At the AWS re:Invent show, Network World's Brandon Butler takes a closer look at the AWS Snowball offering. The ruggedized appliance helps enterprises migrate very large amounts of data to Amazon's cloud.
Looking to bolster its cloud analytics and machine learning technologies, Juniper today announced its intention to buy startup AppFormix for an undisclosed amount.AppFormix brings streaming analytics and machine learning technologies to Juniper that are tailored for managing operations of large OpenStack and Kubernetes-based Hybrid clouds and Network Function Virtualization (NFV)/Telco clouds, wrote Ankur Singla, Juniper’s Vice President, Office of the CTO in a blog about the acquisition.+More on Network World: Juniper CEO: On the cusp of transforming economics of optical networking+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Got innovation?The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week announced a program it hopes will get the world’s deep-thinkers to collaborate and explore emerging science and technology for advanced applications.+More on Network World: 20 years ago: Hot sci/tech images from 1996+The agency is proposing an online community known as Gamifying the Search for Strategic Surprise (GS3) that would “apply a unique combination of online game and social media technologies and techniques to engage a large number of experts and deep thinkers in a shared analytic process to rapidly identify, understand, and expand upon the potential implications and applications of emerging science and technology. The program will also develop a mechanism to identify and quickly fund research opportunities that emerge from this collaborative process,” DARPA stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Pulling cableImage by Reuters/Gregg NewtonVice President Al Gore gives the OK sign as he and President Bill Clinton participate in an Internet demonstration at Ygnacio Valley High School with students Luke Rockwell (L) and Julie Allen. The president and vice president earlier helped wire the school so the connection with the Net was possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There is a fundamental differentiator between companies that are winning the digitization race and transforming industry segments and those that have traditional business models.I’m talking about companies like Airbnb, Uber, Facebook or Amazon. Those companies don’t just create stuff for their customers, their customers create stuff for them, and for each other. The value of their product or service, therefore, is co-created by the people who use it.+ Also on Network World: Is your network a platform for business innovation and growth? +
Facebook is the most obvious example of this. We are the product. Facebook just provides a platform. Its customers create all of the content and thus create the reason to engage as well as the value of the platform. Without us, there is no reason to be on Facebook.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Getting a handle on electricity use in the data center, home or even Navy ships at sea is no easy task, but a system under development by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Office of Naval Research aims to tame that challenge. Office Of Naval Research/Bryce Vickmark
MIT researches have developed a system that could figure out exactly how much power is being used by every appliance, lighting fixture, and device in home or business...Office Of Naval Research . Credit: Bryce Vickmark
With backing from ONR, MIT have designed what they call a portable system to precisely measure and cheaply monitor the amount of electricity used by individual household appliances, lighting fixtures and electronic devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM is opening four new data centers in the U.K., despite some of the gloomy forecasts for the country's economy following its vote to leave the European Union.It's five years since the company began offering cloud services in the U.K., and two years since it opened its second cloud data center there.The new data centers will raise the U.K.'s share of IBM's cloud capacity in Europe from one-sixth to more than one-third. That's an interesting bet on the U.K.'s future outside the E.U.Following June's "Brexit" vote, the U.K. is set to withdraw from the 28-country bloc in a little more than two years, once the U.K. government makes up its mind when and how to leave. After that, it's anybody's guess what role data centers in the U.K. will play in the broader European economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Raspberry Pi is a happy-go-lucky little gizmo, isn’t it? I always associate it with education, cheap ways to get kids into programming, innocent little hobbyist projects and general “the world is a nice place” activity. And not unreasonably.Surely nobody would turn such an innocuous gadget into something malicious or dangerous, ri-oh, wait I forgot what sort of world we were living in for just a moment:Yeah, it’s some sort of missile guidance system, according to the string of Russian-language LiveJournal pages credited by Popular Mechanics, whose original report can be found here. Popular Mechanics says there’s hints in there that the weapon is guided by sound, which would be highly unusual for a weapon that isn’t designed to attack, say, submarines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.BetterWorks Program AutopilotKey features: BetterWorks Program Autopilot helps enterprise customers automate goal setting and performance management program administration. Automated program reminders, timely communications and usage dashboards all ensure engagement and adoption without administrative overhead. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An enterprise cloud platform company, Nutanix helps companies thread the path of hyper converged infra. ComputerWorld India had an extensive chat with Dheeraj Pandey, Co-founder & CEO, Nutanix on hyper convergence, IPO debut, and competitive landscape. "Hyper convergence is a pit stop in the true journey towards an invisible infrastructure for companies. One can spin up a firewall or storage array through a written code than buy the hardware for the humans to rack and stack it," said Pandey during his recent India visit.Edited Excerpts:Tech OEMs, big or small, end-to-end or niche, are all hitching a ride on the hyper converged Infra bandwagon. How do you demystify `hyper converged' for enterprises?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The dream of creating intelligent computers has inspired the development of exotic chips based on the structure of the brain, which operates in mysterious ways. Some researchers are making such chips from components found in today's computers.Using components pulled off store shelves, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have made a chip for intelligent computers that can learn. The chips are structured to discover patterns through probabilities and association, helping with decision making.The researchers are using off-the-shelf, reprogrammable circuits called FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) to simulate the way neurons and synapses in a brain operate. The chip was made as part of the university's DANNA neuromorphic software project.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Azure Stack is Microsoft’s enterprise cloud technology that allows organizations to run Microsoft Azure on their own premise. During the early adopter testing phase, I needed an Azure Stack host that I could take between my office (by day) and home (on weekends), or to take to client sites to demonstrate. So I created a portable version of Azure Stack by building a 14-core / 10-terabyte cloud in a briefcase!For those who need a background on Azure Stack, please see a couple articles I wrote on Azure Stack describing the technology in more detail, as well as the business use cases of who is lining up to buy Azure Stack. My initial article back in February 2016 covers some early experiences, and then a October 2016 article that updated some more recent work on Azure Stack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What have GE, Citigroup, FedEx, Bank of America, Intuit, Gap, Kaiser Permanente, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan Chase learned from using the public cloud?A group of representatives from each of these companies has worked for the past six months with the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) to develop a whitepaper exploring challenges of using hybrid cloud. ONUG’s Hybrid Cloud Working Group (HCWG) includes not only valuable tips from their experiences using the cloud, but also a wish-list of how these enterprises would like vendors to evolve their platforms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While I was off fighting viruses, SUSE released an update to its SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, a popular business Linux operating environment. The focus of this service pack appears to be accelerating network performance, enhancing support for SAP applications and HANA, improving support for IBM Power architecture systems and other important improvements.What SUSE has to say about this release
Ten-fold increase in packet processing via software-defined networking (SDN) that combines Open vSwitch with the Data Plane Development Kit. This is a key enabler for telecom providers to efficiently implement virtual network functions. Added to SUSE Linux Enterprise’s broad hypervisor support, the integration of DPDK gives customers a complete virtualization solution for cloud and on-premise deployments.
More agile support for SAP applications to ease migration to S/4HANA, accelerate deployment of SAP applications, tune SAP HANA for performance, and create a more resilient and secure SAP environment with enhanced support for SAP HANA clusters, even on geographical levels.
Reduced downtime and improved I/O performance through persistent system memory applications using integrated Non-Volatile Dual In-line Memory Modules (NVDIMMs) that save data in seconds and make data immediately available on reboot.
Increased ability to implement cost-effective, high-performance data analytics on IBM Power Continue reading
Heaven for photographers Image by ReutersFull moons are catnip for photographers under ordinary circumstances, but slap a name like supermoon on one, note that it’s the largest of the century, and the cameras will be out in full force. Here’s a selection of images provided by Reuters.New York CityImage by REUTERS/Eduardo MunozTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Every year Cisco produces a Global Cloud Index, a report that was developed to estimate (and it is just an estimate) global data center traffic growth and general trends. The report is a complementary resource to Cisco’s more general IP network studies, but it provides more meat for which cloud-specific pundits can chew on.+ Also on Network World: Enterprise IT pros see most workloads in cloud by 2018 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Fast and powerfulThe twice-annual Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world (adjudged by their performance on the Linpack benchmark) is out this morning, and there are a pair of newcomers on the list. Check it out.TrinityImage by Los Alamos National LaboratoryTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.NetCrunch 9.3Key features: Version 9.3 of the NetCrunch network monitoring system introduces an overhauled GUI, live up/down traffic on physical segments, new views for smaller networks, and integration with JIRA, ConnectWise and more. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The demand from Internet of Things, automotive networking and video applications are driving changes to Ethernet technology that will make it more time-sensitive.Key to those changes are a number of developing standards but also a push this week from the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory to set up three new industry specific Ethernet Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) consortiums – Automotive Networking, Industrial Networking, and ProAV Networking aimed at developing deterministic performance within standard Ethernet for real-time, mission critical applications.+More on Network World: IEEE sets new Ethernet standard that brings 5X the speed without disruptive cable changes+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When it was announced a year ago, the Cisco/Ericsson partnership was hailed as “the right move for us right now,” according to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins to create the networks of the future.While the partnership has done well – the companies say they have closed 60 deals together -- Ericsson is being battered financially this year and the impact that will have on the partnership could change it in the future.+More on Network World: Cisco CEO Robbins: Wait til you see what’s in our innovation pipeline+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here