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The top 12 tech stories of 2022
The year highlighted how vulnerable the technology sector is to the vagaries of geopolitics and the macroeconomy, as IT giants laid off workers, regulators cracked down on tech rule-breakers, nations negotiated data security regulations, the US-China chip war widened, and the Ukraine war disrupted business as usual.
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Looking ahead to the network technologies of 2023
What’s the single most important thing that enterprises should know about networking in 2023? Forget all that speeds-and-feeds crap you hear from vendors. The answer is that networking is now, and forever, linked to business applications, and those applications are linked now to the way that we use the Internet and the cloud. We’re changing how we distribute and deliver business value via networking, and so network technology will inevitably change too, and this is a good time to look at what to expect.Growth in Internet dependence First, the Internet is going to get a lot better because it’s going to get a lot more important. It’s not just that the top-end capacities offered will be raised, in many cases above 2 Gbps. Every day, literally, people do more online, and get more interactive, dynamic, interesting, websites to visit and content to consume. Internet availability has been quietly increasing, and in 2023 there will be a significant forward leap there, in large part because people who rely on something get really upset when it’s not working.To read this article in full, please click here
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Nvidia still crushing the data center market
Nvidia is playing some serious games.When Jensen Huang and his two partners established Nvidia in 1993, the graphics chip market had many more competitors than the CPU market, which had just two. Nvidia’s competitors in the gaming market included ATI Technologies, Matrox, S3, Chips & Technology, and 3DFX.A decade later, Nvidia had laid waste to every one of them except for ATI, which was purchased by AMD in 2006. For most of this century, Nvidia has shifted its focus to bring the same technology it uses to render videogames in 4k pixel resolution to power supercomputers, high-performance computing (HPC) in the enterprise, and artificial intelligence.To read this article in full, please click here
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Intel splits GPU group into two separate units
Intel announced plans to split its AXG graphics group and move the resources into two existing business units to better serve their respective markets.The consumer/gaming end of the GPU business will move to Intel’s Client Compute Group (CCG), which develops consumer computing platforms based on the company’s CPU products. The teams responsible for data center and supercomputing products such as the Ponte Vecchio and Rialto Bridge will move to the Data Center and AI (DCAI) business unit.The GPU SoC and IP design teams will also fall under the DCAI umbrella, but they will continue to support the client graphics team. Jeff McVeigh, currently the vice president and general manager of the Super Compute Group, will serve as the interim leader of this team until a permanent leader is found.To read this article in full, please click here
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What is Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA)?
Zero Trust is a term coined by John Kindervag while he was an analyst at Forrester Research to describe a strategic framework in which nothing on the network is trusted by default – not devices, not end users, not processes. Everything must be authenticated, authorized, verified and continuously monitored.The traditional approach to security was based on the concept of “trust, but verify.” The weakness of this approach is that once someone was authenticated, they were considered trusted and could move laterally to access sensitive data and systems that should have been off-limits.Zero Trust principles change this to “never trust, always verify.” A Zero Trust architecture doesn’t aim to make a system trusted or secure, but rather to eliminate the concept of trust altogether. Zero Trust security models assume that an attacker is present in the environment at all times. Trust is never granted unconditionally or permanently, but must be continually evaluated.To read this article in full, please click here
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Using the ss command on Linux to view details on sockets
The ss command is used to dump socket statistics on Linux systems. It serves as a replacement for the netstat command and is often used for troubleshooting network problems.What is a socket? To make the best use of the ss command, it’s important to understand what a socket is. A socket is a type of pseudo file (i.e., not an actual file) that represents a network connection. A socket identifies both the remote host and the port that it connects to so that data can be sent between the systems. Sockets are similar to pipes except that pipes only facilitate connections between processes on the same system where sockets work on the same or different systems. Unlike pipes, sockets also provide bidirectional communication.To read this article in full, please click here
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EU Commission opens antitrust inquiry into Broadcom’s $61B VMware acquisition
A month after the UK’s Competition Market’s Authority (CMA) announced it was investigating Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of VMware, European antitrust regulators have launched its own probe into the $61 billion deal.In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is five months into its own investigation of the deal.Meanwhile, the EU Commision said in a statement published on December 20 that it “is particularly concerned that the transaction would allow Broadcom to restrict competition in the market for certain hardware components which interoperate with VMware's software.”To read this article in full, please click here
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HPE expands GreenLake private cloud offerings
HPE has announced new features for its GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, including Kubernetes support and workload-optimized instances.HPE launched GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise in June. It's an automated private cloud offering for enterprises looking to deploy both traditional workloads and cloud-native applications inside their data centers. The service includes virtual machines, bare metal workloads, and containers, all running on GreenLake’s on-premises consumption model.Among the new services HPE announced is the option to deploy Kubernetes container services through Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere. Customers can now run the same container runtimes on-premises that they use in the public cloud, with a consistent experience across both public and private clouds.To read this article in full, please click here
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More work for admins: When labor-saving management tools don’t ease workloads
If not deployed properly, today’s whiz-bang network management tools wind up making more work for network admins rather than saving them time and reducing their overload.Wait, labor saving devices don’t save labor? Not really, at least when it comes to freeing up time for more important or rewarding activities.It’s not unlike the "labor saving appliance" revolution in the American home, especially in the post-WW2 era.I’m referring, of course, to Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s classic history of technology book, More Work for Mother, which explored in depth how various supposedly labor-saving advances in household technology did not reduce the amount of time those women who kept house spent on housekeeping. On the contrary, because they mainly mechanized or automated work previously done by servants, children, or (occasionally) men, these tech advances shifted women’s efforts from organizing such work to doing it. At the same time, with some kinds of work around food preparation and clothes washing, they also brought back “in-house” work that had been effectively outsourced to commercial laundries, bakeries, etc.To read this article in full, please click here
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Data center networking trends to watch for 2023
Hybrid and multicloud initiatives will continue to shape enterprise IT in 2023, and the impact on data-center networking will be felt across key areas including security, management, and operations. Network teams are investing in technologies such as SD-WAN and SASE, expanding automation initiatives, and focusing on skills development as more workloads and applications span cloud environments.“The most important core trend in data centers is the recognition that the hybrid cloud model – which combines current transaction processing and database activities with a cloud-hosted front-end element for the user interface – is the model that will dominate over time,” said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. and a Network World columnist. The industry is seeing a slow modernization of data center applications to support the hybrid-cloud model, Nolle says, “and included in that is greater componentization of those applications, a larger amount of horizontal traffic, and a greater need to manage security within the hosted parts of the application.”To read this article in full, please click here
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Kyndryl launches Cloud Native Services to aid app modernization
Kyndryl, formerly IBM’s Managed Infrastructure Services unit, on Thursday released Cloud Native Services, which it said will aid enterprises in accelerating their cloud application modernization efforts.The new set of services will allow enterprises to move their on-premises applications to cloud service providers such as AWS, GCP and Azure. Kyndryl will also manage these services on behalf of its customers across hybrid or multicloud environments, the company said.Cloud Native Services, according to the company, will provide a framework that will consist of code assets, workflows with integrated services around automated backup, patching, key performance indicators (KPI) monitoring, security, alerting and incident management.To read this article in full, please click here
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How to choose a network service provider
Searching for the best provider for SD-WAN, SASE, MPLS, content delivery network (CDN), 5G or any other network service can be a difficult, frustrating, and tedious process.There are so many providers, so many options, so much confusion and possibilities for future regret. What's the best way to move forward?To read this article in full, please click here
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Arista expands high-end data center switch family to offer network speed, density and performance options
Arista Networks has a new high-end data-center switch as well as several smaller ones designed to provide more configuration and upgrade choices to fit the specific needs of individual organizations.“Different customer use cases and application deployments within a single organization have differing requirements. Each deployment needs a right-sized solution—few applications need 400G of bandwidth per server today, but many organizations need to do the groundwork for the move away from 10/25G,” wrote Martin Hull, vice president of Cloud Titans and Platform Product Management with Arista in a blog about the new systems.To read this article in full, please click here
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Arista adds to its data-center switches
Arista Networks has a new high-end data-center switch as well as several smaller ones designed to provide more configuration and upgrade choices to fit the specific needs of individual organizations.“Different customer use cases and application deployments within a single organization have differing requirements. Each deployment needs a right-sized solution—few applications need 400G of bandwidth per server today, but many organizations need to do the groundwork for the move away from 10/25G,” wrote Martin Hull, vice president of Cloud Titans and Platform Product Management with Arista in a blog about the new systems.To read this article in full, please click here
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Equinix’s fix for high power bills? Hotter data centers
Data-center giant Equinix has found a low-tech solution to high data-center electric bills: turn up the thermostat.Guidance from the American Society of Heat, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) recommends a temperature range for data-center servers from 59°F (15°C) to as high as 89°F (31.6°C). Equinix is looking at setting the temperature at 80°F (26.6°C), up from the current setting of 73°F (22.7°C).To read this article in full, please click here
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Meta considers liquid to cool its hard drives
A joint effort by immersion cooling firm Iceotope and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, found cooling hard drives with a dielectric liquid is safe and a more effective means of cooling than using fans.Hyperscalers like Meta deploy thousands of HDDs in their data centers, and while the heat given off on an individual basis is tiny, it adds up, especially since the drives are in constant use and are close together. The drives are stored in server racks that hold nothing but dozens of hard drives and are referred to as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks).A JBOD can overheat without cooling, which up to now has been done with fans, but some drives were further away from fans than others, causing uneven cooling.To read this article in full, please click here
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7 ways to look at network connections on Linux
Whether you’re managing a network at work or just watching out for your home systems, it’s important to understand your network connections--how you communicate with public systems and those on the local network. This article covers some of the most important commands available on Linux to help you get a clear understanding of your local network and how it reaches outside.While the links provided include important tips on using network commands, some include commands that have been deprecated in favor of newer commands. Some of the most important commands to know today include ip a, ip neigh, ping, tracepath, dig, tcpdump and whois.To read this article in full, please click here
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How to reduce 2023 network costs: The cloud
Sometimes, budget pressures mean you just have to cut costs. Sometimes, cutting costs in one area can give you some financial elbow room to fund something in another. A fifth of all CIOs tell me that they have a mandate to cut network costs in 2023, and another third say they’d be open to doing that if they could fund something else with the savings. Most admit that they don’t have a really good idea of how to accomplish their goal without creating a risk that would potentially overwhelm benefits.Cutting CAPEX is popular in theory. Of 87 enterprises with cost-cutting interest, 55 said they thought their capital budgets would be an attractive place to start. That’s not changed much over the last five years, but what has changed is how enterprises think they could cut CAPEX. It used to be that they believed cost reductions could be achieved with new technologies like hosted router software or white-box devices, but this year they reported concerns that integration costs and risks were too high.To read this article in full, please click here
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What is SASE? A cloud service that marries SD-WAN with security
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a network architecture that combines software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and security functionality into a unified cloud service that promises simplified WAN deployments, improved efficiency and security, and application-specific bandwidth policies.First outlined by Gartner in 2019, SASE (pronounced “sassy”) has quickly evolved from a niche, security-first SD-WAN alternative into a popular WAN sector that analysts project will grow to become a $10-billion-plus market within the next couple of years.To read this article in full, please click here
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Intel Xeons to offer on-demand special functionality
Intel has a new program called Intel On Demand that will allow customers of its new Xeon Scalable Processors to unlock specialty processing engines for an extra fee.Intel has not disclosed what it will cost to access the On Demand features, which are activated through Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi), a newly added function using authentication keys to activate the additional features.For most customers, the standard Xeon core is all they need. But some may want the specialty processing engines included in the latest Xeon generation, codenamed Sapphire Rapids. The chips are available now to OEMs but will have a formal launch Jan. 10, 2023.To read this article in full, please click here