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Best of open source in networking If we had to pick the most significant trend in networking today, the VoIP phenomenon might well top the list. And open source is playing no small part. While enterprises remain reluctant to rip out their tried-and-true PBXes, open source VoIP -- usually in the form of Asterisk -- is capturing business communications one small business or branch office at a time. Sooner or later, enterprises too will catch the open source VoIP bug. The cost savings and flexibility are too compelling to resist. CA's Spectrum tool now looks at human errors The latest version of CA's Spectrum network management software, released Monday, can factor in human errors when gauging the health of a network. June 25, 3:51 p.m. PDT Microsoft, EMC team on network management Microsoft is licensing technology from EMC, and the companies are developing new technologies aimed at making it easier for businesses to monitor and manage their IT systems. March 27, 11:55 a.m. PST Predicting user behavior still not an exact science A recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the use of predictive analytics to determine which of Philadelphia’s parolees were likely to commit murder caught my attention. A broad definition of predictive analytics would be the process of matching statistics with historical data in order to predict future events, mainly human behavior.  December 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Entuity grants network admins a third Eye Far too many enterprise networks today lack an essential tool: comprehensive monitoring. Most have some form of connectivity monitoring, such as simple ping tests to ensure that remote sites and Internet access are functional, but the proactive monitoring commonly stops there. September 1, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hack Tales: Keeping track of tools the wireless way “Who has that damn cart now?” During a network build-out for a large New York commercial real estate manager a few years back, that phrase got shouted often enough to become a stress mantra. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Stupid user tricks: Eleven IT horror stories No matter how hard we pray, how many chickens we sacrifice, how often we chant naked by moonlight, every network is at one time or other exposed to the ultimate technology risk: users. April 13, 3:00 a.m. PDT Product previews EMC rolls out entry SAN and archiving software EMC introduced the EMC clariion AX150 and AX150i storage systems and the EMC Documentum Archive Services for Email and Archive Services for Reports. The AX150 systems, available with Fibre Channel or iSCSI connectivity, support as many as 10 host servers and scale from 750GB to 6TB of SATA II storage. Pricing starts at $5,600. The new Archiving Services offerings are based on a unified archiving platform for collecting, retaining, securing, and discovering all kinds of information, including e-mail, reports, documents, images, Web content, video, and transactional data. Prices vary by configuration. EMC Clariion AX150 and EMC Documentum Archive Services, EMC April 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Shunra's network-testing crystal ball gets better For IT, playing the “what if” game to predict how a new CRM application would behave over the corporate intranet used to require a stack of equipment and load of patience. With Version 4.0 of Shunra Virtual Enterprise (formerly Shunra Storm) much of the tedious trial and error is handled for the tester. March 31, 3:00 a.m. PST Cisco to let partner software, services bloom Cisco Systems wants its channel partners to run off with everything it learns about providing professional services. March 15, 4:11 a.m. PST Entuity improves Eye of the Storm's network vision Entuity on Tuesday unfurled Version 4.5 of its Eye of the Storm network management suite, equipping administrators with greater visibility and control over the network. February 28, 8:30 a.m. PST Network General snags Fidelia Further blurring the lines between network and application management, network analysis vendor Network General Monday announced the acquisition of Fidelia, maker of business service monitoring application NetVigil. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. February 6, 8:55 a.m. PST Uplogix provides remote-site lifeline It’s the bane of remote-site network administration: the moment you realize that the routing change you just made on a remote router has locked you out of the site entirely and knocked the site offline. It’s not necessarily a case of poor admin skills, but more likely a simple mistake. February 2, 3:00 a.m. PST Network Physics NP-500 tills the LAN Here’s the scenario: The development guys have just deployed the new version of your CRM application, and the infrastructure group has finally upgraded the backbone to Gigabit Ethernet. So why are the users still complaining about poor performance? Where’s the bottleneck? January 26, 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 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 Cisco mulls acquiring Nokia, report says Internet equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. is interested in acquiring Nokia Corp., the world largest manufacturer of mobile phones, according to several media reports citing the Sunday Business newspaper. August 8, 3:58 a.m. PDT SAP arrives at Home Depot Bob DeRodes, executive vice president and chief information officer of The Home Depot, admits that the home improvement company, North America's second largest retailer and a Fortune 13 company, hasn't been on the cutting edge of information technology. June 1, 8:30 a.m. PDT Investigators link Cisco hack to other activities A theft of computer source code from Cisco Systems, reported a year ago, has led to a wide-ranging investigation of potential criminal activity involving multiple server break-ins in several countries, according to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). May 10, 9:44 a.m. PDT Feed the monitoring multitudes The GigaVue-MP is a modular system that provides line-speed port aggregation, switching, filtering, and duplication of streams via an out-of-band switch fabric for network analysis. It filters traffic on just about anything in the Ethernet header, extracts or combines it with other inputs, sends it to a collection of output ports, and filters it yet again. This combination of pre- and post-filtering allows you to match any link to any tool, as well as perform many-to-one and one-to-many switching. You can send port 80/443 data to your application monitoring tool, VoIP traffic data to your telecom group, and all traffic data to your IDS/IPS tool. Additional monitoring tools can be added to the mix simply by modifying GigaVue’s filter table. May 2, 5:00 a.m. PDT Niksun appliance brings TiVo-like abilities to enterprise networks It’s one thing to implement a network protocol analyzer on a segment to determine traffic patterns and utilization; it’s quite another to perform these functions and to capture and store every bit seen on the wire. April 4, 6:00 a.m. PDT 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 Measuring change management initiatives takes initiative Cynics may say that the field of change management is so vast that the term is practically useless. Yet, if the sun is always shining behind the clouds, one can credit effective change management with improved operational efficiencies and higher customer satisfaction — at least that’s the boardroom consensus. November 5, 3:00 p.m. PST Cisco to acquire P-Cube for $200 million NEW YORK - Cisco Systems Inc. said Monday it has agreed to acquire Sunnyvale, California, software developer P-Cube Inc. in a cash-and-options deal Cisco valued at $200 million. August 23, 1:50 p.m. PDT HP adds more tools to on-demand product line Looking to buttress its on-demand computing strategy, Hewlett-Packard Co. this week plans to announce two OpenView management tools at a conference for users of its software products. June 14, 5:20 p.m. PDT Skybox expands security product support BOSTON - Skybox Security Inc. said it was releasing a new version of its Skybox View Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) product on Monday at the Computer Security Institute's Netsec 2004 conference in San Francisco. June 14, 10:13 a.m. PDT ClearSight sheds a new light on network data Many network administrators feel right at home with standard network analysis tools, which show network traffic flows as lists of packet headers with packet payloads viewable in hex or ASCII. Many other network admins, however, do not. In an effort to ease network and application troubleshooting, ClearSight Networks offers ClearSight Analyzer, a new approach to network analysis. June 11, 3:00 p.m. PDT Systems management companies release new wares Two companies calling themselves "service-oriented" systems management providers released new or updated products on Monday. May 24, 3:15 p.m. PDT Xgig peers inside SANs Investing in diagnostic tools for networked storage bears several benefits. With the proper tools, you can easily shorten the time it takes to get to the root of performance problems in a complex storage infrastructure. Moreover, even when nothing is broken, a good diagnostic tool can provide a better understanding of your SAN’s inner workings, knowledge that can help you improve the performance and resilience of your storage networks over the long haul. April 23, 3:00 p.m. PDT Visio 2003 makes the right moves The term Visio hasn’t quite become a verb, akin to Google, but the presence of this tool in daily IT life is significant. Visio has become the de facto standard for standard diagram drawings, especially network layouts and process flowcharting. April 16, 3:00 p.m. PDT IBM boosts autonomic computing resources IBM on Tuesday will unveil its Autonomic Computing Zone, an online information resource featuring daily and weekly updates of information pertaining to autonomic computing. April 12, 5:00 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 APM under the microscope APM (application performance management) is a lot like exercise: Everyone knows they need it, but only a fraction practice it consistently, citing high costs and lengthy deployment times as excuses. February 13, 3:00 p.m. PST > Networking |
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