Earlier Data Networking
Speaking in Tech: VMware is building the Death Star
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
The "Stack Wars" are on and VMware is adding the final touches to its ultimate weapon ... Your hosts Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela chat to special guest Dave Graham of Juniper Networks this week and discuss VMware's latest moves, Cisco's reactions, Google's …
Juniper disappointed by skittish service providers
Switch and router maker Juniper Networks, like rival Cisco Systems, has been adversely impacted by the skittish economy and has now been rattled by VMware's $1.26bn acquisition of network virtualizer Nicira. The conversation will quickly shift from what Juniper is doing to get an edge on Cisco to what it is going to do to blunt …
Yes, yes, the Olympics are near. But what'll happen to its IT afterwards?
British schoolchildren will be among those receiving computer networking gear liberated from London's Olympic park once the competition is over, said Cisco.
The company provided 2,200 network switches to create a BT-designed topology that can carry the results of the men's 100m to the world and link 22,000 on-site journalists to …
VCE hires Cisco exec to run the company
VCE has finally added a CEO to the top of its management stack after operating without one for almost a year.
The converged infrastructure player - a collaboration between EMC, Cisco and VMware - has lured Praveen Akkiraju, Cisco senior veep and GM for the Services Routing Technology Group.
The new man climbing on board …
Mellanox makes InfiniBand hay while the sun shines
If someone (that means you, Larry Ellison, and maybe you, Michael Dell, or maybe you, Ginni Rometty) was thinking about buying networking chip, switch, and adapter maker Mellanox Technologies, it is probably too late unless that certain someone wants to spend a whole lotta cash doing the deal.
Mellanox just wrapped up its second …
Speaking in Tech: Did Yahoo! suddenly get ... interesting?
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
Host Greg Knieriemen – sans trusty sidekicks Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela – brings you a piping hot, brand spanking-new podcast wrapping up all the latest in enterprise tech in an easy-to-digest chat with a squirt of social media, lettuce optional.
This week he chats to …
Nearly 2 MILLION US Facebook users quit social network
Shares in Facebook continued to slide on Tuesday, after an analyst claimed the dominant social network had seen a modest drop in its userbase.
Capstone Investment's Rory Maher said Mark Zuckerberg's company suffered a 1.1 per cent fall in US users over the last six months. The number of European Facebookers had also declined, he …
Samsung swoops on Brit chip biz CSR, grabs talents'n'patents
A British chip-design company has sold its mobile and GPS location-finding tech wing to Samsung for $310 million (£198m).
Cambridge-based biz CSR sealed the deal today, according to a regulatory notice from the London Stock Exchange. It will shift 310 employees, and an attractive sheaf of patents, over to the South Korean …
Big Blue uncloaks multitalented 40GbE RackSwitch
IBM wants to be a player in networking, and that means getting 40 Gigabit Ethernet switches out the door to compete with those from Cisco Systems, Mellanox Technologies, Dell, HP, and others.
With the 10GbE ramp well under way at the edge in the data center, thoughts naturally turn toward using faster switches at the aggregation …
Stealthy Big Switch plugs into OpenStack clouds
Big Switch Networks is not even out of stealth mode and has not yet revealed its aspirations and products for software defined networks – SDNs, in modern parlance – and yet the company is nonetheless contributing to the open source efforts to build more flexible and virtual network infrastructure and hoping to build awareness …
Cisco backs down on cloud control of routers
Cisco has completed its climb-down over who gets to control Linksys routers, it or the people who bought them.
At the start of this week, Cisco updated the firmware of the Linksys EA4500, EA3500, and EA2700 routers so that they could be fully configured using only its Connect Cloud service rather than via local management …
US govt asks Huawei and ZTE for more answers
US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee chair, congressman Mike Rogers, has turned yet another blowtorch onto Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE, alleging that the Chinese government is subsidizing the price of kit they sell in America.
The committee has been investigating allegations of close ties between the Chinese …
Australian company claims world’s fastest switch
A new Australia company, Zeptonics, has created what it claims is the world’s fastest network switch.
The company’s “Zeptomux” bills itself as a “23-to-1 multiplexing switch that operates with a fibre-to-fibre latency (including SFP+s) of ~130ns.” The Zeptomux can achieve that speed over copper or fibre, and uses 10G Ethernet …
Cisco + OpenFlow + OpenStack = ONE software-defined network
Cisco Live 2012 Everybody is talking about OpenFlow, the "Quantum" networking abstraction project that is part of the OpenStack cloud controller, and software-defined networks in general. A lot of the talk has been about removing the hegemony of Cisco Systems in switching and routing. Now it is Cisco's turn to talk, the company's top brass …
Chambers: Cisco has bounced back
Cisco Live 2012 Cisco Systems is fired up, and if you are in one of its markets and one of its new adjacencies, the company is coming for your market share and more than its fair share of the profits.
The networking giant and server and web services provider is hosting its Cisco Live customer and partner event in San Diego this, week and is …
Cisco predicts 1.3 zettabytes of annual data movements
Cisco has emitted its latest Visual Networking Index, a global study of how much data passes through the world's wires.
Your correspondent feels it is best to take these big global studies with a pinch of salt: it's hardly in Cisco's interests to tell us all that global network traffic is slowing and there's no need to …
Boffins smash 3Gbps speed barrier with 542GHz T-Rays
Japanese geniuses have maintained a 3Gbit/s radio link at 542GHz, opening up more of the electromagnetic spectrum to the voracious appetite of wireless data.
Not that the research will lead to super-Wi-Fi any time soon - but if the proof-of-concept tech built by the Tokyo Institute of Technology can be commoditised then it will …
Speaking in Tech: The worst government IT deal of ALL TIME
Podcast It's the eighth episode of our enterprise tech podcast – and it's a special one. The podcast is split up into two parts: in the first part, your hosts interview a journalist investigating the State of West Virginia's absurd purchase of drastically oversized Cisco routers – it's an incredible story you have to hear to believe. …
Cisco hits the roof in Olympics marketing dash
Cisco has thrown open its Olympics hospitality suite, giving partners and customers both a panoramic view of the Olympic Park and an up-close, 3D view of Stephen Fry loitering on a London Underground platform.
The 2012 Olympics logo
The networking giant is the London 2012 Network Infrastructure Supporter, meaning it is the …
Exercises to keep your data centre on its toes
Given the size of networks today, networking should be open to promote interoperability, affordability and competition among suppliers to provide the best products.
Let’s drill down a little to explore new developments in the ubiquitous Ethernet standard and see how open networking can help you do jobs more efficiently.
Hub and …
The Ethernet Alliance is thinking fast
Make no mistake: the flood of data flowing across networks today will grow into several Niagaras. We can foresee zettabytes of information crossing the internet – and the lion's share will flow via Ethernet links.
Without Ethernet our networked world would cease to exist. Without Ethernet development the internet will choke. …
Intel reels in Cray's supercomputer interconnect biz
Intel really is taking networking and system interconnects very seriously, and is buying the interconnect hardware business from massively parallel supercomputer maker Cray for $140m.
The move is something of a surprise to us outside of Cray, Intel, and the government supercomputer labs that pay the bills at the supercomputer …
Dell flashes 40GE blade switch, fabric manager
The engineers who used to work at the formerly independent Force 10 have forged the first 40 Gigabit Ethernet switch for new owner Dell's PowerEdge M1000e blade server chassis.
If you sell servers, storage, and networking, you are arguably a system maker these days, and that is one of the reasons why Dell bought Force 10 …
Toshiba to demo vid streaming without any work by the CPU
Toshiba's NPEngine hardware directly streams video from SSDs to IP networks without using host server CPU cycles or memory.
Tosh claims the dedicated hardware delivers up to 64,000 x 40Gbit/sec video streams – way more than the 20,000 or so an average 2U server is said to be able to stream. The Toshiba hardware, a server card, …
IPv6 networking: Bad news for small biz
Sysadmin blog IPv6 is traditionally a networking topic. Yet IPv6 is as much a business consideration as it is a technical one. As world IPv6 day rolls around again, we're going to see an ever-increasing amount of technical IPv6 coverage. Before we do, I think a business interjection is warranted.
IPv6 was neither designed for small biz nor …
UC interoperability still a bad joke: Gartner
Unified Communications systems still don’t play together nicely, and Ken Agreess, a Research Director with Gartner IT Professionals Research, says vendors’ attitudes of asking value-added resellers to fix problems they create is a “failure”.
Agress made his assessment in a blog post penned after attending the Enterprise Connect …
Visa shows off data centre 'moat'
Credit card company Visa has boasted that one of its US data centres possesses the ultimate security feature – a moat designed to trap would be ram-raiders from accessing the facility.
As reported by USA Today and Fast Company, which both seem to have been invited to the facility, the company’s Operations Centre East (OCE) can …
Arista juices switch with x86 server, FPGA, atomic clock
Upstart switch-maker Arista Networks, founded by serial entrepreneur Andy Bechtolsheim, is at it again, mashing up new kinds of iron to tackle problems in the data center. This time, Arista is bundling an atomic clock, a baby x86 server, flash memory, and field programmable gate arrays into its Ethernet switches to create what …
Big Blue goes terabit with opto transducer
With the growth of terabit optical systems, the race has been on to shrink their components, so it’s no surprise that IBM has attracted attention with its demonstration of the ‘Holey Optochip’, a single-chip transceiver with terabit per second transfer speeds.
The prototype, demonstrated at the Optical Fiber Communication …
Deutsche Telekom shatters data-transfer speed record
Researchers at Deutsche Telekom's T-Labs have blasted bits at impressive velocity down a single optical fiber, breaking the previous long-distance data-transfer record by more than a factor of two.
The bit boffins achieved a 512 gigabits-per-second transmission rate over a single optical fiber from Berlin to Hanover and back, a …
Hobbit movie locations using 6km of data cabling
Crews working on the two Hobbit movies are doing so with the help of six kilometres of data cabling.
That's one the revelations in the latest official production vlog, featuring IT Systems Manager Nick Trugly who says one of the challenges working on location poses is that “We are a long way from most of the infrastructure we …
Experts: RSA weak keys flaw restricted to network devices
Analysis Flaws in the way some of EMC's RSA security division encryption keys are generated are down to a weakness in generating random numbers that's restricted to network devices rather than digital certificates on websites, according to both RSA and cryptographic researchers.
After analysing 7.1 million keys, cryptography researchers …
Mellanox: Just jump straight to 40GE networks
Network adapter and switch maker Mellanox Technologies is riding the wave of upgrades to 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches and is excited about boosting sales of 10GE adapter cards when Intel launches its "Sandy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5 processors sometime this quarter. But Mellanox CEO and chairman Eyal Waldman has his eye on a bigger …
Broadcom boasts directional antennas for 802.11ac Wi-Fi
Broadcom has provided more details on the 802.11ac Wi-Fi chips it will bring to production in the second half of this year.
The Broadcom chips, announced in January, are initially being aimed at the early adopters in the carrier and enterprise industry, and will be ready for volume production in the second half of the year, …
Iran draws veil over secure internet access
The Tor Project is reporting Iran has blocked access to nearly all SSL/TLS traffic within its borders and is calling for help to break the embargo.
In a site posting Jacob Appelbaum said that the problems had begun around 48 hours ago, with secure traffic slowing before being completely blocked on Iranian ISPs. Tor has prepared …
Ethernet standards for hyper-scale cloud networking
What if the largest Ethernet networks we see today are just precursors, initial steps on the path to what's been called hyper-scale cloud networking?
"Hyper" is the term used generally for something almost unfathomably and exceptionally large. We might say that a regional group of airports is a small air transport network, a …
Cisco stabilizes switching and routing in Q2
Networking - and some would say data center bellwether - Cisco Systems turned in a better-than-expected fiscal Q2 ended in January, with revenues up 10.8 per cent to $11.53bn and net income up a very good 43.5 per cent to $2.18bn.
"We are moving ahead of our competitors and our industry peers," proclaimed Cisco CEO John Chambers …
Inside the mind of EMC: Is storage just a launchpad?
Blocks and Files: It's a vision thing: EMC was a storage company and is an information company, but in the next decade it looks like it will be a data centre infrastructure company.
This thought comes from a parsing of two Pat Gelsinger replies to an interview with EMC's Mark Twomey, otherwise known as the blogger Storagezilla.
Reply number one …
Riverbed virtualizes Cascade network monitor appliance
Riverbed Technology upgraded a whole bunch of its appliances this week, including its Cascade Shark network-monitoring products and its Steelhead WAN optimizers.
El Reg covered the updates to the Steelhead appliances here, and now we'll tell you about Cascade Shark.
The Cascade hardware appliances are high-end network …
Juniper stalled by jittery service providers, product transitions
Juniper Networks warned Wall Street earlier this month that the fourth quarter was going to be rough because key service provider customers are cutting back on spending at the same time that the company is putting the finishing touches on some new switches and routers.
The company hit the high point of its revised revenue and …
Mellanox shrugs off Intel's InfiniBand buy
Having bought rival Voltaire, Mellanox Technologies has pretty much ruled the InfiniBand adapter and switching roost for the past several years. But this week Intel shelled out $125m to acquire the InfiniBand chip, adapter, and switch businesses from QLogic, and the big question now is: what does this mean for Mellanox?
Speaking …
IBM and NEC tag team on OpenFlow networking
IBM and NEC are joining forces to promote switches and controllers based on the OpenFlow protocol to their joint customers.
After a decade-long hiatus, IBM jumped back in the network-equipment business in September 2010 with its $400m acquisition of Blade Network Technologies, which made both blade and rack switches. Big Blue …
