Data center power management vendor Eaton’s newest product has sensors that that the company says will proactively warn customers of when equipment component failures are likely to occur.Eaton’s announcement today of PulseIngisht Analaytics is part of a broader trend in the data center infrastructure management (DCIM) market moving to cloud-based platforms, says 451 Research director for data center technologies Rhonda Ascierto. Vendors such as Eaton, Schneider Electric and Emerson Network Power are evolving their platforms to collect more data their power systems generate and analyze it to provide customers with detailed information about data center performance, and even help predict and prevent downtime from equipment failure.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.Daptiv TTMKey features: With Daptiv TTM, teams can better track tasks and submit timesheets, stakeholders get a more accurate view of project status, and initiatives move forward on time and on budget. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Welcome to the substationImage by NBBJThe typical substation is a high-voltage blot on the landscape. But not this one. Seattle’s Denny substation is under construction in a dense urban neighborhood instead of being screened from the public, and it aims to welcome pedestrians rather than fence out trespassers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell recently sent us its R730xd PowerEdge rack server with uprated Intel Broadwell-series CPUs. The company claims that the 2U server with 22 cores is 20% faster than boxes running the older Haswell family of Intel chips.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
It’s a question of who controls your data – all of it. Think of all the data that say Apple, Google or Facebook or even your health care provider has collected on you and you wanted to remove it or move it elsewhere. It wouldn’t be easy.The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has issued a request for information about how much is too much or too little data portability and what are the implications?+More on Network World: The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2016 (so far!)+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The percentage of IT processed at in-house sites has remained steady at around 70 percent, but data points to a major shift to co-location and cloud for new workloads in the coming years.Half of senior IT execs expect the majority of their IT workloads to reside off-premise in the future, according to Uptime Institute’s sixth annual Data Center Industry Survey. Of those, 70 percent expect that shift to happen by 2020.+ Also on Network World: 10 tips for a successful cloud plan +It is hard to predict what percentage will go to public cloud, but a significant portion of those workloads will be shifting to co-location providers—companies that provide data center facilities and varying levels of operations management and support. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With more than 9 million sold, the Raspberry Pi is a popular as well as low-cost way to get started hacking hardware. But occasionally, something goes wrong.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
IT is a peculiar appliance and has resisted change in the form of overall transparency and/or standardization, perhaps in part due to its unique nature.Generally speaking, IT does not have a great track record in welcoming parties to the decision-making process and even resists efforts to increase transparency. Because IT displaces or eliminates other forms of resource consumption, trying to apply efficient IT principles can invite the threshold question of ‘Why?’ Some people think, “If I can avoid an airplane trip, ride in my car, overnight delivery or firing up a printing press, isn’t that enough?”+ Also on Network World: America’s data centers are getting a lot more efficient +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Fall is back-to-school time, though for those of us who aren’t going back to school, it’s a really good time to reassess 2016 priorities and budgets to see what projects can get done by the end of the year. It’s good to take stock to see what’s been accomplished this year, and see what priorities should take precedence before the new year (and a new budget) approaches.At the beginning of 2016, some CIO priorities for the year included standardization, integration, faster service delivery, more innovation and better IT and business alignment. No problem, right? Right—unless you’re actually working, day to day, to keep networks and apps up and running for users. That makes it a lot harder to achieve those lofty goals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Although I had a few problems with the original PR messages that invited me to meet with MarkLogic, the conversation with Gary Bloom, the company's CEO and president, was well worth the time.Summary of our conversation
The following bullets are a quick summary to a complex and engaging conversation:
The industry is experiencing several fundimental shifts in both the sources of data and how it is being used. The data is now coming from many types of end user focused devices, applications that combine the efforts of many systems that are housed all over the planet, neither enterprises nor end users will tolerate slow response times or failures, and older approaches that are based upon monolithic application and database design simply can't keep up.
While it is true that things have changed in fundimental ways, older applications, systems and designs are not going away. They continue to support enterprise critical applications, but need help dealing with the tsunomi of data coming from everywhere.
The state of the art in database architecture has shifted from a "shared nothing" design center to a "shared everything" center that can take advantage of local, virtual and cloud processing and data.
Database design Continue reading
Nutanix founder and CEO Dheeraj Pandey doesn’t want you to get too excited by today’s hyperconverged infrastructure offerings because they’re just ‘a pit stop’ on the way to making all infrastructure invisible. Pandey, whose company is preparing for an initial public offering, talked with IDG Chief Content Officer John Gallant about the competitive landscape in hyperconvergence today and he pulled no punches in assessing rivals like Simplivity and VCE. In Pandey’s view, only VMware is on the same path of building, essentially, the operating system for hybrid cloud but Nutanix is starting from a clean slate. Pandey also discussed Nutanix’s partnership with Dell Technologies and explained why Cisco has no love for his company these days.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Microsoft announced it plans to power its data centers around the world using 50% renewable energy by 2018.The company also plans to boost its use of renewable power for its data centers to 60% by the early 2020s.Rob Bernard, Microsoft's chief environmental & cities strategist, made the announcement at the VERGE16 conference last week.Bernard's comments during a conference keynote were a reiteration of a commitment earlier this year by the company to increase its use of clean energy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today, Microsoft announced the release to manufacturing of Windows Server 2016. In this piece, I'll comb through the product and offer my thoughts on this new operating system.The verdict on Nano ServerSecurity improvements with SDNShielded virtual machinesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
News today from quiet 2-year-old startup Podium Data, which has raised $9.5 million by way of a series A funding round. The round comes from a syndicate of investors led by Malibu Ventures. The company was founded back in 2014, and since then it has quietly been going about building its offering.The founding team has broad experience within the big data industry, having wrangled data warehousing, advanced high-performance computing, systems integrations, business intelligence and database systems within Fortune 100 companies.+ Also on Network World: Data lakes: A better way to analyze customer data +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco has rolled out a Windows-based network management package that gathers Industrial Ethernet network events and alerts IT to the event for quick impact analysis and troubleshooting, the company said.+More on Network World: Ethernet: Are there worlds left to conquer?+The product, Industrial Network Director, builds an integrated topology of all network automation and assets and lets operators zoom in on specific devices for real-time monitoring of device status and traffic statistics, Cisco said. The system can integrate into other existing industrial asset management systems which lets customers and system integrators build dashboards customized to meet specific monitoring and accounting requirements.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For more than 50 years mainframes have powered thousands of organizations around the world, from banks to militaries to government agencies. Looking looking back at all that history makes me think about the critical role that big iron has played in the world, but it also gets me thinking about the future and what the next 10 years holds for the mainframe industry.+ Also on Network World: The future of virtualization: Don’t forget the so-called 'old' +What makes me so confident that mainframing even has a 2026 worth looking forward to? After all, hasn’t the cloud revolutionized data storage and processing and ushered in the end of mainframes? The truth is that not every disruptive development replaces what it disrupted—sometimes not immediately and sometimes not at all. Globalization did not kill American IT jobs, Metallica didn’t negate Van Halen, and the cloud won’t kill mainframes because mainframes have something that the cloud will need over the next decade: power.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In Lew Cirne's view, all companies are now software companies and understanding how your software is treating your customers is key to business success. Cirne is the founder and CEO of New Relic, a cloud-based provider of application management tools. In this CEO Interview Series conversation with IDG Chief Content Officer John Gallant, Cirne explained how New Relic gets IT and business execs on the same page in improving operations and customer experience, and he described the company's new tools for keeping highly virtualized private and public infrastructure in synch. He also talked about a 'unique' pricing scheme that recognizes the dynamic nature of computing today, and outlined why existing management tool vendors have a long way to go to catch up with New Relic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
“Congratulations”Let’s say you’re a scientist, and you’ve worked your entire adult life at your discipline. You do a sort of offbeat study, for valid scientific reasons, and figure, hey, this’ll get a laugh in whatever journal is relevant to your field, and then somebody calls you from Cambridge, Mass., and tells you you’ve won science’s equivalent of a Razzie. These are this year’s Ig Nobel Prize winners. Enjoy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
That’s one amazingly scary number: Since 2006 cyber incidents involving the Federal government have grown 1,300%.Another Government Accountability Office report on Federal cybersecurity out this week offers little in the way of optimism for the cyber-safeguard of the massive resources the government has control over.+More on Network World: Network security weaknesses plague federal agencies+“Federal information systems and networks are inherently at risk. They are highly complex and dynamic, technologically diverse, and often geographically dispersed. This complexity increases the difficulty in identifying, managing, and protecting the myriad of operating systems, applications, and devices comprising the systems and networks. Compounding the risk, systems used by federal agencies are often riddled with security vulnerabilities—both known and unknown. For example, the national vulnerability database maintained by the Mitre Corporation has identified 78,907 publicly known cybersecurity vulnerabilities and exposures as of September 15, 2016, with more being added each day,” the GAO wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I’ve been a fan of software-defined networking (SDN) since my first conversation about software-based firewalls for an application deployment in 2004. Our goal was to leverage the concepts of grid computing to grow and shrink the web and application server environments in response to load, and we got the idea to throw the firewall into the mix. What made our approach possible was the ocean’s depth of software development knowledge on our team tempered by a puddle’s depth knowledge of networking.+ Also on Network World: Survey shows growing interest in SDN, where and how companies might deploy the tech +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here