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SMB technology: Replacing in-house software with applications in the cloud In the near future, there's only one way to go for SMBs when it comes to purchasing business software -- and that's out of house. Whether it's full-on SaaS (software as a service), where users access all facets of the application through a browser, or a hosted product (including hosted Exchange, where only the server component is off-site and users employ a standard desktop client such as Outlook), either model is simply too cost-effective for SMBs to ignore. Processors: Dividing chips into many virtual cores The current approach taken by x86 CPUs -- to stuff as many processor cores and as much cache memory as will fit on one chip -- will prove impossible to scale beyond a certain point. And adding more, big, hot processor cores may not be the best fit for server roles that call for managing large workloads over long periods of time.  August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hunting down dark fiber The speed of optical-grade broadband is beginning to reach our homes, at least those lucky enough to live in areas covered by Verizon's FiOS (fiber-optic service) or similar offerings. August 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT iPhones flooding wireless LAN at Duke University The Wi-Fi connection on Apple's recently released iPhone seems to be the source of a big headache for network administrators at Duke University. July 17, 8:57 a.m. PDT Silver Peak hits new WAN-optimization heights You know what makes network administrators happy? Making efficient use of their equipment and eliminating "performance stinks" calls from end-users. Thus, investing in an effective WAN optimization and acceleration solution such as Silver Peak NX-5500 2.0 can put a big smile on your network admin's face. July 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT 2007 InfoWorld CTO 25: Steve McCanne Steve McCanne's job at Riverbed Technology is about three things: strategy, strategy, strategy. June 8, 3:00 a.m. PDT Silver Peak Systems: Transforming WANs into LANs You wouldn't accuse any segment of the high-tech sector of orthodoxy. But even by tech industry standards, the market for WAN acceleration is a wild ride. Just ask Silver Peak Systems' founder and CTO, David Hughes, who says that in the WAN space, sometimes "no" means "yes," late is better than early, and you have to add to subtract. May 18, 3:01 a.m. PDT Nortel plans major enterprise product launch Nortel will soon unveil significant additions to its enterprise arsenal, including its initial entré into the WAN acceleration market. May 14, 8:06 a.m. PDT Microsoft, Packeteer team on branch office appliance Microsoft and Packeteer will jointly announce the Packeteer iShaper, an appliance for branch offices designed to combine WAN optimization with native Windows applications, on Monday. May 7, 11:20 a.m. PDT Do-it-yourself content distribution Content delivery networks make a lot of sense if you need to accelerate the delivery of video, content, and applications over the public Internet, but what about internal corporate WANs? “CDNs and ADNs are for folks who need to leverage the Internet as a business-grade network,” says Robert Whitely, senior analyst, enterprise networking, at Forrester Research. “For private networks using frame relay, MPLS [multiprotocol label switching], or an IPSec intranet, where one company owns both ends of the network connection, appliance- and/or software-based approaches to WAN optimization may be the answer.”(Read also about content distribution networks in Your Web site’s secret weapon.) March 19, 3:00 a.m. PST Your Web site’s secret weapon Kenexa, a global provider of talent-hiring and-retention services and software, had a serious customer-satisfaction problem. March 19, 3:00 a.m. PST 12 quick IT productivity wins Stop us if this story sounds familiar. You’ve been asked to a) keep your infrastructure humming and b) come up with innovative ways to use technology to boost the bottom line. Meanwhile, your resources are stretched tighter than a $2 string on a banjo and you spend so much time putting out fires you should be wearing a helmet and carrying a hose. February 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Packeteer iShared yields mixed WAN optimization results Poorly performing WAN links continue to be the bane of many network administrators. Wherever there is a WAN link, there will be performance degradation caused by latency and chatty protocols. Simply adding bandwidth is not the answer. Using appliance-based solutions on each end of the WAN circuit, however, can improve overall response time and throughput. January 26, 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 Exclusive: WAN optimization, the Cisco WAE As the enterprise becomes more dispersed and applications continue to greedily gobble up precious WAN bandwidth, IT struggles to find ways to coax just a little more performance out of its existing circuits. All of the bandwidth in the world won’t reduce application response times as long as TCP and latency remain tightly bound together. In order to improve WAN performance, it takes digital sleight of hand to work a little WAN magic. November 10, 3:00 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 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 China and India to drive WAN growth A stable economic and political climate and foreign direct investment could drive the implementation of WANs (Wide Area Networks) throughout Asia, especially in China and India, a research report said Thursday. September 21, 9:31 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 beefing up WAFS Cisco Systems is stepping up to the plate in the highly competitive application acceleration game, banking on technology and a lot of end-to-end network expertise to set it apart from other players. September 5, 8:00 a.m. PDT Citrix, Microsoft to team on new appliance Microsoft and Citrix Systems plan to co-develop a new line of branch office appliances that will combine Microsoft's Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server with Citrix's upcoming WANScaler network acceleration technology. August 23, 3:59 a.m. PDT Retail: The ultimate distributed architecture Editor's Note: This article has been edited since it was originally published. Spencer Gifts has decided to discontinue its remote access project for the Spirit Halloween chain. August 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Blue Coat SG800 WAN accelerator boosts SSL traffic Blue Coat Systems’ SG line of WAN accelerators builds on traditional WAN optimization methods by adding a couple of their own, including support for SSL encrypted traffic and streaming media. Based on a series of protocol- and application-specific proxies, the SG appliances balance flexibility and performance with ease of use, and they support basic bandwidth management and content filtering. August 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Vanco offers wide-area Ethernet It's not new technology, but Vanco is using its virtual private networking skills to provide a new wide-area Ethernet offering that could be a quick and relatively inexpensive way for enterprises to connect remote sites over high-speed links. August 2, 6:54 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 US gov't telecommuters hit roadblocks Even as some U.S. government agencies embrace telecommuting as a way to keep operating during emergencies, significant resistance from managers holds some agencies back, telecommuting experts said Tuesday. June 6, 10:42 a.m. PDT Slow progress for 802.11n standards The IEEE 802.11n standard has been three years in the making, and from the looks of it, it has at least another year to go. That’s a shame because it offers a lot of benefits, including higher throughput than the current Wi-Fi standard -- about 120Mbps in the real world -- and 50 percent longer range. Plus, because it uses multiple antennas that can stitch together a fractured signal, it eliminates a lot of spots where there might be drop-offs indoors. June 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Bob DeRodes Bob DeRodes used to be a long-snapping center, but he says he missed his shot at the NFL. Instead, he became executive vice president and CIO of The Home Depot. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25 The top technology slot in the enterprise has changed. Once, forward-looking CTOs and CIOs scanned the horizon for new technologies that would improve the lot of IT. Today, as many of this year’s top 25 CTOs can tell you, technology leaders must also focus on understanding the business goals of the enterprise -- and then craft technology strategies to meet those objectives. 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 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 NX-3500 pushes your WAN to peak performance You can always pick out the IT heroes: They’re the ones that keep their users happy -- and productive. Sometimes that’s hard to do when the users have to access applications and data on the other side of an oversubscribed WAN link. It isn’t just a bandwidth issue; a big pipe isn’t always a fast pipe. Users need a reduction in latency and protocol chattiness coupled with TCP optimization and intelligent caching. They need a WAN acceleration and optimization solution. April 27, 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 > Networking |
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