November, 2007

Projected Network Infrastructure Spending For 2008

What are your plans for your network infrastructure for 2008? Do you have a holiday wish list or some New Year’s resolutions regarding the technologies you want to implement or the changes you plan to make? TechTarget’s SearchNetworking site conducted a survey of over 1,200 respondents and they have published the results. Some of the key results are:

• 21.28% project an increase in their budget of more than 10%
• 7.26% of respondents said their networking budgets will decrease
• 8.34% claim that VoIP/data convergence is driving their budget increase

Check out Applications, convergence to boost network spending for the complete results. You can read it just out of curiosity, or maybe you can use the survey results to help prove your case to management and get your budget requests approved.

LAN Security: What Hackers Don’t Want You To Know

This blog is titled “Connectivity” because it deals with all aspects and issues of network connectivity. That includes how to ensure your network connectivity is secure and available, and how to make sure that malicious attackers can not intercept or disrupt your network connectivity. Do you know what ARP Poisoning is? How about a multicast storm? Have you heard of Spanning Tree Protocol or VLAN Trunking Protocol hacks? Do you know how to protect your network from them? Networkworld.com recently hosted a chat session with Christopher Paggen and Eric Vyncke, authors of LAN switch security: What hackers know about your switches, which covers a wide range of security issues and the authors’ advice and tips for how to lock your network down and protect against these (and other) threats. Read LAN switch security: what the hackers know that you don’t to see what the authors have to say.

BitTorrent Grows Up

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking is sort of the “red-headed step child” of the network world. It is almost universally condemned by network administrators and security experts. It is blamed for a good chunk of software piracy, and illegal music and movie downloads. Files downloaded may contain spyware or malware. Even in a best-case scenario, where a user is downloading a legitimate program that is clean and safe, participating on a P2P network still eats up network bandwidth. On the other hand, P2P networking has innovated and revolutionized certain aspects of networking and content delivery. That is particularly true of BitTorrent. BitTorrent filters out spyware/malware, as well as corrupt or fake files, and the method of downloading from multiple sources simultaneously allows BitTorrent users to achieve exceptional download speeds. BitTorrent is continuing to strive to establish the distributed P2P technology as a legitimate networking solution. BitTorrent has announced a new service, BitTorrent DNA, to let customers use the BitTorrent network to distribute streaming video. Check out BitTorrent moves from piracy to video streaming to read more about the new offering.

Merging Wired & Wireless Network Management

Managing wired networks is pretty old school. It is a mature field of information technology with many capable and stable tools. Administrators have experience and the utilities available to proactively monitor network performance, simplify management, allow them to allocate network resources and more. Then along came wireless. Many organizations are still struggling with whether or not to implement wireless networks, never mind how. Many of those that have deployed wireless networks are still on the low end of the learning curve for managing them at all. But, as wireless networks evolve and become an accepted part of standard enterprise networks, administrators will increasingly be looking for tools & utilities that allow them to monitor and maintain the overall network- wired and wireless included. Computerworld.com has an article which explores this issue in some detail. Check out Want to manage your wired / wireless LANs together? Too bad to learn more.

Cisco Jockeying To Lead IP Video

You may have heard of this quaint site that lets users create and share videos with one another. I think it is called “YouTube”. OK, if you haven’t heard of YouTube, you are new to the planet or something. YouTube is just one example of the recent explosion of IP video on the Internet though. Movie studios and television networks are expanding their online presence and the result is an ever-growing library of movies and TV shows available to be watched as IP video as well. Combine that with initiatives such as IP video surveillance, and you have the makings of a hot new trend. Cisco has made some recent acquisitions in the area of IP video that appear to be a maneuver to get ahead of the competition and try to corner the IP video market. Check out Is Cisco Becoming the IP Video Giant? for more about this story.

Google Rumored to Develop 10Gbps Switches

When you’re an Internet juggernaut like Google, you can’t let simple things like the fact that a technology hasn’t been invented get in your way. Google has to transport a lot of data from Point A to Point B within their data center very quickly in order to work all of the magic they do that keeps the users coming back. The mortal world of networking has 1Gbps Ethernet networks, but that is the max for now. IEEE is working on developing both 40Gbps and 100Gbps standards, but it could be years before the standards are ratified and actual, functioning equipment hits the streets. Iconic organizations like Google can’t be sitting around, twiddling their thumbs waiting for standards to be ratified. The rumor is that their is evidence to suggest that Google has developed their own 10Gbps switches in-house for their data centers. Check out this Networkworld.com article for more about the story.

Virtual Replacement for FTP

Do you remember FTP (File Transfer Protocol)? It used to be one of the more common methods of transferring files and data. However, as email became the communication method of choice, file attachments have more or less replaced FTP for transmitting data. Normal FTP also posed some technical and security concerns for many organizations.

Email has its down sides as well though. For one thing, it can take a LONG time to send an email with a 100Mb file attachment, and another LONG time to be the recipient trying to download Continued »

XSS Vulnerability Plagues VoIP

Voice over IP, or VoIP, communication is still relatively new. Being a bleeding edge technology has its pros and cons when it comes to security. On the down side, developers are in such a hurry to be the first to market, and they want to maximize performance, so security is not a priority. On the up side, attackers are often slower to jump on the bandwagon and adopt bleeding edge technologies. But, as the technology catches on and gains critical mass, it becomes a target Continued »

The Promise of UCC

UCC. Get used to it. You will see the term a lot. It stands for Unified Communication and Collaboration. In a nutshell, it represents combining and merging virtually all forms of communication to enable real-time communication and collaboration. Currently, a manager who has a question while reviewing an employee’s expense report most likely has to leave the expense report tool to look up the employee’s contact information, then dial the number on a phone to call the employee. With UCC, this functionality is streamlined and simplified. With a simple click from within the expense report tool, the employee is automatically dialed, perhaps using VoIP from the manager’s computer so that no additional device is necessary. This is just one simple example. A recent blog post at Cisco discusses the concept in greater detail: The Promise of Collaboration.

Running a “Green” Network

If you have gone through the exercise of architecting the power needs for your data center, or doing the math to determine how much power your backup generator needs to produce in the event of a data center power outage, then you know just how much juice it takes to keep the lights on in that room. The fact that you have to run air cooling units to dissipate the heat being generated from the network equipment tells you there is some power in there. Whether you are interested in shaving some dollars off of the bottom line to make sure there is more money in your compensation pool, or you are interested in saving and preserving our environment by not using electricity needlessly, there are steps you can take to reduce or minimize the amount of power being consumed in your data center. Gary Audin, President of consulting firm Delphi, Inc., was recently interviewed on SearchNetworking.com and provides some insight into the issues of power consumption and how to reduce the IT department’s electric bill.