Network World Data Center

Author Archives: Network World Data Center

Linux Foundation to blaze a path forward for mainframes

Open-source software development will be a key component to keeping the mainframe a vibrant part of current and future enterprise architectures.With that in mind the Open Mainframe Project, part of the Linux Foundation, this week said at its Open Mainframe Summit that it was forming a working group to promote mainframe-modernization efforts and that it had acqured its own Big Iron to spur future development. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] The working group will create a common definition and framework defining what mainframe modernization should look like and promote open-source development on the Big Iron.To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia GTC: Hopper processor in full production

Nvidia kicked off its second GTC conference of the year with news that its H100 “Hopper” generation of GPUs is in full production, with global partners planning to roll out products and services in October and wide availability in the first quarter of 2023.Hopper features a number of innovations over Ampere, its predecessor architecture introduced in 2020. Most significant is the new Transformer engine. Transformers are widely-used deep learning models and the standard model of choice for natural language processing. Nvidia claims the H100 Transformer Engine can speed up neural networks by as much as six-fold over Ampere without losing accuracy.To read this article in full, please click here

Survey: Outages, staffing challenge data centers

Data-centers are working to improve the resiliency of their physical infrastructure, avoid increasingly expensive outages, and recruit skilled staff in a competitive labor market. Meanwhile, many aren’t tracking critical environmental metrics, even as they face looming sustainability requirements.These are some of the highlights of Uptime’s Institute's 12th annual Global Data Center Survey, which tracks trends in capacity, tech adoption, and staffing.To read this article in full, please click here

Kyndryl service integrates, automates infrastructure resources

Kyndryl has launched an infrastructure-management service that promises to help connect and integrate enterprise resources.Kyndryl Bridge integrates existing tools, partnerships, intellectual property, and processes the company has amassed through years of delivering infrastructure services and uses it to provide as-a-service capabilities and applications that help control and manage enterprise infrastructure.Enterprises have invested in heterogeneous tools and management platforms that don’t integrate the data they gather, and Kyndryl Bridge connects, aggregates, and centralizes that siloed performance data, said Antoine Shagoury, Kyndryl’s chief technology officer. "Then, we use our engineering expertise and AI to analyze the results in real time to provide operations personnel the intelligence they need to keep systems running at peak performance," he said.To read this article in full, please click here

Using the Linux apropos command – even if you have to fix it first

On Linux, the apropos command helps identify commands related to some particular term. It can be helpful in finding commands you might want to use—especially when you can’t remember their names.For example, if you couldn’t remember the command to display a calendar or put your shell to sleep for a short period of time, you could try these commands:$ apropos calendar cal (1) - display a calendar $ apropos sleep sleep (1) - delay for a specified amount of time usleep (1) - sleep some number of microseconds [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]To read this article in full, please click here

Seagate launches self-healing storage technology

Seagate has upgraded its Exos Application Platform storage arrays with a new ASIC RAID controller that doubles performance and adds what Seagate calls self-healing to preserve data on defective hard disks.The Exos X models are a rebranding of the old Exos AP line. The chassis can hold a mix of traditional hard disks as well as SSDs. It comes with software that automatically moves “hot” data, which is being frequently accessed, to SSDs, while less used, “cold” data is moved to the hard drives.There are three Exos X products, defined by their size and drive-bay count. The 2U12 is a 2U chassis with 12 3.5-inch hard-drive bays; the 2U24 with is a 2U chassis has 24 drive slots; and the 5U84 with 84 slots in a 5U chassis. It has all of the standard connections: SAS, network attached SAS, Fibre Channel up to 32G, iSCSI up to 25G and a 10GBASE-T option as well.To read this article in full, please click here

ARM updates Neoverse enterprise processor roadmap

Arm has introduced the next generation of its Neoverse high performance core technology, and Nvidia will be one of the first licensees to offer it out of the gate.Arm introduced the Neoverse N-Series processors for data center use in 2019, along with the Neoverse E-Series for edge computing and the Neoverse V-Series for high performance computing (HPC).For Neoverse V2, Arm is claiming higher per-thread performance at half the power consumption of its x86 competitors. Dermot O’Driscoll, vice president of product solutions at Arm, said on a conference call with journalists that the main aim of V2 is improved performance for cloud and single-thread workloads while balancing power consumption.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM launches fourth-gen LinuxONE servers

IBM has unveiled the next generation of its LinuxONE server, which uses the Telum processor found in the System Z mainframe, promising both scale-out and scale-up performance and much lower power use.Officially dubbed IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4, even though it uses the System Z processor, it only runs Linux-based workloads. The system is tailored to meet the needs of Linux workloads in the data center, according to Marcel Mitran, IBM Fellow, CTO of Cloud Platform, IBM LinuxONE.He says that if a customer has Linux-based workloads running on a Z series, they will be portable to the Emperor server. The server can run Red Hat, SuSe, and Canonical Linux distros.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM, Bharti Airtel partner on edge cloud offerings in India

IBM will work with telecom provider Bharti Airtel to offer edge cloud services to organizations in India, providing a new option for companies looking to leverage edge services and keep their data in-country.The partnership, announced Wednesday, will extend across 20 of India’s largest cities, with a grand total of 120 network data centers included in the system. The idea is to offer business customers the ability to use cutting-edge new capabilities—for example, automated inspection for manufacturing, or high-level analytics for healthcare providers—without using global cloud services that might take data out of the country or having to implement that type of system completely in-house.To read this article in full, please click here

How to work on Linux with filenames that contain blanks

Personally, I always try to avoid filenames with blanks, usually by filling those places where less blank-phobic people would use them with underscores or hyphens. The filenames are still easy to decipher, and I don’t have to trouble myself with enclosing them in quotes when I want to use them. As a result, some of my files look like this:locking-accts Lost_World I also rarely add .txt file extensions to the end of text files unless I plan to share them with my Windows system.Use quotes When blanks in file names are preferable for any reason, however, there are several easy ways to work with them. To reference existing files, you can enclose the filenames in single or double quotes. In fact, you can make this easier by starting with a quote mark, typing as much of the filename as needed to differentiate it from other files and then pressing the tab key to initiate filename completion. For example, typing the portion of a filename as shown in the example below and then pressing tab should add the rest of the filename to the “file n” beginning:To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia Hopper GPU slays predecessor in ML benchmarks

Nvidia has released performance data for its forthcoming Hopper generation of GPUs, and the initial benchmarks are tremendous.The metrics are based on MLPerf Inference v2.1, an industry-standard benchmark that analyzes the performance of inferencing tasks using a machine-learning model against new data.Nvidia claims its Hopper-based H100 Tensor Core GPUs delivered up to 4.5x greater performance than its previous A100 Ampere GPUs. (Read more about Hopper: Nvidia unveils a new GPU architecture designed for AI data centers) It’s a remarkable jump in just one generation. For comparison, CPU benchmarks often grow 5% to 10% from one generation to the next. To read this article in full, please click here

How to copy files to multiple locations on Linux

Using a series of commands to copy a file to multiple locations or a number of files to a single location can be time-consuming, but there are options to speed up the process. This post explains some of them.Multiple commands like these can to copy a single file to a series of directories on your system:$ cp myfile dir1 $ cp myfile dir2 $ cp myfile dir3 One way to make the task easier is typing the first command and then repeat the command by only specifying the needed changes. This method relies on whether the file or directory names are similar enough to substitute only some portion of the names. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]To read this article in full, please click here

IBM is leasing on-prem System i servers

IBM has jumped on the consumption/leasing bandwagon by offering a low-cost subscription for its Power 10-based System i.For $50 per user per month, IBM will place a quad-core POWER S1014-based System i server on-premises. Extra licenses can be acquired in lots of five. Leases are for three to five years, and IBM service the machne either remotely or on-site. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] The specs are fairly modest but aimed at SMBs. The machine will come 64GB of memory, up to 6.4TB of NVMe storage, and both Ethernet and fiber channel connectivity. However, it may come with a quad-core processor, but just one core will be active.To read this article in full, please click here

Checking exit codes in bash

There are quite a few exit codes used on Linux systems, though no listing you can display when you’re feeling curious. In fact, you won’t see the numeric codes unless you specifically ask for them.Instead, you will see a textual description of the problem you encountered—such as “No such file or directory”—in a context like this:$ bin/runme bash: bin/runme: No such file or directory [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] If you want to see the numeric exit code, you can use the echo $? command. The error message will tell you that there is no “runme” script in your bin directory. The echo $? command will respond with only a number.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft adds virtual cores to Windows Server licensing

Microsoft has announced a major update to its Windows Server licensing program, which in part was driven by threats of legal action by the European Union.The most notable change is adding the option of licensing Windows Server based on virtual cores in addition to the current option of paying based on the number of physical processor cores in host machines. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] “Today, Windows Server is licensed by physical core, which means customers must have access to the physical server hardware to ensure that they have enough Windows Server licenses to cover all physical cores in the machine,” wrote Nicole Dezen, Microsoft’s chief partner officer, in  a blog post.To read this article in full, please click here

McLaren Racing relies on edge computing at Formula 1 tracks

“Twenty-two times a year, we build a data center right down at the edge,” said Ed Green, head of commercial technology at McLaren Racing, a British motor racing team based in Surrey, England.For McLaren, the edge is wherever in the world the company’s Formula 1 racing team is competing. An IT setup at each racing site links the entire team, including mechanics, engineers, crew members, and the drivers of McLaren’s two Formula 1 racecars. [Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters]To read this article in full, please click here

VMware CEO highlights tech upgrades, skims over looming Broadcom buy

VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram kicked off the company’s flagship user conference in San Francisco, noting the event’s new name and its return to an in-person venue after two years of being held virtually due to the pandemic. What used to be called VMworld is now VMware Explore in a switch that acknowledges how the audience has changed over the years.“When we started VMworld, it was a community for data center professionals. But over the years we have broadened,” Raghuram said. Now it’s a community for application developers, platform engineering teams, cloud operations teams, and security teams, he said. “It's about all of these roles… not only in the data center, but across clouds. It is truly a multi-cloud community.”To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia partners with Dell and VMware for faster AI systems

Nvidia is starting to strike deals normally reserved for CPU vendors. At the VMware Explore conference today, it announced a new data-center solution with Dell Technologies designed to bring AI training in a zero-trust security environment.The solution combines Dell PowerEdge servers with Nvidia’s BlueField DPUs, GPUs, and AI Enterprise software, and is optimized for VMware’s newly released vSphere 8 enterprise workload platform. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]To read this article in full, please click here

1 … 15 16 17 18 19 20