NETWORKING

RESET

NETWORKING - Why Service Level Activation, OAM and Performance Monitoring Matter in Real-Time Cloud-Based Services

Thursday, Aug 23, 2012

ARTICLE: The ubiquity of cloud-based services promoted by a variety of different service providers could lull the neophyte network planner or service provisioning agent into a belief that moving apps to the cloud is only a matter of centralizing delay-invariant packet resources.

NETWORKING - What is all this talk about Machine to Machine Solutions?

Friday, Aug 24, 2012

ADVERTISEMENT: SPONSORED BY VERIZON WIRELESS - Machine to Machine Solutions is a growing technology category as it addresses the previous scenarios and more. Verizon provides end-to-end machine-to-machine solutions that help you increase business awareness, drive efficiencies and create new revenue streams.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Open Source Software for Operations Support Systems

Friday, Aug 24, 2012

ARTICLE: Technological heterogeneity is one of the most critical issues telecommunications operators face today. In every moderate-sized company, a network operations center has dozens of computers monitoring network elements by technology and vendor. Finding the root cause of an alarm in such a scenario can be a titanic task.

NETWORKING - ZigBee - A Smart, Viable, Wireless Architecture for Spacecraft Avionics

Friday, Aug 24, 2012

ARTICLE: Zigbee is gaining popularity as the foundation for smart infrastructures being widely deployed today, however at NASA Ames Research Center, it’s also being investigated for use in wireless sensor networks aboard spacecraft.

NETWORKING - When Do Solid State Drives Make Sense?

Friday, Aug 24, 2012

ARTICLE: As solid state drives continue to proliferate due to their falling costs and increased reliability, it follows that IT administrators all the way up to CTOs and CIOs will begin to ask themselves when the jump to SSDs makes sense. One may liken the decision to a Windows 7 upgrade or possibly converting from a laptop to a tablet--both tough decisions--but converting to SSDs can be a low-cost/high-impact effort.

NETWORKING - Is the Hypervisor Market Expanding or Contracting?

Tuesday, Sep 25, 2012

ARTICLE: With the growing trend of virtualized computing, it is time to examine whether the market for different brands of hypervisors is expanding or contracting. In Aberdeen’s May 2012 survey on Server Virtualization, Aberdeen asked survey respondents to report the number and type of hypervisors they are using to support their server virtualization program. According to data in the resulting research report, “Is the Hypervisor Market Expanding or Contracting?“, the number of different hypervisor brands deployed in their datacenters is broad and expanding.

NETWORKING - Streaming Exascale Data over 100Gbps Networks

Monday, Oct 8, 2012

ARTICLE: Data-intensive computing is one of the crosscutting themes in today's computer research. Many scientific activities depend on large-scale data analysis, scientific simulations, and verification of experimental results. Moreover, experimental facilities are distributed around the world, and scientific communities need to engage in large collaborative efforts.

BIG DATA - Q2 2012 Technology Purchase Index (TPI) Update

Monday, Oct 29, 2012

ARTICLE: The TPI for overall technology purchases increased 1.9% between Q42011 and Q22012 reflecting slow but steady growth in the planned IT purchase intentions for business, education and institutions in the United States and Canada.

NETWORKING - The Insecurity of Wireless Networks

Thursday, Oct 18, 2012

ARTICLE: Wi-Fi is the standard protocol for wireless networks used extensively in US critical infrastructures. Since the Wired Equivalency Privacy (WEP) security protocol was broken, the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) protocol has been considered the secure alternative compatible with hardware developed for WEP. However, in November 2008, researchers developed an attack on WPA, allowing forgery of Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) packets. Subsequent enhancements have enabled ARP poisoning, cryptosystem denial of service, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Open source systems and methods (OSSM) have long been used to secure networks against such attacks. This article reviews OSSMs and the results of experimental attacks on WPA. These experiments re-created current attacks in a laboratory setting, recording both wired and wireless traffic. The article discusses methods of intrusion detection and prevention in the context of cyberphysical protection of critical Internet infrastructure. The basis for this research is a specialized (and undoubtedly incomplete) taxonomy of Wi-Fi attacks and their adaptations to existing countermeasures and protocol revisions. Ultimately, this article aims to provide a clearer picture of how and why wireless protection protocols and encryption must achieve a more scientific basis for detecting and preventing such attacks.

NETWORKING - Toward Uninterrupted Operation of Wireless Sensor Networks

Friday, Oct 19, 2012

ARTICLE: A two-step energy transfer and data-collection process combined with a mobile agent that acts as a data sink and wireless energy source would support nonstop operation in a wireless sensor network.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Intelligent Distributed Systems

Wednesday, Oct 24, 2012

ARTICLE: The lightweight Internet-based communication for autonomic services (Licas) system started as a research platform for testing dynamic linking possibilities, to optimize a network for query processes. It was innovative in that respect, but the architecture design is now quite standard. As such, it can also be used to describe these standard features that a distributed and intelligent system would typically require.

SECURITY - To Black Box Cryptography and Beyond

Wednesday, Nov 14, 2012

ARTICLE: Traditionally, cryptography has offered a means of communicating sensitive (secret, confidential, or private) information while making it unintelligible to everyone except for the message recipient. Nowadays, the process of protecting sensitive data embedded in code, while attempting to hide portions of text from malicious eyes, is an ever-growing concern.

BIG DATA - SimWare: A Holistic Warehouse-Scale Computer Simulator

Friday, Nov 30, 2012

ARTICLE: Author Sungkap Yeo discusses how SimWare can simulate various aspects of a datacenter to analyze power consumption and heat efficiency.

NETWORKING - Industrial Ethernet Gains Ground in Manufacturing

Tuesday, Dec 4, 2012

ARTICLE: An increasing number of manufacturing organizations are looking at industrial networking as a discipline. Many of these companies are bringing together traditional automation engineering with corporate IT to gain a cross-functional view of how industrial network performance can be improved.

BIG DATA - SCADA Systems: Challenges for Forensics Investigators

Tuesday, Dec 11, 2012

ARTICLE: Gary Kessler interviews Irfan Ahmed about SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems.

NETWORKING - Toward a Zero-Carbon Network: Converging Cloud Computing and Network Virtualization

Wednesday, Jan 2, 2013

ARTICLE: Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is one of the most challenging research topics in ICT because of people's overwhelming use of electronic devices. Current solutions focus mainly on efficient power consumption at the micro level; few consider large-scale energy-management strategies. The low-carbon, nationwide GreenStar Network in Canada uses network and server virtualization techniques to migrate data center services among network nodes according to renewable energy availability. The network deploys a "follow the sun, follow the wind" optimization policy as a virtual infrastructure-management technique.

SECURITY - Personal Health Records: New Means to Safely Handle Health Data?

Friday, Dec 21, 2012

ARTICLE: Personal health records offer a way to manage health data while lessening healthcare costs, improving patient data quality, and fostering healthcare efficiency, but privacy and security issues are particularly important considerations for PHR designers.

NETWORKING - Boldly Grown Where No Plant Has Grown Before

Monday, Dec 24, 2012

ARTICLE: Plants have been grown in space, notably on the space shuttle and International Space Station (ISS), but have not yet sprouted on another astronomical body. A group at Ames Research Center (ARC) is attempting to change that by sending a small plant habitat to the moon with the private Moon Express vehicle. The project calls for germinating plants within six days of landing and sending photos and telemetry back to ARC via the Moon Express communications subsystem.

NETWORKING - Leveraging Modularity Principle for Agile Middleware Migration Solutions

Wednesday, Dec 26, 2012

ARTICLE: There is one distinct trend getting more visibility these days. It is none other than the aspect of middleware migration as some established middleware solutions such as Sun JCAPS, are getting discarded or dropped on the way due to various reasons. In particular, Oracle has bought up Sun Microsystems and since Oracle has a comprehensive middleware suite, it discarded the Sun’s JCAPS). Also more compact and comprehensive middleware solutions such as Oracle Fusion Middleware, IBM ESB, TIBCO AMX, are coming up fast as the middleware market is steadily growing up. Some niche integration solutions are being bought by bigger companies to strengthen their middleware product offering portfolio. Oracle is one of those buying companies. Also most of the existing middleware products are continuously revisited and refurbished to be solidified and stabilized to anticipate and tackle new requirements quiet efficiently. Business enterprises are planning to embrace open source integration solutions in order to cut the IT budget. All these trends directly and indirectly insist on the need for smarter solutions for automating the growing middleware-migration needs. Product vendors, service organizations and individuals are grasping this grand opportunity to come out with sophisticated solutions.

NETWORKING - Towards a Theory of Trust in Networks of Humans and Computers

Thursday, Feb 21, 2013

VIDEO: Computer science is undergoing a fundamental change. Over the last 40 years the field was concerned with making computers useful. Focus was on programming languages, compilers, operating systems, data structures and algorithms. These are still important topics but with the merging of computing and communication, the emergence of social networks, and the large amount of information in digital form, focus is shifting to applications such as the structure of networks and extracting information from large data sets. This talk will give a brief vision of the future and then an introduction to the science base that is forming to support these new directions in computer science.

BIG DATA - New Directions in Computer Science

Friday, Feb 22, 2013

NETWORKING - Video: Towards a Theory of Trust in Networks of Humans and Computers

Thursday, Feb 28, 2013

VIDEO: Jeannette M. Wing's Keynote Speech on the 14th Computing in the 21st Century Conference.

NETWORKING - Layers of Success

Monday, Mar 4, 2013

ARTICLE: Layering at the protocol stack and beyond has contributed hugely to the Internet's success, letting functionality be introduced basically overnight. However, it's increasingly hampering the reliability of the network it created.

NETWORKING - Van Jacobson: Content-Centric Networking

Friday, Mar 22, 2013

ARTICLE: Content-centric networking is much more than caching of content—it also works well for live streams of popular data. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/Gyt7DFOYt-w is an audio recording of Charles Severance's Computing Conversations column, in which he discusses his interview with Van Jacobson about content-centric networking. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/Bc-4PJPxfVQ is a video interview with Van Jacobson about the advantages of content-centric networking for live streams of popular data.

NETWORKING - Social Networking Meets Software Development: Perspectives from GitHub, MSDN, Stack Exchange, and TopCoder

Wednesday, Mar 27, 2013

ARTICLE: Many successful software companies use social networking as a way to improve the services or products they provide. To gain an understanding of the role social networking plays in today's software development world, the guest editors of the January/February 2013 issue conducted semistructured interviews with leaders from four successful companies: Brian Doll, an engineer who manages GitHub's marketing; Doug Laundry, a principal group program manager at Microsoft; David Fullerton, vice president of engineering at Stack Exchange; and Robert Hughes, the president and chief operating officer of TopCoder. The first Web extra at http://try.github.com is a video of Joel Spolsky discussing the structure, software, technology, and culture of Stack Exchange. The second Web extra at http://blip.tv/play/gvUBgqLbRgI.html is a video of Matthew McCullough and Tim Berglund demonstrating how Git not only incorporates the best features of existing source control systems but also includes unique distributed capabilities that make version control commands available without connectivity, allowing you to choose when to interact with a network. The third Web extra at http://blip.tv/play/gvUBgqLbRgI.html is a video of Matthew McCullough and Tim Berglund demonstrating how to leverage Git's powerful yet underused advanced features. The last Web extra at http://youtu.be/SK6TBI1bNLI is a video of Thomas Baden, Chief Information Officer, State of Minnesota, Department of Human Services, describing the experience of working on the TopCoder Platform and with the members of the TopCoder Community.

NETWORKING - Computing Conversations: Pooja Sankar on the Piazza Collaboration System

Friday, Apr 5, 2013

VIDEO: Computer magazine's multimedia editor Charles Severance interviews Pooja Sankar about the Piazza online collaboration system that was developed to help students, particularly women, studying science and engineering subjects feel less isolated.

SECURITY - Splitting Secrets — “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead”

Monday, Oct 15, 2012

BLOGPOST: “Three may keep a secret,” observed Benjamin Franklin, in his Poor Richard’s Almanack, “If two of them are dead.”Instead of sharing the same secret among multiple parties, what if there was a way to divide a secret among multiple parties without ever disclosing the secret itself? This is the basic idea, announced this week at RSA Conference Europe 2012, behind RSA Distributed Credential Protection, which is designed to eliminate a single point of compromise by scrambling, randomizing, and splitting sensitive data across multiple locations.

NETWORKING - Weaving the Unifying Fabric: The Warp and Weft of Microsoft, Windows 8, and the Enterprise

Monday, Dec 10, 2012

BLOGPOST: The backstory to the launch of Windows 8, Windows 8 Phone, the Surface and all the other recent announcements from Microsoft is more than just a little interesting for Microsoft Dynamics, the enterprise software sub-division of Microsoft and one of the smallest pieces in the software and hardware company’s vast portfolio. Indeed, the backstory for Dynamics is really no backstory at all. Dynamics is in the driver’s seat for Microsoft’s efforts to realize one of the biggest technologies bets in Microsoft’s or any other technology company’s history. If Dynamics can pull it off, the trickle-up success across Microsoft will provide an unexpected element of prescience and justification to the oft-questioned decision to buy Great Plains and Navision and launch the company’s enterprise software aspirations.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Dreams of My Data: GE Software and the Industrial Internet

Monday, Dec 17, 2012

BLOGPOST: Jeff Immelt of GE has the biggest calling card I’ve ever seen, and he wasn’t adverse to flaunting it on stage late last month at GE Software’s coming out party. Flanked by a 12 foot tall GEnx jet aircraft engine, Immelt took to the stage to make clear that GE’s next big bet would be on the what I’ve called the sensor revolution, what others call the internet of things, and what GE calls the industrial internet. The risk that this bet will fail to make an impact on GE and its customers is largely zero –the company’s smart devices are everywhere, from GEnx engines loaded with sensors measuring temperature, airflow, and turbine spin rates to massive locomotive engines collecting accelerometer and location data to hospital equipment sending out patient and equipment status updates to consumer appliances providing energy consumption data. These sensors are everywhere – numbering literally in the billions. Which is why this sensor data revolution is, in my opinion, orders of magnitude more valuable than the click-stream and location data that is currently being mined from consumer devices and web-based customer interactions and hyped as the primary source of the so-called big data revolution.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Open Source: The Unseen Pillar in IT

Monday, Jan 14, 2013

BLOGPOST: Nobody talks about it, everyone’s got it, but who is using it best? Open Source software is hardly ever mentioned when people talk about their business’ core IT foundation. It seems like everyone has some form of Open Source software supporting their business, but the stigma appears to be that Open Source is looked upon as the redheaded step-child no one wants to admit they have. Commercial and proprietary software certainly rules a large portion of enterprise solutions, but there’s still a goodly amount of tools enterprises stand upon that fall into the Open Source bucket.

NETWORKING - Best-in-Class Companies Choose Thin Client Desktops

Tuesday, Jan 22, 2013

BLOGPOST: Aberdeen's extensive research into virtualization adoption has found that server virtualization has been widely accepted by companies of all sizes. While most organizations have deployed hypervisor software on their servers (See "Is the Hypervisor Market Expanding or Contracting?" September 2012), fewer companies have deployed desktop virtualization.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Infor the Innovator: Is There Room for Another Horse in the Race?

Friday, Feb 22, 2013

BLOGPOST: There’s never enough solid competition in the enterprise software market, and it’s been tempting to see the top tier of the market as a three-horse race, with SAP and Oracle the dominant players, and Microsoft, in the form of Dynamics AX, moving fast to catch up, particularly in the large enterprise. It’s looking like that’s about to change.

NETWORKING - M2M – The Rise of the Machines

Wednesday, Mar 13, 2013

BLOGPOST: An emerging trend – dubbed “the Internet of Things” — is the growing prevelance of interconnected devices in our lives. These connected devices range from “smart” refrigerators to intelligent production machines in factories and warehouses. Each of these devices is collecting and sending data back to a central collection point specific to their business role —whether it is the system running the manufacturing plant, or the “smart” home core computer. As more data is collected, data analytics processes can be applied, resulting in the refrigerator compiling a grocery list from items previously consumed, or the automatic delivery of a replacement part to the manufacturing plant for the one pending expiration.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Microsoft’s Lync 2013 Flunks the Unified Communications Opportunity

Thursday, Mar 14, 2013

BLOGPOST: Some things are just too good to be true, and Microsoft’s vision for Lync 2013 – its desktop unified communications product – is a good case in point. It’s almost a shame, because rationalizing the many different channels of communication that business users have access to – email, chat, social, video conference, voice – under a single application has enormous potential for optimizing how people collaborate. And Microsoft’s vision for Lync, as spelled out at its sold-out first-ever Lync conference last month, was a singularly beautiful vision of instant-on, real-time communications enabling amazing feats of collaboration never before possible. Too bad trying to make this vision happen with the current product set is just a dream – or actually, if my example is any indication – a bloody nightmare.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Microsoft and the enterprise/consumer opportunity. Time to go “all in” again?

Tuesday, Mar 26, 2013

BLOGPOST: Microsoft Dynamics has many ambitions, many of them warranted, to become a force for innovation and change in the broad enterprise software market. And Dynamics has a problem, or really a set of problems, that in essence originate from a single source: the rest of Microsoft. As Dynamics performs yeoman’s service defining, or at least trying to define, the enterprise value of its parents company’s increasingly broad innovation portfolio, the rest of Microsoft is having trouble following suit, or a times even playing in the same card game. Windows 8 and Windows 8 phone were both launched largely devoid of any mention of the enterprise, and the Yammer acquisition was jammered into the Office division, where the desperately needed business context for making social collaboration relevant is missing in action (unless you think collaborating over a PowerPoint preso is the raison d’etre of social collaboration). Lync 2013 was launched in a similar way – despite a lot of sloganing and some nifty demos, there was no link to real business processes (or to anything but Lync, apparently).

NETWORKING - We're Not in Post-PC Times, But It Is a Nouveau Mobile World

Tuesday, Apr 2, 2013

BLOGPOST: With the rising importance and ubiquity of devices such as tablets and smartphones, it's becoming trendy for technology pundits to say that we are moving to post PC times, that not only will the importance of the PC dwindle, but that we will soon cease to use them completely.

INSIGHTS - Infor’s Challenges: Is the glass half-full or half-empty?

Thursday, May 9, 2013

BLOGPOST: If you count the hum of engaged customers as a sign of success, then Infor’s recent Inforum user conference was a major high-point for the come-back enterprise software vendor. The customers, all 6000 of them, were definitely there to praise Infor, not to bury it.