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Byte and Switch

Network Computing Blog


Riverbed Ramps Up Disaster RecoveryToday
Riverbed's two new SteelHead appliance models, the 7050-L (large) and 7050-M (medium) add to the upper end of the company's appliance line, increasing WAN throughput and connection performance as well as enhancing disaster recovery fault tolerant options. The 7050-M lists for $179,995 and the 7050-L lists for $234,995 and will be available in Q1, 2010.

The Steelhead 7050 appliances are both 3U units that support up to 4Gbps LAN bandwidth and 1 Gbps WAN bandwidth. There is a 100GB partition set aside for the RiOS Services Platform (RSP), which runs virtual machines on the Steelheads. The smaller 7050-M appliance ships with 16 hot-swappable 160GB SSD drives, providing 2.2TB of data store capacity and 32GB of RAM. The 7050-M can support 75,000 TCP connections. The larger 7050-L has 30 160GB SSD drives for 4.4TB of data storage and 48 GB of RAM, and it can support 100,000 TCP sessions. The appliances have 10Gb Ethernet NIC's needed to connect to a 10Gb switch.

The Steelheads use a fault-tolerant data store. If one or more SSD drives fail, the Steelheads will stop using them for data storage. The purpose of the drives is to simply cache network data and not persistent storage. If a drive fails, you simply lose the cached data that will have to be re-warmed. The SSDs are hot-swappable through the front of the appliances, so replacing failed drives is easy and doesn't impact network traffic. In addition, Steelheads can be clustered side-by-side or in-line with



IBM Rolls Out Power7 As Rivals ConvergeToday

Call it Stack Wars. While competitors play tag-team, IBM this week reminded the market that it's been delivering tightly bundled systems on its own for years and introduced its latest weapon in the race toward fully integrated business engines--Power7-based servers. "This is not a chip announcement," insisted Rodney Adkins, senior VP for IBM's Systems and Technology Group, at a press conference at Manhattan's opulent Mandarin Oriental hotel.

Adkins said the Power7 processor is just one part, though a key one, of a new family of IBM servers designed for a world where everything from toasters to 747s are computerized and online--and businesses will have to deal with all that data. "Computing is becoming a lot more pervasive," said Adkins, noting IBM expects there'll be a trillion connected objects on the planet by next year. Financial institutions, healthcare providers, and other organizations will have to handle and make sense of the resulting information tsunami and will "require a new type of performance" from there hardware to do so, said Adkins.

With that, IBM unveiled four new servers built from the ground up to withstand the data demands of a world envisioned by the company's Smarter Planet campaign, where everything is connected to everything. The Power 780, Power 770, Power 755 are enterprise systems, while the Power 750 Express is for mid-market customers who don't need the horsepower and capacity of the higher-end models. All are based on the new Pow

Cisco Overlay Network Bridges Distributed Data CentersYesterday
Cisco continues its march to complete its Data Center 3.0 vision with a proprietary method to interconnect remote data centers called Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV), extending a layer 2 Ethernet network over a WAN. The claim is that OTV is simpler. Cisco also counted 10Gb Base-T Ethernet modules for the Catalyst 6500 and 4900 switches, and new IO modules for the Nexus 7000. Additionally, they are furthering their Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) product with VMware as well as automatic recognition, acceleration and optimization of SaaS services.

Organizations with multiple data centers typically face expensive and time-consuming work when they want to bring new services on-line or change existing services. The time to get a new circuit up and running, whether it's Carrier Ethernet or MPLS, can be weeks or months. Many WAN service plan changes incur additional costs, and that's just to get the network in place. Then, services have to be enabled. Cisco OTV is an overlay network that the company claims can be provisioned in minutes. Since OTV is an overlay on top of IP, the traffic can be routed transparently over any IP-based WAN connection. OTV is built to have low-management overhead, replication, is fault-tolerant and includes multi-path, optimized paths between nodes. OTV is available on Nexus 7000 in April, 2010 through a software upgrade.
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Short on details, OTV uses a proprietary protocol to encapsulate Ethern




Arts College Designs High-Tech Network For Voice, Data And VideoYesterday
Known for its art, design, architecture and film studies, the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) may not be what comes to mind first when thinking of high-tech campuses. However, the private college has built a savvy, high-speed IP network that supports thousands of students and faculty across multiple campuses, including a multitude of applications including voice, rich media, high-definition video, computer clusters, or render farms built to render computer-generated imagery (CGI) and more.

"Technology is one of the core strengths of the college," says Brad Grant, SCAD's executive director of Campus Technology Systems. "An investment in high-performance networking using products like the Brocade BigIron and SX series devices allow us to extend services like 802.11n networking, render farms, high-definition video storage systems, and voice and video conferencing applications to our entire college community, regardless of location."

Grant says the most powerful proof of the network's efficiency and value is the size of staff relative to the size of the network, which links the Savannah and Atlanta campuses, supports about 10,000 students and 2000 faculty and staff who use it a daily basis, and in Savannah alone, consists of over 100 miles of fiber.

The network also supports students and staff in Lacoste, France where SCAD offers an e-learning program. In the fall of 2010, it will open a satellite campus in Hong Kong. "For this large n





LegalTech Roundup: New E-Mail Archive Software And MoreFebruary 5

A pile of new e-discovery products and services were announced around the LegalTech show this week. E-discovery is now a core concern for IT operations because of the importance of electronically stored information (ESI) in today's lawsuits, and it's the responsibility of IT to find and store this information. We summarize five products below, including the launch of a new e-mail archive product with an e-discovery focus, Kroll Ontrack's Ontrack Compass.

E-mail makes up a large portion of the ESI that companies are required to find, preserve and analyze in a legal matter, so the product is targeted at organizations in highly litigious and regulated markets, such as financial services and pharmaceuticals. Kroll says the archive can scale to over 100,000 mailboxes. Ontrack Compass includes common features found in other archives, such as the ability to stub messages so that users can have a pointer to archived e-mail in their inbox. It uses single-instance storage and compression to conserve disk space. As you'd expect with an archive aimed at the discovery market, it lets administrators apply legal holds, exports messages in a variety of formats and conducts extensive searches. The company also plans to release modules that let administrators and legal counsel conduct early case assessment on archived messages.

Kroll may have a hard time gaining significant traction with this product. The market is saturated with archiving products, and there are fe