Networks Generation

So it looks like the end of another era - that of 3Com - with the announcement that HP is buying what was once THE shining light of Ethernet(working) for $2.7bn.

Even if the company that the French wonderfully called "twa-com" is a Hank Marvin of its former self, given its recent success in China especially and ongoing popularity in many markets (including several countries within Europe), compared with Avaya shelling out $900m in auction for Nortel's Enterprise division, this looks a conspicuous bargain. Bear in mind that the TippingPoint division alone is worth a considerable percentage of that sum (and would have been worth many billions had it existed at the turn of the decade) with still market-leading IPS technology - something that HP ("ash-pay" in France, to continue the theme) simply does not have - and it does makes a lot of sense for both parties. Well, HP anyway...

At the same time, it could be argued that it doesn't solve all of HP's requirements, as well as creating an interesting dilemma with the parent company's ProCurve division now generating almost as much revenue as 3Com itself has of recent. And there are a lot of cross-over products to rationalise/realign. Of course, as someone who has worked with both vendors on an independent basis for too many years to wish to recall, if you want a bit of advice on this front chaps, I'm always here for you...

While also providing ProCurve specifically with a ready-made router platform, what 3Com may not bring sufficiently to the table, even with H3C, is a full compliment of fully-owned core networking product technology - agreed this is a point of argument and maybe more to do with politics than technology. So, ProCurve itself has part of the story - the 8200 series core switches are worthy products - but there is little else in the locker to sell alongside these from within. Is it reasonable to suggest, then, that - if the H3C element of 3Com is not seen as "heavyweight" enough to beat off Cisco that HP might still be in acquisition mode - someone like Force 10/Turin or even Brocade/Foundry makes enough sense in each case, without getting Extreme about this.

I'll be tuning into the various press/analyst conversations around the subject, as well as being in the middle of a number of projects with ProCurve itself at the moment so - regardez l'espace...

P.S. Continuing the French theme - wine tip number several... With the glut of unsold wines and lots of wineries going bust in France, there are mega bargains to be had, especially if you have the ability to club together and bulk buy direct. So don't spend stupid money in the UK on individual bottles at "regular" prices... Good excuse for a weekend across the Channel as well.

Following David Haye's Goliath-conquering exploits at the weekend it would be no surprise to see Mike Tyson attempt to come out of retirement once again, seeing a heavyweight champion whose head he can actually reach.

But it wouldn't be Tyson actually making the big comeback this week but that Load-Balancing originator that was - and again is - Alteon. Following Radware's, er, rescue of the technology from the ill-fated Nortel, a company that had progressed the original Alteon technology about as much as the Detroit carmakers have improved automobile science since its inception, it'll be fascinating to see if a company that already has its own L-B technology does anything truly significant with its new (overgrown) baby.

In case you're wondering, Radware hasn't simply bought the Alteon customer base to flog its own technology to. You can buy a real updated Alteon product - the 5412 - from Radware. It certainly sounds a step forward though, delivering up to 20Gbps of application switching throughput capacity and up to 340,000 Layer 4 transactions per second. It also has 10GbE ports (four of them) - something that wasn't possible, short of time travel, when the original Alteon product range was launched. Moreover, these are performance figures that the old Nortel-badged incarnation could only dream of (that's Layer 8 Networking, the dream layer...).

And, reading the press release accompanying the launch, it's clear that their marketings guys have been on some kind of dream-enhancement substance:

"As the centrepiece of the new marketing campaign, Alteon's appearance personifies the strengths and evolution of the new, powerful Alteon product line, as he combats his evil network archenemies, Bottleneck, Outage, Disconnect, and Disarray - from their destructive network rampage. This sinister IT world, plagued with darkness, has slowed down application networking performance - requiring a hero to be summoned to fight network downtime and deliver super fast performance to the online world. This hero must be brave, powerful, and highly skilled... this hero must be Alteon."

Take a look for yourself, if you don't believe me: Visit: http://www.alteonisback.com

Well, at least it beats shots of metal boxes and LEDs and dull talk of ROI, business benefits and rubbish like that... I mean IT's all about entertainment, right?

Was chatting with Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro about the, er, no pun intended, trends of malware and other threats earlier this week.

Rik highlighted the seemingly exponential growth in aforementioned threats using Trend Micro's own figures for their own Smart Protection Network - the primary architecture in the company's cloud-based AV products. Between Q3 of last year and Q2 of this, the following differences have occured.

Daily Averages	Q3 2008	Q2 2009
Queries to network	7,502,421,008	29,183,474,177 +289 per cent growth
Threats blocked	1,061,196,257	4,000,314,950 +277 per cent growth

These are massive increases by any standards when you're just looking at one product family from a single AV vendor. It does also help to validate my own findings in the recents tests I carried out on Trend Micro's OfficeScan 10 product - the report is available from the Broadband-Testing website: www.broadband-testing.co.uk - where I state that the cloud-based approach has to be the way forward for AV and related IDS/IPS solution for those users who are travelling around a lot especially.

According to AV-Test.org, over 1 million new malware are generated each month.

Which is a lot.

Rik and I spoke about the huge increases in smartphone use and how that is becoming the endpoint of choice. Therefore, how can you put a full-size client onto that kind of platform without killing it stone dead? Using a much reduced client footprint has to be the way forward.

One argument against this approach is that is surely leads to a lower capture rate than "traditional" techniques? Trend Micro has answered that one with a number of further independent performance tests with a variety of labs, so that's one myth squashed. The other concerns what happens if you can't connect to the 'net, but that one's covered in my report.

Of course, Trend Micro's rivals are on the case with the cloud-based solution but the question is - how far behind are they? Answers please on virtual cards, virtually posted in the virtual black box at the back of the virtual room... Or you can just send your comments here.

No, we're not talking bizarre, middle-of-nowhere horsey meetings here but wireless broadband.

Having seen half of Andorra dug up for the past couple of years as fibre cable is run anywhere and everywhere (of course you want 100meg connections to your hotel for those special après-ski videos...) it's a welcome lack of wires that comes to mind as I hear my old mate John Earley and his chums at Metronet in Manchester have been installing majorly point-to-point and point-to-multipoint wireless broadband connections across the city (definitely not united).

Which brings us back to one of my favourite topics in IT and that is "what goes around comes around". In this case - and Case is literally correct, unless they had changed their name to Cray by then, and then back to Case... - it was a Case Communications product in the early '90's, a point-to-point, laser-based Ethernet solution (10Mbps) that we tested in a City of London location and it worked great back then even. However, it was not foolproof, since Case had not allowed for the "cleaner factor".

As all IT folks know, the cleaner is the greatest threat to network uptime and so it proved here. Given that this was in the old "City" certain restrictions were in place, such as not allowing ugly as hell transmitter/receiver equipment to be located externally on certain listed buildings. It so happened that this location was in such a listed building. Anyway, having worked perfectly for days, one morning the IT guys got in to find that the link was down - dead as the proverbial Dodo, Yangtze River Dolphin etc etc. From the control end, all looked perfectly ok, so the only answer was to walk to the office where the other (seemingly dead) end of the link was located.

On arriving there and brushing past the sign that said "PLEASE DO NOT CLOSE THE SHUTTER AT ANY TIME" they found that the internally-located laser transmitter/receiver was no longer pointing through a glass window, but straight into some wooden shutters that had been, er, shut, by the IT devil that is "the cleaner".

T'point (to point) being - cleaner factor allowed for - that such technologies worked well back then and still work well now. Not that the Metronet expansion is being limited to Manky weather town. The operator is rapidly expanding its network into Liverpool, Leeds (now we're talking united), Birmingham and Dublin - not quite the "London, New York, Paris, Rome" associated with top perfumeries, but a start nonetheless. And my aforementioned mate John will welcome the Irish connection, particularly if it could extend into the North-West corner of the republic.

What is interesting about Metronet is that it is the first wireless communications operator to achieve profitability and that, to do so, it has deployed product from a (meerkat free) Russian wireless broadband product company - InfiNet Wireless - who we are currently speaking to about testing by pure chance. And guess what InfiNet's claimed USP is? Price-performance. Doubly interestingly, last year Motorola came to us with a view to us testing its wireless broadband products in order to prove that the additional cost of Motorola product (over alternatives such as InfiNet) was justifiable. After long talks and many promises from Motorola, that particular project (not entirely surprisingly) never happened. Shame the kids had to do without Christmas presents last year, but sometimes these things are unavoidable...

So I (and my kids) personally look forward to validating the opposite argument with the InfiNet technology. But what is it being used for I hear you say (I've got finely-tuned hearing)? Good question. Metronet is using InfiNet's technology to offer customers secure, high-bandwidth access to the Metronet core dark fibre backbone (ah - there's always holes in the ground somewhere!), specifically where access bandwidth regularly requires throughput of above 20Mbps while still conforming to Metronet's 99.95% availability SLA req's. So we are talking point-to-point last-mile applications, as well as more complex point-to-multipoint applications covering enterprise networks, public safety and security networks. The deployments support diverse traffic profiles covering applications such as high-capacity backhaul, VoIP-based call centres, video conferencing, high-bandwidth corporate database synchronisation, remote data centre services, public security applications and IP CCTV surveillance, where low-latency networks capable of supporting PTZ-controlled surveillance systems are an important factor.

As well as targeting corporate data clients with high bandwidth and high-reliability business class Internet and MPLS based Point-to-Point network access solutions, Metronet is engaging with local Police and Council Authorities to promote use of its network infrastructure to support wireless connectivity for applications such as CCTV video and ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) systems. The b******s!

As my mate John Earley explained:

"There's quite a lot that we like about InfiNet.  From a deployment aspect we have found that their kit offers a significant throughput advantage in a smaller channel spacing compared with other manufacturers and we like a bunch of features that the solution offers.  For example, the ability it gives for per VLAN rate throttling which adds an element of network control through the air and enables us to ensure sufficient bandwidth is available for network management and monitoring."

"We also appreciate having direct access to knowledgeable support engineers that can assist with problem resolution as and when required (quite literally)."

Interesting comment, that last one, given that we are talking a Russian company here... and a lesson for many so-called UK ones methinks.

Anyway, I say "bring it on InfiNet" and let's give this Russian technology the Broadband-Testing seal of approval. Part-payment in top quality vodka is negotiable...

Cloud Computing - all marketing guff or reality? And, if it is the latter, then is it really the future?

Industry analyst Gartner Group has already stated that it believes cloud computing will be as influential as e-business. At the same time it warned that 'in the cloud' security services appear at the 'peak of inflated expectations' on Gartner's 2009 Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Protection, expecting reality to deliver it as a mainstream technology within a two to five year timescale.

But what about the here and now? With two laptops and a non-stop travelling month across the UK ahead of me, I took the opportunity to decide for myself whether the cloud is the answer to delivering efficient security services, right-here right-now, including several trips to Brighton, home of the chap who penned those lines a few years ago.

On one laptop, therefore, we installed Trend Micro's cloudy OfficeScan 10 AV software while, on the other, we had a "classic" fat client type AV product, from a well-known purveyor of such. With WiFi and mobile broadband dongles to hand, I was ideally positioned to decide whether the cloud argument is all fluff or really makes sense.

Looking at OfficeScan 10, what we have here is a genuine cloud application that benefits from this approach, enabling fast updates (every 15 minutes) and a relatively light client. It seemed a no-brainer in truth to see the potential benefits of using the cloud approach as a means of ensuring that updates are as timely as possible - critical to the success of an AV product. This approach also removes much of the human requirement for managing updates (pattern file management etc), meaning less chance of errors leading to potentially damaging virus/threat outbreaks. The counter-argument, of course, is what if you cannot get online? The answer is to have enough of a database on your client to protect you in environments you'll encounter offline. But then most of the threats are online...

Of course, there is a key server element to this product. While the OfficeScan 10 suite obviously benefits from having a dedicated server to run on, equally it operates within a virtual environment, such as VMware. We tested in both environments without problems. The modular nature of the server application suite made it very easy to create custom configurations for different types and levels of user, with additional functionality such as file and web reputation able to be applied as required. Via a server plug-in, endpoint security extends to mobile devices - a vital consideration with smart phone and related technology sales and usage increasing enormously within business.

At the client endpoint, while everything can be automated, a simple interface accessible from the Windows toolbar allows the user to optionally run manual scans and related tasks. Comparing day-to-day usage at the client endpoint with another AV product from a well-known vendor, it was clear how 'light' the OfficeScan client is and how non-intrusive it is in comparison. Other features such as the ability to throttle CPU utilisation at the client during scans means that the user experience is essentially completely transparent. Why should they know that AV software is running?

In use during our test period, we were never knowingly aware of the existence of the OfficeScan client, apart from when it captured some test viruses and automatically quarantined them, in line with our configuration options. In contrast, our alternative AV client we were comparing the OfficeScan client with, as well as using more memory, was far more intrusive in terms of the number and length of downloads it made during our test period - in some cases a full client update, rather than simply a virus signature update.

This was really highlighted during travelling around the UK when using a mobile broadband connection - an increasingly common form of Internet access for many users and one that might well become the norm in the next two to three years, as costs continue to fall. Here is where the cloud-based approach really shines. OfficeScan caches as much data locally as it can, which clearly helps in this kind of user scenario. The client can also detect when a laptop or equivalent is in battery mode and cancel an auto-scheduled scan, a life-saver in some cases when travelling with no means of recharging the battery (in every sense).

In summary, the cloud works!

For anyone else who travels as much as I seem to at the moment, you have my deepest sympathies.

Finally back "home" after over six weeks on the road, almost entirely in England. Well, at least I did catch the English "summer" now relocated to September (except it always has been the best month in my memory). Being in a situation where I rarely had more than two nights in any one location and was at the whim of WiFi-ness, free or otherwise, my purchase (admittedly compulsory for a project I was working on) of mobile data dongles for Vodafone and 3 really did save me.

However, as we found out with our smart phones test for our new Mobile Test Labs operation, 3G dongles (occasionally 2.5G or 3.5G) do tend to drop the "call" when travelling across the UK's rail network, so it's not an ideal solution by any stretch, just far far better than relying on the presence of (affordable) WiFi hotspots. Otherwise, using "free" WiFi in bars proves very expensive and it gets difficult to type after a while.

As part of the Vodafone deal I got a free Samsung N110 Netbook running XP. Given that my main laptop (an Acer Aspire) runs the dreaded Vista, booting up the two side by side reminded me just HOW FAR backward Microsoft went with the V word. The XP netbook was up and running and raring to go, fully five minutes before the Vista machine was. And it doesn't crash either. And it's far quicker to do anything, despite having a slower CPU and less memory.

If any of you meantime have tried upgrading your Vista machine to Windows 7 and have found Vista telling you it can't (after about 30 minutes of pre-install) then just perservere. While I was working on site with my mates at NewNetTechnologies, CTO Phil Snell encountered this very scenario, was denied several times, but kept on in dogged Yorkshire tradition and - lo and behold - finally got Vista to crack and accept its upgrade mission. His laptop is now happily running Windows 7 and what looked like a terminal illness has been resolved by a miracle cure.

Change of subject - if anyone from Avaya is reading this, with your newly acquired customer base c/o Nortel's Enterprise division, I have some excellent technology recommendations for you, starting with UK startup Voipex. If anyone hasn't yet checked out the report on what is finally THE technology that cracked the VoIP syndrome, please go onto the Broadband-Testing website and read the report - www.broadband-testing.co.uk

And talking of free reports that are well worth a read, if Data Centres are your bag, checkout the Next Generation Data Centres report by Bob Cushing from MSC consultants (they're in Sheffield, but I can forgive them for being in the wrong part of Yorkshire - more like the South Pole as far as I'm concerned) which you can find at: http://www.msc-reports.co.uk/

Terry Pratchett created rat on a stick for his Discworld novels, but my mates at jetNEXUS have gone one better with a load-balancer on a stick...

...in the sense of a USB stick, or CD if you prefer. For the relevance of this, let's back-track a little. The first L-B product I tested, back in 1999, was the Arrowpoint chassis-based product that cost a cool $125,000 - each. It cost Cisco even more, when they splashed out $5.7bn for that company a couple of months after my test. For the record, that product is now rubbish.

However, we should note that a decent spec server in those days from HP or similar also cost a pretty penny or two. Thus, it was that someone like NetScaler could still charge just south of $100,000 per L-B device, so $200K for a redundant pair, as recently as 2004. And they were a relative bargain at just $300m to Citrix. And, for the record, that still is a good product, just expenisive, as are those from my mates at F5.

In the UK we have Zeus - whose latest product I will be testing very shortly, so watch this space - which undercuts its US rivals on price:performance, but it's not everyone who needs an L-B (or Traffic Management/Application Delivery Controller etc) product that does 30,000 SSL transactions per second.

Moreover, the cost of server real estate has fallen dramatically since the heady days of the dot com boom, so it is not reasonable now to demand mega-money for an L-B solution if it's simply cheaper to add more servers and other forms of redundancy.

So, enter jetNEXUS and the L-B on a stick. The premise is thus: got some old servers that are doing time as a temporary coffee table or simply ticking over without really having an active role to play in your IT shop? So, take a bootable stick or disk from jetNEXUS with its ALB code on it, boot from the disk and watch your old server turn into a load-balancer in a matter of minutes. Key in an IP address and you're away. No mega money required, no weeks of training required, just basic networking skills.

How cool is that?

We tried it with a couple of "retired" servers randomly picked from jetNEXUS' official dusty corner of the machine room and they were magically turned into a redundant pair of L-Bs 10 minutes later, for miles less than the cost of an entry-level product from aforementioned US vendors.

So, if you've got some old servers gathering dust, you know where to go - just checkout www.jetnexus.com - a full report will also be appearing on the Broadband-Testing website shortly.

 

So.

Yet more extensive travelling and lack of Internet (I can't rate McDonald's free WiFi very highly based on recent experience - like going back to 2.4kbps dial-up - but now I am with, not one, but two mobile data networks (Vodafone and 3) as part of our new Mobile Test Labs stuff; so I'll be finding out just how bad (as you can see, expectations not too high at this point) the experience is, or otherwise.

Well, actually, it is my father who is mobile-broadband enabled. Not being a UK resident, I was not allowed to sign-up for myself at the local PC World in Wakefield (or anywhere else for that matter) so my dad did the honours... So he gets the paper work through yesterday and, having read it diligently, rang me to say "Aye up lad, tha's not going to use this when tha's abroad are tha? Have you seen how much it costs?"

I replied that I knew the associated costs and that these dongles would indeed only see use in the UK. That said, the day rate in France (Vodafone) of £9 is actually cheaper than most French MNO's charge in their own country anyway. To use it in Andorra would be £27 however, which is a tad steep, especially when you consider that, in same country, that much money buys lunch for four including wine, in a restaurant.

So - how has it been to date? At best, it's been like an ok WLAN connection, at worst, essentially useless, a bit like McDonalds WLAN for that matter. And here's a tip - anyone who fancies a browse over a pint at the excellent Ossett Tap hostelry and home of Ossett Brewery - forget mobile broadband. The signal for Vodafone, 3, and T-Mobile is as weak as a bottle of American Bud.

Tunnels very quickly become the bane of your life. Especially if you're try to place a bet with your online bookies at the time.

Had a very interesting meeting with Ixia, one of my test equipment partners today. Turns out they have support for the iPhone as a client for their IxChariot performance software wot I use. Since the client end is a free download, let me know if you are an iPhone user and would like to take part in an ongoing experiment to test iPhone performance around the UK.

More tomorrow, including load-balancer on a stick and other delights, so do tune in...

It's a very interesting scenario when you work for yourself and summer arrives.

People go on holiday. Which is very annoying when:

a) You're trying to finalise dates for the next series of test projects and
b) You're looking for news in the networking world to blog about.

Frankly, almost nothing has been announced in the world of networking since June. And anything that has been talked about has had the word "cloud" in it. Then we read an analyst report that says Enterprises are not up for the cloud. Well, I don't think they've any choice, if the work I'm currently involved with or have lined up is anything to go by.

That and the increasingly wireless world. I note that BT is celebrating reaching the half-million point in terms of Wi-Fi hotspots in the UK. Given that its goal is to create a million, I wonder what the odds are on this happening and when? Will femtocell deployment produce WiFi replacement or just a coverage extension and therefore encourage more WiFi delivery?

Of course, if you can connect to anything anytime, that becomes irrelevant, so long as tariffing is flexibile and affordable. My current test project involves A N Other company wot provides session persistence across all types of connections from wired Ethernet to mobile data. The question is, as a subscriber to a mobile data service, if you had to pay extra to get this type of (admittedly very useful) always-on connectivity, which always includes some type of compression/acceleration as well, how much would you pay for the privilege? One of the key markets for this type of product is the operator itself so, unless it can generate revenue from its customers then there is no market.

Which brings us tidily back to the WiFi hotspot market. Let's hope the next half-million deployment is more affordable and reliable than the first half-million... I should get a clue from visiting the US next month to carry out phase II testing on ProCurve's acquisition last year of Colubris WLAN technology. This is the first I've seen which is really geared towards hotspot (rather than Enterprise) type delivery, so it'll be great to put it through its RFC2544 paces.

Meantime, I'm checking out if the Cloud works as a means of providing the level of update speed required for AV and related security defences by taking a look at Trend Micro's Smart Protection Network as part of its OfficeScan product. Rather than using a classic stored signature database, the Trend uses "the Cloud" for all its updating. Should definitely be a better approach but let's find out.

Then there's load-balancing in the cloud, c/o Zeus and load-balancing on a USB Memory stick c/o jetNEXUS. The latter is a really cool idea I'll be putting to the test in the next couple of weeks: take an old server, add someone who's fairly clueless technically but wants to get some use out of their old gear and maximise performance on their new servers and give them a memory stick with a simply instruction - plug it in!  Meantime, on the Zeus front I guess we'll be looking at taking traffic management in the virtual world as close to 20Gbps performance as possible - a far cry from what VMware was capable of not that long ago... A similar project is in the pipeline with another old client of mine Solarflare. 20Gig of virtualness via a single NIC/Server combination....

I wonder if anyone will ever ask me to test an Ethernet switch again? D-Link where are you?

Well, I didn't get a holiday this summer and it doesn't look like I'm going to get one this autumn either. Don't get out the violins, instead check out the www.broadband-testing.co.uk website where there's plenty of new material, including the mobile phone/data testing stuff and lots more to come in the following weeks as you can tell. Oh, and here in Andorra, I have been able to accompany the excellent weather with totally gluggable rosado wine at precisely 1€ a bottle...

I know, it's been an age, and I have been very remiss. So how have things been going for me and my super fast connection?

Very well, I have to say. We connect with 4 computers in the house. 3 Macs, and 1 PC. Sometimes it's 2 Macs and 2 PC's - as my MacBook had a small attack of the Bootcamps and now can run Windows.

The Bootcamp experiment was a good one actually, as it meant I got to check out one fo the big tweaks that not very many PC net users know about, and one that is very important for 50 meg broadband speeds - without it you literally aren't going anywhere. DrTCP is a handy little app that will help you tweak your connection - I literally went from the depth of 12-15 meg to a stonking 44meg with this.

I am pleased with the service, and I intend to keep it. It's dropped me a total of 3 times for an ave of 3 minutes 3 times in nearly 3 months, and when I compare that to my old BT service, well it's not something I want to go back to.

I rarely get 48meg or above, but I very often get 35-43meg, and that for me for a service like this, in it's early days, is more than acceptable.

Will I recommend this service? I do and I have, but with a few caveats:

Do your research

Don't expect 50 meg every time you use it - but do expect around 40 and up

Understand that a lot of sites on the web simply cannot serve pages to you as fast as you can now download them - this isn't Virgin's fault!

Until everyone in the country can get this - you are an early adopter - expect the odd burp - you are on the bleeding edge of technology here, cutting down the long grass in the digital frontier - expect the unexpected, and you will enjoy the ride.

I put my Virgin 50 meg through an awful lot, large uploads of .mov files to dropboxes all over the world, downloads of beta virtual worlds, lots and lots of streaming video and audio and heavy duty virtual world use (they eat bandwidth for breakfast).

Virgin has stepped up to the plate and more. I think their network is more stable than their copmpetition (not that they have any at this level at the moment), and more stable than the traditional high end business broadband I have had to use in my line of work to get a good less traffic shaped connection.

Bravo Virgin, as well as being voted one of the top in customer service, I think you are well on your way to becoming top of the pile in ISP's as well.

Thanks for letting me test, and thanks for letting me be on the bleeding edge of broadband tech in the UK.