What’s going to happen in 2011? First, we’ll continue to see some cool technology and use cases in cloud computing and unified communications, but I think adoption of both will be slower than expected. We will also start to see more about FCoE standards compliance and inter-operation, particularly with FCoE and multi-path routing protocols like TRILL and Short Path Bridging, though I am not convinced that the networking industry will rally around either interpretation. I think virtual desktops are going to remain as popular as they are now, not very popular at all. For each prediction, I am going to make a measurable statement and I’ll check back at the end of 2011 to see how I fare.
Network Computing
My Five 2011 Predictions
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Categories: General.
Aerohive Makes Fat Wireless Phat
When you do the marketing math, Aeorhive’s case is easily made. Big WLAN vendors are having a field day making whopping throughput claims to hawk their latest 802.11n hardware, and the prevailing undercurrent through all IT media centers on the explosion of mobile and portable devices that are becoming mainstream computing devices. Take all those devices, using all of that bandwidth, and you have to wonder if sending it all to the network core is the best strategy. Aerohive says the wireless controller model should be yesterday’s news in an 802.11n world, and that its smart, fat access points are the better way of doing wireless, by eliminating potential controller bottlenecks.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Moving To The Cloud Is Not Cut And Paste
One of the issues that I have been thinking about is the requirements necessary to move an application to a cloud service, and to some extent, move it with little impact to end users. Amazon’s VM Import service is getting a lot of buzz lately, but in itself is about as interesting as converting a Microsoft Word Document to PDF. Sure it’s useful, but it’s not nearly half the story. VM conversion certainly isn’t a game changer for hybrid clouds. Just because you have a VM in your data center doesn’t mean you can simply push it to Amazon’s EC2 and call it a cloud.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Spares Beat Service Contracts Hands Down
I’m sometimes amazed at how much of my clients’ IT budgets go to pay for service and support contracts that they don’t really need. Too many IT guys can only sleep soundly under the security blanket provided by a 24-7 service contract with guaranteed four hour response times, so they just have the vendor include gold plated service on everything they buy. I’ve found that in many cases a few spares and next business-day service can save my clients a bundle.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
NetApp Kills Off DataFort; Encryption A Feature, Not A Product
Reports that NetApp is killing off the DataFort encryption product line it acquired with Decru in 2005 signals the last gasp of the once-promising storage encryption market. While we argued over Data Domain and whether deduplication was a product or a feature, the market decided that encryption alone does not a product make.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
HP, IBM, VMware Rank Highest For Configuration Management Tools
An industry analysis released this month rates HP, IBM and VMware as “value leaders” for their configuration management tools that can identify software applications running on a network and identify the impact of network configuration changes that will effect how those applications run. The report, from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), rates those vendors high based on their product strengths and cost efficiencies. Other vendors ranked as a “strong value,” the second highest ranking, were ASG, ServiceNow, OpTier and ManageEngine.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Cirtas Adds Amazon S3 Support To Cut Cloud Data Storage Costs
Cirtas Systems has enhanced its Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller cloud storage offering by adding support for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) option, which lets users lower their cloud storage charges in return for reducing the protection Amazon gives to their data. In addition, Cirtas has increased the number of cloud systems that organizations can use by adding support for EMC’s Atmos and for the AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service platform. Previously, the storage appliance supported only Amazon and Iron Mountain cloud storage utility providers.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
New AppFirst Monitoring Product Integrates With Top Cloud Providers
AppFirst, a company that provides detailed monitoring and management of computing resources running in cloud environments, has introduced a new version of its solution that integrates with the systems of major cloud providers. The company announced this week that its AppFirst system–which constantly, rather than intermittently, monitors performance– works with cloud providers such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace, SoftLayer and GoGrid, and will support additional cloud providers in the near future.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Correlsense Makes Finding A Needle In A Hay Stack Easy
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Correlsense, a business transaction management company, along with one of their customers, GAINSCO Insurance. We discussed Correlsense’s product, SharePath, which monitors and tracks all of an application’s transactions in real time, and can rapidly deliver root cause analysis and display where transactions are slowed, or stalled. In fact, SharePath can pin point transaction bottlenecks spanning from the discrete user client all the way through the IT infrastructure to the number of bytes read, or written, at the disk storage level. In my opinion, this makes finding a bottleneck in real time, or the needle in a hay stack, easy.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
WikiLeaks Attacks Bringing Needed Attention To DDoS Prevention
The recent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by supporters of the WikiLeaks organization were relatively small among all DDoS attacks, but the outsized media reaction to them brings needed attention to the threat of DDoS attacks in general and to the protections enterprise networks need to take, according to IT security experts.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.