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Intelligence In Software: IT Software Strategy

The Future of Networking on 10 Gigabit Ethernet

The rise of cloud computing is a bit like that of a space shuttle taking off: When the rocket engine and its propellants fire up, the shuttle lifts slowly off the launch pad and then builds momentum until it streaks into space.

Cloud is now in the momentum-building phase and on the verge of quickly soaring to new heights. There are lots of good reasons for the rapid rise of this new approach to computing. Cloud models are widely seen as one of the keys to increasing IT and business agility, making better use of infrastructure and cutting costs.

So how do you launch your cloud? An essential first step is to prepare your network for the unique requirements of services running on a multitenant shared infrastructure. These requirements include IT simplicity, scalability, interoperability and manageability. All of these requirements make the case for unified networking based on 10 gigabit Ethernet (10GbE).

Unified networking over 10GbE simplifies your network environment. It allows you to unite your network into one type of fabric so you don’t have to maintain and manage different technologies for different types of network traffic. You also gain the ability to run storage traffic over a dedicated SAN if that makes the most sense for your organization.

Either way, 10GbE gives you a great deal of scalability, enabling you to quickly scale up your networking bandwidth to keep pace with the dynamic demands of cloud applications. This rapid scalability helps you avoid I/O bottlenecks and meet your service-level agreements.

While that’s all part of the goodness of 10GbE, it’s important to keep this caveat in mind: Not all 10GbE is the same. You need a solution that scales and, with features like intelligent offloads of targeted processing functions, helps you realize best-in-class performance for your cloud network. Unified networking solutions can be enabled through a combination of standard Intel Ethernet products along with trusted network protocols integrated and enabled in a broad range of operating systems and hypervisors. This approach makes unified networking capabilities available on every server, enabling maximum reuse in heterogeneous environments. Ultimately, this approach to unified networking helps you solve today’s overarching cloud networking challenges and create a launch pad for your private, hybrid or public cloud.

The urge to purge: Have you had enough of “too many” and “too much”?

In today’s data center, networks are a story of “too many” and “too much.” That’s too many fabrics, too many cables, and too much complexity. Unified networking simplifies this story. “Too many” and “too much” become “just right.” Let’s start with the fabrics. It’s not uncommon to find an organization that is running three distinctly different networks: a 1GbE management network, a multi-1GbE local area network (LAN), and a Fibre Channel or iSCSI storage area network (SAN).

Unified networking enables cost-effective connectivity to the LAN and the SAN on the same Ethernet fabric. Pick your protocols for your storage traffic. You can use NFS, iSCSI, or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to carry storage traffic over your converged Ethernet network.

You can still have a dedicated network for storage traffic if that works best for your needs. The only difference: That network runs your storage protocols over 10GbE — the same technology used in your LAN.

When you make this fundamental shift, you can reduce your equipment needs. Convergence of network fabrics allows you to standardize the equipment you use throughout your networking environment — the same cabling, the same NICs, the same switches. You now need just one set of everything, instead of two or three sets.

In a complementary gain, convergence over 10GbE helps you cut your cable numbers. In a 1GbE world, many virtualized servers have eight to 10 ports, each of which has its own network cable. In a typical deployment, one 10GbE cable could handle all of that traffic. This isn’t a vision of things to come. This world of simplified networking is here today. Better still, this is a world based on open standards. This approach to unified networking increases interoperability with common APIs and open-standard technologies. A few examples of these technologies:

• Data Center Bridging (DCB) allows multiple types of traffic to run over an Ethernet wire.
• Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) enables the Fibre Channel protocol used in many SANs to run over the Ethernet standard common in LANs.
• Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) and Network Controller Sideband Interface (NC-SI) enable server management via the network.

These and other open-standard technologies enable the interoperability that allows network convergence and management simplification. And just like that, “too many” and “too much” become “just right.”

Know your limits — then push them with super-elastic 10GbE

Let’s imagine for a moment a dream highway. In the middle of the night, when traffic is light, the highway is a four-lane road. When the morning rush hour begins and cars flood the road, the highway magically adds several lanes to accommodate the influx of traffic.

This commuter’s dream is the way cloud networks must work. The cloud network must be architected to quickly scale up and down to adapt itself to the dynamic and unpredictable demands of applications. This super-elasticity is a fundamental requirement for a successful cloud.

Of course, achieving this level of elasticity is easier said than done. In a cloud environment, virtualization turns a single physical server into multiple virtual machines, each with its own dynamic I/O bandwidth demands. These dynamic and unpredictable demands can overwhelm networks and lead to unacceptable I/O bottlenecks. The solution to this challenge lies in super-elastic 10 GbE networks built for cloud traffic. So what does it take to get there? The right solutions help you build your 10 GbE network with unique technologies designed to accelerate virtualization and remove I/O bottlenecks, while complementing solutions from leading cloud software providers.

Consider these examples:

• The latest Ethernet servers support Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), a standard created by the PCI Special Interest Group. SR-IOV improves network performance for Citrix XenServer and Red Hat KVM by providing dedicated I/O and data isolation between VMs and the network controller. The technology allows you to partition a physical port into multiple virtual I/O ports, each dedicated to a particular virtual machine.
• Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) improves network performance and CPU utilization for VMware and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V by reducing the sorting overhead of networking traffic. VMDq offloads data-packet sorting from the virtual switch in the virtual machine monitor and instead does this on the network adaptor. This innovation helps you avoid the I/O tax that comes with virtualization.

Technologies like these enable you to build a high-performing, elastic network that helps keep the bottlenecks out of your cloud. It’s like that dream highway that adds lanes whenever the traffic gets heavy.

Manage the ups, downs, and in-betweens of services in the cloud

In an apartment building, different tenants have different Internet requirements. Tenants who transfer a lot of large files or play online games want the fastest Internet connections they can get. Tenants who use the Internet only for email and occasional shopping are probably content to live with slower transfer speeds. To stay competitive, service providers need to tailor their offerings to these diverse needs.

This is the way it is in a cloud environment: Different tenants have different service requirements. Some need a lot of bandwidth and the fastest possible throughput times. Others can settle for something less.

If you’re operating a cloud environment, either public or private, you need to meet these differing requirements. That means you need to be able to allocate the right level of bandwidth to an application and manage network quality of service (QoS) in a manner that meets your service-level agreements (SLAs) with different tenants — technologies that allow you to tailor service quality to the needs and SLAs of different applications and different cloud tenants.

Here are some of the more important technologies for a well-managed cloud network: Data Center Bridging (DCB) provides a collection of standards-based end-to-end networking technologies that make Ethernet the unified fabric for multiple types of traffic in the data center.

• It enables better traffic prioritization over a single interface, as well as an advanced means of shaping traffic on the network to decrease congestion.
• Queue Rate Limiting (QRL) assigns a queue to each virtual machine (VM) or each tenant in the cloud environment and controls the amount of bandwidth delivered to that user. The Intel approach to QRL enables a VM or tenant to get a minimum amount of bandwidth, but it doesn’t limit the maximum bandwidth. If there is headroom on the wire, the VM or tenant can use it.
• Traffic Steering sorts traffic per tenant to support rate limiting, QoS and other management approaches. Traffic Steering is made possible by on-chip flow classification that delineates one tenant from another. This is like the logic in the local Internet provider’s box in the apartment building. Everybody’s Internet traffic comes to the apartment in a single pipe, but then gets divided out to each apartment, so all the packets are delivered to the right addresses.

Technologies like these enable your organization to manage the ups, downs, and in-betweens of services in the cloud. You can then tailor your cloud offerings to the needs of different internal or external customers — and deliver the right level of service at the right price.

On the road to the cloud

For years, people have talked about 10 GbE being the future of networking and the foundation of cloud environments. Well, the future is now; 10GbE is here in a big way.

There are many reasons for this fundamental shift. Unified networking based on 10GbE helps you reduce the complexity of your network environment, increase I/O scalability and better manage network quality of service. 10GbE simplifies your network, allowing you to converge to one type of fabric. This is a story of simplification. One network card. One network connection. Optimum LAN and SAN performance. Put it all together and you have a solution for your journey to a unified, cloud-ready network.

To learn more about cloud unified networking, see this resource from our sponsor: Cloud Usage Models.

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Intelligence In Software: IT Software Strategy

The Billion Dollar Lost Laptop Problem

Every time a business laptop is lost or stolen, an organization takes a direct cost hit. But how much of a hit might surprise you. What would your organization do if it realized that each year it’s losing millions of dollars in this way? Odds are, it would be far more diligent in protecting laptops.

Last year, the Ponemon Institute released a study (conducted independently and sponsored by Intel) of The Billion Dollar Lost Laptop Problem, an independent benchmark of 329 private and public-sector U.S. organizations — ranging in size from less than 1,000 to greater than 75,000 employees and representing more than 12 industry sectors — to determine the economic cost of lost or stolen laptops. What they found: The cost is huge.

Participating organizations reported that in a 12-month period 86,455 laptops were lost or otherwise went missing. That added up to 263 laptops per organization on average.

According to an earlier Ponemon Institute study (conducted independently and sponsored by Intel), The Cost of a Lost Laptop, the average value of a lost laptop is a staggering $49,246. This value is based on seven cost components: replacement cost, detection, forensics, data breach, lost intellectual property costs, lost productivity and legal, consulting and regulatory expenses. It’s important to point out that the smallest cost component is the replacement cost of the laptop.

Some of the salient findings from The Billion Dollar Lost Laptop Problem report:

• The total economic impact for 329 participating companies is $2.1 billion, or on average $6.4 million per organization.

• Out of the 263 laptops per organization that are lost or go missing, on average just 12 laptops were recovered.
• Forty-three percent of laptops were lost off-site (working from a home office or hotel room); 33 percent lost in transit or travel; and 12 percent were lost in the workplace.
• Twelve percent of organizations said they don’t know where employees or contractors lose their laptops.
• Although 46 percent of the lost systems contained confidential data, 30 percent of laptops lost had disc encryption, 29 percent had backup, and just 10 percent had other anti-theft features.
• Industries that experience the highest rate of laptop loss are education and research; health and pharmaceuticals were next, followed by the public sector. Financial services firms had the lowest loss rate.
• Laptops with the most sensitive and confidential data are the most likely to be stolen. However, these laptops are also more likely to have disc encryption.
• Average loss ratio over the laptop’s useful life is 7.12 percent. That means more than 7 percent of all assigned laptops in benchmarked companies will be lost or stolen.

But Who’s Minding the Data?
Not nearly enough organizations, it appears. Given the significant financial impact of missing laptops and the vulnerabilities of stolen laptop data, it is astonishing that the majority of these companies aren’t taking even basic precautions to protect them.

The worst cost component is the data breach. A stolen laptop can be easily booted to reveal passwords, stored temporary files the user was even unaware of, and access to VPN connections, remote desktops, wireless encryption keys and more.

That’s enough reason to do something. Here are your best options for protecting your organization’s data integrity against all of that potential mayhem.

• Full Disk Encryption: Full disk encryption prevents unauthorized access to data storage. Under this scenario, nearly everything is encrypted, and the decision of which individual files to encrypt is not left up to users’ discretion.  But all too often, end users choose to disable the full disk encryption, probably because they incorrectly assume it significantly slows all of the processing.

• Anti-Theft Technology: Laptops can disable themselves, when the hardware observes suspicious activity, if they get lost or stolen. When the laptop is recovered, it can be easily reactivated and returned to normal operation.

• Data in the Cloud: Keeping sensitive material off your laptop by storing data in the cloud is not a viable solution, because that does nothing to protect the data. Such data is easily accessible by simply cracking the login credentials. Worse yet, the existence of a full backup actually increases the cost of a lost laptop, because backups make it easier to confirm the loss of sensitive or confidential data, resulting in greater expense from  forensic diagnosis and recovery efforts.

Just like Smokey the Bear says about you and forest fires, only you can stop data loss.

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Intelligence In Software: IT Software Strategy

WiGig: More than Wi-Fi on Steroids

Wi-Fi is one of the world’s most widely used wireless technologies. Two common downsides of that popularity are interference and often slow speeds. A new wireless technology called WiGig aims to complement Wi-Fi performance by providing an alternative for certain usages, like peer-to-peer and device-to-device information exchange.

Commercially available by late 2012, WiGig will use the 60 GHz band, which is unlicensed spectrum that’s virtually unused in most countries. Wi-Fi shares the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands with everything from microwave ovens to cordless phones. That spectral difference affects performance, reliability and potential applications. For example, with any wireless technology, higher frequencies typically can support more bandwidth. WiGig has a theoretical top speed of 7 Gbps versus sub-100 Mbps with Wi-Fi.

Higher frequencies also mean shorter ranges. In an area with a high density of wireless devices, such as an office building, a short range reduces the chances that one device will be close enough to others to interfere with them. Interference also saps bandwidth, so a shorter range can improve throughput too. The upshot is that WiGig provides enterprises with a way to reduce interference and improve bandwidth on their Wi-Fi LANs (WLANs).

“By definition, these WiGig applications are much more short range: 5 meters rather than 25 meters for Wi-Fi infrastructure,” says Ali Sadri, chairman and president of WiGig Alliance.

Here’s one scenario: For short-range, high-bandwidth applications — such as connecting a laptop to a projector or display — the enterprise starts replacing Wi-Fi devices with WiGig gear. That offloading means less interference and less traffic for the remaining Wi-Fi infrastructure.

“They can say: ‘All of the infrastructure access technologies are going to be 2.4 or 5 Gig. All of the peer-to-peer (P2P) applications and display applications will go over WiGig,’” says Sadri, who’s also director of Intel’s Mobile Wireless Group. “I think there’s a huge opportunity for IT to clean up the mess, perhaps even disallowing 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz from being used for P2P applications.”

Enterprises also could use WiGig to enhance network security. For example, guests could be restricted to using WiGig for tasks such as Internet access or connecting to a conference room projector. WiGig also could be the way to authenticate guests, such as contractors and business partners, who deserve access to the corporate WLAN.

Consumer electronics vendors could use a similar strategy. For example, some set-top boxes use Wi-Fi rather than cables to connect to TVs. (Panasonic says WiGig can transfer a 30-minute compressed HD video in about 10 seconds.) In the future, they might use WiGig in order to deliver the bandwidth necessary for 1080p 3-D video, reducing traffic on and interference to the home’s WLAN.

What Types of Devices?

The ability to implement those strategies depends on the availability of WiGig-equipped devices. One major vendor, Wilocity, is currently providing samples of its chipsets to device OEMs and expects to start shipping commercial volumes by the middle of this year. If that schedule holds, the first WiGig devices could debut by late 2012.

“I expect to see notebooks and tablets showing up in 2012 and 2013,” says Mark Grodzinsky, Wilocity vice president of marketing. “Phones probably will be a little further out, but they’re definitely a target market.

“Storage is very interesting because with the wireless bus extension in WiGig, you can do things such as wireless PCI Express. Storage devices are moving to a native PCI interface, so rather than going to USB and converting USB to PCI Express, you could do wireless PCI Express direct.”

WiGig also dovetails nicely with the trend toward thin devices, particularly tablets, smartphones, TVs and laptops. The thinner they get, the more difficult it is for OEMs to find room for multiple connectors, some of which may be thicker than the device itself. WiGig could provide a way to reduce or even eliminate USB, HDMI and other ports.

“You can imagine an Ultrabook that you put on your desk, and you’ve got a dock that’s got connections to high-performance storage and a high-definition monitor,” says Grodzinsky.

That’s probably going to be one of WiGig’s initial commercial applications because the alliance is finalizing a docking station extension, which will facilitate connections and secure the data flowing over them. The organization also is working to ensure multivendor interoperability. In December, it held its first plugfest, and it’s developing a certification program.

Is WiGig a Complement or Competitor?

If WiGig is so fast and relatively untouched by interference, why wouldn’t chipset manufacturers and device OEMs simply start abandoning technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, WHDI and WirelessHD?

In the short term, one reason is because they’re incumbents, whereas WiGig has yet to make its commercial debut, let alone build a following. In fact, WiGig is leveraging Wi-Fi’s success by basing part of its technology on Wi-Fi. That means Wi-Fi vendors can reuse some of their designs for WiGig to build multi-technology chipsets.

Another reason is use cases. For example, Wi-Fi’s architecture is better for LAN-type applications and for connections that span 25 meters or longer. WiGig is designed for links of 5 meters or shorter, and for P2P connections rather than, say, an access point supporting several devices simultaneously. Meanwhile, NFC is better suited for low-bandwidth connections over distances of 4 centimeters to 0.2 meters.

“I wouldn’t position these as an either-or,” says Grodzinsky. “WiGig is designed to complement Wi-Fi, not replace it. We were built on top of the 802.11 spec so that everything we’re doing is fully compliant with Wi-Fi. That will allow you to build tri-band products, which will have 60 GHz, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz.”

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Redirecting web pages is an oft used term in search engine optimization. In fact, it is important for all webmasters carrying out search engine optimization of their sites to learn about redirecting web pages. Redirecting a page holds much importance in SEO. This is because inbound links to a web page are considered by search engine ranking algorithms while ranking websites. Therefore, one must know what it is meant by redirecting a page and what are the different techniques of redirecting a page.

Redirect Image Via Shutterstock

What is meant by redirecting a page?

Whenever a web browser or search engine crawler requests a page at a particular URL on any web site, the web server on which that site is hosted tries to locate the page at that URL so that it can return the corresponding HTML to the requester. Now if that web page exists then the server returns the HTML needed to render that page . It also returns a 200 HTTP status in the header of the response. With this status, the requesting browser or crawler gets the message that the page was found and its HTML was returned.

Sometimes some web pages need to be deleted or moved to a new location. In such a case, a webmaster has two options. First, he can all all future requests for the old web page to be returned to a 404 HTTP status that indicates that the page could not be found. Second, he can ask the browser or search engine crawler to request the page using a new URL. There is a temporary redirect as well as a permanent redirect.

Advantages of redirecting web pages

1. First of all, a redirect lets a site to inform visitors that the page or entire site has been moved to a different web address. It also tells the visitors that the redirection process is automatic and the new address is displayed on the browser.

2. With the help of a permanent redirect, one can perform actions like switching domains, redirecting a part of the website to a new domain or redirecting a folder on your site to a new folder.

Different techniques to redirect a web page

There are different techniques available for redirecting a web page. Some of these techniques are discussed here in detail.

1. Browser side redirection using Javascript

JavaScript can be used to redirect web pages. This technique is useful as it makes the redirection conditioned. This is how drop down menus are created. You can also redirect a page without a condition. This is used to cloak the content. By cloaking the content, it will still be interpreted by the search engines as they can penetrate through the JavaScript and at the same time users will be swiftly redirected. Redirecting a page using JavaScript is more instant than ‘instant’ meta-refresh redirection if the code is placed in the header because meta-refresh waits for the page to load first. These days search engines know how to look for redirection in Javascript. Therefore, you can choose to encrypt the script or load it from a remote file as per your convenience.

/* example */
window.location = "http://www.google.com/";


2. Browser side redirection using HTML

You can use HTML to redirect a page. Here you can use the meta-refresh tag to redirect a page immediately or after a period of time. However, one thing that should be borne in mind is that some search engines penalize pages that use page redirection technique with short delays. This is because it could appear as a cloaking attempt. Cloaking means that human users are redirected too quickly to read the page. However, this technique can be useful to redirect to a different site of yours or directly to a sponsors page, with your referral code after 350 seconds. The idea behind this is that a surfer has your site in a stack of windows or tabs and as he closes them he will stop at the new page and look at it.

/* example */
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://www.the-domain-you-want-to-redirect-to.com">


3. Browser side redirection using Flash

If you are comfortable working with Flash, then browser side redirection using Flash will be pretty easy for you. To create an instant redirect, you can make your own flash movie with one frame that has a single transparent area in it. Now you need to paste the relevant code into the actionscript pane for that frame. In case you want to redirect after a period of time, you can make a movie of the appropriate length and paste the code into the actionscript pane of the last frame.

/* example */
var url:String = "http://www.google.com"
var urlRequest:URLRequest = new URLRequest(url);
navigateToURL(urlRequest, "_blank");


4. Server side page redirection using PHP

This technique can be useful if you want to redirect to a different page depending on the outcome of a script. With the help of this technique and appropriate skills, you can redirect to a joke page on a Sunday, political news on a Monday, Books review on a Tuesday and so on. However, one thing that you should keep in mind is that you must call the function before any text or HTML is sent to the browser. Redirect will fail with an error message if you call the function after the redirect.

/* example */
header("Location: http://domain.com/");


5. Hidden Browser side redirection using Iframe and JavaScript

When it comes to search engine optimization some people are too wary of search engines finding their pages are redirected. If you are one of those then this is a good method for you. All you need to do is to put an iframe in the page you want to redirect from. After this, in the source attribute of the iframe, put the url of the page you wish to redirect to.

When you do this, the browser loads the new page into the iframe. Then the page is executed in framebreaker and the new page is displayed in place of the one that was originally loading. Thus you can quickly redirect a page using this Javascript technique

6. Server side redirection using .htaccess 301 on Unix servers

Result Code 301 is the only way to redirect to a new page which is properly supported by search engines. It is also known as permanent redirect. With this, Google not only transfers all the traffic but also any page rank to the new page. The .htaccess files are simple text files that contain instructions for the server on your site. You can either have one such file in every directory where it is needed or a single file in the document root directory for the entire site. In case you already have a .htaccess file in your directory then you can simply add any redirects to the top of the file.

/* example */
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]


7. Page redirection from any point in a PHP script

The PHP script gives you an option of redirecting your page at any given interval. You may utilize this technique if in case you stumble upon the awkward header which the script may produce sporadically.

/* example */
header("Location: http://domain.com/");
exit;


8. Server side redirection using ASP and ASP.net on windows servers

The only way to redirect to a new page which is properly supported by search engines is Result code 301. And it is known as the permanent redirect. It will make sure that Google transfers not only all the traffic but also any page rank to the new page.

/* example */
/* ASP */
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/"

These are some of the good techniques that you can use to redirect your web pages. Make sure that you use the right code.

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Tonight, it is very very very *very* hard to write about anything but this. The tragic loss that we all felt today – we lost an inventor, an icon, an idol, an entrepreneur, and a great person. RIP Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011). I don’t care who you are – his genius touched you, and changed your life and the lives of those around you. There isn’t much to say. It’s a very sad day for everyone. All we can really say is Just, Thanks Steve. and Farewell. I hope that you all step back in light of this tragedy, and look at what Steve taught us. Look at yourself, and your life, and ask yourself in the mirror like steve did every day “if today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” – Whenever that answer is no, start changing things. I aspire (as a lot of us do) to one day be a great of an impact on the world, and people, for the better – as he was.

As this day will surely be a historic tribute day to Steve Jobs’ Legacy & the amazing company he left us with, Apple. I am just keeping it short and sweet, this is merely my thanks to the man himself, showcasing some of my favorite memories of Steve & Apple over the years, and links to some other resources I found that will help you get to know more about him (If any of this is duplicate content from anywhere else, I apologize beforehand, at this time I don’t think really matters, we are all just showing our love for our favorite Brand – I just put together some of the best resources I could think of). feel free to join in with me in saying thanks (as the rest of the internet, and the world, surely will).

Truly an amazing man. He will never be forgotten. He forever changed our world.

I leave you with a link to some amazing quotes from the life of this amazing man.

A Collection of 60 Inspirational Steve Jobs Quotes About Life, Design and Apple

Now go out and make the world a better place starting today. It’s what Steve would have wanted!

Update 3:30AM: I just wanted to link to Robert Scoble’s post about all of this, he has actual pictures and video of Apple Headquarters since he was physically there yesterday, kind of puts it all into perspective and gives you a family feel. as we all know, we are all part of the Apple family for life. Here is the post:

My apology to Tim Cook and remembering Steve Jobs

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