha. Page No.47 (tenth line) The pride of man is due to his thinking and man are different from animals due to his thinking power only. Above written in Hindi Book-----Vedanta In Practical Life Written by SWAMI VIVEKANANDA This means everybody can be also become anything like others if you think like them i.e. Swami Vivekananda, Christ, Buddha, Shiva or more like anything etc.

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A Better Windows World tools library update

Ron Barrett — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:03:22 -0400
As promised, here is an update to the tools library I posted in July. Enjoy the full list of everything we have featured on A Better Windows World. Tool Names: A-Z Altiris Software Virtualization Solution Amazon Kindle Angry IP Scanner Civil Netizen ClamWin Portable

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