Stories by John Dix

Cisco bounces back

<a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/cisco/">Cisco</a> has been crowing about its rebound, and with good reason. What a difference a year makes.

A10 CEO spells out application delivery controller advantage and next steps

A10 has built a solid business in the application delivery controller (ADC) market, but its platform also supports <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/073009-ipv6-guide.html">IPv6</a> migration and many cloud requirements, nicely positioning the company for the future. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently sat down with A10 founder and CEO Lee Chen for a company update. Chen, who was co-founder of Foundry Networks, says A10 already has 1,700 customers and more than 7,000 devices deployed.

Juniper exec gives inside look at QFabric

R.K. Anand, executive vice president and general manager of Juniper Networks' Data Center Business Unit, was employee No. 12 of the network startup back in 1996, leaving a job as a microprocessor designer at Sun Microsystems. Years later he left Juniper for a brief stint at another startup, but came back to help finalize the company's QFabric product and get it out the door. QFabric began shipping in September 2011. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Anand at the company's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., for a deep dive on the company's answer to high-end data center demands.

Apple tops the $100B+ tech club

Ten years ago Apple posted revenue of $5.3 billion, a mere gnat compared to the IBM elephant which topped all tech companies with sales of $85.8 billion.

Out with SOPA, in with cloud

Count us among the critics of SOPA and PIPA, the two ill-conceived bills that were intended to protect American firms against copyright infringement by foreign websites.

Bang for your IT buck

By all accounts the economy is stronger now than it was 12 months ago, but it is also clear that companies are still moving cautiously, and for the bulk of IT that means continuing to do more with what you have, which is at least better than doing more with less.

Tower, tower, come in tower

It is hard to put your finger on any one thing that sums up developments in the world of IT this year, but a speaker at one of Network World's recent IT Roadmap conferences had an interesting analogy that seems apt.

What's next with hypervisors?

The world of hypervisors is complicated by the fact that there are proprietary and open source tools and the latter are often pressed into service in different ways, say nothing of the fact that the whole market is evolving quickly.

The water pump alarm

If nothing else, the now disputed "hacking" of an Illinois water utility has brought the spotlight back to shine on the vulnerability of our national infrastructure.

Corralling complexity

It has been referred to as Moore's Flaw: The IT complexity that results from the inexorable innovation driven by Moore's Law.

Getting a handle on complexity

Everyone knows complexity is a foe of IT. But how bad is it, and how do you tell if your decisions are making it better or worse? Peter Leukert, CIO of Commerzbank, one of the largest banks in Germany, set to find out. Leukert, who runs the financial service giant's 3,800 member centralized IT group, built an IT Complexity Model to get a handle on the problem, and then turned to consulting firm Capco Partners to help get other financial service firms involved. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Leukert and Mat Small, Partner with Capco in New York, for a briefing on the effort.

Assessing the APT threat

Do <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/security.html">security</a> vendors secretly create the attacks their tools are designed to ward off? Of course not, but that old chestnut hints at a broader suspicion about whether the current state of security is really as bad as the security firms make it out to be, especially when it comes to the latest poster child: advanced persistent threats.

Nudging IT forward

There is basic agreement on the nirvana vision for the next-generation <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/data-center.html">data center</a>, but the tricky part is getting there from here.

The OpenStack juggernaut

The OpenStack collaborative industry effort to build an <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/opensource/">open source</a> cloud platform is to be applauded for the remarkable gains it has achieved in a short amount of time. Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA in July last year, the organization is now backed by 120 companies, including the likes of HP, Dell, Intel and <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/cisco/">Cisco</a>, and has already issued four major code releases, the last of which, Diablo, just came out last month and has already been downloaded 50,000 times.

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