Category: News digest

Nortel continues the enterprise fight

NortelEven though it filed Chapter 11 and is reportedly looking to sell off huge chunks of its business, Nortel is not giving up the enterprise fight.

The company this week will unveil its next generation large enterprise core/data center aggregation switch. The Virtual Service Platform 9000 is Nortel’s entry into the increasingly crowded core data center switch field, which has seen numerous announcements of late from Nortel’s competitors: Force10, Extreme, Juniper and even 3Com, which is re-entering the battle to provide a lower cost alternative to Cisco during these trying economic times.
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Nortel says the VSP 9000 will go up against Cisco’s Nexus 7000, Force10’s ExaScale, Extreme’s BlackDiamond 8900, Brocade’s BigIron RX, Juniper’s EX8216, 3Com’s S12500 and any other switch approaching or exceeding 100Gbps per slot capacity and designed to aggregate hundreds of 10Gbps Ethernet ports.

Nortel’s challenges are significant, however. The company is restructuring under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from creditors so its future is uncertain. Also, the VSP 9000 won’t ship for another year, while most competitor offerings are already on the market.

Read the full article on NetworkWorld.com…

Encryption and decryption half century ago

enigmaI know that it’s not the latest discovery in cryptography area, but still this device amazed me with it’s ingenious construction and way of utilization.

An Enigma machine is any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. The first Enigma was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. This model and its variants were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries — most notably by Nazi Germany before and during World War II. A range of Enigma models was produced, but the German military model, the Wehrmacht Enigma, is the version most commonly discussed.

The machine has become notorious because Polish mathematicians-cryptographers and then Allied cryptographers were able to cryptanalyze, and thus decrypt, a vast number of messages which had been enciphered using the Enigma. The intelligence gleaned from this source, codenamed ULTRA by the British, was a substantial aid to the Allied war effort. The exact influence of ULTRA is debated, but an oft-repeated assessment is that decryption of German ciphers hastened the end of the European war by two years.

Though the Enigma cipher had cryptographic weaknesses, in practice it was only in combination with other factors (procedural flaws, operator mistakes, occasional captured hardware and key tables, etc.) that those weaknesses allowed Allied cryptographers to cryptanalyze so many messages.

Enigma cryptanalysis contributed greatly to the success of Allied war efforts—in the Battle of Matapan in March 1941; in course of the Battle of the Atlantic, beginning in the latter part of 1941; in Rommel’s efforts to capture Cairo in 1942; in the invasion of Sicily (1943) and mainland Italy (1943–44); in the planning and execution of Operation Overlord (the Allied invasion of France, 1944); and in the subsequent drive to and through Germany. Evidence suggests that Soviet strategy and tactics against Nazi Germany likewise benefited from Ultra intelligence, conveyed to the Soviets by a variety of conduits.

Below you can see a demonstration of how Enigma was used to encrypt and decrypt messages thanks to NetworkWorld.com:

For more detailed presentation please read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma

Brought to you by NetworkWorld.tv and FirstDigest

Is it time to cut the Ethernet access cable?

A range of companies with wireless LANs are discovering that 50% to 90% or more of Ethernet ports now go unused, because Wi-Fi has become so prevalent.

They look at racks of unused switches, ports, Ethernet wall jacks, the cabling that connects them all, the yearly maintenance charges for unused switches, electrical charges and cooling costs. So why not formally drop what many end users have already discarded — the Ethernet cable?

“There’s definitely a rightsizing going on,” says Michael King, research director, mobile and wireless, for Gartner. “By 2011, 70% of all net new ports will be wireless. People are saying, ‘we don’t need to be spending so much on a wired infrastructure if no one is using it.”

Many of these issues were predicted in fall 2007 by Burton Group Analyst Paul DeBeasi, in a report provocatively titled “The end of Ethernet?” In it, he argued that the demand for mobility and the advent of 802.11n networks with shared throughput of 150M to 180Mbps would lead enterprises to cut the Ethernet access cord. (See our Clear Choice Test of four 802.11n vendors’ gear.)

Read the full article on NetworkWorld.com…

Live HP Virtual Conference: Discover how to save costs & boost competitiveness

hp-liveToday’s tough economy presents you with a series of challenges. How do you do more with less, when the pressures to manage costs and boost business benefits are even higher than usual?

Discover how HP can help. You’re invited to take part, for one hour, one day, or every session, in HP’s  three-day complimentary virtual conference. Hear industry experts share proven solutions, technologies and case studies.

Attend the online conference and see how HP is changing the economics of technology:
• visit technology booths
• chat with industry experts
• learn how “green” fits into the equation

Register for the LIVE virtual conference

Topics:

Monday, 8 June
1400 – 1830 CET Improve your data center eco-nomics
With expenditure on power and cooling escalating, new solutions like virtualisation and energy efficient computing are becoming main-stream. What is best-practice? How much benefit can be realised? What pitfalls need to be avoided?

Tuesday, 9 June
1400 – 1830 CET Take a look at cloud; move to service-oriented IT
Delivering IT as a service with more flexibility and lower cost improves efficiency and user satisfaction. HP, as a leader in ITIL and cloud computing, will share our experience and insight.

Wednesday, 10 June
1400 – 1830 CET Transform your applications
It’s more critical than ever to understand your applications environment and make a sound transformation plan to streamline and strengthen competitive advantage. Learn about solutions and tools from HP, Intel and Oracle.