Aruba has come out with a new, ultra-high-capacity wireless access point, the 340-series. It has two uplinks--2.5 GBPS and 1 GBPS--and if you use both of them together you can expect to see each access point support 150 simultaneous sessions and 256 connections. Or, it's getting to the point where it's hard to pack enough [...]
Use VSF to create high-availability clusters Hewlett-Packard has come out with a way to use inexpensive 5400R switches to create a high-availability core. Their new clustering utility is called VSF, or Virtual Switch Fabric. You can connect two 5400R switches together with a gigabit or 10 gigabit 'heartbeat' link, configure VSF, and let fly. What [...]
2920 switch replacement HP will soon discontinue their 2920 line of switches. These have been on the market for quite some time. The 2920 switches are layer 2 gigabit switches that have modules in the back to make 10 gigabit uplinks and to stack together with special stacking cables. They are being replaced by two [...]
Unless you've been living under a rock you know several facts: more and more networks are being attacked--successfully--by ransomware and other forms of malware, and the problem is getting worse. The miracle of networking means that everyone can now be attacked, and since a single ransomware package can be written and deployed across the Internet [...]
Cloud services have lots of allure--depend on someone else for the routine maintenance and management, sit back and enjoy the ride. So far this has worked well...people run their payroll, VoIP systems, CRM, conferencing, data storage and backup, security systems, and lots of 'heartbeat' applications on someone else's servers, in some unknown place. This all [...]
If you follow Software-Defined Networks (SDN) you know that one of the great future promises of SDN was the ability to abstract the network hardware from the overlying software. Buy any hardware you want; add the most apt operating system and then add an SDN console that suits you to implement security, access and usage [...]
I had a couple of chats with CIO's this past week. In the first chat we were talking a network refresh, and the comment was made that network and computing hardware were fast becoming commodities. If you have bought any of these recently you know that's true. What's not well understood is that the consequences [...]
This is something to ponder. For the past twenty-odd years it's been possible to freely move around the Internet, from resource to resource, all the while using the same browser. The freely-used Internet is about to be replaced with the launching of applications; generally stored on the edge device and then accessing remote (cloud-based) resources [...]
I'll introduce our new product by discussing the quality of work. Sometimes people tend to confuse hard with with effectiveness. Hard word being its own reward, in effect. But sometimes--in fact, most times--its better to work smart than hard. We'll move on to cite the hardest work that I know of. If you have lots [...]
I'd talk about this new product even if we didn't sell it. Videoconferencing has long been stymied by the fact that it's actually hard to use. Some of that has been the state of the technology, and some of that has been the inability of videoconferencing vendors to make their products actually usable. So it [...]