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  Next-generation Enterprise WANs

  The network benefits of WAN Virtualization by Andy Gottlieb

  Having covered in recent columns what WAN Virtualization is and how it relates to WAN Optimization, let’s look at the benefits to the network that WAN Virtualization delivers for the WAN manager, which are substantial. [In an upcoming post, we’ll look at the benefits delivered by WAN Virtualization and the Next-generation Enterprise WAN (NEW) architecture beyond the WAN itself.]WAN Virtualization drastically changes the price per bit of bandwidth for the enterprise Intranet,...

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  Countermeasures

  Heavy Lies the Crown: Apple's Mobile Success Puts it on Thin Security Ice by John Linkous

  Last week, I was hanging out with my friend Steve, who is a professional digital cinematographer and long-time Apple Macintosh user. We were talking about how great a piece of hardware the iPhone 4S is, when there was a pregnant pause in conversation before he asked me, “So why did this Flashback thing happen?” Ah, yes … the Flashback malware. For many Apple users, this is the first time they have ever been familiarized with the string of dead silence, followed by tacit acknowledgement, vendor...

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  Networking Nuggets and Security Snippets

  Tibco And LogLogic: An Interesting and Revealing Acquisition by Jon Oltsik

  Over the past few years, a number of independent Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) vendors were acquired by bigger players.  In late 2010, HP scooped up market leader ArcSight for $1.5 billion.  Last year, McAfee purchased Nitro Security while IBM acquired Q1 Labs.In each of these deals, large vendors were using these acquisitions to bolster existing security offerings, replace legacy SIEM platforms, or filling holes in their portfolios to grow their security...

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  A Greener Field

  The Four Lies of Networking by Dave Greenfield

  Big Data and networking in general are all about numbers and statistics. We talk about our Petabytes of data, the number of packets per second and the Mbytes replicated in an hour. We want to know about the uptime percentages of our services and the time to repair on our circuits. We’re sold on loss ratios and round trip times.And like statistics and their “Lies, damned lies,” as Mark Twain put it, networking has its own set of fallacies and half truths we’ve all run up against. Here are the...

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  The Cisco Connection

  Q4 challenges not a downturn, Cisco CEO says by Jim Duffy

  After marked improvement in its business following the wrenching restructuring and "reinvention" Cisco's gone though over the past year, the company - and perhaps the industry - are not out of the woods yet.Cisco's current quarter, the fourth in its 2012 fiscal year, is likely to come in well below Wall Street expectations due to ongoing economic challenges - particularly in Europe - and conservatism in enterprise IT spending. Cisco's Q3 came in as planned last week, but the company's forecast...

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  The Cisco Connection

  Warrior keynote on Cisco COPE by Jim Duffy

  Implementing security policies into the network based on identity and other application and user awareness parameters will drive network programmability, with network-based APIs and customer-specific algorithms, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior said last week during her Interop keynote address. That's the same keynote where Warrior briefly discussed the Cisco Open Programmable Environment (COPE), the company's SDN architecture that it will apparently discuss in more detail at next month's CiscoLive...

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  Networking Nuggets and Security Snippets

  Final Thoughts About Interop by Jon Oltsik

  Well I've been out of Las Vegas for several days now so I've had time to adjust back to normal society and reflect a bit more on Interop2012.  My colleague Bob "LAN" Laliberte met with nearly everyone in the industry and while I don't remember every encounter, here are a few final thoughts:1.  Whither data center fabric?  Everyone was talking about data center fabrics last year -- TRILL, SPB, QFabric, Fabricpath, etc.  This year however, hardly a word was spoken although we...

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  Networking at Play

  Finding your TV shows on the Internet by Steven Vaughan-Nichols

  It seems to me some days like the media companies want their own Internet TV subsidiaries to fail. Take, for example, the simple task of finding the show you want. DVRs manage it, TV Guide managed it when the only way we got to watch TV was by using rabbit ears. But finding the shows you want from Hulu Plus, iTunes, or Netflix can be a major pain in the rump. Oh sure, each of them makes it easy on the Web to see what they offer, but let's say you want to find a TV show and you don't know which...

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  The Cisco Connection

  Cisco's not on board, but is Shortest Path Bridging winning? by Jim Duffy

  Is Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) winning the data center fabric standards battle? One could have walked away from Interop 2012 with that impression, given the level of interest in it during a conference session and the production implementations that were discussed at the show.SPB is IEEE 802.1aq and is based on the same MAC-in-MAC technique used in IEEE 802.1ah,  Provider Backbone Bridging. SPB uses a link state routing protocol to allow switches to learn the shortest paths through an...

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  Next-generation Enterprise WANs

  WAN Virtualization is the next-generation complement to WAN Optimization by Andy Gottlieb

  Fellow Network World blogger Zeus Kerravala, wrote an interesting post in his Network World blog last month about the need for a different type of WAN Optimization from branch to the cloud. He also wrote another piece here about the need for “next-generation WAN Optimization.”While we’ll get into the details through the course of this column, let me start with the punch line: WAN Virtualization is the next-generation complement to WAN Optimization that Zeus is looking for,...

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