Ciena Packs New 10-Gig Punch

The 5160 and 5142 Service Aggregation Switches are aimed at making it more economical for service providers to offer 10-Gig Ethernet services, a rapidly growing category of Ethernet today, says Mike Adams, VP of Product & Technical Marketing at Ciena. The new boxes also target the internal bandwidth needs of large enterprises in datacenters, and they are designed for outdoor deployment so service providers can push more bandwidth closer to their customers and use these switches as aggregation points.

via Ciena Packs New 10-Gig Punch | Light Reading.

By deploying pairs of 5160s in core network locations such as Central Offices, Ritter has been able to have carrier-grade redundancy with dual homing for fiber-optic rings while achieving the same throughput as a much more expensive 10 Gig core switch, he says.

OpenStack is not for the enterprise

OpenStack backers scoff at the notion that the open source platform is not meant for enteprises. “We’ve seen significant traction from service providers globally, but we’ve also seen significant demand for OpenStack on-premise, hosted private and hybrid cloud by both medium and large enterprises,” wrote Lauren Sell, who manages public relations for OpenStack. Bloomberg, Fidelity, Best Buy, Cisco WebEx and Comcast have all shared their experiences using OpenStack, she notes.

via VMware CEO: OpenStack is not for the enterprise – Network World.

Vyatta.org Community

The free community Vyatta Core software(VC) is an award-winning open source network operating system providing advanced IPv4 and IPv6 routing, stateful firewalling, IPSec and SSL OpenVPN, and more. When you add Vyatta to a standard x86 hardware system, you can create an enterprise grade network appliance that easily scales from DSL to 10Gbps. Vyatta is also optimized to run in VMware, Citrix XenServer, Xen, KVM, and Hyper V, providing networking and security services to virtual machines and cloud computing environments. Vyatta has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times, has a community of hundreds of thousands of registered users and counts dozens of fortune 500 businesses among its commercial customers.

via Welcome to Vyatta.org | Vyatta.org Community.

On this site, you’ll find all the downloads, tools, documentation, and community resources to help you get up and running with your own Vyatta-based system. Ask questions in the Forums. Propose new features and vote on existing proposals. Participate and have fun. We have been working together with our community for over five years to continue to enhance the world’s leading software-based network OS.

Mobile Grabs $813.6M in February Funding

TruPhone: This London-based company develops low cost voice-over-IP software. The company got $118 million in February from the Russian business tycoon Roman Abramovich, who is currently worth over $10 billion, according to Forbes.

via Light Reading – Mobile Grabs $813.6M in February Funding.

From: http://www.truphone.com/en-GB/Business/

Truphone is the mobile phone network specially designed for international businesses.

  •  Save between 30-90% on voice, text and data compared with major UK operators
  •  Enjoy price plans that cover usage in the UK, plus Europe, the US and Australia
  •  Experience business-class coverage in 220 countries
  • Multiple international numbers on a single handset

  • The Leading Open Source Data Center Automation and Configuration Management Tool

    Puppet Labs’ IT automation software enables system administrators to deliver the operational agility and efficiency of cloud computing at enterprise-class service levels, scaling from handfuls of nodes on-premise to tens of thousands in the cloud. Puppet powers thousands of companies, including Twitter, Yelp, eBay, Zynga, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Google, Disney, Citrix, Oracle, and Viacom.

    via Puppet Labs: The Leading Open Source Data Center Automation and Configuration Management Tool | Puppet Labs.

    Why do Enterprises Favor Centralized SIP Trunking Topologies?

    Forrester Consulting estimates a 401% ROI for a typical large organization that deploys a centralized SIP trunking topology using Acme Packet E-SBCs. The Total Economic Impact of Acme Packet’s Session Border Controller, which is based on separate and independent research by Forrester, indicates organizations save by eliminating underutilized TDM trunks serving each location as well as lower per-minute rates that apply to VoIP usage. In fact, each of the customers that Forrester interviewed reported a 40%-60% reduction in monthly service fees upon replacing T1/E1 TDM trunk lines with SIP trunks. Obviously, savings is directly proportional to the number of TDM trunks eliminated.

    via Why do Enterprises Favor Centralized SIP Trunking Topologies?.

    The Forgotten Secrets Of The Enterprise Giants: Virality, Word Of Mouth, And Other Radical Experiments

    Did you know that Salesforce initially launched with an activity-based pricing model, where the first two seats were perpetually free? It was designed to get critical mass in a company to soften it up for an inside sales call — and it worked great. This was their sales model up to about $17 million in sales, until the dot-com crash wiped out fundraising opportunities right at a moment when they had high customer churn combined with a major spend on inside sales, creating a cashflow nightmare.

    via The Forgotten Secrets Of The Enterprise Giants: Virality, Word Of Mouth, And Other Radical Experiments | TechCrunch.

    If there’s one lesson that the old school continuously fails to teach, it is stop listening to the so-called (and self-styled) experts. Do your own research, talk to the original sources, and just go out and build your crazy thing.

    Alcatel-Lucent Takes SDN to the Enterprise

    AlcaLu wants to see policy infused into SDN early on. Ideally, the network would tap a user profile — or a virtual machine’s profile — to help it make on-the-fly decisions about what to do with traffic coming from (or being sent to) a virtualized application.

    via Alcatel-Lucent Takes SDN to the Enterprise – IP & Convergence – Telecom News Analysis – Light Reading Service Provider IT.

    Better Defense Through Open-Source Intelligence

    Reconnaissance, while commonly overlooked and discounted, is a key phase providing successful targeted attackers (and penetration testers) with information about the target, the target’s server and application technologies in use, employees, location, and much more. Often called OSINT, or open-source intelligence because it uses publicly available sources, the recon phase is anything that can help the attacker obtain his goal. Security pros can leverage the same tools and techniques as the attackers to identify unintentionally exposed devices on the Internet and users leaking sensitive information via social networking sites, and address those issues before they’re used during an actual attack.

    via Tech Insight: Better Defense Through Open-Source Intelligence – Dark Reading.

    There’s also the excellent Shodan computer search engine that contains service banners from Internet-accessible servers all over the world. Security pros can find all sorts of juicy information, like internal network and host names exposed through DNS, or unintentionally exposed services that Shodan has found without scanning or touching the target network.