Author: techadmin

Juniper blooms

There has been a great deal of announcements from Juniper regarding its strategy and product ranges in the last few months. How big is this time in terms of milestones for the company?

I would say this is probably after the founding of the company 12 years ago this is the biggest announcement ever since.

And it is a reactive move perhaps to the call, globally, for cloud computing to become a stronger part of the overall business and networking provisions today…

Yes, we believe that networks overall are changing, it is about access and about the user experience and it is about overall virtualisation of everything for enterprises. We don’t believe that it is scalable for business to continue to build their dedicated data centres and this is why we believe that on the whole virtualisation is going to be very important and this is why we call it cloud networking rather than cloud computing. I think it is much bigger than just the computing part.

And you claim you can really save money for the end-user in both CAPEX and in OPEX. This is a claim though, that many vendors have been making as it is obviously what the end-user wants to hear right now. So why and how is your claim different? Is it down to the flexibility of the cloud?

It is that element for sure, because you start to share resources, applications and application providers in their shared space and you don’t need all of the IT resources for assistance and maintenance.

And the other thing that I really believe is important is — how are you going to scale this massive ramp-up? We have shown you what happened with all the devices that there are now, it will break, if a company and search providers are not starting to think more strategically about the future, it will break. It is not for us, just announcing one product, it is about software, it is about network architecture, and scalability. It is also about how to do things differently than we have done before.

This is also you laying down the gauntlet to Cisco as it faces increasing competition from all sides. How will your ‘New Network’ strategy help you challenge Cisco here on a local basis?

In most of the markets we have become either the number one or the number two player. That is definitely one of the things, we have been very successful in competing with them in the high performance routing space, enterprise space and service provider’s space.

And Juniper has been very successful and taking second place in the security networking space and we are starting to move very aggressively with security in the pipeline. The good thing is we are not competing in the same space as IBM, Sun or Oracle, nor HP in a way, and if you look at Cisco they are really narrow, sort of fighting with their traditional rivals.

We stay, a pure play networking and security company, which provides Juniper a huge opportunity in the market and this is also why you have seen the OEM announcement with Dell and also with IBM, in which they are really working with Juniper.

Is the Middle East really ready for cloud computing on this scale that you have announced, because in many enterprises in this region are still looking at the consolidation of their infrastructure and are they really ready to move a lot of it into the cloud?

The good thing is that it is not an architecture that is out there over nothing. What we do is we provide a real gradual approach to it, you can start with our switching products and then you can expand to the infrastructure at their own pace. I think today all enterprises and service providers are suffering from the same challenges. One is the power supply, the space and physicality of how to manage it and how to introduce new applications and bring the total cost of ownership down for their customers.

美联邦通讯委员会发布宽带网速实时检测工具

美国联邦通讯委员会周四发布了一项宽带测速服务，帮助消费者实时检测网络速度。
消费者可以登录网站www.broadband.gov进行测试， 然后将实际网速与网络服务供应商承诺的网速进行对比。在此之前，联邦通讯委员会的官员曾在去年9月召开的一次会议上提出，消费者的实际网速在网络流量高峰 时间估计会减慢50%。

联邦通讯委员会主席 Julius Genachowski在声明中表示：“联邦通讯委员会给宽带用户提供的这个新工具可以为他们提供宽带连接的实时信息，也可以为服务机构提供全国服务的有用资料。”

联邦通讯委员会还将收集关于宽带尚未普及地区的信息。消费者可通过电子邮箱fccinfo@FCC.gov或电话与联邦通讯委员会取得联系。

Video Graphics Array (VGA)

With VGA you see a change in the terminology from adapter to array. This was a result of the fact that VGA graphics started to come on the motherboard as a single chip and not as plug-in adapter boards that took up an expansion slot in the computer. While since replaced with other standards for general use, VGA’s 640×480 remains a sort of lowest common denominator for all graphics cards. Indeed, even the Windows splash screen logo comes in at 640×480 because it shows before the graphics drivers for higher resolution are loaded into the system.

VGA supports both graphics and text modes of operation and can be used to emulate most (but not all) of the EGA, CGA, and MDA modes of operation). The most common VGA graphics modes include:

640×480 in 16 colors. This is a planar mode with four bit planes. When speaking about VGA, this is the mode most often thought of and is often what is meant when some say “VGA.”
640×350 in 16 colors.
320×200 in 16 colors.
320×200 in 256 colors (Mode 13h). This is a packed-pixel mode.
The VGA specification dictated 256KB of video RAM, 16- and 256-color modes, a 262,144 color palette (six bits for each of red, green, and blue), a selectable master clock (25 MHz or 28 MHz), up to 720 horizontal pixels, up to 480 lines, hardware smooth scrolling, split screen support, soft fonts, and more.

Another VGA programming trick essentially created another graphics mode: Mode X. By manipulating the 256 KB video RAM four separate planes could be formed where each used 256 colors. Mode X transferred some of the video memory operations to the video hardware instead of keeping them with the CPU. This sped up the display for things like games and was most often seen in 320×240 pixel resolution as that produced square pixels in 4:3 aspect ratio. Mode X also allowed double buffering; a method of keeping multiple video pages in memory in order to quickly flip between them. All VGA 16-color modes supported double buffering; only Mode X could do it in 256 colors.

Many other programming tweaks to VGA could (and were) also performed. Some, however, caused monitor display problems such as flickering, roll, and other abnormalities so they were not used commercially. Commercial software typically used “safe” VGA modes.

Video memory typically mapped into real mode memory in a PC in the memory spaces…

B0000h (used for monochrome text mode)
B8000h (used for color text and CGA graphics modes)
A0000h (used for EGA/VGA graphics modes)
Note that by using the different memory areas it is possible to have two different monitors attached and running in a single computer. Early on, Lotus 1-2-3 took advantage of this by having the ability to display “high resolution” text on an MDA display along with color (low-resolution) graphics showing an associated graph of some part of the spreadsheet. Other such uses included coding on one screen with debugging information on another and similar applications.

8514 Display Standard

IBM introduced the 8514 Display Standard in 1987; about the same time as VGA. The companion monitor (model 8514) was also sold by IBM. The pair (8514/A Display Adapter and 8514 monitor) comprise the 8514 Display Standard and is generally regarded as the first mass-market video card accelerator. It was certainly not the first in the industry, but others before it were largely designed for workstations. Workstation accelerators were programmable; the 8514 was not; it was a fixed-function accelerator and could therefore be sold at a much lower price for mass-market use. The card typically had 2D-drawing functions like line-draw, color-fill, and BITBLT offloaded to it while the CPU worked on other tasks.

The basic modes the 8514 were designed to operate at were…

1024×768 pixels at 256 colors and 43.5 Hz interlaced.
640×480 pixels at 256 colors and 60 Hz non-interlaced and other regular VGA modes. The 8514/A card was only responsible for the 1024×768 graphic mode. All other modes were created using the VGA hardware on the computer’s motherboard and then the video was fed through the adapter card to the monitor which was connected to the adapter card. 8514 did not support an 800×600 pixel mode even though you might think it could.
Note the difference between interlaced and non-interlaced display and the frequency above. While the 8514 displayed a much higher resolution screen than most other mass-market solutions of the day, the use of an interlaced display was unusual.

8514 was replaced by IBM’s XGA standard which we’ll talk about later on this page. For now, we’ll get back in sequence with VGA…

SolutionBase: Fortinet firewalls provide more bang for the buck than Cisco PIX

My company is planning a project to migrate from a traditional frame-relay network to a site-to-site VPN. As part of this project, we must decide on what firewall and VPN devices we will standardize on.

Currently, we have two remote site-to-site VPN test locations utilizing Cisco PIX 501 firewalls. These locations are connecting back to a Cisco IOS firewall and working successfully. Having configured the PIX firewalls myself, one of my concerns was the complexity of the configuration and troubleshooting. Once we standardize on a device and roll out the VPN network with these associated firewall/VPN devices, I’ll turn this project over to the network administrator and the network support group.

I’d like the end solution to be as simple as possible to troubleshoot, monitor, and modify. While I like Cisco products and I like the idea of standardizing on a Cisco solution, I don’t consider the PIX firewalls to be easy to configure, troubleshoot, or monitor. Sure, Cisco PIX devices do offer the PIX Device Manager (PDM), a Java Web-based interface for management. However, I still feel that, even with the Web-based interface, the PIX still lacks a great deal of user-friendliness and simplicity. Again, while I like Cisco products, in my capacity as project manager, I don’t want to have to say, “Here is the excellent solution I came up with, but yes, it is a pain to do many of the day-to-day tasks.” I was curious if I could find a solution that does the job, but which the network support group would find easy to work with.

Enter Fortinet
I met with a security consulting firm and, after hearing my requirements, they recommended that I take a look at devices from Fortinet, a company that I had never heard of. The consulting firm told me that, yes, there are a large number of choices available in the VPN/firewall market; however, based on the devices they have looked at, they felt that selecting Fortinet offered “the most bang for the buck” in my case.

Some of you reading this may already be very familiar with Fortinet. For those who aren’t, here’s a little background on the company. Ken Xie, the former founder and CEO of Netscreen, founded Fortinet in 2000. I heard that he left Netscreen because he believed strongly in the use of ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to run devices like firewalls. At the time, Netscreen disagreed and Xie left to form Fortinet. Today, Fortinet’s Web site says that it is “the only provider of ASIC-powered, network-based antivirus firewalls.”

This idea of using ASICs is interesting. I’m not a firewall architecture expert, but this is what I gathered from my research: Cisco devices use a standard RISC or AMD processor (just like you could find in a small UNIX server), RAM, and operating systems with applications. By using ASICs, Fortinet has dedicated chips that speed the processing of things like firewall filtering, encryption, virus scanning, and traffic shaping. By using these dedicated chips, Fortinet claims that they are the only provider that can screen traffic for viruses at “broadband rates.” In other words, other firewall solutions that scan for viruses have higher latency than the Fortinet solutions, according to Fortinet.