Western Digital launches open-source zettabyte storage initiative

Western Digital has announced a project called the Zoned Storage initiative that leverages new technology to create more efficient zettabyte-scale data storage for data centers by improving how data is organized when it is stored.As part of this, the company also launched a developer site that will host open-source, standards-based tools and other resources.The Zoned Storage architecture is designed for Western Digital hardware and its shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs, which hold up to 15TB of data, as well as the emerging zoned namespaces (ZNS) standard for NVMe SSDs, designed to deliver better endurance and predictability.To read this article in full, please click here

Western Digital launches open-source zettabyte storage initiative

Western Digital has announced a project called the Zoned Storage initiative that leverages new technology to create more efficient zettabyte-scale data storage for data centers by improving how data is organized when it is stored.As part of this, the company also launched a developer site that will host open-source, standards-based tools and other resources.The Zoned Storage architecture is designed for Western Digital hardware and its shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs, which hold up to 15TB of data, as well as the emerging zoned namespaces (ZNS) standard for NVMe SSDs, designed to deliver better endurance and predictability.To read this article in full, please click here

How to send email from the Linux command line

There are several ways to send email from the Linux command line. Some are very simple and others more complicated, but offer some very useful features. The choice depends on what you want to do -– whether you want to get a quick message off to a co-worker or send a more complicated message with an attachment to a large group of people. Here's a look at some of the options:mail The easiest way to send a simple message from the Linux command line is to use the mail command. Maybe you need to remind your boss that you're leaving a little early that day. You could use a command like this one:$ echo "Reminder: Leaving at 4 PM today" | mail -s "early departure" myboss [ Two-Minute Linux Tips: Learn how to master a host of Linux commands in these 2-minute video tutorials ] Another option is to grab your message text from a file that contains the content you want to send:To read this article in full, please click here

Looking for What’s Not There

DNSSEC is often viewed as a solution looking for a problem. It seems only logical that there is some intrinsic value in being able to explicitly verify the veracity and currency of responses received from DNS queries, yet fleshing this proposition out with practical examples has proved challenging. Where else might DNSSEC be useful?

Feedback: Ansible for Networking Engineers

I always love to hear from networking engineers who managed to start their network automation journey. Here’s what one of them wrote after watching Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar (part of paid ipSpace.net subscription, also available as an online course).

This webinar helped me a lot in understanding Ansible and the benefits we can gain. It is a big area to grasp for a non-coder and this webinar was exactly what I needed to get started (in a lab), including a lot of tips and tricks and how to think. It was more fun than I expected so started with Python just to get a better grasp of programing and Jinja.

In early 2019 we made the webinar even better with a series of live sessions covering new features added to recent Ansible releases, from core features (loops) to networking plugins and new declarative intent modules.

A case for managed and model-less inference serving

A case for managed and model-less inference serving Yadwadkar et al., HotOS’19

HotOS’19 is presenting me with something of a problem as there are so many interesting looking papers in the proceedings this year it’s going to be hard to cover them all! As a transition from the SysML papers we’ve been looking at recently, I’ve chosen a HotOS position paper from the Stanford Platform Lab to kick things off. As we saw with the SOAP paper last time out, even with a fixed model variant and hardware there are a lot of different ways to map a training workload over the available hardware. In “A case for managed and model-less inference serving” Yadwadkar et al. look at a similar universe of possibilities for model serving at inference time, and conclude that it’s too much to expect users to navigate this by themselves.

Making queries to an inference engine has many of the same throughput, latency, and cost considerations as making queries to a datastore, and more and more applications are coming to depend on such queries. “For instance, Facebook applications issue tens-of-trillions of inference queries per day with varying performance, accuracy, and cost constraints.”

If Continue reading

VMware Announces Intent to Acquire Avi Networks to Deliver Software-Defined ADC for the Multi-Cloud Era

By Tom Gillis, SVP/GM of Networking and Security BU

Today I’m excited to announce that VMware has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Avi Networks, a leader of software-defined application delivery services for the multicloud era.

Our vision at VMware is to deliver the “public cloud experience” to developers regardless of what underlying infrastructure they are running. What does this mean? Agility. The ability to quickly deploy new workloads, to try new ideas, and to iterate. Modern infrastructure needs to provide this agility wherever it executes – on premises, in hybrid cloud deployments, or in native public clouds, using VM’s, containers or a combination of the two. VMware is uniquely suited to deliver this, with a complete set of software-defined infrastructure that runs on every cloud, even yours.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) are a critical pillar of a software-defined data center. Many workloads cannot be deployed without one. For many customers, this means writing their application to bespoke and proprietary APIs that are tied to expensive hardware appliances. The Avi Networks team saw this problem and solved it in the right way. They built a software architecture that is truly scale-out, with a centralized controller. This controller manages not Continue reading

Oracle updates Exadata at long last with AI and machine learning abilities

After a rather long period of silence, Oracle announced an update to its server line, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8, which features hardware and software enhancements that include artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities, as well as support for hybrid cloud.Oracle acquired a hardware business nine years ago with the purchase of Sun Microsystems. It steadily whittled down the offerings, getting out of the commodity hardware business in favor of high-end mission-critical hardware. Whereas the Exalogic line is more of a general-purpose appliance running Oracle’s own version of Linux, Exadata is a purpose-built database server, and they really made some upgrades.To read this article in full, please click here

Oracle updates Exadata at long last with AI and machine learning abilities

After a rather long period of silence, Oracle announced an update to its server line, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8, which features hardware and software enhancements that include artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities, as well as support for hybrid cloud.Oracle acquired a hardware business nine years ago with the purchase of Sun Microsystems. It steadily whittled down the offerings, getting out of the commodity hardware business in favor of high-end mission-critical hardware. Whereas the Exalogic line is more of a general-purpose appliance running Oracle’s own version of Linux, Exadata is a purpose-built database server, and they really made some upgrades.To read this article in full, please click here

Protecting Project Galileo websites from HTTP attacks

Protecting Project Galileo websites from HTTP attacks

Yesterday, we celebrated the fifth anniversary of Project Galileo. More than 550 websites are part of this program, and they have something in common: each and every one of them has been subject to attacks in the last month. In this blog post, we will look at the security events we observed between the 23 April 2019 and 23 May 2019.

Project Galileo sites are protected by the Cloudflare Firewall and Advanced DDoS Protection which contain a number of features that can be used to detect and mitigate different types of attack and suspicious traffic. The following table shows how each of these features contributed to the protection of sites on Project Galileo.

Firewall Feature

Requests Mitigated

Distinct originating IPs

Sites Affected (approx.)

Firewall Rules

78.7M

396.5K

~ 30

Security Level

41.7M

1.8M

~ 520

Access Rules

24.0M

386.9K

~ 200

Browser Integrity Check

9.4M

32.2K

~ 500

WAF

4.5M

163.8K

~ 200

User-Agent Blocking

2.3M

1.3K

~ 15

Hotlink Protection

2.0M

686.7K

~ 40

HTTP DoS

1.6M

360

1

Rate Limit

623.5K

6.6K

~ 15

Zone Lockdown

9.7K

2.8K

Continue reading

Data centers should sell spare UPS capacity to the grid

The energy storage capacity in uninterruptable power supply (UPS) batteries, languishing often dormant in data centers, could provide new revenue streams for those data centers, says Eaton, a major electrical power management company.Excess, grid-generated power, created during times of low demand, should be stored on the now-proliferating lithium-backup power systems strewn worldwide in data centers, Eaton says. Then, using an algorithm tied to grid-demand, electricity should be withdrawn as necessary for grid use. It would then be slid back onto the backup batteries when not needed.[ Read also: How server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters ] The concept is called Distributed Energy and has been gaining traction in part because electrical generation is changing—emerging green power, such as wind and solar, being used now at the grid-level have considerations that differ from the now-retiring, fossil-fuel power generation. You can generate solar only in daylight, yet much demand takes place on dark evenings, for example.To read this article in full, please click here

Data centers should sell spare UPS capacity to the grid

The energy storage capacity in uninterruptable power supply (UPS) batteries, languishing often dormant in data centers, could provide new revenue streams for those data centers, says Eaton, a major electrical power management company.Excess, grid-generated power, created during times of low demand, should be stored on the now-proliferating lithium-backup power systems strewn worldwide in data centers, Eaton says. Then, using an algorithm tied to grid-demand, electricity should be withdrawn as necessary for grid use. It would then be slid back onto the backup batteries when not needed.[ Read also: How server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters ] The concept is called Distributed Energy and has been gaining traction in part because electrical generation is changing—emerging green power, such as wind and solar, being used now at the grid-level have considerations that differ from the now-retiring, fossil-fuel power generation. You can generate solar only in daylight, yet much demand takes place on dark evenings, for example.To read this article in full, please click here

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