The Great Firewall of China Faces Challenge During Olympics

For example, Cisco (CSCO) (which supplies the Chinese with equipment such as mirroring routers) will demonstrate what it calls the Holy Grail of digital IP video–the ability to provide select shots on low-res files and extract high-res material. And there surely will be global implications of China's best-kept secret of ways of trying to control rain by injecting clouds with fairy dust. But the most extraordinary feat would be China's efforts to put the tech "genie" back in the bottle after the games are over and the crowds have gone home. That's one event for which there is no gold. Disclousre: Author does not own any media, entertainment or internet stocks. .

Brocade to pay $3B to buy Foundry Networks

Cisco is a small player in that area, but has long been the leading provider of routers and switches that direct Internet traffic. That industry has become increasingly attractive as Internet traffic, particularly bandwidth-hogging video, has exploded, and companies and Internet service providers have to spend mightily to upgrade their networks. Foundry is a smaller competitor to Cisco in that area. The acquisition promises to make Brocade a more well-rounded competitor to Cisco, but isn't likely to substantially dent Cisco's dominance because Foundry Networks is considered a niche player, albeit at the high end of the market, which means the company can command higher prices and healthy profit margins. Despite its smaller size — Foundry had $607 million in sales last year, compared with Cisco's $29 billion — Foundry is known for its innovative technologies and has a loyal base of customers in the government, health care and financial services industries.

A primer on the Terry Childs case for the non-technical

They were passwords that could be used to log into routers and switches to make changes. Nothing more, nothing less. • The passwords released by the DA's office were not the passwords they were trying to get from Childs. The passwords they released to the public were for another part of the network entirely, one that provided external access to the network for city employees. In essence, by publishing this list, the city opened the deadbolt on the door to the network, but left the handle locked. • Modems plugged into routers and switches in various places on a large network are not scandalous, they're common. They're also generally mandatory on large networks. These modems are used to provide instant emergency access to remote locations to reduce or eliminate network downtime.

rocade Buying Foundry Has to be an FCoE Play

If Brocade customers started buying Cisco Nexus 5000 switches to connect hosts at the access layer via FCoE, how long would it take Cisco to convince that customer to replace Brocade's director switches with a pair of Cisco MDS switches. Yeah, not too long. Then what is Brocade left with? So, this should be an interesting play. If I am going to update my DC LAN environment with FCoE I have to use Cisco's new - and, um, pricey - Nexus line anyways. That's a change in architecture, not a normal evolution of the 6500 or 4500 series. So, if the cost is low enough for Brocade/Foundry FCoE and I already have a Brocade SAN, do I make the jump to Brocade? Might be worth the look. More >From the Field blog entries: I Need Some Twitter Friends Wireless Steps Up The Underlying Message of John Chambers Keynote at Networkers Cisco Networkers Network Performance Cisco Live Report Card Go to Cisco Subnet for more Cisco news, blogs, discussion forums, security alerts, book giveaways, and more.

Network Virtualization

The Cisco Factor However, if you want to throw the first kind of network virtualization into the mix, sure Cisco is selling a ton of gear (such as Catalyst switches) that use virtualization (which, of course, has nothing to do with hypervisors per se.) As to Microsoft's conspicuous absence in the top three, Saugatuck contends that Microsoft will not be a fully engaged market force in 2009 as it continues the process of rolling out Hyper-V. “Microsoft's new solution will not be roduction-ready for most users for 6 to 12 months after its release", the report states. You could certainly argue that a lot of early deployments will be used for test and development. You could further argue that VMM 2008 still hasn't gone into G/A and won't be available until later this year. In fairness to the report's authors, Charlie Burns and Bruce Guptill, the report was issued earlier this
year, well before the release of Hyper-V.

WAN application

Juniper's enterprise switch could give Cisco pause But Cisco fans might rejoice in the fact that the switch wasn't perfect. Multicast support wasn't great and the tests uncovered some security concerns. Meanwhile, Juniper is increasing the battle stakes the WAN application acceleration area, too. The company this week will unveil appliances that is says perform better but don't
cost more. These compete with Cisco's Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) systems as well as Riverbed's wide area data services (WDS) products, and devices from Blue Coat, Ipanema and others (Compare optimization tools). More from Cisco Subnet:Cisco certs and home labs, a great discussionThe 10 most interesting entries from the Cisco iPrize contestNew dual-N band Linksys router geared for multimedia home networking Cisco, Nivis demo 6LoWPAN IPv6 networkGo to
Cisco Subnet for more Cisco news, blogs, discussion forums, security alerts, book giveaways, and more.

Virtualization

Cisco Expands Virtualization Across Data Center Portfolio DCAP also now supports Cisco ACE and Cisco MDS blade server fabric switches, and solutions including Oracle 11i E-Business Suite,
Microsoft Exchange 2003, Tibco Rendezvous and active-active disaster recovery. Cisco has also extended its related DCAP for Applications program for the Cisco Application Delivery Networks portfolio by offering new tested and validated delivery solutions for Oracle E-Business Suite R12 and Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007. .