Beyond the human cost, natural disasters like hurricane Ian can take a high toll on business continuity, causing enterprise-infrastructure damage that takes days or weeks to fix at a downtime cost in the six figures per hour. If Ian didn’t get you, now is the time to prepare for a future disaster that might hit your network.Vulnerable areas include cloud providers’ managed services that might require customers to explicitly specify they want their apps, compute, and storage housed in redundant, geographically separate availability zones. According to Uptime Institute, roughly one third of enterprises are architecting cloud apps that are vulnerable to outages in single cloud availability zones, rather than distributing their workloads across multiple zones.To read this article in full, please click here
Beyond the human cost, natural disasters like hurricane Ian can take a high toll on business continuity, causing enterprise-infrastructure damage that takes days or weeks to fix while downtime costs in the six figures per hour. If Ian didn’t impact your operations, now is the time to prepare for a future disaster that might hit your network.Vulnerable areas include cloud providers’ managed services that might require customers to explicitly specify they want their apps, compute, and storage housed in redundant, geographically separate availability zones. According to Uptime Institute, roughly one third of enterprises are architecting cloud apps that are vulnerable to outages in single cloud availability zones, rather than distributing their workloads across multiple zones.To read this article in full, please click here
The Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA), IBM and Vodaphone are teaming up to form a task force that will promote quantum-safe cryptography standards for telco networks and, ultimately, enterprise cloud service environments.The idea behind the new group, called the GSMA Post-Quantum Telco Network Taskforce, is to define requirements and create a standards-based roadmap to implement quantum-safe networking and mitigate anticipated security risks.“Telco networks are the underpinning of all enterprise services, regardless of what industry they are in, so it is critical that those networks [get] out in front of the security challenges quantum brings,” said Ray Harishankar, IBM Fellow, vice president, and leader of Big Blue’s Quantum Safe strategy. “The idea of the group is to start to develop a quantum-safe plan now, because the components and standards of that roadmap won’t be developed overnight.”To read this article in full, please click here
Doreen Bogdan-Martin of the US today defeated Russia’s Rashid Ismailov by a convincing 139 to 25 in a vote to decide who will become the next secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union, allaying Western concerns about nation-state control and interoperability of the internet Bogdan-Martin, who will become the first woman to head the ITU in its 157-year history, is seen by some observers as the candidate most likely to preserve the ITU’s status as a neutral arbiter of a free and open internet, in opposition to recent Russian and Chinese maneuvering in the group that would have placed much more control over the internet’s basic functionality in the hands of nation-states.To read this article in full, please click here
Thanks to innovative cooling technology developed by an MIT-hatched startup, data center managers may soon be able to acquire servers and HPC (high-performance computing) devices that will significantly reduce the energy cost and footprint of the faciities they oversee.The startup, Jetcool, sprang from research conducted at MIT’s Lincoln Labs, and this month received an R&D 100 Award from R&D World magazine, marking it as a standout innovator for its use of what it calls “microconvection” liquid cooling of electronics.To read this article in full, please click here
Cloud expertise dominates the most in-demand tech skills for enterprises today, according to Skillsoft.The digital-learning company released its 2022 list of top-paying IT certifications, and AWS certs accounted for five of the 15 slots. Two Google Cloud Platform (GCP) certs and one Microsoft Azure cert also made the list.The continuing value of cloud certifications isn’t surprising, but what’s noteworthy is a shift toward multi-cloud skills, said Michael Yoo, customer market leader for Skillsoft’s technology and developer portfolio. “The increase in importance of Google Cloud and multi-cloud certifications—not just AWS and Azure—speaks to the growing fraction of enterprises that now rely on more than one cloud computing platform.”To read this article in full, please click here
Lenovo Group is marking its 30th anniversary with its largest data-center product launch ever, with more than 50 new products covering servers, storage, and edge systems.Specifically, the celebration is for the ThinkSystem server, and many of the announcements were about upgrades. first introduced under the name PS/2 Server when IBM owned the business. It sold that x86 business to Lenovo in 2015, and it became the Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group.Due to the sheer numbers we won’t get into the individual products. Suffice it to say nearly everything is being upgraded. The next generation of ThinkSystem servers and storage, along with the ThinkEdge edge computing device lineup, as well as the ThinkAgile family of hyperconverged infrastructure appliances collectively are called Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions V3.To read this article in full, please click here
As the Log4J crisis made clear, understanding what is in the software unpinning your applications is crucial to understanding your security posture. This is no less true of your network services.Enterprise-network infrastructure is still very much about hardware in data center and LAN and WAN, but now it is becoming more and more about software.In this era of software-defined networks, an ever-increasing number of network appliances are just proprietary software running on generic switching hardware or even a plain vanilla x86 server with extra network cards. That shift in emphasis from the hard to the soft has made the software stacks running the network a new source of risk and worry for cybersecurity.To read this article in full, please click here
Fortinet has added support for AI operations to its Secure SD-WAN and 5G/LTE gateways giving customers more insights into the networks linking their distributed resources and reducing the time it takes to fix problems.The company has expanded its FortiAIOps platform, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to collect network data and analytics to help identify and automate problem resolution. The addition of Secure SD-WAN and 5G/LTE fills out the FortiAIOps portfolio, which already supported WAN, wireless LAN, and LAN operations on a single console to manage and secure wired and wireless connectivity.To read this article in full, please click here
Supply chain problems have triggered most major networking players such as Cisco, Juniper, Arista, and others to redesign or re-engineer some products in an attempt to overcome component shortages and deliver products to customers.Lead times for some routers, switches and other gear is already delayed well beyond six months. Retooling to get hardware out the door can add is own delay and put additional pressure on engineers looking to reshape things like power supplies and board-level features without causing major problems themselves.To read this article in full, please click here
In reviewing CPU and server benchmarks, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that testing covers both single-core and multi-core performance. Here's the difference.In terms of raw performance, both are equally important, but single- and multi-core have areas of use where they shine. So when picking a CPU, it’s important to consider your particular workloads and evaluate whether single-core or multi-core best meets your needs.Single-core CPUs
There are still a lot of applications out there that are single-core limited, such as many databases (although some, like MySQL, are multicore).Performance is measured in a couple of ways. Clock frequency is the big one; the higher the frequency the faster apps will run. Also important is the width of execution pipelines, and the wider the pipeline, the more work can get done per clock cycle. So even if an app is single threaded, a wider pipeline can improve its performance.To read this article in full, please click here
In reviewing CPU and server benchmarks, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that testing covers both single-core and multi-core performance. Here's the difference.In terms of raw performance, both are equally important, but single- and multi-core have areas of use where they shine. So when picking a CPU, it’s important to consider your particular workloads and evaluate whether single-core or multi-core best meets your needs.Single-core CPUs
There are still a lot of applications out there that are single-core limited, such as many databases (although some, like MySQL, are multicore).Performance is measured in a couple of ways. Clock frequency is the big one; the higher the frequency the faster apps will run. Also important is the width of execution pipelines, and the wider the pipeline, the more work can get done per clock cycle. So even if an app is single threaded, a wider pipeline can improve its performance.To read this article in full, please click here
The commands for looping in bash are extremely useful. They allow you to run a series of commands as many times as needed to process a large collection of data. The break and continue commands provide another special option. They allow you to exit a loop early or skip the remaining commands in the loop and return to the beginning.Both the break and the continue commands are meant to be used only in for, while and until loops. In fact, if you try to invoke the break command on its own, bash will tell you just that.To read this article in full, please click here
Breached information includes names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, and, for a subset of customers, addresses, ID document numbers such as driver's licence or passport numbers.
A new survey released by UK-based research firm Omdia bears out some of the industry’s rosier predictions for IoT uptake among businesses, finding that almost four out of five companies expect to be actively deploying IoT within the next two years.The survey, which was commissioned by IoT connectivity vendor MachineQ and collected responses from more than 200 enterprises in the manufacturing, retail, real estate and construction, healthcare and life sciences industries, also found that 70% of respondents said that they planned to have more than 50,000 IoT devices deployed within the next 24 months.To read this article in full, please click here
Artificial intelligence (AI) may be all the rage, but it's still slow to be deployed. The learning curve is steep, there are few people with adequate AI experience, and the rules of governance are unclear.That explains Gartner's 2020 statistic that only 53% of AI pilot programs actually make it to deployment. The tools and experience needed are just not there for the average IT shop, especially a smaller enterprise.Nvidia is looking to change that with a pair of AI-related alliances with consulting giants Deloitte and Booz Allen Hamilton. Both deals are designed to help companies plot AI strategies and gain access to Nvidia technology and expertise.To read this article in full, please click here
Chip powerhouse Broadcom recently announced its intention to acquire virtualization pioneer VMware for $61 billion. In light of Broadcom’s less than stellar track record with prior acquisitions (CA Technologies in 2018, and Symantec in 2019), VMware’s enterprise customers are understandably worried.“Following the purchases of CA and Symantec, Broadcom raised prices, decreased support, and stopped investing in innovation,” says Tracy Woo, senior analyst for Forrester. “VMware customers would be wise to have an exit plan,” she cautioned.IDC analyst Stephen Elliot sees it differently. Rather than advising VMware customers to identify the exits, Elliot believes customers should “double down” on their relationship with the vendor, moving towards a more strategic business partnership.To read this article in full, please click here
Digital-twin technology is playing an important role in the plan by French industrial automation company Schneider Electric to fully take over UK industrial and engineering software vendor Aveva, in a $10.7 billion deal announced Wednesday.Schneider has been a majority shareholder of Aveva since 2018, when it bought roughly 60% of the company’s shares through a reverse merger that made Schneider’s industrial software business a part of the UK firm. The new acquisition deal, when it closes, would see all shares of the British company transferred to Schneider.To read this article in full, please click here
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.
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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
A former employee of chip designer Broadcom was sentenced to eight months in prison this week by a federal district court judge after pleading guilty to charges for theft of trade secrets in May, according to an announcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California.Peter Kisang Kim, who worked for Broadcom as a principal design engineer for more than 20 years, quit his job in July 2020 and, after less than two weeks, took a job at a startup based in the People’s Republic of China. In pleading guilty, Kim admitted to accessing trade secret information from Broadcom related to the testing and design of the company’s Trident family of chipsets, which are designed for use in network switches and cloud-based networking equipment.To read this article in full, please click here
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