Data is piling up, and storage keeps getting faster thanks to flash, so the networks that link it all together need to keep up, too.Both traditional Fibre Channel and more general-use protocols used in storage keep steadily ratcheting up performance. On Wednesday, Cisco Systems is boosting the speed of long-distance storage links for disaster recovery and business continuity. It’s also introducing higher speeds for IP (Internet Protocol) storage networks in data centers and enhancing its software to simplify storage management.Fibre Channel hangs on as the glue that binds together SANs (storage area networks) because it’s dependable and secure, said 451 Research analyst Steven Hill. A majority of large enterprise installations use it even though typically cheaper IP-based systems like iSCSI have been around for years, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Considering how much significance Gartner is placing the future influence of artificial intelligence and algorithms, it comes as little surprise that the group is saying that technology will be one of the most strategic and potentially disruptive for 2017.
At its Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow detailed the key technology trends for 2017 as the group sees them including how data science technologies are evolving to include advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence is helping create intelligent physical and software-based systems that are programmed to learn and adapt. Other key trends include the impact of melding of the physical and digital environments and how digital technology platforms are influencing the enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s easy to get all “cloud first” when you’re talking about new, greenfield applications. But how do you get the core business applications running in your data center – so-called brownfield apps – easily and efficiently migrated to the cloud? That’s the problem startup CloudVelox set out to solve, with the larger mission of helping CIOs build “boundaryless” hybrid data centers. IDG Chief Content Officer John Gallant spoke with CloudVelox CEO Raj Dhingra about how the company has automated the migration of complex, traditional applications to Amazon Web Services (and Microsoft Azure in the near future). Dhingra explained how companies are using CloudVelox’s One Hybrid Cloud platform to not only migrate apps, but to build cloud-based disaster recovery capabilities and simplify a variety of test/dev chores.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
It wasn’t long ago that the big spectator sport in IaaS cloud computing was to watch a leading provider such as Microsoft or Amazon Web Services announce price cuts and then ready for its rivals to follow suit.The new game in town plays out in a similar way, except now the vendors are matching or one-upping each other with new data centers and cloud computing regions.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Winners and losers from the AWS-VMware deal | Mapping the cloud: Where does the public cloud actually live? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced algorithms are at the heart of an emerging digital world.That was one of the chiefs components of Gartner’s Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president and global head of Research opening remarks at today’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo show in Orlando.More on Network World: Will future developments in the realm of Artificial Intelligence be like the wild west or a more controlled situation? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For now, the US Secret Service has no reasonable assurance that its information systems are properly secured to protect Law Enforcement Sensitive case management information.That was but one of the conclusions laid at the feet of the US Secret Service today by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General, John Roth in a scathing report on the agency tasked with protecting the President and other important government officials.+More on Network World: Federal cyber incidents grew an astounding 1,300% between 2006 and 2015+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
From a global leader in flash memory technology, the SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.0 Flash Drive is an ultra-small, low-profile drive with a storage capacity of 128GB, and enough speed to transfer a full-length movie in less than 30 seconds. It's a #1 Amazon Best Seller in its category with 4 out of 5 stars from over 2,500 people (read reviews). Its typical list price of $40 has been reduced 31% to just $28. See the discounted Flash Drive from SanDisk now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A woman from Ohio tells a Cleveland TV station that she has been summoned for jury nine times in the past 12 years."Usually what I do is snap a picture (of the summons) and send it to my friend, like, again!" she says. From that TV station story:
Administrative judge for the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court John Russo says that people are supposed to get called about every two years. According to him, jury selection is random, with 300 names picked electronically per week based on voter registration. But Russo says there could be a glitch with addresses that would put your name back in the pot too soon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As connectivity grows, so do threats to the IT infrastructures under your care—and, by extension, your organization’s ability to profit and serve its customers. Security strategies that worked fine in the not-so-distant past have grown woefully inadequate as the technology terrain shifts.
You’ve probably heard the acronym SIEM being thrown around a lot these days and for good reasons. As security experts, we know that perimeter defenses simply aren’t enough anymore, and we need a holistic view of our IT infrastructures.
+ Also on Network World: SIEM market dynamics in play +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Will future developments in the realm of Artificial Intelligence be like the wild west or a more controlled situation? The real answer is probably somewhere in the middle but the government at least would like to see more measured research and development.The White House today issued report on future directions for AI called Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. In it, the report comes to several conclusions – some obvious and some perhaps less so. For example, it accepts that AI technologies will continue to grow in sophistication and ubiquity, thanks to AI R&D investments by government and industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What happens when fans of the Game of Thrones TV series work at a company that makes power equipment?This: Eaton
The Eaton ePDU G3 Throne
Behold the Eaton ePDU G3 Throne. Compare it to the original Iron throne, pictured here. Eaton commissioned a North Carolina artists to design the chair and then workers constructed it out of 35 rack power distribution unit. It has a total of 821 outlet receptacles. Now that’s a throne with some power capacity. Check out a slideshow of how the Throne was built here. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Some 31 years ago, the RMS Titanic was discovered resting on the ocean floor. The legend of its sinking has been retold many times in books and movies. One compelling aspect of the story is the safety claims made by its creators. Even as reports of the disaster began to filter into New York, the vice president of the White Star Line stated, without qualification, “We place absolute confidence in the Titanic. We believe that the boat is unsinkable.” Obviously reality betrayed those maritime engineers’ confidence.What lessons might this famous disaster teach engineers in modern data centers? In particular, how do we prevent hostile attacks—the “icebergs” that lurk on the seas we sail—from causing catastrophic breaches?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Deploying new software to production can be hard -- really hard. If you’re among the many businesses adopting new infrastructure and deployment technology today, you’re keenly aware of how difficult it can be. Even as you adopt modern devops tools to streamline development, test, deployment, and ongoing management, and to bring development and operations teams closer together, it often seems you're only creating new silos.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
From time to time, a vendor's PR rep sends me a note about the "problem" that is caused by mainframe systems being at the hub of enterprise computing. In reality, these systems often offer more integrated processing power, larger memory capacity and more efficient database operations than a distributed, x86-based solution.The most recent pitch I received included this sentence: "How the dusty old legacy mainframe holds back cloud initiatives... and how it can be modernized."What are the real costs?
Part of the reason mainframes won't die is that often they simply cost less to operate when all of the costs of ownership and workload operations are considered.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has spent the past few years engaged in massive expansions of its data centers in the U.S., adding the capacity needed as its Azure business grows. Now it's moving on to Europe, as is Amazon, in what looks to be the next big cloud battleground. At a company event in Dublin, Ireland, CEO Satya Nadella told an audience that the company is building out its data centers as "a global hyperscale cloud." Microsoft has over 30 regions across all parts of the globe, making sure customers worldwide have access to the cloud. Its next big push will be to open multiple cloud data centers in France, beginning next year. Amazon Web Services (AWS) last week said it plans to do the same. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The next release of OpenStack made its debut on Thursday with a raft of new features for better scalability and resiliency.Architectural and functional barriers can make it difficult for companies to scale their clouds up or down across platforms and geographies, but OpenStack's 14th release -- dubbed Newton -- does away with many of those limitations. The open source cloud-building software now includes improved scaling capabilities in its Nova, Horizon, and Swift components, its makers say.New improvements bolster the horizontal scale-out of Nova compute environments, while others add convergence by default in the Heat orchestration service as well as multi-tenancy improvements in Ironic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A small semiconductor company based in Cambridge, Mass., was acquired today by Nokia, in a move to make the Finnish giant’s base station technology more energy-efficient.Eta Devices’ technology and institutional expertise appear to be at the heart of the acquisition, for which terms and pricing were not disclosed. Eta has 20 employees, located in Cambridge and at an R&D office in Stockholm, Sweden.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Satya Nadella's comp package slips 3% to $17.7M + Happy 25th once again to Linux, 'the little OS that definitely could'To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It seems like the chip war between Intel and ARM is slowly winding down, at least for the time being.Intel for decades has doggedly sworn by chips based on its homegrown x86 architecture, but the company is putting a 64-bit ARM processor in its new Stratix 10 FPGA (field-programmable gate array), which was announced on Tuesday.The FPGA -- based on Altera technology -- can be reprogrammed to do a wide variety of server or network tasks. It can also run algorithms for machine learning.In a larger context, the chip points to a long-term strategy of Intel thinking beyond x86 and warming up to other architectures as it looks to shed its reliance on PCs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I spend a lot of time talking to organizations about disruption and the fact that no matter what industry they’re in, there is an equivalent to Uber breathing down their neck just waiting to destroy them. Normally these conversations end up with defensive legacy IT practitioners finding a million reasons why agile and innovative couldn’t happen in their setting—to much compliance, too many core systems, too much of a “slow and steady” business.Don't get me wrong: While I’m a huge fan of webscale approaches to IT, commodity infrastructure, and moving up the value chain, I’m still well aware that many of the world’s most critical systems—from banking to air travel—run on big old traditional mainframes and that forklifting these applications onto new architectures is hard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Network World started its Wider Net stories in 2003 in an effort to lighten up our news pages, acknowledging that there is a lot more to the world of enterprise networking and IT other than speeds and feeds of switches and routers and WAN links.
The story approach was modeled somewhat after the Wall Street Journal's famed and quirky front page A-Hed articles (i.e., the middle column), but tended more to networking topics, from "When animals attack…networks" to the story of networking's most famous couple, Alice and Bob of security lesson fame.
While Network World did away with its formal weekly Wider Net articles when the publication switched over to publishing twice a month, we've tried to continue mixing in lighthearted pieces through our blogs and in other places on our website and print magazine. Here are some of our favorites:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here