Author: Calin

Calin is a network engineer, with more than 20 years of experience in designing, installing, troubleshooting, and maintaining large enterprise WAN and LAN networks.

Cisco’s take on 4G

Cisco is predicting that the advent of 4G services will lead to an explosion of new video applications that will transform telecom service providers into what the company is dubbing “experience providers.”

Suraj Shetty, the vice president of marketing for the Cisco Worldwide Service Provider Marketing, said during an interview this week that companies’ investments in high-speed wireless broadband technologies such as WiMAX and Long Term Evolution (LTE) will make high-definition video streaming widely available on both fixed and mobile devices. The upshot of this, he said, is that telecom providers will move more into the cable companies’ traditional territory by offering more comprehensive video services, while the cable companies will offer improved voice and Internet options that will put them in position to better compete with the telcos.

“One thing that has been very clear from day one is that you could deliver high-definition video over a fiber or a DSL connection but it was never possible to deliver it over the air,” he said. “But when 4G comes along, whether it’s WiMAX or LTE, it opens up that possibility.”

Read the full article on NetworkWorld.com…

Cisco adds rack server to data center computing system

Cisco this week extended its Unified Computing System data center convergence platform with rack mountable servers, saying the new form factor represents an “entry level” into UCS and more choice for customers.

Cisco, however, did not disclose pricing for the 1RU and 2RU servers, which will be available in the fourth quarter.

The new C-Series rack-mount servers are designed to help accelerate the adoption of the Cisco unified computing and data center virtualization system. Like the predecessor B-Series blades, the C-Series rack mount servers utilize X86 Intel Xeon 5500 processors and are optimized for Cisco’s memory expansion and virtualized adapter technologies, which are integral to UCS.

The addition of the C-Series lets customers pick the compute form factor that fits their current and future data center environments, Cisco says.

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CRS-1: Cisco’s huge router reaches five-year milestone

Cisco introduced the CRS-1 (Carrier Routing System) on May 25, 2004, as its first multichassis core router platform. The numbers were impressive: Fully configured, the system would have 72 racks of network interface modules and eight racks of interconnecting “fabric” modules, all acting as a single router with 92Tb per second (Tbps) of capacity. In the four-year development of the CRS-1, Cisco even created a new version of its IOS (Internetwork Operating System) software, called IOS XR. The new OS shared elements with the traditional IOS, including its venerable command-line interface, but had a modular architecture for high availability.

Five years later, Cisco’s predictions of high-definition online video and ever-growing demand for Internet capacity have come true, and big carriers including AT&T, Verizon Wireless, China Telecom, Telstra, Comcast and BT Group all have deployed CRS-1s, according to Cisco. But the rising tide has lifted rival Juniper Networks’ core routers even more than Cisco’s, and China’s Huawei Technologies is making inroads in the lower end of the market, according to one analyst.

The CRS-1 came in the wake of Juniper Networks’ T Series routers and TX Matrix interconnection system, another big multichassis platform for the core of carrier networks. It also emerged after several startups, including Caspian Networks and Procket Networks, had tried to jump into the big-money business of supplying the biggest routers on the Internet amid a historic telecommunication crash. Shortly after introducing the CRS-1, Cisco announced it was buying Procket’s assets.

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Cisco releases patch for critical flaw in CiscoWorks

Cisco has released a patch that fixes a vulnerability in CiscoWorks Common Services that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to access application and host operating system files. The exploitability of this flaw is rated as high. Note that only CiscoWorks Common Services systems that run on Microsoft Windows are vulnerable. The Solaris version is not affected.

Specifically the following Cisco products that use CiscoWorks Common Services as their base are affected by this vulnerability.

* Cisco Unified Service Monitor versions 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and 2.1
* CiscoWorks QoS Policy Manager versions 4.0 and 4.1
* CiscoWorks LAN Management Solution versions 2.5, 2.6, 3.0, and 3.1
* Cisco Security Manager versions 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2
* Cisco TelePresence Readiness Assessment Manager version 1.0
* CiscoWorks Voice Manager versions 3.0 and 3.1
* CiscoWorks Health and Utilization Monitor versions 1.0 and 1.1
* Cisco Unified Operations Manager versions 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and 2.1
* Cisco Unified Provisioning Manager versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3

Source: NetworkWorld.com