Mitsubishi Electric eyes 10Gbps secure VPNs
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(InfoWorld) - KAMAKURA, Japan -- Mitsubishi ElectricÂ has developed a prototype encryption device that can handle IPsec v2 on 10Gbps Ethernet. The encryption and decryption units are developments on the company's existing hardware for Gigabit Ethernet and were demonstrated here at Mitsubishi Electric's research and development center. The company has managed to increase the amount of data that can be processed each second by expanding parallel encryption of data packets inside the device, said Shinobu Ushirozawa manager of the network security architecture team at Mitsubishi Electric's network security technology department. This was the bottleneck preventing faster speeds, but with 50 parallel data processing units 10Gbps Ethernet is supported. Four encryption algorithms -- AES, Camellia, MISTY and 3DES -- can be handled by the device and two authentication algorithms -- SHA1 and 256-bit SHA2 -- are ready, said Ushirozawa. Mitsubishi Electric has already begun promoting the unit to customers in some industries and is working on an even faster model for 100Gbps networks. Such a device could be available next year, Ushirozawa said. Also on Thursday the company said it has developed four integrated circuits necessary for 10Gbps fiber-to-the-home networks. Currently broadband Internet connections in Japan use 1Gbps access lines that are typically shared between a handful of houses or apartments but carriers are already looking ahead to a next generation service that increases speeds ten-fold. To realize such networks the development of several low-cost components is necessary. Among these are the four chips that Mitsubishi Electric showed as samples. There still remains a number of devices to be realized including new lasers and diodes for both the optical line transmission unit used by the carrier and the optical network unit in the consumer's home. Mitsubishi Electric engineers estimate developments over the next few years will lead to commercialization of 10Gbps fiber-to-the-home in Japan around 2010.
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The 10-year project is designed to deliver a worldwide network that could forewarn of impending natural disasters like tsunamis.
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The Hitachi Ultrastar 10K300 Fibre Channel drive will be offered in the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), and the Ultrastar 10K300 SCSI drive will go in HP&#39;s ProLiant servers and StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) family, the vendors said
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TOKYO -- Japan plans to start research on new networking technology that could one day replace the Internet amid its growing quality and security problems, according to the nation's communications ministry.
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(InfoWorld) - A high-tech mecca in Silicon Valley wants to get even more connected by rolling out a superfast fiber network for all its residents. The city of Palo Alto, California, home to many major IT vendors and venture capital firms, last week put out an RFP (request for proposals) seeking a private partner to build a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network. The required speed: 100M bps (bits per second) both downstream and upstream. And as debate swirls in nearby San Francisco over how much the city should be involved in a proposed citywide Wi-Fi network, Palo Alto's position is clear: It wants to eventually own the whole fiber network. The drive by some U.S. cities to build their own broadband networks has been attacked by incumbent carriers and other critics who claim governments have an unfair competitive advantage. Many municipalities have taken a different tack by forming partnerships with private network providers. This approach is now under fire in San Francisco, where the city's budget analyst is studying the business case for a government-owned wireless system. City ownership is critical for network neutrality, according to Peter Allen, a founder of the advocacy group Palo Alto Fiber Network. The city understands that having a service provider own a municipal network doesn't work, he said. "If UPS owned Highway 1, FedEx would not be able to make competitive deliveries," Allen said. Existing service providers that might object to the city's plan, such as local incumbent AT&T Inc., can compete for the project along with other private applicants, he said. Palo Alto, a mostly affluent and liberal city of 60,000, already owns several of its own utilities. Its electric utility owns a fiber-optic ring around the city that links to the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, a "peering point" where most major Internet service providers meet on the Internet. In 2000, the city launched an FTTH trial that reached 66 homes and drew rave reviews from users. The city explored having the electric utility build a fiber network itself but found that its plan to pay for it with revenue bonds wasn't allowed, according to the RFP. The council eventually settled on seeking a private partner, then transferring ownership to the city after a few years. How that transfer would work has yet to be determined. At a minimum, the network would provide data, video and VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service, according to the RFP. It would be neutral and open to multiple service providers who would buy wholesale access. The city wants services to be affordable and available citywide, though some remote parts of the city might not get the full 100M bps bandwidth, according to the RFP. A service provider would have to come up with just over US$36 million to build the whole network and operate it until it achieved positive cash flow, according to Neil Shaw, a principal at Uptown Services LLC, a Boulder, Colorado, consulting firm the city hired to study the concept in 2002-2003. That estimate included an upgrade after 10 years to provide even greater speed. Uptown estimated revenue from the network would pay off that capital investment within 14 years. The cost of building fiber networks has gone down since 2003, Shaw added. Responses to the RFP have to be in by Nov. 28, and the city plans to identify the finalists on Dec. 18, according to the RFP. The timing of its final choice will depend on what responses come in and how long it takes to review them, said Kathy Bradley, the city's contract administrator.
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Technology behind super-fast wireless networks is close to getting official approval.
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Faster ADSL2+ service promises 8M to 15Mbps of dedicated Internet access in 11 markets.
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Falling prices for 10-Gbps Ethernet switches may spur a new round of network upgrades by businesses looking to provide more speed for bandwidth-hungry applications.
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Wireless speeds of 300 Mbps downstream. That&#39;s the goal of &quot;Super 3G&quot; experiments that Japanese telecommunications giant NTT DoCoMo will begin this month.
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Blade switch specialist Blade Network Technologies and 10Gig Ethernet (GE) vendor NetXen have collaborated to deliver what they described as "the industry's first solution offering 10GE connectivity for blade servers."
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(InfoWorld) - Researchers from Siemens have successfully tested technology that not only increases the speed of passive optical broadband connections to the home or office but also the radius of coverage. The team of researchers, sponsored by the European Union, achieved downstream transmission rate of 10Gbps and upstream speed of 2.5Gbps over a passive optical access network, Siemens said Monday. By comparison, current gigabit passive optical network (GPON) technology supports downstream data rates of 2.5G bps and upstream rates of 1.2G bps. In addition, the researchers were able to extend the distance between the hub and subscribers, the equivalent of the "local loop" in copper networks, from 20 kilometers to 100 kilometers. The number of subscriber lines per splitter, where the optical signal is divided up to serve more destinations, was also expanded from 64 to 512. Numerous operators are keen to deploy high-speed broadband access systems that offer far greater speed than DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) technology, which uses existing copper twisted pairs to provide data rates of up to 50Mbps, Siemens said. Services such as VOD (video-on-demand) and HDTV (high-definition TV) perform best when delivered over fiber-optic subscriber lines. At the same, new GPON systems eliminate the need for aggregation devices commonly used to collect and distribute data traffic locally. In the future, operators will be able to connect subscribers directly to the core network, Siemens said. Earlier this year, Siemens researchers achieved a transmission speed of 107Gbps over a single optical fiber. The speed, which the company claimsÂ sets a recordÂ for electrical processing of data through a fiber-optic cable, was reached over a 100-mile route. Siemens has developed a new transmission and receiving system that is able to process data directly before and after its conversion into optical signals using electrical processing only. Current systems handling very high data rates have to split signals into multiple lower data-rate signals and later reconvert them from optical to electrical, a process that adds to costs and reduces network capacity. Â
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Upgrade for 'L' punters Virgin Media has announced plans to upgrade its mid-range "L" broadband from maximum 4Mbit/s downstream to maximum 10Mbit/s at no extra cost to customers.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Enterprise companies will soon begin offloading many of their network security responsibilities to telecommunications and Internet service providers and save vast amounts of time and money doing so, if AT&T has its way. Speaking to the assembled crowd at the IDC Security Forum in New York on Wednesday, Edward Amoroso, chief security officer for AT&T's services division, predicted that enterprises will begin adopting more "virtual" security capabilities from their ISPs and bandwidth providers in the coming years as those companies are better positioned to do battle with botnets, spam, and denial-of-service )DoS) threats. Based on the bandwidth-providers' existing abilities to see spikes in traffic that are tell-tale signs of botnet, spam, or other malware activity -- long before enterprises can see evidence of the attacks on their own -- Amoroso contends that companies will soon concede the process of fighting the threats and turn to companies such as AT&T for help. "We think that security at the perimeter should be virtual, which is a somewhat controversial concept, because a lot of time, effort, and career capital has already been spent securing the perimeter," Amoroso said. "But we think a lot of existing technologies there are running out of legs, and simply running firewalls at the gateway is no longer a valuable proposition." The United States government's Telecommunications act of 1996 prevents carriers from approaching customers and marketing services to them based on any trends they observe on the end users' network connections. However, the companies can already identify much of the spam and malware activity being carried out in the pipe, based on their massive infrastructure, and should be enlisted to help solve security issues, he said. For threats such as distributed DoS that can easily be thwarted upstream, the CIO said, it makes little sense for companies to continue to invest in new technologies and staff when the carriers could easily detect and snuff out the campaigns ahead of time. "How do you stop DDoS at the edge? The physics just don't make sense. When these attacks happen, the customers' routers will already be dead," said Amoroso. "We think the idea that the pipe should be dumb is strange; with spam accounting for 90 percent of all traffic on the e-mail pipe, we're delivering nothing but more attacks, malware, and junk. If people want us to keep doing that we can, but why would they want us to keep doing that when we can see it, scoop it, study it, and stop it?" Lest someone should contend that AT&T and other carriers are merely licking their chops at the prospect of adding pricey new security services to their products, the expert said security services should eventually become a set of non-optional capabilities included with the purchase of ISP and telephony services. Much as the carrier community focused on providing faster services in the 1980s and added tools to improve quality to their products in the 1990s, the CIO said that security services will become a de facto element of all the capabilities that the firms market. While early adopters are already paying a premium to use the security capabilities offered by carriers today, eventually the price should be blended into the packages of capabilities that companies buy from providers such as AT&T, the expert predicted. At the same time, AT&T and other carriers would have to sacrifice their existing businesses of selling firewall management and intrusion detection-type systems into enterprises, he said. But the move to push security tools to the bandwidth providers is one that has been made even more likely by the complexity of those technologies. "I think we'll come out of this decade thinking it was silly to have separate perimeter security systems, it doesn't make sense to build the network and overlay security as an afterthought," Amoroso said. "We have as large of a managed security services business as anyone, but this work is better off embedded in the pipeline." Emerging mobile and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services will also include integrated security capabilities that replace many of the systems being implemented to protect those technologies today, according to the AT&T CIO. "We can virtualize these things, and any carrier can do it; this is the direction that perimeter security is headed in. It's not a collision course, but rather something very pleasant, as finally there's something smooth and simple to solve these problems," he said. "It's absurd that all we hear today is that the carrier plays no role in all of this, that companies should do it at the edge. We know it's a lot of work, but we're already prepared to do it."
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Narus Inc. is moving to help service providers scale up their network security.
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NTT DoCoMo, Japan&#39;s biggest mobile communications carrier, achieved a 1Gbps packet transmission speed using 4G) mobile communication equipment in August, the company has said.
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Juniper Networks Inc. on Monday launched an initiative to tighten security between its VPN gear and third-party end-point security products.
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SonicWallÂ Tuesday announced the release of a low-cost firewall device aimed at small businesses and designed to allow remote users to communicate via a VPN (Virtual Private Network).