Sentillion saw a business opportunity, talked to its customers, and mashed up a novel solution to a problem that already had a couple of "answers."

Juniper's switch announcement is raising a lot of eyebrows. Many in the industry point to this announcement as the play Juniper needed to make to get into the enterprise. The switches -- at first blush -- look like any other switch supporting the common layer two and three protocols.

Cisco frowns on resellers of used network hardware because it doesn’t get a cut of aftermarket sales. Network Hardware Resale (NHR), a prominent reseller, is going a step further by offering an alternative to Cisco’s SMARTnet maintenance service -- a key revenue source for the networking giant.

Today was one of those days that make you wonder: Just how may PR firms are working the virtualization sector?

Last century when Cisco started buying companies like an Orange County Housewife with a Platinum card in Silicon factory, the fool-proof way to sniff out the acquisition's purpose was to start with the assumption that Cisco believed the acquired company would help it sell more routers.

We're less than a week away from finding out whether Punxsutawney Phil predicts six more weeks of winter. While we wait for him to make his annual weather forecast, we've got time to squeeze in another holiday. You may not be as familiar with this one -- there's no parades, gift-giving or time off from work. Frankly, it's a shame we have to acknowledge it at all. But it's a testament of the kind of world we live in. Today is Data Privacy Day.

Last March we reviewed ScienceLogic in our Real World Labs and while we really liked the product, we pointed out a few areas of improvement. Their developers were listening! In version 5.1, ScienceLogic addressed our issues and also released a host of compelling features around VMWare management that may launch it to the top of the pack in consolidated Enterprise management products.

Most interesting in the release are a number of components to manage virtualized environments. Using Dynamic Applications built for VMWare, EM7 reports information on the VMWare ESX Server, hypervisor, and any Virtual Machines running a guest OS. This version also expands upon this foundation to provide better visualization of the entire virtualized environment and the relationships between virtualization infrastructure components. This includes auto alerts for individual virtual machine migration to composite graphs showing the health of multiple virtual machines.

Alan Shimel's latest blog post takes vendors to task that have added NAC functionality to their existing product line and specifically goes after LANDesk's NAC, which, he states, is an afterthought. Shimel has often said that host assessment is critical to NAC. Is he changing his tune?

I spoke with Don Norbeck out of Wayne, Pa., this morning. He's director of product development for SunGard Availability Services, though a more appropriate title might be SunGard Virtualization Guru. Or Evangelist.

I'm not ready to drop $200 for a Leopard-friendly iSCSI initiator for the test lab. Aside from writing our own (which won't happen), it looks like ATTO Technology's Xtend SAN is the only game in town.

A new startup has licensed technology from Los Alamos National Laboratory to help enterprises respond to security incidents. But does the company really want to be associated with a lab that routinely mishandles nuclear weapons secrets?

Alright, no actual transmutation occurs, but LeftHand Networks can help customers repurpose existing x86 storage into iSCSI SANs with its Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) for ESX.

Stay with me for a minute. I was going to write on topic about storage options for virtualized environments but got led astray by current events.

Leveraging the ESX experience of subsidiary Mosso, Rackspace is moving beyond 1x1 hosting solutions.

Chris Hoff points out a limitation with NAC appliances and virtualization in "How the Hypervisor is Death By a Thousand Cuts to the Network IPS/NAC Appliance Vendor." But the example he describes is somewhat silly when compared with how virtualization and NAC are deployed.

ASG Software Solutions released Version 7 of its BSM-focused application portfolio management (APM) software ASG-becubic.

The architecture of the new version was redesigned for scalability, with the goal of processing higher volumes of data with added flexibility. It also includes integrated standard metrics and application views.

Vernier Networks video review segments. The videos illustrate the points we make in print and provide you visual context for the review.

ConSentry Networks video review segments. The videos illustrate the points we make in print and provide you visual context for the review. For more details, check out ConSentry Network's Rolling Review.

Adding to our ever-expanding coverage on network access control products, I am starting to post video reviews of the products we have in the lab that should complement our print and online reviews.

Powering the new enterprise-grade 802.11n access points continues to be one of the necessary talking points for vendors and an item of concern for enterprises. That's interesting because, before 802.11n, powering APs hasn't really been a significant discussion item. Some dual-radio APs (i.e., Cisco's 1200 series) have pushed the limits of some PoE (power over Ethernet) switches, but the AP always was well within IEEE 802.3af specifications.

The sad truth is that every computing problem has at least one performance bottleneck. Those of us lucky enough to run applications where the slowest component of the chain is the user don't often have to worry about it.

VMware buys Thinstall and acquires services side of Foedus.

I’ve had a number of recent requests for additional virtualization sites and resources. While I’m reluctant to admit that one might need to look outside of Network Computing or InformationWeek, I'm including some of my favorite bloggers and vendor sites on the topic. Feel free to fire up your favorite RSS reader (as long as you subscribe to NWC.com's feed first!) Enjoy.

The SANS Institute’s Top 10 Menaces of 2008, developed by panel of security experts, predicts key threats in 2008. While some threats have been with us for some time, like Web-based attacks, spyware, and bot nets, and insider problems, the difference is in the sophistication of the attacks.

Last week I blogged about conflicting reports on new plans laid out by Cisco's new Green Guru, Paul Marcoux. I had a chance to catch up with Paul this morning -- here's what I learned.

Sophos issued a press release announcing that Microsoft's recent update contained fixes for a critical vulnerability in the TCP/IP stack. Sophos then went on to recommend NAC to "reduce the risk of unauthorized, guest, noncompliant, or infected systems compromising the network, ensuring that only correctly secured computers gain network access."

Mac admins rejoice. Others may want to read, too. Trust me.

A couple of recent fee-for-view reports stated IT spending on virtualization will ... go up over the next three years. Perhaps we will need to spend money to save money in the long run.

Usually I support lawsuits against big corporations that expose sensitive customer information. Most corporations only take privacy seriously when you whack them on the nose. But a $5 million suit recently filed against Sears for exposing customer purchases is more about cashing in than redressing harm.

A new year brings a new SAN in our lab.

Network access control can address some compliance and reporting requirements, but truthfully, there is only so much that it can audit effectively.

Not up to date with your Intel and AMD chipset nomenclature? Unsure if that spare no-name server on the bench is a good platform for a hypervisor solution? You can test your server's capabilities in less time than it takes to read this post.

I had a chat with Paula Daley, a product marketing VP at CA, about Unicenter ASM and virtualization management strategies in general. CA has worked hard to leverage its existing broad cross-platform base as virtual environment management has grown in its product line. CA's design goals for an ASM-managed ESX shop? How about dynamic resource brokering per host to optimize application performance, with VMotioning as a last resort. Oh, and reducing the menial workload for high-cost VM talent in your IT shop.

Will 2008 be the year that organizations finally conquer application performance management? In a few weeks we will be publishing our wrap-up from nine months of testing various application performance tools.