10 Gigabit upgrade helps college modernize network

While the tech industry looks ahead to 40 Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, lots of IT shops are still undergoing the transition to 10 Gig networks.   At the College of New Jersey, a school with 6,000 students, the IT staff upgraded its core network to 10 Gigabit bandwidth one year ago to improve performance and replace out-of-date equipment. "With 10 Gigabit, it seems like its time has come," says Alan Bowen, who currently serves as the college's manager of IT security and was previously the network systems engineer. "Its price per port has come down." The college has been buying network equipment from Extreme Networks for almost a decade and was ready for an upgrade to the vendor's new switches last year. (Extreme last week dismissed CEO Mark Canepa and 9% of the company's workforce, in an effort to improve the company's bottom line.) "Our issue for upgrading was that we had aging equipment," Bowen says. "This equipment was installed in August 2000, and this stuff ages in dog years. The new 10 Gigabit capabilities help deliver performance to widely used applications, like a student information system, e-learning systems, and payroll. "We need Internet connectivity to our users. It was well past its prime." The college spent about $300,000 for upgrades including Extreme's BlackDiamond 8800 Series 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, as well as the vendor's Summit X450a switches for a new distribution layer to create redundancy throughout the campus network.

We do a lot of Web 2.0 stuff that's mostly hosted on campus," and use software-as-a-service applications from outside the network, he says. Gigabit Ethernet is still good enough for many academic and residential buildings, he says. Internet bandwidth is the college's biggest limiting factor, Bowen says, but he didn't need 10 Gigabit speeds throughout the whole network. For many users, "the demand isn't there for faster bandwidth," Bowen says. "When we look at port utilization, we hardly ever see more than 100 megabits of throughput." For the upgrade, Bowen stuck with Extreme because a big-name vendor like Cisco probably would have been two-thirds more expensive, he says. Adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet is increasing rapidly, with worldwide vendor revenue jumping from $384 million in 2004 to $1.2 billion in 2006 and up to $2.5 billion in 2008, according to Dell'Oro research. Another important factor for the College of New Jersey was Extreme's Ethernet Automatic Protection Switching (EAPS) technology, which provides rapid recovery after link and node failures.

A standard for 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet is being considered by IEEE, and is on track for approval in June 2010. Products should hit the market by the second half of 2010, according to Extreme Networks. Today, 10 Gigabit Ethernet is becoming pervasive in the core network, whereas Gigabit Ethernet is still ruling the edge, according to the vendor. "One of the factors for 10 Gigabit migration is cost," Nguyen says. "If I want to make an investment and upgrade the network today, I want to make sure that investment will last for five to seven years." Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin Customers are still buying more 1 Gigabit products than 10 Gigabit, but revenue for 10 Gig should more than double by 2013, says Huy Nguyen, director of convergence technologies for Extreme Networks.

5 things missing in VMware's new virtual desktop app, View 4

With VMware Inc.'s release of View 4 last week, the company is promising two things: Full desktop performance at a desktop price tag. Moreover, the cost of building out a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), including servers, storage, network bandwidth, thin clients and software licenses, has generally outweighed potential savings in IT labor and security costs. Desktop virtualization requires huge amounts of data to be constantly streamed from server to client.

That is a "huge, huge change" in View 4, asserted Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer for VMware. Moreover, the "acquisition cost barrier" has been "neutralized." "I don't see how a CIO with a large desktop population doesn't look at this," Jackson said in an interview this week. View 4 is so efficient that some apps run faster virtually than when loaded from a local hard drive, he said. For all the sizzle, analysts cite five ways the steak isn't fully cooked. 1. Bandwidth bandwidth bandwidth. Chris Wolf, an analyst with the Burton Group, said he and his clients have tested the View 4 beta.

View 4 uses a new compression protocol called PC-over-IP (PCoIP) licensed from Teradici Corp. Over local area networks, PCoIP "performs very well," he said. Also, PCoIP natively encrypts all data traffic, according to Wolf, meaning that companies can't use WAN traffic accelerators such as those from Riverbed Technology Inc. But PCoIP is still enough of a bandwidth hog that trying to deliver high-definition video or support multiple monitors to remote users or branch offices over wide area networks remains "impractical," Wolf said. Finally, VMware doesn't offer a VDI appliance, such as those from Kaviza Inc. , to enable acceptable remote performance, said Wolf. One way that VMware could deliver better performance to remote desktop as well as mobile laptop users is by allowing View 4 to run locally and synchronizing only occasionally.

That forced some of Burton's clients, for now, to rule out View 4 for development centers in India, he said. 2. Lack of local virtualization. That's what VMware's Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) will do. That is later than Citrix's equivalent, called Xenclient, is scheduled to arrive, said independent analyst Brian Madden, as well as already available apps from Neocleus Inc. and Virtual Computer Inc. Problem is, VMware announced CVP more than a year ago and doesn't plan to deliver it until the middle of next year, Jackson said. Such client hypervisors "will be a big, big deal for 2010," he said. 3. Full Windows 7 support.

He declined to offer a timetable but Madden expects VMware to be targeting June next year. Despite being released weeks after Windows 7, View 4 still only offers beta support for Microsoft's latest OS, said Raj Mallempati, a product marketing manager at VMware. But planning for PC deployments can take years, meaning that VMware could be too late for some enterprises that have already started their planning. "You want to get in real early so you can be part of any PC migration project," Wolf said. No one is making solid plans until the middle of next year," he said. Madden somewhat disagreed. But "VMware needs to have their stuff together by then, or else they are screwed." 4. Lack of application personalization.

Think bookmarks, passwords and Web site history in your Web browser, or the macros and settings and list of recently opened documents in Microsoft Word. Where Madden criticizes View 4 is its inability today to let users keep their application preferences and history. VMware announced at VMworld in September that it is licensing the Virtual Profiles software from RTO Software. That "is just another reason I'd chill for six months," Madden said. 5. Unless you go big and compromise, costs are higher than advertised. There's no timetable for when it will be integrated into View 4, said Mallempati.

VMware is partnering with EMC Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. to deliver an all-in-one server-storage-software package that doubles the number of virtual desktops to 16 per server CPU core, resulting in a cost of $750 per PC. (see PDF white paper) That compares well with the typical $600 to $800 cost of buying a new Windows 7 PC. And going with View 4 allows customers to slice their annual desktop operational costs by half, Jackson said. To attain $750 per PC, the VMware-EMC-Cisco solution requires companies to deploy it to at least 2,048 users, Mallempati confirmed. There are two big caveats, however. That results in a minimum outlay of $1.54 million. But Madden said desktop virtualization remains a "limited niche use case," restricted to deskbound, always connected employees such as financial traders, call center workers, and the like.

Wolf said he has some clients looking to roll out desktop virtualization in a big way in the next three to five years: 40,000 users for one company, and 150,000 for another. Coming up with at least 2,000 workers willing to be moved to desktop virtualization may be a stretch for many companies. That's all fine and good, Wolf said, but it increases companies' operational costs, sometimes significantly, as they deal with failing hard drives and fans, and support the PC's native operating system. For another, VMware-EMC-Cisco's $750-per-desktop calculation assumes that companies recycle existing PCs into thin clients for View 4, Mallempati said. Buying new thin client devices from vendors such as Wyse Technology Inc. to reduce administration and service overhead will add about $450 per user for multimedia-enabled devices, he said.

Wolf's conclusion? "Price is still a significant barrier to adoption."

Five Reasons Windows XP Has About a Year to Live

For all the stories about enterprises holding off on Windows 7 deployments, Windows XP's dominance in the enterprise is at the beginning of the end, says one industry analyst. Windows 7 Bible: Your Complete Guide to the Next Version of Windows Indeed, Windows XP still powers almost 80 percent of commercial PCs, according to a survey of 665 IT decision-makers that was part of the Forrester report entitled "Windows 7 Commercial Adoption Outlook." Nevertheless, many factors point to XP's demise. This will not happen overnight, writes Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray in a new research report, but there are enough reasons for IT managers to "shake the status quo, and finally end Windows XP's corporate reign." XP, now an eight-year-old OS, "has delivered the compatibility, security, and reliability that firms had hoped for and to this day remains the desktop standard for most businesses and government agencies," Gray writes. Two-thirds (66 percent) of the 655 surveyed IT decision-makers from North American and European enterprises and SMBs are planning to migrate to Windows 7 eventually, although most don't have firm plans yet.

Forrester also urges that companies should prepare for employee requests for Windows 7 as it becomes more popular with consumers. Additionally, the research shows that 51 percent of respondents plan to have Windows 7 as the primary OS on their PCs within 12 months. Here are five other key factors that Forrester believes will loosen Windows XP's grip on the enterprise and make way for Windows 7. Businesses Are Supporting Old Infrastructure Forrester's Gray writes that because of the recession, IT managers needed to lower costs by extending the life of existing desktops and laptops. For global companies that support thousands of apps, compatibility testing can take up to 18 months. Many also held off on hardware upgrades because they wanted them to coincide with a Windows 7 deployment. So if they've been testing in anticipation of Windows 7's release, full deployments will conclude by the end of 2010. Windows XP Support Is Waning Since April of this year, Windows XP SP2 has been in the extended support stage, which means support is no longer free and only includes security updates and patches.

All support for Windows XP SP2 and SP3 will end in April 2014. Windows XP Availability Will Get Pinched The ability to buy Windows XP machines will change after Windows 7 becomes generally available this week, Gray writes. Next July, XP SP3 will enter extended support as well. With the release of Windows 7's first service pack, scheduled to be a year or so after its initial release, OEM licenses bundled with every PC will no longer have downgrade rights to XP. This means that to deploy Windows XP on a new PC, companies will have to purchase volume license copies of Windows along with the new PCs or use existing, unused Windows volume licenses. Some features that Forrester recommends IT departments prepare for include: DirectAccess, which lets remote workers connect to corporate networks without the use of a VPN; BranchCache, which speeds up access to networks in remote offices that are away from corporate headquarters; BitLocker To Go, an extension of the BitLocker hard-drive encryption feature introduced in Vista that will now protect removable devices like external hard drives and USB thumb drives; AppLocker, which aims to protect users from running unauthorized software; and federated search, which promises to simplify access to data across local and remote networks. Business Reasons Encourage Upgrade to Windows 7 Forrester has found that the enterprise features in Windows 7 will help companies improve networking and security and ultimately cut costs.

Improved Client Virtualization Can Accelerate Deployment Plans Windows 7 ships with Windows Virtual PC and Windows XP Mode, which provide the ability to run apps not yet compatible with Windows 7 in an XP-compatible virtual machine. Shane O'Neill is a senior writer at CIO.com. Moreover, customers with software assurance agreements can use MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack), a subscription-based suite of apps that includes virtualization technologies allowing IT pros to deploy and manage virtual images, "thus removing the last barriers to deploy Windows 7," writes Gray. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/smoneill. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter at twitter.com/CIOonline.

Microsoft pushes Bing in China with mobile portal

Microsoft stepped up promotion of Bing in China with the launch of a Web services platform for mobile phones this week, a possible step toward challenging the dominance of Google and Baidu.com in the country. Bing has not caught on in China and Microsoft has done little to promote it in the country. The Microsoft portal, an effort to spur use of its services in a market crowded by local competitors, offers downloads of mobile clients for Bing and Windows Live Messenger, along with instructions on how to use Microsoft services, including Hotmail, from a mobile phone. However, Bing, launched in June, has grown quickly in the U.S. and attracted about 9 percent of online searches there last month, according to Internet monitoring companies.

Baidu and Google together account for as much as 95 percent of online searches done in China, leaving Yahoo, a range of local search engines, and any new players like Bing to compete for the remaining slice of the market. China's online search market is dominated by local player Baidu, with Google in a distant second place. The Bing mobile client lets users search for local information such as maps, restaurant locations and weather forecasts. Bing has strong potential but will face difficulty competing with Baidu and Google in the near term, said Ben Cavender, senior analyst at China Market Research Group in Shanghai. Microsoft "will continue to strengthen and expand the service scope of its mobile Internet products," the company said in a statement.

While Baidu and Google have well-established search services for free music downloads that keep Chinese users coming back, Microsoft so far has done little to localize Bing, Cavender said. Bing did not make a list of China's top 10 most-visited search engines in August, as posted on the Web site of local online traffic analyzer CR-Nielsen.

Internet TV could boom in the next few years, study says

Internet-enabled TV sets could see wider adoption in the next few years as viewers get comfortable with the idea of running widgets on TV screens, according to a study released by Ernst & Young on Thursday. TV widgets are designed to pull selective content from the Internet to complement TV watching. Widgets - or mini-applications - are already being used in devices like mobile phones and computers to run light applications, and those applications could reach TV sets, the analyst firm said in the study.

For example, users can view weather information on TV or buy products advertised on TV from online stores. Web-connected TV shipments could total less than 500,000 in 2009, but top 6 million by 2013, E&Y said in the study, citing statistics from Parks Associates. Many consumers consider it an "appealing" idea to mesh TV with information from the Internet, according to the study. Widgets could also be the glue that brings together Internet and TV content. Many Web sites and technology companies are developing an ecosystem to bring content from the Internet and TV together.

Broadcast TV is already competing with the Web for viewership, and widgets could facilitate content searches through both mediums, giving more entertainment options to viewers. Myspace.com, for example, has developed a widget that blends TV with its social-networking offerings. Users don't need to rely on a browser to access MySpace content. TV watchers could exchange e-mail messages or browse photos on MySpace by activating a widget at the bottom of the TV screen. TVs and chips, for instance, are also being developed to build Web-enabled TVs. Sony, Samsung and LG have said select flat-panel high-definition TV models would be able to run widgets or download movies from online entertainment services like Netflix. Intel is also working with companies like CBS and Cinemanow to bring widgets to TVs. Web-enabled TV has struggled over the past 15 years since Time Warner Cable launched the iTV service in Orlando, E&Y said.

Intel last week announced the CE4100 media processor, which enables the use of Internet and multimedia applications on TVs, Intel said. Ever since, it has seen many iterations, with companies like AOL, BSkyB, RespondTV, Hewlett-Packard and Apple trying to bring the Internet to TV through devices like set-top boxes or adapters. Widgets for TV use also need to be adopted by television programming and cable operators. The success of widgets depends on applications that users will want to have on their TVs. For example, one-click access to on-demand content from online movie stores is well-suited for widgets. The operators will look to monetize widgets by developing an ad sales model around it, which could face some challenges, the study found. Conflicting advertising could also appear on a TV screen and widget at the same time, which could affect ad sales models.

For example, viewers could migrate their attention from TV shows to widgets, which could affect the ratings of a program.

On Facebook and Twitter: Your Medical Troubles?

Next time you're recovering from trip to the emergency room, keep an eye on the young doctors tending to you. A survey of medical schools published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 13 percent of respondents reported breaches of doctor-patient confidentiality, and 60 percent reported "unprofessional content" posted online. They might be chatting about your case on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs.

Many of the unprofessional postings cover the kinds of things you'd expect from young folks, such as drinking and obscenities. According to the Associated Press, one of these incidents described a patient's case on Facebook, and another involved a student requesting an inappropriate relationship with a patient. But in some instances, students went into detail about cases, to the point that patients could be identified. Survey responses came anonymously from school deans, so while instances of confidentiality breaches are rare, it's likely that more violations aren't being reported. Most of the medical students that behaved badly online were given a warning, but 7 percent of cases resulted in expulsion. For example, the study's lead author, Dr. Katherine Chretien of the Washington, D.C., VA Medical Center, searched YouTube and found students playing a prank with a dead body, though it's not known whether the body was real.

The bigger concern is that 62 percent of the medical schools don't have policies to govern how students are allowed use social networking sites. As anyone who's vented about work online knows, sites like Facebook and Twitter can be a good outlet. And the vast majority of those schools aren't actively working on the issue, either. It can even be productive, but students need to be told when they enroll that discussing medical details online is off limits.