SNWSpotlight is your source for the latest information from Storage Networking World. It’s brought to you by LSI.

Tags: 8-Gigabit fibre channel, 8-Gigabit, fibre, fibre channel over Ethernet, FCoE, Ethernet, Tom Hammond-Doel, FCIA, Greg Schulz, The StorageIO Group, solid state storage, Brian McKean, Texas Memory Systems, LSI, storage, SNWSpotlight, Storage Networking World

Tags: ESX 3.5, Joe Gazarik, Virtual Center 2.5, virtual machines, VMWare

Tags: Bernard Daines, Intell, James Sorenson, Rocky Mountain Voices, UTC, Women Tech Council

Daines was the first to create the 100 megabit Ethernet Switch when he worked as a consultant for 3Com and Bob Metcalfe. Later, Daines leveraged his experience to push data 10 times faster to create the first Gigabit Switch.

Daines was the first to graduate in Computer Science at Brigham Young University, and played a major role in defining the programs and curriculum for future graduates. After sharing his knowledge as a professor, Daines went on to work at IBM and HP. Later he founded or co-founded a number of businesses centered on Ethernet, including Grand Junction Networks (acquired by Cisco), Packet Engines (acquired by Alcatel), World Wide Packets, and Linux Networx.

The guest is Alla Reznik, Group Product marketing Manager – Global Ethernet and IP services, Verizon Business.

Tags: Verizon Business, Virtual Private LAN Service, VPLS, Ethernet, MPLS, SONET, Alla Reznik, Verizon

Morris Chang helped create the fabless chip industry. And in doing so, he created a massive innovation platform by enabling small bands of chip designers to buy production time as they needed it. Chip companies no longer needed to own and maintain hugely expensive chip fabs.

John Hennessy helped develop the RISC microprocessor, whose features are found in all modern microprocessors. As president of Stanford University, he has made huge contributions to education, and the creation of a student body that has gone on to found many of Silicon Valley’s largest companies. And his work has helped generate huge licensing revenue for the university.

David Patterson made important contributions to microprocessor design and RAID data storage technologies. As head of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, he has helped educate generations of computer engineers.

Charles Thacker helped create the personal computer. His work at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center led to the Alto, the machine that inspired Apple Computer and featured a windows graphical user interface. He co-developed Ethernet and also the laser printer.

Tags: Morris Chang, John Hennessy, David A. Patterson, Charles Thacker, John Hennessy, David Patterson, Charles Thacker

Tags: Futurenet, Alla Reznik, Verizon Business, Wide Area Network, VPLS

Tags: VOIP, Danellie Young, Verizon Business, MPLS

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Tags: NETGEAR, Digital Entertainer HD, Jamison Ching

This podcast is brought to you by Rocky Mountain Voices.

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Tags: Control4, Ed Ryan, Jeff Thomas, Brad Baldwin

This Juniper Networks podcast is part of the Juniper Networks Master of IT program.

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Tags: Paul Schopis, OARnet

Part two here.

Transcript:

Host: Michael Johnson – PodTech
Guest: Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks

Michael Johnson – PodTech
This is Michael Johnson and we have on the line with us today Kevin Hohenbrink who is the optimization product manager for the product WANJet over at F5 Networks. So welcome to the podcast, Kevin.

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Well thank you.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Now today we’re going to talk about some interesting things that have to do with how a business runs. We are going to talk about Disaster Recovery and Continuity. Now these are couple of terms that we hear are RTO and RPO and its importance to the Continuity Disaster Recovery Plan. Let us define what those terms are and explain how that works in this picture.

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
So the two terms RTO and RPO, Recovery Time Objective and I’m going to use some sort of industry definitions that are pretty accepted by everybody. This is the maximum viable downtime after an outage for recovering systems, applications and functions. RTO provides the basis for developing cost effective recovery strategies and effectively getting the resources up and working again and implementing these recovery strategies during a disaster situation. Typically companies will measure in minutes to hours the downtime, their RTO and RPO. There was a recent study done by Forrester that talks about – in the event of a primary data center site failure, that 45% of North American respondents and 47% of European respondents recover in five hours or less. However, only a small percentage of those respondents, 8% North America and 7% European Theater could measure their recovery time in 120 minutes or less. Recovery point objective as per the industry standard definition, defines how current or fresh the data is after a disaster. Recovery point objective, the RPO, is really the earliest point in time which systems and data must be recovered after an outage. RPO typically defines maximum amount of data that the organization is willing to sacrifice after a disaster. And the zero RPO business continuity solution can survive a disaster without any loss of data and that typically tends to be very expensive. Another data point from a Forrester study — the same Forrester study, in the event of a primary data center site failure there was as much as 55% of North American respondents and 59% of European respondents. They would lose about five hours of data or less. 28% of the North American respondents and 27% of the European respondents could measure their data loss in less than 120 minutes. So when you put these two together RTO and RPO, they provide a measurable target for business continuity and Disaster Recovery Solutions. At any time you can improve the RTO and RPO, you got to increase your investment in networking and storage technologies as a result. The physical distance between your data center is typically and how well your applications tolerate network latency affect how close you’re going to get to zero RPO. This is why you should limit your RTO and RPO to whatever levels your organization can tolerate from a cost perspective.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Well let’s talk a little bit talk about that cost and what’s the impact of the WAN on those recovery objectives when we talk about that distance and how far out your network goes?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Okay. So a comprehensive Disaster Recovery Solution typically requires an investment, multiple hardened (ph) recovery sites, duplicating the IT assets such as your servers and your storage arrays, your networking equipment and you typically do it at all these sites and then having the replication software and the necessary bandwidth between these sites. Typically, the cost of bandwidth is often a significant component of the cost of Disaster Recovery Solutions that rely on data replication between these sites. There was a Forrester survey that said 25% of North American enterprises and 26% of the European enterprises reported that cost of bandwidth was representing between 20 and 30 percent of the total cost of data replication and again these are recurring monthly costs.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Let’s talk a little bit more about that network — the idea of the transport network. How does that affect your recovery objectives in the long run?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
So the amount of bandwidth and the type of network transport selected whether it’s Wavelength Sonic Ethernet or IP is really the key to achieving desired recovery objectives. Limiting the impact and latency to the business applications and increasing the distance between the sites. WAN connectivity issues such as latency, reliability limit to service options and limited bandwidth may make significant impacts in improving recovery objectives and we’re going to talk more about this as we go through this, I’m sure.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Let’s talk a little bit more about some of those characteristics and break that down a little bit more because I think it’s — we kind of went over it kind of quickly but I think they’re pretty important points.

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Sure. So the inherent characteristics you are going to find on a WAN network are latency, this is typically caused by limits to the speed of light over distance. You are going to have packet loss, caused by signal degradation over the network medium, over saturating network links, corrupting packets, rejected in transit or faulty network hardware. Network congestion, a big key point — excessive, lots of data on the network slows overall transmission speed kind of like too many cars on the freeway. Actual bandwidth is not the expected bandwidth often due to a combination of the factors listed above, whether its latency, packet loss or network congestion and of course last is expensive bandwidth. Large pipes can incur significant monthly costs. Unfortunately, such factors as these can often cripple a D R plan. WAN links are often subject to variable congestion caused by other application traffic, file transfers, even possibly other migration or recovery activities. This means your RPO and RTO that are met in minutes, can now be completely unobtainable the next minute due to congestion. So heavy latency do perhaps to extended distances can prevent meeting RPOs and RTOs irrespective of how much bandwidth is used. So adding more bandwidth doesn’t always solve all of your problems.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Okay and now when people think about networks going down, sometimes they think okay, you know it is time we take a coffee break and you know, that’s kind of what it is but its — we’re talking a lot more stuff is on the table here besides this lost revenue, just things going down. What are some other key factors that are you know going to fuel that need to really improve your recovery capabilities of your business?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Sure. So it’s also the cost associated with permanent customer loss and the ability of competitors to gain market share. So aside from the cost of downtime, additional drivers feeling the need to improve recovery capabilities are going to include increased risk fiduciary responsibilities to your shareholders, competitiveness in the market and of course regulatory like SOX and HIPAA are additional legal drivers. So based on recent events especially here in North America including terrorist attacks, blackouts, earthquakes, hurricanes wildfires and on and on, the perceived risk level is increasing among enterprises. So and additionally due to a significant number of corporate scandals that led to such government oversight and regulatory Sarbanes-Oxley, enterprises that operate in the business environment have increased fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, partners and customers and even their own employees.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Okay, now F5 is in the network business. Is there a WAN optimization appliance solution that you have?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Absolutely. The WAN optimization solution from F5 is the WANJet product. F5’s WANJet is an appliance-based solution that uses compression, acceleration technologies to dramatically improve the speed of application traffic over the WAN. WANJet accelerates a wide variety of application traffic types including data replication which is the focus of this discussion, file transfer, email client/server applications and others. WANJet also has some unique features that enable bandwidth to be efficiently allocated amongst different applications, we call it our quality of service, and thereby ensuring that the most critical traffic receives the priority access to the valuable bandwidth. We buy the bandwidth in lot of cases specifically for a particular application, you want to make sure that that application gets its bandwidth.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Okay, so can WAN acceleration appliances like this actually help in achieving that goal that we were talking about before, that zero RPO?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Yes. WANJet appliances help to improve throughput. They also mitigate latency of existing networks through such techniques as this compression, our TDR data reduction and transport protocol acceleration. Often the cost of deploying a WANJet appliance at each end of the link is less expensive than the cost of increasing bandwidth. Typically, these appliances can be particularly helpful for enterprises that want to use replication or remote backup between sites, with limited bandwidth to the corporate data center.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
So how is WANJet going to work in that formula, to mitigate that latency?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
In situations where the WAN link, WAN is the bottleneck, WANJet can improve the performance of synchronous and asynchronous replication solutions which in turn can mitigate application latency and its performance impacts on applications.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Okay. Now you also have this situation that, you know that enterprises that have some replications solutions in place between their data centers and other sites can the WANJet support replication of more data with existing bandwidth as opposed to say adding more, you know?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Yeah, absolutely. Traditionally business applications like ERP, SCM, CRM as well as messaging and collaborative applications such as email — these are going to continue to grow steadily each year. These are often the very applications that are supportive with remote replication. The WANJet appliance can help enterprises support to continue replication of these applications with existing bandwidth. WANJet uses a QoS technique to guarantee and prioritize data replication over non-data replication applications as we just mentioned.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Can it also enable the extending replication of other applications as well?

Kevin Hohenbrink – F5 Networks
Yeah. Do the cost replication — most enterprises are very selective about which applications they replicate and which ones they don’t. Usually they limit it to mission critical apps. Today it’s no longer a one-to-one relationship between a business process and application. Business processes now rely on multiple applications and to restore the entire process that means that they’re going to have to coordinate the recovery of the multiple apps. So customers are going to be very pleased to know that these apps that were once deemed only business critical as opposed to mission critical also require replication to another site.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
That was F5 networks Kevin Hohenbrink. This has been the first of a two-part series on data replication, disaster recovery and business continuity. Tune in next time right here on PodTech for Part two of our conversation with Kevin Hohenbrink.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Kevin Hohenbrink, F5 Networks, WANJet

Tags: Michael Marcellin, Verizon Business, firewall, Verizon

Click here for transcript.

Tags: Peter Newton, NETGEAR, ethernet, Paul Lancour

This podcast is brought to you by Rocky Mountain Voices.

Transcript:
Host: Eric Smith - Control4
Guest: Bob Metcalfe - 3Com

Eric Smith - Control4
I’m Eric Smith, CTO and Founder of Control4 and I am here today at the CES show with Bob Metcalfe, doesn’t need that much introduction, inventor of Ethernet, Founder of 3Com and many other things.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
…and Chairman of Ember.

Eric Smith - Control4
And chairman of Ember?

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
A ZigBee supplier.

Eric Smith - Control4
Who is one of our best providers and we’re here just kind of talking about technologies and kind of the future of automation and what’s happening and it’s exciting for us to be involved in this kind of a business.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
People talk about the future of Home Automation, you have to be careful, it’s here already that what we’re really talking about, it has to do with very large numbers, but as you — we were talking earlier, Home Automation has been around for 20 years and it’s beginning to develop some scale now.

Eric Smith - Control4
We founded Control4 on two fundamental technologies, which are Ethernet and Zigbee and really we wouldn’t be the company we were without those things. We need those connectivity standards and honestly for a startup company, like us that’s focus on this kind of product to develop our own networking standards, just wasn’t feasible. And the main reason we needed too, is we needed some things for high throughput, higher bit rate, user interface and things like that and so certain things I mean that kind of thing did, but we also needed kind of a low bit rate, but high reliability, very inexpensive control network. Spent a lot of time looking for a solution, we even looked at putting Wi-Fi in light switches at one point, but it was then that we discovered ZigBee and got pretty excited about it.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
Well, there’re different kinds of networks for different purposes and there’s large numbers of them in the notion that they’ll be in one emerging standard just doesn’t fly because of what you just said, there’s just such a diversity of the requirement.

Eric Smith - Control4
I think this is why people ask me sometimes when Home Automation standardize, will Windows PC just talk to it all, would it just — how’s it all going to work together and there has been this kind of dream of a plug-and-play home, you put in a light switch, put in a thermostat and it just works. And I often tell people, “Well, look at your PC today. How many different ports are on the sides of that PC?” So, why is there an Edge Modem in it and a Wi-Fi modem underneath in that port and a traditional 56K modem and a USB and a FireWire and a parallel port and a serial port and a mouse connector and a cable connector, or a keyboard connector and a video connector, why so many ports? And that’s a pretty standardized area, it’s we’ve been working on it for a long time and that to think there one standards is going to do, everything seems pretty strange.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
Well the problem with that suggestion that the Windows PC would be the center of everything is just how what a bad starting point Windows is for something that supposed to be easy to use and transparent and user friendly. I mean we live in fear at our house that something will break with the computer and then we’re going to have to call somebody to come in because we can’t fix it ourselves.

Eric Smith - Control4
I’ve been seeing especially with the advent of the Media Center PC, which is a pretty fun technology, I really enjoy the Media Center PC, but just like any other experience I’ve had at the PC, it’s a PC and occasionally it falls down and people, I don’t know the last time I’ve had to reboot my Sony receiver, it’s been a long time.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
You have this, as you just said this Ethernet ZigBee combo in your products, so what do you use each of them for? I guess you would use the Ethernet for going up stream into the Internet and you would use ZigBee for going down stream into the control points?

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
Yeah, generally, we just occasionally use the Ethernet to get between devices when it’s possible to, but what we really needed and Home Automation has been around for a long time. I think most consumers are becoming aware of it recently, but it’s been around for 16-17 years at least. I mean that’s how long I’ve been involved in it, but it’s always been kind of this metaphor you’ve either had these kind of, like your XTen stuffing by RadioShack that works most of the time, but was very inexpensive, or you had these very nice wired systems. The problem is what’s the odds that as you have a piece of 5-wire in a light switch box, it’s pretty low for most consumers.

ZigBee is just amazing and because it gives us a very robust, very inexpensive control network that makes all the devices talk and they talk reliably and I think most of it has to do with the mesh networking capabilities there where every device doesn’t have to see, it’s way all the way back to the controller, just as we’ll see the next device.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
I think you underestimated how old XTen is. I mean I think XTen was around in early 80s, so that be 20 some years ago. It’s amazing how that has persisted.

Eric Smith - Control4
It’s still around and it’s — but it has been mostly a obvious thing because it doesn’t always work. And so, it’s really hard for someone who makes a business of selling Home Automation to put in XTen, because if a certain light in the basement won’t turn off because there’s a compressor on it deep freeze down there next to it, there is nothing that do, or can do about it. And the consumer is going to say, “Why is that? You’ve said it would turn off the lights, it doesn’t turn off that light; I want my money back.” ZigBee allows us to provide the kind of reliability of the wire systems, but very close to the price points of the old XTen systems.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
Have you thought ahead to when every home has every device on a Control4 network whether there’ll be any interference or overlaps or security breaches are in?

Eric Smith - Control4
It’s definitely something that’s concerning that’s one of my favorite things about ZigBee, is the fact that it has encryption built into it, so that your neighbor can’t just hack your lighting system, or even worse, your security system. I love that and I love the fact that there’re different frequencies. So that there’re 16 different channels, so we can move things around and have a house next door to another house. We’re doing quite a few apartment buildings at this point and we’re finding it works quite well, even when you’ve one apartment right on top of another, there’s full security between them and they all tend to work quite well.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
How does ZigBee do in a Wi-Fi environment?

Eric Smith - Control4
That’s always a good interesting question too.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
I guess you could ask it the other way around, how does Wi-Fi do in the ZigBee environment?

Eric Smith - Control4
My best example of all of that is this trade show actually — the Consumer Electronic Show is the worst Wi-Fi nightmare on the planet, mean if you walk over the Convention Center across the street and you set an access point in a Laptop, next to each other, they will not connect. There’s so much noise in that 2.4 Giga Hertz Wi-Fi spectrum. What’s interesting is, ZigBee is in the same spectrum, but because it uses different techniques of sending data, it works better in it. We’ve got a booth right over there in the mid of that where Wi-Fi does not work in that building and the ZigBee works great and it’s a kind of an amazing thing.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
So, all that prior planning and engineering is paying off now.

Eric Smith - Control4
It is and it’s — companies like Ember that have made it happen for us, we’ve been very excited about that.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
So, introduce a long term standard like Ethernet was, like ZigBee will be, you do a lot of engineering, thinking of scalability in the long turn and then when you first come out with products, they’re too expensive because they’ve all that functionality, multi channel, encryption, frequency this, frequency that, speed and the initial instantiation of the product that you compare that to the junky proprietary things and they look better.

Eric Smith - Control4
Absolutely.

Eric Smith - Control4
So, if there was Ethernet in the early 80s at 10 mega bits per second and put up a little ARCNET look better because it was much, much cheaper, it didn’t have all that rigmarole in it. Of course then it’s the networks scaled up and as the Ethernet got cheaper then the frailty of the proprietary things faded.

Eric Smith - Control4
I remember when the concept of an Ethernet card built into a computer was just absurd. I mean no one would think about building that in because how many people really need that with network anyway and so you buy a NIC card and put it in the PC and make it work together. And it was a pretty neat thing and I think it was like about 95 or 96, when I first started seeing Ethernet card standard in the PCs. And I think the problem was, as I said earlier we looked into it for control systems, but it was in the neighborhood of $80 to $90 back in 1995 to put Ethernet on a device, now it’s $5 or $6.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
Well, the first Ethernet card I sold cost 5000.

Eric Smith - Control4
I can imagine?

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
But ZigBee has a similar problem in that. It is — because now we’re down to some $5, way below $5 single chip solutions and that’s continuing to go down. So, as the network scale up and as the Control4 networks get bigger so that the features of ZigBee are more appreciated and then as we manage at Ember to get ZigBee to be cheaper and cheaper, a little take off.

Eric Smith - Control4
Volume plays the game almost everywhere in the — we’re seeing it happened already and I think when you get to. If you go right now — Control4 sells dimmers their $99 and that honestly shocks regular people, $99 for light switch? Because they’re used to that $2 home depot that a rocker and that seems expensive, but if you look that as compared to the other technologies, they’ve historically have been the lighting systems, they were $350 - $400 and so people in this industry tend to go, “Wow, $99 dimmer? That’s just as affordable as anything I’ve ever seen.” But I do believe, we’ll get down to where they were at the $25 to $29 dimmer, which is about the price of a decent dimmer, home depot right now. If you want to go buy nice dimmer that you can put on your wall, that’s would it cost and I think that’s when it becomes ubiquitous. I think we’re on the right curve to get there.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
It’s all inevitable really just at the moment — it sort of feels like it’s coming, but it’s inevitable, it’s going to happen. Those curves always happen.

Eric Smith - Control4
The one I’d like to look at is similar I talk about is, one of our evidences that Home Automation will hit the broad market, is that rich people and regular people are the same, they want the same things, just rich people can afford them. And high-end homes tend to have these systems. They’ve been for at least for last five years most high-end homes that are being built, have a Multi-room Audio System, have a dedicated media room, have lighting control, have an integration system.

If you look back 30 years ago, how many cars had power locks and power windows? It was only the very high-end cars because it’s quite of an expensive feature. Well I just read something a couple of months ago and one the papers saying that, Apple-Ford and Chrysler aren’t going to offer crank Windows anymore because that mechanical crank is more expensive than the power window motors,” because they’ve gone into a volume now that that’s less expensive and I think we’ll get there.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
Well, look at the GPS I am never going to buy a car without a GPS.

Eric Smith - Control4
Absolutely.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
How long will it be before all cars have GPS in them, five years, two years, eight years?

Eric Smith - Control4
I don’t think it’s very long.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
Not very long.

Eric Smith - Control4
It’s the best thing for men because we don’t have to ask for directions ever again.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
So, Eric, I have been — as to ensure the expert in Home Automation and I’m just the expert on networking. How do you see things rolling out over the next 10 years, so you can use our networks in your Home Automation systems?

Eric Smith - Control4
I believe the prices will go to the point in the next 10 years that most consumers, almost all consumers will have, like the same kinds of consumers that have TVs, will have Automation. I think we’re going to get there because the price points are going to get there and…

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
Yeah, but there’s another point, there’s price points and I take your — I’m not just agreeing, but then there’s usability points, that’s right now a lot of our systems they’re as like my Honeywell Thermostats that I have on that, which are very old. I still can’t program those things. I go through the manual pressing all those silly buttons, so when you’re going to reach a — when do you think, or have you already reached the usability price point where things take off?

Eric Smith - Control4
Well, fundamentally when you look at Home Automation, it’s about two issues. It’s about networking all devices so they talk to each other and then building up a common user interface to all those devices. And the thermostats is a very good question because programming a setback thermostat with a little cryptic buttons and keys, trying to figure out what you’re doing is almost impossible, it’s a real pain. And one of the things we do because we talk to the thermostat whether it be one that we build or someone else does, we can present that UI on your home PC, which is a much better user interface, you have a much better ability to do things on that.

Can you imagine trying to do — like buy a new computer on your thermostat, but buying it on a Web page isn’t that hard. If you can program your thermostats through a Web interface, you can give them a better user experience. If you can do it through your TV and things like that. The other things that happens, if we have a setback thermostat, I know you live somewhere it’s kind of cold, in most of the year. Most people have their thermostats setbacks so that in the evening, it turns out that sets back to heat a little bit, then brings a backup in the morning at 6:30, say, but have you ever had to catch a flight earlier than that? Did you actually reprogram your thermostat to bring out the heat? No, it’s too difficult.

But if you have an automation system, your alarm clock could be integrated to your thermostat. So, now when you set your alarm clock to wake you up an hour earlier, because you’re going to go catch a flight, they track automatically adapts to turn on 20 minutes before that wake up and that really makes a great experience for the consumer.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
I need that, absolutely. Because my situation is so bad that when Daylight Savings Times comes, we just let the heat come on an hour earlier or later depending on (voice overlap) we can figure it out.

Eric Smith - Control4
It is too difficult to program this stupid thing. It is very difficult and that’s one of the benefits of automation. And another one I’d like talk about a lot, is people say why automate things? I mean I’ve got all these separate systems, but there’re real synergies to come when you integrate the systems. The best example I can think of is, if you have a smoke detection system, that’s integrated with your heating and air conditioning system and that’s integrated with your lighting system and that’s integrated to your motorization, like motorized blinds, or garage door and that’s also integrated with your audio system, there’re some really interesting synergies that can come.

Let’s say the smoke detectors go off, when people are in a fire what kills them? It’s usually not the fire, it’s the smoke. Well, a heating air conditioning system is a perfect mover of smoke in your house, so I call it the equal opportunity killer. Doesn’t matter where the fire is in the house? The HVAC will make sure that the smoke gets to every room; it also provides fresh Oxygen. So, if the smoke detectors could immediately turn off the heating systems, the fan doesn’t blow. That has some real tangible benefit for a consumer. Usually when fires kill people tonight…

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
Turning the lights on.

Eric Smith - Control4
…dark, turn the lights on. Maybe not full blast — though because it might do the fog light a whole, but bring up 20% so you don’t blind yourself in the middle of night. How about making the motorized blinds in the garage door, automatically pop open so you get quicker escapes, so you don’t have to wait for door to go. How about having the audio system announce over the house, system where the fire is? By law, all smoke detectors have to go off, even if one senses the fire, but if the audio system could say, “You know the fire downstairs in the office, or the storage room,” that would be very helpful to people getting out of the house.

Another the problem is, fire trucks come at down the street at night. It’s a little bit hard to see address numbers on a house and truthfully if the flames are coming out the roof, it’s too late. The fires usually are hidden if you could have your front porch lights and yard lights are flashing that has some real tangible benefit, that kind of shows how you feel — integrate all those systems. That really has benefit because there’s so much…

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
So, there’s three sort of triggers, there’s price point, there’s usability point and then there’s systemic value point to connecting everything together. Those three things are driving adoption I’m guessing.

Eric Smith - Control4
People have been looking. I’ve spoken at probably 15 conferences, where the topic was, “What’s killer app of Home Automation,” and they’re looking for the killer app, kind of like the Spreadsheet was for the PC, what’s the killer app for Automation? The challenge I think is that the killer app is the integration itself. It’s the making the things work together that is the killer app, I don’t think there’s anyone item of a Home Automation that’s going to be the reason why people buy it all by itself.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
So, that’s another benefit of standardized networking. When you have a standardized network, not only does it get cheaper more quickly because there’re a lot of people using it driving volume, but then there’s also the value of being able to connect products from many different companies together, so that you can — “Oh, there’s a light I will use ZigBee that talk to it.”

Eric Smith - Control4
Absolutely. Well, thank you Bob it’s been great talking to you and it’s been good to spend some time with you.

Bob Metcalfe - 3Com
It’s exciting being here at CES with you.

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Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: automated home, networking, Eric Smith, Control4, 3Com, Bob Metcalfe, venture capitalist, ZigBee, Smart Home, Rocky Mountain Voices

Tags: Intel, CES 2007, John Furrier, Sean Maloney

More information:
www.metaswitch.com/podcasts

Click here for transcript

Tags: Joe McGarvey, Current Analysis, John Lazar, MetaSwitch, IMS, VoIP, IPTV

Tags: MetaSwitch, IMS, softswitching, VoIP, triple-play, IPTV

Maxtor places the emphasis squarely on mobility and security in the latest addition to its OneTouch line of external drives, the OneTouch III Mini Edition.

Digital Silence has a post as well. New or enhanced products scheduled in the second quarter of 2006 for consumers, creative professionals and small business owners include:

The Maxtor Shared Storage II is the next-generation, three-in- one network storage device providing centralized storage, automated backup and media streaming to multiple connected devices on a home or small office network. The enhanced family of products will include a more robust design, a lightening-fast Gigabit Ethernet interface, user-configurable RAID for enhanced read/write speeds or mirroring capability for ultimate data redundancy, and capacities up to 1TB.

Maxtor put the PodTech podcast in a press release.

More Maxtor Podcasts here.

For more information about Network General please go to:
www.networkgeneral.com

NetApp is also a leader in corporate blogging with one of the founders David Hitz blogging hard for the company.. Now NetApp is podcasting. Dave blogs about his trip with Kevin Brown to DC which was a pretext to this announcement.

Full Transcript for the NetApp Podcast Announcement:

Host: John Furrier, Founder PodTech.net
Guest: Kevin Brown, VP of Marketing, Decru a Network Appliance Company

John Furrier: Welcome to the PodTech.net Infotalk series. We are here at the Network Appliance headquarters with Kevin Brown the Vice President of Marketing here at NetApp in charge of marketing at Decru.

John Furrier: Welcome to the podcast.

Kevin Brown: Thanks.

John Furrier: Network Appliance has been a leader for years in pioneering storage … storage area network among other technologies. Now you guys are moving into a new area extending the pioneering work with data encryption and intersecting in security. Talk about what you guys are announcing today.

Kevin Brown: Yeah that’s right. If you look at NetApp’s history, it has really grown up from an innovator in mass storage to a unified storage platform that could handle multi protocols in the same appliance to a whole storage system company with replication and disaster recovery. There are a lot of innovations around how do you create snapshots of data and comply with regulations Now, what customers are pushing for is expansion of that into the next level up, into data management. It’s not just can you store the data, but can you really manage it? Part and parcel of data management today is security. This is one of the top topics that everyone in the federal government to Wall Street to the entire Fortune 500… Fortune 2000 are really looking at as a priority. Building security into data management; that is where the innovation is. That is where the acquisition of Decru has played in over the last few months.

John Furrier: The world is changing. Everyone talks about how the environment is changing…with security. Everyone is always connected…always on. There is huge talk about security. You were with Decru which recently was purchased by NetApps this past summer. Talk about what Decru is doing and how that fit into NetApp’s plans.

Kevin Brown: Sure, NetApps had a number of security initiatives in the past around the NetCash product line for gateway access… for Internet access and security and a number of native security features. The Decru acquisition brings in some expertise around encryption, around access control, authentication … some of the tightly bound features that are being injected into the storage networks themselves. One of the things that was unique about Decru is we took some thing that was relatively hard and slow…encryption and it was very difficult to employ in an enterprise type of an environment. Much like NetApp has done over the past few years, we did a lot to simplify and remove the tradeoffs. What used to be slow, invasive and difficult we’ve taken and made it really fast. We made it very easy. We tried to simplify and make it very robust…taking something that’s been hard to do, for enterprises, and simplifying that to address a major business need.

John Furrier: Storage is getting bigger. Everyone is storing more photos, more podcasts; these files are getting bigger. People are always connected. Storage is part of the critical infrastructure. From a security standpoint what did Decru do in terms of speed? What other things fit into, from a user perspective, where the security (for enterprise) what this means?

Kevin Brown: Sure. If you look at the history of storage it started out as direct attached … a little disk drive attached to a server. Over the last few years, to handle the explosion of data, as you mentioned data has increasingly been centralized into very large pools of shared data, and now increasingly being replicated… so there are multiple copies of that data. You take all your eggs and you put them in one basket and you make eight copies of that basket for disaster recovery and for information sharing and compliance. All of a sudden, what used to be little pools of data which were relatively separate are now all in the same basket. From a security perspective, this is a real problem. It gives you benefits in terms of not losing your data. There is a dilemma you want to make copies so you don’t lose it if there is a hurricane or some other type of disaster. You’ve got to have copies. But the more copies you make, the more risky it is in terms of theft. What Decru has come in with is a turnkey appliance, a piece of hardware very much like NetApp storage. We sit in the middle of the data path, and we can encrypt selectively everything at wire speed. Our new box that we just launched, our 10 port box, we are doing a total of 10 Gb/second of throughput in single box. These are very, very fast pieces of hardware. We can do it invisibly without changing any of your existing infrastructure or workflow. It’s taking something that is very hard and applying military grade security. We are used on the battle field today by the military. Those same boxes are now being plugged into credit unions to protect your credit card number.

John Furrier: That’s unbelievable. Basically, it evolves to… First, it was secure your network. Now everyone is always connected. Now the next phase is secure your data. It is obviously key.

Kevin Brown: It’s a good observation. Where security started, ten years ago you would telnet to each others computers over the Internet. It was totally cool. People started to realize there are a lot of threats over the Internet. So today if you plug in a network without a firewall you are fired. Things start as a good idea maybe for the military or banks, but then really quickly move into best practices. Data encryption. If you look at data in flight, like shopping on the Internet, you wouldn’t shop on a site that didn’t have a secure webserver or Https. You just probably wouldn’t do it, because you would be concerned about your credit card. How much more so for the company that is storing 14 million credit cards in a server and they are sitting there all in clear text…readable formats? That is just the way the storage grew up. You start from these little pools of data. They never changed the formats. What we’re doing is we are trying to change that, so that you have layers of defense. So that whether you are a bank or an HMO or the government or a manufacturing company…everyone has secret data that they are trying to protect. As you look at the layered defenses… one sort of tongue and cheek comment from our team was, “What do you call a firewall with a lot of holes punched in it to work from home and to work with partners? That’s called a router.

John Furrier: It’s unbelievable; you have to really protect that data. You can’t side load anymore. Everything is about complete ubiquity in terms of access. Let’s talk about the announcement. You are announcing at NetApp today a new initiative. Talk about the new initiative you are doing. It is called Uncompromised Security.

Kevin Brown: What we are trying to do is to put a wrapper around all of the different initiatives and product announcements and so forth that we have within the company so that people understand the direction and where we are going and the commitment that we are making to the customers. I just came back from Wall Street. Some of biggest customers just came back from a meeting with a lot of the Fortune 500…a meeting on Capitol Hill with legislatures. There is a real concern about we need the tech vendors to make a real commitment to securing data, to building security into their systems. We are responding with is, really, that commitment of, “we are going to build products, we are going to partner with other companies to make it all work, we are going to organize ourselves in a way that we can very quickly integrate in this area.” There is a pretty holistic push. There are a number of products, for example, which really come with substance today. For instance, NetCash product for the Internet access, gateway security, the Decru products that we are shipping today many, many large customers using that in production today. Iron Mountain, for example just announced that they are using it for all their data and they’ve now recommended to all 40,000 of their customers that they ought to encrypt data before giving it to the courier. We are making a pretty big push around the technology itself and also all of the business backing. There is no one product that is a silver bullet. This is a sustained initiative. What our customers told us is it is important for our vendors that we rely on to invest in us.

John Furrier: You guys are using your leadership position as a company to go out and spearhead… pulling together the policy side and the business side… leading the charge of what the policy should be for data security.

Kevin Brown: Yes that’s right. And we have been serving as a resource for Congress, who is starting to look at these issues that involve technology. We have been asked. We have met with various Congress People and their staffs, to talk over these issues, to make sure that we can help streamline legislations and regulations for companies, so that it makes sense for them. We can do all the things that are needed to protect consumer data as well.

John Furrier: You mentioned in your press release, it states, “The accepted definition of acceptable security is alarmingly weak.” What do you mean by that?

Kevin Brown: Let me give you a couple of examples, easy to understand ones. You look at backup tapes. They have been falling off the back of trucks, probably for a long time. It is only in the recent past that people had to start thinking about how much exposure there is. If you look at the new backup tapes that companies are using, you can hold almost a terabyte of data on a single tape. You are able to put all the data you want on that. You could put every credit card on the world on a single backup tape and put it in your back pocket. If you printed that much data out on paper, that’s twenty million pounds of paper. All the rules that have to do with, that have lasted for a million years, of what you do with paper or papyrus or stone tablets, all of those types of media which were well understood, the rules all change when you go digital. The issue that people have is they are starting to realize, “Wow, there is a lot of exposure.” Ninety-three percent of companies are sending these offsite with no protection at all. It is a matter of statistics. If you send around millions of tapes, some of them are going to fall of the back of trucks. Some of them are going to get lost. In this case, you can expose many, many millions of people. As a public policy issue and as a company’s responsibilities to its consumers this is a hot topic.

John Furrier: So this is where the encryption comes in I imagine.

Kevin Brown: Exactly whether it is a backup tape you want to have it encrypted in case it falls off the truck…or whether it is a big database holding millions of credit card transactions or bank account or x-rays…you can imagine the different kinds of data…source code, pharmaceutical designs.

John Furrier: It sounds so easy, just encrypt it. You are saying was it has been an issue of “slow”, “practices”?

Kevin Brown: If you look at today’s networks these are Gigabit Ethernet, 2 Gigabit fiber channel going to 4 Gig going to 10 Gig. These are very very fast networks. There are a lot of products than can do encryption. Encryption has been around for 4,000 years, but to do it fast in these kinds of environments without disrupting any of your enterprise applications or systems with all the interoperability and with a level of security that has been certified up to the military levels of security, that’s pretty unique. That is what people are looking at. If we are going to put security in we can’t have any of the compromises. We can’t have the tradeoffs of slowing down our networks, or making harder to recover data in a disaster. We can’t have it harder to manage. We are already up to our eyebrows in work. That is the set of data management challenges that NetApp excels at. The idea of simplifying data management now including not only the storage, but really the manipulation and the security of that data, that is the bigger vision that we want to make sure that people understand as we are rolling out new products, new initiatives, new partnerships.

John Furrier: What you are saying too is, “It is not just network-centric it is storage-centric.”

Kevin Brown: It is data-centric.

John Furrier: Exactly.

Kevin Brown: The other important thing about this is the customers are asking for us to have a very grown up and mature approach to this. They say, “Look we’ve got many different vendors in our data center…your competitors…different companies.”
We need solutions that work across all of these. One of the things we did, again to fit with this initiative, is we have carved a crew off as a separate subsidiary. That is fire walled off. So we can work with any storage company, even if they compete with NetApp storage products. We can collaborate with them to solve a customer problem, to work on engineering, interoperability, testing and all the things that make it easier for customers.

John Furrier: You have to get behind the curtain. You have to be exposed to some of the customers “jewels” in terms of systems, and that would include your competitors. That would make a lot of sense.

Kevin Brown: Yeah, think about IBM. They have had to deal with this. Everyone competes with IBM. Everyone works with IBM. They have learned how to deal with this. As you look at different companies like NetApp that are growing quickly, it is something where all of us realize that we need to be able to accommodate a more complicated model of working for customers’ benefit.

John Furrier: Well Decru is a great solution. We are here with KEVIN BROWN the VP of Marketing of Decru, a NetApp subsidiary company…fire walled off to work with customers in all types of areas. Final question for you, what types of solutions can NetApp customers and Decru customers see in the next year or two?

Kevin Brown: I think you’ll see us continue to innovate in terms of being able to cover the entire enterprise with a single platform. We’ve already rolled out NAS, DAS, SAN, and ISCUSI Tape. We’ve just rolled out SCUSI tape. We rolled out our new 10 port encryption appliance, software that automates all the key management and really bundling this together with NetApp storage and other solutions to really make it easier for customers. If you look at the analogy of the car, when they invented the Model T, it didn’t have any windows, locks alarms… today you just wouldn’t buy a car with out security. There’s one button on your key ring that turns it all on and off. It is very simple, even though that is different companies working together. It’s that same model for the customer. We’ve got to make it simple. One button, simple, all works together, it’s tested, you get it and it works. That is really where a lot of the focus is in terms of partnering, in terms of solutions, testing and innovations. We are really excited about the opportunity to work closely with customers to really solve some pretty challenging problems coming up over the next few years.

John Furrier: That is a great analogy. Make it comfortable. Make it work. Make things easier for customers.

Kevin Brown: Yes.

John Furrier: Well I do have one more question, which I realized that I wanted to ask. You mentioned that you were in D.C. What are some of the legal things? You were out with the founder of NetApp, talking to the legislators. What was the outcome of that? What were some of the discussions that you guys were having?

Kevin Brown: What is happening right now is there are a number of bills in Congress that are in committee and are being looked at and are working their way through. The way that D.C. works is they take the different bills and ideas, and they sort of combine during the process to come up with some sort of an aggregate… sometimes better, sometimes worse. The idea is some of the people who are writing this legislation today, either the Congress People or their legislative staff, we have been in contact with them. They asked if we could provide some perspective in terms of “how practical is this?” What is really the test? For example, if a tape falls of the back of the truck and it is encrypted with military grade encryption that is used on the battlefield today, is that good enough for credit cards? We think it is, but that is … a lot of these things that are a combination of public policy, business and technology. Where we have a unique role to play is we are working with government as a customer and in other ways. We are working with all the big enterprises and we make the technology. That is a place where we can try to contribute, to end up with a good win-win for consumers, for enterprises, for everyone.

John Furrier: The uncompromised security issue. How do customers get involved? Is there a forum? Is there website? How do people get involved with you guys?

Kevin Brown: What we would love to invite folks to do is to continue to track us. We have got a few customer newsletters and other ways that you can stay up on this. If your job involves data management and looking after the compliance and the safety of the data in the corporation, these are topics we think are pretty good to be smart about. We can certainly help out in terms of the technologies, how it is working, and some perspectives on how this rolls out. Again, what we believe is that there is no one point in time that you launch security and you’ve got it forever, right? It is an ongoing process. We would invite folks to stay in touch with us by our website or through podcasts like this, and to continue to educate themselves. We want to help out. From the perspective of technology, our commitment is we want to deliver a set of solutions that don’t compromise on either security…really give you the top end military grade of security when you need it… and don’t force you to compromise to trade off all of the things that have been painful in the past, whether it is performance or simplicity or inoperability etc. That is our brand promise, “How can we simplify data management? How can we let you get your business done with no compromise?”

John Furrier: Simplifying data management. We are here with Kevin Brown VP of Marketing with Decru a NetApp company announcing the Uncompromised Security Initiative – really pioneering a whole other level of our history, which is security-centric, data-centric…security and data. Thank you for the podcast.