Our Amazon Echo, a voice-controlled appliance--for want of a better word--arrived on May 17 and we've been using it all week. As Prime members, we paid $100 for ours, but the list price is $200. While some parts are beautifully done, the information services at the back end have a long way to go before the Echo is more than a novelty.
Thin clients aren't very exciting, and for a reason: they're designed to allow remote access to servers, usually with a Citrix, Microsoft, or VMware client. The folks at Dell WYSE have spiced up the category by building a thin client on top of Android, and getting it down to a form factor only slightly larger than a USB memory stick.
Hidden in Cisco's Nexus 9000 and Application Centric Infrastructure news was another nifty announcement: an optical transceiver that delivers 40Gbps speeds using older 10Gbps fiber and standard connectors. Cisco's "BiDi" optical transceivers solve a sticky cabling problem in an elegant way.
The Cisco Nexus 9000 series, the fruit of Cisco's Insieme spin-in, is more than another fast router -- it's a change in the way that high-end routers are designed and built.
Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a revolutionary re-thinking of how to provision and manage data center networks. While the early version we looked at has some rough edges, and Cisco still has some hard problems to solve, ACI has the potential to completely change the way that large, highly virtualized data center networks are configured and built.
My first Mac was a Mac 512K from the early 1980s, probably 1985. It replaced my Heathkit CP/M system, and when I went on business trips, that thing -- and an external hard drive, what a luxury -- traveled with me all over the country in a huge padded case.
Upstarts Exinda and Ipanema challenge network optimisation kingpin, Riverbed
As applications move to the cloud, network managers are seeing increasing requirements to optimize and manage WAN connections. Most enterprises have migrated to web-based applications and make heavy use of Internet services for day-to-day business. All of this makes network performance a key factor for productivity and end-user satisfaction.
When we tested next-generation firewalls last May, at least one important security vendor wasn't there: Cisco, because they weren't ready to be tested. Now that the ASA CX next-generation firewall has had a year to mature, we put the product through its paces, using the same methodology as our last NGFW test.
Thin clients can't be cracked or hacked; they don't have fans or disks to fail; they don't need to be patched nearly as often as Windows; they don't draw much power; and they don't cost a whole lot of money to buy or maintain.
The Cisco UCS Express family is a new set of blades that add high-performance general-purpose Intel server capabilities to the ISR G2 series of routers.
The Cisco CSR 1000V router is designed for enterprise network managers who want to have a little piece of their Cisco infrastructure in the cloud.
When we tested four next-gen firewalls strictly on performance, we found that the products could forward packets at impressive rates, but throughput dropped when advanced security features were turned on. We now dive deep into application identification and control - the defining features of next-gen firewalls - to find out what works and what doesn't.
Knowing what's happening on your network is a pre-requisite to controlling the traffic. We call that visibility because it combines all of the information the firewall knows, including session and application information, traffic volumes, and rate information, into a way to "see" into your network -- to give you visibility.
URL filtering has become a "checkbox" feature on most Unified Threat Management firewalls, and no wonder: it doesn't require a lot of imagination to do it right, and it's hard to really differentiate yourself or do a bad job of it.