Hewlett-Packard: 8 Weapons 3Com Brings to the HP-Cisco Brawl

HP’s massive $2.7 billion pick-up of 3Com will certainly turn the heat up on the company’s growing rivalry with Cisco. Channel Insider takes a look at which new capabilities added by 3Com will best help HP go toe-to-toe with Cisco.

3Com Open Network Program

HP has made it clear that the biggest differentiator it has developed in its battle against the Cisco networking juggernaut is a product base built on an open architecture. 3Com complements this strategy with its 3Com Open Network Program, through which the company has worked to develop relationships with ISVs, service providers, system integrators, consultants and customers to improve interoperability and open development in the networking environment.

Data Center Core Switch S12500

The coup de grace of the 3Com acquisition will be the added capability of core and aggregation switching, a needed complement to flesh out HP’s offering beyond the edge into the core. At the heart of this is the young H3C switch portfolio, including the flagship H3C S1250, doubles the performance of Cisco’s Nexus 7000 and eats up half the power of this rival.

Flex Chassis SwitchS5800

Similarly, HP is paying big bucks for the top-of-rack switching capabilities offered by 3Com, as evidenced by the H3C S5800, a flex-chassis switch that can be used as a modular chassis as well as a fixed-form-factor stackable switch.

MSR Family

Though ProCurve has helped HP beat up on Cisco at the edge within the SMB, HP’s still weak when it comes to enterprise edge routing. 3Com helps remedy the situation with the MSR family of routers, many of which will help HP take on Cisco’s ISR series.

Intelligent Management Center

HP’s existing Business Technology Optimization (BTO) suite will gain added firepower with the addition of Intelligent Management Center. An enterprise-class management system that scale to handle a high-density infrastructure, IMC is built on service-oriented architecture and can help enterprise customers consolidate network management within the largest of environments.

TippingPoint

While HP certainly bolstered its security practice with the 2007 acquisition of SPI Dynamics, it was still lacking strength in the area of network security. A venerable player in the IPS/IDS field, TippingPoint offers HP options to not only sell stand alone intrusion detection, but also build it into next generation networking equipment, a strategy that 3Com was already spinning up with H3C.

3Com VoIP

While there’s certainly some overlap with HP’s Halo, 3Com’s VoIP portfolio offers a more mature technology portfolio on which the folks in Palo Alto can draw upon if they get the integration right. Overall, this will be crucial in strengthening HP’s attack on Cisco’s UCC market share.

H3C S7506E

One of the big boons of the H3C portfolio in general is its energy efficiency. The S7506E is the greenest of the bunch, according to a recent report from independent performance testing firm Miercom. Miercom found that this switch has an annual operating cost that runs 24 percent lower than industry average.

McAfee New Channel Chief Eyes Cisco Model

Alex Thurber has just assumed the role of McAfee’s global channel chief, but he’s already laying plans for bringing better structure to the security vendor’s channel program. His inspiration is the Cisco channel way, a program he’s spent the better part of the last decade.

If McAfee partners are looking for clues to the future of the security vendor’s channel program, they only need to look to the organization from which the new global channel chief came: Cisco.

Just nine days on the job, Alex Thurber is still feeling his way around the McAfee headquarters and collecting bits of information about the channel he inherited. But the one thing he’s observed so far is the need to provide better structure and consistency in partner relationships.

“The channel program has been cobbled together in the legacy that is McAfee’s endpoint security products and all the acquisitions it’s done,” Thurber told. “There hasn’t been an overall strategy that, with a plan, that we can snap new acquisitions into place.”

In the past decade, McAfee has acquired 18 companies ranging from small startups to mature organizations. Companies added to the McAfee portfolio include Foundstone, IntruVert, Citadel, Reconnex, Preventsys, Solidcore Systems, Entercept, Secure Computing and, most recently, MX Logic. The acquisitions have bolstered McAfee from being an antivirus software vendor to a portfolio company of security products that address consumers to large enterprises.
Resource Library:

The enterprise security challenge: Turning security into a business enabler
Your Network at Half the Price: Slash Network Hardware Costs with Pre-Owned Equipment
What CIOs Want from the Channel Headlines Event
Common Vulnerabilities in Business IT Systems

Acquisitions have given McAfee more weapons to battle longtime rival Symantec, but Thurber says it’s created a channel hodgepodge as different programs, products and partners. What’s needed—he suspects—is better program structure and consistency in the way McAfee interacts with partners.

“We need to give partners consistency in the money they’re going to make, who they are going to work with and where they’re going to get support,” Thurber said.

Where Thurber will draw the inspiration for that structure, consistency and guiding channel management principles is the company he called home for the last decade, Cisco.

Until last month, Thurber was Cisco Go-To-Markets team, where he handled channel strategy for Cisco’s security, wireless and emerging technologies under Edison Peres. At the Cisco partner summit in Boston last June, Thurber was one of the key executives talking up the virtues of peer-to-peer partnership and collaboration, and the need for solution providers to adopt technology and vertical alignment to maximize their market potential.

Thurber envisions building a channel structure at McAfee that’s similar to Cisco in terms of creating technology disciplines, systems of rewards for partner investment and consistency in support and communications. He says that companies like McAfee cannot lose sight on the fact that partners are independent small businesses that rely on their vendors to create a navigable framework for conducting business. The ultimate goal is to create a value-based channel program that has common elements for all channel partners—from small business to large enterprise.

Will the Thurber McAfee channel program have the same attributes as Cisco’s? Thurber says no. “It won’t be a carbon copy,” he says. “There will be elements that we emulate and elements that we improve upon.”

Thurber replaces Roger King, the former executive vice president of worldwide sales who also oversaw the company’s channel strategy and management. King, who left to pursue other opportunities, was standing in for David Dickison, who left McAfee a year ago, and Lisa Loe, who oversaw channels for just three months.

Thurber’s appointment follows the promotion of McAfee veteran Fernando Quintero from his role overseeing Latin America to running North America channels.

Prior to joining Cisco, Thurber was the founder and owner of Thurber Works, a network and security VAR in Portland, Ore. He sold the business in 1999 when he took his first position at Cisco.

Leaving Cisco and taking the McAfee post was a chance opportunity resulting from connections made through social networks. After meeting with McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt and Michael DeCesare, the executive vice president of worldwide sales, he was convinced that the security vendor had a tremendous opportunity to build world-class channels that would help grow the overall business.

The move means Thurber will compete, on some level, with his former employer, Cisco. It’s a situation that doesn’t faze him. “I love Cisco and it’s a wonderful company, and I want them to do well except in one area.”

HP ProCurve's BattlePlan

Paul Congdon is chief technology officer (CTO) at ProCurve, the division of HP that manufactures switches, routers and other networking products. He talked to Computing about how network virtualisation can improve the performance and manageability of virtual servers in the datacentre.

Analyst research suggests Ethernet switch sales are down 24 per cent year on year - how can ProCurve get companies buying again?

The market has been down overall, but we have had enormous success with wireless, seeing 112 per cent growth even though the market was declining by 20 per cent overall. We are closing the gap on Cisco in sales of 10Gbit/s Ethernet equipment as well.




Many organisations still find it difficult to obtain cash or get a loan, while ProCurve has been traditionally strong in the public and education sector, and in the US at least government cutbacks have presented a challenge – public sector money is not as available as it used to be. We are offering various incentives within the [reseller] channel, trade-in programmes and initiatives around lead generation. There are no heavy discounts, but the margins have not changed much.

What new technology will tempt firms into upgrading their existing network infrastructure?

Embedding security in switches is an ongoing process. One of those things with the whole Moore’s Law process is the density of silicon and the amount of space within chipsets to add programmable functions to switches. The other is network virtualisation, where we can create virtual ports inside a switch. You might have 24 physical Ethernet ports, but another 200 virtual ports, for example.

What will network virtualisation do?

There are a couple of approaches to the technology being proposed to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), one backed by HP ProCurve, and another by Cisco. The driving force here is that a virtual server has a piece of network infrastructure, a virtual switch, embedded in its software, which could actually be moved into hardware to improve virtual server performance and manageability.

The big questions are what should the virtual switch do, how much number crunching should it implement, and where should it reside? Network managers generally like to configure devices to make them behave the way they want them to, either within virtual software on the server, or at the edge of the network. Either the servers need to take on new functions, such as firewalls, or that stuff has to be put out on the network where the switches can do it for them.

What would you recommend as the best approach?

HP ProCurve proposes choice and flexibility, a way to configure virtual software so it can direct traffic out onto the edge of the network rather than have every feature known to mankind embedded within software that will ultimately run on a network interface card (NIC) with input/output (I/O) virtualisation capabilities.

The difference here could be NICs that cost $500 rather than $5, so we are very interested in finding a way that uses the capabilities in existing switches so the upgrade path is less disruptive. We could add a lot of that software into a switch without the capital cost of the NIC, it just comes down to a question of complexity and management – configuring firewall rules between new virtual LANs (VLANs) for example, could be done on one switch or every switch in the system, and that could create management problems for some people. There is trade off between performance and functionality and customers should be able to choose between the two rather than be limited to what is put inside NICs.

What are the potential benefits of network virtualisation for the IT manager?

Performance and manageability are foremost, but it is also ease of migration. You could import a base set of these capabilities into a switch, for example, without requiring a hardware upgrade, and therefore experiment without taking on capital costs right away. There are some open-source solutions available now – I wrote some of the code myself.

Where will demand for this sort of network virtualisation come from?

Datacentres will be the big beneficiaries, but also imagine how that extends to wireless environments. If you can embed a wireless controller in an Ethernet switch, you can use virtual ports to represent wireless users, then terminate virtual private network (VPN) connections on virtual ports [without taking up physical ports on the switch].

Cisco Scores First UCS Win

Construction company consolidates five datacenters into one by going with Cisco's Unified Computing System.

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) has landed the first major customer win for its Unified Computing System (UCS) blade computer offerings, a civil construction firm that was able to consolidate five datacenters into one with the new system.

Tutor Perini does jobs such as airport construction and building casinos in Las Vegas. It had five datacenters scattered around the country using a mish-mash of computing systems, from single, stand-alone servers to some older blades.

Its networking equipment was already mostly Cisco, so that familiarity assured Tutor Perini that Cisco, a newcomer to the blade server computing world, had a top-flight product.

"It did give us a little pause because it's a brand new tech they are rolling out, but this isn't a startup company. Everyone on my team has over a decade of experience with Cisco products, so we felt pretty comfortable they would meet all our needs," James McGibney, datacenter lead for Tutor Perini said.

That's also why Tutor Perini was willing to build almost all of its datacenter on one vendor product. "We liked having one source for everything. We like that fact it's a one-stop shop. Some critics have said you're putting all your eggs in one basket, but we're pretty comfortable with who has that basket," said McGibney.

Tutor Perini built a new datacenter with four chassis, 22 server blades, and two Cisco 6120 Fabric Interconnects. The system connects to 83 terabytes of data in an Ethernet environment. The company makes heavy use of thin clients and virtualization with VMware (NYSE: VMW) to support the clients.

With the UCS, Tutor Perini will be able to deploy four times as many virtual machines per VMware ESX host as it could in its previous environment. At the same time, it has capacity for 30 percent growth over the next three years despite cutting its datacenter facilities down.

The consolidation is not yet complete. McGibney said that only three of the five datacenters have been shut down, so there is more consolidation to be done. That said, so far Tutor Perini has reduced the hardware footprint by 60 percent. Power consumption has been reduced by 38 percent so far.

Then there's the advantage of having an all-Cisco shop. McGibney said he has one Cisco console to manage all of his devices from one console, which was very appealing to Tutor Perini.

"It's a one-stop interface, so we're able to view things from the 10,000-foot level to every server and every blade. We haven't had that many problems, which is amazing, especially since this is a brand-new technology. If it's something, it's usually minor, like a fan failing. But there just haven't been that many problems with it," he said.

Being the first UCS deployment had its pluses, too. Cisco made a full-court press to get its first UCS customer up and running with as little disruption as possible. Tutor Perini is not finished with the migration, so it doesn't have a final performance measure. So far, the thin client performance has gone up at least 20 percent with the more powerful server systems.

Likewise, it doesn't know how much savings it will enjoy, but just going from five datacenters to one will yield inevitable savings. Still, McGibney is already satisfied with the results. "We're happy with overall migration because we are seeing overall savings, which is what you hope to achieve when you start reducing server counts," he said.

Cisco profits (nearly) cut in half

Cisco's fiscal year has ended on a low note. Net income for its fourth quarter totaled $1.1bn, a dive of over 46 per cent from the same quarter last year.

But CFO Frank Calderoni prefers to look at the year in total. As he pointed out, the quarter-to-quarter match-up is "a tough comparison, given that Q4 '08 was the highest revenue-generating quarter in Cisco's history."

If you look at the full fiscal years, the numbers weren't as drastically dismal. Net income for the full fiscal 2009 year - which, for Cisco, ended on July 25th - was down 23.8 per cent, from $8.1bn in 2008 to $6.1bn in 2009.

CEO John Chambers characterized the current climate as "clearly the toughest economic challenge of our lifetime." But after reporting on that challenge Chambers performed one of the prime duties in every CEO's job description: putting the best possible face on the numbers. In his comments he emulated the proverbial stable boy and kept shoveling. But he came up with what he identified as a pony: a quarter-on-quarter rise in orders.

"Q4," Chambers noted, "had both the first positive sequential product-order growth and was also the first quarter in the entire fiscal year that was anywhere close to having normal sequential-order seasonality."

Translation: Orders were up from the previous quarter, and their growth rate approached being normal for that time of year.

"For me, personally," he said, "this was the most important take-away in the quarter. In other words, while it is too early to say that this is a definite trend and therefore the much-anticipated recovery, the sequential-order numbers were very solid and more along the line of our normal, seasonal quarterly results for the first time in the last four quarters."

But Chambers also cautioned against excessive optimism: "While this is a very important trend," he said, "I would want to see the sequential trends continue for several more quarters before we would be comfortable with saying that we are returning to normal business momentum."

But putting a happier face on that note of caution, Chambers concluded that "If we continue to see these positive trends for the next one to two quarters, we believe that there is a good chance we will look back and see that the tipping point occurred in Q4."

Cisco turns 25 next year. If Chambers's guarded optimism turns out to be justifiable, the celebration might be more upbeat than had that anniversary occurred during the company's just-completed fiscal year.

EXCITING Seacom Goes Live - Get Ready Africa - Collaboration and Connectivity are Here

Post by Yvon le Roux, Vice President, Emerging Markets

In my role as vice president of Cisco’s Africa and Levant region, I’m fortunate to meet dynamic people from across the region face-to-face and via TelePresence. I hear inspiring stories of how technology is improving lives, and I feel proud of the role we play in assisting in country transformation, providing the backbone to a human network where technology empowers people to connect, process and share information.

I was honored to address the launch ceremony of the Seacom submarine cable in Tanzania this week. It was a major announcement, as SEACOM will provide the catalyst for African consumers, business and government to realise the benefits of connectivity and collaboration across the globe.

Pictures on Flickr

I shared the stage with His Excellency, President Kikwete of Tanzania and Brian Herlihy, the CEO of SEACOM. We simultaneously addressed dignitaries, partners and journalists situated at venues in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique and South Africa.

Cisco and SEACOM jointly built a voice, data and video platform for this launch, relying on the Seacom network to create a collaborative environment to stream live video over Internet Protocol to the five launch locations. The Cisco team supplied routers, switches, DMS equipment and encoders for this launch.

The benefits of Seacom’s 1,28 Terabytes per second (Tb/s), 17,000 kilometers, submarine fiber optic cable system are far reaching, and its far more than simply installing broadband in homes and offices. It’s about the people of Africa, bringing networks to them, changing lives and about improving how nations plan public services, health care, transportation, construction, and even sporting events.
Take health care as a primary example. Broadband is key to the success of telemedicine, as it will provide communities with multichannel access to a wide range of health care services. This milestone will help improve collaboration among health workers as well as provide for greater capability for self-treatment and improvements in primary care. This improvements will help optimize the performance of health care service as a whole, resulting in a healthier and economically stronger nation.

There is no doubt it is an exciting and truly transformational time for Africa.
John Chambers, our President and CEO, says that ‘Education and the Internet are the two equalizers in life’. As a company, Cisco is firmly committed to advancing the Human Network in Africa. I look forward to sharing more of this excitement with you over the next few days and months.

Cisco Revising Managed Services Partner Program

During the Cisco Partner Summit 2009 in Boston, Channel Chief Keith Goodwin announced plans for a new managed services program for VARs and MSPs. The effort includes lower barriers to entry. Here are some quick details.

Almost 80 percent of Cisco partners have some sort of managed services offering today. But less than 10 percent use Cisco’s managed services channel program today. Why is that?

Goodwin concedes that the Cisco’s current managed services partner program is too complex and the barriers to entry are too high. So, changes are coming. Most notably: Partners will no longer need their own NOCs (network operation centers).




Goodwin hinted about the revised managed services program a few minutes ago during his keynote address. It sounds like the new partner program will launch in a matter of weeks.

With Microsoft in Sight, Cisco Buys Jabber

With Microsoft in Sight, Cisco Buys Jabber

Cisco said this morning it would buy instant messaging service Jabber for an undisclosed amount. The deal is another move by the networking company into the collaboration space — this time highlighting the importance of presence awareness and interoperability in collaboration. It follows nicely with Cisco’s buy of PostPath and WebEx acquisition earlier this month, as well as its Cisco CEO John Chambers has been pretty vocal in its desire to go after three hot markets: collaboration, virtualization and video.













Doug Dennerline

From Cisco’s press release:

“Enterprise organizations want an extensible presence and messaging platform that can integrate with business process applications and easily adapt to their changing needs,” said Doug Dennerline, Cisco senior vice president, Collaboration Software Group. “With the acquisition of Jabber, we will be able to extend the reach of our current instant messaging service and expand the capabilities of our collaboration platform. Our intention is to be the interoperability benchmark in the collaboration space.”











Jabber is based on Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), the same protocol being used by several open-source IM implementations. Services like Twitter use XMPP. Jabber also operates with Google Talk, and with the AIM Gateway from Jabber, it can be used to communicate with AOL users. Jabber also communicates with users of Microsoft Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.


















Yesterday, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior told that the company believes collaboration to be a $34 billion business, and emphasized the move away from selling only networking gear. Services are a crucial part of the that strategy and a robust presence platform is one of the essential services in offering real-time collaboration that Warrior highlighted in her keynote. And for those keeping score in Microsoft/Cisco showdown, Jabber is way more compelling that what I’ve seen demonstrated in Microsoft’s unified communcations efforts through SharePoint.

Riverbed CEO: 'We Can Be One of the Survivors'

Jerry Kennelly, chief executive and co-founder of networking equipment maker Riverbed Networks (RVBD) stopped by the Barron’s offices today after three days of meetings with investors. He offered two takeaways: the company is not for sale, and making his sales forecast this year shouldn’t be hard.

Given that Riverbed shares spiked 9% yesterday, as Eric noted, I asked if RiverBed was for sale, to which Kennelly said, “None of use wants to work for Cisco [Systems (CSCO)] or one of the giants,” portraying Riverbed’s staff as a a tight-knit band of humble software engineers spending all day on their laptops at Starbucks (SBUX). Not exactly the Cisco culture, in other words. Kennelley argues Riverbed “can be one of the real big survivors in tech over time” and so he’d like to go the distance.

He attributes the bounce in the stock to a couple things he’s talked with investors about this week. First, he sees it as no big deal for the company to make sales of $375 million this year, as the company implied last week. As he sees it, “In the last quarter of 2006, we were at a $140 million annual revenue run rate, but we ended up delivering $236 million [in sales] in 2007. So, if we were at a revenue run rate of $300 million in this most recent quarter, we think it’s reasonable to expect we can deliver $375 million this year.” RiverBed did $76 million in the fourth quarter ended in December. And the uses for Riverbed’s gear are newer than for Cisco’s, which means, he thinks, CIOs will cut back on Cisco’s equipment before they cut back on Riverbed’s.

Second, the company has plans to spread its technology further as the year goes on. Today, Riverbed gear is used mainly for speeding up how fast branch offices can fetch data from computers at headquarters. New versions of the company’s switch could improve how efficiently data is moved between central computers within and between corporate data centers, conceivably broadening Riverbed’s addressable market. Kennelly is holding off on details of the product until its formal introduction.

Powerful new antiphishing weapon DKIM emerges

DKIM standard attracts Cisco, Google, PayPal and more.

Spoofers, spammers and phishers, beware.

There's a new gun in town, and some of the Internet's most powerful companies -- including Yahoo, Google, PayPal and AOL -- are brandishing it in the ongoing battle against e-mail fraud.

The new weapon is called DKIM, an emerging e-mail authentication standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force. DKIM, which stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail, allows an organization to cryptographically sign outgoing e-mail to verify that it sent the message.

DKIM addresses one of the Internet's biggest threats: e-mail fraud. As much as 80% of e-mail from leading brands, banks and ISPs is spoofed, according to a report released in late January by the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance (AOTA). AOTA analyzed more than 100 million e-mails from Fortune 500 brands sent over a five-month period.



"It's a critical need that IT professionals look at e-mail authentication as a competitive advantage to protect their brands and their customers from these exploits as well as to protect their employees from spoofed or forged e-mail coming into their networks," says Craig Spiezle, chairman of AOTA.

DKIM proponents say the standard is an important step in rebuilding consumer confidence in e-mail.

"DKIM increases the trust with which people can regard their e-mail," says Jim Fenton, a distinguished engineer with Cisco and one of the authors of the standard. "DKIM isn't going to put an end to phishing, but I'm confident that DKIM is going to make it harder for phishing attacks to occur."

Under development since 2004, DKIM is finally reaching a critical mass. It's expected to be widely deployed this year, particularly in financial services and e-commerce firms. Early adopters include Bank of America, American Greetings and Cisco.



"My guess is that probably half of the Fortune 1000 will be DKIM signing in 2008," predicts Greg Olson, director of product management at Sendmail, which started shipping a DKIM-compliant e-mail appliance in November.



"I do feel that 2008 is the year when things are going to come together for DKIM," says Patrick Peterson, vice president of technology for IronPort, an e-mail appliance vendor that supports DKIM. "We have the Internet standard. We have a tremendous amount of vendor support . . . DKIM is solid as a rock."

How DKIM Works
DKIM allows an organization to insert a cryptographic signature in outbound e-mail and associate that signature with its domain name. The signature travels with the e-mail regardless of its path across the Internet. The recipient of the e-mail can use the signature to validate that the message came from the organization’s domain name.

"Right now, a receiver of a message has no confidence that the message they are receiving is from whom it claims to be from," Olson explains. "DKIM is a way to permit a receiver of a message to validate that a message is, in fact, from whom it claims to be from."

DKIM won’t eliminate e-mail fraud altogether, but it will help companies that are targets of phishing scams to give their customers a way of ensuring they sent a particular message.

"If the receiver has confidence that an e-mail that claims to be from Bank of America is from Bank of America, then they are not going to worry that someone is trying to steal their Social Security number," Olson says.

DKIM is a merger of two protocols: DomainKeys, which was created by Yahoo, (read a Q&A with a Yahoo executive on DKIM and beyond) and Identified Internet Mail, which was created by Cisco. These companies along with other messaging vendors and ISPs are working with the IETF's DKIM working group on technical specifications, which are almost done.

"DKIM is a stable specification," Fenton says. "The DKIM base specification, which is how you sign a message and how you verify the signature, is very well defined. It’s not a moving target."

The IETF's DKIM working group is still tweaking the Sender Signing Practices, which is a document that will describe how senders can provide information in their DKIM records for recipients to use in deciding what steps to take with messages received from the sender.

"If I sign all my mail and you get a message that purports to come from me that's not signed, then you can assume that message is not from me," Olson explains. "That policy would be in the DNS record associated with the sender. The SSP is in its 10th draft right now. . . . I hope it will be done soon."

Network vendors say DKIM is ready for deployment. In November, 20 ISPs and messaging vendors conducted an interoperability test of their DKIM deployments.

Vendors that participated in the DKIM interoperability test say the standard works, and that no technical stumbling blocks were discovered.

"We did find some cases where the RFCs need some clarification," Olson says. "But the test showed that multiple people working independently have been able to interoperate with DKIM."

DKIM-compliant software and appliances are available today from Sendmail, IronPort, Alt-N Technologies, Message Systems, Port25 Solutions, StrongMail Systems and others.

"It's pretty easy for a corporation to go out and deploy DKIM because there are enough commercial products that have DKIM support," Fenton says.

DKIM usage booms
DKIM adoption is accelerating, especially among banks, mortgage companies and insurance companies.



"I think there will be rapid adoption of DKIM," says Charles Stiles, director of worldwide business development for Goodmail, a certified e-mail service that will support DKIM in May. "The standard is proving to be very successful. The best and brightest people in the world worked on it. It offers up a foolproof, spoof-proof way to authenticate messages."



BITS, a group of 100 of the largest U.S. financial institutions, last year recommended that its members adopt DKIM by October 2008. BITS also recommended two other standards for securing e-mail: Transport Layer Security (TLS), which encrypts e-mail messages between servers; and either Sender ID Framework (SIDF) or Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to validate that a received e-mail originates from an authorized mail server within a particular domain.

"What BITS is doing here, with all of its members speaking in one voice with such a massive impact, gives people confidence in DKIM," Peterson says. "It's unlike anything we've seen" in terms of driving DKIM adoption.

ISPs are adopting DKIM because they want to protect their customers against spam and phishing scams. E-mail senders are tying to protect their brands, identities and customers from phishing scams.

PayPal and eBay have teamed up with Yahoo to battle phishing attacks with DKIM. PayPal and eBay are signing their e-mails with DKIM, and Yahoo Mail will block e-mails claiming to be sent by eBay and PayPal that haven’t been signed through DKIM.

"EBay and PayPal have always attracted fraudsters, phishers and all that. Our customers see too much e-mail that isn’t coming from us," says Mike Vergara, director of account protection at PayPal, which is owned by eBay (Read our Q&A with Vergara). "DKIM takes a good industrywide standards approach. We need to add strong authentication to our e-mails so customers can have confidence that it did come from us. And we need to get ISPs to leverage that so we can say to them: If it didn’t come from us, please don’t deliver it."

PayPal is deploying DKIM after already rolling out Sender Policy Framework (SPF), a complementary Microsoft-backed standard that is an extension to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). SPF allows software to reject e-mail coming out of forged "from" addresses.

Vergara says the hardest part about deploying DKIM was documenting PayPal’s e-mail infrastructure to determine all the systems and domains that send e-mail to customers.

"There's no one postmaster at eBay or PayPal. It took a lot of time to figure out all the e-mails we were sending -- transactional e-mails, marketing e-mails, customer support e-mails -- and where they were coming from around the world," Vergara says. "Getting our hands around that took us 12 months. Rolling out e-mail appliances and upgrading them to DKIM took a couple of weeks."

Vergara says DKIM works. He says Yahoo has blocked hundreds of thousands -- sometimes millions -- of messages per day that supposedly came from eBay or PayPal but weren’t legitimate because they weren’t DKIM signed.

Now PayPal is in discussion with other ISPs to convince them to block messages from either PayPal or eBay that aren't signed with DKIM.

"We can't solve this e-mail fraud problem on our own," Vergara says. "We are trying to light a fire under the ISPs to help us solve this problem for the people who use our services."

DKIM has its limitations. A minority of companies is signing their outbound messages with DKIM, and fewer still are checking for DKIM signatures on inbound mail. But backers of the technology hope this problem will be eliminated as ISPs and banks deploy DKIM.

"If I sign all my messages to protect my brand, but the person receiving it or their ISP aren't checking, it all looks the same to the recipient," Peterson says. "I feel pretty confident that a year from now 30% of all companies will be signing their messages. Yahoo and Gmail have adopted it. Bank of America and PayPal have been very vocal supporters. Hope springs eternal. I do feel that we're at the tipping point for DKIM."

Cisco & others sued by intellectual-property company...

Network-1 Security Solutions, an acquirer and licensor of intellectual property, this week said it has initiated patent litigation against several data-network equipment manufacturers, including Cisco, Foundry Networks, Extreme Networks and 3Com.

The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division, for infringement of Patent No. 6,218,930, or the "Remote Power Patent." This patent, titled "Apparatus and Method for Remotely Powering Access Equipment Over a 10/100 Switched Ethernet Network," relates to several technologies used in equipment that complies with the IEEE 802.3af Power Over Ethernet (PoE) standard. The Remote Power Patent was granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on April 17, 2001 and expires on March 11, 2020.

Also named as defendants in the suit are Cisco's Linksys division, Enterasys Networks, Netgear and Adtran.

Network-1 seeks monetary damages based on reasonable royalties, as well as treble damages for the defendants' "continued willful infringement" of the patent.

"We have made repeated efforts, at considerable expense, to license the Remote Power Patent on reasonable terms to companies manufacturing, selling, and using equipment taking advantage of Power-over-Ethernet technology," said Corey Horowitz, Chairman and CEO of Network-1, in a statement.

"We prefer licensing the Remote Power Patent to the PoE industry without the distraction and cost of litigation, but will take whatever action is necessary to protect our intellectual property rights and maximize shareholder value," Horowitz continued. "Unfortunately, many technology companies employ a multifaceted strategy which depends on expensive litigation, delay tactics, adverse public relations, and intense lobbying in order to avoid licensing intellectual property from small companies and inventors, leaving us with no choice but to respond with litigation."

Cisco said it has received and is studying the complaint. "In the matter of patent litigation in general, cases such as this illustrate the reasons why a broad coalition of industries are asking Congress to reform many elements of the current patent system, which has created uncertainty and undue risk for true innovators," the company said in a statement.

Large technology companies are lobbying Congress to pass a patent reform bill that makes it harder for companies with no intention of creating products to buy up patents and file multimillion-dollar infringement lawsuits against other companies 3Com, Adtran, Enterasys, Extreme and Foundry declined comment. Netgear did not respond by press time.

In August 2005, Network-1 initiated patent litigation against D-Link Systems and D-Link Corp. relating to the Remote Power Patent. After two years of litigation, Network-1 and D-Link entered into a full-term license agreement covering D-Link's sale of all its PoE products at a royalty rate of 3.25% of net sales, subject to adjustment.

In addition, in November 2005, Network-1 and PowerDsine settled all outstanding litigation and entered into a settlement agreement relating to the Remote Power Patent.

Will Cisco ever catch Riverbed or should they just get out now?

Source: CiscoSubnet

I want to start off with an excerpt from a Gartner paper by Mark Fabbi, it was put out back on March 15, 2007. This paper was written for the Cisco Applications Network Services, an before we go farther the Cisco WAAS is a part of this service. Plus we can look at it as a standalone product.

From a product perspective, Cisco's progress through 2006 has been, at best, mixed and largely disappointing. Cisco is a late entrant to an innovative and dynamic market, and it is "playing catch-up" across all market segments. Despite new product announcements during 2006, Cisco still lags behind the market.

I answer so many questions each week from Cisco customer with regards to the Cisco WAAS, what they are told by their Cisco Sales teams and the Riverbed Steelhead. Being a partner of both products it puts me in a unique position with my customers, it allows to me to what is right for my customer. Many VAR’s do not have this opportunity and are looking just to sell a customer more equipment. I always remember the excerpt above that was put out by Gartner and keep waiting for a change, but I have been disappointed just like customers.

From a VAR stand point I think it is time for Cisco to cut its losses and put the WAAS on the shelf. Right now it is not even in the top two of the product category, Riverbed Technologies and Juniper are one and two. If you are asking why would I say this? Well I have been involved in many bake off’s with customers using every product in this category, when it is an unbiased test Riverbed has never lost. By unbiased I mean that that the VAR just does not drop off equipment to the customer and says go test. You cannot just do that with customers or customers will pick based on culture or who gives them more free stuff than who really is the best.

Case in point, I will give two examples of what has happened to me when I was involved in two evaluations using Cisco, Riverbed (product demo) and Juniper. The first was a state organization that would not allow our engineers to be present when they did the testing; they just wanted the equipment and us out of the way. They said that if we were there we would influence the decision and that they were a state organization, let me say the biggest in the state. Now I have performed many bake offs and with the applications they were using, Riverbed would have no trouble winning.

It came to be that the customer said that Juniper and Cisco both did better than Riverbed, but they would not show us the data. Another bake off was with a very large company in which they were drinking the Cisco Kool-Aid way to much and an engineer sabotaged the evals so that Cisco would win. . If they were so up on putting the wrong product in, you might was well let them and we did. Some people will only put Cisco in and they do not care about anything else. There is an old rule with IT Managers and Directors; you never get fired for putting Cisco in your network even if it does not work. This same company called me one month later wanting help with the WAAS when they could not get it to scale or work like they did in the testing.

So as you can see, even if you are number one with Gartner you still have a huge mountain to climb when going up against Cisco. Now back to another reason why Cisco needs to drop the WAAS, the new mobile client from Riverbed is leaps and bounds above anything anyone else has in the network space. Cisco is years away to catching up with Riverbed on the WAAS and another three to five on to that just to get a mobile client that could compete with Riverbed.

I have copied the cautions from the 2007 Gartner report on WAN Optimizations Controllers; both of these were with reference to the Cisco WAAS:

* Successful implementation often requires multiple days by on-site Cisco engineers, dueto the solution's complexity. There is no single view of configuration, policy or WANoptimization features that are split across Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) andseveral router-based Internetwork Operating System (IOS) software options.

* Cisco has been slow to understand emerging market needs, resulting in WAAS featurereleases usually following other vendors' innovations. For instance, WAAS lacksadvanced features such as acceleration for HTTPS and Messaging ApplicationProgramming Interface (MAPI), and Cisco does not offer a software WOC client. Each ofthese features is available from other vendors.

Now I know things change and Cisco has fixed some issues, but even in this December 2007 Gartner Report they did not even mention the lack of a mobile client from Cisco. Now just to be fair I am going to show what Gartner put in about Riverbed:

* Less-capable QOS and reporting features than some leading vendors.

* Steelhead lacks UDP support.

Now I have to say that it looks to me like Gartner could not find anything else to write about Riverbed since they have great reports and have no issues with QOS (Quality Of Service)for any customer using a Cisco or Juniper network.

Let’s think about this for a second, what would happen if Riverbed took my ideas of which I have told the CTO and published a Windows Mobile Client, Blackberry Client and then got into the home user market?

This is my unbiased opinion being a partner of both vendors and doing many bake off’s. I hate to say this about any Cisco product or any product one of my vendors have but if you want to bring order to chaos within your network, don’t use the WAAS. Going back to my comment above it is about doing what is right for your customer with any product; give them the best product for the money.

Time to get out Cisco, maybe a Cisco Iphone?

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Cisco Pushes Big Firewall For Big Business Needs

Large and geographically dispersed enterprises seeking to tame their network security face difficulties far bigger and more complex than those confronting smaller firms.

What's the solution? A security offering that's massive enough to handle big enterprise problems.

That's the thinking behind Cisco's new ASA 5580 firewall security appliance, which is the new high-end firewall device from the networking behemoth. In addition to firewall capabilities, the ASA 5580 also provides both IPsec (define) and SSL VPN features.

The pure performance capability of the ASA 5580 stands as a key differentiator for the new product, which sits at the high end of the enterprise spectrum. Cisco claims that the ASA 5580 can handle up to 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) of throughput, two million simultaneous connections and 750,000 security policies.

Though the ASA 5580 is a high-performance appliance, raw speed isn't what Cisco expects will give it the edge in the highly competitive firewall security market.

"What's really important about performance is that it's not just about raw speed anymore," Cisco product manger Tom Russell told InternetNews.com.

"You need to look at how many transactions are really occurring ... the depth of security polices that are required [and] latency issues, and then come out with a device that looks at the multiple of what performance issues are," he said.

Reporting is one issue typically encountered by high-performance networks. Russell argued that security has often taken a back seat to business requirements. Plus, at 10-Gigabit Ethernet connection speeds, with thousands of users per second, the logging effort is often a technical challenge.

Now, with the ASA 5580, Cisco is expanding its NetFlow network telemetry technology to handle the device's speeds and scale.

"You can finally enable secure logging in high-performance environments and not overrun the system or collectors to capture the data," Russell said. "You don't lose any visibility of security events and get much more efficient handling."

With greater power, Cisco expects that the ASA 5580 will also help in power reduction efforts, assisting enterprises in their own "green" efforts. For instance, Russell said the ASA 5580 can provide up to 50 virtual firewalls, so an enterprise could consolidate departmental and other internal firewall deployments into a single device.

Though the ASA 5580 is only now being officially announced, Cisco already has at least one taker -- Del Monte Foods.

During Cisco's Webcast announcing the ASA 5580, Dennis Tokarski, Del Monte's telecommunications and network operation manager, explained that his company faced difficulties in extending its network to third-party suppliers and partners.

Until now, access to Del Monte's network was what Tokarski described as a "free-for-all". But with the ASA 5580, he said he now expects to be able to provide secure access limited to just what the partners need.

Tokarski added that Del Monte wound up choosing Cisco after examining the top five firewall vendors.

"We selected the ASA because of its ability to fit into our environment," he said. "We're looking to utilize the SSL VPN that the ASA offers and want to provide users with a better experience to using the network, no matter where they are."

Cisco expects that the ASA 5580 will be widely available in March.

Source: InternetNews

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40gbit Internet Connection, Karlstad Sweden

Source: YouTube




Original Text;

Sigbritt Löthberg i Karlstad har världens snabbaste bredband - 40 Gbit per sekund. Hon är mor till internetlegenden Peter Löthberg, som tillsammans med Karlstads stadsnät har ordnat uppkopplingen för att visa på möjligheterna med fiberteknik.

Sigbritt Löthbergs villa i Karlstad har världens snabbaste bredbandsanslutning. En direkt fiberkoppling till Stockholm ger en hastighet på 40 Gbit per sekund. Vidare till Kalifornien, där sonen och Internetlegenden Peter Löthberg bor, går anslutningen med en hastighet på 20 Gbit per sekund.

Sigbritts uppkoppling motsvarar mer kapacitet än vad som levereras av de andra operatörerna i Karlstad sammanlagt. Att överföra en HD-dvd mellan Stockholm och Sigbritts villa går på två sekunder. Anslutningen snabb nog för att leverera 1500 tv-kanaler i hd-upplösning.

Det är sonen Peter Löthberg som tillsammans med Karlstad stadsnät ligger bakom Sigbritts uppkoppling. Syftet med världsrekordsuppkopplingen i Karlstad är att visa hur mindre orter i Sverige kan få tillgång till blixtsnabbt bredband med hjälp av fiberteknik.

Peter Löthberg var en av drivkrafterna bakom internets intåg i Sverige och benämns ofta som det svenska internets fader. Idag arbetar han på Cisco, och det är även Ciscos teknik som används för Sigbritt Löthbergs uppkoppling.

Att uppkopplingens hastighet är så hög beror bland annat på ny modulationsteknik som gör att signalen kan skickas över avstånd på upp till 2000 km utan mellanliggande transpondrar. Lösningen bygger endast på att ny teknik används i ändarna av anslutningen -- alltså behövs inget nytt nät. Beviset för detta är Sunets fibernät, som används för sträckan mellan Stockholm och Karlstad, bara byggdes för en maxhastighet på 10 Gbit, enligt ett pressmeddelande från Karlstads stadsnät.

-- Jag ville visa att det finns andra vägar att gå än de gammaldags metoder man använt i Värmland i lvrigt, som till exempel koppar och radio, vilka saknar de obegränsade framtidsmöjligheter som fibern har. Att vi har lyckats är bevis för att det lönar sig att samarbeta, säger Peter Lötbherg i en kommentar.

-- Med detta vill vi visa vilka möjligheter man har när man väljer att förse sin fastighet med fiberanslutning. Detta visar ju också att fibern är en framtidssäker invest

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Bad translated text;

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Cisco 10 Gigabit Transceivers

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Is Telepresence Worth the Big Bucks?

Source; Ann All

Distance adds management difficulties. Cultural differences play a role, which has led some North American companies to opt for closer outsourcing alternatives like Latin America.





But cultural differences aside, much of communication goes beyond words, and thus is lost in telephone and e-mail discussions. According to two information systems professors cited in this Knowledge@W. P. Carey article, more than 60 percent of communication is nonverbal.

The two academics, Harvey Shrednick and Ajay Vinze, predict more mainstream adoption of video conferencing. In particular, they think companies will want to use ultra-sophisticated — and ultra-expensive — “telepresence” solutions from vendors like Cisco. Vinze says Cisco’s TelePresence Meeting system offers an experience in which “you can see a sweat bead on someone’s forehead.”








(Another system with similar high functionality and cost is HP’s Halo.)










In a March 2007 IT Business Edge interview, Wainhouse Research analyst Ira Weinstein likens the difference between previous iterations of video conferencing and telepresence to “watching TV on a small set as compared to a big screen on the wall with surround sound.”

While simpler video conferencing systems might do for some remote meetings, Weinstein says that telepresence is preferable for more strategic situations.

This is the kind of thing that a typical enterprise would deploy in eight or 10 strategic locations. … Imagine a geographically dispersed development team charged with finding the next round of ideas and solutions for companies, such as a drug company or a car manufacturer. These guys don’t get together very often, and every extra day it takes to come up with a solution is another day to market. They go into telepresence rooms, interact, meet for hours and hours, and virtually interact face to face and still go home to their families at night.

Rob Enderle blogs that video conferencing — whether it’s telepresence or simpler systems — won’t be successful if employees resist it or if organizations using such systems aren’t given the credit for travel savings. He writes:

If you don’t have the authority or executive backing to require that the system be used instead of travel, or if you can’t get credit for the savings, but will be charged for the hardware and upkeep, then you probably won’t be happy with the result.

Nonetheless, Enderle adds, for organizations committed to making it work, the ROI can be “amazing.” In addition to direct savings on transportation and accommodation expenses, he says, companies gain productivity that is typically lost during transit. Video conferencing means “no missed connections, lost luggage, airborne in-plane viruses or long lines to the terminals.”

Another point working in video conferencing’s favor, notes Shrednick of W.P. Carey, is a generation weaned on YouTube. He says:

(Young people have) gotten more used to visualization and video than my generation. That’s how they do business: they want to see people.

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Is Cisco worth the premium?

Source: Cisconet

Nortel loves to shout from the roof tops whenever it sees arch rival Cisco falter, and this week Tony Rybczynski, director of strategic enterprise technologies at Nortel, writing in his Hyperconnected Enterprise blog is citing a recent Gartner Dataquest report that found that Cisco's share by ports of the Ethernet switching market fell to 37%.

He mulls that the results mean that two-thirds of enterprises are saving money or finding better performance elsewhere, and that given Cisco's share by revenue is 73%, "customers are paying way too much to Cisco."

He adds:

Cisco is not going to lower their prices any time soon since they could lose 15% of their revenue base if their revenue share tracked their port share! In fact, as a mature technology, one would expect Ethernet prices to come down over the years …. my friends at Gartner tell me this is generally true but NOT for Cisco.


He concludes that: "If Cisco is only a 400 pound guerilla, then don’t feed him as if he were a 700 pound one!"

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WAN optimization: Money for nothing, clicks for free

Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization : Market Trends

Optimization technology can slash the cost of WAN bandwidth and improve app performance

Source: Network World

WAN optimization technology is a way to save money — take that to the bank. For instance, custom machinery manufacturer Curt G. Joa in Sheboygan Falls, Wis., avoided the cost of adding a server to its German office by installing WAN-acceleration gear from Silver Peak.

Joa engineers in Germany needed to access engineering applications, but the applications performed so slowly over the WAN that it could take an hour just to open a Novell directory.

The initial plan was to install a server in the German office for $100,000 including time, hardware and licenses. Instead, the company spent $17,000 on a Silver Peak NX appliance that solved the problem by speeding application performance over the WAN.

In another example, Riverbed gear that cost $20,000 reduced the need for bandwidth between a Millard Lumber site in Omaha and a second site in Lincoln, Neb., from three T-1s to one, saving $3,000 per month. That’s a payoff within seven months.

In addition, WAN-optimization devices improve transaction times between sites by as much as 90% or more, reducing user frustration and in some cases making it possible for applications to perform at all over long distances.

Despite their impressive results, these devices often are overlooked, mainly because potential users worry they might remove chunks of data, block visibility of traffic through firewalls, or fail and stall out networks altogether, says Eric Siegel, an analyst with the Burton Group.

These concerns are groundless, Siegel says. “They should do it now. You can really save money on these things. And there’s soft benefits like happier customers and more cooperation,” he says.

In the grand scheme of things, a paltry amount of WAN optimization gear has been sold, says Mattias Machowinski, an analyst with Infonetics. This year, vendors will sell about $300 million worth worldwide.

Even so, the optimization gear is catching on. Sales this year have increased 27% compared with last year, and Machowinski projects double-digit increases in each of the next three years.

These devices help save money in two ways. First, they reduce the need for WAN bandwidth, which translates into buying smaller WAN pipes or staving off the need to add more.

Second, they enable businesses to consolidate servers in data centers, saving money by reducing the number of servers in corporate networks that need to be purchased, installed, maintained and repaired.

Optimization appliances use a variety of means — compression, caching, boosting TCP efficiency, protocol optimization, imposing QoS — to reduce the amount of traffic that crosses WAN circuits, compress the traffic that is sent and make sure it does so efficiently to avoid congestion.

Vendors — Cisco, Citrix, Expand Networks, F5 Networks, Juniper, Packeteer, Riverbed and others — use varying blends of WAN-optimizing technology, so one vendor’s gear might do a better job on a particular traffic mix than another’s. Consequently, the single most important thing customers can do is test gear made by more than one vendor on live networks.

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Aruba Networks takes to AirWave for $37m

Will use white flag of neutrality to shoot at Cisco

Source: TheRegister


Find out how your peers are dealing with Virtualization
Wireless switch specialist Aruba Networks is buying AirWave Wireless, a multi-vendor WLAN management firm, for $37m.

AirWave software manages different types of wireless networks built with equipment from a variety of manufacturers including Aruba, Cisco, Motorola, HP, Avaya, 3Com, Juniper and several others. The software also supports upcoming wireless technology such as WiMAX and 802.11n.

Aruba spokesman Michael Tennefoss said the company's charter for AirWave is to "continue doing exactly what they're doing," but with the added resources of Aruba behind it.

AirWave software will continue to be sold as a standalone vendor-neutral product and will also be integrated into future Aruba products. The acquisition will also add compatibility to wireless technologies currently unsupported by Aruba products such as point-to-point bridges and Metro Mesh.
"It's our intention to not only continue to sell the software as it is, but expand on its vendor support and capabilities," said Tennefoss.

Because AirWave software manages old and new networking equipment side-by-side, customers can more easily upgrade their WLAN without needing to replace all their equipment, Tennefoss said. it also puts Aruba's foot in the door for a large installment of potential customers currently using competing systems, he added.
"They can get better management of Cisco's networks than Cisco offers itself. We will offer complementary features that will work with what [customers] already own."
And once they're on the wagon, Aruba hopes to woo them over to the company's own equipment, of course.

AirWave will operate as a separate business unit within Aruba and remain in its San Mateo, California headquarters. "Virtually all" staff will stay on-board, including management. The deal is expected to close at the end of March 2008.

Cisco invests in mobile services start-up

Source: Network World



SoonR, a provider of mobile computer file access and management services, this week received $9.5 million in Series B funding led by Cisco.

The investment is intended to help the company expand its mobile platform and advance its partner-driven distribution strategy. Previous investors Intel Capital and Clearstone Venture Partners also participated in the round.

Total investment in the 2-year-old company now stands at $15.5 million.

SoonR’s platform integrates computer desktops and mobile devices. The company’s service lets users access, back up and share files on their desktop computer from their mobile phone or Internet-enabled device, whether their computer is turned on or off. Documents created in a number of applications, such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and Outlook calendars and e-mail are accessible, SoonR says.

Data on the user’s computer is also continuously backed up, allowing it to be restored should the computer be lost or stolen, SoonR says.

SoonR can also reportedly enable Skype calls to be made from cell phones, including Apple’s iPhone.

SoonR has partnerships with Denmark carrier TeliaSonera as well as a joint development and marketing partnership with QuickOffice to provide next-generation mobile services. SoonR says it has partnerships with additional international carriers and is in pilot trials with others.

The SoonR service is designed to work across worldwide carrier networks and major handset operating systems.

SoonR was founded in 2005 and is based in Silicon Valley and Denmark.