On September 18-19, ATCA users, vendors, journalists and analysts will get together in Silicon Valley for the eighth annual AdvanedTCA Summit. I enjoy these focused technical conferences both for their ‘deep dive’ on a topic that I am very interested in and the opportunity to meet with friends and colleagues from around the world. This year there are two ‘hot’ topics that will be discussed in the sessions and in the hallways. ...

NAB Show 2012 is just a couple of weeks away and I am working on my personal ‘must see’ list. With the focus on the Content Lifecycle (creation, management, commerce, distribution and delivery, consumption), there is always a great deal to see at NAB. The theme for this year’s event is The Great Content Shift. The explosive growth of the mobile market is causing and shift in demand for content ‘anytime, anywhere’ and users...

A headline in a post on the New York Times technology blog  Bits  said it all – “Even Big Companies Cannot Protect Their Data.” The story was about a user who had been the victim of 3 cyber attacks in January.  Two of the attacks were against two retailers owned by Amazon (Zappos and 6PM) and the 3rd at eBay. In the case of Zappos, the data that might have been exposed included customer names, encrypted passwords, phone numbers,...

Virtualization is a hot topic especially in the data center as cloud computing infrastructure continues to grow.    Virtualization technologies have evolved and improved greatly over the last few years and Virtual Machines (VMs) have proven extremely useful to run different operating systems (OS) on the same hardware, run different versions (32-bit and 64-bit) of an OS in parallel, or to run different configurations of the same OS....

Quality, Quality, Quality, we hear it everywhere but what exactly does it mean? Everybody says they have it, but ultimately we should care about quality as an empirical measure. QoS (Quality of Service) has been much used to imply a more specific attribute of quality as well as a feature that allows control over specific traffic flows. QoS is typically linked to a defined metric/s and an associated SLA (Service Level Agreement) e.g. average...

When Napster first appeared nobody knew the effect it would have on network traffic. Popularized by its music sharing ability, Napster epitomized a new breed of file sharing systems known as peer-to-peer or more commonly referred to as P2P. While the exact amount of P2P Internet traffic has been much debated (one oft quoted claim was greater than 60%) it is undeniably large. According to a forecasting study conducted by Cisco, although P2P...