ReadWriteEnterprise

Blue Coat today has announced PacketShaper 9, a new software operating system release for Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances. The update introduces the industry's first application- and content-level visibility and control for IPv6 "shadow networks."

The reason they are called that is because cybercriminals are beginning to use IPv6 connections as a back-door conduit for penetrating corporate networks and providing communication links to already embedded malware and computers secretly enlisted into botnets. Many end-user devices, including standard Windows and Mac computers, have IPv6 addresses, and corporations may not be monitoring these protocol streams. That is where the new PacketShaper comes into play.

Given that many businesses plan to roll out some collection of IPv6 equipment in the next few years, it makes sense to set up your own test lab to ensure that you can understand some of the transition issues and deployment problems early on.

In the sponsored brief Building an Enterprise IPv6 Test Lab Jeff Carrell and Ed Tittel dive into what you need to know to build your own test lab.

Tired of tracking down when you need to refill your printer supplies? Then check out the latest innovation that IT management vendor Spiceworks has implemented today: an automated printer ink and toner reminder and restocking program. The company claims its users are responsible for maintaining more than 10 million printers, and that adds up to a lot of toner cartridges.

There is a lot more to IPv6 than just a lot more addresses, including redesigned protocols, better routing, security improvements and finally getting rid of Network Address Translation. In this sponsored brief, How to Prepare for IPv6 Networking by Ed Tittel and Jeff Carrell, they dive into the nuts and bolts of IPv6 and show you what you need to know to start planning your network's transition.

Based on hands-on evaluation of many networking products, the authors will show you what changes you need to make to your networking infrastructure, how you deal with the lack of native IPv6 Internet access, and what particular things you need to upgrade to enable key networking services. There is even a sample case study showing you the time and effort it takes to get IPv6 setup on a typical small business network.

Ed and Jeff are computer industry veterans (Ed has written for us previously) who were former Novell employees, authors and hands-on corporate trainers.

What ground Hewlett-Packard lost in recent months in revenue from personal systems - which triggered last week's surprise shutdown of webOS device operations - it has gained over the same period from enterprise products and services. Paying off in spades is 3PAR, the network storage device manufacturer that HP literally swiped from Dell's hands for a $2.35 billion purchase price. Last June's quarterly report pinned a big star on 3PAR, crediting it with turning the tide in storage revenue to 3% positive, quarterly year-over-year.

The keyword is "federation," which HP is invoking as a replacement for today's storage virtualization schemes.

Now, HP is making good on 3PAR's plan to rethink the infrastructure of storage networks. Today it announced new P10000-class storage systems, and a new class of storage management software called Peer Motion, which HP says utilizes both thin provisioning and peer-to-peer networking to shift workloads faster and more efficiently. The same peer-to-peer concept that eliminated the need for an administrative hub in home networking, is being put to use here by eliminating the need for a separate storage management appliance.

His vision was to internationalize the oversight body of the Internet naming system, to structure it less like a spider and more like a starfish. (A starfish, you see, can regrow lost limbs.) To some extent, the dashing security expert Rod Beckstrom has accomplished that as President and CEO of ICANN since mid-2009, most notably by removing the U.S. Dept. of Commerce from its direct oversight role over ICANN.

Come the end of his term next July, Beckstrom will leave the President and CEO role of ICANN, presumably to resume his career as a world-renowned security expert. But in the twilight period of his term he may have to fight at least two more significant battles, neither of which may conclude before his departure. First and foremost is ICANN's adoption of a controversial generic top-level domain (gTLD) plan for the domain name system - one which would give any applicant with $185,000 to spare (PDF available here) a new root domain of its own alongside .com, .net, and .org.

More trouble for Cisco: Ars Technica is writing a damning piece, written by Ian Mulgrew, on how Cisco may have abused the legal system to unjustly punish a former employee engaged in an antitrust suit against the company.

According to Ars Technica, Cisco filed spurious hacking charges against former Cisco executive Peter Adekeye to prevent him from giving a deposition.

Yesterday Cisco announced that it will lay off 6,500 employees and sell a manufacturing plant in Juarez, Mexico to Foxconn to shave off an additional 5,000 employees. This follows Cisco's decision to discontinue its Flip camera products and its Eos video/social platform.

It wasn't long ago that Cisco was expanding into new markets and burning through billions of dollars acquiring companies like WebEx, Tandberg and Flip. So what happened?

PacketTrap MSP has come out with a new 6.0 version that is chock full of features and is specifically designed for the Managed Service Provider (MSP) or for multiple data center enterprises to monitor and troubleshoot their networks.

Today at the GigaOM Structure event in San Francisco Citrix Data Center and Virtualization CTO Simon Crosby announced that he and Xen founder Ian Pratt are stepping down and starting a new company called Bromium. The company also announced that it closed a series A to the tune of $9.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

We caught up with Crosby by phone today to ask a few questions about the Bromium's plans.