Fortinet® has been granted four new patents related to network virtualization and network security by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. These are

• U.S. Patent #7,333,430 - Systems and Methods for Passing Network Traffic Data - directed to efficiently processing network traffic data to facilitate policy enforcement, including content scanning, source/destination verification, virus scanning, content detection and intrusion detection.
• U.S. Patent #7,340,535 - System and Method for Controlling Routing in a Virtual Router System - directed to controlling the routing of network data, and providing efficient configuration of routing functionality and optimized use of available resources by applying functions to data packets in a virtual environment.
• U.S. Patent #7,376,125 - Service Processing Switch - directed to providing IP services and IP packet processing in a virtual router-based system using IP flow caches, virtual routing engines, virtual services engines and advanced security engines.
• U.S. Patent # 7,389,358 - Distributed Virtual System to Support Managed, Network-based Services - directed to a virtual routing system, which includes processing elements to manage and optimize IP traffic, useful for service provider switching functions at Internet point-of-presence (POP) locations.

This question has been bugging me for a long time, and I’ve just read this short technical note which is by far the best piece on the distinction between these two types of states.

“Hard-state” protocols mean that in the absence of some event to trigger a protocol response, the protocol’s state will remain unchanged or “hard” for an unbounded time period. This happens in a deterministic manner. Hence hard-state protocols must be reliable, with acknowledgments and retransmissions.

On the other hand, “soft-state” seems a bit difficult to comprehend. In this case, the state is not necessarily consistent, maintained probabilistically, and the existence of the state may or may not be critical to the receiving service. Interested readers should go through the technical note.

I’ve been appointed as a reviewer for the 2nd workshop on “End-to-end Virtualization and Grid Management” (EVGM 2008), which will be held in conjunction with MANWEEK’08 on September 24, 2008 on the Island of Samos, Greece.

The End-to-end Virtualization and Grid Management (EVGM) workshop has been recently founded with a view to dealing with the very topical subject of managing virtualized resources in distributed environments, including resources that are dispersed geographically and/or administratively. The workshop is sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 6.6 on Management of Networks and Distributed Systems, with technical co-sponsorship by the IEEE Communications Society, Technical Committee on Network Operations and Management (CNOM).

I just noticed that the European FP7 4WARD project site is now up and running. In short,

4WARD is a project in the European 7th Framework Program Call 1 and partly funded by EU. It belongs to Objective ICT-2007-1.1 “Network of the Future” and started January 2008, with a first phase of 2 Years. The total size is 23.2 million euro corresponding to approximately 180 person-years.

4WARD has six work packages, and the one that interests me most is obviously the third one - Network Virtualisation (VNet). An overview of the project can be found here.

Viva la “network virtualization“.

A collection of conference and journal rankings and statistics in the networking area that I’ve found on the Internet.

Conferences

• Networking Conference Statistics [Link]
• Networking Conference Dates [Link]
• Computer Science Conference Ranking [Link]
• Network Management: Where to publish? [Link]
• Networking Conference Ranking [Link]
• CS Conference Ranking [Link]
• CS Conference Tiers (2007) [Link]
• Impact of Publication Venues in Computer Science (May’2003) [Link]

Journals

• CS Journals Ranking [Link]
• CS Journals Ranking (Jan’2007) [Link]

Let me know through comments if you find more.

Last Tuesday our on-going investigation on network virtualization has taken a formal shape after the formation of the eNVy project. For anyone interested, eNVy stands for NV or network virtualization, all credits to Fida. (I think at some point I thought about eNVious, but that’s just me being myself)

Members of eNVy will be working on different aspects of network virtualization, ranging from theoretical foundation to real-life implementation.

Right now eNVy is headed by Prof. Raouf Boutaba, and consists of five members: Constantine, Fida, Muntasir, Nabeel, and I. Hopefully we will be having regular project meetings starting next week.

I will be posting updates in this blog regularly.

WordPress 2.5.1 have been released today with some major and minor fixes, as well as improvements. There is supposedly one security fix for a scary security hole completely unknown to the general people. But I am curious anyhow.

Download it here; and for the newbies like me, upgrade instructions can be found here (basic), and here (extended).

As for me, I didn’t take much time before jumping into the upgrading bandwagon. I always love new stuff.

This is my first post, ever !!! Just hoping that it won’t be the last one. Can’t say for sure though.