Sounding something like Harry Potter’s Nimbus 2000, Cisco has released the Nexus 7000, a big honkin’ switch, according to an article in the Register. The switch will handle more than your average “physical world” switch, says the report:
But for this new incarnation of Cisco gear, the company is clearly focused on virtualization. The Nexus is designed for simultaneously forwarding storage, Ethernet and IP traffic by virtualizing network interface cards and host bus adapters rather than requiring separate cards for SAN and LAN.
Seeing these as interchangeable means a lot for where Cisco views the new data center world. We won’t be making distinctions between physical gear and virtual gear. They will blend into the same flavor of network without us having to consider the platform. As this level of integration migrates down to lesser model switches (the Nexus is set to retail for around $75K, according to the Register), we’ll see some new methodologies to how we architect networks, particularly around storage and pushing it around to support virtual systems.
Wired has run an AP Newswire story on its blog talking about the future of RFID chips, and some of the potential downsides of them.
A seamless, global network of electronic “sniffers” will scan radio tags in myriad public settings, identifying people and their tastes instantly so that customized ads, “live spam,” may be beamed at them.
Further:
By placing sniffers in strategic areas, companies can invisibly “rifle through people’s pockets, purses, suitcases, briefcases, luggage – and possibly their kitchens and bedrooms – anytime of the day or night,” says Rasch, now managing director of technology at FTI Consulting Inc., a Baltimore-based company.
There are some serious considerations to these points and the several others made the article ( read the full article here). But between that future where these things are more integrated and now lies several opportunities for businesses to contemplate the use of these technologies outside their current mainstay of supply chain empowerment. The article has several ideas for consideration. Do any strike YOUR fancy?
Mobile applications are more important than ever before. Mashable posted this resource showing seven places to get BlackBerry applications, skins, and resources.
Currently, the top apps on my BlackBerry Curve are Google Mobile applications, and then a few bookmarked browser pages, like Twitter mobile. I don’t edit docs on my BlackBerry, and only occasionally read any on the device.
How do you use YOUR BlackBerry, and what are your top applications?
Looking for ways to put time back in your day? How about transferring some of the documents you have to read into MP3 files, throwing them on your portable player, and listening to them while you take a walk? New service VozMe makes it easy to do this. Though the voice isn’t especially good, it’s a simple, quick hack to getting text into MP3 form.
Another solution which has some merit is Xfruit’s new Vocal Fruits service, which translates RSS to voice. That site, by the way, has about a dozen other ways to get data from one form to another. You’ll see some other interesting applications besides voice.
Putting data in a form we’d like starts off as a novelty, but the more we consider applications, the more we can see some business uses for this same technology. What do you see?
Enterprise technologists are getting closer to understanding and accepting the notions behind cloud computing. In this blog post, the folks at the FAST Forward blog point to an article about collective intelligence, cloud computing, and networked knowledge work.
What’s happened over the past few years is that people writing web applications have found ways to fully take advantage of the Internet for collaborative work. They’ve learned methods for building applications that harness the efforts of many people to build an even stronger value on top.
For instance, instead of storing your bookmarks to websites on your own browser, by adding them on a site like del.icio.us, not only can you see the bookmarks you’ve stored, but you can browse and search and find what other people have discovered elsewhere. The combined bookmarking builds another whole level of discovery on top of standalone efforts, meaning that more hands lighten the load.
Enterprises have been slow to accept and adopt this. Partly, it’s security. Another part is finding ways to turn consumer product models into business product models. But it’s coming. Slowly. Software as a service and distributed computing models are just the start. Virtualization is showing how we can disaggregate the hardware layer from computing.
Check out the article for more thoughts on this: Full article here.
My RSS reader of choice is Google Reader, because it’s fast, flexible, and has lots of great sharing features. Mashable reports today that Google silently threw in more new features, including some new keyboard commands.
Stay tuned. In a week or two, we’ll throw up a “how to use Google Reader” screencast to get you started. While you’re waiting, here’s how I use Google Reader in the context of helping businesses “listen” to the Web.
