Storage Networking

The Storage Networking Market has traditionally been driven by the Fibre Channel equipments and product offerings.The market from then onwards has been a fight between the companies championing the cause of the Fibre Channel and the more recent proponents of iSCSI/IP Storage technologies. Companies like Adaptec (Acquisition of Platys Communications) , Alacritech, Qlogic, LSI Logic came out with their offering on iSCSI/TOE Offloaded PCI/PCI-X NIC Cards. iSCSI as a protocol was pushed strongly by Cisco/IBM. (Julian Satran , You listening ?? ) The product offering of all these companies fall into the Storage Initiator Segment, Storage Target Segment and as a switch in between (Remember Maranti Networks ??). The IP Storage market has thus far been very slow in developing and has been growing at a snails pace. Braodcom too has iSCSI chips.Of late Cavium with it's latest Octeon General purpose processor have been trying to address the IP Storage Vertical. How would they fare , given the fact that there are already existing BIG storage players ? This remains a question which their Storage Clientele would only tell.

Please read : http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/080410/0385472.html

Octeon Powers Palo Alto Networks - Yahoo News

Cavium Networks OCTEON Powers Palo Alto Networks' PA-4000 Series, Best of Interop Grand Prize Winner

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(MARKET WIRE)--May 20, 2008 -- Cavium Networks (NasdaqGM:CAVM - News), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, storage, wireless and security applications, today announced that Palo Alto Networks uses Cavium's OCTEON Multi-core MIPS64 processors to power its entire series of next generation firewall systems. Palo Alto Networks' PA-4000 Series next generation firewall won the highly coveted Interop Grand Prize Award as well as the Best of Show award in the security category at the recent Interop 2008 in Las Vegas. Cavium Networks' processors are being designed into market-leading networking equipment such as routers, switches, Unified Threat Management appliances, Layer 4+ content-aware switches, modular chassis switches, wireless infrastructure equipment, broadband router and wireless LAN access/aggregation points. "Palo Alto Networks is delivering a new class of security equipment which enables unprecedented visibility and policy control of applications running on enterprise networks regardless of port, protocol, evasive tactic or even SSL encryption -- at up to 10Gbps with no performance degradation," said Nir Zuk, founder and CTO of Palo Alto Networks. "We selected Cavium's OCTEON processor family from a number of options due to its leading performance, unmatched hardware acceleration, top-to-bottom scalability and lower power. Furthermore, Cavium's strong market momentum and processor roadmap execution make Cavium an ideal long term silicon partner for us."
"Cavium processors are becoming the CPU of choice for a wide range of applications in networking, security, storage and wireless equipment. Cavium's blue chip customer base is leveraging our highly integrated System on Chip multi core processors and targeted hardware acceleration for packet processing, security and intelligent Layer 4 to Layer 7 processing to produce bench mark setting world class products. We congratulate Palo Alto Networks on winning this prestigious award," said Rajiv Khemani, Vice President Marketing and Sales of Cavium Networks.

Quantum Level Jump ?

Cisco has come out of late with it's latest Quantumflow network processor. What Impact will it have in the market ? What would Cavium do ? It's only the ensuing times which will tell.
The link provides the detail.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/routers/ps9343/solution_overview_c22-448936.html

Palo Alto Networks.

This company has been making the headlines over the last few months as they have a good product offering which has made quite an impact in the recently concluded RSA 2008.They seem to have what we know as the next generation firewall. Below is the extract from a web site.

Palo Alto Networks is marketing what it calls next-generation firewalls to address the problems described in the report. But the research itself looks quite solid. It is based not on surveys of people but on a study of network traffic at 20 large companies and government agencies over the last six months. Using its software, Palo Alto Networks monitored the computer behavior of more than 350,000 users. The company has pledged to update and publish the results every six months.
Many companies try to block access to peer-to-peer file-sharing services, but programs used to access these services were found at 90 percent of the companies studied. The most popular were eMule and BitTorrent, which are used to share music, movies and software.
Unauthorized proxies, or software agents that disguise applications, were found on 80 percent of the corporate networks. These can be used for corporate espionage or pilfering trade secrets.
Google applications like Google Docs and Google Desktop were used in 60 percent of the corporations studied. And, no surprise, Internet video services like YouTube were consuming large portions of network bandwidth at all the companies.
One conclusion, the report notes, is that users are routinely, and fairly easily, circumventing corporate security controls. And that is because traditional firewall technology was not meant to grapple with the diversity of Internet applications of recent years.
“We see every enterprise leaking from the inside out,” said Dave Stevens, chief executive of Palo Alto Networks.
But the answer, it seems, is not a draconian crackdown on all Internet applications, but a more fine-grained monitoring and sorting of what applications can play in corporate networks and under what ground rules. After all, many Internet applications are seen as vital tools of productivity, collaboration and innovation — the stuff of Enterprise 2.0 companies.
Take Google Desktop, Mr. Stevens noted. It is a great productivity tool for users to quickly search by topic for the nuggets of information buried in their computer files and information. But companies, he said, are deeply uneasy about the indexing feature that links desktop searches back to Google’s computer servers, and the prospect of their corporate data being indexed by Google.
“But companies don’t want to block Google Desktop, they want to use it securely,” Mr. Stevens said. In this case, he explained, the solution is to be able to turn off the link back to Google’s servers. And in general, he added, the answer is for corporations to have that sort of granular control over the new wave of Internet applications.

Watch This : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNdrGJsGNx8

Rohati - An extract from Allen Shimel's Blog

The best way for me to describe Rohati is that it is layer 7 ACLs to control access to applications. Where we already have security at the perimeter and at the edge, Rohati is about controlling access at the server/application. The diagram on the left (click on it to get a bigger version), is a good illustration of how Rohati works. By integrating with LDAPs Rohati can assign you an access policy to any application. Based upon that Rohati gives a very fine grain level of access control at the application layer. It acts as a proxy to the app server for both regular and encrypted traffic. Because the ACLs are on the Rohati box itself, there really is not any integration with switches per say and so no integration worries.
The only problem is that the Rohati box has to be able to handle the traffic flow. Hence the box is a big honker. The cheap one is about 20k list I believe and the industrial size version is 80k. This product is aimed squarely at the data center space and is sold through channels.
Will Rohati succeed. Yes, I think it will. I think they have taken a unique approach to a security issue that will continue to grow in years to come. Application access is an area that I think is still up and coming. In a period of nothing is ever new in security, the Rohati team seems to have found something that has not been done before in a packaged dedicated way like this. If nothing else, with all of the ex-Cisco folks there, Cisco will eat its young and buy the technology back in.

NAC Market Trend - From a Friend's Post

I am sure many of you, who are working or worked with NAC vendors, would love to hear this. After a lot of talk about NAC market being dead, Infonetics has taken a fresh view of NAC market and predicts strong forecast ahead. Ref: Reports of NAC’s death have been greatly exaggerated; market up 16% in 1Q08
According to the research report, NAC market jumped 16% in 1Q08 to $62.7 million which means $10 million more over the previous quarter.
Though NAC market is still dominated by out-of-band appliances mainly from Cisco and Juniper, Infonetics predicts shift towards Ethernet switch based NAC appliances and in-line (bump in the wire) products. It predicts that purpose-built products from Consentry Networks and Nevis Networks will make up 25% of the NAC market. Being a Nevis employee, I am really happy to know this and wish that it happens!!

FireFox 3 goes live.

Early server issues did little to dampen an enthusiastic response on Tuesday for the release of the latest version of Mozilla's Web browser, Firefox 3.
The browser, released at 1 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, uses less memory and adds one-click bookmarking, better suggestions for sought-after Web sites, and features to help Web surfers avoid malicious software. Rival Opera released their latest browser last week, boasting a similar security feature, as does Microsoft's next browser Internet Explorer 8, which is still in beta.
By Tuesday afternoon, Mozilla stated that about 14,000 people were downloading the software every minute. The demand caused server problems in the early afternoon, according to the company.
"This will put us well into the tens of millions of downloads in a 24 hour period if we can sustain it," the company said in a statement. "Each download is about 7MB so that’s around 13 Gigabits/s of just download traffic. Not too shabby!"
External attackers have increasingly focused on the browser as a vector through which to attack unsuspecting users' computers. Among the most popular techniques, attackers compromise legitimate Web servers with code to redirect the Web site's visitors to servers hosting malicious code. Anti-malware builds on the anti-phishing features that all three browser makers incorporated into their software last year.
Mozilla had publicized the release, asking users to sign up to download the product in an attempt to set a worldwide record for the most downloads in 24 hours.

From : http://www.securityfocus.com/

Download : http://www.mozilla.org

Cavium going great guns !

The company I worked for about an year before joinng Nevis is doing great. Cavium is gaining a strong foothold in the Security Market with it's latest Octeon Processor Family. Octeon being a general purpose processor caters to verticals like Storage, Security, Wireless,Data centre etc. Cavium's share value has been going up since the IPO last year May.

Share Price of Cavium : http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CAVM

Introduction

Hi , I am Kaushik Datta, a person devoted to understanding the nuances of the computer networking industry.I am passionate about networking and interested in new trends in the market , new products and new companies. Having started my career with Cisco Systems (HCL Technologies-Cisco Development Centre), I was always interested about networking as a subject of research and the contributions it can bring to the world community.I have subsequently worked with Adaptec, Cavium Networks and Nevis Networks. This blog is an effort to publish recent trends and happenings in the industry trends and ways of things to come in future. I also with my limited knowledge try to corelate such events and post my views.