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HP core LAN switch signals rise of ProCurve Hewlett-Packard isn't yet a household name in enterprise LANs but is poised to extend its gains against leader Cisco with a new core switch and coordination with HP's consulting arm. Networking: Convergence is at hand In networking, the big news of 2006 was the emergence of 10-Gigabit Ethernet as a mature, enterprise-ready technology. The past year also witnessed important advances in security and monitoring on the enterprise LAN, thanks to ever tightening integration and partnerships.  January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 Year in Reviews: Networking After most of the vendors declined our invitation to a WAN shootout last year, we settled for a series of standalone reviews of WAN accelerators this year. As usual, Riverbed’s Steelhead shined -- so did products from Silver Peak, Blue Coat, and Cisco Systems, though they still swam in Steelhead’s wake. Perhaps competition will be stiff enough for a comparative test in 2007. Stay tuned. December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST Cisco opens R&D center in west of Ireland Cisco Systems Inc. will open a research center in Ireland to develop unified communications products. November 22, 8:21 a.m. PST Juniper unveils branch-office strategy Enterprises have done wonders in recent years consolidating their IT operations into efficient and tightly managed datacenters. That trend has been a godsend for system administrators and IT workers, who no longer have to spend long hours on the road, in transit to far-flung branch offices to reboot servers and take care of other mundane tasks. One population that hasn’t benefitted from centralized IT operations: the poor souls who have to work in those branch offices and live at the mercy of their WAN connection. And that’s no small population. By one estimate, as much as 80 percent of employees at many companies now work outside of headquarters. October 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Cisco banking on collaboration tools Triple plays are rare in baseball. But Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers plans to do one better Wednesday by promising to pull off a "quadruple play" in the networking business: incorporating data, voice, video, and mobile capabilities across its product lines. September 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld’s CTO 25 winners have the right stuff Five years in, and the quality keeps improving. I’m talking about InfoWorld’s CTO 25 award winners, our annual crop of high achievers who have pushed their companies’ IT efforts to new heights over the past year. In this incarnation of the awards, not only did we see a record number of nominees, but we were bowled over by the qualifications and the sheer accomplishments of so many of the candidates. Read the highly distilled results of that embarrassment of riches -- a collection of 25 profiles. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hack Tales: Keeping thin clients synced from coast to coast I once consulted for a medical-records company that was rolling out thin clients to nearly 50 offices around the United States. The goal was to build a large Citrix MetaFrame farm over WAN links to the main datacenter, which was located outside Boston, providing a Windows desktop for every user without dealing with hardware problems at each site. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hack Tales: Network auditing on a shoestring What do you do when the auditors are breathing down your neck, wanting to see an exhaustive report on the Windows network security of a 2,000-user network across eight sites? That’s easy. Break out a text editor and start writing some Perl. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hack Tales: Air-gap networking for the price of a pair of sneakers Federal IT managers face troubling times when it comes to synchronizing an air-gap network. And just in case you’re thinking “air gap” refers to a new brand of sneakers … well, you’re almost right. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Nortel, Symantec team on app security Symantec plans to announce Monday a deal to put its intrusion prevention system (IPS) software on Nortel Network's application switching hardware. May 22, 8:50 a.m. PDT Gigamon offers one view of many monitoring systems Compliance requirements, security threats, and the need for operational visibility require more and more monitoring of activities on the network. Vendors have responded by offering plug-and-play appliances to fill specific needs, yet nobody wants to manage a patchwork of one-off solutions, each with its own proprietary spin. “At some point, the customer is going to get tired of all this. They’ll want help to aggregate the monitoring,” says Denny Miu, CEO of Gigamon. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Interop shows slow, steady progress on NAC Network access control was a hot topic at last year’s Interop show, despite an evolutionary state that was barely protozoic. But new developments from the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and pure-play vendors such as Vernier and InfoExpress could soon enable the technology to crawl out of the muck and take its place on enterprise networks, according to one expert. May 1, 3:00 a.m. PDT Dark tales from your friendly IT help desk The features I normally tend to write for InfoWorld are … well, let’s call them "technically thick" … somewhat dense studies in micro- and macro-IT management issues. Good reads if your life revolves around these things, but not exactly where you’d look for a barrel of laughs. But there’s an exception to every rule. April 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Product Previews Certeon Appliances Smooth WAN Application Traffic Certeon this week is lifting the cover on its S-Series appliances, looking to boost the speed, scalability, and security of WAN application traffic. The Layer 7 appliances will accelerate secure SSL traffic (HTTP and HTTPS) between remote sites and central datacenters using the company’s Secure Acceleration Technology, which speeds up app traffic by recognizing requests, comparing them to the data, and sending only the changes over the network. This approach conserves both time and bandwidth. A set of “application acceleration blueprints” provides an extra boost by allowing the devices to better predict traffic patterns. The 1U S-1000 and S-2000, and 2U S-3000 are differentiated by capacity and the number of WAN links supported (five, 10, and 15, respectively), making the boxes appropriate for a range of office sizes. S-1000, S-2000, and S-3000, certeon.com February 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Product Previews WebEx Opens Tap to Systems Management After handing it a wrench with the WebEx Support Center, software-as-a-service specialist WebEx is now offering an entire toolbox. Developed in partnership with Everdream, WebEx System Management Services will allow IT organizations to manage Windows desktop systems through a hosted Web application that integrates asset management, software distribution, patch management, virus protection, and automated online backup capabilities. System Management Services will be available Feb. 1 and cost from $5 to $15 per computer per month, depending on services. WebEx System Management Services, WebEx January 30, 3:00 a.m. PST IT will give up control of the network As we look at all the changes taking place on the Internet during the past several years, I think we can boil it down to two simple observations. First, the volume of traffic is increasing exponentially: E-mail, IM, and RSS all mean more connections. Second, each connection is moving a great deal more data, including multimedia, voice, and video. January 10, 3:00 a.m. PST Hardware isn't enough IT buyers live in a golden age of commodity hardware. Processors, servers, networks, storage, you name it: Every segment of the IT stack keeps getting faster, cheaper, and more commoditized. No surprise, then, that IT managers often resort to a checkbook-waving strategy, throwing hardware at every IT problem, from a balky WAN to an application speed bump. November 28, 3:00 a.m. PST Moving toward mesh networks The dream of broadband connectivity that’s as ubiquitous as the air you breathe still is not reality, and perhaps it would be a cruel pun to tell you not to hold your breath. November 22, 3:00 a.m. PST Competing network-management rivals unfurl faster, smarter wares Network management rivals Network General and Network Instruments on Monday separately announced significant enhancements to their respective Sniffer and Observer product lines. November 7, 12:01 a.m. PST The dumb remote office Management, compliance, and security concerns have made consolidation all the rage in large organizations, which have increasingly moved their applications and data from globally dispersed servers to a few centralized, tightly secured data centers. With the trend toward intelligent networks, we may one day see remote offices with very little intelligence of their own. July 18, 5:00 a.m. PDT Building the intelligent network The days of the fat, dumb pipe, are over. Servers applications, and storage have been shouldering the intelligence and security burden for too long. It’s time for the network infrastructure itself to add some smarts. After all, when it comes to intelligence, the real beauty of the network is that it touches everything. July 18, 5:00 a.m. PDT Cisco nets Airespace for $450 million Cisco Systems this week confirmed plans to buy wireless LAN switch vendor Airespace for $450 million in stock, following several weeks of speculation that Cisco was shopping for a WLAN switch vendor. January 13, 5:24 a.m. PST The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid We all like to think we learn from mistakes, whether our own or others’. So in theory, the more serious bloopers you know about, the less likely you are to be under the bright light of interrogation, explaining how you managed to screw up big-time. That’s why we put out an all-points bulletin to IT managers and vendors everywhere: For the good of humanity, tell us about the gotchas that have gotten you, so others can avoid them. November 19, 3:00 p.m. PST Grand jury subpoenas Nortel documents WASHINGTON - A federal grand jury in Texas has issued a subpoena for documents, including financial statements and accounting records, from Nortel Networks Corp., the company announced Friday. May 14, 12:05 p.m. PDT MCI expands security product line MCI Inc. on Tuesday announced several new IP (Internet Protocol) security products, including intrusion protection, vulnerability scanning, an antivirus/antispam offering and new managed firewalls. April 27, 12:48 p.m. PDT Riverbed's Steelhead swims through WAN bottlenecks IT managers are always being asked to do more with less. When it comes to WAN links, less is sometimes all you have to work with. The Steelhead 2000 WAN acceleration appliance from Riverbed Technology is part file cache, part proxy, and part TCP optimization, providing a unique and extremely effective way of reducing the time spent transferring files from one office to another. In addition, the Steelhead is easy to install, and it does not require any LAN/WAN re-engineering. But like other WAN acceleration appliances, a unit must be installed on each end of your WAN link. April 9, 3:00 p.m. PDT > Networking > LAN |
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