Networking

Overheard - WAN clustering

“It’s going to involve different parts of your organization to really construct a true WAN cluster. You are going to have to involve your data storage team, your software team, your network engineering team and really look holistically at everything.” Jeff Boles, WAN clustering emerges to provide transparent failover between physical sites

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is WAN clustering.

Overheard - Real-time location system (RTLS)

“A lot of healthcare equipment is starting to come with Wi-Fi radios already installed. If it’s not there, they add a Wi-Fi tag. It broadcasts and contacts the closest … access points.  Such tags retail for about $50 and can last for months, emitting ‘chirps’ to update any listening Wi-Fi access points about their current position and condition.” Stan Schatt, Wi-Fi-based real-time location systems primed to grow market share

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is real-time location system.

Overheard - Wi-Fi Direct

“In theory, Wi-Fi Direct takes personal area networks (PANs) from short distances using cables or Bluetooth to full Wi-Fi range and speed.” Eric Griffith, New ‘Wi-Fi Direct’ Spec Revamps Device Networks

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is Wi-Fi Direct.

Overheard - Unified computing system

“A unified computing system brings certain service benefits.  What it really comes down to is one throat to choke.” Marc Staimer, Defining ‘unified computing systems’

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is unified computing system.

Overheard - Single stream 802.11n for the iPhone?

802.11n was developed as a range and speed booster, employing multiple antennas and two or more radios to work over greater distances (sending a stronger signal, having better receiver sensitivity) and at greater speeds (improved encoding, multiple spatial paths, double-wide channels).  That’s fine for laptops, desktops, and routers, but it’s hard to cram that much radio technology into a battery-powered mobile device without making the time between charges unusably brief. Glenn Fleishman, Does the iPhone Need 802.11n?

That’s where single-stream 802.11n comes in. With single-stream 802.11n, only a single radio and single antenna are used…

…802.11n’s single stream encoding is 65 Mbps, where 30 to 50 Mbps of throughput is possible. So you lose wide channels, antenna diversity, and multiple streams, but could gain 50 percent or more in net throughput.

Overheard - IPv6 not backwards compatible with IPv4?

The Internet engineering community says its biggest mistake in developing IPv6 - a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol - is that it lacks backwards compatibility with the existing Internet Protocol, known as IPv4. Carolyn Duffy Marsan, Biggest mistake for IPv6: It’s not backwards compatible, developers admit

I just finished reading Carolyn Marsan’s piece, Google: IPv6 is easy, not expensive.  Google, you see, has moved to IPv6.  IPv6 operates in much the same way as IPv4, but with one very important distinction — IPv6 assigns IP addresses of 128 bits instead of IPv4’s 32 bits and that really increases the total number of possible Internet addresses.

Carol reports that Google engineers worked on the IPv6 effort as a 20% project – meaning it was in addition to their regular work.  So far, the U.S. has been lagging behind other countries with IPv6 — mostly because we can — but now that Google has come on board, that may hurry things along.

What really caught my interest,  was a sidebar that linked to an article where Carol did a bang-up job explaining the REAL issue that is holding up IPv6.  Simply put, the developers mis-judged how adoption would really occur.  They may have shot themselves in the foot by not making IPv6 backwards-compatible with IPv4, but It’s not their fault — it would have been cost-prohibitive, complicated and illogical in some ways.

(Explaining it to myself) It would be like your television station broadcasting in both analog and digital for awhile and then gradually fading out analog broadcasts as people replaced their old analog sets with new digital ones.  It seemed like a logical, practical plan.

The IETF developers designed IPv6 to run in a dual stack.  That means that IPv4 and IPv6 would run side by side for awhile and then IPv4 would gradually be faded out.

They didn’t foresee a scenario where IPv4 devices would stick around for years, some vendors wouldn’t bother upgrading their products to be IPv6-compliant and some administrators would just shut off the IPv6 part of the dual stack in an effort to keep things simple.

Since IPv4 isn’t fading away as the engineers had thought, they are going back to the drawing board to help IPv6 addresses be understood by IPv4 devices.

Carol says the transition mechanisms include:

* Dual-Stack Lite, a technique developed by Comcast that allows for incremental deployment of IPv6. With Dual-Stack Lite, a carrier would give new customers special home gateways that take IPv4 packets from their legacy PCs and printers and ship them over an IPv6 tunnel to a carrier-grade network address translator (NAT).

* NAT64, a mechanism for translating IPv6 packets into IPv4 packets and vice versa. A related tool, dubbed DNS64, allows an IPv6-only device to call up an IPv4-only name server. These two tools would allow an IPv6 device to communicate with IPv4-only devices and content.

Overheard - Why Cisco bought Flip

One of the things we see happening is combining video communications with social networking–what we call “visual networking,” which will change the way we do business and how we communicate with our families. Padmasree Warrior,  as quoted in America’s First CTO?

I guess we’ll have to define ‘visual networking.’

David Talbot at MIT Technology Review has an entertaining nterview with Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s CTO. Rumor has it that she’ll be President Obama’s pick for America’s CTO.

As you probably know by now, Cisco has acquired Pure Digital (makers of the popular Flip video camera) for $159 million.

I’m not surprised by the acquisition, but I am confused that Cisco said they were adding Flip to the ‘Cisco Consumer Business Group.’  What’s up with that name? If your group is named Consumer Business Group, doesn’t that account for ummmm….everyone?

According to Cisco:

Upon the close of the acquisition, the Pure Digital team will become part of Cisco’s Consumer Business Group, which includes Linksys® by Cisco® home networking, audio and media-storage products. Jonathan Kaplan, chairman and CEO of Pure Digital, will become general manager of the combined organization, reporting to Ned Hooper, Senior Vice President of Cisco’s Corporate Development and Consumer Groups.

Overheard - When won’t IKE work?

IKE negotiation sends and receives messages using UDP, listening on port 500. This can be a problem if you have a firewall in front of your VPN router or are trying to establish an IPsec client connection through a firewall. Michael J. Martin, IPsec VPN router configuration: The ISAKMP policy

I wish I had read this earlier — Michael says “Remember that IKE is a protocol that supports ISAKMP — ISAKMP makes the rules, and IKE plays the game.”

If you’re thinking about implementing a VPN, be sure to read Lisa Phifer’s excellent breakdown on IPSec VPN clients.  Our newest sister site also has some good resources — SearchEnterpriseWAN.com.

Overheard - Virtualization sprawl is like ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’

“When we started out with virtualization, we thought, ‘VMs are easy and cheap, so let’s go. Let’s create as many as we need.’ We ended up with several hundred more machines than we actually needed.” Chuck Brust, as quoted in Virtualization users beware: Sprawl is real

Today’s Word of the Day is virtualization sprawl.   It wasn’t such an important consideration when VMs were just used for testing, but now that we’re finding VMs in production, vendors are scrambling to come up with tools that allow administrators to monitor and manage VMs more efficiently so that virtualization remains cost-effective. The holy grail? A tool that allows the admin to see and manage both physical machines and VMs from one dashboard.

Every time I read about virtualization sprawl, I’m reminded of the Start Trek espisode The Trouble with Tribbles. Click - new server.  Click- new server.  Click - new server.  Will the exponential propogation of VMs will eat any profits we might have gained from moving to virtualization?

Overheard - The power of ping

Ping is probably the simplest TCP/IP diagnostic utility ever created, but the information that it can provide you with is invaluable. Simply put, ping tells you whether or not your workstation can communicate with another machine. Brien M. Posey, Using ping command for troubleshooting Windows network connectivity