Andy Patrizio
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Andy Patrizio
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One in five serverless apps has a critical security vulnerability
Serverless computing is an emerging trend that is likely to explode in popularity this year. It takes the idea of a smaller server footprint to the next level. First, there were virtual machines, which ran a whole instance of an operating system. Then they were shrunk to containers, which only loaded the bare minimum of the OS required to run the app. This led to a smaller footprint.Now we have “serverless” apps, which is a bit of a misnomer. They still run on a server; they just don’t have a dedicated server, virtual machine, or container running 24/7. They run in a server instance until they complete their task, then shut down. It’s the ultimate in small server footprint and reducing server load.To read this article in full, please click here
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Overclock puts your idle servers to work for other people
Putting unused CPUs to work is nothing new. In the modern era, it started in 1999 when the SETI Institute launched SETI@Home, a screensaver that also examined slices of radio signals gathered by a giant telescope for signs of intergalactic life. Nineteen years later, and ET still hasn’t phoned us.But the concept grew to dozens of science and math-related projects. I took part in the World Community Grid run by IBM for years, letting my idle PC look for potential cures for AIDS and Ebola.To read this article in full, please click here
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Overclock puts your idle servers to work for other people
Putting unused CPUs to work is nothing new. In the modern era, it started in 1999 when the SETI Institute launched SETI@Home, a screensaver that also examined slices of radio signals gathered by a giant telescope for signs of intergalactic life. Nineteen years later, and ET still hasn’t phoned us.But the concept grew to dozens of science and math-related projects. I took part in the World Community Grid run by IBM for years, letting my idle PC look for potential cures for AIDS and Ebola.To read this article in full, please click here
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New distributed database adds international and GDPR controls
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will force very strict new privacy compliance rules on firms doing business in the EU, but a startup that has an atrocious company and product name has what it says is the solution to maintaining compliance.Cockroach Labs has introduced version 2.0 of its CockroachDB distributed database, which can be run in a data center or cloud. The company bills the product as “the SQL database for global cloud services.” It automatically scales, rebalances, and repairs databases spread over multiple locations.To read this article in full, please click here
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New distributed database adds international and GDPR controls
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will force very strict new privacy compliance rules on firms doing business in the EU, but a startup that has an atrocious company and product name has what it says is the solution to maintaining compliance.Cockroach Labs has introduced version 2.0 of its CockroachDB distributed database, which can be run in a data center or cloud. The company bills the product as “the SQL database for global cloud services.” It automatically scales, rebalances, and repairs databases spread over multiple locations.To read this article in full, please click here
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Nvidia packs 2 petaflops of performance in a single compact server
At its GPU Technology Conference this week, Nvidia took the wraps off a new DGX-2 system it claims is the first to offer multi-petaflop performance in a single server, thus greatly reducing the footprint to get to true high-performance computing (HPC).DGX-2 comes just seven months after the DGX-1 was introduced, although it won’t ship until the third quarter. However, Nvidia claims it has 10 times the compute power as the previous generation thanks to twice the number of GPUs, much more memory per GPU, faster memory, and a faster GPU interconnect.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] The DGX-2 uses a Tesla V100 CPU, the top of the line for Nvidia’s HPC and artificial intelligence-based cards. With the DGX-2, it has doubled the on-board memory to 32GB. Nvidia claims the DGX-2 is the world’s first single physical server with enough computing power to deliver two petaflops, a level of performance usually delivered by hundreds of servers networked into clusters.To read this article in full, please click here
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Nvidia packs 2 petaflops of performance in a single compact server
At its GPU Technology Conference this week, Nvidia took the wraps off a new DGX-2 system it claims is the first to offer multi-petaflop performance in a single server, thus greatly reducing the footprint to get to true high-performance computing (HPC).DGX-2 comes just seven months after the DGX-1 was introduced, although it won’t ship until the third quarter. However, Nvidia claims it has 10 times the compute power as the previous generation thanks to twice the number of GPUs, much more memory per GPU, faster memory, and a faster GPU interconnect.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] The DGX-2 uses a Tesla V100 CPU, the top of the line for Nvidia’s HPC and artificial intelligence-based cards. With the DGX-2, it has doubled the on-board memory to 32GB. Nvidia claims the DGX-2 is the world’s first single physical server with enough computing power to deliver two petaflops, a level of performance usually delivered by hundreds of servers networked into clusters.To read this article in full, please click here
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Patches for Meltdown and Spectre aren’t that bad after all
Internal tests from a leading industry vendor have shown that fixes applied to servers running Linux or Windows Server aren’t as detrimental as initially thought, with many use cases seeing no impact at all.The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, first documented in January, seemed like a nightmare for virtualized systems, but that is overblown. There are a lot of qualifiers, starting with what you are doing and what generation processor you are using.The tests were done on servers running Xeons of the Haswell-EP (released in 2014), Broadwell-EP (released in 2016), and Skylake-EP (released in 2017). Haswell and Broadwell were the same microarchitecture, with minor tweaks. The big change there was Broadwell was a die shrink. Skylake, though, was a whole new architecture, and as it turns out, that made the difference.To read this article in full, please click here
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Patches for Meltdown and Spectre aren’t that bad after all
Internal tests from a leading industry vendor have shown that fixes applied to servers running Linux or Windows Server aren’t as detrimental as initially thought, with many use cases seeing no impact at all.The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, first documented in January, seemed like a nightmare for virtualized systems, but that is overblown. There are a lot of qualifiers, starting with what you are doing and what generation processor you are using.The tests were done on servers running Xeons of the Haswell-EP (released in 2014), Broadwell-EP (released in 2016), and Skylake-EP (released in 2017). Haswell and Broadwell were the same microarchitecture, with minor tweaks. The big change there was Broadwell was a die shrink. Skylake, though, was a whole new architecture, and as it turns out, that made the difference.To read this article in full, please click here
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Patches for Meltdown and Spectre aren’t that bad after all
Internal tests from a leading industry vendor have shown that fixes applied to servers running Linux or Windows Server aren’t as detrimental as initially thought, with many use cases seeing no impact at all.The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, first documented in January, seemed like a nightmare for virtualized systems, but that is overblown. There are a lot of qualifiers, starting with what you are doing and what generation processor you are using.The tests were done on servers running Xeons of the Haswell-EP (released in 2014), Broadwell-EP (released in 2016), and Skylake-EP (released in 2017). Haswell and Broadwell were the same microarchitecture, with minor tweaks. The big change there was Broadwell was a die shrink. Skylake, though, was a whole new architecture, and as it turns out, that made the difference.To read this article in full, please click here
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IBM, HPE tout new A.I.-oriented servers
IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week introduced new servers optimized for artificial intelligence, and the two had one thing in common: Nvidia technology.HPE this week announced Gen10 of its HPE Apollo 6500 platform, running Intel Skylake processors and up to eight Pascal or Volta Nvidia GPUs connected by NVLink, Nvidia’s high-speed interconnect.A fully loaded V100s server will get you 66 peak double-precision teraflops of performance, which HPE says is three times the performance of the previous generation.The Apollo 6500 Gen10 platform is aimed at deep-learning workloads and traditional HPC use cases. The NVLink technology is up to 10 times faster than PCI Express Gen 3 interconnects.To read this article in full, please click here
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IBM, HPE tout new A.I.-oriented servers
IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week introduced new servers optimized for artificial intelligence, and the two had one thing in common: Nvidia technology.HPE this week announced Gen10 of its HPE Apollo 6500 platform, running Intel Skylake processors and up to eight Pascal or Volta Nvidia GPUs connected by NVLink, Nvidia’s high-speed interconnect.A fully loaded V100s server will get you 66 peak double-precision teraflops of performance, which HPE says is three times the performance of the previous generation.The Apollo 6500 Gen10 platform is aimed at deep-learning workloads and traditional HPC use cases. The NVLink technology is up to 10 times faster than PCI Express Gen 3 interconnects.To read this article in full, please click here
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There’s still a lot of life left in tape backup
This industry likes to abandon technologies as soon as it adopts them, but a few find a way to hang around. I recently purchased a car, and in the finance office was a dot matrix printer, chugging away at the same multipage forms I saw used more than 25 years ago.Tape backup is also hanging in there. With data being produced in ever-increasing numbers, it has to be stored somewhere, and hard drives aren’t enough. For true mass backup, enterprises are still turning to tape backup, and the LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs) say 2017 shipments grew 12.9 percent over 2016 to 108,457 petabytes (PB) of tape capacity.Read also: The future of storage: Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo shares his predictions | Sign up: Receive daily network news updates LTO TPCs is a group consisting of three tape backup providers: HPE, IBM, and Quantum. There are other tape backup providers, such as Oracle, which inherited the StorageTek business from Sun Microsystems and still sells them, but it was not included in the count.To read this article in full, please click here
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IBM launches private IoT analytics cloud platform
IBM has launched the latest effort to bring the nature of the cloud to the on-premises data center with Cloud Private for Data. It's an integrated data science, engineering and development platform designed to help companies gain insights from data sources such IoT, online commerce, and mobile data.Cloud Private for Data builds on IBM Cloud Private, a private cloud platform IBM introduced in November that brought Kubernetes into the data center. Cloud Private for Data expands on that greatly, adding IBM Streams for data ingestion, IBM Data Science Experience, Information Analyzer, Information Governance Catalogue, Data Stage, Db2, and Db2 Warehouse. All run on the Kubernetes platform, allowing services to be deployed “in minutes,” IBM claimed, and to scale up or down automatically as needed.To read this article in full, please click here
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IBM launches private IoT analytics cloud platform
IBM has launched the latest effort to bring the nature of the cloud to the on-premises data center with Cloud Private for Data. It's an integrated data science, engineering and development platform designed to help companies gain insights from data sources such IoT, online commerce, and mobile data.Cloud Private for Data builds on IBM Cloud Private, a private cloud platform IBM introduced in November that brought Kubernetes into the data center. Cloud Private for Data expands on that greatly, adding IBM Streams for data ingestion, IBM Data Science Experience, Information Analyzer, Information Governance Catalogue, Data Stage, Db2, and Db2 Warehouse. All run on the Kubernetes platform, allowing services to be deployed “in minutes,” IBM claimed, and to scale up or down automatically as needed.To read this article in full, please click here
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Another selling point of bare-metal cloud providers: local service
Several things make bare-metal cloud providers appealing compared with traditional cloud providers, which operate in a virtualized environment. Bare-metal providers give users more control, more access to hardware, more performance, and the ability to pick their own operating environment.There's another interesting angle, as articulated by Martin Blythe, a research fellow with Gartner. He maintains that bare-metal providers appeal to small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) because those companies are often small, local players, and SMBs looking for something more economical than hosting their own data center often want to keep the data center nearby.To read this article in full, please click here
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Another selling point of bare-metal cloud providers: local service
Several things make bare-metal cloud providers appealing compared with traditional cloud providers, which operate in a virtualized environment. Bare-metal providers give users more control, more access to hardware, more performance, and the ability to pick their own operating environment.There's another interesting angle, as articulated by Martin Blythe, a research fellow with Gartner. He maintains that bare-metal providers appeal to small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) because those companies are often small, local players, and SMBs looking for something more economical than hosting their own data center often want to keep the data center nearby.To read this article in full, please click here
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13 flaws found in AMD processors, AMD given little warning
It’s probably a good thing AMD didn’t rub Intel’s nose in the Meltdown and Spectre flaws too much because boy, would it have a doosy of a payback coming to it. A security firm in Israel has found 13 critical vulnerabilities spread across four separate classes that affect AMD’s hot new Ryzen desktop and Epyc server processors.However, the handling of the disclosure is getting a lot of attention, and none of it good. The company, CTS-Labs of Israel, gave AMD just 24 hours notice of its plans to disclose the vulnerabilities. Typically companies get 90 days to get their arms around a problem, and Google, which unearthed Meltdown, gave Intel six months.To read this article in full, please click here
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13 flaws found in AMD processors, AMD given little warning
It’s probably a good thing AMD didn’t rub Intel’s nose in the Meltdown and Spectre flaws too much because boy, would it have a doosy of a payback coming to it. A security firm in Israel has found 13 critical vulnerabilities spread across four separate classes that affect AMD’s hot new Ryzen desktop and Epyc server processors.However, the handling of the disclosure is getting a lot of attention, and none of it good. The company, CTS-Labs of Israel, gave AMD just 24 hours notice of its plans to disclose the vulnerabilities. Typically companies get 90 days to get their arms around a problem, and Google, which unearthed Meltdown, gave Intel six months.To read this article in full, please click here
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A few buckets of cold water on the Broadcom-Qualcomm-Intel merger talk
The M&A activity in the chip business isn’t restricted to the big guys snapping up promising startups. The titans are talking marriage, but really, there should be no merger between any of the three giants that are Intel, Broadcom, and Qualcomm.On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Intel was closely watching Broadcom’s hostile bid for Qualcomm in the hopes that Broadcom would fail so it could buy Broadcom. The deal would be valued at an insane $170 billion.Intel issued a denial over the weekend, saying it was only looking to assimilate and absorb several recent acquisitions.The White House steps in, stops Broadcom-Qualcomm merger Meanwhile, the Broadcom-Qualcomm talks persisted despite Qualcomm’s resistance to the idea until Monday, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order blocking the merger, citing national security concerns. I didn’t think he could do that.To read this article in full, please click here