Last Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2007, Carolyn Duffy Marsan at NetworkWorld wrote, "The American Registry for Internet Numbers plans to post proposed changes to its IPv4 address space transfer policy on its Web site this week."

According to NetworkWorld, that would allow ISPs to transfer IPv4 address registrations; and thus fuels speculation that IPv4 addresses would become "tradable goods." As many IPv4 addresses were assigned before the current popularity of the Internet was seen, this benefits those large corporations, universities, and government institutions that were allocated large blocks of IP addresses.

In fact, the next day, Feb. 14, 2007, NetworkWorld ran an interview with Internet Assigned Names and Numbers (IANA) general manager David Conrad, in which he basically confirmed that there would likely be a market:

"I can't actually imagine there not being a market. The market will either be black or white. If black, it will have a negative impact on the ability of ARIN to maintain accurate databases, such as, Whois. If white, ARIN (and the other Regional Internet Registries) will undoubtedly get dragged into politics related to fairness, particularly with respect to the developing world."

Indeed, if adopted, this would be a major reversal of policies by ARIN, [PDF] which made this statement in a press release last October:

"There are, however, those who propose that the democratically established governance principles now be abandoned, to create a market in IP addresses. A market that abandons these existing, consensus-driven core values would encourage speculators to take advantage of the upcoming time of relative scarcity of IPv4 addresses to profit from less foresightful users' remaining need.

The purpose of this memorandum is to assure the community that the democratic principles of Internet governance will be adhered to by ARIN, the Regional Internet Registry serving Canada, many Caribbean and North Atlantic islands, and the United States.(7) The resource-allocation policy under which ARIN operates has been produced through an open, transparent, and democratic process over more than a decade. ARIN is fully dedicated to preserving universal access and stable functionality of the Internet, and our policies do not encourage profit-driven speculation in the Internet addresses."

The humor value in watching the gullible bid for 172.0.0.1 on E-bay aside, I find it difficult to understand how a market for IP addresses - black or white - would sustain itself. Yes, IPv4 addresses are scarce - but it is only an artificial scarcity.

IPv4 prices can only rise so high, because if the cost of buying IPv4 addresses becomes higher than the cost of moving to an IPv6 based infrastructure, companies will move to IPv6. And, of course, the more companies that do move to IPv6, the more the intrinsic value of IPv6 versus the intrinsic value of IPv4.

Even before IPv4 addresses and IPv6 upgrades hit a break-even point, it may be a smarter move for businesses to go to IPv6 directly instead of having to pay twice - once for an IPv4 address at its peak, and again down the road to move to IPv6 after it becomes the new de facto standard. Eventually, IPv6 addresses will have more real utility value than the IPv4 address. Those speculators left holding onto IPv4 addresses for too long will find their worth had dried up quickly. Either way, it's unlikely that a company that buys an IPv4 address will be able to make a profit reselling it except as speculation. That doesn't sound like a very stable market.

The speculation about who will move to IPv6 and when really doesn't make a big difference. Yes, we're probably going to run out of IPv4 addresses in a couple years, but there is already an established infrastructure to replace it. When companies are forced to move to IPv6, they will move to IPv6, and it looks likely that, one way or another, companies will be forced to move to IPv6.

It was almost inevitable in the age of the digital camera; Polaroid is discontinuing production of Polaroid film for its once ubiquitous "instant" cameras. For many, this means the loss of nostalgic memories with a family camera.

However, while digital cameras have filled the need for instant photography more effectively than the Polaroid camera could have done, the analog processes of light + film + developer fluid in a handy-dandy photograph-sized pack found interesting niche industrial uses - industrial uses now impacted by the end of Polaroid's film.

For example, doctors used it in medical imaging. Archeologists used the portability of Polaroid in combination with X-ray photography to examine ruins without disturbing them.

Additionally, Polaroid film is impossible to retouch without there being signs of alteration. This meant that law enforcement and criminal justice relied on them.

In these industries and others, the Polaroid camera filled a niche that will now have to be filled by digital technology; and in many cases, that digital technology will place new demands on the network.

For example, medical imaging requires very high detail; shots on film provided a low-cost way of providing that detail. Equivalent digital technology would produce images that have extremely large file sizes. Instead of passing the photo instantly from doctor to doctor, the files would be transferred from doctor's computer to doctor's computer - or to a photo printer. Since a photo printer of sufficient resolution would be rather expensive, it is likely that a hospital might only have a few of them, networked together. And, of course being forced to move to digital from film, doctors would take the new capabilities of digital to converse with doctors across long distances - that means traffic on the WAN.

One of the medical companies that has already gone "filmless" is CliniTech - they're using NetQoS's end-to-end application performance monitoring tools to track the performance of their digital radiology application, so that they can make sure all the doctors and nurses can view these digital images from anywhere in their healthcare system. They may have been forced to go digital by Polaroid's obsolescence, but once there, the advanced applications of digital technology will then become expected.

The archeologists are in a similar situation. Instead of taking photos back with them to be analyzed locally and taken back with them on the flight to their laboratories, once they have been forced to move from Polaroid to digital cameras, they will probably then use satellite communication to send those photos back to remote colleagues immediately.

Perhaps most complicated of all are the law enforcement personnel. A move to all-digital photography would require some sort of watermark-like digital signing to certify that images were not retouched. The networks that these images reside on will have to keep a very tight audit trail which includes EXIF-type data for the full path of the image in order for it to effectively be used in court. And, of course, they would need to transfer the images over a secure network to prevent people from altering or destroying digital evidence.

It just goes to show you that even things that you may never have thought about can impact network performance in ways that are nearly unforeseeable.

How are you being affected by the Polaroid film discontinuation? Leave a comment below.

(Special thanks to Carol Schiraldi for giving us this story lead.)

by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

By now, everyone will have heard of Microsoft's hostile takeover bid for Yahoo, and of Yahoo's board rebuffing the offer. What people may not be thinking about would be how a "Microhoo!" would affect IT application performance planning.

While it's clear that Microsoft, having been unsuccessful in promoting its own software-as-a-service offerings, is now trying to buy their way into this market simply by buying out the market leader, it shows how seriously Microsoft takes the SAAS space.

Yes, it's Yahoo, and not Google, that is the leader on online SAAS solutions - at least as far as consumers are concerned. Google gets more searches and does better with online advertising, but Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Flickr, Yahoo Del.icio.us, Yahoo Voice, Yahoo Upcoming.org and all of the other services that are owned by Yahoo more than make up for Yahoo's second banana status in search - to the point that Yahoo has more users and page views. Typing the word "mail" into Google returns Yahoo! Mail as the top search result - over Gmail. Seriously. Try it.

One reason, perhaps, why Microsoft might want Yahoo!

It's not a sure thing of course, that Microsoft will build SAAS applications after a Yahoo acquisition, or that those applications will become commercially successful. It seems like a paradox that Microsoft has not been able to do well in SAAS development when SAAS applications discourage open-source solutions. Sure, there are open source SAAS applications but the overhead and cost of hosting and maintaining SAAS infrastructure favors larger, established proprietary software vendors, with more money to sink into the project.

This also provides enough reason for those who predict that Microsoft would somehow "ruin" Yahoo's online-app offerings to pause and consider what would happen Microsoft's business strategy combined with Yahoo's online development and marketing.

As we've mentioned on Network Performance Daily before, you don't stop thinking about application performance once applications move out from the data center to the Internet.

The conversion of Microsoft applications - which are still in a strong position in the enterprise - to SAAS applications would mean big changes to IT planning. When you move an app from the Data Center to the cloud, you're giving up control of the infrastructure, and submitting it to the vagaries of the Internet. As we've seen recently with the undersea cables, it's not always that great an idea to rely on consistent Internet performance for business applications.

Additionally, it's disconcerting when you realize data, in SAAS solutions, is typically stored online. This makes SAAS solutions convenient, but it also makes SAAS solutions particularly prone to vendor lock-in. Salesforce is a wonderful app, but I wouldn't want to switch to another CRM manager, online or offline, if all my data was already in Salesforce.

So with this sort of lock-in, IT managers have absolutely no back-up plan if things start to go wrong with their application performance - whether it's in the SAAS application's data center end or the Internet links in-between the SAAS data center and the enterprise data center. There's even less margin for error.

In addition to making sure that each of the offices on the WAN has the connectivity and performance it needs (after all, even in the hypothetical situation where all the applications a company uses are online, someone still has to make sure the Internet gets to every computer) network engineers in the future may be evaluating solutions by running hypothetical scenarios of what would happen if particular Internet links or nodes went down for a period of time, and recommending particular SAAS services based on "worst case scenario" disaster prevention and recovery capability.

Of course, I could be completely wrong about that - prognostication is fun, but invariably you look ridiculous with the passage of time. But if there's one thing is certain: Whether or not Microsoft is ultimately successful in its bid, the bid itself is a herald of new challenges for IT.

I'm reading some "at-a-glance" promotional material for a major new network hardware product. There is a slight problem though. I can't make heads or tails of it.

Certainly I can't figure out what it's trying to say either "at a glance" or after hours of technical study. This could be because I don't have the necessary educational background to appreciate it - although I'm a smart guy, my formal education and my experience is in editing and writing.

But it is exactly that - my experience in editing and writing - that leads me to write this.

The problem is that this promotional material is packed with technical details presented without context. I couldn't tell you anything particularly insightful regarding it, because it seems to be a bunch of buzzwords strung together. In the end, I'm having trouble figuring out what business problems this piece of hardware solves.

While no one would ask that technical material to make it more accessible but less accurate, there are ways of writing which provide context and enough information for the uninitiated to make informed decisions.

But tons of material which supposedly explains the benefit of IT products from scores of companies is written in a confusing manner which simply doesn't make the information clear. These may be written for "the experts" but not everyone who needs to know about networking will have an expert's level of comprehension of the subject. IT managers and CIOs are often generalists whose greatest skills are in management, rather than engineering, and it is IT managers and CIOs who have to decide what projects get funded and which ones do not.

IT executives are busy today with a whole host of problems. Infrastructure, Sarbanes-Oxley, Network Performance, Application Development… combine all of this with the belt-tightening of the predicted upcoming recession, and it becomes important to make your case with the absolute least amount of time and effort required by the person who makes the purchasing decisions. It's critical in enterprise IT to explain things as simply as possible, and relate the information to the business.

At last year's symposium, Joel Trammell, CEO of NetQoS, made communicating to IT executives a key part of his keynote address. It's a well-established truism that if the CIO doesn't have time to understand it, he's not going to buy it.

In NetQoS's resource room, we've got a free Web-based app called the NetQoS Network Estimation Tools (or "latency calculator" for short) that allows you to calculate the theoretical latency of network connections under a number of different scenarios.

The NetQoS Network Estimation Tools, a.k.a. latency calculator

Allow me to clarify: A number of different plausible scenarios. Like, for example, if you knew that there was a 5ms router latency, a 20ms server latency, and a link distance of 100 miles, you would be able to get the overall theoretical latency of that connection, whether it's point-to-point or frame relay. However, it will not give you the latency involved in IP over Avian Carrier connection. Plausible scenarios only.

In addition to the main latency calculator, there are several sub-tools, such as an Ethernet packets per second calculator, a link speed calculator (with packets per second and packet size as inputs), a multicast calculator that will give you the Multicast Low Order and a MAC address, a HEX to decimal converter, and other tools useful for the network engineers at their desks and in the field.

The calculator was invented as a teaching tool by Bill Alderson, who has been diagnosing problems in large-scale networks for 25 years. We asked him what some of the uses for the calculator were out in the field.

Bill Alderson: You can use it to calculate how long it would take to do an FTP transfer from a 400 MB file to… whatever. So it's pretty easy and simple, it does take a little bit of instruction, but the latency calculator counts the number of round trips that are required and you can make the size whatever you'd like. Instead of having a packet size with a 1500 or an 8000 byte MTU maximum, you can simply crank in a 450GB file, and it'll tell you how long it'll take to serialize that file across the links you have selected.

You can put in all of the various entry points which are drop-downs of Ethernet, drop-downs of T1s, sub-T1 speeds, and you can just pick those in there, and then you can change all the sizes and determine, theoretically, how long a transaction should take.

Let's say that you were in Dallas, and you wanted to do a transaction with a server in San Francisco (or Japan or what have you). All you have to from your desktop is to go and ping your destination and find out what your latency is. Then you can make sure that the latency you put in is the same the calculator has. We don't express that latency necessarily in exacting numbers, but we have some general rules the industry has used. I like to teach people from a standpoint of being able to do the math in their head eventually after they've used the calculator 10 or 12 times, they can do this math in their times.

So rather than doing this an exact 186,000 m/s speed of light transaction, I broke it down into very simple things like 100 miles is about 1ms of latency. That way, not only can you use the calculator, which will also calculate serialization, but most of the latency calculations are things that are changing all the time - not exact numbers. The 1ms per 100 miles or 1.5 seconds for 100 miles of frame relay - it works out. It's very very close, especially for the type of things that people want to do.

You try and break down very complex things into very simple things so that the average man or even the non-average man who doesn't calculate those things very often can have an anchor to information that helps them begin to do it in their heads so it's second nature when you do a ping from your desk. If you do go in and do everything exactly, down to the nanosecond, the largest part of the audience's eyes glaze over, and they're completely lost.

When you see when something's 2000 miles away and comes back in 40ms, you see that you're very close to the theoretical. But if it comes back at 92ms, you're going to scratch your head and say, "That's too far away from theory. I'd better do an investigation and analysis to find out why it's so far away from the theoretical." We're trying to give the average man the ability to calculate quickly and see the many outcomes of many different examples, so he can commit these things to memory eventually.

If you have a lot of complex things, you can crank it into the calculator, and people love it. We built it for a learning tool, but absolutely, I've used it in reports and helped people understand. That's what we're looking for: Take theoretical numbers that are very close, and help people simplify those so they can get to the answers and then learn those things so that they eventually don't have to go to the calculator.

Let us know what you think of the latency calculator in our comments section below.

With mysteries abounding about the undersea cables cut in the Middle East, Network Performance Daily talked to Eric Schoonover, a senior analyst at TeleGeography, a market research firm specializing in telecommunications supply, demand, and pricing. We wanted to get to the bottom of what's happening with the undersea cables and widespread network outages, and see if there's any truth to the various rumors floating around.

Network Performance Daily: Could you tell me a little bit about the effects of the undersea Internet cable cuts?

Schoonover: The undersea cables that were cut are part of the global network and in fact a heavily used part of it. And as such when they were cut, it limited the amount of capacity connecting the Middle East to Europe. I'm specifically referring to the cuts on January 30th - the first two. And because of that, the Internet and things that relied on the communications to Europe, you know, phone traffic and business-to-business type communications were severely hampered until the carriers that were affected were able to find alternative routing.

Network Performance Daily: When they were able to find alternative routing - was that immediate? Did the traffic find they couldn't get connectivity and just routed around it, or did someone have to pull a switch somewhere?

Someone had to pull a switch. With this amount of capacity, in terms of percentage, there's not that level of restoration available on the direct route. So, for instance, I know an affected carrier that has been quite vocal about the things they have done to restore capacity to their customers - even to the point of having to enter into some short-term contracts to transit traffic around the other side of the world, you know, via India, Sinagpore, Japan to the U.S.

So it does take a little bit of time. And each carrier that was affected responded a little differently in a little different time as well. So anywhere between a few hours to a few days to get service back, depending on the type of carrier and their relationships with the wholesale providers in the area.

Network Performance Daily: Has this increased network latency for those kind of connections?

Schoonover: Absolutely. Two kinds of factors increasing the latency - anytime you go the other way around the world from the Middle East, it's going to add a little bit of distance and distance equals latency, because of that "physics" thing. The other thing is that 75 percent of the capacity connecting the Middle East to Europe was cut, which, when you try to move that type of demand around, then you're going to create congestion on the remaining line.

Between those two factors there is a higher amount of latency and it does take some creativity on the part of the carriers to keep their business customers operating and keep their voice calls at a higher performance level.

The thing to suffer the most would be the Internet. Because that's not as latency sensitive as voice or real-time business communications, the carriers allow it to be more affected by the problems than the other services.

Network Performance Daily: Is there any basis for any sort of conspiracy theory here at all?

Schoonover: No, I don't think so, really. Cables are damaged with relative frequency, and I think that this is more along the lines of coincidence that there were a few different incidences within a couple days than anything else.

Network Performance Daily: What about the two main lines?

Schoonover: Well the two main lines were close enough that it probably was the same event. Whatever cut one most likely cut the other one as well. I know that the initial speculation was that a ship had dragged anchor across the two cables which would very easily snap them. That was later refuted by the Egyptian regulator. You can then look at things like seismic or geological events, something like that.

But most likely because those cables went down together, and they were so close - most likely that's one event.

The other cable breaks in the gulf - there's two others - were separate events that happened within a few days of the initial one.

Network Performance Daily: So if this stuff happens all the time, what can companies do to preserve mission-critical network connectivity and performance?

Schoonover: Finding restoration paths and having existing agreements for having restoration in place is very important, and many carriers have diversity in route and upstream providers, as well as the option to exercise a backup plan. And as we've seen, even if it takes a few hours to a day to get things back up and running with some amount of regularity, that's a result of having these pre-existing redundant relationships available.

I think businesses are getting smarter about that and I think carriers as well, particularly after the Taiwan Earthquake from December [2006], that cut a significant amount of capacity in the inter-Asia region. A lot of businesses quickly realized that their disaster-recovery plans were not sufficient, and went about getting better ones.

The fact that businesses have been able to recover relatively speedily is indicative of good planning to a large extent.

Network Performance Daily: How important are these sea cables to global communication?

Schoonover: Very. A lot of people don't realize, but undersea cables are the backbone of the global communications network. Obviously Europe has a lot of terrestrial cable as does the U.S., but as soon as you need to cross an ocean, the bulk of the traffic is travelling via submarine cable, not satellite.

Network Performance Daily: Well, why couldn't we just use satellite?

Schoonover: Higher latency, less capacity, and more expensive.

Network Performance Daily: What's the most important thing that people are learning from this incident?

Schoonover: I think there's a fragility to any sort of infrastructure, and I think you can take away that businesses and carriers do need to prepare for the unexpected. With the Taiwan earthquake taking seven of eight cables, and this taking two of three on a particular route, there has to be physical redundancy, both geographical and capacity.

But that being said, the carriers knew that and they're working towards it. There's at least four cables being planned and built on the exact same route that the cables that were cut are on. It'll be another year or two until the new cables are operational, but the demand for this type of thing was known and is being addressed, it's just that the timeline didn't work in the favor of the Internet users in the Middle East.

Network Performance Daily: The whole thing - just to get this whole conspiracy thing out of the way - what would it actually take to knock Iran's communication infrastructure off the Internet?

Schoonover: Well, it would take a lot more than what's been done. Really, when you look at Iran's connectivity, while they have been affected by the cable cuts, they are not the most affected country. They have terrestrial connections to surrounding countries, satellite connectivity, and redundant submarine connectivity.

Really, what's been done, if it were a directed attack, it has not been particularly effective.

• Network World: What those oceanic cable cuts mean to you.


• Wired/Threat Level: Cable Cut Fever Grips the Web

How is your company weathering the cable cuts? If you've been affected, let us know how you got back up and running by leaving us a comment below.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently put out a press release which announced that six of the 13 root servers in the root zone (presumably located in-between the Phantom Zone and the Forbidden Zone) now had IPv6 addresses.

It's a small step but one which is necessary for bigger steps to follow. With the root name servers having IPv6 addresses, it paves the way for a full IPv6 end-to-end transmission path for data. The fact that the nameservers still relied on IPv4 made at least some form of IPv4 over IPv6 necessary for Internet transmission.

We were able to ask a few questions about the IPv6 assignment to ICANN and got answers from David Conrad, Vice President of Research and IANA Strategy.

NPD: Why only six of the 13 root servers?

Conrad: 6 of the 13 were ready at this time. Each of the root servers is run independently and are funded through internal means (that is, in general, no one is paying any of the root server operators to operate a root server directly). The 6 that requested ICANN add IPv6 records were the ones that had finished setting up their IPv6 infrastructure sufficiently to provide service.

NPD: Could you explain a bit about the 512 byte limit on the packet sizes?

Conrad: The original specification of the DNS protocol chose 512 bytes as a reasonable approximation of the largest packet that could get through the Internet (of the time, circa 1983) without being fragmented. Enhancements to the DNS protocol since then have allowed for an increase in that limit (specifically, requesters can indicate how large a packet they're willing to accept).

NPD: How will computers get the new info about the root name servers' new IP addresses?

Conrad: The only computers that will actually need the new information are DNS caching servers. When a caching server starts up, it asks one of the 13 root servers it has pre-configured (the root hints) for an up-to-date list of all the root servers. It then uses that new list.

DNS caching servers are typically operated by ISPs or the IT departments of large enterprises. Average PCs and workstations send their DNS queries to these caching servers.

NPD: Would this require operating system upgrades/patches?

Conrad: A patch will likely be supplied to make the change in the root hints permanent (the updated list obtained by the caching servers isn't generally written to disk), but as described previously, caching servers will be able to use the new addresses without the patch.

Is this a significant move towards standardizing Internet traffic on IPv6? Tell us your thoughts in our comments section below.

Yesterday, we covered four issues that you should keep in mind before voting in the primaries, covering Intellectual Property Laws, Broadband Penetration/Infrastructure, Spectrum Regulation/Allocation, and Network Neutrality.

We conclude our list of issues below.

Whether or not it is justified, we know that it has been the policy of the current government to intercept communications without warrants, and that there have been major telecommunications players that have helped the government to do so. As one can imagine, this has got a number of people very upset. At the core, the two questions are: "How much data should the government be able to collect?" and "How well can data the government collects be kept secure?"

Regardless of the supposed value in "fighting terrorism," or any "unreasonable search and seizure" or "due process" issues, these warrantless wiretaps create a third party privy to any confidential data that travels along the wire. While some may trust the government with keeping data confidential to the best of its ability, that may not be very reassuring to yourself or whichever department is in charge of things like Non-Disclosure Agreements and company secrets if they don't have much faith in the government's ability to keep confidential data confidential.

Additionally, the government collects alarming amount of data through more traditional methods - social security records, tax records, and the like - which need to also remain confidential. Computer security policies that are effective and followed are crucial.

6) Open Government Initiatives

One of the ways to increase transparency in government is to make information that the government collects available to the public in an easily computer-parseable, standard format - some candidates have made this a priority, other candidates have ignored it. The idea is that if the government data is online and both easily searched and easily crossed referenced, citizens can use that information effectively.

There are, however privacy concerns that accompany an open government. Additionally, any move to standards begs the question of "which standards" and whether your IT department will need to conform to those standards in order to interoperate with governmental computers.

7) Energy Policy

While energy policy will be a key part of the campaign this year, most people won't be thinking about energy policy as it affects IT departments. Energy costs directly affect the operating budgets of major enterprise IT departments, which need to power, and cool, racks and racks of servers, switches, and routers - not to mention the end-user PCs distributed throughout the enterprise. If one candidate proposes a carbon-tax, that could raise energy costs. Then again, if another candidate develops no oil alternatives, energy costs could increase naturally.

By encouraging and perhaps subsidizing the invention of computer processors that consume less energy, the government can have an additional impact on IT departments. Additionally, a more subtle effect can be found from the military-industrial complex - that is, technologies which get their start in the military often eventually find their ways into the private sector. A military demand for low-power consuming technology - such as chips and routers to be used in small, autonomous devices, may eventually result in low-power consuming data centers.

8) Immigration and Education

Immigration is a double-edged sword when it comes to IT, and nowhere is this clearer than with the H1B visa program. The H1B visa allows the best and brightest of the world's technological geniuses to work for companies within the United States. Too few, and companies are starved for brain power, too many and domestic IT workers begin to feel the pressure of competing against immigrated labor. Where the H1B quota is set has a large impact on both the IT job market and the U.S. technology industry as a whole.

One of the concerns is that the demand for H1B visa-granted immigrants is the idea that we do not graduate enough competent technology professionals in the United States to fill the demand of large companies since computer science and computer engineering went from the "guaranteed good career" major in the late 1990s to a career to be avoided in the post-Dotcom era. Through grants, scholarships, and loans, the federal government has a great deal of influence in what people choose to study.

There have been some interesting proposals around training those with Associate's Degrees from junior colleges to prepare IT "operators" with training less than a full four-year degree in computer science to stem this tied. As hiring and retention are always important concerns for CIOs, this is a major area of concern.

SuperTuesday is coming up in less than a week, and many people, (including myself,) are chomping at the bit to talk about politics.

Don't get me wrong; this is a blog focused on issues that affect network performance in enterprise (read: business) environments, and politics and vendor blogs go together like potassium chlorate and gummi bears - a whole lot of heat, sparks, and violent reactions that take forever to die down. But, if nothing else, U.S. technology policy affects U.S. technology companies. Network neutrality and broadband policy will affect those companies hoping to roll out SAAS solutions, H1B visas will affect the tech job market and innovation, and of course there are the fundamental questions about data security and privacy that have become issues over the past decade.

Among the tech blogosphere there were two politics-related events that may be of interest to our readers. The first was that Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch interviewed Mitt Romney. Arrington focused on technology growth policies in the U.S., Internet taxes, H1B visas, venture capital tax issues, and renewable energy, and it's an interesting read if you're a Republican currently mulling which candidate to support in the primaries.

The second, from a stranger source, came from Randall Munroe, the author of the technology focused webcomic, XKCD, who used his public forum to endorse Barack Obama, because of Obama's association with copyright-reformer Lawrence Lessig, his support for network neutrality, among other reasons.

(This may not seem significant, but Munroe is not just any comic artist. XKCD focuses on high tech issues - including a few editorial cartoons regarding technology and science policy - and it is one of the most popular on the Internet, rivaling Penny Arcade. Because of this, Google invited Munroe to speak last month as part of their Authors@Google series of lectures, an honor shared with Paul Krugman, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Brokaw, among others. In less than two years, Munroe has become the pre-eminent technology editorial cartoonist - all with a few crudely drawn stick figures.)

Whether or not Munroe's endorsement will carry any weight is yet to be seen, but that doesn't mean that technology issues aren't real and considerable, and if the guys who actually know something about technology don't speak up, well, then we're left with the talking heads on cable news shows who have trouble understanding even basic computer concepts, let alone subtle computer issues.

During the main election season, technology issues will probably not be the foremost on voters' minds, so primary elections are extremely important for those who believe that a solid technology policy is important to U.S. national prosperity. While we'd feel uncomfortable (and kind of icky) endorsing any particular candidate, we've put together a list of the top ten current technological controversies which you should consider before voting.

1) Intellectual Property Laws

There is not one portion of the tech industry that is untouched by the intellectual property laws, both current and proposed. First, any company that makes software, either for resale or in-house, has to be aware of their rights under copyright law to preserve their own products. Any company that uses - in whole or in part - open-source software needs to be aware of how open-source licenses work - that is, open-source code remains under the copyright of the author, who may be very specific about who may or may not use the license.

Additionally, the current entertainment industry crackdown on pirated materials affects enterprise networking in a number of ways. First, there's the question of liability of an end-user on the corporate network uses it to distribute material when they do not have the permission of the copyright holder - while traffic is a consideration, it's also a consideration that if you aggressively patrol your network for copyright violations, you can find yourself liable if a copyright violation gets through the tracks. This leaves enterprise networking in a precarious position - police the network and assume the legal liability, or take sanctuary in "safe-harbor" provisions and allow the traffic of illicitly traded files to clog up your network.

There is a middle ground where certain types of traffic can be prevented from taking up bandwidth necessary for business applications - without looking at the individual files in deep packet inspection, using QoS policies, and that seems to be the best solution right now. However, any changes to copyright law would have a profound effect on the ways that companies do business, and that is why everyone in IT should be keeping an eye on this issue.

2) Broadband Penetration/Infrastructure

American broadband infrastructure is simply not quite up to the standards of other countries. Japan, Korea, and France are often touted as having much better broadband than the U.S., with various explanations given regarding U.S. having a lower population density. However, it seems dubious because there's little correlation between population density and broadband penetration when you look at actual states.

The U.S. population density may be 31/km^2 compared to France's 113/km^2 or 337/km^2 for Japan, but a lot of that is Alaska and Texas and whatnot. California has a population density of 90.27/km^2 - rivaling France - yet does not have France's broadband speed - and considering that California is one of America's technological "bread baskets," this is a serious problem. On the other coast, New Jersey has a population density of 438/km^2 - and New Jersey's broadband is not better than the rest of the nation. Additionally, even considering that nationwide population density number, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, have lower population densities and both faster broadband speeds and greater household penetration.

Just as the highways developed by the Eisenhower administration helped to foster America's post-war manufacturing boom, better broadband infrastructure can help foster America's technology industry. An ubiquitous, high quality broadband can mean more applications can be run as a Web service out on the Internet instead of the WAN. More bandwidth for everybody means that the bandwidth for your company becomes cheaper and they can afford more of it, which means that existing apps will run faster (presuming there aren't other network performance problems) and that you'll be able to run high-bandwidth apps such as Cisco Telepresence.

Even if your company is sitting on more dark fiber than a bowl of NinjaBran™, every company relies on smaller companies as vendor product makers, as distributors, as customers - and those smaller companies are relying more on SAAS solutions. In the grand scheme of the business world ecosystem, communications infrastructure policy can have far-reaching effects.

3) Spectrum Regulation/Allocation

When people think of bandwidth, they often think of bits traveling down pipes. The other type of bandwidth is just as important; the bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum. Because you can't run two different signals on the same frequency (they would interfere with each other,) the FCC allocates which frequencies are going to be used for which purpose - and some frequencies are better suited towards different purposes.

For example, currently, there is an auction for the 700MHZ band - a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum which can penetrate through walls, and can cover a very wide area. This made it very desirable for the television stations which now control the bandwidth, and also very desirable for cell phone companies currently bidding for the bandwidth when the television stations must return the bandwidth to the FCC as part of the analog/digital TV switchover in 2009.

Anything that deals with broadcasting of any sort - wireless networking, WiMax, even telecommunications ownership - goes through the FCC, making it one of the most important and powerful Federal commissions. Decisions made by the FCC can affect any rollouts your company makes regarding wireless networking or cellular technology.

4) Network Neutrality

If you haven't been keeping up on this one, it's a doozy, and you might want to check out the very informative Wikipedia page on the subject. The possibility of network neutrality legislation - or the actions of big-business players in the absence of network neutrality legislation, can mean fundamental changes in the way that bits travel over the wire.

We won't get into a rundown of issues here, but while you can plan for a neutral Internet or a non-neutral Internet, it is much harder to prepare contingencies while this matter remains up in the air.

Some candidates have expressed support for network neutrality legislation, others opposition, and still others ambivalence - and depending on which position is the best for you and your company, it may be something to consider.

We'll cover Telecom Immunity and Privacy, Open Government Initiatives, Energy Policy, and Immigration and Education in Part II of this series tomorrow. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment below to discuss these issues.

Douglas Gourlay from Cisco has posted a comment on this site which probably explains some of the features of the Nexus 7000 much better than I possibly could. Please check it out.

Cisco just announced its Nexus 7000 switch will be available in the second half of 2008.

The Nexus is a rather large machine that boasts a number of improvements over the 6500 series switches. If you have recently made a large purchase of 6500 series switches for your enterprise, you have my sympathy.

Andy Greenberg covers the technical beat at Forbes.com and explains some of the benefits of the behemoth box in plain English. For example, the Nexus has Gigabit Ethernet support (as well as support for future delivery of 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s,) so that you can run your whole data center with just Ethernet.

The killer feature, according to Greenberg, is that the Nexus 7000 allows distant virtual servers to use parallel processing. In other words, the virtual server in San Juan can now take advantage of idle cycles on the virtual server in Philadelphia, and vice versa. But there's more to it than that. The Cisco NX-OS, the new OS for the Nexus 7000, is said to allow switches to be virtualized at the device level, doing for switches what VMWare did for servers - that is, it not only helps get virtualized systems into parallel processing clusters but network engineers can create "domains" which define particular combinations of "bandwidth, processing, storage, and software," according to an article in BusinessWeek.

In addition to the obvious benefits, using previously unused resources can do a great amount towards reducing energy consumption and costs.

For a real look at the Nexus 7000, Cisco has provided an interactive model of the Cisco Nexus 7000 on their Web site.

What are your thoughts on the Cisco Nexus 7000? Feel free to discuss it in our comments section.