Aruba Networks made its first 802.11n product announcement this week by adding new wireless controllers and 802.11n access points, as well as incrementing its controller software.

Although rumored about weeks ago, there wasn't doubt in any customer or competitors' minds that Aruba had 802.11n product under development. Unlike many product announcements from technology companies, where there is a measurable element of innovation and ingenuity, the 802.11n product announcements to date, including this one, are in many ways merely the tangible culmination of several years of IEEE task group work. With standards the ultimate equalizer, vendors have emphasized their architecture, performance, and implementation flexibility as key differentiators. Aruba follows much of the same formula.

Call me a geek, but as my bus pulled into the Microsoft Corporate Campus in Redmond, WA this morning, I couldn't help but feel like a little kid entering Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. I'm here in Redmond covering a Windows 2008 Server technical workshop for the media, and while I'll be blogging about Longhorn developments soon, I felt compelled to share a fascinating experience I just had.

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.

If Cisco Systems gets its way, data centers eventually will be replaced by virtual machines running somewhere on a switch or a router. It's spent the last 2 ½ years talking about the virtual data center, and in July this year made its boldest claim yet: that in the long term, virtualization will mean the end of physical servers.

While at Interop, I had the chance to talk to Stephen Hanna, Distinguished Engineer at Juniper and Co-chair of the Trusted Computing Group Trusted Network Connect working group and Paul Mayfield, Group Product Manager for Enterprise Networking.

(now you see why I do print)

The Trusted Computing Group Trusted Network Connect published Microsoft’s Statement of Health protocol (SoH) which lets NAP clients send health information to a Policy Decision Point (PDP)—the server that makes a decision based in whole or in part on the host health.

Let's face it, network monitoring is not fun or interesting. It's downright boring. Scanning line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, and (ick) tabular data is tedious.

Network Computing's editors and tech experts were in Orlando this week reporting from the forum for business IP telephony. Here is a list of the news, analysis and highlights from the show:

The Green Grid is a new standards body promoting energy efficiency in the IT industry. Its goals are to reduce energy costs and help enterprises better manage energy usage by developing industry-wide metrics for measuring power usage and efficiency, create technology standards, and promote best practices for data center power management.

Charter Communication’s wildcard DNS resolution maybe useful to users surfing the web through a browser, but will break all other IP applications. Error handling needs to be performed locally by the application receiving the error. Handling errors in the network for application traffic causes more problems that they solve. Using wildcard domain names to handle unresolved hosts is bad engineering. Period.

Extrusion protection is heading for the desktop. Once defined by gateway appliances that monitored Web, e-mail and IM traffic for sensitive information that might be slipping out of the enterprise, a new crop of products put an agent directly on the desktop to plug potential leaks.

According to Neil Wu Becker, PR Manger, Security, for Cisco, "Cisco is NOT open-sourcing CTA, nor do we have any plan to do so. We're not even considering it -- it's not something on our radar and it's not a pressing issue on our agenda."

Extreme's ExtremeXOS 11.6, available on the X450 and BlackDiamond switches are getting an uplift that starts to make DHCP NAC enforcement comparable to 802.1X for enforcement. The feature enhancement tracks DHCP leases as they are handed out and applies ACL's on access ports. Extreme has a solid foundation that enhances NAC DHCP enforcement, but needs to work on a few niggling, but critical details with handing mobile computers, before it is truly enterprise ready. DHCP lease awareness is not new. Cisco has a feature in IOS 12 called DHCP Snooping and IP Source Guard that offers similar functionality. Switching software from other infrastructure vendors like Foundry Networks, and Nortel, also have DHCP snooping features.

If you’re still thinking of network capacity planning as speeds and feeds, then take a deep breath. Electrical power may well become the limiting factor in equipment purchases. Low wattage desktop devices like VoIP phones are on the market and are being deployed and powered using Power of Ethernet as defined by IEEE 802.3af. PoE is designed to run over regular CAT 3&5 cable and not interfere with other network devices. As more devices are powered over PoE, the load on the switch infrastructure will increase. Power meets networking.

Despite the best intentions, simple changes to infrastructure can turn into a Chevy Chase slapstick schtick. You know the routine—Chevy reaches for a glass on a table, knocks a candlestick, tries to catch it, knocks something else over, and so on. A few weeks ago, I decided to make a few changes to our network topology. I set aside two hours for the changes to take place and that included troubleshooting time. I thought I was being liberal. I was wrong.

Code Green Networks is launching an information leak prevention appliance for the mid market. The appliance sits at the boundary of the internal network and monitors e-mail, Web mail, HTTP and FTP traffic for sensitive corporate information.

Energy costs to power and cool the data center are a top concern for IT these days, but what about all those laptops and desktops in your organization? Does their power consumption matter?

Is it too early in the NAC space to starting talking about revolution or evolution? Maybe. But there are some interesting changes going on. The whole of NAC has really been centered around assessing an endpoint's health and making an access decision like granting access or enforcing quarantine. That's all well and good, but really, your protecting the network from an infected or malicious host. It's not really access control.

Extreme Networks is trying to strengthen it’s play in the mid-size market with two limited engagement assessment services, a Mid-Size Networks Security Assessment, $6000, and a Convergence Readiness Assessment, starting at $9500. The two day on-site assessments aimed at assisting mid-sized companies with defining the scope of security and convergence projects and determining the steps to get from where the company is to where it needs to be. Extreme claims that the assessment is vendor neutral, and that may be the case for equipment that Extreme doesn’t sell, but I bet any assessment will suggest Extreme hardware or it’s partners products.

Let’s face it, Extreme is a one trick pony in a sea of competitors that have diversified their product offerings in the last few years. Extreme has to do something to stay in the game and compete against vendors like Cisco, HP, and Nortel, that can offer broader solutions and going after the mid-market makes sense for them. I chuckle every time I talk to a vendor that is targeting the Fortune 500 or Fortune 100 because there are only 500 or 100 potential customers and a whole bunch of competitors. Do the math. It’s refreshing to see a vendor target a smaller, and much larger customer base.

While smaller IT shops, and Extreme’s initiative is aimed at companies ranging in size from 100 to 1000 users, probably do have more need for consulting on advanced network issues because the IT staff or busy running the network, the big question is why would a mid-sized company go to Extreme and not a trusted, or at least local, value added reseller, that can offer a broader set of services and possibly get discounts for consulting services? It’s not a matter of whether Extreme has the chops to provide consulting, it’s a matter of what a mid-sized company needs and that often means more reliance on a VAR for more than just assessment. That’s the hump Extreme has to get over.

The following post contains the correspondence between Barracuda Networks and Frank Bulk in response to Frank’s blog on Barracuda’s representation of its Spam Firewall e-mail capacity.

Veteran IT buyers know that vendor promises about performance or capacity tend to be aspirational rather than factual. But Barracuda, maker of the Network Spam Firewall, has stooped to a new low: eight times lower, that is.

Is the new Cisco NAC/Microsoft NAP Interoperability Architecture partnership a harbinger of things to come? Is this the situation that NAC vendors have feared (or welcomed, depending on your point of view)? It certainly is an ambitious partnership and if successful, will change the shape of the NAC market and, more importantly, your deployment options.

Contrary to what you may believe, Skype is primarily used for business, not home use. So concludes a Cornell University study of Skype use.

A new study from PointTopic found that VoIP subscribers jumped by 83% in 2005, and hit nearly 19 million subscribers worldwide. It's just one more piece of evidence that traditional telephone are going the way of the horse and buggy.

Verizon is aggressively targeting Long Island with it fiber-to-the-home FiOS service -- but it looks as if cable company Cablevision may clean its clock. This doesn't bode well for telcos in the upcoming cable versus telco all-out war.

A report from the Mail & Guardian Online claims that a home firewall is virtually useless, and "is not much more than a leaky dike." But there's less to this report than meets the eye, and its conclusions may be highly misleading.

I bumped into the Phil Edholm, chief technology officer and vice president of Strategy and Architecture for Nortel's Enterprise Solutions and Packet Networks group, here in the halls at VoiceCon. We spoke about the opportunities for Nortel in light of the Microsoft relationship and his vision for the future of communications. Here's what he had to say:

The recent ruling by a federal judge that the NSA wiretapping program violates the constitution is bad news for AT&T and other telcos -- they may end up paying millions of dollars because of their acquiescence in the program.

News.com is reporting that the fall out from AOL's privacy fiasco has begun.

VoIP has dropped the cost of international calls so drastically that sleazy marketers and scammers call into the U.S. from overseas to evade our country's do-not-call regulations. And the problem is only getting worse.

When people think of VoIP, they think of Skype. That's the interesting conclusion of Phil Wolff's blog on Skype Journal. That's bad news for Vonage...and very good news for Skype.

I wrote briefly about the financial troubles Zultys was having. So I popped off a few questions to Ian Milnes, the President of Zultys. If I were a Zultys customer, I would be really nervous until I saw an announcement about a new round of funding. I wish them all the best.

Here is his resopnse.

Fratto: How long do you think it will be before operations resume?
Milnes: Your question seems to assume something that has never happened. We have never ceased operations so there never has been any need to resume them. For the past two weeks we have been building product, selling product, taking orders, and shipping product. We have been supporting product and fixing software bugs that have been found in the field. So, I don't think your first question is the correct one. If your question is when we will be back at full bore as we were a month ago, I cannot answer that. We are going through a restructuring and will come through that a stronger company (with some managers who are wiser now than they were a month ago!).

Fratto: What services are being offered today and how long do you expect them to continue?
Milnes: I think I have answered your second question. However, I would add that each of our sales and support offices around the globe is operating at 80% capacity as before. It's a bit more of a work load for people, but sales are already picking up and we hope to be able to hire back people at the remote offices to full capacity this year.

Fratto: Is there a strategy in the event that Zultys can't get funding?
Milnes: I do not consider your third question a viable option at this point. We have engaged an investment banking firm in NYC that is an expert in assisting companies in our position. They have generated significant interest in Zultys and at this point I don't think we will fail to get funding.

Digium, the company behind open source PBX software Asterisk, has just gotten $13.8 million in Series A funding from the Boston-based VC fund Matrix Partners. This should be the final nail in the coffin of old-style PBXs.

Sony's new mylo instant messaging/calling device includes Skype so you can make VoIP calls using Wi-Fi networks. Yes, it sounds cool...but I think this one is going to crash and burn, so I don't think Skype will be a big winner here.

Possibly the most disturbing news out of the Black Hat security conference last week was how Asterisk, the open source PBX, is being increasingly used by hackers in a wide variety of hard-to-stop VoIP hacks. Everyone, from home users to corporate networks, could become a target.

Not happy with the limited choices you have for broadband Internet access? That may change. The FCC has just announced it plans to back broadband over powerline (BPL) technology, so you may eventually get Net access from your local utility. And AT&T and the other telcos certainly aren't happy about it.

A hacker's toolkit of 14 programs designed to test VoIP security has just been released at the Black Hat security conference. The tools were designed so that security pros can test the safety of their networks. But you can be sure that hackers are licking their chops at getting their hands on this one.

Internet telephony providers are in for some more rough times. The IRS and Department of Treasury helped traditional carriers cut their costs yesterday by eliminating the three percent Federal Excise Tax (FET) on long-distance telecoms. They also chose not to impose the tax on other services, such as IP telephony and wireless. Many IP telephony providers, however, have never included FET in their charges anyway.

The Vonage earnings report is out, and it's only bad news: A whopping loss of more than $74 million in the quarter, skyrocketing marketing expenses, and worsening customer churn. Despite that, the company had the gall to claim it's on the way to profits. Does anyone believe these people any more?

I recently reviewed a new version of Zulty's 3.0 release only to find out from a reader that Zultys has reduced operations. This little tidbit from Robert Liu on TMCNet.com provides more detail. Looks like Zultys is going to be selling and supporting the product while they search for funding. In fact, a press release today announces a case study of Australia's Health Services Union, Victoria Branch use of Zultys products. I have an email into Iian Milnes and hopefully I will have more details.

In the mean time, you might want to get familiar with the IP PBX space again.

The Skype co-founders last week personally paid millions of dollars in the over $100 million plus settlement against Kazaa, which they also co-founded. Why did they fork over such big bucks, when they had sold the company long ago and are no longer liable? Merely so they could enter the U.S., fear-free.

Ok, some days the craziest press releases cross my email. They usually get deleted based on the headline, but this one caught my eye because the FUD factor just jumps out right from the title.

If Microsoft is going to make an inroads at all with its Zunes iPod rival, it's going to have to make the device perform a lot of tricks the iPod can' dot. Here's a start: Make it a Wi-Fi phone.

Think of VoIP and you think primarily of Vonage and Skype. But quietly in the background, Comcast has been signing up VoIP customers, and may become king of VoIP.

Now you can reduce costs with an open source router. Heck you can probably get enough money by selling your Cisco routers on eBay for a company picnic this year. Doing the happy dance yet?

When Vonage looks at the competition, Skype isn't even on its radar, but Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T are directly in its cross-hairs. Vonage has targeted online buys directed at the phone companies, but not at Skype.

Vyatta officially launched its open source routing platform this week. The routing software, called Open Flexible Router (OFR), is available for a free download.

Skype has gotten a reputation for being a big-time security headache for networks. But, in fact, if you're willing to spend the time, there are ways get the rogue application under control.

Verizon's chief flack, in an interview with Business Week, claims the telco is a leader in innovation, an "insurgent" deploying technology to change the world. What a joke! This company couldn't innovate its way out of a paper bag.

Everything you've ever suspected about AT&T and other telcos is true: They're backwards-looking, technology-averse dinosaurs whose idea of progress is to fight innovation and try to dominate markets with monopoly power. That's essentially the conclusion of a superb investigative piece in BusinessWeek.

Two developments in the last day show why Skype can't make a profit. First, in an eBay earnings conference call, eBay execs clearly were trying to hide Skype's real performance. And then today, the Gizmo Project announced that all VoIP calls to landlines throughout most of the world will be free -- forever.

I always find it interesting to see how standards bodies work. A group is attempting to form within the IETF, though it’s probably more accurate to say the people are talking about forming a working group, called Network Endpoint Assessment (NEA) which from it’s proposed charter aims to standardize protocols, either existing elsewhere or developing new one, for exchanging posture information between a client, a broker, and a server.

The problems this group is addressing is fundamental and while it seems from the meeting notes at a recent Birds of a Feather meeting that a large number of participants are vendors, a few participants were from companies that will ultimately consume the products the vendors will put forth. That’s a huge advantage of a truly open standards process. This group, if it gets started, may have a significant impact on core network access control interoperability and tangentially the feature sets. Without input from stake holders, critical features may be left out weakening the usefulness of the resulting work. I remember watching the activity in the IPSec working group and the decision to not work on NAPT and user authentication resulted in years of non-standardized solutions to remote access VPN which let’s face it, was the driver in that market.

I would like to see this group form and bring some sanity to the network access control space. I think it would benefit everyone involved.

We're at war – again. No kidding. It seems that life in Israel is the stuff that happens between battles and bombings. Only what's so strange about the Lebanon war, at least for this Jerusalem-based journalist, is how normal it all seems.

AT&T and other telcos make big promises about the future of IPTV delivering video over IP networks. But in private, these same execs pooh-pooh the technology. In fact, a recent Accenture survey found that not a single telco exec surveyed believes the technology will generate revenue in the next year, and only half say it will bring in money in the next three years.

Here's bad news for anyone interested in RFID: The Senate now has an "RFID Caucus" focusing on the technology. And any time that happens, it usually means bad regulations, more taxes, and overall inanity.

Reports say that the Skype client has been reverse engineered, and that a compatible client using the cracked code will be released some time in August. If true, this is very bad news for eBay, because it'll make it much tougher for the company to make back its multi-billion dollar Skype investment.

Wi-Fi hacking is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, so much so that the courts are starting to hand down big-time penalties. Just consider the latest -- a federal appeals court has upheld a nine-year sentence for someone who hacked into a Lowe's wireless network.

With competing network access control (NAC) initiatives like the Trusted Computing Group's Trusted Network Connect (TCG TNC), Microsoft's Network Access Protection (NAP), and Cisco's Network Admission Control (CNAC), as well as all the vendor specific NAC products and solutions, one thing is painfully clear. Standardization and conformance is critical. The matrix of security and network infrastructure products that should be included in a NAC solution for either end-point validation, profile authorization, or enforcement, is mind boggling.

The FBI is apparently drafting a law that would require makers of network hardware to sneak backdoor wiretapping capabilities into their gear --- and Cisco couldn't be any happier.

CNET News is reporting that new legislation being drafted by FBI will require ISPs to wiretap conversations and force makers of networking gear to alter their hardware to accommodate that capability.

It's easy for us urban dwellers to forget that most of the Internet world doesn't live pining away for optical-driven packet performance or even broadband. Their more immediate needs are just getting predictable Internet connectivity, the sort that proved darned hard to find on my recent trip to St. Lucia, South Africa

Is there anything going right for Vonage? Here's the latest bad news: It is being sued by Klausner Technologies for alleged patent infringement, which is asking for $180 million in damages and royalties.

Want to make a network security specialist cringe? Tell him Skype is rife on the network. The VoIP software has myriad security holes that bedevil enterprise networks. Skype has refused to admit them -- and now it appears that rather than confronting them directly, it's rolling out a PR campaign to deny their existence.

Google is playing hardball when it comes to net neutrality -- it's now threatening to file anti-trust suits against AT&T and any other telco that abuse their power if no net neutrality law passes Congress.

Big telcos have been waging a silent battle to outlaw towns and cities from building Wi-Fi networks, getting state legislatures in states including Florida, Texas, Virginia and Pennsylvania to curb or ban them. But now a U.S. Senate committee, in a rare moment of lucidity, is backing a bill to ensure that towns and cities can build their own networks.

Apple's next-generation operating system, code-named Leopard, will include VoIP and videoconferencing bundled into iChat 4.0, according to reports. But I don't think Apple will stop there: Expect it to launch a nifty VoIP device, called iVoice maybe?

Finally, there's evidence that FCC head Kevin Martin is in bed with industry lobbyists -- a photo in Details magazine shows Martin in an unmade bed in a hotel room with a lobbyist and a communications executiv