The number of compromised records involved in data breaches investigated by Verizon and the U.S. Secret Service decreased from 144 million in 2009 to only 4 million in 2010, representing the lowest volume of data loss since the report's launch in 2008, Verizon says. By contrast, its report covers approximately 760 data breaches, which Verizon says is the largest caseload to date. Wade Baker, director, research & intelligence at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, says that was the most surprising finding. "To go from 385 million in 2008 to less than four million a couple of years later is a pretty dramatic decline,'' he says. "That's hands down the number one thing that surprised me."

The biggest trend, according to Baker, has been the shift in tactics used by organized criminal groups. "They're really in it for the money; not to embarrass you or steal intellectual property ... they're just looking to make a buck." Organized crime groups are especially prevalent in Eastern Europe and South America, he says, and they specialize in offloading records in the black market.

Significantly, both reports found that the food, beverage, hospitality and retail vertical saw the most system breaches. Baker says there has been a decline in the number of records being stolen in the financial sector since many hackers were caught and sent to prison, which "sent a message," and changed the way they calculated risk. Hackers then began targeting smaller companies and settling for smaller batches of data, he says.

"It's very interesting; the hospital and retail standard attack is a very quick attack, where the attacker scans the internet for openings in remote access systems." He says attackers look for well-known user names and passwords that can be easily compromised. "These organizations don't have very strong security mechanisms."

The Verizon report also found that outsiders are responsible for 92 percent of breaches, a significant increase from the 2010 findings.The Trustwave report found that industries with franchise and chain store models are the top targets, primarily because franchises often use the same IT systems across stores. The report notes that if a cybercriminal can compromise a system in one location, "they likely can duplicate the attack in multiple locations. More than a third of 2011 investigations occurred in a franchise business and this number is expected to rise in 2012."

Trustwave also determined that passwords remain a big problem for global businesses, and that despite well-publicized data breaches, continue to allow employees and system administrators to use weak passwords. The most common password businesses use is "Password1," which satisfies the default Microsoft Active Directory complexity setting, Trustwave says.

Besides the ongoing threats of malware and hacking, the financial services industry needs to be vigilant about watching for social engineering tactics, says Baker, where people are tricked and deceived and are prime targets of phishing attacks. "Criminals usually have to work harder here and try different techniques that are more ... sophisticated." Baker says he "likes to make the point if you're in charge of managing security in the financial services industry, the threats most pertinent to your organization are very different from [threats geared at] hospitals and retail, so way you go about securing your systems needs to be different. The one-size-fits-all notion doesn't fit."

Baker says remote access applications that smaller businesses tend to use from third-party providers, are very common ways for criminals to get into systems. He says 71 percent of all intrusions occur through remote access as the starting point for hackers to get into networks. Small businesses may not be aware this is a problem, nor whether their vendors are doing a good job securing those systems.

However, he believes that while large companies are more security-minded, they still tend not to monitor systems as closely as they should. "One of the chief problems we call out in this report is it's not really what we don't know that hurts us in the security world ... it's almost always the stuff we know about and how to handle and what to do to prevent [breaches], but for some reason we're not doing those things."

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/security/232600665 http://www.networkcomputing.com/security/232600665 http://www.networkcomputing.com/security Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:00 EST In this second installment of a three-part series on IPv6 implementation, Network Computing looks at the issues involved in deploying an IPv6 network alongside an IPv4 network.

The IPv6 protocol was established because the number of IPv4 addresses is quickly running out. As the IPv6 protocol creates a 128-bit address, four times the size of the 32-bit IPv4 standard, there will be infinitely more available IP addresses. That's intended to connect all the smartphones, tablets and other computers on the network, but also the coming proliferation of Internet-connected devices including refrigerators, cars, and myriad sensors in homes, buildings and on IP networks.

With IPv6, a company may have exponentially more Internet addresses to use, but also more to manage, says Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for the Internet Society (ISOC), a global nonprofit organization that certifies technical standards for the Internet.

"The IPv6 address space is so large and your allocation is likely to be larger than you need it to be," she says. "On the flip side, that makes it a lot harder to probe your entire network because it is a much larger space."

The volume of available IP addresses adds to the network operator's workload because they have to probe the "dark spaces" within the network where there are no assigned IP addresses. "The managing and making sure that no one is squatting in your address space is considered to be a possible additional challenge," says Daigle.

The ISOC has created a Web portal, Deploy 360, to share information about how to deploy an IPv6-compliant network. On the site are a number of case studies on how IPv6 rollouts went, including one about the project at Oxford University in the UK. In an online report, Oxford's Guy Edwards detailed a five-step plan for deploying IPv6 alongside the existing IPv4 network.

First, Edwards advises, the organization should perform a network device audit, identifying all the routers, switches and firewalls on the network and what specific versions of hardware and software are there. With the help of networking vendors, the next step is to determine which of them are already IPv6 compliant. He also advises that network administrators run a test on a particular IPv6 device to make sure that the software application to run on the network works.

Secondly, Edwards says perform an audit of services to run on the network, such as the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) for e-mail and the Domain Name System (DNS) for associating Internet domains and unique IP addresses. The audit should identify which of the network services may be IPv6-supported.

The next step is to build an IPv6-only test network and run the same services and applications that already run on the IPv4 network. In the test environment, document any differences in configuration syntax and behavior for setting up the service under IPv6.

The fourth step is to write a detailed IPv6 deployment plan that lays out in as much detail as possible how the rollout will occur. The plan should be shown to management to get their approval; it can also be peer-reviewed if desired to make sure that nothing is overlooked.

Lastly, write a formal IP-addressing policy for going forward, which could also be peer-reviewed.

Some companies are going to discover that the network management tools designed to operate on an IPv4 network may not work the same way on an IPv6 network, says Jim Frey, managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates.

"There are still some challenges with how to manage these mixed environments. Underneath the covers there is actually in many cases a different set of data being drawn about the IPv6 traffic versus the IPv4 traffic."

A network monitoring tool may reveal that maybe 5 or 10 percent of network traffic is IPv6 traffic, but it may not be able to identify which specific packets are IPv6, and some tools may not have been upgraded to support IPv6.

"It's still a work in progress to gain consistent visibility of mixed environments," says Frey.

Variables such as those described by Frey illustrate the need for a well thought out and executed rollout plan, states ISOC's Daigle.

"Any enterprise network operator knows that something done quickly is something done expensively," she says.

The third segment of this series --- which first looked at how different networks have different IPv6 needs -- will look at how to manage compliance and security in an IPv6 project.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/ipv6-tech-center/232600590 http://www.networkcomputing.com/ipv6-tech-center/232600590 http://www.networkcomputing.com/ipv6-tech-center Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:00 EST InformationWeek: Outlook 2012 report, 75 percent of respondents see heightened demand for new IT projects. More importantly, IT is getting money to execute on those projects, with 56 percent saying their companies plan to increase IT spending in 2012, and just 16 percent think they'll cut.

That's good news because appropriate project management is the differentiating characteristic for IT projects that succeed, says the author of a new InformationWeek report. The Research: 2012 Enterprise Project Management report found that of the 508 business technology professionals surveyed, only 60 percent said they had a project management organization (PMO), but 30 percent said IT initiatives almost always add value to the business. There's a continuing mentality that IT professionals don't require good soft skills, but with IT success being directly related to business success, that's no longer true, says Jonathan Feldman, director of IT services for a North Carolina city and author of the report.

"I think the biggest problem is there are still pockets of 1980s mentality out there where IT people do not need to have good soft skills like written communications, tact, diplomacy, follow-up, follow-through. That's, I think, the biggest problem," he says. All of those skills are necessary for good project management.

PMOs are generally considered to be rather dry and boring by most people, and there are a lot of common misconceptions about project management in general.

"The big complaints are it's bureaucratic, it takes up time, it doesn't provide a lot of value, it's preventing you from doing what you need to be doing in the first place, it ties you up in meetings instead of working, on and on," Feldman says. "There are people who dive for cover when they see a project manager coming down the hall because they're afraid they're going to be put on a task that's a complete waste of their time."

Although it may come across as a waste of time, project management is necessary to keep projects on time and on budget, he says. In organizations that don't have a dedicated PMO, 77 percent of IT projects are being managed by IT staff. It's not okay to just be a technologist any more (unless that staff member is confined to the data center), and the increasing need for IT professionals with soft skills has been a trend in the making for 20 years, he adds.

The technology-native generation is now in the workforce, and the IT bullying that happened more than 20 years ago is no longer acceptable in the enterprise, says Feldman. The need for good project management is already there, mostly because an organization cannot execute well on a business technology project without soft skills related to project management.Good project management will enable businesses to reap the benefits of consistent, high-quality delivery of innovative IT projects. If project management is done right, it means that IT projects will succeed. Without it, failure is inevitable, and with failure comes a loss of time, money and effort, he states.

Can IT alone manage its projects? No. IT organizations that have their own PMOs only attribute 1-1.5 percent of the entire IT organization's budget to the PMO. They're not going to be able to manage every little project on IT's bailiwick, Feldman says. IT is equipped to handle a large number of smaller projects that don't require a PMO, but for larger projects where failure could mean significant harm to the organization, a PMO can ensure the project is a success. Unfortunately, only 53 percent of IT projects are always or usually delivered on time, based on responses to the survey. There's plenty of room for improvement.

"I think that by and large IT organizations need to understand that most of their infrastructure is going to be in the cloud in one way, shape or form in the future," says Feldman. "There's going to be very little in the way of internal infrastructure, and they had better bone up on their project skills if they want to keep working there because the projects are where the innovation comes from."

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center/232600601 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center/232600601 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:00 EST While it may be hard to calculate the F5 ROI on just numbers, the benefits are real, reports St. Louis-based Distribution Management Inc., which decided to virtualize its entire network infrastructure and desktop environment on VMware View. The challenge became figuring out how to give end users access to everything they have inside the company, even when they work remotely, while not compromising performance and security. The $6 million wholesale computer, copier, fax and printer supplier, which has 300 employees, decided to deploy the BIG-IP Edge Gateway to provide secure, remote access combining SSL, VPN, security, application acceleration and availability services.

"We saw about five or six different ways users were connecting to the network," notes Dan Shipley, IT architect at Distribution Management. When that occurs, the VPN client has to be smart enough to know when a user is switching from one connectivity point to another and keep working, but he found the ones they were using "did a terrible job handling those network changes." The gateway is "very smart to switch to different connectivity options; it knows when to do it and holds the connection if the network isn't there."

Distribution Management is also using BIG-IP Edge client to talk to the application and send it a retry, letting it know that the network isn't down, but rather in waiting mode. It will let communication pass through as soon as the Edge client connects again.

Additionally, when users log in to the hosted virtual environment, they typically have to log in three different times, Shipley says. F5 Edge Gateway allows for single sign-on by caching the log-in information on the back end, he says.

Another challenge was that end users were seeing "widely varying experiences remotely depending on their network bandwidth. The Edge client, in concert with Edge Gateway, compresses traffic, and Shipley says IT has seen speed double over what they had without that compression. Latency has also decreased for certain applications, so the company has witnessed a lot of traffic optimization, he says. "The net effect to the user is they feel like they have twice the bandwidth, and everything works faster."

From a back-end perspective, Shipley says there are several features he likes: Network Access Control (NAC) of endpoints, based on whether the clients have anti-virus running and are updated; NAC for both Windows and browser; the ability to push the VMware View client out to the user if it is not installed; QoS of VoIP, RDP, and PCoIP protocols; load balancing of incoming user connections; "Webtop" page listing applications users can connect to and firewall limiting of ports, protocols, and IP addresses the clients can communicate with. The only downside Shipley has seen with F5 is that the technology is so powerful it has a fair amount of complexity and a big learning curve. "I wish it would configure itself,'' he says.

Just two weeks ago VMware expanded its management portfolio with vCenter Operations Management Suite by integrating with VMware vCenter Capacity IQ and VMware vCenter Configuration Manager for improved performance, capacity and configuration management. The new enhancements focus on embedding and integrating management tools into the platform, streamlining processes and applying analytics so customers can achieve better economics with their cloud computing deployments.

Shipley hasn't calculated the ROI since they started using F5, but he says it has leveraged the company's internal infrastructure by allowing external/remote access. "Without the F5, users would not be happy with the solution and wouldn't use it as much. The [virtualization] project wouldn't have been successful without the Edge Gateway and Client."

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/virtualization/232600577 http://www.networkcomputing.com/virtualization/232600577 http://www.networkcomputing.com/virtualization Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:00 EST 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) from 1GbE appears to be gaining traction, 4G and LTE wireless networks are quickly replacing 3G, and the introduction of Intel's Romley microprocessor platform later this year, with built-in 10GbE support, is expected to drive another round of server refreshes industry-wide. All of this is causing network operators to buckle up for a bumpy ride as they try to manage the torrent of data on their networks these innovations will unleash.

And even as 10GbE is advancing, an increase to 40GbE and 100GbE connectivity is generating the next threatening waves. But many of the clients that industry researcher Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, consults for don't have a clear sense of what traffic courses through their networks and how to best manage it.

"One piece of advice I always give network managers is don't re-architect your network or make any decisions until you truly know your network," he advises. "My estimate is that only about 25 percent of network managers really know their network."

Enter Gigamon, which just introduced an additional network chassis that delivers what is calls a Traffic Visibility Fabric technology. It sits on top of the network layer as an abstracted layer, providing that visibility for various network management tools that track performance, quality of service, security and other important metrics.

The GigaVUE-HD4 Traffic Visibility Node chassis is a 5-rack unit (5RU) device that complements the GigaVUE-HD8 chassis unveiled by Gigamon in May 2011. That is a larger 14RU chassis that customers thought was great, but a bit much.

"We designed this [HD4] box because customers were saying your big chassis, the HD8, is pretty efficient on space at 14RU but it's big. Is there something that fits between a classic 1RU and the 14RU?" says Paul Hooper, network visibility strategist for Gigamon.

The HD4 offers eight 40-gigabits per second ports, 96 10Gbps ports or 176 1Gbps ports, depending on how the blade is configured. It delivers up to 1.3Tb of throughput and aggregates data from a row of servers by sitting at the end of each row.The beauty of the HD4, as well as the HD8, is the investment protection of being able to migrate from 10 to 40 to 100GbE as needs change, said ZK's Kerravala. "The fact that it can do 10 gig natively and it's got enough capacity to do 40 gig and 100 gig without an upgrade, means it lets companies upgrade to the higher speeds at their own pace," he says.

The confluence of events increasing network traffic -- 10GbE, 4G wireless, Intel Romley -- is needed to support the increasing demands on service provider and data center networks, says Gigamon's Mike Valladeo, product director for the HD line. Faster and more sophisticated networks are needed to support the growing number of end-point devices, the explosion of data they are creating and crunching, the variety of applications they are running on premise and in the cloud, the number of physical and virtual servers they have to manage, and the extension of the fixed network to a mobile network, he says.

This creates a market opportunity for network administrators seeking to upgrade as well as for vendors like Gigamon. "People are moving quicker now because I believe their budgets are starting to open up and they are seeing that the data that was evolving is now all of a sudden starting to explode," says Valladeo.

Another factor helping drive the 10GbE market is declining prices, which has seen the average selling price of drop to $388 per port in 2011, down from $818 per port in 2008. Key vendors in this market include Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Brocade, Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, Dell, HP, IBM, and Juniper Networks.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232600569 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232600569 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:00 EST The Solarflare ApplicationOnload Engine, available in late April, provides a direct path between the application and the network for applications that demand low latency, low jitter and high message rate performance, says CEO Russell Stern. "We cut their latency by half, increased their message rate by from 7 to 10 times and reduced jitter to zero," he says, of customers already using the technology. He identified the New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade as Solarflare customers, but said others did not want to be identified for competitive reasons.

The 10GbE standard is gaining new traction as network operators upgrade from 1GbE to meet demand for more bandwidth. According to the latest market data, sales of 10GbE switches are expected to reach $13 billion by 2016 and will constitute nearly half of a total $28 billion Ethernet switch market by then. That year sales of 40 and 100GbE products will amount to $3 billion. Vendors in this market include Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Brocade, Cisco, Extreme Networks, Dell, HP, IBM, and Juniper Networks.

Growth in 10GbE deployments will be driven primarily by continued adoption of virtualization, meaning servers will be running at higher utilization rates than will non-virtualized servers, says Alan Weckel, senior director at Dell'Oro Group. Another driver is expected to be the server refresh cycle prompted by the release of Intel's new Romley microprocessor platform, which will provide the faster server throughput that is needed for virtualization, he adds.

"Romley comes out in the first half of 2012, so 2012 is going to be the time that enterprises go through qualification tests of the new servers and new switches. The hockey stick up is [in] 2013," Weckel says.

Solarflare's ApplicationOnload Engine (AOE) adds FPGA capability to a previously introduced Solarflare OpenOnload application programming interface for connecting apps to the network. The company learned that many of its financial services customers were trying to engineer a FPGA feature of their own, but had trouble doing the engineering, and financing the projects internally, says Stern. The AOE from Solarflare can be sold with either custom software developed by the financial institution, software developed by Solarflare, or software from a third party, he says.

Solarflare is actually co-developing the AOE solution with some of the financial institutions needing it, says Scott Woolsey, director of brand development at Solarflare. He declined to identify them, but adds they were "household name" companies. Solarflare also sells through value-added resellers that serve the financial services industry.

While Solarflare adapters have found a market in other compute-intensive fields such as video surveillance, oil and gas exploration, research institutions, virtualized data centers and other big data applications, "we chose to land our beach craft in the financial services market," Stern says, because of the market opportunity there for financial trading and business analytics where speed, accuracy and uptime are critical.

Stern believes the AOE capability distinguishes Solarflare from other 10GbE server adapter vendors such as Broadcom, Intel, Qlogic and Emulex, and that Solarflare has greater market share than them in the financial services sector because of AOE.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232600507 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232600507 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:00 EST InformationWeek's "Data Encryption: Ushering In a New Era" report found that cloud and mobility are adding new challenges to security, but only 47 per cent of 506 IT professionals that responded to a survey on data encryption stated that have mobile-device encryption has been made a priority.

Another InformationWeek survey, Research: 2012 State of Cloud Computing, of 511 IT professionals regarding cloud computing found that 64 per cent of enterprises using cloud services are dealing with between two and five different providers. As the number of servers and applications move into the cloud, the more the use of encryption drops off.

"The problem of mobility and cloud is it forces policies, processes, and encryption technologies to have to scale to an outside device, organization, and too many more use cases," says Michael Davis, CEO of Savid Technologies and author of the report. "This usually means the governance/audit team isn't ready, the security team gets bogged down in details related to deployment, but in the end we don't see users impacted too much by encryption in these spaces as the technology is usually transparent."

All of the encryption technologies require keys, but in the case of mobile devices, the keys are usually controlled by end-user when they turn on their phones, Davis explains. In that case, the user must have a lock/password screen or encryption isn't able to do its job. IT can create policies around using lock/password screens, but end-users frequently ignore policies. In the case of mobile devices, it leaves potentially sensitive data open to anyone who comes into physical contact with the phone.

Of the 506 respondents to the data encryption survey, 38 per cent said their organizations have comprehensive formal policies in place that expressly require encryption of personally identifiable information (PII) or confidential data on certain devices within their networks. They said the policies are strictly enforced. Another 38 per cent noted that although they have policies, enforcement is limited or done on an application-by-application basis.

"If the organization doesn't start looking at their data in terms of who, what, why, and where the access to that data needs to occur, they won't be able to properly encrypt the data and know what devices need to decrypt the data," states Davis. "Furthermore, when it comes to cloud, if you don't encrypt and have control of your keys, you are basing your security on the fact that the cloud provider promises to implement security at or above the level your organization does, and sadly, most organizations don't check to see that the cloud provider actually meets the same level of security requirements."

From a mobility perspective, enterprises have been lucky because of the type of data typically being stored on mobile devices, Davis says. End-users have not wanted to work with large documents, spreadsheets and other files not easily viewable on mobile devices, but as the form factors, available applications and performance of mobile devices have increased, they are becoming more likely to work with such data on their smartphones and tablets.

"Mobility has enabled anywhere, anytime access. I call it the Starbucks problem. Every Starbucks is now the corner office for most workers, and mobility is going to continue to demand that employees access files anywhere from any device," he says.

IT organizations need to ask themselves some tough questions about security and encryption, with a focus on securing data that is not under their control (because most of those mobile devices aren't). The solution to the problem is usually taking a data-centric approach to security instead of the traditional premise-based model, says Davis.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600474 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600474 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:00 EST Conversion to IPv6 is necessary because the supply of IPv4 addresses is close to exhaustion. An IPv4 address is only 32 bits long, creating a supply of just 4 billion addresses. The IPv6 address is 128 bits, creating more than 340 undecillion address combinations -- (340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), which is a 34 followed by 34 zeros -- a virtually unlimited supply.

By one measure, IPv6 adoption is on the upswing. A November 2011 survey commissioned by Infoblox, a network infrastructure automation vendor, found that 25.4 percent of the Internet zones under .com, .net and .org domains support IPv6, up from only 1.27 percent in a 2010 survey.

But in terms of enterprise adoption of IPv6, little work is being done on the upgrade. Jim Frey of the research firm Enterprise Management Associates, points to another Infoblox-commissioned study that said only 9 percent of businesses surveyed had completed an IPv6 rollout, 68 percent said that they "had made little or no progress in conversion" while 23 percent said they were in the midst of a rollout.

Converting to IPv6 may not seem a priority, but the pressure to upgrade varies by the type of business, says Arpit Joshipura, chief marketing officer for Force 10 Networks, a network equipment vendor recently acquired by Dell. He says the industry segment most likely to adopt IPv6 first is Web 2.0 companies, such as social networking sites like Facebook, because they have a lot more user endpoints. Under the least pressure to adopt IPv6 are enterprise data centers, he says, because they have relatively little "Internet-facing IT."

That being the case, enterprise data center operators can plan a smaller project focused just on its Internet-facing network.

"We see enterprises recognizing that they need a plan but that the plan can be done in pieces," says Keith Stewart, director of product management for Brocade Network's application delivery products. "Very few people that I talk to anymore are thinking about 'How do I do an end-to-end upgrade to v6,' because the cost and benefit analysis just isn't there."

Service providers have led the market in migrating to IPv6 and they have an opportunity to monetize the IPv6 skills they have built up to advise others how to make the switch, Stewart says. "There's not a lot of IPv6 expertise out there but ... they've got a lot of the IPv6 talent in house."Some companies will have to adopt IPv6 sooner than others also based on where they operate, adds Dell's Joshipura. The federal government faces an IPv6 mandate in the U.S., while mandates apply to all organizations in China, Japan and South Korea.

Wider adoption of IPv6 presents one of those "chicken-and-egg situations," says Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for ISOC.

Content providers don't see the point of providing production-quality, IPv6 access to their content if there are relatively few users who they can reach over IPv6, Daigle says. Meanwhile, ISPs don't see the point in providing IPv6 services to their customers unless there's actually content that's available over IPv6.

"We're trying to untie that Gordian knot and basically get a number of content providers and service providers and the hardware manufacturers upon whom the service providers depend to jump into the swimming pool all at once," she explains.

IPv6 day 2012 is not just a one-day event to promote IPv6, as was the case last year, but it's the date by which several high-profile committed participants will be offering IPv6 as part of their regular service. Key members of ISOC are service providers such as AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable in the U.S. and counterparts abroad, home networking equipment vendors such as Cisco Systems and D-link, and major Web sites such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo.

ISOC also has a Web site called Deploy360 to help businesses plan and implement an IPv6 migration. Among the items on the site are this humorous take on running out of IPv4 from Cisco .

Part two of this series will look at how to deploy an IPv6 network on top of an existing IPv4 network.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/ipv6-tech-center/232600450 http://www.networkcomputing.com/ipv6-tech-center/232600450 http://www.networkcomputing.com/ipv6-tech-center Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:00 EST "As application management becomes much more complex as they turn to cloud, [IT organizations are] using cloud in ways that surprised me in terms of sophistication,'' Craig says. For example, almost half of the companies surveyed are running tiered transactions/services spanning both cloud and on-premise, according to the report, while 35 percent have either integrated or are in the process of integrating multiple Software as a Service (SaaS) applications.

"The research showed quite a large number of companies that are actually already running transactions that span multiple SaaS services, and I didn't expect them to be this far long,'' Craig notes. "They are very sophisticated in terms of deployment but struggling as an industry with finding APM products that can deal with this kind of complexity." Her research found, for example, that many public cloud providers do not yet offer monitoring agents or APIs, which is hampering vendors' ability to build capabilities management into APM products.

Additionally, the majority of medium- to large-sized businesses have already embraced private cloud as a viable delivery option for business-critical applications, the report finds, as some 66 percent of companies are either already using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or planning to do so within the next year. Among the other findings are that 44 percent of companies are already utilizing at least one SaaS service, with another 33 percent planning to do so in the next year.

There are a couple of key challenges in terms of managing cloud applications, says Craig. "One is that you have to build an end-to-end picture of the transaction or application. Unless you have that [visibility] you don't know where to start in terms of actually solving application performance problems." But the challenge is being able to drill down and understand as many as 30 to 40 components supporting the application to determine the origin of a slow down, for example. "You have to be able to see the application from start to finish in context with the technology that's supporting it,'' she says. "IT organizations are starting to experience this problem. In many cases they're trying to manage these very complex environments with manual kinds of activities, and they see the need to get away from that because it's taking a tremendous amount of time." It's also very expensive to manage these complex environments with people alone, she adds.

In spite of the struggles APM vendors are having, Craig was also surprised by "how fast vendors are evolving products to address" the complexity during the timeframe she conducted her research. "There are constant updates and enhancements to cloud APM solutions," she says, "so it's a very rapidly evolving market." APM product vendors covered in the report include OpTier, AppDynamics, AppFirst, Aternity, CA, Compuware, Correlsense, eG Innovations, HP, IBM, INETCO, Nastel, Netuitive, New Relic, OPNET, Quest, SolarWinds and Splunk. Over 40 users of the products were interviewed for the report.

But even with the upgrades and enhancements, Craig doesn't see the level of APM complexity diminishing anytime soon. "It's still an evolving market,'' she says. "The task of managing applications is probably the most challenging of any of the enterprise management disciplines. Application management relies on assimilation of metrics from across the entire application execution ecosystem."

Her vision is to see APM become "increasingly automated," although full automation capabilities will likely take five to 10 years to evolve. Flow-based network analytics will likely be a powerful force in enabling full automation of APM systems, Craig believes. Network analytics leveraging such information to track and model end-to-end application execution will be the answer to enabling greater levels of automation in the future, she maintains. "I believe the network will ultimately provide the unifying information necessary to automate the process of Application Performance Management,'' Craig says, adding that within the next two to four years, "APM vendors are going to turn to the network in very creative ways to build this end-to-end view of application execution."

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600455 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600455 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:00 EST Gluster, now known as the Red Hat storage unit, is announcing new storage products. The Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced this week, is essentially a rebranding of the Gluster product, or what the company refers to as "baselined," which means that it now uses the Red Hat Linux open-source operating system rather than the CentOS operating system it had used previously, and it has also been retested and re-certified. In addition, it now supports a new file system option, the Extensible File System (XFS).

"Net/net, this is an example of the continuing evolution of storage from a hardware offering to a software offering -- creating a flexible environment that can be spun up in minutes rather than days or weeks and months," says Terri McClure, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "It is inevitable that storage follow in the footsteps of servers and become a software play – we can't have a virtual, software-based server world attached to a hardware-bound storage world. That is what we find compelling about Red Hat's Storage Virtual Appliance: You can deploy it on commodity hardware or in the cloud, and be up and running with a standards-based interface. Your storage environment can become as flexible and fast to provision as your server environment."

The Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance helps make AWS more acceptable to enterprises by giving organizations the capability to move applications compliant with the Portable Operating Systems Interface (POSIX) specification to the Amazon cloud service without any modification, says the Linux and open-source vendor. Previously, users had to modify their applications to use Amazon's object store S3, it says. Red Hat believes enterprises have been looking at ways to increase their compute capacity and storage capacity in the data center, yet at the same time be able to minimize their costs and go faster. Buying more servers and storage is not a cost-friendly option, but using enterprise cloud storage systems such as Amazon's means that users can deploy in the Amazon cloud, pay for what they're using, and then shut it down, with the result that the funding is shifted from a capital expense to an operational expense, it says.

Ironically, Amazon just reached out to the Window community four weeks ago, offering free developer time for several Windows Server editions to build, migrate, test and deploy Web applications on AWS in minutes. This option was previously only available to Linux server users.

Gluster, a company that once aspired to be the Red Hat of storage, formed the core of a storage unit created around the acquisition and headed by both Gluster and Red Hat staff. When the deal was announced it had about 150 commercial customers and up to 20,000 downloads a month for open source community users.

Since its acquisition by Red Hat in October, 2011, Gluster has been working on integrating its storage products into the other offerings that Red Hat has, such as its JBoss business unit and its cloud business unit. Storage that is low-cost, portable, and flexible allows Red Hat to meet more of the needs that an organization has, says the company. For the rest of the year, announcements will be coming out about integration, it says.

The Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services costs $7,500 per node; a minimum of two nodes are required and the product is available now. Deployments typically start at 250 terabytes and increase in 250TB increments as appliances are added. The cost of storage is paid to Amazon at typical S3 rates, and is not included in the purchase price of the appliance. By using multiple appliances the product can support multiple petabytes, the company says.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232600445 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232600445 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:00 EST InformationWeek's "Data Encryption: Ushering In a New Era" report, found that the trend of implementing data-centric security is growing as businesses increase their use of mobile devices and cloud computing services and architecture. Perimeter-based security's focus on encrypting the transport of data from the perimeter to its destination relies on technologies like IPSEC and SSL VPN, but it leaves data within the enterprise unencrypted, said Michael Davis, CEO of Savid Technologies and author of the report. It also relies on full-disk encryption for mobile devices, such as laptops, that leave the four walls of the enterprise. A data-centric model, however, takes the focus away from data transportation and the device, resting it firmly on the shoulders of the data itself.

"Furthermore, the determination of what is encrypted or not is based on the data itself," Davis said. "Depending on the classification schemes of the organization, it could mean credit card data, PII (personally identifiable information), or PHI (protected health information). Using this approach reduces the risk of having to manage and detect when data leaves the organization because you can be assured it is encrypted no matter where it is."

According to the survey, 36 per cent of respondents indicated a belief they were ahead of the encryption curve, but only 47 per cent have made mobile device encryption a priority. Most respondents (94 per cent, down one point from the 2009 survey), said they have either already implemented IPSEC or SSL VPN technologies, or plan to do so in the next 12 to 24 months. Additionally, 81 per cent indicated the same about email or communication systems encryption, 79 per cent about mobile device encryption, 77 per cent about backup media encryption, 77 per cent about file system encryption, and 76 per cent about file system encryption. In fact, all but IPSEC and SSL VPN increased in implementation or planned implementation from the 2009 survey.

Davis said most enterprises are engaging in a little bit of every type of data encryption.

In the shift from perimeter-focused to data-centric security, encryption is a cornerstone in any security. "The issue is less to do with what technologies they are using but how they are using them. Most organizations have not fully deployed a specific encryption technology enterprise wide. Rather, most base it on whether you are using data inside or outside the perimeter."

Although the perimeter-based security model comes with flaws in regards to data housed within the enterprise having no protection should someone with malicious intentions access it within the four walls of the enterprise, the data-centric security model has no competitive down side. The report concluded that there is no risk attached to security sensitive data and embracing a data-centric security model.

Encryption has become a standard feature in many IT systems, including relational database management systems, so there is no reason not to lock down sensitive data, Davis said. Unfortunately, legacy systems provide a challenge because many legacy security systems are incapable of supporting encryption. Although a data-centric security model would benefit all enterprises, the shift from a perimeter-based security model doesn't come with an easily demonstrable ROI, meaning it's an uphill battle for IT departments to convince top decision-makers to invest in the technology. The survey found that cost is becoming less of an inhibitor to data-centric security technology adoption, though.

Last year another survey reported that 90 percent of organizations use encryption for data security and systems authentication, with about half encrypting data for three potentially sensitive data types (customer, employee and transactional), and just over a third for intellectual property data. A quarter of the organizations said they only encrypt data required by regulation, such as Payment Card Industry (PCI), while 40 percent said they encrypt data on mobile devices, reflecting regulatory requirements and rising security concerns over mobility.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/security/232600361 http://www.networkcomputing.com/security/232600361 http://www.networkcomputing.com/security Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:00 EST "SOS Collaborate is a first-in-class offering for business customers of all sizes, and is poised to deliver a tremendous amount of value to organizations struggling to let end users work more flexibly with unstructured data while simultaneously avoiding the loss of control that is being caused by the army of cloud-based Dropbox-like solutions that end users are turning to," says Jeff Boles, senior analyst at Taneja Group, a Hopkinton, Mass.-based consultancy. "We've been carefully watching this space to see who would be first to innovate inside the enterprise walls with a Dropbox-like solution, and SOS looks like they're first. While I'm waiting for hands-on time to see if the promises do indeed stand up, if SOS Collaborate delivers the ease of implementation, scale and performance, and end user functionality SOS is promising, I think we'll hear a sigh of relief from admins looking to take their end user file access and protection infrastructure into the modern age."

According to Forrester research ("Q2 2011 US Workforce Technology And Engagement Online Survey"), half of U.S. information workers now split their time among the office, home and other remote locations. The company sees three technology "trains" impacting the future of workforce productivity, innovation and advocacy by 2016: enterprise mobility, enterprise social and cloud services for business.

In January, Enterprise Strategy Group named Box a leading enterprise-class solution in the file sharing and collaboration market, in a study that included Dropbox and six other vendors: Egnyte, Nomadesk, ShareFile, SugarSync, Syncplicity and YouSendIt. ESG's Terri McClure, senior analyst, hasn't been briefed on the SOS offering yet, but she says it is not the first vendor that sells its software so users can run the solution behind the firewall on their own hardware; Nomadesk, Syncplicity and Egnyte do that, too. "Plus, there are hybrid models that allow the certificate server to be behind the firewall and the storage outside, or some capacity to be behind the firewall but other capacity to be outside. Again, it is all about the tradeoffs a company is willing to make."

She says there are some pretty big tradeoffs to make when thinking about running 100% behind the firewall on your own hardware. For instance, the big things users cite as adoption drivers for these solutions are reducing headcount and help desk costs, as well as footprint, planning, managing and allocating capacity, and agility. "So you can get some economies of scale from putting a private file sharing and collaboration cloud in place, but the cost/benefit analysis may not pan out enough to change the status quo."

The SOS service offers standard collaboration features, including performing previews of Microsoft Office files and synchronizing files with the desktop, says Ken Shaw, CEO of the El Segundo, Calif.-based company. It has a simple interface that is designed to be rapidly adopted while being easier to use than competing enterprise collaboration products such as Microsoft SharePoint or EMC Documentum, he says.

Other features in the service include data encryption (128-bit Secure Sockets Layer in transit and Advanced Encryption Standard 256 at rest); open source plug-ins; the ability for administrative personnel to perform functions such as setting LDAP policies, creating audit trail reporting, monitoring and limiting storage by user, monitoring notifications and conversations, and producing activity logs; and the ability to gain access to files using mobile devices.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600336 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600336 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:00 EST Providing universal access for mobile, residential and business access provides capital and operational savings for buyers and provides better flexibility for traffic management, says Juniper. The access layer extends from the initial connection to a network from mobile phones and the nearest cell tower, from a subdivision of homes or from a business park, to the edge of a service provider's network, be it a mobile carrier, an ISP or a conventional phone company.

The ACX Series routers should be in demand with mobile service providers that are migrating to 4G/LTE networks, the company said, which they are doing because of the continued heavy usage of smartphones and tablets, applications such as video, high bandwidth usage and high quality of service requiring applications.

Michael Howard, principal analyst at Infonetics Research, noted that Juniper's support for both Ethernet and Mulitprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), should interest a number of carriers who will want to evaluate the ACX. Wireless carriers, in particular, favor Ethernet and MPLS as primary cell site backhaul connection protocols.

In September Cisco expanded its service provider offerings, the ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers System portfolio, in response to the proliferation of mobile Internet services and devices such as tablets and smartphones that are fueling demand for bandwidth and quality experiences, and the ongoing evolution to IPv6. The latest additions to the series, which has an installed base of more than 500 service providers, featured the company's nV (Network Virtualization) technology, which blends the network edge, aggregation and access layers into a single 96-Tbps system.

The ACX series also combines the benefits of traditional synchronous optical networking (SONET) technology and more contemporary packet network architecture, he continued. SONET architecture was exceptional at timing, meaning all the elements of a network signal arrived in the right order at the right time. This is why land-line phone calls sounded better than some cell calls, said Juniper. Packet network architecture offers the ability to deliver packets of data, regardless of type of content or structure, over a shared network, but timing is as optimal as on a SONET network.

Juniper has timing built into the [ACX] product that increases the quality of the experience for the users and also decreases the chances for service providers to have to incur SLA violations, it said.

The new series delivers 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) throughput, versus most competitive routers in this space that typically deliver 1Gbps. It also adds a number of operational intelligence features to handle a variety of types of applications that have different quality of service requirements and that may require different service level agreements (SLA), said Juniper. The ACX line of routers is offered in five models, four of which are 1 rack-unit (IRU) configurations that are designed to be "passively cool" for energy efficiency and hardened to be unaffected by environmental conditions such as dust. The fifth model is a 2RU model that has more capacity but lacks the hardened design of the others. However, all five products support Power over Ethernet (PoE) connectivity.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232600360 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232600360 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:00 EST Take the task of tracking an inventory of IT assets in a data center, for instance. Catbird, a security and compliance technology vendor, has just introduced version 5.0 of its vSecurity suite of tools for securing virtual, cloud and physical networks. One feature of the product is Automated Asset Inventory: every time a new device is attached to the network -- a server, a router or a printer -- the inventory feature sees it and applies the appropriate security rules to it.

This is an example of something you can't do in the physical world, said the company. You can never have a perfect inventory. Invariably, someone plugs in a printer without telling anyone or buys their own Wi-Fi router at Best Buy.

"These are the kinds of things that drive IT people crazy but are a huge security problem," said Catbird's Tamar Newberger. "If you can't monitor something, you can't detect if there is a problem with it," she said.

According to new data from InformationWeek Research cloud progress is slowing down. At the start of 2011, the cloud survey found 60 percent more IT organizations reporting using cloud services: 31 percent vs. 18 percent the previous year. This year, there was a measly two-point gain, with 33 percent of respondents saying that they're using cloud services. The easy stuff has been done. Integration challenges and security concerns are as real as they ever were.

Catbird's vSecurity suite also delivers intrusion detection and prevention, network access control, vulnerability monitoring, compliance enforcement, policy management and configuration management. While that array of functions is comprehensive, the company said customers can use similar tools from other vendors if they prefer them and vSecurity 5.0 can integrate with them.

Security and compliance in virtual environments is a mixed bag, she added, because auditors don't all agree on how or whether to certify those systems. Some auditors will certify a virtual environment but others won't. Only last year did the PCI Security Standards Council issue a set of new guidelines for passing PCI audits for virtualized environments. PCI is the payment card industry standard for the security of networks that process debit or credit card payments.

The Security Standards Council issued a report January 20 advising companies that want to move PCI systems to the cloud that, even if they outsource those functions, they're still ultimately responsible for compliance and for safeguarding their data. The council has certified widely used cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Verizon's Computing as a Service as PCI compliant.

But not all network standards-setting bodies have virtualization-specific rules. The National Institute of Standards & Technology, like PCI, has virtualization rules, but the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in health care does not, she said.

"So there's a little bit of chaos going on," Newberger said.

But while compliance is important, compliance doesn't guarantee security, she added. Newberger recently was given new Visa and MasterCard credit cards to replace ones she had, with new account numbers. She believes it was a result of a breach at Zappos.com, a shoe and apparel shopping Web site, which disclosed that personal data of 24 million customers was compromised in mid-January.

"I'm sure they were PCI compliant at Zappos. I'm sure they are all sorts of compliant," Newberger said. "What's driving a lot of virtualization security thinking is actually compliance. Part of that is because there's really not an empirical measure of security that we know of except compliance standards. And they are imperfect for sure."

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600317 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600317 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:00 EST "In 2011 we more than doubled the amount of capacity we shipped." The company shipped more then 3 petabytes in 2009 and more than 10 petabytes in 2010. Early adopters were Wall Street people, Sorenson says, who wanted automation but were OK without it. "FAST [Fully Automated Storage Tiering software] helped cross the chasm to mainstream."

The company's initial flash storage provided 300 times faster data access than 15K-rpm hard disk drives. By placing flash technology in the server on a PCIe card, performance can be accelerated again up to 4,000 times faster data access than 15K HDDs. EMC says the hardware and software combination that makes up VFCache achieved a three times throughput improvement and 50% reduction in latency in an Oracle environment. It extends the protection benefits of the company's high-end Symmetrix VMAX and VMAXe, as well as midrange VNX and VNXe, flash-enabled storage arrays into the server, delivering data availability, integrity, reliability and disaster recovery capabilities.

Later this year EMC plans to add deduplication technology to VFCache, enabling even higher efficiencies. Also, additional flash capacity and form factors will be supported, and VFCache will be more deeply integrated with EMC's storage management technologies and FAST architecture.

The company is also previewing Project Thunder, a purpose-built, low-latency, server networked flash-based appliance that is scalable, serviceable and shareable. Scheduled for an early customer access program in the next quarter, it will deliver I/Os measured in millions and timed in microseconds.

While using PCIe flash as a cache is cool, EMC wasn't the first to think of it, says Network Computing contributor Howard Marks, citing Marvell's Dragonfly and Fusion IO's directCache. "The key difference is that EMC designed Project Lightning to act as cache for shared storage in the dynamic environment of vSphere with vMotion, dynamic resource scheduling, high availability and fault tolerance. Given that EMC owns 80% of VMware, it's a sure thing that Project Lightning will appear on the VMware hardware compatibility list soon after it hits the streets, making my friend Stephen Foskett, and the rest of the world's steely-eyed storage guys who treat vendor HCLs as holy writ, happy."

EMC isn't providing pricing on VFCache, but Sorenson says cost continues to be a customer concern. "We have seen prices come down, but not in a meteoric way ... which is why software is so important. EMC offers all-flash configurations, but the most popular choice is hybrid. The majority, 90% percent, is disk-based, and the remaining 10% is flash."According to recent data from IDC, solid-state drives (flash) are reshaping the enterprise storage market as prices continue to fall and performance increases. "We are seeing increased use of SSDs across the enterprise. A number of environments from tiered solutions, virtualized, databases and the cloud can all benefit from the use of SSDs," says IDC's Jeff Janukowicz, research director for solid state storage and hard disk drive components.

Jim Bagley, senior analyst and business development consultant, Storage Strategies Now, calls VFCache "a pretty conservative product." "It is a straightforward implementation of a write-through read cache. Each server can accelerate access to a designated LUN, but servers can't share a LUN due to the potential of stepping on data. The PCIe board selected as the lead product is Micron's 34nm SLC model, with only 300 Gbytes of capacity."

Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, isn't sure about EMC's claim that this signifies the next era of enterprise flash technology, "ironically because I think it was EMC itself that propelled us into the latest era, four years ago, when it introduced solid state drives into the Symmetrix. The move to the server is simply another logical step in terms of making solid state technology a standard element in storage infrastructures."

The company may not be the first to put flash in the server, but Peters says this is EMC, and so the move is extremely significant for the entire industry. "It is now blessed directly by one of the industry giants, and that signifies that solid state will prevail as a key element for the foreseeable future in storage ecosystems. This matters to EMC, to other big vendors, to start-ups and, last but certainly not least, to users."

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232600274 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232600274 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:00 EST Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA) product with Content Pack 10, which gives the software the ability to discover more public and private cloud service providers. In particular, this version adds support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Volumes and Snapshots, as well as private cloud services using vCloud. In addition, the company improved mainframe discovery by including iSeries discovery by Eview, along with enhancements to the Eview/390z Mainframe discovery package. Finally, the company has added functionality, as well as integration with other infrastructure applications.

"HP is adding some continued enhancements to DDMA/uCMDB that helps it keep that product as a strong solution beyond traditional configuration management database information technology to cloud environments," says Ronni Colville, VP and distinguished analyst for Gartner. "As IT organizations extend private clouds to hybrid clouds and combine that with their traditional computing, tools such as DDMA will help to discover and track an IT service or application, wherever it is. In addition, HP continues to focus on integrating both to their products, which they are not always leading with, such as Network Node Manager, and beyond HP products, such as Service-Now, Aperture and Troux."

Support for the new public cloud services means that users will now have the ability to discover Amazon public cloud services, including discovering how Amazon has configured and provisioned its environments with servers and storage elements, giving it the same visibility as it would have in its own data centers, says Jimmy Augustine, group product marketing manager, configuration management systems (CMS), operations, HP Software. The company chooses what to support based on prioritizing requirements that it hears from its current clients, he says.

The Discovery and Dependency Mapping (DDM) service automates what can be an expensive and time-consuming manual process that can be prone to errors and may not produce an accurate report on how the data center is operating. The software lets users monitor the environment and understand the significance of an issue, such as whether a problem is affecting an email system that can wait for a few hours or an ecommerce system that needs to be up all the time. It also helps administrators perform impact analysis, such as determining what changes to approve at different times of day, he says.

Discovery capabilities have also been added for HP ServiceGuard, Glassfish open source server and VMware Datastore. In addition, integration has been enhanced to include CiscoWorks LAN Management Solution (LMS), Aperture VISTA, NNMi, Application Signature and Service-Now. Functionality has also been added to the integration of Troux. Finally, Content Pack 10 provides new features such as support for SAP JCo3, Oracle VM Server for SPARC, UCMDB to XML export and a BMC Atrium pull adapter.

Existing users get the additional functionality for no additional charge. For new users, the software starts at $30,000 for discovery of up to 100 servers, Augustine says.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600278 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600278 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:00 EST There, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior reportedly outlined Cisco's SDN strategy but did not mention OpenFlow as the protocol on which it would be based. "It appears Cisco will go proprietary on its SDN strategy," according to a report. The report also quoted another Cisco executive saying that "at this point, we don't think [OpenFlow] is production-ready."

Asked to respond, Bethany Mayer, senior VP and general manager of the HP Networking business, said Cisco and HP have very strong differences on support for standards-based versus proprietary technology.

"It is at the heart of a philosophy at HP that we remain open with open standards so that we can be interoperable with the other networking vendors in the industry. If they have decided to go the proprietary route, frankly, that's bad for the customers," said Mayer.

OpenFlow is a protocol developed at Stanford University, and HP Labs was present at the creation in 2007, working alongside Stanford researchers, said Charles Clark, an HP distinguished technologist and director of research in HP Networking. The idea behind it is that the intelligence in the network--to route packets, prioritize traffic, minimize latency, enforce quality of service (QoS) policies and provide security--is moved from network switches and routers to a software-based controller. Hence, the term software-defined networks.

The Open Network Foundation (ONF) is a community of academic researchers, networking vendors and companies managing their enterprise networks that is developing the OpenFlow protocol, evangelizing it and helping to bring it to market.

At the HP event in Cupertino, Calif., Dan Pitt, executive director of the ONF, said Cisco is also a member of the group, as are other networking vendors, and that "everybody is contributing in good faith.""This is a movement that is happening and vendors will react to it in different ways over time, but I don't think the movement itself is stoppable," Pitt said, adding that Cisco or any other company can bring to market both a proprietary product and one built to industry standards.

But he and HP representatives think OpenFlow is proven technology and that HP is the first networking vendor to offer OpenFlow over such a wide array of its networking products.

HP is offering a free download of OpenFlow to enable SDN on 16 switching product lines that are deployed by service providers, in data centers, on campus networks and in branch offices, said Dan Montesanto, worldwide product manager for data center network solutions integration at HP. Those 16 product lines represent an installed based of 250,000 devices with a combined total of about 10 million ports that can be SDN-enabled.

IBM and NEC jointly announced on Jan. 24 the introduction of an IBM switch coupled with an NEC network controller based on OpenFlow, but Montesanto noted that is only one switch that is SDN-enabled. Both IBM and NEC are also members of the ONF.

The CEO of a new vendor in the OpenFlow space, Big Switch Networks, says more OpenFlow products still in beta testing are expected to come out in 2012.

At an OpenFlow conference last fall, Cisco was asked if the intelligence is moved from the switches to the network control layer, wouldn't that make switches more commodity products, selling for less money and making less profit for switch vendors? David Meyer, a Cisco fellow, said the company is aware of the situation and is preparing to deal with it. "Folks get this and how to react to it is what's being formulated right now."

He said it's very obvious to everyone that something's going on here, and the question is how to react to it in a way that everybody can live with. "When you have a big company like Cisco, you've got to socialize those kinds of things." Meyer added that he was pushing people inside Cisco "to start thinking about it."

Responding to the same question on Thursday, HP's Saar Gillai, VP of the Advanced Technology Group within the networking division, replied that OpenFlow/SDN is not a "commodity play."

"This is a simplification play," he said. "If you look at where HP is deployed today, we're solving customer problems. If you look historically when things like this have happened, typically the same vendor who is providing the value in one place is now providing value some place else."

Cisco did not reply to a request for comment for this story, but the story will be updated when and if the company does.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232600195 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232600195 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:00 EST "Database Discontent" report, a top item on IT departments' 2012 to-do list is handling big data in a way that allows for change over time.

According to Joseph P. Raiti Jr., managing director of Blue Slate Solutions and co-author of the report, there is a perfect storm of factors driving the need for data analysis. Changes in technology during the last 15 years have pushed businesses to adopt the Web and field more end user applications, which results in far more transactions and data on those transactions. The increased volume combined with rapidly dropping data storage costs has created an environment that is continuously generating and storing more and more data, he said.

"Given this growing transactional data along with environments that support big data analysis, businesses have now identified an ability to gain value by analyzing the data they are generating in transactional systems and, more recently, data being generated by their own process automation tools," Raiti said. The process and productivity improvements gained through the Web and implementing new and more integrated transactional systems have created a certain level of process entitlement within enterprises, he added.

As the amount of data available in an enterprise continues to grow, it's becoming a chore to track, manage and understand that data. Additionally, data is scattered in different places--on-premise storage, cloud-based storage, virtualized systems, desktop and notebook hard drives, and across a growing number of mobile devices (some owned by the enterprise and others owned by the worker).

The process and productivity improvements gained through the Web and implementing new and more integrated transactional systems have created a certain level of process entitlement within enterprises, he added.

"Knowing where to look in the data is becoming the new focus of analysis," said David Read, CTO of Blue Slate Solutions and co-author of the report. "For years, business subject matter experts [SMEs] have defined reports, cubes, universes and so forth. Understanding the data, where the interesting and potentially profit-driving enlightenment could be found, was defined manually."

Data is no longer managed so simply, though. With the significant depth and breadth of data contained inside and outside the enterprise, in addition to the high volume of transactions that are continually generating more data, there is no reasonable way for people to know where to look when seeking out actionable knowledge, Read said. Predictive analytics will likely outpace reporting and traditional business intelligence efforts in the future, and they will be used to inform SMEs about where to invest their business intelligence efforts, he added.IT departments often use SQL-based systems for performing operations on data of a uniform type, but the analysis breaks down when it comes to unstructured data. Some enterprises have found the answer in NoSQL, but according to the report, that's not always effective because as the average size of enterprise data stores increases, the feasibility of restructuring and reloading each time the business requires a new view of its data will decrease.

As the fundamental way data is structured changes, semantic technology will be the solution. Semantic technology has matured in the last few years, and Read and Raiti said they expect it to become the new gold standard for housing enterprise data.

Analysis tools in general have matured in their capabilities while also dropping in price.

"The analysis tools to get this done have grown in capability and have also reduced in price. So there really is a confluence of mature technology producing large amounts of data in organizations where process improvements have become harder to find and the easier place to gain value is through data analysis," Raiti said.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600109 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600109 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:00 EST TOSCA joins an already crowded field of standards and requirements principles for cloud computing that includes, but is not limited to, the Open Cloud Principles (OCP) from the Open Cloud Initiative (OCI); the Open Data Center Alliance standards for cloud providers; a guide to cloud computing from the Cloud Standards Customer Council; the OpenStack Compute for developing a cloud-based server environment and OpenStack Object Storage for cloud-based storage; the IEEE's Cloud Computing Initiative; and the Clouds Standards Customer Council (CSCC).

Cloud initiatives are top priorities for many enterprise IT organizations because they aim to reduce costs and improve business agility by creating highly flexible IT environments that can quickly respond to changing business priorities, according to IDC. "To date, however, most cloud implementations have been unable to easily migrate applications across heterogeneous public and private infrastructure resources,'' notes Mary Johnston Turner, research VP, enterprise systems management software at IDC, in a statement.

"TOSCA's aim is to enable broad cloud portability by providing an open standard to describe a complex application running on a complex environment. This is a critical missing link for customers that want to take full advantage of hybrid cloud architectures and the full range of available cloud services," she says.

TOSCA will enable the interoperability of application and infrastructure cloud services, the relationships between parts of the service and, independent of the supplier creating the service as well as any cloud provider or hosting technology, the operational behavior of these services, such as deploy, patch and shutdown. TOSCA will also make it possible for higher-level operational behavior to be associated with cloud infrastructure management.

"TOSCA will be the first standard to describe IT services that go beyond infrastructure as a service,'' says Simon Moser of IBM, a co-chair of the TOSCA committee, in a statement. "It will define service templates across *aaS layers, connecting them to the resource abstraction layer."

As business and IT consumers pursue the potential benefits of cloud/IaaS/ PaaS/ SaaS, etc., the fundamental challenge is how to assure easy portability and access to any and all cloud services, observed Rich Ptak, an industry analyst, in a blog posting (http://ptaknoel.com/tosca-tech-committee-announced-great-news-for-cloud-community/). At the same time, cloud systems need to interoperate and co-exist with traditional structures. "As clouds (public, private and hybrid) proliferate and expand, achieving this new degree of structural independence requires standards and reference architectures at a higher level of abstraction,'' said Ptak. "To get this done right, customers and vendors must cooperate to create multivendor standards and architectures to meet these expectations. TOSCA provides an excellent way to do this."

TOSCA will streamline the migration of existing applications to the cloud, as well as cloud bursting, by improving service and application portability in a vendor-neutral ecosystem, said Paul Lipton of CA Technologies, who also co-chairs the TOSCA Committee, in a statement. "It could also facilitate the evolution toward more dynamic, multicloud provider applications."

Members of TOSCA include 3M, ASG Software, CA Technologies, Capgemini, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Gale Technologies, IBM, Jericho Systems, Morphlabs, NetApp, Red Hat, SAP, Software AG and TELUS.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600121 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600121 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:00 EST October 2010. Major new features in the software include OnePass, which will back up server data, archive it and report on it simultaneously. The company said the process could take less than half the time of separate processes.

For PCs, CommVault introduced Edge Protection, which backs up data on devices such as laptops and desktops, using deduplication, and gives users the ability to perform their own data recovery through any Windows, iOS or Android device. The company also made improvements to SnapProtect, which accelerates data recovery through the use of data snapshots.

Sheila Childs, research VP of storage technologies and strategies for Gartner, is particularly interested in the OnePass feature. "One of the most challenging issues in managing data growth is managing the number of copies," she says. "Creating separate copies of data for backup and archive adds to this problem. The OnePass feature will go a long way toward alleviating this redundancy. Backups should be used for recovery; archives are used for discovery, compliance, historical preservation. What differs is retention. Being able to assign a different retention period to a single copy of data, and change that retention over time or generate an index of a subset of the data over time, makes it easier to manage backup and archiving holistically."

In contrast, Rachel Dines, senior analyst of infrastructure and operations for Forrester, was particularly interested in Edge Protection. "Laptop/desktop backup and mobile file access are really hot topics," she says. "To my knowledge, CommVault is the first of the big server backup vendors that is offering the capability of access from mobile devices to files that have been backed up on PCs. I believe that the markets for PC backup and mobile file syncing and sharing are rapidly converging, and this release shows that CommVault is aware and keeping up with these key trends in mobility and workforce computing."

Other new features include improved integration with Microsoft's SharePoint, which means that users can now recover their archived data from within SharePoint rather than having to use the CommVault Simpana interface, says Jeff Echols, senior director of product marketing and business development for the Oceanport, N.J., company. This is because Simpana is now integrated with Microsoft's Blob Storage application programming interface, he says. Other new features in edge data protection include creating content index data, which is intended to help with e-discovery requests, he says. CommVault has increased the number of third-party platforms supported by SnapProtect, and the company has opened the API to hardware manufacturers so they can develop support themselves, he says.

The company does not use dot-version numbers and says that this was simply the next release of Simpana 9, encompassing several service packs, and that existing users would be automatically updated for free. Starting prices for the software range from $7,000 to $17,0000, and pricing is based upon capacity.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232600111 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232600111 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:00 EST Like other networking vendors, Cisco is adding these higher-capacity switches to meet network demands for cloud computing, wider use of video, the increased use of mobile devices and the explosion of data flowing on those networks. According to the latest market data, sales of 10GbE switches are expected to reach $13 billion by 2016 and will constitute nearly half of a total $28 billion Ethernet switch market by then. That year sales of 40 and 100GbE products will amount to $3 billion. Other vendors in this market include Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Brocade, Extreme Networks, Dell, HP, IBM, and Juniper Networks.

Cisco is also introducing a capability it calls Easy Virtual Networking, which simplifies network virtualization functionality for its Catalyst 6500, 4500 and ASR 1000 product lines. A new Nexus 1010-X appliance enables scalable virtual services in a data center environment.

"We aren't just throwing bandwidth at the problem and saying everything is going to be sunshine and roses," said Shashi Kiran, senior director of marketing for Cisco Data Center and Enterprise switching. "We are helping customers to utilize that bandwidth in a much more resource-intelligent manner and, with ease of use, reduce complexity."

Cisco's domination of the network market continues, but a new report from Information Week Analytics indicates that the people who buy networking equipment are considering other vendors, such as Dell, HP or IBM, as an alternative. In addition, 49 percent of respondents said they were not considering switching vendors at all, a decline from 60 percent in the October survey.

Cisco earned the highest score among the seven vendors represented in the survey, scoring 77 percent out of a possible 100 percent. However, IBM came in a very close second with a performance rating of 76 percent, while HP and Dell both came in at 75 percent. Juniper and Brocade also scored generally well, just three and four percentage points respectively behind Cisco. Avaya earned a performance ranking of 70 percent.Cisco has been feeling the competitive pressure from rivals such as HP, which acquired networking vendor 3Com in 2010, and Dell, which late last year acquired Force 10 Networks. But Cisco's Kiran says the company is maintaining its market share lead measured either by revenue or the number of ports sold. Its revenue share was 71.8 percent in the third quarter of 2011, up from 68.6 percent in the previous quarter, and port share was 51.7 percent in the third quarter, up from 49.8 percent in the second. The figures are from the networking equipment research firm Dell'Oro Group. Meanwhile, Gartner research shows Cisco's share of the fast-growing 10GbE market is 76 percent based on port count.

"There's a lot of noise out there in the market today, a perception that Cisco is losing its port or revenue market share and the facts say otherwise," said Kiran. "Despite all this noise we're in a very strong position."

The Catalyst 6500, becoming available in April, supports 44 ports of 40GbE and 176 ports of 10GbE connectivity. The Nexus 7000 line, available sometime in the second quarter of this year, offers 96 ports of 40GbE and 32 ports of 100GbE connectivity.

Also new and available now is a Catalyst 4500-X switch that offers 40 ports of 10GbE connectivity and up to 1.6 terabits (TB) capacity. It is designed for deployment on campus networks. Coming in March is a Nexus 3064-X switch supporting 40GbE connectivity and targeted at data center deployments for high-frequency trading, big data or Web 2.0 environments.

Pricing information was not shared.

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]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232600076 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232600076 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:00 EST Oracle also singled out software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor Salesforce.com as a competitor whose sales force automation and other business tools come up short compared to the breadth of the Oracle/RightNow tools. Oracle has dissed Salesforce in other venues, particularly at Oracle Open World in 2011.

The presentation followed the official closing of Oracle's $1.5 billion acquisition of RightNow on Jan. 25. In brief remarks at the beginning of the webcast, Oracle President Mark Hurd directly addressed RightNow's business customers: "I want you to know you're in good hands; I'd say great hands."

The strategy behind the Oracle/RightNow product line is to manage the customer experience from the moment a customer first starts shopping for a product or service, through its purchase and if the buyer contacts customer service with any questions or problems. If there is a problem, the goal is to resolve the problem satisfactorily so that the customer is happy, buys more and praises the company to others.

Today, many products have become commoditized, and traditional marketing methods such as TV advertising and direct mail are less effective, says Greg Gianforte, founder and CEO of RightNow, who's now on board at Oracle. Social media, however, is on the rise as a way to reach customers and get them to share positive experiences online.

"We've got to create raving fans who love our products and talk about them, and the only way to do that is to deliver great experiences," says Gianforte. Oracle and RightNow tools enable companies to use their own Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to share customer endorsements.

A survey commissioned by RightNow revealed that 86% of customers said they have stopped doing business with a company because of a bad experience, 26% posted negative comments about a bad experience on a social network, and 79% of those negative comments were ignored by the company that was the subject of the complaint, Gianforte says.

Oracle tools already available include Oracle Fatwire for using Web-based marketing to influence customers, the Oracle Social Network tool for doing online customer research, Oracle Endeca for business intelligence, EnterpriseOne Sales Force Automation software, Oracle ATG Commerce for managing e-commerce sites, and Oracle Fusion software for financials, procurement and supply chain management.RightNow brings four main SaaS-delivered products: RightNow Web Experience for website management, including instant messaging and chat on shopping sites; Social Experience for managing the customer experience using social media; Contact Center Experience for serving customers over the phone or through a customer service website; and Engage for managing and analyzing customer feedback, service, sales and marketing information in all three areas.

"For business-to-consumer customers, we offer the ability to reach them through this entire lifecycle and offer a unified customer experience across that entire lifecycle and across all the channels through which that consumer may be reaching and interacting with your organization," says Thomas Kurian, executive VP for software product development at Oracle.

Kurian says Oracle, in its offerings, distinguishes between customer experience management for business-to-consumer (B2C) commerce and business-to-business (B2B) commerce because they have different sales cycles.

A B2B sale usually involves a vendor contacting a potential customer directly and can include a personal meeting at the company's offices to make a sales presentation, Kurian says. The B2B selling process also involves marketing people, brand managers, a field sales organization, a contact center team and field service people. Oracle, with RightNow, will serve this B2B market with its sales force automation software, among other tools.

"The first step is to provide an efficient, seamless and unified view across all of these lines of business that are interacting with the customer and have a common view of that customer," Kurian says.

Learn more about Strategy: Database Defense by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports (free, registration required). ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center/232600020 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center/232600020 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:57 EST The report also found that virtualized workloads are expected to nearly double by 2015, from 37% to 63%, leading to an estimated government-wide savings of $23.6 billion. Among federal agencies, 57% believe server virtualization takes priority over desktop virtualization, compared with 64% of state and local respondents. Although some form of desktop virtualization will be implemented by government agencies, less than one in 10 plans to virtualize all applications for all users, according to the report, which was underwritten by Microsoft and NetApp.

The reason for the low number is that "agencies are still getting their arms around server virtualization and private cloud, and desktop and application virtualization are yet another paradigm shift,'' noted Susie Adams, Microsoft Federal's CTO, in an email. Respondents say the top challenges associated with desktop and application virtualization include incompatible business applications, security concerns, lack of end-user training, increased complexity and uncertain ROI.

The transition of VDI from largely try to must-buy status has been slower than predicted, but prospects are improving. Technologies that enable desktop virtualization, of which VDI is only one, are finally maturing to the point where enterprises can realize ROI, says Karin Kelley, analyst, infrastructure management, at 451 Research.

Survey respondents appear to be willing to wait for the savings to be had from virtualization projects. Some 57% say they expect to wait a year or more to realize savings once a server virtualization implementation is completed and operational.

"In an era of cost-consciousness, virtualization is literally doing more with less,'' said Adams. "Not only have agencies already realized savings, they also estimate saving an additional $30 billion. Those savings mean the possibility of fewer cuts for citizen services. That is simply better government."

Adams added that virtualization is the "next step down the road to larger savings initiatives." If agencies combine server consolidation, data center consolidation and private cloud infrastructures, she maintained, they can realize even more scalability, cost saving, improved services and integrated management.

Tying a well-conceived virtualization strategy to data center consolidation can lead to many benefits, according to the federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI), in an August, 2011 report, Federal Data Centers: Server Virtualization, by InformationWeek Analytics. The FDCCI, part of the office of Management and Budget, requires agencies to take an inventory of data center assets, develop consolidation plans and integrate those plans into their fiscal year 2012 budget submissions.

The key benefits of server virtualization identified by the FDCCI are reduced energy consumption, lower facilities and server maintenance/operations costs, and improved automation of server management and provisioning. Other benefits include lower data center complexity, rapid provisioning and support for continuity of operations, the InformationWeek Government report states.

Virtualization "dramatically" reduces the time to provision servers, down from day or weeks with physical servers to minutes or hours with virtual servers, according to the report. Virtual servers can be moved faster and easier than physical servers, expediting the process of consolidating dispersed computing environments into a central location. Space savings is listed as another big benefit.

The MeriTalk report was based on an online survey of 302 government agency CIOs, CTOs, IT directors/supervisors, IT managers, and data center managers conducted in October 2011.

Learn more about Strategy: Delegation Delivers Virtualization Savings by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports (free, registration required). ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/virtualization/232500814 http://www.networkcomputing.com/virtualization/232500814 http://www.networkcomputing.com/virtualization Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:34 EST The ADX 12.4 is designed to address a shift in the role of networks in delivering applications. Because of the proliferation of various endpoint devices to which applications are delivered, no one optimization will suffice. For service providers such as ISPs, that range of devices includes laptops, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles and Internet-enabled TVs. Because applications are also delivered via the cloud, traditional server-based application controls come up short.

The OpenScript Engine feature in ADX 12.4 is a Perl-based platform for customizing applications for a service provider's unique needs, such as improving network infrastructure, security, acceleration or monitoring. Brocade is a supporter of the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), a community of app developers who share extensive libraries of scripts that have already been created. A developer trying to accomplish one task may find the work of someone else in the community who already solved the problem, so efforts aren't duplicated.

Although other application delivery vendors also offer scripting engines, Brocade's support of Perl is laudable because it's a well-known and widely used scripting language, says Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud research at the research firm Infonetics. Barnett is also a veteran of the networking industry, running startups that worked with Brocade and Foundry Networks, which Brocade acquired in 2008.

A particularly impressive feature of the OpenScript Engine, Barnett says, is the Application Performance Estimator, which, as its name implies, predicts how an application will run on a network as it's currently configured, before the application is actually deployed.

"The service provider community didn't really know what a new application or service delivery platform was going to do on the network because they didn't really understand how it was going to be used," he says. "This [Estimator] gives you ... a really good understanding of where your pain points are going to be before you introduce something completely unknown onto your network."

ADX 12.4 also streamlines the transition from the IPv4-based network to the IPv6 network. It will help maintain service parity on both networks, which in a typical situation will run in parallel. IPv6 is a new standard for assigning IP addresses because the worldwide supply of IPv4 address is running out.

Learn more about Strategy: OpenFlow vs. Traditional Networks by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports (free, registration required). ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/ipv6-tech-center/232500760 http://www.networkcomputing.com/ipv6-tech-center/232500760 http://www.networkcomputing.com/ipv6-tech-center Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:00 EST BMC itself has been the subject of acquisitionrumors, especially as the management segment has been experiencing slower growth. To avoid being swallowed up, BMC has focused on delivering high-level management functions, such as end user experience monitoring and cloud management. However, long term, the company may need to do more than just nibble away at competitors' market share. In mature markets, the handful of top suppliers eventually gives way to a few vendors. BMC would like to remain in that grouping, but its market position is not guaranteed.

Numara's flagship products, FootPrints and Track-It!, will be offered by BMC as it continues to push its unified BSM platform, including products such as the BMC Remedy OnDemand solution and the BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite.

Management products are gaining importance as organizations move to more automated data centers and private cloud architectures. While service desk and ticketing are most often used, according to our Informationweek Analytics survey data in Research: Enterprise Management Strengthening IT's Core (free, registration required), other management tools like inventory management and performance management are widely deployed.

It's a familiar scene: A large enterprise vendor looking downstream for revenue and market growth. Charles King, president and principal analyst, Pund-IT, has seen such a move played out many times. He said we'll know more in 12-18 months how it'll unfold for BMC but in general, it tends to be very challenging for vendors accustomed to dealing with enterprise clients to successfully shift toward working with smaller customers."Offhand, I wouldn't expect much of an effect on BMC's installed base, though stretching things a bit, it might earn the company some business among its existing customers' channel partners," he said. "Not sure what the effect might be on Numara's clients, though this sort of deal generally sparks understandable concerns about an enterprise-focused acquiring company's ability to connect with smaller clients."

While praising BMC for recognizing the potential opportunity Numara represents for it, King also noted the company is trying to deal with major changes in its traditional markets. Much like its competitors including CA.

"Mainly the burgeoning competition from players like VMware and Microsoft, and the shift of major enterprise vendors including IBM and HP to take on or over systems and facilities management tasks," he said. "Numara offers BMC the opportunity to expand its position in the midmarket, a sector it's not typically associated with."

Michelle Warren, president, MW Research & Consulting, added this acquisition would help BMC expand its market reach by way of a broader portfolio of IT management solutions and services.

"This will be an in for BMC, namely into some of the smaller, midsized firms. BMC will also benefit from Numara's reseller channel program," she said. "BMC is in the midst of improving its go-to-market strategy by involving the channel, and this move helps them do so."

The transaction is expected to close during BMC's fiscal fourth quarter. Additional details of this transaction will be provided during BMC's upcoming earnings call on Feb. 1st, 2012 at 4pm Central Time.

Learn more about "Research: 2012 Enterprise Project Management" by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports (free, registration required). ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center/232500765 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center/232500765 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:10 EST