Sean Michael Kerner

At Interop Las Vergas conference last week, HP unveiled its vision for virtual application networks (VAN) that will reduce reliance on the CLI and usher in a new era for network administration. In a keynote address, Bethany Mayer, senior vice president and general manager, HP Networking, said that in traditional networks it takes a lot […]

Cisco reported third quarter fiscal 2012 earnings late Wednesday that were in line with expectations. Expectations for the future, however, aren’t overly enthusiastic as customer conservatism begins to set in and macroeconomic concerns are slowing the sales cycle. Looking at market share growth specifically,  Cisco’s service provider business grew by five percent while enterprise was down one […]

The Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is a long standing standard for networking that has come under fire in recent years. Spanning Tree doesn’t meet the demands of cloud scale and it doesn’t deliver the latency characteristics that many companies want from large multi-chassis networking deployments. It’s a challenge that was debated this week, during a […]

Herrod delivered a keynote at the Interop conference in Las Vegas last week about his company’s vision for software-defined data centers. It’s a model that enables different hardware and software solutions to fit together. “When we started out, many people thought that all the server vendors would hate virtualization, but the opposite has happened,” Herrod […]

From the ‘When Proprietary Doesn’t Matter’ files: I’m a big believer in open source and open standards, which is why Juniper’s QFabric is something that I have struggled with. QFabric is Juniper’s proprietary fabric for data centers, one that kinda/sorta compete against Shortest Path Bridging and TRILL. The fear with anything proprietary is always the […]

Microsoft’s May Patch Tuesday update is now available, with seven security bulletins (three rated Critical) that deliver 23 fixes across Windows, Office, Silverlight, and the Microsoft .NET Framework. At the top of the list is MS12-034, a combined security update for Microsoft Office, Windows, .NET Framework, and Silverlight. It’s an update that addresses vulnerabilities first […]

LAS VEGAS. Allan Leinwand, CTO of Zynga is not the typical kind of CTO to take the keynote stage at the Interop networking conference. Instead of representing a networking vendor, Leinwand works for an application vendor that makes games. Leinwand noted that there are now 292 million monthly active players that play Zynga’s games. The […]

LAS VEGAS. Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior took the keynote stage at the Interop conference today to detail where the world of networking has been and where it is going. It’s a world where the network’s value is about individual users. Warrior began by explaining that the first phase of the networks evolution was just about […]

At Interop 2012, there was one theme that dominated all others – Software Defined Networking (SDN). At the center of the SDN revolution is OpenFlow and the center of that is the Open Networking Foundation. I got the chance to catch up with Dan Pitt, Exec Chair of the ONF at Interop, where there was […]

From the ‘Yo Yo Network’ files: There is never a shortage of interesting things that show up on the show floor of a conference, Interop 2012 is no exception. While there is no boxing ring with fighters this year (thnx Xirrus!), there were some interesting ‘shenanigans’ that vendors had to try and entice people. F5 […]

What is the reality of the cloud? That’s the question that a new Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey set out to answer. As it turns out, reality is somewhat different then the cloud-everywhere-right-now hype permeating every facet of the IT landscape. While cloud offers benefits, it also has the potential to introduce a non-trivial amount […]

Networking vendor F5 has long been focused on application delivery optimization. Now thanks to the Google SPDY protocol for TCP, web traffic can now be accelerated faster than ever before. In its initial implementation, SPDY was baked into the Google Chrome web browser, only enabling users of that browser to benefit. This year, Mozilla Firefox […]