IBM and data security and backup provider Cohesity have formed a new partnership, calling for Cohesity’s data protection functionality to be incorporated into an upcoming IBM storage product suite, dubbed Storage Defender, for better protection of end-user organizations’ critical information.The capabilities of Cohesity's DataProtect backup and recovery product will be one of four main feature sets in the Storage Defender program, according to an announcement from IBM Thursday.The Storage Defender suite is designed to bring together IBM and third-party products in order to unify primary, secondary replication, and backup management, said IBM. It’s an as-a-service offering that features a single-pane-of-glass interface, SLA-driven policy automation and the ability to work with a wide variety of data sources, including physical storage, cloud hypervisors, and an assortment of different database types.To read this article in full, please click here
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
IBM said this week it will soon roll out an AI-infused, hybrid-cloud oriented version of its z/OS mainframe operating system.Expected in the third quarter, z/OS 3.1 will support technologies intended to enable deployment of AI workloads co-located with z/OS applications, IBM said in a customer preview letter.The new OS will work best with the newest version of the Big Iron, the z16, but it will support z14 models and above, IBM says.The z16 includes an AI accelerator built onto its core Telum processor that can do 300 billion deep-learning inferences per day with one millisecond latency and includes what IBM calls a quantum-safe system to protect organizations from anticipated quantum-based security threats.To read this article in full, please click here
Nvidia recently announced fourth-quarter earnings, and all things considered, they weren’t that bad. They beat expectations even though sales were down. There was no panic on the conference call, no layoffs.But amid all the talk about earnings and projections for 2023, CEO Jensen Huang dropped a surprise bombshell onto the earnings call with the announcement of DGX Cloud. It’s a deal to make its DGX systems available through multiple cloud providers, rather than installing the the necessary hardware on premises.Nvidia sells GPU-based compute systems called DGX Pods. The same processors, networking, and Nvidia’s comprehensive AI Enterprise software stack from the Pods will be available through your browser, rather than sinking six or seven figures into hardware for your data center.To read this article in full, please click here
Looking to simplify the way enterprises buy its software, Cisco has streamlined the licensing scheme for its Intersight cloud-operations management platform.The SaaS-delivered Intersight package manages a variety of systems from Kubernetes containers to applications, servers, and hyperconverged environments from a single location.Cisco said this week it was moving from a four-tiered licensing menu to one with two tiers named Essentials and Advantage.Under Essentials, Cisco provides full lifecycle operations with proactive support and service for use cases including managing server profiles/policies, managing firmware updates, and proactive health monitoring and security advisories, Mahesh Natarajan, senior director of product management with Cisco’s Compute group, wrote in a blog. To read this article in full, please click here
Wi-Fi HaLow, the marketing term the Wi-Fi Alliance has chosen for the IEEE 802.11ah standard, is a long- range, low-power, low-speed version of traditional Wi-Fi. It shows promise with deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as sensors, wearables, machine-to-machine (M2M) applications, smart buildings, and smart cities.With the ability to connect low-bandwidth devices to IP networks including the internet, it supports enough bandwidth to handle HD-quality video and can even be used for rural communications and offloading cell phone tower traffic.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco and Intel have teamed up on private 5G for enterprise and IOT use cases.During the Mobile World Conference (MWC) this week, Cisco also made other 5G announcements including its Meraki 5G cellular gateways for fixed-wireless access and linking up with NTT, NEC, and Qualcomm to offer 5G services.Many enterprises are still kicking the tires on private 5G service, and many will continue to use 4G LTE for a long time, but 5G is definitely drawing interest, according to Patrick Filkins, research manager, with the IoT and Telecom Network Infrastructure group at IDC. “We expect that by 2026, roughly 80% to 90% of enterprises will have incorporated private 5G as part of their network. Some will benefit from the enhanced mobile-broadband aspect, but many will dig into the advanced features yet to come.”To read this article in full, please click here
Of the 47 enterprises I chatted with in December, guess how many were NOT users of hybrid cloud. Zero. Guess how many ever used another cloud model. Zero. Guess how many believe they will "move everything to the cloud". Zero. OK, I realize that you may not have read this sort of thing very often or at all, but I think it demonstrates just how important hybrid cloud is and how little we really know about it. That’s bad in that it’s always a bad thing when something critical is hardly understood, but it could be a good thing for network professionals looking to engage again with their company IT planning process.To read this article in full, please click here
One year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country’s overall resilience and defiance has been inspiring, but telecommunications and internet connectivity has grown much more difficult.Initially the country’s internet network mostly withstood with some outages and slowdowns, but that has changed over time as the aggressors devote more effort in destroying physical locations and deploying malware and other cybersecurity weapons.For example, researchers at Top10VPN recently reported some distressing analysis including:To read this article in full, please click here
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
The CDN provider's new DDoS scrubbing offering impersonates the customer’s network to phase out malicious traffic, and employs advanced IP masking at source to prevent direct-to-origin attacks.
Looking to make a long-term splash in private-enterprise 5G, HPE has grabbed up Italian private cellular technology maker Athonet for an undisclosed amount.Founded in 2005, Athonet says its goal is to speed and simplify private 5G deployments. Among other packages, it offers CBRS and 5G starter kits that include Athonet mobile packet core, SIM cards, a choice of radio and other components needed to set up private cellular networks quickly. In 2022 the company formed the 5G Consortium to bring vendors together to develop a 5G ecosystem. The group includes Google Cloud, AWS, Airspan, Bearcom, and Digi.Athonet technology will expand HPE’s 5G portfolio, which includes private 5G equipment integrated with its Aruba Wi-Fi gear to provide the option of using the technology that best meets enterprise requirements. HPE also has integrated 5G core technology it offers to service providers.To read this article in full, please click here
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
Cisco issued field notices this week outlining what has apparently become a persistent issue: failed Ethernet connections due to a connected Webex device being moved around too much by pulling on its Ethernet cable.The product involved is the Cisco Webex Room Navigator, a small touchscreen device that combines on-screen, controls, sensors and a power-over-Ethernet port used as a controller for Webex conferencing devices and scheduling conference spaces.The problem, as the field notice describes, is that “the Ethernet port might fail when the Cisco Room Navigator is pulled across the table by the Ethernet cable frequently over a period of several months.”To read this article in full, please click here
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced availability of its new Amazon EC2 M7g and R7g instances, the latest generation of instances for memory-intensive applications and running Amazons custom Arm processor, known as Graviton3.This is the second offering of Graviton3-based instances from AWS. It previously announced specific instances for compute-intensive workloads last May.Both the M7g and the R7g instances deliver up to 25% higher performance than equivalent sixth-generation instances. Part of the performance bump comes from the adoption of DDR5 memory, which offers up to 50% higher memory bandwidth than DDR4. But there’s also considerable performance gain from the new Graviton3 chip.To read this article in full, please click here
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
Wi-Fi HaLow, the marketing term the Wi-Fi Alliance has chosen for the IEEE 802.11ah standard, is a long- range, low-power, low-speed version of traditional Wi-Fi. It shows promise with deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as sensors, wearables, machine-to-machine (M2M) applications, smart buildings, and smart cities.With the ability to connect low-bandwidth devices to IP networks including the internet, it supports enough bandwidth to handle HD-quality video and can even be used for rural communications and offloading cell phone tower traffic.To read this article in full, please click here
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
Most organizations use both on-prem data centers and cloud-based IaaS services, often employing multiple IaaS platforms.For some, this multicloud reality has come about as part of a steady, one-way migration to the cloud, and they may have intentionally kept their cloud networks distinct as part of that goal. Others may have a business strategy for keeping them distinct, such as providing services for a stand-alone division or a particular geography.As a consequence, they are almost certainly already tying their on-premises and cloud infrastructure networks together in some way or are about to be.Those with limited integration among their networks are often dealing with a patchwork of solutions that evolved haphazardly as cloud systems went from being experimental and isolated to being developmental and peripheral and then to being central and in-production.To read this article in full, please click here
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
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