January, 2008

Juniper’s causing a stir in crowded switching field

Before even having time to digest, let alone write about, yesterday’s Juniper announcement that the company was entering the switching market, we received two responses to it from two competitors. It sounds like switch manufacturers feel crowded enough with Cisco’s dominance and aren’t happy about another big name entering the fray. But they might raise some valid points. Does Juniper not “gets the enterprise,” as some critics have charged? I also wonder if they were expecting this warm a reception from their new competitors. See excerpts after the jump.

Continued »

iPhone corporate plan makes accountants smile

AT&T has added the iPhone as a device option for its enterprise wireless plans. On the surface of things, this is big news for iPhone fans who are waiting for the enterprise to welcome the device.

I haven’t seen an official announcement from AT&T about their iPhone enterprise offerings. So far, only the above link with feature and pricing options has turned up. But from what I can gather, this is more of a sales channel move than a product offering. This news won’t make IT managers feel warm and fuzzy towards the iPhone. Only accountants will be smiling.

No, this news doesn’t mean the iPhone is suddenly an enterprise-ready mobile device. All the concerns that Forrester Research voiced last month about its suitability for business use still apply. There is still no support for push email or third-party applications. Security is still a big problem, too, with no support for data encryption and no capability to remotely lock or erase lost devices. And the absence of a removable battery will still be a headache for road warriors.

This news is really about the accountants. It will now be easier for end users to request a device because your company’s accountants now have a direct channel for buying the iPhones and paying for the plans centrally instead of compensating individual users for deals they make on their own with AT&T.

Does overhauling the data center mean changing the network?

This week I read survey results showing IT priorities in 2008, and was surprised to see how much the top IT priorities involved the network. So I did a little research.

The following article focuses on the network worker’s priorities alone: Disaster recovery, convergence and security top 2008 networking to-do lists. Putting these articles side-by-side made me see that very few priorities differed. The top priority for both networking and IT managers, for example, was disaster recovery. What was even more interesting was that even though the networking survey included questions on typical networking topics (i.e., routing, security, wireless, etc.) disaster recovery and data center topics came up very high in the results.

According to the IT manager questionnaire, almost half of IT managers surveyed plan to renovate and/or build a new data center (shown in the figure below):

Figure 1 — Lots of new data centers: In 2008, will you build or renovate a new data center?

So what might these data center changes have to do with the network? Below, you can see that 50% of those who plan to build/renovate a data center are incorporating new networking technology:

Figure 2: New technologies coming to new data centers
Will your new data center contain new technology?
(Respondents able to select more than one response.)

There’s a reason why so many people are making this change. Schlack says “New data center construction is a response to the need for more capacity but also for better disaster recovery capabilities and better use of energy.”

These changes must surely be a result, too, of the outmoded architecture in place. News Writer Michael Morisy’s found that the average age of a data center is 18 to 20 years old, which is to say that cooling and other mechanisms are grossly out of date. Even half that time ago the data center looked and behaved quite differently.

In Cooling a blade server, networking infrastructure expert Carrie Higbie explains: “Ten years ago, data centers consisted primarily of a mainframe and maybe a few PC servers. This is far different than what is in a data center today. We have Cisco 6500 series switches or maybe Force10, Extreme or Foundry switches — whatever the manufacturer, they are probably large chassis-based switches unless you are a smaller enterprise. While power was probably added, cooling may not have been.”

For better or for worse, a lot of money this year is being put toward data center overhauling. “Despite the large capital expenditures involved,” Morisy says, “upgrading these antiquated facilities begins to make more sense.” We aren’t relying on the same information that came out 20 years ago to get us through today, so why would we try to rely on architecture long passed its due date?

Are you happy with where these priorities lie? Perhaps network workers are finally being heard (and understood) and the money is finally going to the right place. On the other hand, maybe these expenditures are costing more than just money. Are you seeing negative or positive effects from this change, and do you see changes in the data center directly affecting your network?

Server sabotage plot backfires on sys admin

Bridget Botelho has an interesting post on the DataCenter.com ServerSpecs blog about a recent story from Reuters covering a sys admin sentenced to 30 months in prison after his plot to wipe out his pharmacy benefit management company’s servers with a logic bomb — out of fear he was about to lose his job.

Network managers spend a lot of time protecting the network from common insider user threats such as sharing sensitive data over P2P or careless use of public wireless networks… (see Five common insider threats and how to mitigate them as an example). But who protects the network from trusted IT pros who do something irresponsible or intentionally harmful?

I don’t like it (but find it fascinating) when geeks perpetuate negative stereotypes about geeks — for example, the story of Hans Reiser, the Linux visionary accused of murdering his wife. In Reiser’s case, he didn’t use technology as his weapon, he used it as his defense: The “geek defense,” or “I’m a geek; I’m socially inept, but that doesn’t make me a murderer.”

I once knew a boy who hacked into a library’s computer network through a public terminal (this was back in the green text-on-a-black screen days) just to impress a girl. He sent all the terminals in the library into some kind of diagnostic that would tie them up for hours, and the girl was not amused. His reasoning seemed to be that if he was smart enough to do that and the library staff was dumb enough not to prevent him, then they deserved what they got.

I suspect that boy’s attitude was shared by the logic bombing sys admin, and tends to be common among disgruntled computer geeks everywhere. And it is probably perpetuated every day by the kinds of non-IT co-workers who say things like, “I don’t care how it works, just fix it.” So maybe the moral of the story is: Be nice to your IT guy, because you never know if he’s an evil genius with a chip on his shoulder (or a misguided impulse to impress a girl).

The IT Guy: Amazing Grace

When we left Dave, he had discovered an interesting room full of forgotten computers…

> View all our IT Guy cartoons on SearchNetworking.com.

• Read more about Grace Hopper
• Read a definition of “cruft“

Troubleshooting wireless connectivity: Plug it in, plug it in

Troubleshooting wireless connectivity is often about fixing the physical issues first. Although we like to think that “going wireless” means there are no wires involved, anyone in networking knows that this is not at all the case. To quote Neil Schubert at last year’s Mobile Wireless World conference “there are a lot of wires in wireless.”

Wireless access seems so complicated at times that when a wireless connectivity issue occurs, our brains skip right past the simple steps and jump into the world of other possibilities: Am I getting a DoS attack? Do I need to replace my wireless card? Did somebody in the kitchen turn on a microwave? But the first step to take is to start with the most obvious and simplest task. As much as we hate to ask if everything is plugged in as a helpdesk administrator, we should get accustomed to asking ourselves that same question — is everything plugged in?

Case in point, wireless networking expert Lisa Phifer resolved one user’s connectivity problem after learning that the user had a loose wire inside the desktop. And it’s not hard to see how that might have happened in these pictures:

As you can see, hands are much larger than much of the technology we work on. And to offer more perspective, my hands (in the pictures to the left) are much smaller than most other people’s.

So in the event we have to crack open a desktop or replace a network card, be mindful of what your hands are knocking against. Before you check network configurations and replace hardware that might be faulty when troubleshooting wireless connectivity, check to see if everything is connected. This simple procedure can be a real time (and money) saver when tracking down connectivity issues.

For more extensive information on wireless troubleshooting, view Lisa Phifer’s expert response or check out SearchNetworking.com’s Wireless Troubleshooting Guide. Xfce’s Notes from the mousepad also mentions this Ubuntu Wireless Troubleshooting Guide.

P.S. Let me know if you have a way of reaching into spaces you’re otherwise unable to.