Brandon Butler

Author Archives: Brandon Butler

The best ways to Celebrate Pi Day 2017

It’s that time of year again: Pi Day! Image by Flickr/kok_sexton Pi enthusiasts around the world wait each year for March 14 to celebrate the mathematical constant that represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Check out our tried and true tips for celebrating Pi Day, and be sure to check out our past year’s coverage for even more ideas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Female execs front and center at Google Cloud conference

On International Women’s Day, during the opening keynote of Google Cloud’s NEXT user conference, former VMware CEO Diane Greene gave the primary keynote.When Google showcased its machine learning technology, renowned Stanford University computer scientist Fei Fei Li addressed the audience of 10,000 attendees and thousands more on the live-stream.And during a press conference after the keynote, eight of Google Cloud’s top executives sat on a stage to answer questions from press and analysts. Four of the eight are women, and three of which are listed on Google’s About Us Leadership page.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Four ways Google Cloud will bring Machine Learning & AI to the enterprise +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Cloud exec talks courting enterprises, competing with Amazon and Microsoft

Tariq Shaukat doesn’t have the typical background you’d expect from someone leading the sales and professional services division at Google’s Cloud. Before becoming president of customers, Shaukat was chief commercial officer for Caesar’s Entertainment, the vast hotel and casino chain. As Google is attempting to court enterprise clients, Shaukat is bringing a customer-centric view to the business. And by the way, he’s no tech novice: He’s got undergraduate and graduate degrees from MIT and another graduate degree from Stanford.Analysts who track the IaaS cloud computing market give Google high marks for innovation and infrastructure backbone. But in last year’s Magic Quadrant, Gartner noted that Google was in the “rudimentary stages” of interacting with enterprise clients. The hiring of VMware co-founder Diane Greene in early 2016 was seen as a turning point for Google being serious about pursuing the enterprise market. Shaukat is continuing that work. In a market dominated by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, how will Google reach out to enterprise clients? That’s Shaukat’s job.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco’s exam prices increase for first time in three years

Cisco recently updated the pricing for its certification exams, raising them by between 10 and 20 percent.Certification exams price increases include (all amounts in US dollars): Entry Skills exams (certifications 101-105 and 200-105) changed from $150 to $165, a 10% increase CCN Routing and Switching exam (certifications 220-125) increased from $295 to $325, a 10% increase Professional, Specialist and Technical skill certification exams (300, 500, 600, 640, 642, 642 and 648 series certifications), went up from $250 to $300, a 20% increase. CCIE and CCDE written exams, (350 and 400 level certifications, as well as the 352 level exams) rose from $400 to $450, a 12.5% increase. “Cisco continues to make investments in the content and integrity of its certification and training program to support the increased demand for skilled IT professionals,” wrote Chris Jacobs, Director of certifications and lab deliveries in Cisco's Technical Services Department. “As a result, effective February 9, 2017, Cisco has adjusted the prices of some of its certification exams to align with this effort.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Full text of Amazon’s post-mortem from its S3 cloud brownout

As is customary after a major service disruption, Amazon Web Services today released a post-mortem explaining why its Simple Storage Service experienced elevated error rates, causing many sites across the Internet to slow down or stop working on Tuesday.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 5 Lessons from the AWS S3 outage and how to insulate yourself from the next one | Half of the top 100 retail websites had slow load times during the S3 outage, vendor finds +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco expands Docker partnership, rolls Contiv open source container networking software

Cisco and Docker today announced an expanded partnership that will see further integration of container management software from Docker with infrastructure equipment.Cisco also released a 1.0 version of an open source container networking project named Contiv.+More on Network World: 5 Lessons from Amazon’s S3 Cloud blunder – and how to protect yourself from the next one +The integration of Cisco hardware with Docker software is codified through new Cisco Validated Designs (CVD). One CVD includes a Cisco UCS deployment pre-integrated to support Docker Datacenter, a container management platform that includes the Docker runtime Engine, a Trusted Registry and a Universal Control Plane. Cisco announced another CVD that includes its FlexPod hyperconverged infrastructure with NetApp storage and support for Docker software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Half of the top 100 retail sites had slow load times during AWS’s S3 outage, vendor finds

Yesterday Amazon Web Services had a bad day. And when AWS has a bad day, so do a lot of other sites.Vendor Apica is a website monitoring services that keeps a close eye on some of the top retail websites around the country. All in all, the retail website Apica tracks had trouble dealing with the elevated errors rates AWS reported in S3 starting around mid-day Eastern Time.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 5 Lessons from Amazon's S3 cloud blunder, and how to protect yourself from the next outage +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 lessons from Amazon’s S3 cloud blunder – and how to prepare for the next one

According to internet monitoring platform Catchpoint, Amazon Web Service’s Simple Storage Service (S3) experienced a three hour and 39 minute disruption on Tuesday that had cascading effects across other Amazon cloud services and many internet sites that rely on the popular cloud platform.“S3 is like air in the cloud,” says Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti; when it goes down many websites can’t breathe. But disruptions, errors and outages are a fact of life in the cloud. Bartoletti says there’s no reason to panic: “This is not a trend,” he notes. “S3 has been so reliable, so secure, it’s been the sort of crown jewel of Amazon’s cloud.“To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service isn’t working

Amazon Web Services today acknowledged that its Simple Storage Service (S3), one of the company's most popular cloud-based products, is experiencing increased error rates, causing some sites across the Internet to stop working.AWS posted an alert on its Service Health Dashboard noting: “We've identified the issue as high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is also impacting applications and services dependent on S3. We are actively working on remediating the issue.”+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Battle of the clouds AWS vs. Azure vs. Google +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Cisco wants to become the Switzerland of the cloud

After years of juggling with different strategies of how to pursue the cloud computing market, Cisco now has what it believes will be a winning one: Become a so-called Switzerland of the cloud.Cisco is not spending billions of dollars to build a public cloud to compete with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. “That ship has sailed,” says Fabio Gori, head of cloud marketing at Cisco.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Cloud comparison Amazon Web Services vs. Microsoft Azure vs. Google Cloud Platform +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google cloud debuts Intel’s latest Skylake processors

Google today announced that it is the first IaaS public cloud provider to run the newest version of Intel’s chips, named Skylake.The news comes just months after Google and Intel announced a partnership in November 2016 to co-engineer new processors for the company’s cloud platform.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Battle of the IaaS cloud: Amazon Web Services versus Microsoft Azure vs. Google Cloud Platform+Skylake is the code-name for the next-generation silicon beyond Intel’s Broadwell processors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft Azure now runs Kubernetes, for managing lots of containers

Microsoft today announced that the open source Kubernetes container management platform is now generally available to control clusters of containers in the Azure public cloud.Increasingly developers are, or want to, use containers when writing new applications. It’s a way of packaging the code that makes up an application into a container, which can then be run in the cloud, on a developer’s laptop or wherever the container runtime is supported.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How Philips is turning toothbrushes and MRI machines into IoT devices +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell EMC combines hyperconvergence and cloud in latest VxRail offering

Dell EMC is now offering a combination of its VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure and the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) platform to make it easier for mid-size organizations to build private clouds.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: This DARPA-backed Machine Learning program is a quick thinker | Hot Products at RSA 2017 +VxRail, which combines compute, network and virtual storage, is based largely on VMware management software, including the vRealize Suite, which allows for self-provisioning of virtual machines, and vSAN, which is VMware’s virtual storage array. EMC introduced VxRail about a year ago and Thursday said that to date it has sold 8,000 nodes to 1,000 customers, reaching over 65 Petabytes of scale.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell EMC combines hyperconvergence and cloud in latest VxRail offering

Dell EMC is now offering a combination of its VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure and the Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) platform to make it easier for mid-size organizations to build private clouds.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: This DARPA-backed Machine Learning program is a quick thinker | Hot Products at RSA 2017 +VxRail, which combines compute, network and virtual storage, is based largely on VMware management software, including the vRealize Suite, which allows for self-provisioning of virtual machines, and vSAN, which is VMware’s virtual storage array. Dell EMC introduced VxRail about a year ago and Thursday said that to date it has sold 8,000 nodes to 1,000 customers, reaching over 65 Petabytes of scale.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Philips is turning toothbrushes and MRI machines into IoT devices

The Philips FlexCare Platinum Connected toothbrush is more than just a device for keeping your mouth clean – it’s an IoT machine. Wireless sensors measure the location, pressure and scrubbing patterns of the 31,000 strokes-per-minute vibrating bristles. The data is transferred via Bluetooth to a mobile app that provides a three-dimensional post-brush analysis of coverage, recommending areas of the mouth that should be “touched up” or given extra attention. There’s an option to send a month-long history of brushing patterns to your dentist to keep them informed of your brushing habits. And all of this data, along with many of Philips’ other connected device efforts, run out of Amazon Web Services’ cloud. It’s a new era of Intenet of Things-enabled machines, and Philips wants to be on the cutting edge of offering its consumer and business customers access to more data, which they hope will help keep patients more healthy and the machines running more smoothly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This DARPA-backed Machine Learning program is a quick thinker

Gamalon is a Cambridge, MA-based startup that has received $7.7 million from DARPA to create an advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence platform that the company says is more time and computationally efficient than others on the market.Gamalon uses a new type of machine learning it has developed named Bayesian Program Synthesis, which the company says can accelerate machine learning by more than 100X. The basis of the BPS system is that it uses probability statistics to determine potential connections among the data. By doing so, it drastically reduces the amount of data that it needs to conduct artificial intelligence tasks, the company says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon releases Chime, a new cloud-based UCaaS

Amazon today announced Chime, a unified communications as a service (UCaaS) offering hosted in Amazon Web Service’s cloud.Amazon is entering a crowded market of UC solutions, some of which are already cloud-based and others that run on customer premises. Nevertheless, analysts who track Amazon say the company has an opportunity here.Chime uses a mobile or desktop application that is available across iOS, Android and Windows environments. It uses noise-cancelling wideband audio, which Amazon says allows it to deliver high quality audio and video experiences. When a meeting starts, Chime calls all the participants, who can join by clicking a button; there is no PIN required. Chime shows a visual roster of all attendees, which Amazon says eliminates the “who just joined” questions that can occur on conference calls. Any user has the ability to mute a noisy participant. Advanced editions of Chime allow IT to centrally manage users and settings, including integrating it with existing corporate directories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft blends IaaS and PaaS with new Managed Disks

Microsoft introduced a nifty new feature to its Azure public cloud this week called Managed Disks. The idea is that developers will not have to worry about provisioning storage when spinning up virtual machines. Managed Disks automatically adds persistent disk storage for Azure virtual machines as applications demand it.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: HPE's Mesosphere reseller agreement heats up the container management market | Rackspace is cutting 6% of its workforce +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rackspace is cuting 6% of its workforce

Via a blog post by CEO Taylor Rhodes, Texas-based cloud computing company Rackspace announced that it is cutting about 6% of its workforce in areas that have seen slowed growth in recent years.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How Rackspace will stay alive in cloud: Stop competing with Amazon, start partnering +Rhodes says the cuts will primarily be focused on the company’s corporate administrative expenses and management, and that the company’s “front-line” support staff and product teams will be least impacted by the layoffs. Rackspace did not provide additional details about where the cuts will come from, saying only they are in areas “where the workforce has grown more rapidly than the revenue.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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