Networking

The local Sun channels team is weighing up the viability of launching a green partner program in Australia.

A new dedicated datacentre project management group has been formed in response to the growing demands in the market.

Microsoft touted Windows Vista's lower patch count this week, saying it required about 20 percent fewer fixes in 2007 than the four-year-old Windows XP Service Pack 2.

The departure of a longtime Cisco executive last week is the latest sign that the company is transforming itself from a pure networking vendor into more of an overall provider of IT systems.

A recent study by In-Stat says that fixed-configuration 24- and 48-port switches can vary by more than 600 per cent in terms of how much switching capacity they support in relation to how much electric power they draw.

Cisco on Tuesday posted a solid third quarter, with revenues and earnings slightly better than Wall Street expectations. But the company was challenged in some product and geographical areas, and Cisco also felt the impact of softness in the US and European enterprise markets.

Venture capital investment in network companies hit another low during the first quarter, with the total number of investments dropping to its lowest point since the third quarter of 2004.

The cool, odd and interesting from the big networking show.

Metro Health Hospital, a healthcare system serving 130,000 patients across Michigan, is already using what some consider the desktop of the future. The hospital has rolled out server-hosted virtual desktops to every employee no matter where they are or what client device they use.

Privileged IT staffers literally holds the keys to the castle. Access to those keys that open the doors to critical operating system and application resources must be carefully managed and legally audited. Enter the class of products referred to as privilege account management wares.

Symantec chairman and CEO John Thompson last week delivered a keynote speech to thousands of security professionals at the RSA Conference 2008 in the US. Ellen Messmer caught up with Thompson at the RSA event, where he expanded on a range of topics including vendor alliances, Symantec's competition and the importance of data-loss prevention technology.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse shared the company's WiMAX plans last week at CTIA Wireless. The plan to build a fourth-generation wireless network is a risky one, but Hesse explained to Denise Dubie why it's a smart strategy for Sprint.

The Internet engineering community will be eating its own dog food tonight. For one hour, the 1,250 network experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting will be able to access the Internet only through IPv6. The IETF created IPv6 in the mid-1990s, but this upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol has not yet been widely deployed -- even by the technology's biggest proponents here. Network World National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan talked with IETF Chair Russ Housley about the group's IPv6 experiment, why the transition to IPv6 is taking so long, and whether the IETF leadership is starting to panic about IPv4 addresses running out. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

It's perhaps no small coincidence that Cisco makes a major announcement just days before Juniper does or hosts an important event. The day before Juniper unveiled its EX line of Ethernet enterprise switches last month, Cisco introduced its new data center switch, the Nexus 7000. This week was no different, as Cisco unveiled its next-generation ASR1000 edge routers just as Juniper held its annual analyst conference in Southern California. Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy stole some of Juniper CTO and founder Pradeep Sindhu's time at the conference to gauge his thoughts on Cisco's new router as well as a range of other topics.

WeFi is hoping to do for Wi-Fi connectivity what Facebook has done for social networking.

One of the interesting things that's been happening over the past few years is that just as workforces have become less centralized, IT departments have gotten more so. The vast majority of companies I work with consider themselves virtual, meaning that employees work together on teams from widely distributed geographies. Yet fewer IT teams are virtual in the same sense -- in many cases IT teams are increasingly consolidated into a few central sites.

Analytic databases are the principal engines driving business intelligence, delivering operational data into reports, dashboards and ad-hoc queries.

At the company's recent Partner Summit, Cisco's John Chambers painted a picture of collaboration driving a second wave of the Internet. But although increased uptake of video technology as part of broader unified communications has great potential, the Internet is facing a couple of serious challenges in the next few years that could greatly impact on its ability to define the way we work and play.

Being a pundit, like being in love, means never having to say you're sorry, right? Wrong. Besides, that's got to be one of the dumbest lines in history -- from what I can tell, loving someone means acknowledging your mistakes early and often, and making reparations as best you can.

An interesting thing happened in 1999. The unit price of a long-distance voice call to consumers, which had been falling since the early 1980s, finally crossed over the cost curve and long-distance voice became a loss leader. This eventually led to the acquisition of the long-distance giants by the regional Bells. It was certainly one of those pivotal events in telecom history, but another 1999 event might be even more important.

Small businesses have, for some time, been able to easily deploy a wide-open access point or two, or put together a couple of access points with a basic level of security. The thing that hasn't been easily available is a small, secure, managed wireless network that's easy to deploy and administer, and priced for the needs of a smaller business. Now there is such a thing, and its existence does a good job of highlighting what we've been missing. The solution is the Ruckus Wireless ZoneFlex Smart WLAN System, and it is a very good thing, indeed, for the SMB wireless market.

This wireless networking kit enables high-performance network gaming and simultaneous streaming of multiple high-definition videos and will connect to any existing router or gateway.

Network admins have spent many a late night trying to figure out how to improve application response or file replication across the WAN. Faster performance is all about bigger pipes, right?

Reflex Technologies' Command Center is itself a virtual machine that sits on VMware's ESX server and acts as an intrusion-prevention system, watching connectivity activity between other VMs and the virtual network interface provided by VMware.

PowerRecon is a planning and monitoring application for organizations with a high number of servers and virtual host targets. On the surface, PowerRecon looks similar to traditional network monitoring/management applications that track application inventory, connectivity and network usage.