On Monday, April 4 Brocade Communications Systems announced its intention to acquire the company for $ 1.5 billion Ruckus Wireless. It seems that another strong player on the network solutions market is emerging before our eyes, able to compete with such powers as HPE and Cisco.

It is clear that the takeover of Aruba by HP, about what we wrote in March 2015, resulted in a change of the market leader in network technologies. This is indicated by the Gartner report published in September 2015, which we commented recently on our blog. In addition to the leading position, HPE draws attention strong weakening of Cisco's position and the grouping of many companies in the middle of the chart for the completeness of the solution vision. Brocade and Ruckus are also in the main group.

At this point, however, it should be noted that for some time Gartner has been treating the offer of solutions in the field of wired and wireless networks as a whole. This approach enables an objective evaluation of the comprehensive network offer and at the same time weakens the position of manufacturers with only LAN solutions or only WLAN solutions. In this context, the Brocade-Ruckus offer should be strongly shifted to the right in the near future. This is all the more likely as both companies have the flexibility and adaptability that are not appropriate for very large corporations such as HPE or Cisco.

About Brocade Communications
Brocade was founded in 1995 by Seth Neiman - former manager at Sun Microsystems and professional racing driver (!), Kumar Malavia - co-author of the Fiber Channel protocol specification, and Paul R. Bonderson, manager from Intel and Sun Microsystems.

Currently, Brocade Communications Systems in IT environments is associated primarily with high-quality, efficient solutions for SAN networks. As a leader in the implementation of the Fiber Channel protocol, the company sells its products both through its own network of partners, as well as under OEM agreements with major suppliers of IT solutions such as HPE, Dell, EMC, NetApp, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Lenovo or Oracle .
Beginning in 2008, after purchasing Foundry Networks, Brocade also offers a wide range of LAN and WAN devices. Such products include ultra-fast switches for data centers, enterprise-class switches and routers, load balancers. It should be mentioned that Brocade actively supports network virtualization solutions as well SDN (Software Defined Networking) by offering own products and participating in Open Networking Foundation and contribution to the work on the protocol OpenFlow.

We also invite you to read the article on our website dedicated to the product family Brocade FCS Fabric dedicated to data centers.

About Ruckus Wireless

Ruckus is an innovative company founded in 2004 by William Kish and Victor Shtrom. Since its inception, it has focused on providing indoor and outdoor wireless products from the "Smart WiFi" family for Internet providers and enterprises.

As the owner of many patents in the field of wireless voice, image and data transmission, Ruckus has made a significant contribution to the development of WLAN technology. Thanks to the use of adaptive matrix antennas, it was possible to increase the range and speed of data transmission, reduce interference effects and thus enable the transmission of delay-sensitive data and multimedia services using the standard 802.11 protocol.
It was Ruckus who invented and designed the technology of matrix antennas BeamFlexand then sold licenses to other producers to use beam forming technology. Beam forming technologies are now available on access points from many vendors such as Aruba, Cisco, Meru, and others.

In 2015, Ruckus was the first manufacturer to implement the 802.11ac Wave 2 standard in its access point long before others - it was the Ruckus ZoneFlex R710. According to data from Ruckus Wireless, this device provides transmission speed of 800Mbps at 2.4GHz and 1733Mbps at 5GHz.

Oh, it will be happening !!!

In recent years, we were associated mainly with Cisco Systems solutions. After introducing Aruba Networks solutions to HPE offer, Cisco is no longer a lonely leader on the market of enterprise-class networking solutions. In the Gartner report from September 2015, HPE significantly exceeds Cisco in terms of Completness of vision. On Concerns About HP's Purchase of Aruba Networks I wrote in March 2015, however, despite the threats, HPE was able to efficiently complete the merger of the two companies.

If we can offer our clients good solutions at a much better price, why not do it ?!

Source: Magic Quadrant for the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure, September 1, 2015

At present, the HPE Aruba Networking offer includes:

• Switches - modular devices and devices with a fixed number of ports addressed to data centers, campus networks, company branches and the small and medium-sized enterprise sector,
• Routers - modular devices with a fixed number of ports as well as virtual and wireless devices for use in branches.
• Access Points and Controllers - The offering covers the full line of Aruba devices.

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Evolution of threats

Malware threats have changed radically over the last several years. Viruses, which at the end of the 20th century took the form of pranks displaying funny messages and sound or visual effects, have become a tool in the hands of organized crime groups. Behind today's malware is a thriving black market, where you can choose from offers to sell 0-days, exploits, exploitpacks, backdoors and even ready-made botnets consisting of thousands of hijacked computers. All of this makes it easier for organized crime groups to run large-scale phishing campaigns or infection with TeslaCrypt, CryptoLocker or CryptoWall ransomers.

Approach to protection

Unfortunately, the evolution that has taken place in the field of threats has not yet been accompanied by a change in our mentality in our approach to protection. If you asked a statistical administrator how his approach to securing IT infrastructure has changed in recent years, he would most likely reply that he replaced the floppy MKS with a network, centrally managed antivirus and a simple firewall with a "next generation" device. More aware administrators would boast about taking local administrator rights from their users and using GPO policies enforcing a secure password policy. Continue ...

IPv6 - Opportunity, Necessity or Threat?

A few years ago, counters presenting the diminishing pool of available IPv4 addresses were very popular on the Internet. The closer to zero the value on the numerator approached, the more it aroused interest in the new version of the protocol - IPv6. Producers of network devices, operating systems and Internet providers quickly intensified their activities aimed at preparing them to work in the new reality. Their homework was to a greater or lesser extent done by them. The IPv4 counters have reached zero and… nothing has changed practically. In both home and business applications, hardly anyone thought about IPv6. While IANA distributed the last available pools of IPv4 addresses to regional registries (RIR), it was not a major problem for end users. The regional registers had some reserves of address space for the following years. With time, however, these also began to melt and reach zero. The situation repeated itself, but this time the role of the buffer with the backup address space was taken over by local registers (LIR), which are mainly large Internet providers. This resulted in a tightening of IPv4 address allocation policies at the level of regional registries. For example, the European RIPE has stopped registering new ASs (Autonomous Systems) for clients applying for PI (provider independet) in version 4 addresses. offer their own addresses from the pool assigned to them as LIRs. This state of affairs has continued since 2012. Although this is really the last stage before the actual exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, few people are interested in the implementation and, above all, the proper protection of the infrastructure working on IPv6. Continue ...

In the period from September to November, UpGreat takes part in three IT conventions (Wielkopolskie, Mazowieckie and Śląskie) - cyclical events organized for employees of offices and public institutions. During these meetings, issues related to the adaptation of local government institutions to the requirements of legal regulations concerning, inter alia, computerization, personal data protection or the National Interoperability Framework. The meetings are also attended by UpGreat experts in the field of ICT security, personal data protection, audits and security policies. Our consultants advise IT specialists from public institutions on how to adapt their systems to the requirements of the KRI regulation related to, inter alia, with the implementation of the Information Security Management System. We discuss issues related to the implementation of information security policies as well as risk estimation and analysis. We also answer questions regarding the amended Personal Data Protection Act and the obligations of the Information Security Administrator.
We pay special attention to security audits and penetration tests, which are an indispensable element of security management in any organization.

The AirTight Networks offer includes an interesting solution for monitoring the area of an office, warehouse, conference room in terms of the use of mobile phones. In some situations, it is necessary to discover phones and cellular connections. The applications proposed by AirTight are:

• army and police,
• prison system,
• institutions in which it is forbidden to use mobile phones, e.g. near devices and buildings classified as classified,
• detection of eavesdropping devices, network listening devices and printing systems in order to intercept confidential information and further data transmission via a GSM modem.

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Televisions, portals and experts warn all of us against various types of cyber threats. The topic is media attractive and often discussed. However, in the sheer volume of information, these warnings are relegated to the background as relating to other people and not ourselves. We assume that, because we are careful, no one will steal our access data and empty our bank account. Anyway, in order to make their offer more attractive, banks offer various types of insurance that provide reimbursement of lost money in the event of unauthorized withdrawals from the account.

However, there are threats not only to individuals but also to larger communities. In recent months, we have dealt with our clients several times with attacks consisting in encrypting data belonging to the enterprise. The criminal undertook to decrypt the data after paying the ransom. In this case, the threat concerned the entire company / organization.

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In my earlier post, I discussed QSAN matrices. Each of them has its own built-in management panel, but the question arises whether it is possible to manage several matrices from one place. The answer is - YES. All you need is QCentral software. I will not elaborate on the possibilities of this software now, I would like to share only the experience I gained while running this application.

This software is written in java. The file has a .jar extension. Hence, problems with starting Qcentral may arise. If the program cannot be started, check if the Java virtual machine - JRE (Java runtime enviroment) is installed in the system. If we still can't run Qcentral please add environment variables. Below is an example for Java 7 on a 64-bit system. Find the location of the java.exe file on your own system.

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On Monday, March 2, I received it information on the acquisition of Aruba Networks by HP. The transaction, valued at $ 2.7 billion, is designed to strengthen HP's position in the wireless network solutions market. In this way, HP will become the No. 2 player after Cisco Systems, which is the undisputed leader in the global market. Currently, Cisco has a 52% share in WLAN sales, Aruba 13% and HP just over 4%.

The question is whether HP will be able to take advantage of the transaction opportunities since it failed to do so in previous WLAN acquisitions - Colubris in 2008 and 3Com in 2010. Another question is that Aruba is a supplier to HP competitors such as Dell. Brocade or Juniper. Will these companies continue to buy WLANs from Aruba while it is owned by HP? Nevertheless, we can say with certainty that a new strong competitor, HP-Aruba, has emerged behind Cisco's back, and with the estimated 40% WLAN market growth until 2019, Cisco's share of sales will decline in the coming years.

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Technology is not everything.

When talking about security and security, we first think of advanced technologies and expensive devices: intruder detection systems, active prevention systems, data protection against leakage, secure authentication, authorization and sharing of resources. In order to feel safe, we spend a lot of money and surround ourselves with barriers, scanners, probes, tokens, fingerprint readers or the iris of the eye. We install systems that scan and filter traffic for viruses, worms, Trojans, attack signatures or other anomalies. To process data from so many systems, we launch new ones, used to log events, correlate them, analyze and warn us about threats. It would seem, therefore, that by doing so much, with so much resources, we have the right to feel confident about the security of our systems and the data processed with them. The reality is unfortunately very brutal. While doing so much, we forgot about the essential thing - the level of safety, just like the strength of a chain, is not determined by the sum of all its links, but by the strength of the weakest of them. The question "what is this link?" will not lead us to an answer. For we should ask not "what" but "who" is.
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