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Jun 032010
Visibility
Visibility provides insight into network activity, usage and performance. In short it gives you the information you need to keep your network operating at peak performance.
Visibility into the use of the network provides instantaneous feedback that can be used by an organization to improve their business decisions. Many organizations are facing costly bandwidth upgrades that they believe will resolve the existing problems they are having with network and applications performance. Often when layer 7 deep packet inspection capabilities are employed, an organization gains instant visibility into the use of the network and determines that large quantities of network traffic are non business related. This is often as high as 70-80% of their network traffic. If an organization can scrape or squeeze even 50% of the traffic from the network because it is non business related this amounts to a huge savings by foregoing a bandwidth upgrade or even reducing their current bandwidth capacity. It can also lead to productivity improvements for the users as the critical applications perform more effectively.
Inspection
Layer 7 Classification – Utilizes application signatures to identify and control applications based on the data payload within the packet. This is a required technology to classify and control port hopping applications or to further decipher applications riding within other protocols like video or audio streaming within http.
Layer 7 classification requires WAN Optimization appliances to perform Deep Packet Inspection or DPI. This forms the foundation of next generation traffic shaping products. DPI provides application awareness by analysis of the content in both the packet header and the payload over a series of packet transactions. DPI provides the ability to analyze network usage and optimize network performance by inspecting the complete communication including all layers of the OSI model.
Signatures are the core of Deep Packet Inspection technology. They are patterns that allow unique identification of an application or protocol similar to how and x-ray machine identifies hazards in baggage or how fingerprints are used to identify individuals.
The ability to look inside the packet payload offers capabilities such as URL reporting and control, complete application identification of recreational, peer 2 peer, gaming, streaming video and radio, and many other non critical applications. It also allows identification of business critical applications to ensure these are not impacted by non business network use.
Heuristic Classification – Allows visibility and control of a new breed of advanced applications such as Bit Torrent and Skype that use full encryption techniques to mimic other applications. These are some of the most aggressive and harmful applications to networks.
Heuristic inspection is an additional requirement for complete traffic classification in today’s networks. A few years ago the level of sophistication of many protocols and applications like BitTorrent p2p increased to a level where deep packet inspection was ineffective. These applications have always been difficult to identify but deep packet inspection was capable of doing this. With the increase in sophistication these applications and protocols now completely encrypt the communications which scrambles the packet payload beyond recognition. There is no use of SSL certificates or other means to identify the traffic so heuristic based inspection was developed to classify the traffic based on behavior by correlating a number of attributes of the traffic. Packet size, packet frequency, connection frequency, and more…
Drill Down Capabilities – Allows correlation of user and application usage. Without the ability to drill down and see what applications users are running or what hosts are generating the most application traffic you cannot gain a full understanding of user and application usage on the network.
Real Time Monitoring – Provides instantaneous views into what is happing on the wide area network from a user, application, and conversation perspective. Real time monitoring must also be capable of viewing Layer 7 information such as what URL’s a user is accessing and their precise bandwidth usage over the instance in time.
Top Talkers/Top Conversations – Information should be presented to the IT organization in a manner that is easy to understand and assimilate. Solutions that require extensive investments in training to obtain value are not suitable for today’s reduced staff, resource constrained environments.
User Identification – The use of IP address information is no longer effective to monitor and control user activity on the network. When every system had a static IP address that was tied to a PC in a cube or a public PC at a library it was easy to track the source of the traffic. Today’s network users are using laptops, smartphones, wireless and wired connections, and are connecting to the network from offices, conference rooms, class rooms, libraries, cafeterias, and more. The use of dynamic IP addressing makes tracking a users activity across these various connections and devices almost impossible for an organization. The ability to seamlessly track usage back to a user is critical for an organization to enforce acceptable network use policies and to have the needed visibility to overcome the challenges of today’s mobile computing environments.
Integration with Microsoft Active Directory provides fine-grained visibility into network usage by mapping all network traffic to Users. You can view traffic usage by user names and create policies to manage bandwidth for users rather than IP addresses, especially in dynamic address environments. Policies can be applied to individual users or to whole active directory groups such as the finance department or all printers. This allows you to report and digest information the way you want it, saving you time and money and the ability to make decisions and react quicker.
Anonymous Proxy Detection – Organizations have implemented firewalls, URL filters, and appropriate network use policies to keep their network safe. Anonymous proxies allow a user to easily bypass these policies, and bypass them while going undetected. In addition there are new anonymous proxies available each and every day making it extremely difficult for an organization to block their access. This creates a security holes allowing the potential for malicious or illegal content as well as opening up an opportunity for a user to access improper, banned, or illegal sites/resources/applications that may degrade the performance of the network and critical applications. As an organization plugs one hole a new one becomes available. Anonymous proxy detection using a several identifiers – URL, IP, domain, HTTPs and SSL application signatures and more.
Application Response Time Measurements – Quantify application performance from the end-user perspective. Application response time measurement detects how long end users are waiting for their applications to respond. It also helps to pinpoint whether a problem is network or server related. Equipped with this information, network managers can fine tune QoS policies to control application response times. These measurements are an integral part of a comprehensive solution. Without monitoring application response times, there is no clear measurement to know if application response times are improving.
Application response measurements provide valuable information so the network administrator isn’t clueless when the user complains about application performance. Viewing the network and bandwidth usage is important, it is absolutely critical to be able to see what’s happening on the network. However, just being able to see bandwidth usage and what applications are using the network resources isn’t necessarily providing the complete picture of the network. It is also critical to understand application response times. When there are performance issues what is to blame ? Is it the Network, Server or Application? Application response measurements provide objective data based on analysis of the actual user traffic in the network rather than synthetic measurements such as ping tests. This type of data can help prevent expensive network upgrades when the problem really might be a slow overloaded server or vice versa.
Reporting
Real-time, Drill Down Correlation, On Demand
With the built in reports available with Exinda’s x60 appliances you can gain real-time visibility into network activity, identify performance issues as they are happening and rapidly troubleshoot your network. Alerts, warning and email notifications inform administrators of configuration errors, NIC drops and transmit and receive errors.
With either our cloud-based Service Delivery Point (SDP) or the built-in tools on individual appliances network managers can view summary reports of network activity or drill down for a more detailed granular view in order to pinpoint areas of concern on the network. If desired, a network manager or analysts can summarize and categorize peer-to-peer (P2P) and recreational traffic to determine how much time and data is being spent on non-business activities.
Exinda has built an extensive collection of out-of-the-box, customizable report templates that means customers spend less time and effort building reports. Run historical reports to identify trends in network usage and to aid in capacity planning. Automatically generate and distribute reports via email to customers, users and stakeholders to keep them informed of key metrics. Reports can be delivered in PDF format or in a variety of other formats suitable for further analysis.
May 302010
Why should anyone want to convert DVD to MP4? Everyone knows that DVD-s are the best. Everyone has a DVD player. What reason can one have for converting then?
The video DVD ushered in a new age of multimedia entertainment with its high-definition visuals, great audio tracks and convenient handling and storage. It is the most popular movie distribution medium in the world, and with good reason. But it is plastic-based medium, and this type of medium has one big problem. They aren’t long-lasting.
This may not be very apparent in the case of DVD-s yet, because they are a relatively new technology. But consider VCD-s. The material compositions of the VCD and the DVD are nearly identical, give or take a few layers. Now try to play a VCD that is more than five years old, and has not been preserved in a climate-controlled environment. Chances are, it’ll be scratched and pitted, and you’ll experience hiccups and stick-ups. The movie playing program may crash. Windows may freeze up on you if the CD drive stops responding. And the video data stored on the medium may have become lost forever.
You wouldn’t want the same to happen with your valuable DVD-s, would you? I mean some movies you just watch and then forget, but there are some that you watch again and again, and want to be watching more than five years from now. You can’t just keep them as DVD-s and assume they will be there whenever you need them.
If you dump DVD data to your hard drive, you’ll find it takes up several gigabytes of space. Even with today’s cheap and high-density HDD-s, you shall soon run out of real estate, after storing only a few titles. This is because DVD video is only lightly compressed. You need to use a different compression, something that retains quality but yet reduces the file size to less than what would fit on a single cdrom. And MP4 is the way to go for this. When you convert DVD to MP4, you’ll be able to store your entire collection on a hard drive and possibly still have space to spare.
Ten years ago, a majority of the world was still using inkjet printers in their home and offices. These printing devices had many flaws, but ink printers were extremely affordable, so it made the most sense for a business or home to purchase this printer as opposed to a Laserjet printer. A laser printer is considered much more intricate of a process than that of an ink printer. When comparing the intricacies of toner and fast printing, it makes sense to consider a laser printer as the superior and significantly more complicated machine. With recent price drops in the industry, it is much more affordable to purchase a laser printer, so there has been a notable increase in sales.
Laser printers have a significantly higher output than ink printers, so it is no surprise that laser printers have consistently been gaining popularity since their inception. Laser printers are innovative because they use toner as opposed to ink. Toner is a powder that is used to form the printed text and images onto each piece of paper. Toner is a combination of carbon powder and a polymer. The toner particles are melted by the heat of the fuser and bonded to the paper. The specific polymer that is used in toner varies on the manufacturer of the product. Typically, the polymer used is styrene acrylate copolymer. This is combined with a polymer resin, a styrene butadiene copolymer, or other special ingredients. Toner formulas can vary per manufacturer or even per machine.
At the beginning, toner would have a particle size of fourteen to sixteen micrometers. In order to improve image resolution, the particle size was reduced. Today, toner has a particle size of eight to ten micrometers. There are studies being performed today to further reduce particle size in order to improve resolution and printing. Toner manufacturers maintain a high level of quality control for particle size distribution. Traditionally, toner was created by compounding all of the ingredients and creating a fine powder. This process resulted in toner granules with varying sizes and spherical shapes.
In earlier designs, toner was in a liquid form and had to be poured by the user into a reservoir in the machine. To improve efficiency and consumer use, toner is directly fed to the printer by a toner cartridge. These cartridges can be purchased directly from the manufacturer or from a third party supplier. Toner cartridges supplied by third parties are typically reconstructed from old and new parts. These old parts are from the cartridges produced by the OEM. A HP 3600 toner cartridge that was produced by Hewlett Packard, purchased and used by a consumer, and recycled can now be used to create a remanufactured cartridge to be sold to another consumer. This circle of life benefits the environment and allows for the everyday consumer to purchase a brand name toner cartridge for their printer without having to spend a large amount of money. Remanufactured cartridges are typically priced at half the cost of the OEM toner cartridge. Due to this price discrepancy, many consumers have begun to purchase the lower priced option.
A remanufactured Phaser 6130 toner cartridge can be purchased for fifteen dollars from some online suppliers. The OEM charges $84.00 for the same quality toner cartridge. This is a major price discrepancy. A consumer can purchase all four color toners needed to operate this printer for $60.00 if they purchase a remanufactured cartridge, or they can pay $336.00 for the four cartridges they need by purchasing it from the OEM. In the end, a consumer will have to make a tough decision, but saving three hundred dollars might convince them to purchase the remanufactured cartridges.
May 292010
Pioneer release the first ever 12x Blu-ray drives
Blu-ray technology has, without doubt, revolutionized the way we experience movies and games. With its high-power definitions, storage, and quality of video, it has left viewers spellbound and dumbstruck. Although it was thought that this technology would never become affordable, with the advent of Blu-ray enabled PS3s all over the globe, and simultaneous innovations in the field, Blu-ray is now within reach for most tech-loving people.
Where there is a new disc type, there has to be a new disc writer. Pioneer has now come out with the BDR-205. This Blu Ray Disc Computer Writer is supposed to be the fasted around – with its 12x speed capacities leaving the older 8x versions far behind.
With this new release, Pioneer has leaped forward in the market of computer hardware, and has also made a landmark contribution to computer technology in general. Steve Cohn at the Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. (he is the director of the Optical Sales Dept.) has this to say:
“The BDR-205 drive represents our ongoing efforts to combine Pioneer’s engineering expertise with advanced technologies, and our next generation Blu-ray Disc writer is a great example of our no-compromise approach to optical disc product development. We are bringing to market the fastest Blu-ray Disc writer to date, and it is just one of the many ’firsts’ that have come to define Pioneer’s 30-year heritage in optical disc innovation and leadership.”
Technical specifications for the BDR-205 12x Blu-ray Burner include:
- Up to 12x writing speed on BD-R & BD-R DL media
- Write up to 50Gbytes on one BD-R DL disc (equal to 10 single layer DVDs)
- Serial ATA (SATA) Interface
Short, sweet and packs a power punch with the “50GB write limit” criteria! In fact, with the BDR-205, Pioneer has unleashed a new high in terms of our limits of storing and writing on portable discs. Considering that HD movies and games need a huge amount of information to look and sound good, this piece of engineering will make HD-movies more common than ever before. Moreover, the BDR-205 is equipped with a low vibration mechanism (LVM) – a design that is primed to maintain a high write accuracy so that people who need to write huge amounts of sensitive and critical data on Blu-ray discs can rely on the BDR-205 not to let them down.
And it’s not just the movies, the BDR -205 will be useful to anyone who needs a heavy-duty portable disc, and needs to write data on it – fast. This writer drive will be soon be the norm on all desktops in institutions and corporates first, and will then slowly work its way to home PCs within a few years.
HD movies consist of a lot of data; with any new feature film, there are going to be tens of gigabytes of video, sound, and system information. If you’re a computer builder, or if you are planning on purchasing the drive yourself, keep in mind that you could really use a spacious hard drive to compliment the BDR-205 burner. Although 12x is an amazing speed for reading and writing Blu-ray disks, the drive is also able to process DVD’s at a speed of 16x and a solid 40x when processing media CDs.
Pioneer stayed true to its name with the new BDR-205 model; it’s the first and the fastest Blu-ray drive of its kind. The future is here – right now – with the BDR-205. It is the most silent of all drives around – something that is surprising, as you would wonder if it’s really writing 50GB worth of data so fast and so quietly. Moreover, note that this drive not only has the fastest write speeds, it also reads just as fast – ranging from a 40x reading speed for a CD to a 8x read speed for a Blu-ray disc. Overall, this drive is a must have for those who want to be at the cutting edge of technology, as well as those who need to work with obscene data sizes.
Pioneer is sure to bring on other new innovations similar to this new unit. The BDR-205 will lead the way for other new “super” drives like it, that will revolutionize technology right before our eyes.
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