Archive for Networking

RB | November 1, 2011
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Arbor Networks Adds 20 New Mich Jobs

Michigan Ann Arbor.com reports that Information technology security firm Arbor Networks promises to add 20 new jobs to its Ann Arbor R&D operations. In exchange the Ann Arbor City Council unanimously agreed to give Arbor Networks a five-year abatement on $883,527 in real property improvements and $7.8 million in new personal property and equipment.

Arbor NetworksThe tax break for the University of Michigan spin-off, runs through Dec. 31, 2016. As part of the agreement, Arbor Networks will be required to add no less than 20 jobs by Dec. 31, 2013. The city’s administration recommended approval of the latest tax break, calling the attraction and retention of Arbor Networks’ operation consistent with the city’s economic growth objectives,

“The digital information business is continually changing with new and faster technology and Arbor Networks needs new test equipment and digital equipment, with anticipation of 20 new employees resulting to this facility,” City Assessor David Petrak wrote in a memo to council members.

Image representing Ann Arbor SPARK as depicted...Paul Krutko, president and CEO of the  economic development group Ann Arbor SPARK also supported the action in a statement; “Attracting and retaining Arbor Networks in the Ann Arbor region is reflective of Ann Arbor SPARK’s work to help IT businesses grow in the region.”

Arbor Networks is a leading provider of network security and management solutions for next-generation data centers and carrier networks, including the majority of the world’s Internet service providers and many of the largest enterprise networks in use today. Arbor’s proven network security and management solutions help grow and protect customer networks, businesses and brands.

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The Michigan techie jobs story keeps growing and maybe i was wrong about Arbor Networks abandoning Michigan.

The information technology security firm will receive a five-year abatement on $883,527 in real property improvements and $7.8 million in new personal property and equipment.
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RB | June 8, 2011
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26 Terabits per second – New Data Rate Speed Record

The BBC is reporting that researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have set a new data rate speed record. The new data rate speed record is 26 terabits per second down 50km of optical fiber. Professor Wolfgang Freude, a co-author of the paper in Nature Photonics told the BBC how they set the  new speed record.

SubcarriersThe trick is to use what is known as a “fast Fourier transform” which separates a single laser beam into 300 colors and encodes data in each different color. Professor Freude and his colleagues have instead worked out how to create comparable data rates using just one laser with exceedingly short pulses. Within these pulses are a number of discrete colours of light in what is known as a “frequency comb”.  When the pulses are sent into an optical fiber, the different colors can mix together and create 325 different colors in total, each of which can be encoded with its own data stream according to the article.

LaserAt the receiving end, the researchers implemented an optical fast Fourier transform to receive the data streams, based on the times that the different parts of the beam arrive, and at what intensity. The authors of the paper say the technique can be easily integrated into existing silicon photonics technology. The story says that stringing together all the data in the different colours turns into the simpler problem of organising data that essentially arrive at different times.

Professor Freude told the BBC that the current design outperforms earlier approaches simply by moving all the time delays further apart, and that it is a technology that could be integrated onto a silicon chip – making it a better candidate for scaling up to commercial use.

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So what does it mean to transfer 26 terabits per second over fiber optic cable? Reportedly the contents of nearly 1,000 high-definition DVDs could be transmitted down an optical fibre in a second – or the entire Library of Congress collections could be sent in 10 seconds. Since the LOC already has a home in Washington DC, more likely uses of these new technologies will be applications like cloud computing, virtual reality and 3-D Hi-definition TV.

Just last year I wrote about Intel Corp’s. (INTC) efforts in this domain and noted that, “1 terabit per second link could transfer the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in 1.5 minutes.”

 

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RB | June 4, 2011
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Google, Facebook and Yahoo to Test IPv6

A global trial of IPv6 is scheduled for June 8th 2011.  Google (GOOG), Facebook, Yahoo (YHOO) and Akamai (AKAM) will reportedly take part in the IPv6 “test flight.”  The Internet Society, a non-profit group which educates people and companies about net issues is coordinating  World IPv6 Day.  Those who sign up for the test will make their pages available via IPv6 for 24 hours to help iron out problems created by the switch to the new addressing scheme.

“By providing an opportunity for the internet industry to collaborate to test IPv6 readiness we expect to lay the groundwork for large-scale IPv6 adoption and help make IPv6 ready for prime time,” said Leslie Daigle, chief internet technology officer at the Internet Society in a statement.

Cerf wants you to use IPv6“The good news is that internet users don’t need to do anything special to prepare for World IPv6 Day,” said Lorenzo Colitti, a network engineer at Google in a blog post. “Our current measurements suggest that the vast majority (99.95%) of users will be unaffected. However, in rare cases, users may experience connectivity problems, often due to misconfigured or misbehaving home network devices.”

According to Google, Vint Cerf, the program manager for the ARPA Internet research project chose a 32-bit address format for an experiment in packet network interconnection in 1977. For more than 30 years, 32-bit addresses have served us well, but now the Internet is running out of space. IPv6 is the only long-term solution, but it has not yet been widely deployed.  In November 2010 Mr.  Cerf, one of the driving forces behind Google’s IPv6 efforts warned that the net faced “turbulent times” if it did not move quickly to adopt IPv6.

 

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It will be interesting to see the number of participants. This all may just blow over the top because not enough of the right people in organizations see the need. I spoke to my Boss about this a while ago and I think one phone call has been made to our upstream ISP to see what they are doing.  We probably wont deal with it until there is a need for a point-to-point IP video conference with China or something and when it wont work,  then it be a crisis that gets addressed.

What do you think?

Is your organization participating in World IPv6 day?

Does World IPv6 day even matter?

Does your organization have a plan for IPv6 migration?

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RB | May 6, 2011
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Obituary for a Former Network Force

RIP NovellNetworking pioneer Novell ceased trading on NASDAQ 04-27-11 and will be delisted, which is a sad ending for an outfit which was once one of the big names in networking. Novell completed its previously announced merger, whereby Attachmate bought it for $6.10 per share in cash and the  sale of certain identified issued patents and patent applications to CPTN Holdings for $450 million in cash. Attachmate, which started as a terminal emulation company (I spent a lot of time configuring the green screen emulator as a newbie network guy) in 1982, is privately held. ZDNet says the primary owners are the private equity firms Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo.The Attachmate side of the company still works in X Window and terminal emulation.

NovellWhen the company started up in Utah in 1979, it was a hardware company making CP/M based gear and had to be rescued from bankruptcy by a last-minute fund-raising effort. In January 1983, Ray Noorda headed the firm and introduced the multi-platform network operating system (NOS), Novell NetWare.  Originally NetWare ran on a Motorola 6800 CPU supporting 6 MUX ports per board for a maximum of 4 boards per server using a star topology with twisted pair cabling.  Novell based its network protocol on Xerox Network Systems (XNS), and developed what it called the internetwork packet exchange (IPX) and sequenced packet exchange (SPX).   By 1990, Novell was the only choice for any company which wanted to run a network. In 1993, the company bought Unix System Laboratories from AT&T (T), with the idea of challenging Microsoft. The next year it bought WordPerfect, as well as Quattro Pro from Borland to give it an Office package. Taking on Microsoft (MSFT) did not workout so Novell sold-off WordPerfect and Borland off by 1996.

AttachmateIn 1996 it pushed into internet-enabled products and a TCP/IP stack.The result was the excellent NetWare v5.0 (Which I installed over 30 of), released in October 1998. But by 1999 Novell had lost its dominant market position, and was continually being out-marketed by Microsoft. Novell focused on net services and platform interoperability, but products like DirXML, failed to set the world alight. Between 2002 and 2003, Novell tried to buy its way into new fields, particularly Linux in November 2003, Novell acquired SuSE.

Although Novell did not stop releasing products, it did not do as well as it hoped. It’s Linux business grew slowly but not enough to make up for the lack of revenue from Netware. It then scored an own goal by signing a deal with Microsoft to cover patents on Linux. This angered the Open Source community, which had seen itself at war with Microsoft. In November 2010 Novell agreed to be acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion. Attachmate said it will split Novell into two units, one being SUSE.

Less than a week after completing its acquisition of Novell, Attachmate has laid off as many as 700 to 800 of Novell’s employees. According to Utah’s Daily Herald many of the jobs that are being lost will be in the human resources, finance, accounting and legal departments, as well as under-performing departments.

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In the interests of full disclosure, I do did hold Certified Novell Engineer certifications CNE3, CNE4 and CNE5 certs. Now that the deals are done, we’ll have to see if Attachmate lives up to its promises to keep supporting NetWare and Linux.

What do you think?

Does Novell even matter anymore?

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RB | April 30, 2011
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IPv4 Address Grey Market Emerges

The UK’s Register reports that depletion of the world’s IPv4 address space is spawning a new development in the Internet address space, IPv4 address trading. According to the Register,  German Phython developer Martin von Loewis launched a site called Tradipv4.com in March. The site is offering IPv4 addresses for $3 for v4 addresses located in American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)  and $4 for those in the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) region.

TradeIPv4IPv4 address trading, however, is still a grey market idea now. FireceTelecom reports that to make sure that unmanaged address transfers don’t compromise network operations or security, the Internet Society (ISOC) said that buyers and sellers should make sure any “transfers be affected per appropriate Regional Internet Registry (RIR) processes.” Citing its own estimate of prices reaching $11 per address, ISOC said, “We strongly urge that such transfers be affected per appropriate RIR processes.” Unmanaged address transfers will undermine network operations, and it could raise security issues since anonymous address spaces can be spoofed according to ISOC.

Internet Society logoOn their FAQ page, Tradeip4.com says its auctions can cover both the sale and lease of addresses, subject to RIR policies. Some of these policies, the site notes, have grey areas. For example, APNIC policy aims to discourage address transfer by applying what amounts to a 12 month embargo on the originating party receiving new addresses. However, Tradeip4.com dismisses this as irrelevant, since APNIC’s space is exhausted and no new blocks are being assigned according to FierceTelecom. Despite these concerns, Tradeip4.com, maintains that it can sell and lease IPv4 addresses and maintains that it follows RIR policies.

This is not just a SMB issue Microsoft (MSFT),  recently bought Nortel‘s IPv4 addresses (Which I wrote about here). Craig Labovitz, Chief Scientist for network security vendor Arbor Networks, told FierceTelecom that Nortel’s deal with Microsoft reflects how IPv4 depletion is becoming a more pressing issue, now that IPv4 is a scarce resource.

IPv4 addresses have not been a scarce resource and no one has had to pay more, but what really is starting to change is Microsoft spending money to buy Nortel’s IPv4 address space.  For the first time, there’s now a price associated with V4, and one you have a price you start having providers charge for it and start seeing people having a reason to care.

The Register article notes that the Canadian government, via its Industry Canada department, is also against the trade of IPv4 addresses, and it has weighed in on the sale of Nortel’s addresses to Microsoft. In a letter discussed on CircleID, Industry Canada expressed its support for the long-standing position that addresses are not property and therefore cannot be traded.

rb-

I see several problems with the  IPv4 grey market. Trading in IPv4 is just another sign of resistance to IPv6. Firms with a global view have to realize that reallocation of a handful of  IPv4 will not make a difference in an IPv6 world. Another issue could be the routability of an IPv4 address originally assigned to APIC and traded on the grey-market to RIPE. Right now there is no guarantee that these type of addresses will be recognized. There are also political issues, the Canadian government opposes the IP grey-market. Industry Canada has expressed its support for the long-standing position that addresses are not property and therefore cannot be traded.

The ISOC says IPv4 addresses are worth $11.00, MSFT paid $11.25 and ARIN addresses are currently (04-30-11) trading $7.00 per IP. on tradeipv4.com so MSFT appears to have overpaid for the Nortel address range. The bigger issue is the change in nature of an IP address.

What do you think?

Are grey market IPv4 addresses woth it?

Has your firm started its transition to IPv6?

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