Networking: Opinions

As the red mist clears and Julia Gillard assumes the top job in politics, many of the anti-filter crowd are hoping that pro-choice Senator, Kate Lundy, will take out the more divisive Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy. But they shouldn’t hold their breath.

The former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has stood down and been replaced by Julia Gillard as the leader of Australia.

As the most important supplier of network infrastructure to enterprises, Cisco's NAC products are a natural point of curiosity for network managers. Unfortunately, though, Cisco's approach to NAC has been riddled with in-fighting, false starts, delayed product releases, and a good dose of chaos and confusion.

Information security was always an esoteric field but with personal computing came personal security issues, culminating in the identity theft problem that concerns even the most techno-phobic of consumers. It's about to get much worse.

Sure, online social media and social networking are popular, but they don’t mimic the way we naturally interact. Why use Facebook or Twitter to tell friends what you are doing at the moment, when you can directly show them what you are doing and where you are doing it?

US iPhone lovers who want their device freed from AT&T's wireless network could soon get their wish.

George Peppard said as his character Hannibal Smith on The A-Team, "I love it when a plan comes together." Several trends, if not a plan, are coming together in interesting ways in technology for small businesses. Mix equal parts of online applications, netbooks, and constant wireless networking together, and you get new ways to do more work in more places for less money.

The beginning of a new year normally is a time to reflect; it's all the more so when the network industry is facing (along with the rest of the economy) a major financial crisis. We are of a generation that has taken network growth for granted, that has seen the Internet reshape culture and that has come to believe that "more bits" paves the road to the future. It just might be that this comfortable view is the greatest threat we face, because networking is going to change one way or the other.

There's likely a number of building systems in place at your organization: HVAC, lighting, fire, security, telephone, and the like. You also have your IT infrastructure. Turns out that converging those systems on a single IP-based network promises a wealth of money-saving benefits and efficiency gains, according to a recently released white paper from Johnson Controls titled "The Perfect Technology Storm."

Cisco’s observation that the “network is the platform” might have its roots in a compelling marketing campaign, but it’s fast becoming a reality for those working in the infrastructure space. With accelerating demand for mobility, increased use of multimedia applications and Web 2.0 technologies, and the associated security and storage issues that come with them, having a top notch network that is reliable today and scalable tomorrow is critical.

Small businesses converging voice, video and data traffic sometimes end up with haunted networks, but you can exorcise the demons. Affordable QoS mechanisms are available to oust the goblins that cause delay, jitter, bit-rate errors and dropped packets.

An investor and blogger on Yahoo's Tech Ticker site doesn't expect Nortel to survive the current market downturn which he says is stalling big infrastructure buildouts.

You might believe, and with some real justification, that the term "end to end" is only used by vendors who custom-fit the definition to the scope of their particular product.

When vendors and marketers get their hands on an IT concept, it doesn't take long for that concept to morph into a totally new business opportunity and possibly a new market segment. Such is the story of cloud computing.

Whenever I plan and configure an enterprise WLAN system, I always advise that an additional 10 to 20 percent of the capital budget be reserved for expansion and filling in holes in coverage or capacity that couldn't be anticipated during the planning process.

In the world of content distribution networks, A is for Akamai. What about the rest? Is B for BitGravity, or maybe BitTorrent because of the potential impact of peer-to-peer technology on CDNs? Is C for content? I don't think so. I think it's for carrier or maybe cloud -- and in either case, the "C change" is potentially a major one for the CDN world.

An Ethernet patent dispute is again rearing its ugly head in court this week as Intel has filed suit against patent licensing firm Negotiated Data Solutions (N-Data) looking to indemnify Intel customers against any royalty claims N-Data is looking to grab.

It's a wireless world, some say, conveniently overlooking the giant balls of cables behind every personal computer and every server, router and printer. But many want to expand the wireless world, so let's look at two companies doing just that.

Network traffic data holds a wealth of information about application response time, network usage and bandwidth consumption. Getting at that data in an efficient and inexpensive manner would help network managers better understand and control their networks.

It seems that every decade or so I get the opportunity to write an article on IT deja vu. This time around, the topic is cloud computing, which is the latest IT buzz word.