When Henry Ford introduced the Model T in the fall of 1908, he likely didn’t comprehend the full scope of events he would set in motion. Come 1914, and Ford’s production line had reduced assembly times from 12 hours to less than two and a half hours, slashed the going price of an automobile, and redefined the working wage of factory employees, ultimately putting more than 15 million Model T’s on the road and igniting the entire automotive industry in the years to come.
Competition often leads to innovation and progress for other industry players. One modern equivalent of this can be seen in the rise of public and private cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft. AWS’ sales numbers recently topped $12 billion, up nearly 55 percent from the same period last year. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to push ahead and is projected to reach $20 billion in annual cloud revenue by June 2018. As these powerhouses and others like Oracle and Google continue to see widespread adoption across industries, other players have stepped in to consume their piece of the $204 billion-dollar cloud infrastructure pie, leading to an ecosystem of cloud and data center partners that continue to push Continue reading
Juniper is reshaping some of its top executive roles as Jonathan Davidson, executive VP and general manager of the firm’s Development and Innovation group resigned from the company.Davidson, a former Cisco executive in charge products such as the Cisco 7200 and Enterprise ASR 1000 product management team joined Juniper in 2010 to lead the company’s Security, Switching and Solutions Business Unit. He ultimately became executive vice president and general manager of the Juniper Development and Innovation group, where he replaced Rami Rahim who is now the company’s CEO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The world of the database is one of those areas that sees lots of people obsessing over details that to outside observers would seem trivial. Graph, NoSQL, SQL, distributed—so many choices.So, when ScyllaDB told me about a funding round that they’d raised and their stated intention to replace Apache Cassandra, I was interested—if slightly skeptical. Not skeptical because of anything I know about ScyllaDB per se, but simply because of the busy-ness of the space.+ Also on Network World: Google’s new cloud service is a unique take on a database +
The launch only a couple of weeks ago of Google’s Cloud Spanner database, an offering developed from the internal tools that Google itself uses, certainly upped the database ante. Google’s assertion that Cloud Spanner gives users all the benefits of both regular relational and NoSQL databases put all other database offerings on guard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The fate of Avaya’s networking business has been the subject of speculation for well over a year now. In December, I wrote about the most likely suitors for the business. Ideally, I would have liked to have seen Avaya remain a “full stack” solution provider and keep the group, but it appears that wasn’t in the bankruptcy cards. This brings us to the current news where the winner of the Avaya Networking sweepstakes is (drum roll… although its in the title) Extreme Networks. That’s correct: Purple Extreme Networks is purchasing the networking assets from Avaya (Red) that came to it from Nortel (blue), so from a color perspective, it all makes sense. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) outage on Feb. 28 took down many well-known websites and web services. For the complete post-mortem from Amazon Web Services (AWS), read this lengthy explanation of what went wrong and what AWS is doing to address the issue.If the full explanation too long and too complicated, here is a short version:
An administrator was going to perform maintenance on a set of S3 servers.
He mis-typed the command to take a set of servers offline, and more servers than intended were taken off line
This took the entire S3 environment in the U.S. East Zone closer to the edge in capacity than the system was designed for and caused widespread availability issues in web services that relied upon the S3 environment.
More instructive and more worrisome are the steps Amazon took to prevent this issue from happening again:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s safe to say that the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market has heated up in a big way. In September 2016, Nutanix went public and had a fantastic IPO. Since then, the company’s stock has slid due in part to increased competition from the likes of Dell-EMC, which recently extended its HCI products to private clouds, and HP Enterprise, which acquired SimpliVity earlier this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The fundamental role of data infrastructure is to protect, preserve, secure, serve applications and data, transforming them into information. Data protection is an encompassing topic, as it spans security (logical and physical), reliability availability serviceability (RAS), privacy and encryption, backup/restore, archiving, business continuance (BC), business resiliency (BR) and disaster recovery (DR).Recently, we've seen news about data infrastructure and application outages, including Amazon Web Service (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3), Gitlab, and the Australian Tax Office (ATO).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Writes a contributor to Reddit’s section devoted to all things “mildly interesting:”“This is the computer (pictured above) which controls the paging system at the hospital where I work.”The audience found this much more than mildly interesting, as the post attracted more than 500 comments and 13,000 up-votes.The comments were split between those who see a disaster in the making:“You may find it funny, but aging hardware and obsolete systems plague medical facilities, and when those critical old pieces fail, it costs the facility many times more capital and labor power to restore critical systems, and risks patient health and safety.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Fave Raves is Network World’s annual roundup of the best products, as chosen by IT pros. Do you have a favorite enterprise IT product you can't live without? Tell us about it and we'll share your raves with our readers.Please send your submissions to Ann Bednarz at Network World ([email protected]) by Friday, March 17. Please note: Submissions must be received directly from IT professionals, not through a third party.Items to address:1. Please provide your name, title and employer.2. What's your favorite product? (vendor name and product name)3. Why do you like it?4. How has it helped you and/or your company?5. How many years have you worked in IT?6. What upcoming IT projects are you most excited about and why?7. Please include a picture of yourself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The White House plans to substantially hike defense spending, but it's going to cut other agency budgets with a big axe. It is nail-biting time for people who develop supercomputers and do other scientific work that relies on federal R&D funding.The White House said today it will increase defense spending, currently at about $600 billion, by $54 billion or 9%. But most other agencies, with the exception of "security agencies," will see budget reductions, it said at a briefing for reporters on Monday.This means the cuts will fall heavily on agencies such as the Department of Energy, which funds exascale supercomputing development. Another target may be the National Science Foundation, a major funder of basic scientific research. Overall, the cuts will be focused on civilian agencies because there isn't a lot of room to cut otherwise. The Trump administration is expected to leave Medicare and Social Security alone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Eliminating a “tangled Christmas tree lights” wiring scenario in data centers is imperative and can be achieved with infrared, reckons an academic network engineering team.Infrared lasers should be installed on the top of data center racks and be used to transmit information. It would be far superior and cheaper than fiber optic, and it would be better than attempted, but lacking, radio signaling.Radio doesn’t work, says Mohsen Kavehrad, the W. L. Weiss Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering at Penn State and one of the developers, in an article on the school’s website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The European edition of Cisco Live took place this week in Berlin, which is a fitting location given the amount of innovation happening in that city right now. If you ever find yourself in Berlin, be sure to check out Cisco’s Open Berlin innovation center where inventive start-ups are building and showcasing solutions that run on Cisco technology.
Innovation and digital transformation are linked together like Kirk and Spock. You can’t have one without the other. At this week’s event, Ruba Borno, Cisco vice president of growth initiatives and chief of staff for the office of the CEO, gave her first-ever keynote to a Cisco Live audience. Not surprisingly, she focused on digital transformation. However, unlike many keynotes I have seen, Borno didn’t just talk about digitization at a high level. Instead she was more prescriptive and gave the audience a guide on how to proceed with making the shift to a digital enterprise. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) said it would begin offering testing and standards conformance services 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T Ethernet products.The broad testing services safeguard that Ethernet products and services are interoperable and will help customers boost network speed up to five times without requiring cabling infrastructure changes.The Ethernet Alliance in September wrote that the IEEE 802.3bz Standard for Ethernet Amendment sets Media Access Control Parameters, Physical Layers and Management Parameters for 2.5G and 5Gbps Operation lets access layer bandwidth evolve incrementally beyond 1Gbps, it will help address emerging needs in a variety of settings and applications, including enterprise, wireless networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has been red hot over the past few years as more customers look for turnkey solutions to simplify the deployment of technology in its software defined data centers. The converged infrastructure group at Dell EMC, formerly known as VCE, was a late entrant into the market, but with Usain Bolt-like speed, the company has caught up to the field and is well on its way to becoming the market leader and de facto standard. RELATED: Hyperconvergence: What’s all the hype about?
The value proposition for Dell EMC is as simple as its products are to deploy. It’s HCI solutions, VxRack and VxRail, are kept in lockstep with VMware’s vSphere and VSAN roadmaps. Businesses that want to run VMware on HCI will almost certainly get a superior experience with VxRack and/or VxRail than they will with any other solution. The VMware install base is obviously huge, and Dell EMC has parlayed this into the following momentum in about a year: To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You know when AMD’s Ryzen is launching, how much it’ll cost, and you even have a pretty good idea of its performance. But you might not know why AMD dropped the original Zen name for Ryzen, so we asked. And it all begins with what AMD couldn’t do with the brand.As John Taylor, corporate vice president of marketing for AMD, describes it, AMD was between a rock and a hard place. Mike Clark, an engineering fellow at AMD who led the Zen architecture development, had dubbed the architecture “Zen” for the balance it struck between various aspects of the design. Fans who had followed Zen’s development would buttonhole AMD execs and rave about the Zen name: “‘I love Zen...there’s something about it I’m just connecting with,’ they’d say,” Taylor said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s hard to find a company that does not have some form of a hybrid (cloud and on-premise) ERP system. For most, that happened by accident. Someone in the organization bypassed IT and bought a cloud service to fill a need more quickly than they could with an on-premise solution. Salesforce.com, for example, has often been the start of a company’s march to a hybrid environment.Cloud applications can be relatively easy, low-cost solutions, but they do introduce new complexities when they need to be integrated with on-premise ERP systems and databases, or with each other. Ensuring that cloud and on-premise systems play nice together is just one part of the hybrid challenge. Making the right decisions about what will be in the cloud and what stays in-house is the other.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ryzen is here. AMD said Wednesday that it plans a “hard launch” of its first three Ryzen processors on March 2, outperforming Intel’s high-end chips while undercutting its prices by as much as 54 percent. AMD executives confidently unveiled the first three desktop chips to attack Intel’s Core i7, supported by several top-tier motherboard vendors and boutique system builders. In many cases, executives said, AMD will offer more for less. The top-tier Ryzen 7 1800X will cost less than half of what Intel’s thousand-dollar Core i7-6900K chip does—and outperform it, too. You can preorder Ryzen chips and systems from 180 retailers and system integrators today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
To misquote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the Apple Genius Bar, but that's just peanuts to space.And out there, in the vast reaches of the cosmos, continuously streaming towards Earth are what are called cosmic rays which are protons and atomic nuclei theorized to come from both supernovae explosions and probably the centers of galaxies. The earth is continuously bombarded by these alien particles which, in turn, collide with the atmosphere and generate a whole range of secondary particles including neutrons, muons, pions and alpha particles. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When you get involved in the actual wiring of networks, one of the things you find yourself checking over and over is whether Ethernet ports are actually live along with do they connect to DHCP, is the Internet visible, and so on. Typically you’ll grab your laptop, plug it in and run a few tests but while this works, you might describe it as “sub-optimal” because how often have you tried to do exactly this in a ceiling void? In a cramped comms cupboard? Somewhere in the bowels of a rack? In every one of those situations it’s just time consuming and annoying to have to fiddle around and juggle with your laptop. The Netool network port analyzer aims to be a better tool for doing exactly this.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the latest vendor to identify a faulty clocking component of its products that can cause them to crash and not recover.
HPE joined Cisco and Juniper in identifying the problem, even going so far as to tap the widely-suspected Intel-based clock element as the cause.
In a statement the company said:“To the best of our knowledge, our customers are not experiencing failures due to the Intel C2000 chip, which is deployed on a limited number of our products. We remain committed to assuring the highest quality experience from our solutions and are proactively working with Intel to mitigate any future risk and impact on our customers.”
Unlike Cisco and Juniper however, HPE did not identify its affected products nor offer any details as to what customers can do with them should the problem occur.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here