Networking: Opinions

The beginning of a new year normally is a time to reflect; it's all the more so when the network industry is facing (along with the rest of the economy) a major financial crisis. We are of a generation that has taken network growth for granted, that has seen the Internet reshape culture and that has come to believe that "more bits" paves the road to the future. It just might be that this comfortable view is the greatest threat we face, because networking is going to change one way or the other.

There's likely a number of building systems in place at your organization: HVAC, lighting, fire, security, telephone, and the like. You also have your IT infrastructure. Turns out that converging those systems on a single IP-based network promises a wealth of money-saving benefits and efficiency gains, according to a recently released white paper from Johnson Controls titled "The Perfect Technology Storm."

Small businesses converging voice, video and data traffic sometimes end up with haunted networks, but you can exorcise the demons. Affordable QoS mechanisms are available to oust the goblins that cause delay, jitter, bit-rate errors and dropped packets.

One of the signs of getting older is the feeling that things were better "back in the day." I've been lucky enough to avoid it, most of the time. OK, I'd like to have tasted Coca-Cola back when it had the original ingredients. And I'll admit to being a bit nostalgic for the days when you didn't have to take your shoes off to get on a plane. But overall, it strikes me things are generally better today, from medical advances that didn't exist three years ago to being able to Google on your mobile phone.

An investor and blogger on Yahoo's Tech Ticker site doesn't expect Nortel to survive the current market downturn which he says is stalling big infrastructure buildouts.

You might believe, and with some real justification, that the term "end to end" is only used by vendors who custom-fit the definition to the scope of their particular product.

Heard about a competitor's security being breached? Then you're probably next. In fact, you may already be owned.

The initial approach to storage virtualization, which has been around for years, was to address it in the storage-area network because the SAN sat between the storage and servers, and would cause the least disruption to these systems. However, after nearly a decade, this approach has not taken off while server virtualization has become widely accepted. What needs to be changed to make storage virtualization as ubiquitous as server virtualization?

Not long ago, the powers-that-be detected an impending crisis. To resolve it, they rushed into action crafting a proposal that represented an unprecedented upheaval of existing infrastructure. On the grounds that "something needed to be done" to avert the crisis, they brushed aside objections that the upheaval was too convulsive and might nonetheless fail to address the underlying issues that had created the crisis in the first place.

There's IT, and then there's shadow IT.

In terms of malicious insiders committing fraud, can anything "really" be done?