Monday, March 03, 2008 6:02 PM/EST
Aside from VKernel, I'm not seeing a lot of choice for IT managers who want to enable chargeback for virtual infrastructure costs. However, I met today with virtual test lab management toolmaker Surgient and got a little more insight into some ways IT managers might think about chargeback. Erik Josowitz, a VP at Surgient, suggested that quantifying RAM and time might be a good way to measure the amount of resources a VM is using, and therefore could be a good way to charge departments for virtual computing resources. Other resources to measure could be VLAN, IP address and MAC address consumed. I suggested network bandwidth, but agreed with Erik that the incremental use cost for bandwidth was so small as to be negligible when compared to the other metrics he suggested. What is clear is that VM infrastructure is paying for itself through hardware consolidation and power reductions. It's...
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 7:01 PM/EST
I got DNS in my anti-spam product. And I've got anti-spam in my DNS management. This all happened while working on my "Top 10 things you should know about spam" while also putting together an RFP (Request for Proposal) for a review on DNS service tools. DNS plays a big role in identification and verification systems including DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail). I'm finding that DNS systems going online today may be asked to take on a bigger network over the next three to six years. Let me break this down. First, I get the sense that DNS and the more comprehensive IPAM (IP Address Management) tools will take on bigger roles as IPv6 begins to gain traction. With an ever-growing collection of devices (both physical and virtual) needing IP address service and management, DNS will move from the shadows--where it has played a reliable and remarkably understated role in...
Thursday, September 20, 2007 4:31 PM/EST
When Network General was reanimated in 2004 I asked "is there life left for Sniffer?" Today, my news colleague Paula Musich reported that NetScout intends to acquire Network General, the once storied leader of packet capture and analysis and creator of the Sniffer product line. From all reports, the entity known as Network General has been going down in price since it was purchased by McAfee in 1997 at the beginning of the dot-com bubble. The long story short is that the combined companies became known as Network Associates, the Oakland Coliseum joined Candlestick Park and the San Francisco baseball stadium in a degrading parade of name changes and today, Network General, again, is no more. Eaten by a much smaller company, matched against fierce competitors and losing value with each pass of the hat, the question now is: can NetScout and Network General effectively join together? You can get...
