After almost a year and a half of delays, Intel has begun to ship its 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors, code-named Sapphire Rapids, to customers, and it has set January 10, 2023 as the formal launch date.The launch is a formality because, according to an Intel spokesperson, the new Xeons are already shipping to customers—OEMs—now, but it falls to those OEMs to announce their product release plans.CEO Pat Gelsinger said during the company’s earnings call last week that the company was ramping up production for launch and that he expected the new Xeons to see the fastest ramp to one million units ever.The challenge for Intel wasn’t in design, it was manufacturing. This will be the first generation of chips using Intel 7 fabrication, an advanced 10nm design that took years to get right.To read this article in full, please click here
Adoption of public cloud IaaS platforms like AWS and Azure, and PaaS and SaaS solutions too, has been driven in part by the simplicity of consuming the services: connect securely over the public internet and start spinning up resources. But when it comes to communicating privately with those resources, there are challenges to address and choices to be made.The simplest option is to use the internet—preferably an internet VPN—to connect to the enterprise’s virtual private clouds (VPC) or their equivalent from company data centers, branches, or other clouds.However, using the internet can create problems for modern applications that depend on lots of network communications among different services and microservices. Or rather, the people using those applications can run into problems with performance, thanks to latency and packet loss.To read this article in full, please click here
Agentless security management system aims to simplify vulnerability management for security teams and developers in cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
The chip maker says tests of its BlueField-2 data-processing units (DPU) in servers results in significant power savings over servers that don’t use the specialized chips to offload tasks from the CPUs.The DPUs, or SmartNICs, take on certain workloads—packet routing, encryption, real-time data analysis—leaving the CPU free to process data. But Nvidia says they can also reduce power consumption.The four tests involved running similar workloads on servers with and without DPUs, and Nvidia concluded that even with the additional power draw by the DPUs, overall power consumption by the servers dropped.To read this article in full, please click here
The chip maker says tests of its BlueField-2 data-processing units (DPU) in servers results in significant power savings over servers that don’t use the specialized chips to offload tasks from the CPUs.The DPUs, or SmartNICs, take on certain workloads—packet routing, encryption, real-time data analysis—leaving the CPU free to process data. But Nvidia says they can also reduce power consumption.The four tests involved running similar workloads on servers with and without DPUs, and Nvidia concluded that even with the additional power draw by the DPUs, overall power consumption by the servers dropped.To read this article in full, please click here
In the year since it spun out of IBM, Kyndryl has made a number of big strides in establishing itself as a core infrastructure service management player, but challenges remain.For example, while it has substantially expanded its partnerships and technology, its financial situation hasn’t shown a similar bump. Just this week the company reported second quarter revenues of $4.2 billion, a year-over-year drop of 9%. The company has reported similar results in other recent quarters. “Currency and energy-costs impacts are superseding the operational progress we’re making,” Kyndryl CFO David Wyshner told Wall Street analysts during the firm’s 2Q 2023 call this week. “And while the risk of a global recession has clearly increased, we continue to see broadbase demand for digital transformation in infrastructure services.”To read this article in full, please click here
AMD announced third quarter results this week, and while it posted a $64 million loss in terms of overall operating income—mainly due to its acquisition of Xilinx—but large gains in the company’s data center, embedded and gaming segments provided an encouraging note.Total revenue rose by 29% for the third quarter of 2022, to $5.56 billion from $4.31 billion one year ago. Gross profit also rose in year on year terms, from $2.08 billion in last year’s third quarter to $2.35 billion for the past three months. The decline in operating income was caused by much higher operating expenses, which more than doubled in the third quarter, rising from $1.14 billion a year ago to $2.42 billion in the most recent figures.To read this article in full, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has introduced the 11th generation of its ProLiant servers designed for a range of modern workloads, including AI, analytics, cloud-native applications, graphic-intensive applications, machine learning, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and virtualization.The new ProLiants have three processor options: AMD Epyc “Genoa” generation processors, Intel Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” generation processors, and Ampere Altra and Altra Max cloud-native processors.Compared to the previous server generation, the new HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers support twice as much I/O bandwidth and 33% more high-performance GPU density per server to support AI and graphic-intensive workloads than the prior generation.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco and Red Hat have expanded their partnership to include a new combination that lets customers more easily turn-up and manage bare-metal containerized workloads.The companies have integrated Cisco’s cloud-operations management platform, Intersight, and Red Hat OpenShift Assisted Installer, which controls OpenShift clusters, to handle the complex and time-consuming process of networking a containerized environment.Nearly 80% of enterprises have adopted containers in production environments, and containers are especially effective when they are migrated across different hybrid-cloud domains—on-premises data centers, colocation facilities, network edge, and public clouds, wrote Dhritiman “DD” Dasgupta, vice president of product management for Cisco’s Cloud and Compute team in a blog about the integration. To read this article in full, please click here
NetApp announced Tuesday that its on-premises and cloud storage offerings are now unified under the umbrella of a single platform, called BlueXP, which serves as a control plane for each of its products and simplifies the management of enterprise storage for organizations.BlueXP—which is a free upgrade for its customers—is a reaction to the reality that more and more companies’ storage environments are hybrids these days, combining cloud and on-premises storage, according to NetApp. Businesses of almost any size that have been in operation for more than a decade or so are, more often than not, involved in digital transformation efforts that move at various paces, said company senior vice president and general manager for cloud storage Ronen Schwartz.To read this article in full, please click here
A new specification from the Open Compute Project could mean more choices for IT pros when it comes time to replace server cards.The spec defines a block of code that, when used in processors, establishes root of trust (RoT) boot security. Because the spec is open, any chip maker can use it, and it will provide interoperability with chips made by other chip makers that also use it. This can help eliminate being locked into a single vendor because of proprietary RoT code.By standardizing on OCP hardware, for example, it’s possible to replace a bad smartNIC from one vendor with one from another vendor, says Bill Chen, general manager of server product management at Supermicro, an OCP member.To read this article in full, please click here
Despite problems getting parts and a gigantic backlog of orders to fill, Extreme Networks landed a record-setting first-quarter FY23 of nearly $300 million, up 11% year-over-year, and 7% quarter-over-quarter.The backlog CEO Ed Meyercord referred to during the company’s quarterly earnings call this week sits at $555 million, also a record. To put it in perspective, that's nearly three full quarters of product revenue in backlog, mostly due to supply-chain issues. Concerns about the economy are also in the mix, but Meyercord said that when it comes to investing in networks, things look bright.To read this article in full, please click here
There has been much teeth-gnashing, mixed with a little obfuscation and concern, about what the merged VMware and Broadcom might look like and what it will mean to customers. On Thursday, Broadcom President and CEO Hock Tan took to his blog to offer some details about what he expects the VMware buy will mean to Broadcom and try to ease some of the concerns customers are having.One of the apprehensions for all customers is cost of products going forward. “Following the purchases of CA and Symantec, Broadcom raised prices, decreased support, and stopped investing in innovation,” Tracy Woo, senior analyst for Forrester told Network World in a recent article. “VMware customers would be wise to have an exit plan,” she cautioned.To read this article in full, please click here
There has been much teeth-gnashing, mixed with a little obfuscation and concern, about what the merged VMware and Broadcom might look like and what it will mean to customers. Broadcom President and CEO Hock Tan has taken to his blog to offer some details about what he expects the deal will mean to Broadcom and try to ease some customer concerns.One worry: cost of products going forward. “Following the purchases of CA and Symantec, Broadcom raised prices, decreased support, and stopped investing in innovation,” Tracy Woo, senior analyst for Forrester told Network World in a recent article. “VMware customers would be wise to have an exit plan,” she cautioned.To read this article in full, please click here
Determining how many characters are in a file is easy on the Linux command line: use the ls -l command.On the other hand, if you want to get a count of how many times each character appears in your file, you’re going to need a considerably more complicated command or a script. This post covers several different options.Counting how many times each character appears in a file
To count how many of each character are included in a file, you need to string together a series of commands that will consider each character and use a sort command before it counts how many of each character are included.To do that, you can use a command like this one:To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco is offering software updates for two of its AnyConnect for Windows products it says are actively being exploited in the field.AnyConnect for Windows is security software package, in this case for Windows machines, that sets up VPN connectivity, provides access control and supports other endpoint security features. Cisco said AnyConnect products for MacOS, Linux are not affected.Cisco said its Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is aware that proof-of-concept exploit code is available for the vulnerability, which is described in this advisory.To read this article in full, please click here
As an industry analyst who focuses on network management, I make it my business to cut through hype and buzzwords. When vendors started talking about “network observability” last year, I found myself at an impasse. It seemed everyone had their own take on what this term means.Google network observability, and you will find an endless list of varying definitions. I recently read a blog that boiled it down to this: “Network monitoring is fault management. Network observability is performance management.”No! No, it is not!I decided to do something about this chaos. I talked to multiple network tool buyers and users, and I surveyed 402 IT stakeholders. I asked them to define network observability and explore what it means in the context of their network management tools and processes.To read this article in full, please click here
Network World