In an article published on the BBC News site in October '09, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, confessed that the "whack-whack" (//) in a web address was actually "unnecessary." He said that he had no idea that the forward slashes in every web address would cause "so much hassle." Well, 20 years ago, Sir Berners-Lee revealed his pair of forward slashes and they have been whack-whacking everything in sight since. All major media have succumbed to the transformative powers of the mighty "//." It was only a matter of time before books would find themselves being double slashed.

A full-scale assault is under way. Wal-Mart and Amazon used the double slashes to initiate a price war that sent the price of hardcover books below $10. Not to be outdone, Barnes and Noble raised a pair of slashes to join Sony and Amazon in the digital reader battles. Amazon and others further whack-whacked books by moving the e-reader software onto smart-phones. Amazon has started swinging the double slash at text books as it targets the Kindle reader at academia. Google is whack-whacking books and periodicals in the public domain with its Google Books while HP is re-whack-whacking the same imaged books with a print on-demand service. In case you were wondering, those reprinted books from digital images of the original hardcover books can be purchased through //www.amazon.com. Meanwhile, Internet Archive's BookServer will attempt to make even more books available directly to individuals through laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. Libraries, once the gate keeper of the "Book stacks" are now wrestling with how to lend books via the "eBook Stacks". Finally, The New York Times posed the question "Will books be Napsterized?" and described how people snatch free copies of digital books from on-line users at file-storage sites.

Are books standing on the plank newspapers, music, and videos have walked? The double slashes are quite efficient at whack-whacking and reducing physical media to digital bits. It seems unlikely books will survive the assault as physical stores give way to digital stores and the weight of paper yields to the wait-lessness of downloads. But weight alone is not enough to break the spine of the book. The whack-whacking of books by eReaders is derived by uniting capabilities and redefining the reading experience with instant, additional information. Simply pressing one's finger on a word or phrase makes it highlight-able and note-able for future reference; searchable for dictionary meaning, placed into context via Wikipedia or searchable via Google, Bing or Yahoo. It appears that data centers and not mega centers will ultimately house endless collections of fiction and nonfiction. Mobile 3/4G will replace I-80 as the road taken to pick up a good read in the future.

It remains to be seen if Apple's iPad will accelerate the demise of the printed word. It is clear we will read more books digitally and store those eBooks on virtual shelves. As it becomes easier to pull a book off of the "shelf" from anywhere, the requirements for security, performance and availability increase. A spike in demand requires immediate response to satisfy customers, shopping carts must be secure and the store must remain open 24x7x365. We've designed the ServerIron ADX family 9 to meet the scalability, security and availability our customers require and their customers expect. When you sit between the reader and a bestselling book, you have to securely complete the transaction and begin the download immediately. Products like the ADX1000 with SSL acceleration are built to move the book from the shelf to the reader quickly.

In 1455, Gutenberg automated the printing process and sowed the seeds of mass media, enabling the growth of newspapers and books that lasted over 450 years. Now, in the time it took Rip Van Winkle to sleep, we're watching the presses grind to a stop. In 1989 Sir Tim Berners-Lee began joining hypertext to the internet. In that same year John Grisham's first novel A Time to Kill was published in hardcover. It is ironic that 20 years later Grisham's latest novel Ford County would be whack-whacked by the Wal-Mart Amazon on-line price war. “If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is over,” said David Gernert, Mr. Grisham’s literary agent, in a recent New York Times article.

So, perhaps the hassle of the "//" lies in the hands of the beholder. If the slashes get you down next time you buy, download, stream, or read something from the web, just yell whack-whack! Hopefully doing so will make you feel a whole lot better.

My 4th grade daughters arrived home for the December break and told me (with enthusiasm!) they had projects to complete before the second week in January. "Oh?, what's involved in completing your projects?"  I asked. " We have to write a research paper, build a display and present a summary of the paper to the class. I'm doing the Skeletal System and Deirdre is doing the Digestive System." Siobhan uttered those words without batting an eye while I nearly spit out my coffee. Nine year olds researching, writing papers, and presenting? So, over the holiday with keyboards in hand, displays in sight and armed with queries for Google, a pair of 4th graders started to research, write and tell me things about the human body I'd was better off not knowing about.

Our lives have rapidly moved beyond  “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” and  "You've got Mail!". Today, 4th graders can begin researching complex topics with questions like "What is the digestive system?" that return a list of sites containing text, images and sounds. It seems like a life time ago when we went to the library to use card catalogs, microfiche and stacks to research a topic. My daughters looked both perplexed and horrified when I explained that A) 4th graders didn't write research papers when I was their age and B) Google didn't exist. Their eyes glazed over when I explained how microfiche worked  and the look of horror shifted to sympathy, for me.  The Internet has made research so simple that even a 4th grader can do it. But, as with all things that look easy, a lot of work goes into making that research easily available. Unbeknownst to my daughters, the Internet is a contentious place.

Beyond the links deposited on screens by search engines is the content itself -- loads of it, all fighting for the same constricted network resources. Delivery of content is the only game playing today. Above the pipes that connect users to servers and servers to storage is Application Delivery. As the pipes shift from wired to wireless globally, the number of people expecting anytime/anywhere access to applications and content will grow rapidly.  As mobile broadband supplants wireline for internet access, the need for robust Application Delivery solutions for remote users will increase. From customer facing Web sites to Enterprise applications, ServerIron will provide the "on" in "You've got Content".

2010, may be a watershed year for the Internet. Globally, we'll see an increase in mobile network coverage and speed; more smart phones, laptops, net-books and tablets connecting to networks; and of course, access to more content.  So, while 4th graders (and the rest of us) will have plenty search, plenty to find and plenty to access no matter where we are, companies like Brocade will keep working to make sure the network can make it look so easy.

Who knew the skeletal system is an organ? A 4th grader.

In a video blog this month, I briefly discussed the Fortieth anniversary of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the surface of the Moon, an incredible quest initiated by the U.S. when the Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik in 1958. By 1962, President Kennedy pushed the country upward when he stood before the students and faculty of Rice University and said “But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard...”  In December 1968, Apollo 8 carried three men away from earth and around the moon ten times. During those orbits William Anders captured the image “Earthrise”.  On July 20, 1969, with about 30 seconds of fuel remaining, the Lunar Lander named Eagle set down, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard, in the Sea of Tranquility.

Sputnik however had sparked more than a race to the moon; it also ignited The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a division within the US defense department chartered with pursuing advanced technology research for the United States.  In the same year Neil Armstrong captivated the world; ARPA was also taking a small step and created ARPANET, the cornerstone of today's Internet. Like the Apollo program, ARPANET took several small steps (connecting computers, email, file transfer and Voice over IP) and along the way morphed into today's Internet. In 1991 CERN (those proton smashing folks) sponsored creation of a system to interlink hypertext documents also known as the World Wide Web (W3). The giant leap happened when CERN agreed to make W3 free to everyone in 1993.  A year later, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded with support from DARPA and the European Commission. The combination of the expanding Internet and World Wide Web have unleashed a force greater than Apollo 11’s Saturn V rocket or The Large Hadron Collider that smashes protons together.

In the 18 years since CERN published the first web page announcing the World Wide Web project, we've seen a radical transformation in communication. W3 plus the Internet are akin to all mass media delivery systems the world has created since Gutenberg invented the printing press. Yet, with growing list of 80 million websites, it is well beyond the era of books, newspapers, magazines, over the air broadcasting, cable and the satellite systems that evolved over half a millennium. As we march towards the end of this decade, W3 is beginning to weave ordinary people into extraordinary events; spanning politics, entertainment and yes the Application Delivery team at Brocade.

When NightLine began broadcasting in March of 1980, Ted Koppel was our primary source for news on the Iranian hostage crisis.  Koppel and company would inform the public about the hostages, politics and on occasion provide an “inside view” of Iranian culture. Thirty years later, in the aftermath of the Iranian National Election, FriendFeed and Twitter provided the insight while facilitating communication and coordinating activities within Iran. With traditional media having reporters expelled and silenced, social networks and micro-blogging displayed the power of today's ability publish and subscribe.

The death of Icon is a galvanizing event.  However, in a twist on the Buggles song title “Video killed a Radio Star”, not only did we witness the demise of a Pop Star, we also observed the challenge pre-Web media faces. A story as large as any we've witnessed, broke on TMZ not NYT and spread like a wild fire on Twitter, Facebook and via Text messaging not CNN. Brick and mortar stores ran out of physical inventory while the unlimited digital shelves of online stores released millions of tracks breaking records.  iTunes and Amazon reported sales records in real-time while Billboard made its announcement days after the records were broken. The anytime and anywhere abilities of the Cloud (W3 + Internet) enable concurrent communication and commerce. The power to be informed and interact now exists in the palm of your hand.

Everyday new stories appear. Now we can to insert our pages into a story even while “the moving finger writes”. The Wednesday after the July 4th holiday, news spread that 60,000 personal computers attacked Web sites run by private and government institutions in the United States and South Korea. The attacks, commonly referred to as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), are designed to render the sites under siege unavailable.  Preventing DDoS attacks is one of the many features in Brocade's ServerIron application delivery platform.  This breaking news was passed onto ServerIron product management, marketing and PR teams; they quickly reviewed the news stories, gathered the specifics and outlined how ServerIron would have thwarted those very attacks. Within twenty-four hours of the first DDoS news story breaking, Brocade had written, produced and published to the Web how ServerIron will help prevent these attacks in the future. In an instant we were woven into the fabric of the story and its solution.

As we celebrate the men and women who helped raise this nation to new heights, let’s remember, there were two small steps in 1969. One took us out of this world while the other has helped to change the world we are in.

I am huge advocate of collaborative communities that empower users to increase productivity within organizations and across similar IT disciplines. With that, I am excited to announce the release of our new social community forum for our application delivery infrastructure (ADI), under Brocade’s umbrella MyBrocade Web portal. The major driver behind creating the ADI community forum is to enable current and future customers and partners with Brocade Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) and Load Balancers to assist their business with rapid time to resolution for their “latest” application delivery challenge.  For example, this can enable our typical users to independently search and obtain answers to common and complex implementation questions.

Our expectation is that people involved or responsible for ensuring application delivery for their businesses and those who leverage Brocade or partner technology, will leverage the community to connect, learn, search, ask, share, and find answers in real-time for increased productivity. It is important to note, the application delivery infrastructure community forum is a hybrid community where we will have Brocade subject matter experts (SME’s) participating by sharing their experiences, providing answers, as well as learning from other users.  Ultimately, we expect the ADI community to evolve into a comprehensive collective information portal for our customers’ application delivery infrastructure with a heavy emphasis on ADC and Load balancers.
Included are discussion forums and separate dedicated zones that outline sample code to perform common Layer 4-7 application traffic management operations (e.g. performing SSL offload or rewriting HTTP content). Additionally, there are dedicated areas which outline implementation scenarios (e.g. global server load balancing) and widely used application solution integrations (e.g. IBM WebSphere integration).  In the future we plan to expand the portal to include educational and tutorial sections.

The best way to become familiar with the Brocade Application Delivery community is by visiting http://community.brocade.com/adi or by selecting application delivery infrastructure community through the community section on http://community.brocade.com. Remember to register for your own MyBrocade account to become actively involved in the community.