Information security was always an esoteric field but with personal computing came personal security issues, culminating in the identity theft problem that concerns even the most techno-phobic of consumers. It's about to get much worse.

Cisco is acquiring CoreOptics, a designer of digital signal processing (DSP) technology for optical networking applications. Will this $99 million buy turn out better than Cisco's past optical purchases?

Juniper Networks' announcement this week of switches and routers designed to flatten and simplify legacy networks is the latest sign that this company has no intention of backing off in the face of ever stiffer data center competition from Cisco, HP and others.

During last week’s Cisco Q3 FY10 quarterly financial conference call, John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO, said something that impressed and shocked me. The company has been quiet about the growth rates for its Nexus line of data center switches until this call. What shocked me was that the Nexus 7000 is now on an annualized run rate of $1B, yes that’s Billion with a B!

In my research on Adaptive Security Infrastructure and Context Aware Security, I have concluded that future information security policy enforcement points must move security policy enforcement “up the stack”. As we move to virtualize our data centers and adopt cloud-based computing platforms, security policy can no longer be bound solely to physical attributes such as IP address or device.

Juniper Networks this week unveiled new switches, routers, software and services designed to help enterprise IT reduce the cost and complexity of data center networking while also improving application and business performance.

By Cisco Systems

By Greg Ferro

You can take the view that Cisco Unified Computing System is a product that is carefully designed so that selling it is as easy as possible. A cynical marketing analysis has produced a product that customers can be convinced to buy. Or is it an innovation in server and data centre design that is desperately needed ?

This past Interop in Las Vegas was one of the best I have attended, since even before the economy took a noise dive in 2008. The tone and level of excitement of the industry’s growth potential was refreshingly up beat from the hundreds of IT and vendor executives I talked with. While the size of Interop is a small fraction of what it was in the late 1990s, (70k attendees with over 600 exhibitors to ~ 15K attendees with ~ 200 exhibitors) it still provides a pulse of the networking industry.

Cisco introduced the CCIE certification in 1993 to aid the industry in distinguishing the top inter-networking experts worldwide.