Inter-Cloud Peering Points

The golden question in the Cloud computing industry is what role will outsourcing providers play. Enterprise customers adopting lots of Private Cloud is an internal function, it does nothing to stimulate procurement from third-party outsourcing suppliers.

The Inter-Cloud

One key answer is ‘Inter-Cloud Peering’: Gateway services to inter-connect these private clouds.

As highlighted in their ‘Cloud for Clunkers‘ plan the US Government is......READ MORE

The Clock Is Ticking On Encryption

In the indictment that led to the expulsion of ten Russian spies from the U.S. in the summer of 2010, the FBI said that it gained access to their communications after surreptitiously entering one of the spies' homes, during which agents found a piece of paper with a 27-character password.

In other words, the FBI found it more productive to burglarize a house than to crack a 216-bit code, despite having the computational resources of the U.S. government behind it.

That's because modern cryptography, when used correctly.....READ MORE

Is a next-generation firewall in your future?

The traditional port-based enterprise firewall, now looking less like a guard and more like a pit stop for Internet applications racing in through the often open ports 80 and 443, is slowly losing out to a new generation of brawny, fast, intelligent firewalls.

The so called next-generation firewall (NGFW) describes an enterprise firewall/VPN that.....READ MORE

The Smart Paranoid's Guide to Using Google

Google is nearly everyone's best friend. But have you ever stopped to think about just how much Google knows about you?

Do you realize that Google may have recorded and stored every single search term you have ever punched into its search box? Chances are some of those searches could be soberingly damaging to your reputation. What about Gmail? Have you ever sent any sensitive e-mails? How about business information stored in Google Docs?

Unless.......READ MORE

Samsung WiMAX 2 test hits 330Mbps

Yes, it's only a demonstration. Even so, Samsung's trial of WiMAX 2 technology that touched speeds of 330Mbps is still impressive.

Samsung is holding a public demonstration of the yet-to-be-finalized WiMAX 2 standard at the CEATEC IT and electronics tradeshow in Japan this week. In teaming up with Japan's UQ Communications ISP, Samsung is wirelessly streaming full-HD 3D videos over a WiMAX 2 trial network. WiMAX 2 is an evolution......READ MORE

The Next Generation of Business Networks

The wide area network (WAN) is central to the IT strategy of any multilocation business. Employees expect the WAN to be available when they need it, much like any other utility in the business. WANs have historically been built on "best effort" circuit or packet-switched IP networks such as VPN, Frame Relay, or Private Line connectivity.

This strategy is effective when the WAN is required for email and file-sharing. However, with the growing need to add.....READ MORE

100G Watch: Brocade Goes Big

The latest salvo in the war of big 100-Gbit/s numbers leads off our latest update on all things 100 Gbit/s.

Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) introduced its new router, the MLXe, today, saying it doubles the MLX's backplane capacity to 15.4 Tbit/s and can support 480 Gbit/s per half-slot.

The star feature, though, is the 100-Gbit/s module -- the first to carry two wire-speed ports rather than just one, Brocade claims. That's 32 ports per chassis, a figure....READ MORE

IT Shops Rally Around Private Clouds

Private clouds -- where companies use their own infrastructure and provision virtualized services to end users via automated tools -- are gaining traction among IT leaders who want to deliver advanced services at lower cost.

However, as with any new approach to computing, private clouds today fall short on manageability, and some users worry about the risk of vendor lock-in, particularly with virtualization and other tools that make cloud computing possible. Further....READ MORE

IBM's Mote Runner Project to Integrate Internet Connectivity into Everything

In IBM's planned future, everything will communicate with everything. The company has now announced a new software development kit, Mote Runner, that will allow programmers to put anything from coffee makers to environmental monitoring systems on the "Internet of things."
Mote Runner -- nicknamed for motes, wireless sensor nodes that gather information and refer it back to a network -- can interlink any hardware equipped with wirelessly connected sensors. The extremely lightweight software is made to run....READ MORE

Mobile Backhaul Driving Carrier Ethernet Success

After years of planning convergence around fixed-mobile services, telecom network operators suddenly find themselves living in a converged world primarily to deliver one big service: mobile backhaul.
The reality of the bandwidth demands for mobile data today and for the projected mobile video services of the near future is driving deployment plans for the Carrier Ethernet backbone networks of companies such as AT&T and Verizon. Mobile backhaul is a major reason the Carrier Ethernet market grew 14 percent year-over-year to $492 million in the first quarter....READ MORE

40/100G Ethernet Standard Ratified

The 40G/100G Ethernet standard has been ratified, the first specification to simultaneously utilize two new Ethernet speeds.

The IEEE 802.3ba standard was ratified last Thursday, according to the IEEE. Ratification paves the way for a new wave of higher speed Ethernet server connectivity and core switching products, the standards organization says.

Some vendors, such as Cisco and Juniper Networks have already been trialing 100G Ethernet products since late last year. By producing pre-standard products..... READ MORE

Research shows IP traffic will increase fivefold between 2008 and 2013

Cisco plans to acquire privately held CoreOptics, a maker of optical networking technology designed to help carriers handle an expected surge in IP traffic driven partly by the adoption of cloud computing. CoreOptics' digital signal processing technology is intended to help service providers scale their IP networks while keeping costs down by making transmission more efficient, Cisco said.....READ MORE

IBM points predictive analytics at social Web

The next time you choose an emoticon to spice up a comment about a company, product or service online, know this: There's a chance that a software program is capturing the sentiment expressed by your smiley or frowny for analysis. The capability is part of a new release of IBM's SPSS Modeler text mining and........READ MORE

FCC to claim some broadband regulatory power

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will move to partially reclassify broadband as a common-carrier service in an attempt to move forward with net neutrality rules and its national broadband plan, an official there said Wednesday.

The FCC will move to reclassify broadband from a largely unregulated information service to a more regulated common-carrier service under Title II of the Communications Act, but the agency will try to establish.......READ MORE

Intel's Sean Maloney Talks Nehalem, And More

40G Ethernet products on stage at Interop 2010

Switching will once again be all the rage at this week's Interop conference in Las Vegas as the first 40Gbps Ethernet products are slated to be unveiled.

Extreme Networks plans to roll out 40G Ethernet uplinks for its stackable switches and modules for its chassis-based systems in the enterprise core. Those products will be priced aggressively too, at less than $1,000 per port.

Meanwhile.....READ MORE

Net neutrality, Internet-based VPNs, and cloud computing

We began a discussion of the net neutrality ruling and the impact on the enterprise. And while we feel that we're far from a final call on the exact rules that we'll be playing by in this respect, there are certain areas that could be significantly impacted by the rulings. Let's start....READ MORE

FCC won't have much luck regulating ISPs as telecom providers, expert says

April 7 2010 -Yesterday's appeals court ruling that the Federal Communications Commission lacks jurisdiction over how Internet Service Providers manage network traffic is narrow, but probably makes it difficult for the FCC to try to regulate broadband providers as telecommunications services providers, said......READ MORE

For ROADMs, Less Is More

SAN DIEGO -- OFC/NFOEC 2010 -- Vendors of reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) technology have talked about colorless, directionless, and contentionless cases. Next up might be "gridless."

It's all part of making ROADMs more flexible in order to give service providers more options. The gridless ROADM -- vendors seem to favor the phrase "flexible spectrum," actually -- has gained some buzz amidst all the 100-Gbit/s chatter..... READ MORE

Carrier Ethernet Global Interconnect Service Provider Interoperability Test

Does anybody remember the world before the Internet, when IP packet networks were islands – some larger, some smaller? A number of Internet service providers (ISPs) already offered great IP services back then, but accessing their networks from anywhere in the world was a major headache and usually came with very limited service guarantees.......READ MORE

100G Hits the Ground Running

With a significant rollout starting in the data center and the first deployments of 100-Gbit/s transport in the long-haul network, 2010 is the year for 100G. Over the past eight years, many companies have made major investments in 40-Gbit/s technology with relatively little return, but with an eye on 100G. For some......READ MORE

The Internet will make you smarter, say experts

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An online survey of 895 Web users and experts found more than three-quarters believe the Internet will make people smarter in the next 10 years, according to results released on Friday. Most of the respondents also said the Internet would improve reading and writing by 2020, according to.....READ MORE

Facebook sees need for Terabit Ethernet

Facebook's data centers already need 100-Gigabit Ethernet and ideally could use 1-Terabit Ethernet, according to a senior network engineer at the company.

The popular social-networking service's growing bandwidth needs reflect the explosion in overall network traffic that enterprises and technology companies are trying to address, according to speakers at the Ethernet Alliance's Technology Exploration Forum, held Tuesday in Santa Clara.

Facebook builds.....READ MORE

Less than 10% of IPv4 Addresses Remain Unallocated, says Number Resource Organization

AMSTERDAM – The Number Resource Organization (NRO), the official representative of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) that oversee the allocation of all Internet number resources, announced today that less than 10 percent of available IPv4 addresses remain unallocated. This small pool of existing IP addresses marks a critical moment in IPv4 address exhaustion, ultimately impacting the future network operations of all businesses and organizations around the globe. “This is a key.....READ MORE

Redefining P-OTS

Packet-optical transport systems (P-OTS) are moving from the metro and into the network core, and Heavy Reading believes that 2010 will be a big year for this emerging product segment. Over the past several months, we've researched the core P-OTS opportunity and published the findings in a new Heavy Reading report entitled "The Core Packet-Optical Transport Evolution."

With a host of equipment suppliers....READ MORE

Nortel: 100GE today, 100GE next year

Nortel Networks (OTC:NRTLQ) appears to have taken the lead in the 100-Gb/s long-haul optical market this week with its OME 6500 optical edge platform. But the other end of the 6500 -- the short-haul end -- won't go 100G until sometime in the back half of next year.

Nortel's 6500 includes a mix of what it calls "client-side" and "line-side" circuit packs. Traffic enters the router directly through the client-side interfaces, which......READ MORE