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KVM solutions offer greater computer control – Network Accessories

December 22nd, 2011
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Businesses can use KVM solutions to allow multiple computers to share a keyboard, video monitor and mouse.

Items such as KVM switches and Cat 5 extender varieties can help businesses make the most of their IT hardware, and keep their physical infrastructure under control.

Users simply need to connect their monitor, keyboard, and mouse to the console port on the KVM device, and then hook up the computers to the other ports using network cables.

Control is switched from one computer to another through the switch or buttons on the KVM device, giving IT managers and other business users maximum flexibility with their IT.

This may be able to help them increase efficiency, or raise productivity within the workplace – both of which are particularly useful in the current economic climate.

The number of computer which can be connected varies according to each KVM device, but some switches cater for up to 512 individual units.

Source:http://www.comms-express.com/news/networking-equipment/kvm-solutions-offer-greater-computer-control-801246055/

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IOCELL NetDISK 351UNE Network Storage Device

November 29th, 2011
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The first thing that IOCELL Networks wants you to know about the NetDISK 351UNE is that it is not a NAS; instead it is a network-direct-attached-storage (NDAS) device. It does not function as a server, and there are some distinct benefits that come with that. For one: size, cost and complexity go way down. Two: it does not use TCP/IP to connect to your network, which eliminates all common TCP/IP-based methods for hacking into your data. Three: it’s faster, since there is so much less overhead to manage. Sometimes, less is more. Benchmark Reviews has looked at several full-range NAS products in the last few months, now let’s investigate what a more tightly focused approach can provide.

The NetDISK 351UNE uses a proprietary Lean Packet Exchange (LPX) protocol to transfer data to and from your network, and this protocol is contained in a driver package that must be loaded on each computer that desires access to the data store. Before you balk at that, it’s the same with printers, scanners, or any other peripheral device on your network, so don’t despair. There are advantages, such as the fact that no one is likely to hack into your LPX device. I’ll take that over troubles with DHCP settings, any day.

The IOCELL NetDISK 351UNE is the first logical step up from an ordinary direct-attached-storage device. Hooking an external drive up to your PC with USB 3.0 or eSATA makes that storage available on the PC it’s connected to, and it can also be accessed by other computers on the network through drive sharing. The downside is that the target PC may not always be turned on, or if it’s a laptop, it may not even be in the building. Also, folder sharing is still a little cumbersome, and introduces security risks. If you’re worried about hidden malware on your own PC, just imagine the number and the types of threats that are contained on the typical teenager’s laptop.

The 351UNE is one of the lowest cost storage units on the market to offer a full complement of interfaces – Ethernet, eSATA, and USB. The unit I tested came without a drive, and there are also units available with 1TB and 2TB drives installed at the factory. I like the ability to choose the brand and type of HDD that contains my data, so this unit is the one I would most likely purchase.

Three features dominate the discussion of network storage hardware: data capacity, data security, and data transfer speed. The current crop of NAS devices offer a dizzying array of applications to help manage and distribute the data, and provide several new ways of accessing that data. The 351UNE is content to live a simpler life, serving up files and folders with a stripped down interface that looks and acts just like a local drive. As such, it focuses intently on those three critical features: capacity, security and speed. Going back to basics also caps the cost as well, which always an advantage.

Benchmark Reviews wants to believe that smaller, faster and cheaper is better, but we remain skeptics at heart. Let’s dig in and carry out a full review of this new class of network storage products, and see how it compares to more traditional solutions.

Source:http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=849&Itemid=70

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DARPA Wants Wireless Network For Satellite Clusters

November 17th, 2011
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The Department of Defense is looking for a way to wirelessly connect a cluster of small satellites so they can communicate as one entity with facilities on the ground.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has put out a call to computer chip and electronics manufacturers to develop a networking device to achieve this for its System F6 program. Rather than a one-time, custom system, the agency hopes to reuse the F6 Technology Package for various satellite clusters it aims to launch as part of the program, it said.

Such electronics technology already exists on earth, but there is nothing comparable for space use, according to DARPA.

“Today’s space electronics are clunky,” said Paul Eremenko, DARPA program manager, in a statement. “They provide limited processing speed and capability, they’re bulky and power-hungry, and they are manufactured as bespoke, one-of-a-kind products.”

What DARPA is looking for is essentially a network-computing device to physically connect and provide switching and routing functions between the spacecraft bus, wireless inter-satellite transceivers, shared resource payloads such as computing, data storage, and mission payloads such as sensors, the agency said.
As envisioned, F6TP would act as a hardware platform running cluster-networking software, such as the network protocol stack, middleware that allows the satellite cluster to share resources, and flight and mission-specific applications.

The technology also would provide security features such as encryption to protect communications and information being shared across the cluster.
The concept behind DARPA’s F6 program is to have a group of small satellites act and function as one larger satellite, according to DARPA. This type of activity requires the sharing of a host of technology–such as communication networks and flight logic–and DARPA is eyeing open-standards-based interfaces to facilitate this unified system.

In fact, one of the three main aspects of F6 aside from F6TP and an in-orbit demonstration scheduled for 2015 is an F6 Developer’s Kit (F6DK), a set of open source, freely exportable interface standards, protocols, software and behaviors that will allow anyone interested to develop a clean-sheet module design for a satellite cluster, the agency said.

To send F6 satellites into orbit, DARPA also is working on a new launch capability that is less expensive and more efficient than technology currently used.
The agency’s Airborne Launch Assist Space Access (ALASA) program is working on a new design for sending small satellites into space independent of larger satellite payloads, which is how they are launched now.

Source:http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/mobile/231903182

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Internet Architects Warn of Risks in Ultrafast Networks

November 14th, 2011
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If nothing else, Arista Networks proves that two people can make more than $1 billion each building the Internet and still be worried about its reliability.

David Cheriton, a computer science professor at Stanford known for his skills in software design, and Andreas Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, have committed $100 million of their money, and spent half that, to shake up the business of connecting computers in the Internet’s big computing centers.

As the Arista founders say, the promise of having access to mammoth amounts of data instantly, anywhere, is matched by the threat of catastrophe. People are creating more data and moving it ever faster on computer networks. The fast networks allow people to pour much more of civilization online, including not just Facebook posts and every book ever written, but all music, live video calls, and most of the information technology behind modern business, into a worldwide “cloud” of data centers. The networks are designed so it will always be available, via phone, tablet, personal computer or an increasing array of connected devices.

Statistics dictate that the vastly greater number of transactions among computers in a world 100 times faster than today will lead to a greater number of unpredictable accidents, with less time in between them. Already, Amazon’s cloud for businesses failed for several hours in April, when normal computer routines faltered and the system overloaded. Google’s cloud of e-mail and document collaboration software has been interrupted several times.

“We think of the Internet as always there. Just because we’ve become dependent on it, that doesn’t mean it’s true,” Mr. Cheriton says. Mr. Bechtolsheim says that because of the Internet’s complexity, the global network is impossible to design without bugs. Very dangerous bugs, as they describe them, capable of halting commerce, destroying financial information or enabling hostile attacks by foreign powers.

Both were among the first investors in Google, which made them billionaires, and, before that, they created and sold a company to the networking giant Cisco Systems for $220 million. Wealth and reputations as technology seers give their arguments about the risks of faster networks rare credibility.

More transactions also mean more system attacks. Even though he says there is no turning back on the online society, Mr. Cheriton worries most about security hazards. “I’ve made the claim that the Chinese military can take it down in 30 seconds, no one can prove me wrong,” he said. By building a new way to run networks in the cloud era, he says, “we have a path to having software that is more sophisticated, can be self-defending, and is able to detect more problems, quicker.”

The common connection among computer servers, one gigabit per second, is giving way to 10-gigabit connections, because of improvements in semiconductor design and software. Speeds of 40 gigabits, even 100 gigabits, are now used for specialty purposes like consolidating huge data streams among hundreds of thousands of computers across the globe, and that technology is headed into the mainstream. An engineering standard for a terabit per second, 1,000 gigabits, is expected in about seven years.

Arista, which is based here, was built with the 10-gigabit world in mind. It now has 250 employees, 167 of them engineers, building a fast data-routing switch that could isolate problems and fix them without ever shutting down the network. It is intended to run on inexpensive mass-produced chips. In terms of software and hardware, it was a big break from the way things had been done in networking for the last quarter-century.

“Companies like Cisco had to build their own specialty chips to work at high speed for the time,” Mr. Bechtolsheim said. Because of improvements in the quality and capability of the kind of chips used in computers, phones and cable television boxes, “we could build a network that is a lot more software-enabled, something that is a lot easier to defend and modify

Source:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/technology/arista-networks-founders-aim-to-alter-how-computers-connect.html

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How trustworthy is your digital hardware?

November 11th, 2011
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In May 2010, for example, the FBI’s Operation Network Raider seized more than 700 pieces of counterfeit Cisco network hardware and labels with an estimated retail value of more than $143 million. While that scheme was likely conceived for financial gain, designers of integrated circuits, or microchips, also need to protect military, financial, transportation, and other critical digital infrastructure from Trojans inserted by intruders with other criminal or military intentions.
Like the Trojan horses of Greek mythology, cyber Trojans appear to be harmless but instead steal information or harm a system once it is in operation.

Ramesh Karri, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly), and researchers from the University of Connecticut have developed new techniques that designers can use to defend against weaknesses in the supply chain, which typically includes an overseas manufacturer and often stretches across the globe.

Their new “design for trust” techniques update the well established “design for manufacturability” and “design for testability” mantras. They were outlined in two IEEE Computer Magazine articles, “Trustworthy Hardware: Trojan Detection and Design-for-Trust Challenges,” and “Trustworthy Hardware: Identifying and Classifying Hardware Trojans.”

“The ‘design for trust’ techniques build on existing design and testing methods,” explains Karri.

One such technique involves ring oscillators, which are sets of odd numbered, inverting logic gates that designers use to ensure an integrated circuit’s reliability. Circuits with ring oscillators produce specific frequencies based on the arrangement of ring oscillators. Trojans alter the original design’s frequencies and alert testers to a compromised circuit.

However, sophisticated criminals could account for the frequency change in their Trojan design and implementation. Karri and his team suggest designers thwart their tactics by creating more variants of ring oscillator arrangements than criminals can keep track of, making it harder for them to implant a Trojan without testers detecting it.

Unlike microbiologists with relatively easy access to sample viruses, Karri and other hardware security researchers cannot study ample real-world Trojans because companies and governments are reluctant to share infected hardware for reasons of intellectual property, national security, or fear of embarrassment.
So Karri and his colleagues turned to the crowd to collect sample Trojans that informed their design-for-trust techniques.

Graduate and undergraduate students from across the country build and detect hardware Trojans for the Embedded Systems Challenge.

Karri and his team analyzed a diverse collection of 58 submissions from the 2008 competition and developed a taxonomy that is helping to standardize metrics for evaluating Trojans.

Crowdsourcing Trojans benefits the team’s research and will help guide future researchers and practitioners, according to Jeyavijayan Rajendran, an NYU-Poly electrical and computer engineering doctoral candidate and co-author.

Rajendran was the 2009 winner of the Embedded Systems Challenge and has been the student leader of the national challenge since then. In the 2010 competition, Rajendran’s 2009-winning defense was successfully attacked.

“I went back and studied the vulnerabilities and developed additional techniques to fix them,” he says. “The Embedded Systems Challenge changed my research process. Now I am not only thinking from a defender’s point of view, but I am also thinking from an attacker’s point of view.”

Trojans from the Embedded Systems Challenge and the design-for-trust techniques are available on TrustHub.org, a site funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that was created to encourage community building and knowledge exchange among hardware security researchers and professionals. NYU-Poly is one of four cybersecurity research institutions that founded the site.

Source:http://www.futurity.org/science-technology/how-trustworthy-is-your-digital-hardware/

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Why B2B for Network security is Needed

November 2nd, 2011
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The road to network security is a long one for any business, with many pitfalls along the way. Human personalities can make life difficult when personal preferences and personalized use profiles intervene with intelligent technical design of a network use plan. The concept of a motive in planning a uniform use of network devices needs to be underlined and emphasized to the staff.

A system that was secure last year is open to newer and newer threats each week, especially with patches, upgrades, physical device upgrades and IT overhauls. The more things change in computer system safeguarding the more things in device and computer desktop security stay the same. Aligning personal interests to the device security is key to motivating personnel to remembering best practices for network security. The market for B2B products and services along this industry channel therefore remains robust.

Employees must be advised repeatedly that the investment in computer integrity and device security is not the employee’s to control. Policy updates to any intellectual property uses of a computer can lead any employee can accidentally or inflict harm on a network even through the purest of motive. For company employees to value the total product of what they do and the mission of their organization means to value the total entity. Thus demand for B2B network security services for companies of all sizes and shapes exists and grows daily.

Device security and online threats to networks via malware, viruses and intrusions are now common knowledge. But the lengths to which a computer sniffer or intruder will go to get into a system via various types of device platforms such as cellphone, smartphone and wireless devices may still surprise even sophisticated computer users. Passing through airports and using business machines on “personal time” can compromise a business machine instantly.

The investment a company makes in its employees awareness of network security via everyday best practices can protect every dollar spent in network security and IT tech. In fact, malicious intruders and device sniffers count n the every day users being “fed up” with safety and conservative computer use habits to break the protocol and be careless. They are waiting with a variety of programmed sniffer technologies and hardware to scan and screen for openings into valuable systems and to allow them to seed harmful programs that can cause damage down the line to companies and individuals.

Ironically, these same employees are disappointed and annoyed when their own retail and institutional commercial credit and business companies and vendors fall short in the security department. Software and technology innovate daily and sadly so do network security threats.

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Palo Alto Networks takes firewalls to next level

October 24th, 2011
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For the past 15 years or so, security pros have relied on the trusty firewall and other hardware to keep bad guys from running amok on corporate networks. For the most part, this has meant blocking tainted e-mails and keeping workers away from harmful websites.

The latest wave of Web services, like Skype and Google Docs, has introduced fresh problems. They can transfer files, store data and allow remote computer access in ways that can’t be easily patrolled by the standard sentinels.

Nir Zuk has another option. He’s a veteran of the traditional firewall and security industry who struck out on his own six years ago to create a product for today’s Web. The company he founded, Palo Alto Networks, sells a next-generation firewall that makes modern Web services safe for the workplace and gives companies precise control over how their employees can use them.

“Our customers don’t want to block Facebook,” Zuk said. “They want to use it, but they also want some control.”

As interest in Web-based software has surged, so too have Palo Alto Networks’ sales. The company has hopped from office to bigger office since its birth at Zuk’s Palo Alto house in 2005. This year, the company moved into a giant headquarters in Santa Clara.

A year ago, Palo Alto Networks had 1,000 customers; today it has 4,500, including Qualcomm, the city of Seattle, and eBay. Sales will exceed $200 million this year, according to Zuk, who adds that the company is gearing up for an initial public offering.

Zuk says Palo Alto Networks owes much of its success to modern computing habits, which require more sophistication than what’s provided by traditional security products. Older firewalls are designed to monitor one-way traffic. E-mails and data from websites pour in, and the security products look for suspicious patterns. Yet threats can snake their way through a network in various ways: A worker might go to Facebook, click on a nefarious link, and download a virus. Soon enough, he’s using software from enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com to upload those infected sales data files and send them to colleagues.

“Most security groups used to focus on blocking apps like Skype or GoToMyPC but now are often required to allow them to be used,” says John Pescatore, an analyst at the research firm Gartner. “That’s why firewalls needed to evolve.”

Palo Alto Networks gives each Web service its own signature. This means that Palo Alto’s systems know when employees are using Skype or Salesforce.com, and have a general idea of what they’re doing there. Customers can set policies for how an application is used so that, for example, all employees can view Google Docs files, but only some can actually create them.

Keeping track of all the traffic flowing through a corporate network requires a lot of computing horsepower, and part of Palo Alto Networks’ secret sauce is a homegrown chip that chews through data quickly. A Palo Alto Networks system can even peer into encrypted traffic: It’s fast enough to decrypt packets of information, check whether they’re safe, and then pass them on to the employee who requested them, all without much lag.

Norm Fjeldheim, the chief information officer at chipmaker Qualcomm, says the Palo Alto Networks systems he bought replaced not just firewalls but also things such as intrusion detection hardware and other types of security systems. “They are doing the work that was done by multiple things in the past,” Fjeldheim said. “They watch over everything.”

To date, Palo Alto Networks has raised a total of $65 million. In August, Palo Alto Networks lured Mark McLaughlin from his role as CEO of VeriSign to run the young company and prepare it for an IPO.

Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital is one investor.

Said partner Jim Goetz: “I don’t think we’ve ever seen an enterprise technology company grow as quickly.”

Source:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/22/BULH1LKCDV.DTL

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