Networld+Interop, Day 3
Greetings from Las Vegas. The show is wrapping up nicely today with may of our staff members heading homeward. Mike DeMaria and I recorded our mid-week, This Week at Network Computing show yesterday, but thanks to some incredibly pathetic line quality in the hotel room this morning, I was unable to post the show. May apologies. We'll have it live for you tomorrow morning without fail.
Meanwhile, from the show this morning, here are a few of the stories we're following:
- "Blue802, Blue802, Hut, Hut!" Feeling our pain, two wireless vendors, Intersil and Silicon Wave, this week unveiled PCI card that could broadcast both WiFi and Bluetooth simultaneously -- a feat unheralded. Code named Blue802, this chipset doesn't actually transmit both access methods simultaneously. Instead it simply does the frequency-hoping shuffle employed by spread-spectrum devices, flip-flopping back and forth between the two technologies...very cool indeed. Let's just hope this one makes it to market.
- Cisco Goes to 11. In its struggle to improve Web content switching performance, Cisco today announced new versions of its Content Switching Module for the Catalyst 6509. Sporting improved density, this new module will supposedly marshall even more SSL connections than its predecessor. Also of note is a new version of Cisco's Content Transformation Engine (1400), which performs a very nice trick in automatically converting Web pages into portable, non-PC formats. (Hint to CMP IT department:Every self-respective Web site should have one of these.)
- Big Blue Girds for Grid Computing. At the keynote today, IBM's technology guru, Wladawsky-Berger, pointed out an obvious problem. With the Internet, folks who know nothing (or should know nothing) about managing networking technology must attempt to understand and deal with many networking issues. The answer to this problem, however, is not so apparent. According to Wladawsky-Berger, using open standards and Web Services (there's that phrase again), companies can participate in something called Grid Computing. In doing so, companies can just plug into "the grid," building and running applications without fear of incompatibility or connectivity problems.
"Grid computing makes managing the IT infrastructure the responsibility of IT professionals instead of people who have better things to do, like run a business or write applications," explained Wladawsky-Berger.
If anyone out there knows what he's talking about, please let us know.
Posted by Brad Shimmin at 10:54:10 AM
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