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Fear of insider threats hits home The more money that companies spend on securing their IT operations from external attack, the more it seems they become aware that the potential threat posed by their own employees remains their most significant risk. Cisco extends NAC product lineup Cisco announced a pair of additions to its Network Admission Control (NAC) product line on Monday, launching new tools that promise to extend the authentication system to a greater variety of devices and office environments.  September 10, 5:00 a.m. PDT 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. September 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Best of open source in enterprise monitoring Open source software has had a foothold in the enterprise monitoring sphere for almost as long as open source has existed. One only needs to look at the sheer ubiquity of small applications such as MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) and its RRDTool back end to see that. What we haven't had from open source is the big application -- the comprehensive, community supported open source enterprise management suite that provides the depth and breadth of functionality that businesses need and generally find in closed-source competitors. That is changing in leaps and bounds. In fact, open source enterprise monitoring solutions are evolving so quickly, we won't even try to declare a clear winner yet -- but we're working on it. September 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft enters virtual machine-management Microsoft released its first software designed specifically to manage virtual machines on a network Thursday and tweaked licensing for its system-management products to take into account virtualization. September 6, 1:47 p.m. PDT Nokia, Intel beef up new network security appliance Nokia added a new appliance to its network security range that has more processing muscle -- the first product to come out of its collaboration with Intel. September 6, 4:43 a.m. PDT Lockheed Martin begins to deploy IPv6 U.S. government contractor Lockheed Martin has begun to move part of its network to IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) as a way of showing customers how to make the transition, the company said. August 30, 12:36 p.m. PDT Open source storage gets a virtual lift It has been a while since I last discussed Coraid, but two announcements the company made at LinuxWorld earlier this month have me thinking about AoE (ATA over Ethernet) these days. August 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Huawei expands development in India Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei Technologies Co. plans to expand its research and development operation in India with the addition of 700 new staff over the next two years. August 20, 6:04 a.m. PDT Microsoft System Center can ease network security fright The night is so dark, it sticks to your skin. The young geek wanders lost through thick foliage, branches grabbing his sleeves, the glow from his pitiful penlight only serving to accentuate the crushing blackness all around. Suddenly branches snap under mysterious feet somewhere ahead, his heart base jumps into his mouth, and he nearly swallows his penlight in a vain attempt to stay hidden. August 1, 3:00 a.m. PDT Take the guesswork out of capacity planning Paperwork bites. So badly, that it's amazing how far normally lucid (in my case semi-lucid) people will go to avoid it. For example: The process of reviving the Ducati also involves obtaining a new title because I've managed to lose the original ... somehow. That means going to New York where the bike was purchased, filling out paperwork, and dealing with notoriously uncooperative DMV staffers. Such an unpleasant prospect that I black out this weekend and come to in a BMW dealership trying to convince myself that buying a brand new, super-sexy K 1200 GT for $20,000 is a good idea because the dealer will take care of the Duc. Now that's avoidance behavior! June 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT IBM, Cisco ready codeveloped management software IBM and Cisco Systems plan to release a jointly developed product in July as part of an expansion of their existing alliance around telecommunications network management and service assurance, the companies said Thursday. June 14, 5:12 a.m. PDT 2007 InfoWorld CTO 25: Marc Willebeek-LeMair Dr. Marc Willebeek-LeMair, CTO of 3Com, is used to wrestling with weighty problems. After all, the man spent a decade at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center working on so-called intelligent infrastructure technologies and has done research on everything from distributed computing and high-speed networking technologies to network processors and management systems. So when Willebeek-LeMair talks about the problems facing the enterprise networking industry, people tend to listen. June 8, 3:00 a.m. PDT 2007 InfoWorld CTO 25: Carl Snyder Sometimes, the process is the product. Employing a blueprint drawn from 26 years of IT experience – along with best practices outlined in the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) – Carl Snyder already has reaped success during his brief tenure as director of global IT infrastructure and operations at Tellabs. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Zenoss: Bringing open source to enterprise management If you curse your "tier-one" IT management solution as too cumbersome, too complex, and too expensive, you're not alone. In arecent Gartner study that declares the "Big Four" -- BMC, CA, HP, and IBM -- increasingly vulnerable to SaaS (software as a service) and open source alternatives, surveyed users gave their vendors mostly C's and D's, and a good number of incompletes. May 31, 3:00 a.m. PDT Cogneto: to identity and beyond! Multifactor authentication is all the rage these days, thanks to increasingly sophisticated trojans and phishing attacks and even rootkits aimed at stealing passwords and sensitive data. High-stakes online crime has even spurred financial services companies and some enterprises to consider new, "risk-based authentication" solutions, which examine behavioral patterns and session characteristics to identify rogue users. May 25, 3:00 a.m. PDT Exclusive: Raritan changes the KVM game Although KVM over IP has been around for years, it hasn’t been perfected yet. There are plenty of players in this game, and each solution has its share of idiosyncrasies that can prove frustrating when trying to fix server problems from afar. Raritan’s original Dominion KX line of KVM switches were sturdy and stable, yet somewhat cranky when used over WAN links with high latency. They were certainly functional, but left something to be desired. May 22, 3:00 a.m. PDT Future of NAC pits host against network Makers of network access control technologies find themselves dividing along familiar lines within the world of IT security as some providers evangelize a centralized, network-based approach for enforcing device authentication tools and others claim that NAC should reside on the endpoint. April 24, 7:15 a.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 Sophos to integrate NAC into desktop security Sophos will weave network access control (NAC) functions into its client antivirus security product, Endpoint Security, over the next 12 months, the company's chief executive officer said on Thursday at CeBIT in Hanover, Germany. March 15, 9:34 a.m. PST IBM aims to make computing clusters easier It may be too early to talk plug-and-play but IBM believes it can help businesses of all sizes easily cluster their servers to handle intensive computing workloads. February 28, 6:47 a.m. PST The benefits of a fast close A fast close — the ability of a company to complete its accounting cycle and close its books — is more than just a badge of honor for the finance department. It means dollars. The question is, Is your technology getting in the way or is it helping? February 27, 3:00 a.m. PST Cisco backtracks on open source promise After promising to turn the client software for its CTA (Cisco Trust Agent) into an open-source application, Bob Gleichauf, CTO of Cisco's Security Technology Group, said that the company has not made up its mind yet about the future of the software. February 21, 3:00 a.m. PST Cisco going open source with NAC client As it develops the next generation of network security infrastructure, Cisco Systems Inc. is planning to cease development on its network admission control (NAC) client, the Cisco Trust Agent (CTA), and submit the source code for the software client to the open source community, Bob Gleichauf, CTO of Cisco's Security Technology Group, told InfoWorld. February 7, 3:06 p.m. PST Analysis: Cisco's transformation still a work in progress Cisco Systems used the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco to trumpet its transformation from "packet pusher" to "infrastructure" company, unveiling a string of product updates that unify its diverse security portfolio on Monday. February 6, 10:10 a.m. PST Accelerate your 802.1x rollout During the course of our NAC reviews, we also tested Cloudpath Networks' XpressConnect. XpressConnect is a small, browser-delivered agent that can reconfigure wireless access profiles and 802.1x supplicants. Placed on a captured portal page for guests or staff, it automatically configures systems for access to your 802.1x network, be it wired or wireless. As a result, 802.1x authentication is much easier to deploy than has been the case in the past. February 5, 3:00 a.m. PST NAC: How we tested Our test infrastructure for the NAC reviews included an edge switch for the client systems, a core switch with server VLANs for the common and secured servers, and a RADIUS server for authentication. Client systems connected into the edge switch, authenticated as defined for the specific scenarios, then accessed (or attempted to access) the various areas of the network: Internet, enterprise, and limited access. We created additional policy networks for remediation and scanning as well. February 5, 3:00 a.m. PST NAC smorgasbord: Four ways to police the network In this age of worms, zombies, and botnets, mobile computers themselves are a kind of Trojan horse. Do you know where that computer’s been? No, you really don’t. February 5, 3:00 a.m. PST NAC policy management wags the watchdog The most critical element of a NAC system is the policy management system. As every administrative interface that an administrator must use requires specialized focus and understanding, the ease with which an administrator can launch the policy management system, make the changes desired, view reports, and perform other management tasks is critical. No administrator is likely to have hours to devote to these systems each day, so the simplification and visualization provided by the system should be a primary consideration for shoppers (and a prime opportunity for differentiation among the vendors). February 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Eclipse, Novell near 'Big Bang' for identity Two open-source identity management projects said on Monday that they had achieved a key milestone in the development of open-source identity services that connect products regardless of maker or platform. January 29, 3:36 p.m. PST Cabling blunder fouls up DoD network Back in the days of RG-58 Ethernet co-ax and Novell NetWare servers, I worked for a small networking firm. One of the VPs had friends at the Pentagon, and one day — to everyone’s amazement — we landed a lucrative contract to install a network for a military pay-and-benefits facility at the Department of Defense (DoD). This was supposed to be a ground-up installation, everything from pulling cable to configuring the server, setting up all the stations, and training the user community. January 9, 3:00 a.m. PST Cisco warns of vulnerabilities in NAC product Networking equipment vendor Cisco Systems Inc. issued an advisory to customers Wednesday about two serious vulnerabilities in its Cisco Clean Access software, a network access control product. January 4, 1:36 p.m. PST 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 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 Nortel opens network management center in India Nortel Networks has set up a network management center in Delhi, India to service its customers worldwide. December 4, 9:24 a.m. PST IBM aims security bundle, new blade at telecom space IBM is looking to increase its business with telecommunications operators with the unveiling of products, including a security bundle and a blade server, specially tailored to their needs. December 4, 8:24 a.m. PST WAN appliance underdog Exinda pushes open standard Looking for an edge in the hotly contested market for wide-area network performance tools, Exinda Networks wants to help everyone get along. December 1, 1:49 p.m. PST IBM to buy Vallent for telecom expertise IBM is looking to better meet the needs of wireless service providers with its planned purchase of network performance monitoring and service management software vendor Vallent. November 28, 7:54 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 Trouble in homicide: a network detective story Several years ago i found myself working for a major metropolitan police department, mainly building specialty databases. All the databases were stored on a single PC in the division office. It wasn’t the best way to do it, but it worked. And it provided the illusion of security. November 21, 3:00 a.m. PST Consolidate, outsource, or both? Datacenter consolidation is the mega-solution for bringing IT costs, man-agement, and disaster recovery under control, but depending on a company’s goals and size, outsourcing can also play a useful complementary role. “Outsourcing should definitely be part of the decision process,” says Michael Bell, research vice president at Gartner. “Once you make the decision to consolidate or relocate, it then becomes a question of whether you should build a new datacenter, buy one, lease one, or outsource it.” November 20, 3:00 a.m. PST Consolidation power tools Can software management tools help bring your consolidation initiative under control? It depends. Certainly solutions abound that can help with one of the first steps: identifying and analyzing the hardware, software, and infrastructure you already have in place. November 20, 3:00 a.m. PST Juniper releases Version 2 of NAC product With all the hype and anticipation that has surrounded the NAC (network access control) space in recent years, you can forgive IT administrators for assuming that full-featured NAC solutions were just around the corner. But progress on client screening and NAC has been agonizingly slow since the first NAC products hit the market in 2004. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Government agencies gear up for HSPD 12 Most major IT projects of any size are slow moving beasts: amorphous blobs of specs and builds and regression tests slouching toward completion, someday far in the future. October 23, 3:00 a.m. PDT Riverbed Steelhead boosts WAN data flow IT always seems to be caught in the middle of the WAN-performance battle: On one hand, users never seem to be happy with an application’s performance; on the other, the bean counters won’t budget for bigger pipes. If more bandwidth isn’t the answer to end-users’ performance problems, then what is? October 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT Emerging security solutions vie for approval Aside from a flurry of beta releases, security updates, and the usual E.U. he said/she said dance, it's been a pretty quiet week in Redmond. In case you're wondering which betas to watch for (past, present, and near-immediate future), the list includes Vista RC2, Exchange Server 2007 Beta 2 Help, Virtual PC 2007 Beta 1, and PowerShell RC2. All that and the happy announcement that Microsoft will soon be ending support for Windows XP Service Pack 1. (Is it my imagination or was that awfully quick?) October 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Klir Analytics shares IT management advice Inspired by the communal wisdom generated on sites like Wikipedia.com, Klir Technologies launched an IT management product Monday intended for system administrators at small and medium businesses. September 25, 6:29 a.m. PDT Experts advise caution on implementing NAC Security researchers and experts this week cautioned network administrators to consider carefully whether they need to implement network access control (NAC) technology in their security infrastructure before buying in to the current hype surrounding it. September 22, 9:31 a.m. PDT Caspian Networks up for sale Caspian Networks, a one-time core router startup that today makes devices to improve network performance, is on the block. September 18, 7:05 a.m. PDT More players announce NAC plans Microsoft and Cisco Systems played the role of proud parents on Sept. 6. But with so many questions about when NAC-NAP, as it’s been called, will be available, and how it will work with non-Windows clients and non-Cisco infrastructure, it’s been hard to figure out what the companies created. September 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT Cisco, Microsoft NAC plans leave many questions Building a bridge is rarely a quiet affair. Just ask John Augustus Roebling and his son, Washington, whose Brooklyn Bridge took 13 years to complete and cost 27 people their lives. September 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT 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 Cisco, Microsoft to announce NAC progress Cisco Systems and Microsoft will announce progress on a 2-year-old effort to link their separate technologies for network client health screening, commonly known as "network access control," according to sources familiar with the companies' plans. September 6, 7:15 a.m. PDT 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 IBM broadens security portfolio with ISS IBM is so massive, so wealthy and has its hands in so many enterprise pies that it’s easy to find wisdom in pretty much any acquisition decision the company makes. In recent weeks, those decisions have been coming hot and heavy: SOA vendor Webify and asset management company MRO, then content management firm FileNet for $1.6 billion. August 28, 3:00 a.m. PDT Lessons from the verticals Every industry presents unique challenges, where IT must marshal more than the usual chunk of resources to solve extreme headaches. That may mean walking out to the edge of grid computing to garner greater compute performance, or it may involve management challenges such as accommodating a mobile workforce or connecting hundreds of far-flung offices. The greater the problem to overcome, the greater the potential to learn from successful solutions. August 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Cacti makes network monitoring less painful The world doesn't revolve around IT. Consultants like yours truly sometimes have a hard time grasping that concept, because our lives really do revolve around IT. So when I walk into a site where we helped build the network three years ago to find that the total amount of network monitoring that's been going on since we finished UAT (user acceptance testing) is … nada, you can imagine the initial reaction. August 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Researchers: Management apps could pose security risk Insecure coding and loose deployments of enterprise management applications could turn anti-virus, patch management and systems management applications into powerful and malicious botnets, according to research presented at the Black Hat Briefings Conference in Las Vegas. August 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Linksys small-business Wi-Fi grows up Small businesses will get some of the wireless LAN bells and whistles enterprises already have as Cisco Systems' Linksys division expands its product lineup on Monday. July 31, 4:18 a.m. PDT Motorola, Wipro form Indian services venture Motorola and Indian outsourcer Wipro Technologies are forming a joint venture to pursue the growing market for outsourced network management services, the companies said Tuesday. July 25, 8:36 a.m. PDT Juniper, Cisco focus on access control Although Cisco Systems began evangelizing the notion of NAC (network access control) in 2003, it took its time putting a NAC strategy together, allowing competitors and small startups to rush in to fill the void. The fuzzy NAC picture, however, is starting to snap into focus, with access control news from both Cisco and Juniper Networks in recent weeks. July 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT Podcasts: Microsoft and Sun groom their OSes for 10 Gig With 10 Gig making inroads into mainstream datacenters, we had to check and see how server OS vendors were responding to this fast new media. In the past, even when straight Gigabit Ethernet adapters were first introduced, operating systems simply weren’t prepared to handle the increased bandwidth. July 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Spirent melds voice, video, and data into networking test gear We’ve been doing network-switch testing for more than 10 years now, and the concept of a triple-play test (voice, video, and data) has been a part of our plans from the early days of ATM OC-12 through Gigabit Ethernet’s birth and now to 10 Gig. July 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT RSA confirms acquisition rumors RSA Security confirmed published rumors that it is in discussions to be acquired, but declined to reveal the companies with which it is negotiating. June 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Symantec to exit security appliance business Symantec laid off staff and said it is shaking up its network and gateway security business this week, ending the company's experiment with security hardware appliances. June 23, 12:38 p.m. PDT Microsoft steps in to VMware's virtualization arena I recently commented to a Microsoft technology manager, "Hey, we're thinking about doing a shootout-style lab test on something in virtualization." June 22, 3:00 a.m. PDT Franchising the energy web I’m already so depressed about the sorry state of our planet’s energy systems that I’m afraid Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth would just send me over the edge. Oh, I’ll probably relent and go see the movie, but in my case the ex-Veep will be preaching to the choir. I don’t need to be convinced any more than I already am that we’re in for a rough ride. What I need, instead, are hopeful signs that we’ll be able to engineer our way out of the mess we’re in. June 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Nokia to run managed services business from India Responding to increased demand in the country, Nokia has decided to run its worldwide managed services business from India, it announced on Monday. June 19, 7:40 a.m. PDT FIFA network tackles tough challenge The World Cup soccer tournament taking place in Germany is not only the planet's largest sporting event; during the four weeks of play through July 9, it's also home to what many experts say is the world's biggest communications network built for a single event. June 19, 4:35 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Russell Daniels As CTO and vice president of HP’s software business, Russell Daniels has a service-oriented perspective normally associated with applications -- rather than, say, his flagship OpenView product. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT NAC appliances reveal who's rapping at your network door As the NAC (network access control) market matures, the solutions are becoming more sophisticated at identifying users and assessing the security compliance of host devices. Answering questions such as how snugly they fit into the existing infrastructure (is it a forklift upgrade?) and how well they qualify a device’s security compliance posture before admitting it to the network helps to separate the wheat from the chaff. June 2, 3:00 a.m. PDT Get a head start on NAC In the past two years a consensus architecture has emerged for providing policy-based control over access to networks. Led by the development of the Trusted Network Connect (TNC) specifications, this architecture provides a framework for all standards-based NAC (network access control). It is also shared by the two major proprietary initiatives -- Cisco’s Network Admission Control and Microsoft’s Network Access Protection -- and many other third-party NAC solutions. June 2, 3:00 a.m. PDT Snap up SNP for a server boost The recent Microsoft WinHEC was a throwback to last year’s developer and small business partner trade shows: new announcements by the bushel. Microsoft was tossing so many new acronyms around that newbies were getting dizzy and passing out. (It could happen.) June 1, 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 Determina pre-hacks applications against intruders Malicious hackers are constantly exploiting software vulnerabilities. Vendors and IT staff alike spend countless hours racing to update protection signatures and install patches before their exposed systems can be compromised. It’s a never-ending battle that favors the hackers. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Companies may miss 20 percent of network printers See correction below May 15, 3:00 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 Splunk combs log files for hidden problems More and more IT systems generate a glut of metadata -- log files, systems states, and so on. “And more and more of the IT budget is spent trying to keep systems up and running,” says Michael Baum, CEO of Splunk. Much of that cost can be attributed to the growing complexity of systems and the labor it takes to sift through metadata for troubleshooting purposes. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT ConSentry locks down the network Traditionally, enterprise networks have been built on trust: Anyone connected is assumed to be authorized because they have to be on the premises. But the growing prevalence of wireless networks, remote access, and nonstaff workers have turned networks into easy targets. “The LAN is now the new DMZ,” says Tom Barsi, CEO of ConSentry. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Cisco finds cutting edge in Eastern Europe Cisco Systems expects emerging markets like Eastern Europe to be among the fastest adopters of its application-oriented networking software, which tunes the performance of networks to handle specific services like voice-over-IP, IP TV, and remote access to customer relationship management applications. May 10, 8:26 a.m. PDT Product previews IBM primes x86 servers for consolidation IBM announced a new line of Intel x86 server hardware called System x that is designed to deliver enterprise class virtualization capabilities for server consolidation. IBM also unveiled the Consolidation Discovery and Analysis Tool (CDAT), software that scans the network for under-utilized servers and helps identify opportunities to consolidate and virtualize x86 systems. Three new models -- System x3950, System x3850, System x3800 -- will be available this month. System x3950, System x3850, System x3800, IBM May 8, 3:00 a.m. PDT NAS 6 automates and controls Opsware NAS (network automation system), formerly Rendition TrueControl, originally served as a sort of Star Trek Universal Language Translator for network devices, providing a single interface for configuring switches and routers from virtually any vendor across a large network. Today automation is still the watchword, but the emphasis has shifted to policy compliance and control: Mass configurability is nice, but preventing unauthorized changes is necessary. May 8, 3:00 a.m. PDT Spam vigilante spat knocks out blog services A dispute between a mysterious Russian spammer and an Israeli antispam firm spilled over to the rest of the Internet on Wednesday, when denial of service attacks aimed at the Israeli firm's Web site knocked out servers that host millions of blogs. May 4, 11:41 a.m. PDT RSA buys PassMark for $44 million RSA Security said on Monday that it acquired PassMark Security, a maker of lightweight authentication technology. April 24, 1:24 p.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 NetSuite Flexes Process Automation, Woos Verticals Hosted applications vendor NetSuite announced NetSuite 11.0, its latest integrated CRM and back-office suite. The new version, due in May, extends AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) beyond the current real-time dashboards into functional areas, including reporting, scheduling, and document management. It also adds complex process customization via a new scripting language, SuiteScript, built on JavaScript. The company also launched vertical editions of NetSuite for wholesale/distribution, services, and software companies. NetSuite 11.0, NetSuite April 17, 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 Raritan keeps close eye on infrastructure The Raritan company name is absolutely synonymous with KVM switching. In fact, I’ve heard more than a few admins use the word Raritan to describe KVM switches made by another manufacturer, and Raritan’s MasterConsole KVM switches can be found in datacenters far and wide. April 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT RSA polishes its smart token system Branch offices aren’t always just nests for employees further down the food chain. Sometimes they comprise critical pieces of business infrastructure that are just geographically removed from HQ. Unfortunately, managing high-end authentication becomes troublesome when target nodes are distant from knowledgeable IT staff. April 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Building the branch office from the ground up Inevitably, the call comes in at 4 p.m.: problems at a remote site. The network seems OK, but one server is completely inaccessible. One switch is pingable but isn’t answering a Telnet connection. There’s no IT staff at the site, and this problem has caused all work to cease. Looks like a long night for the admins. April 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Exclusive: ESP 2.0 boosts your network perception System admins used to only dream about knowing exactly which devices were on their network and controlling what resources those devices were accessing. There has been an explosion of products announced and released during the past few months aimed at providing this highly sought view of traffic flows and hosts, as well as tools to enforce network policies. One of the more mature solutions is ESP (Elemental Security Platform) 2.0. March 31, 3:00 a.m. PST The hidden challenges of federated identity For years, companies have kept stores of identity information about employees, customers, and partners. These databases and directories are critical components of a company’s identity infrastructure. But as businesses push to create new products and increase productivity, they have discovered that they often must cooperate to provide the services their customers and employees demand. March 24, 3:00 a.m. PST Scaling a federated identity infrastructure Different kinds of organizations approach the problem of scaling a federated identity implementation in different ways. When you’re federating with one or two partners, hammering out the legal arrangements and assigning risk and liability is done one partner at a time. Even if technology standards provide universal system interoperability, the lawyers are likely to approach each agreement as a one-off task. Let’s call this model “peer-to-peer federation.” March 24, 3:00 a.m. PST User-centric identity brings federation close to home Federation doesn’t have to be a behind-the-scenes interaction between big companies. Lately, an idea called “user-centric identity” has gained traction. It revolves around a few core principles, most notably the idea that users should be allowed to choose which identity credentials to present in response to an authentication or attribute request. March 24, 3:00 a.m. PST Product Previews Fujitsu unveils eight-socket server blade Fujitsu last week announced an eight-socket server blade based on dual-core AMD Opteron processors. Taking up a good chunk of a Primergy BX600 chassis -- which otherwise supports as many as 10 two-socket blades or five four-socket blades -- the Primergy BX630 can be installed alongside one or two other blades running AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon processors. The eight-socket BX630 blades will be available in the second quarter of this year, priced at less than $36,000. Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse Linux Enterprise Server, and VMware ESX Server operating systems are supported. Primergy BX630, Fujitsu Computer Systems March 20, 3:00 a.m. PST LogLogic hits the high points of log management There are a million and one log-management tools running in networks all over the world. Some are simple file-searching utilities. Some dig a little deeper. But all are focused on a specific log file from a specific service or network device. They don’t always talk to one another, however, which creates havoc for admins. March 10, 3:00 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 > Networking |
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