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Pure Storage debuts denser blade-based flash storage system

Flash-based storage vendor Pure Storage is targeting companies using disk-based mass storage market with a new model of blade server, dubbed FlashBlade E, that provides lower price points for petabyte-scale systems thanks to a tweak to the company’s FlashBlade architecture.Pure Storage’s existing FlashBlade S system is designed for performance – each blade in the 5U chassis of the system has built-in compute and networking, which are interconnected and combined into a single namespace for ease of use. (Multiple chassis can be connected together and will work similarly via an external fabric module, or XFM.)That’s great for high-performance computing (HPC) and other applications that need particularly high performance, but Pure Storage wants to bring its all-flash approach to the world of unstructured storage, where spinning discs are still widely used.To read this article in full, please click here

Digital platform conductors help manage hybrid networks

One of the biggest technology challenges organizations face is managing an increasingly complex environment that might include multiple cloud services and providers, on-site data centers, edge systems and other components.An emerging solution is an orchestration tool that taps into cloud management data, edge systems and on-premises infrastructure to provide a full picture of the environment and come up with recommendations to improve the flow of business workloads, cut costs, and streamline processes.To read this article in full, please click here

How to use the echo command

In this Linux tip, we’re going to look at the echo command and several ways you can use it. First, on the command line, you can enter the echo command followed by a string to display some text. You can even include variables and commands.

Dell launches new PowerEdge servers, private 5G partnerships at MWC

Dell today announced the forthcoming availability of a new line of PowerEdge servers powered by 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors, as well as new partnerships with cloud networking providers and hardware makers for private 5G networks.The new PowerEdge server models, which will be availabe in May, are the XR8000, XR7620, and XR5610. They’re designed with modularity and scalability in mind, with the idea of making it easy to deploy and maintain them, even in difficult conditions. (The systems are meant to support temperatures ranging from -5 to 55 degrees Celsius in the field.)To read this article in full, please click here

Tailoring your Linux command prompt

The command prompt in a Linux terminal window is often just a $ unless you’ve logged in or sudo’ed your way into the root account, in which case you'd expect a #.Sometimes, though, your prompt will be more complicated, with a format like [lucky@fedora ~]$. But it's possible to change your prompt to some friendlier character, word, or phrase, and if you’re so inclined, you can even change its color. This post shows how easy it is to make these kinds of changes.Changing the format To get started, one thing you need to know is that your command prompt is not just something your shell creates on the fly. Instead, it’s a variable and its name is PS1. To see how your prompt is defined, display its value like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Bash scripting tips that can save time on Linux

Committing routine and even rarely required tasks to scripts is almost always a big win because you don’t have to reinvent the approach to getting work done each time it’s needed, and you save a lot of time on issues you handle often.Here are some tips for writing bash scripts and ensuring that they’ll be easy to use, easy to update/ and hard to misuse.Comments One important thing to do when you're preparing a script on Linux is to add comments – especially for commands that might be a little complex. If you don’t run a script very often, comments can help ensure that you quickly grasp everything that it’s doing. If someone else has to use your scripts, the comments can make it a lot easier for them to know what to expect. So, always add comments. Even you might appreciate them! You don’t need to comment every line, just every significant group of commands. Here's a simple example.To read this article in full, please click here

Broadcom, VMware extend deadline to complete acquisition by 90 days

Software and semiconductor maker Broadcom and its acquisition target VMware have agreed to give themselves another 90 days to complete the $61 billion acquisition they announced on May 26, 2022. A regulatory filing by enterprise cloud vendor VMware showed that both the companies had delivered a mutual notice to extend the final date of the merger to twelve months from the day the deal was announced.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco chips away at product backlog but challenges remain

Cisco is getting more products out the door, thanks to significant product redesigns and relentless efforts by its supply-chain team to address component shortages, but the situation is still challenging.“While components for a few product areas remain highly constrained, we did see an overall improvement in the supply chain,” said Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins during a call with financial analysts to discuss the vendor's second-quarter results. Cisco reduced its backlog 6% sequentially in the second quarter, however total backlog grew year over year, Robbins said, though he didn't cite an exact dollar figure. The company still expects to have a backlog that’s roughly double what it would normally be at the end of the year. (In February of last year, Cisco said its product backlog was valued at nearly $14 billion.)To read this article in full, please click here

AMD gains share in server market while overall x86 sales take a hit

AMD continues to gain ground in the data center, grabbing CPU market share from leader Intel despite a significant decline in server processor shipments.Overall, the processor market took a hit in the fourth quarter of 2022, as well as for the full year 2022, due to lower demand, ongoing inventory corrections, and a slowing economy, according to analyst firm Mercury Research.For 2022, total unit shipments (client and server, excluding ARM) were 374 million and revenues came in at $65 billion, down 21% and 19%, respectively, compared to 2021.Specific to server processors, sales for the year came in at 36.1 million units, down 4.2% from 37.7 million in 2021. Revenues were $24 billion in 2022, down 7.7% from $26 billion in 2021. Mercury’s principal analyst Dean McCarron attributes the sharper drop in revenue versus units because the average selling price (ASP) declined.To read this article in full, please click here

Akamai targets cloud computing’s middle ground with Connected Cloud

CDN (content delivery network) giant Akamai Technologies today announced that it will discount cloud egress pricing, add ISO, SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance, and build out enterprise-scale cloud computing sites and distributed points of presence in over 50 cities as part of a new initiative — dubbed Connected Cloud — aimed at filling a niche between the hyperscalers and edge computing.The idea is to fulfill what the company sees as unmet demand. In Akamai's view, modern applications are ncreasingly being broken into a range of different microservices. In many cases, those microservices need to be distributed across a geographically wide area, creating different computing needs than those addressed by most cloud vendors.To read this article in full, please click here

Joining lines of text on Linux

There are number of ways to join multiple lines of text and change delimiters if needed. This article shows two of the easier ways to do this and explains the commands.Using the tr command The tr command is quite versatile. It’s used to make many types of changes to text files, but it can also flatten multiple lines into one by replacing newline characters with blanks. It does, however, remove the final newline as well. Note the $ prompt at the end of the second line. That's a clue!$ tr '\n' ' ' < testfile This is a file that I can use for testing. $ $ tr '\n' ' ' < testfile > newfile To fix this problem, you can add a newline to the end of the file with an echo command like this:To read this article in full, please click here

VMware ESXi server ransomware evolves, after recovery script released

After the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday released a recovery script for organizations affected by a massive ransomware attack targeting VMWare ESXi servers worldwide, reports surfaced that the malware evolved in a way that made earlier recovery procedures ineffective.The attacks, aimed at VMware’s ESXi bare metal hypervisor, were first made public February 3 by the French Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-FR), and target ESXi instances running older versions of the software, or those that have not been patched to current standards. Some 3,800 servers have been affected globally, CISA and the FBI said.To read this article in full, please click here

Hard-drive failure rates tied to age in latest Backblaze analysis

Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze released its latest annual report dissecting hard-drive failure rates, and it’s clear that age is a key determinant of a drive’s potential for failure.Backblaze has become something of a go-to source for hard-drive durability, thanks to its quarterly analysis of its own fleet, which included 231,309 hard drives used to store data as of December 31. (After excluding drives used for testing purposes and low-count models, Backblaze analyzed 230,921 devices for its report.)To read this article in full, please click here

IBM denies suggestion that AIX being deprioritized

IBM disputes a report that it has de-emphasized development of its Unix-based AIX operating system by moving development to India and said that it remains committed to the venerable OS.Commentary in The Register said AIX development had been transferred to India with a sub-headline not to expect "any more big AIX news." IBM’s response is that there has always been AIX development in India, and U.S.-based talent remains at work on the Power platform, which runs AIX.“For this transition, every single person that was on my US team on the day that we announced this was mapped to a new role where we needed them to help us next,” said Mark Figley, vice president of IBM Power development. To read this article in full, please click here

Manipulating text with awk, gawk and sed

The awk, gawk and sed commands on Linux are extremely versatile tools for manipulating text, rearranging columns, generating reports and modifying file content.Using awk and gawk To select portions of command output using gawk, you can try commands like those below. The first displays the first field in the output of the date command. The second displays the last field. Since NF represents the number of fields in the command output, $NF represents the value of the last field.$ date | awk '{print $1}' Sat $ date | awk '{print $NF}' 2023 Note that on Linux systems today, awk is usually a symbolic link to gawk, so you can type either command and get the same result. Here's what you'll probably see when you do a long listing of the awk executable:To read this article in full, please click here

Oracle to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia to expand cloud capacity

Oracle on Monday said it is planning to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia to bolster its cloud computing capacity in the Middle East.The planned investment, which is part of Oracle’s memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, will see the public cloud services provider expand its existing cloud region in Jeddah, and open a new one in Riyadh. In addition to the Riyadh region, Oracle will work with the ministry to set up a commercial and operational model for another cloud region in Saudi Arabia that complies with Saudi government requirements and local data residency regulations.To read this article in full, please click here

Oracle to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia to expand cloud capacity

What is a virtual network

A computer network as we usually visualize it involves various cables (Ethernet, fiber optic, coaxial) connecting to appliances like routers and switches, which direct data packets where they need to go.The rise of Wi-Fi and cellular data networks have replaced some of those wires with wireless signals, but even radio waves are in the realm of the physical, and they connect back to cell towers or Wi-Fi access points.In the seven-layer OSI network reference model, all of that network equipment, processing, and communication occupies the lowest three layers: Level 3 (the network), Level 2 (the data link), and Level 1 (the physical layer).To read this article in full, please click here

AMD issues firmware fixes for Epyc, Ryzen processors

Earlier this month AMD quietly disclosed 31 new CPU vulnerabilities affecting both its Ryzen desktop chips and EPYC data center processors. AMD disclosed the flaws in coordination with several researchers, including teams from Google, Apple, and Oracle.AMD typically releases vulnerability findings twice a year, in May and November, but decided to release the fixes early due to the relatively large number of new vulnerabilities and the timing of the mitigations.Despite the severity and number of flaws, AMD posted the lists to its security page. The flaws include BIOS/UEFI revisions that AMD has distributed to its OEMs. Since every OEM has a different BIOS/UEFI, it’s best to check with your motherboard maker or system vendor to see if you need the updates.To read this article in full, please click here

Startup ECL promises off-the-grid green data centers

Startup ECL has emerged from stealth mode with some mighty big plans: to reinvent the data-center industry with hydrogen-powered modular data centers that use no local power and water.Rather than drawing power from the electrical grid the company will generate electricity for its data centers using hydrogen fuel cells. The only byproduct is water either as a liquid or vapor that is used for cooling with the leftovers being returned to the local environment. “So we can give back to the community some of the water that we’re producing,” said ECL founder and CEO Yuval Bachar, who previously helped design data centers for Facebook and LinkedIn.To read this article in full, please click here

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