Besides regular vendor briefings and the occasional trade show, as time allows I also make an effort to sit on the consumer side of the sales process and attend vendor webinars in my beat area. I recently attended a webinar on 802.11n (by a vendor that shall remain unnamed) that provided a good technical overview of the principle technical features of this upcoming IEEE standard. The director of product marketing manager who led the webinar surprised me with his first multiple-choice survey question: "What is the main reason you are interested in 802.11n". Of the five choice he listed, there appeared to be at least one obvious one missing. Apparently the rest of the webinar participants felt the same, as their responses appeared to take the leader of the webinar off-guard.

It's amazed me how many people have asked me about 802.11n support in Vo-Fi handsets. While I'm a strong advocate of Vo-Fi, both for its increased productivity and potential costs savings, Wi-Fi support in this form factor has always lagged behind the laptop modules, PC card, and USB products in terms of security and radio support.

At Sun's invitation, I spent an hour with EVP and manager of Sun's System's group, John Fowler yesterday. Surprisingly, the meeting came just a week before Sun announces its FYQ1 numbers.

Forget "SAW." Never mind "The Grudge" or "The Hills Have Eyes." You want a true tale of horror? Then watch this video, if you dare!

NetIQ introduced a compelling new IT process automation tool, called Aegis (pronounced e-gis). Unlike BMC and Hewlett-Packard, which went on shopping sprees to gobble up RealOps and Opsware/iConclude, respectively, this summer, NetIQ took the novel approach of developing the software from the ground up over the past 18 months. What's unique about Aegis is was designed to be a vendor-agnostic, or perhaps NetIQ-agnostic, software platform.

Don’t get too excited yet. The greatest development need is for NetIQ to release integrations into more applications. At launch, NetIQ Aegis' architecture only supports NetIQ AppManager. In development are five more adapters for third-party products such as Remedy, HP OpenView, EMC Smarts and other NetIQ technologies. NetIQ plans to release these over the next 1.5 quarters. We can't wait!

If you review the quote and marketing material from different WLAN vendors over the last few months it's pretty clear that there are divergent views on *what* 802.11n is good for. And it's much more than those vendors just trying to be unique for the sake of value differentiation, it's that they really do have a stake in seeing the market go their way.

Ah, Halloween. A night of frolic, candy and costumes, spooky tales and good-natured fun. But all is not as it seems. Evil lurks in the data centers. The malevolent shadow of inexplicable server crashes and the presence of clueless management fill even the most stalwart of IT professionals with dread. Fortunately, the folks are Hyperic want you to face your fears. The company is sponsoring "A Nightmare on Web Street" -- a short essay contest, in which participants submit their most dreaded IT scenarios they have survived in their careers. The IT pro with the most bone-chilling tale will win a Nintendo Wii.

The deadline is Oct. 30 at 11:59 p.m. PDT -- one minute before Halloween! So send in your tale ... if you dare!

Total consolidated revenues for the 3rd quarter were $358 million, up a striking 90% vs 3Q06. Does anyone out there still think virtualization is a passing fad?

This week, a funny little animation for all you feline lovers out there. Not being a cat owner, I have to ask -- does this thing tend to happen?

OPNET is working to bolster its application performance management solution and Monday announced the purchase of Network Physics for $10M. OPNET will add the NetSensory product line of Network Physics into their ACE Live end-to-end monitoring solution announced in September.

In my recent review of Tripwire, I was remiss in not mentioning Solidcore S3 Control. Solidcore S3 Control, like Tripwire, offers more control to change management. The software provides real-time visibility of changes being made across a variety of infrastructure elements, adds accountability to validate change activity and can also develop policies that can enforce change policy. Thanks to an avid InformationWeek reader (and Solidcore) for pointing this out to me. We hope to get the products in our labs soon.

I had the opportunity to speak with both Jim Grant and Cos Santullo, senior executives from BMC software, about BMC's business service management (BSM) strategy. BMC is deeply committed to promoting BSM and sees the success in BSM as an driver of BMC's success as a company.

A short Monday morning post: The Citrix/XenSource deal has been finalized, as expected, to the tune of $500 million in cash and common stock.

HP announced that they enhanced their Business Service Management (BSM) solution and this will likely kickoff a battle of 'Who Has the Best BSM Solution' in the big enterprise management vendors.

Keeping an eye on an employee’s desktop is a touchy subject, and who hasn’t enjoyed a read of their favorite Network Computing blog in the middle of the workday?

Establishing enforceable policy on Windows desktops across an enterprise is a daunting task even in a fairly small environment. Manual policies such as a security checklist for configuring end user systems or servers require automation. Policies concerning application access, passwords, content accessibility and configuration, as well as server changes all should be managed in today's environment.

It's predictable like the change of the seasons. Every year systems come off lease or are fully depreciated and its time dump the old and bring in the new. But just how careful are you about erasing data from old systems?

NAC deployments often require more integration than seen at first blush. Especially when the NAC products don't meet with expectations. Take user login/log-offs that were a problem I mentioned in my review of ConSentry's product. There are ways to mitigate problems or bolster your NAC deployments using features you already have.

...which sounds better than 700 pounds of expensive gear got dumped at the wrong loading dock on Wednesday. Hey, everything sounds better in French. As they say, the best laid plans...

I was recently kicking the tires on some other data center blogs and came across Data Center Knowledge -- lots of good info there, and among all that good stuff was this link.

Perhaps the scariest thought for data center managers is the prospect of actually needing your generators -- just ask the good people at 365 Main. Given that California again had brownouts this summer, it's a good time to think about preparing for minor (and major) disasters.

For businesses that rely heavily on Microsoft back office products, DPM 2007 has a lot going for it. The product provides near continuous backup for products such as Exchange, SQLServer, SharePoint server and more.

2008 will be my 20-year high school reunion. My twins also will be turning 4, which means just another two years before they enter the first grade. While waxing nostalgic and at the same time pondering their future academic careers, I came across an interesting video I wanted to share. It's titled "A Vision of Students Today" and sheds a little light on what it means to be in one of today's learning institutions and how technology has affected student lives.

I had an interesting chat with John Toor and Ariel Cohen from Xsigo Systems late last week. Xsigo has a novel approach to I/O hassles in virtualized (and traditional) server environments. Virtualize everything (network connections, HBAs) for a host, aggregate all the bits via one InfiniBand adapter, run the traffic from your servers over one cable to an “I/O Director” box with massive internal data fabric, and then connect everything on the back end (gigE, FC, iSCSI, copper, optical, you name it) to the I/O Director. You know what? Virtualizing I/O makes a heck of a lot of sense...

About a month ago, green computing vendor Rackable Systems announced ICE Cube. It's a data center in a tractor trailer, and it's pretty cool (pun intended).

While BMC Software continues to focus on business service management, it has been quietly making a big push into the emerging service automation market. After purchasing RBA innovator RealOps this summer, this week BMC launched Service Automation, a set of solutions that automate the life cycle of IT-delivered business services, and also announced the acquisition of Emprisa Networks, a network compliance, change, and configuration management solution.

Established software vendor Opnet Technologies has taken an interesting approach to help organizations solve the vexing problems of application performance management. While nearly all of the big enterprise software vendors are trying to solve this problem by selling software, Opnet launched a service called STAR 24 (Special Team for Application Responsiveness). For a fixed fee, Opnet will dispatch consultants to a customer site within 24 hours of receiving the service order. If Opnet is unable to successfully identify the root cause of the problem, the full service fee is waived.

The Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002, or FISMA, started the ball rolling in many ways for the government's own internal policies on how they handle private data. While it was ostensibly about improving the security status of government agency networks (and it's certainly highlighted deficiencies in that area), it also has a lot to say about the normal handling of private data.

There's a lot of different types of data leaks that have made the press. Hackers compromising servers, laptops stolen, backup tapes lost. But some of those data losses share one thing in common -- the data was never supposed to have been there to lose in the first place.

In security, as in anything else, trends come and go. Some hang around for the long haul, some get superseded, and still others just get laughed at in hindsight. From identity management, endpoint compliance, de-perimeterization, and dozens of other buzz-word compliant trends that have ebbed and flowed over the years, we've learned a lot as an industry. Like the fact that any vendor can and will apply their product to whatever the current trend is. Or, probably more important, that behind most trends there's a kernel of useful knowledge and functionality to be gained.

It's like watching grass grow, but less exciting. Every three years, HP puts out a new version of HP-UX 11i, then every six months it issues updates and patches, more or less like Microsoft releases service packs.

As one-half of the parents of precocious 3-year-old twins, I couldn't help but laugh at this video. In it, comedian Anita Renfroe shares with the young audience what she believes a typical mom would say to her child/teenager during a 24-hour day. Only she does so in just under three minutes, and to the tune of the "William Tell Overture."

I gave a presentation at the MIS Training Institute IT Security World 2007 conference in San Francisco, and I when finally got done (I went a bit long) and a few people were left, I asked if there were any final questions. One of the attendees asked, "Is NAC ready for deployment?" A simple enough question, and I hemmed and hawed trying to sort through all the special-use cases, exceptions, and whatever accounts for accumulated conventional wisdom.

Trying to get a jump on my IT gift giving, I hit ShowStoppers Digital Holidays to see what was cool. As my wife put it, there were a lot of things to stuff in your ears (Bluetooth headsets) and stuff to play in your ears (audio things). Nestled in between were some interesting items any IT geek could use.

For those of you who read my last blog post, virtualization wasn’t the problem. You may recall my minor tiff with vendor support over a building maintenance system. The support tech was stonewalling problem resolution ‘til we ran their SW on a dedicated physical server, or real server, in his parlance. After much testing, it turns out that VM’ing wasn’t the problem, and our VMware Server host box keeps chugging away. Speaking of successful, free virtualization hosting platforms: It seems the OpenVZ project team wants to make it even easier for newbies to demo their stuff. Read on after the link for more...