Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘if you can’t measure it, it’s not true‘ files: Green IT and power saving has been a hot topic ever since the inconvenient truth of our planet’s global warming crisis hit the mass media. Sure there are a lot of vendors that have green initiatives but how do you actually measure how green […]

With enterprises scrambling to find ways to cut energy costs, one less-obvious means may come in the form of Ethernet — that venerable, ubiquitous networking technology. While already pervasive throughout the enterprise, Ethernet is continuing its march forward with new initiatives that could mean far faster connectivity for all network users while still being “green” […]

SCO will gets its day in court today, but it’s not likely the day they were originally hoping for. The trial in Utah is with Novell and will help determine what SCO may or may not own in terms of Unix rights it acquired from Novell (most of which came down in a summary judgement […]

We generally think of virtualization in terms of applications and servers. Yet the network is a key part of the mix, though it’s often overlooked in what can be a critical oversight. After all, those virtualized servers and applications still need to connect to users over networking hardware that may not necessarily be optimized for […]

From the ‘aaah now I get it‘ files: I’ve spoken to many vendors over the last few years about application and WAN acceleration.  The gist of the conversation is usually the same, ‘we can accelerate more than our competitors and we’re better because…blah blah blah…’ So you can imagine my skepticism when I took a […]

A slew of the big names in networking are aiming to push the hot technology of network access control (NAC) beyond its proprietary beginnings, incorporating a broader base of vendor frameworks and implementations. The effort marks a joint initiative between Cisco and the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) — a five-year old consortium of vendors working […]

With evidence mounting that the U.S. US economy is slowing down, you’d think it was a tough time to attract paying customers to a big IT conference. Tough times are often the best time to invest in infrastructure. Networks can provide competitive and productivity advantages that are even more important in lean times than in […]

From the ‘hey it’s Friday‘ files: In the tech business the name Red Hat refers specifically to the publicly traded  Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) that has been in business since 1995. There is however another Red Hat, that seems to come up in my Google News alerts for the term ‘Red Hat’. I’m talking […]

The networking industry is in a period of transition now as 10GbE networks are becoming increasingly popular as a way to deliver bandwidth for demanding loads. Network analysis vendors, however, argue that raw bandwidth alone isn’t enough to solve the problem of modern networking bottlenecks. Rather, they argue that networking analysis technology in the 10GbE […]

From the ‘you’ve got a lot more browser choices than just the little blue e‘ files: Opera claims that it has 20 million users of its Opera web browser and that 500,000 people have tried out the early development releases of Opera 9.5. Not too shabby. There a few key things coming in Opera 9.5, […]

The newest Ubuntu Linux long term support (LTS) release, code named ‘Hardy Heron’ (officially called Ubuntu 8.04) is set to be available today, including both desktop and server editions with a long list of new features. Among them is an innovative new way to install and uninstall Linux with a Microsoft Windows desktop. With the […]

Sun continues building out its flagship Unix operating system, Solaris 10, with a new update that adds new virtualization features that may be chiefly of interest to users of older Solaris systems. The Solaris 10 5/08 update for the three-year-old OS also continues the evolution of the platform, as Sun attempts to gain operating system […]