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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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Silver Peak squeezes into the WAN game As the WAN optimization market continues to grow and evolve, new and established vendors are developing systems that accelerate previously ignored varieties of network traffic. One promising newcomer is Silver Peak Systems, whose breadth of application support impressed me in a recent demo. January 2, 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 Stellar Steelhead WAN accelerator reduces network wait time If you're tired of having your remote users complain about the WAN's performance, it may be time to check out a WAN optimization/acceleration solution. Up until a few years ago, the only way to try to improve poor WAN performance was to throw more bandwidth at it, but that didn't solve the problem -- or make users any happier. The length of the link (latency) is a big factor in performance shortcomings, as is application chattiness and TCP slowdowns when a packet error occurs. November 14, 3:00 a.m. PST Cisco gears up to accelerate applications Two families of network appliances announced Thursday and now shipping from Cisco Systems Inc. may help enterprises reach out to customers and branch workers more quickly and efficiently. October 13, 5:51 p.m. PDT Quicker insights into network performance When users complain that the network is slow, IT needs a way to look inside the LAN or WAN and find exactly where the problem lies. Network Physics' NetSensory NP-500 and NP-2000 appliances offer an unparalleled view into the health of the network by capturing dozens of performance metrics and providing the means to understand the results. These products allow IT to pinpoint the source of the problem -- whether a server, the network, or an app -- anywhere in the enterprise. The recently updated NetSensory OS 5.0 improves this already impressive system. October 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Living in an all-Internet Protocol world Hossein Eslambolchi is a man of many titles. He is president of AT&T Global Networking Technology Services and AT&T Labs, as well as CIO and CTO of AT&T proper. When Hossein talks, I listen. And what he talks about in late August is the inevitable move to 100 percent IP networking. August 30, 4:00 a.m. PDT WANjet optimizes, accelerates, shapes Joining other WAN-acceleration vendors in the march from specialized to all-in-one products, Swan Labs’ newest line of appliances, WANJet, combines tried-and-true WAN optimization, application-layer acceleration, and traffic-shaping in a single solution. The feature-packed WANJet boxes, which include the SL400 for datacenters and the SL200 for remote locations, replace Swan’s current NetCelera products. July 25, 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 Wide-area slowdown Ten years ago, the WAN was the exclusive domain of frame-relay communication and leased lines. Today, a WAN may use anything from IPSec connections and cable modems to MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) tunneled over multimegabit networks. The methods may have changed, but the challenge remains the same: How do you make a WAN seem like one big LAN? May 30, 5:00 a.m. PDT Bridging connectivity gaps IT infrastructure requirements can shift quite suddenly. Say, for example, your company lands several large new accounts at the same time. The sudden influx of sales and account management staff so quickly outstrips your office’s square footage that the only reasonable thing to do in the time available is to look for additional space. That space turns out to be a mile or so down the street. As an IT administrator, you need to get the new location connected to the network as soon as possible. May 30, 5:00 a.m. PDT Far-flung file serving WAFS (wide-area file sharing) appliances combine WAN optimization with file-caching in an effort to remove file servers from remote offices. Sometimes called wide-area file-server replacements, they also rely heavily on application-specific acceleration, especially CIFS and MAPI. May 30, 5:00 a.m. PDT Some WAN things you just can't control In the quest for ultimate performance, IT folks tweak TCP stacks, strip out unnecessary services, and manage traffic flows. But where the WAN is concerned, some things are in the hands of the ISP rather than IT. That’s a sad fact of life: As link speeds and round trip time increase (latency), overall throughput degrades tremendously if router queues aren’t sized accordingly. May 30, 5:00 a.m. PDT Supercharge your WAN It wasn’t so long ago that calling a telco to order frame-relay circuits was the only feasible way to securely connect remote offices to headquarters. The typical frame-relay network consists of T1 and fractional T1 circuits connected via a frame switch located in a telco CO (central office), with all these circuits aggregated on a central circuit in the corporate datacenter. The recurring fees are costly, leaving IT directors little choice but to severely limit the bandwidth to remote sites. If 128Kbps circuits can do the job, albeit slowly, then up they go. January 21, 3:00 p.m. PST Metro networks go wide MANs (metropolitan area networks) have been around for some time. Companies such as Yipes took advantage of the fiber glut in major cities to offer intracity connections with throughputs of 1Gbps or faster at low prices. For large enterprises with many offices or partners in a relatively limited geographic region, this type of connectivity can dramatically increase bandwidth while cutting WAN costs. January 21, 3:00 p.m. PST Shape up your WAN traffic Traffic across WAN connections always seems to grow faster than available bandwidth. Tools to help optimize application usage of available bandwidth continue to increase in capability and sophistication. Both 8e6 Technologies' TurboPipe NP T100 and Packeteer's PacketShaper 9500 appliances offer traffic monitoring and control, using a sophisticated variety of possible criteria for shaping traffic. They can control traffic based on source, destination, type of application, and more, giving the administrator plenty of flexibility in prioritizing the most important traffic and restricting unwanted traffic such as peer-to-peer file sharing or network gaming. January 7, 3:00 p.m. PST The best products of 2004 Hardware and Software Platforms December 30, 3:00 p.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 Exclusive: Stampede tramples WAN bottlenecks IT administrators always keep an eye out for ways to cheat and pull more performance from existing bandwidth. Network traffic shapers and accelerators have been around for a while, but because they require a device on each side, rolling them out to small remote offices or lone remote users often is not cost effective. November 5, 3:00 p.m. PST Tacit I-shared brings welcome relief to over-the-WAN file sharing Sharing files with users at remote offices over a WAN often creates enormous headaches, due to limited bandwidth and the high latency of the connection, combined with the “chattiness” of file sharing protocols such as NFS and CIFS. September 3, 3:00 p.m. PDT Product Previews Rackable delivers servers for high-density datacenters Blade servers offer good bang for your buck in terms of datacenter real estate, but they also limit flexibility. Rackable Systems’ Scale Out Series server line hopes to give IT managers the best of both worlds, by offering blade density with the benefits of traditional rack-mount server design. Each Scale Out cabinet enclosure has room for as many as 92 servers, with an additional 19 inches of rack-mount space for networking equipment. The servers support both Intel and AMD CPUs in either single or dual-processor configurations, and each includes one full-height PCI-X expansion slot. Both in-band and out-of-band management systems are available. Rackable will engineer and configure systems to order, running a wide range of operating systems and software. Contact Rackable for pricing. Scale Out Series, Rackable Systems August 20, 3:00 p.m. PDT Compuware, Segue smooth out apps management Compuware and Segue Software next week are bolstering their application management wares, with Compuware finding ways to boost performance without increasing a user’s equipment expenses and Segue managing application quality. April 23, 2:00 p.m. PDT > Networking > WAN |
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