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Speaking in Tech: 'Wanna come upstairs and look at my VRTX?'
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
Another fine instalment of El Reg's all-encompassing tech podcast wings its way to loyal Reg readers (and listeners), hosted by Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela. This week all three of the terrific trio are together for the first time in weeks!
Technet's gone …
Mellanox coughs nearly $130m for optical networkers to fight off Chipzilla
Network chip and switch maker Mellanox Technologies knows that Intel is breathing down its neck in the data center switching market, and it is not just sitting around waiting for Chipzilla to read it the riot act. Rather, Mellanox has been on a buying binge - to the tune of close on $129.5m - in recent weeks to build out its …
Intel doubles throughput, slashes power to stave off DATAPOCALYPSE
Research@Intel Intel researchers have developed a prototype interconnect that they say will both increase bandwidth and lower power requirements, whether used for simple CPU-to-CPU connections or scaled up to connect tens of thousands of CPUs in a data center.
"Based on past trends, every four years the bandwidth requirements for systems is …
Cumulus sighting means storm coming for Cisco
Cumulus Networks has a cunning plan to change how companies buy, use, and manage networking equipment. It involves Linux, and any success the company has will come at the expense of incumbent networking giants such as Cisco, Juniper, and Brocade.
The company came out of stealth on Wednesday at the data center infrastructure love …
Brocade: People try to put us down, talkin' 'bout my (Fibre Chan) generation
Interview Is "fifth-generation Fibre Channel" marketing-speak or a useful term?
Earlier this year the "Gen 5 Fibre Channel" term popped up from Brocade, which used it to describe 16GBit/s Fibre Channel, the computer network technology's highest available speed.
And Brocade started using the Gen 5 term around the time Cisco finally …
PowerCloud launches new kit, partner program
WiFi upstart PowerCloud Systems (PCS) wants to give hotspots a dose of multiple personality, to make WiFi fit better in the world of multi-tenant networks.
The company says its aim is to solve a bugbear of public WiFi: sure, everybody can connect, but they're all on the same SSID, and security is less-than-ideal. Instead, PCS' …
Australian unis to test quantum-comms-over-fibre
The University of New South Wales, one of the world's leaders in quantum computing research, will get the chance to put its work to the test in Australia's capital city, Canberra.
Within a few months, two nodes on Canberra's ICON network – one at the Australian National University, the other at the Australian Defence Force …
India forges ahead with fibre-to-the-village
India is readying a plan to connect 250,000 villages to fibre backhaul, announcing winning bids to connect six regions to what will ultimately be a national network.
Under the Rs 2,500 crore project – more than $US420 million – the Indian government has set up a body called Bharat Broadband Networks to oversee deliver of the …
Big Switch Networks quits OEM-led SDN scheme
Big Switch Networks, a startup with everything to gain from adoption of its software defined networking (SDN) technology, has left an SDN group dominated by traditional OEMs who had much to lose, after the group went with Cisco's tech over Big Switch's as the base of an SDN spec.
Big Switch announced on Wednesday that it was …
EU-US nets get 100 Gbps Atlantic connection
The European educational network community is feeling pleased with itself, switching on a single 100 Gbps link across the Atlantic.
While submarine cables these days routinely have aggregate capacity in the Terabit range, this is the first time Europe's educational networks have had a single 100 Gbps link to play with. The test …
Cisco nearly ready with next giant router
Cisco is reportedly close to pushing the start button on manufacturing for a router to surpass its current CRS-3 core router.
According to Light Reading, which says it's seen a Cisco document outlining the as-yet-unannounced “CTR” router, the new iron will support 1 Tbps per 10x100 Gbps ports slot. That would put the per-slot …
Mellanox forges fun-sized 40Gb/sec Ethernet switch
Mellanox Technologies is trying to milk its switch-hitting, hybrid Ethernet-InfiniBand SwitchX-2 chips for every dollar possible, and has just cooked up a baby switch that can run at 40Gb/sec or 56Gb/sec using the Ethernet protocol.
The SX1012 is a half-width switch that has a dozen ports in a 1U rack form factor, which means …
Cisco predicts massive data networking growth by 2017
There are three sure things in life – death, taxes, and the insatiable hunger of people for more and more bandwidth.
By 2017, over 1.4 zettabytes of data will be flowing over global networks, Cisco said in its latest Visual Networking Index forecast, which it released on Wednesday. The annual survey predicted faster broadband …
Raspberry Pi puts holes in China's Great Firewall
A tech-savvy China-based Redditor has spotted a hassle-free way of ensuring he or she is always able to bypass the Great Firewall, even when out and about, using the Raspberry Pi to connect to a virtual private network (VPN).
VPNs are a necessity for foreigners living in the People’s Republic who want to access sites prohibited …
How God and übergeek Ron Crane saved 3Com's bacon
Ethernet Summit Over 30 years ago, the company formed by Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe, 3Com Corporation, was teetering on bankruptcy. What saved it was the monomaniacal perfectionism of one engineer, and his refusal to ship the company's most important product until he was damn well good and ready.
At the Ethernet Innovation Summit last …
CloudEthernet Forum formed to scale networks into virtual age
Nine of the majors in the Ethernet market have joined up to create the CloudEthernet Forum which they say will help the venerable networking protocol adapt to the challenges of large-scale cloud services.
The forum is being spun out of the Metro Ethernet Forum – MEF – with the initial cabal comprising Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, …
Fibre boosters trip the light fantastic with 800G BPS LINKS
It's been quite a weekend for fans of fast fibre, with Ciena and BT demonstrating 800 Gbps superchannels, and Bell Labs offering a glimpse of higher speed submarine cables.
Announcing the deployment at BT, Ciena noted that while laboratory speeds are far faster than 800 Gbps, the UK deployment covered an already-deployed 410 km …
Industry execs: Network admins an endangered species
Ethernet Summit If you are a network administrator, be aware that there are a lot of industry movers and shakers who want to put you out of a job.
Mike Banic, marketing VP for HP's networking division, exemplified that goal when speaking on a panel at the Ethernet Innovation Summit, held this week in Mountain View, California, to celebrate …
Stand aside, Wi-Fi - these boffins are doing 40Gbps over the air
It won't make fibre-optic networking obsolete anytime soon, but it's still an impressive achievement: German researchers have demonstrated a one-kilometre point-to-point wireless transmission at 40Gbps.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics and the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology researchers used 240GHz as …
Aryaka adds mobile admin to WANOP kit
WAN-optimisation-in-the-cloud provider Aryaka has added mobile portal access to its network.
Unleashed on the world at Interop, the MyAryaka portal has a simple enough proposition: since systems administrators are expected to be able to tell their bosses what's going on even in their downtime, why not make the ability to look at …
Facebook crashes into networking with open switch
Not content with shaking up storage and servers, Facebook is creating an open source switch to help it save money on networking equipment and stop it being dependent on technologies pioneered by any single company.
The switch was announced by Facebook's infrastructure czar Frank Frankovsky in a keynote speech at Interop on …
'Quantum network? We've had one for years,' says Los Alamos
The boffins at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are known as a secretive lot; a much understated lot, in fact. Rather than cause a fuss, researchers there have quietly published a paper showing they've had a flexible quantum network – something rather a lot of people are interested in – up and running for two and a half years …
Cisco borgs VHA packet core
Troubled mobile carrier Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) is pressing ahead with the network upgrade it hopes will rebuild its fortunes in the country, with Cisco to provide the foundation of its 4G network backbone.
The Borg's ASR 5500 is to be rolled out as Voda's multimedia core platform, the companies say. VHA is preparing …
Juniper betas Contrail control freak for software-defined nets
Interop 2013 Juniper Networks is fast-tracking its Contrail software-defined network control freak to try to blunt the advances of myriad other players that have crashed onto the SDN bandwagon from all angles of attack. The JunosV Contrail Controller, which was not expected to be commercially available until sometime in the first half of …
HP revamps FlexFabric fixed and modular switches
The Interop networking extravaganza kicks off next week in Las Vegas, and Hewlett-Packard's Networking division is trying to get a jump on all of the chatter by previewing its latest FlexFabric fixed and modular switches as well as rolling out a new carrier-grade physical router and a virtual one.
The first new box that HP is …
A10 ships new iron, OS
A10 Networks has announced new gateway devices and a revision to its ACOS operating system.
The three new chunks of metal are the 6430 / 6430S (same unit, with and without SSL support) and the half-the-power, half-the-price 5430S.
A10's director of product marketing Paul Nicholson introduced El Reg to yet another measure of …
Mellanox boffins concoct chips for 100Gb/sec InfiniBand
Mellanox Technologies reported its first quarter financial results today, and Eyal Waldman, chairman and CEO at the networking chip and switch maker, said in a conference call that the company had taped out its first experimental chip that would run at 100Gb/sec and support the future Enhanced Data Rate (or EDR) version of …
Juniper pushes up sales and profits in Q1
The top brass at Juniper Networks are breathing a little bit easier as the company turned in numbers that show it is growing despite taking a big hit in sales of gear, software, and services to the US government in the first quarter.
In the quarter ended in March, Juniper nudged up revenues by 2.6 per cent to $1.03bn, and net …
Huawei: 'We're not interested in US market'
Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei has revised its enterprise sales projections downward after admitting that it has given up on plans to expand into the US market.
"We are not interested in the U.S. market anymore," Huawei executive vice president Eric Xu told Reuters. "Generally speaking, it's not a market that we pay …
Data centre networks are getting flatter and fitter
We have all come across the traditional corporate network with three distinct layers: the core layer dealing with heavy-duty switching and routing, which runs on socking big switches and routers; the distribution layer dealing with lighter (but still intelligent) tasks such as packet filtering and some routing; and the access …
Dell crams modular hybrid server and storage switch into 1U pizza box
One of the bright spots in Dell's business these days is its networking unit, which doubled its sales last year thanks in large part to the acquisition of Force10 Networks nearly two years ago. Now Dell has to keep pace with its many competitors in the networking racket – which it has just done with the launch of a new modular …
Intel demos inexpensive 100Gb/sec silicon photonics chip
Intel has demoed what it says it "believes" is the world's only silicon photonics module that uses a hybrid silicon laser – a breakthrough that should allow such advances as vastly improved system-to-system interconnects in the data center.
The demo of the 100Gb/sec module was presented via a video during Intel CTO Justin …
Software defined networking works up a head of steam
Software-defined networking (SDN) represents a revolutionary tide flowing through the fusty, slow-moving halls of data-centre networking, bringing speed and dynamism to network connectivity management.
The idea that computer data network connectivity can be automatically set up to have its characteristics changed as needs change …
Juniper future-proofs 'programmable' switches in Cisco battle
Juniper networks has trotted out a new line of EX series modular Ethernet switches that will scale up to 100 Gigabit/sec links later this year – and its timing is spot on. With a resurgent Cisco Systems on its hands, Juniper Networks must work harder to get attention and peddle networking gear to the world's data centers and …
Oracle gussies up Xsigo switching as Virtual Networking and SDN
Oracle is ratcheting up the virtual networking wars with the relaunch of its Xsigo line of I/O director switches.
Sun Microsystems made it clear years ago that it thought the future of data center networking was InfiniBand, and Oracle has followed along on that path by investing in Mellanox Technologies, which makes InfiniBand …
Alcatel-Lucent uncloaks its software-defined network tech
Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary Nuage Networks has leaped into the crowded money-pit of software-defined networking (SDN) with a technology suite designed for carriers and large enterprises.
The "Virtualized Services Platform" (VSP), announced on Tuesday by Nuage, is a proprietary network virtualization overlay that uses distributed …
Virty network whisperer Midokura takes VC cash
Software-defined networking startup Midokura has raised $17.3m to help it hunt a rarely seen creature: a punter who actually pays for SDN.
Midokura's cash infusion was delivered by Japanese government–backed sovereign fund the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, the company announced on Tuesday, along with investments from …
Arista wires software-defined networking into its kit
Network speed-freak Arista Networks has woven software-defined networking technologies into its operating system.
The company announced on Thursday that it had integrated SDN support via OpenStack Quantum and the OpenFlow protocol into key parts of its network software, the Arista Extensible Operating System.
The move sees the …
IBM unfurls SDN network manager
First virtualization chewed up processors and regurgitated them as a pile of fungible compute resources, then it started gobbling storage, and now it's turned its hungry eye to networks, and IBM wants to help VMware, OpenStack, and others, do the chewing.
IBM gave details on Tuesday of its Software Defined Networking for Virtual …
Juniper goes skinny to pack routers into little racks
Juniper Networks has caught the “smaller is better for routers” bug, kicking off a 300mm form factor member of its PTX family which it says targets the traditional telco exchange, where rackspace was designed for the phone switching kit of the 1970s instead of the computer racks in data centres.
Speaking to The Register ahead of …
VMware NSX mashes up Nicira and homegrown network virt
Having let go of its aspirations to be a player higher up in the systems stack – now that application frameworks, caching software, and other elements of the business have been shuffled off to the new Pivotal group established by parent EMC – VMware is doubling down in the virtualization business, and its top brass were banging …
Riverbed rolling script language and SDK everywhere
Riverbed Technologies has announced its intention to open up its APIs and make its kit more consistently scriptable across all devices.
The announcement today of FlyScript is as much the launch of a strategy as a finished product, but Riverbed sees it as an important move in two ways: ultimately, FlyScript will support the …
