Cisco Cuts Nutanix from the Partner Portal
Less than a week after Nutanix issued a press release announcing their independently validated ability to run on Cisco UCS, Nutanix has been booted from the Cisco Solution Partner Program. Cisco has its own hyperconverged solution utilizing UCS hardware, bundled together through an agreement with software company Springpath, which they call Hyperflex.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AMD knew it needed to make radical changes in its Zen CPU chip to become a force in the PC and server markets again.So when the chip designers sat down four years ago to etch out the Zen design, they had two things in mind: to drive up CPU performance as much as possible and to keep power efficiency stable.The company ultimately settled for a 40 percent improvement in Zen over its predecessor, Excavator."We had a hard time convincing the team we were going for 40 percent," said Mike Clark, a senior fellow at AMD. "It was a very aggressive goal, and we knew we had to do it to be competitive."AMD first promoted the 40 percent CPU improvement goal when it introduced Zen in 2015 during an overhaul of its chip roadmap. The company recently demonstrated chips to prove it has achieved the goal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For more than 15 years, Gary Smith has been at the helm of Ciena, leading the company through the so-called ‘telecom nuclear winter’ following the early 2000s dot-com bust to its global leadership position today in the optical networking and metro Ethernet markets. In this installment of the IDG CEO Interview Series, Smith talked with Chief Content Officer John Gallant about Ciena’s expanding enterprise business, including its data center connectivity strategy. He also discussed how Ciena is reshaping the portfolio of WAN services for enterprise customers – from the explosion of Ethernet services, to on-demand links and, ultimately, the software-defined WAN. Smith also explored the back-office work and revenue challenges ahead for service providers as big IT shops push for a more dynamic WAN.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), more commonly known as blockchain, has the potential to revolutionize financial, investment and insurance technology infrastructure and networks. It will form one of the foundations of “next-generation financial services infrastructure,” the World Economic Forum (WEF) says in a new report.The WEF pulls together political and business leaders to focus on global issues such as technology changes.+ Also on Network World: Blockchain: You’ve got questions; we’ve got answers +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s been a good year for IT administrators who want more information, more often, about what’s happening on their networks.In April, startups Veriflow and Nyansa introduced new ways to determine whether a network is doing what it should. In June, Cisco Systems unveiled its Tetration Analytics appliance to collect and analyze information about all parts of a data center in real time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Vietnam’s technical talent, retention rates and modern tech infrastructure has attracted the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Intel to set up operations there. While it will never be able to offer the scale of IT services hubs in India and China, Vietnam is increasingly an attractive alternative for IT organizations that are frustrated with high turnover and rising costs in the usual offshore locations.[ Related: Is Vietnam a viable offshore outsourcing alternative? ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft’s key, .NET-based scripting and management framework is now open source and available for Linux (initially Ubuntu, RedHat and CentOS) and Mac OS, and both cloud and traditional infrastructure companies are stepping up to support it.Open source, Linux and Mac OS announcements from Microsoft are becoming routine under CEO Satya Nadella, but making PowerShell fully open source and making it cross-platform is particularly significant — and not just because PowerShell for Linux is something that customers have been requesting for a long time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Audi is equipping some of its new model cars with traffic technology information to tell drivers how long it will take for the light to change from red to green.
Cisco Systems plans to lay off about 7 percent of its global workforce in a restructuring that will see it further focus on hot IT areas such as the internet of things, security, collaboration, next-generation data centers, and the cloud.The move will cost the company around $700 million in redundancy payments to the roughly 5,500 staff who will be out of jobs in the coming months. The layoffs will hit some of Cisco's smaller and more mature business areas where long-term growth prospects are low, the company said."We expect to reinvest substantially all of the cost savings from these actions back into these businesses and will continue to aggressively invest to focus on our areas of future growth," Cisco said in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco today confirmed it will lay off about 7% of its workforce – about 5,500 jobs.Or as Cisco put it: "Today, we announced a restructuring enabling us to optimize our cost base in lower growth areas of our portfolio and further invest in key priority areas such as security, IoT, collaboration, next generation data center and cloud. We expect to reinvest substantially all of the cost savings from these actions back into these businesses and will continue to aggressively invest to focus on our areas of future growth."During its earnings announcement the company said total revenue actually increased 3% to $48.7 billion for its fiscal year ended July 30. Still, the company faces challenges in its core switching and routing business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Despite their limited driving range, electric vehicles could easily meet the needs of about nine in 10 car owners and bring about a meaningful reduction in the greenhouse-gas emissions causing global climate change, a new study found.
Researchers from MIT and the Santa Fe Institute published their four year-long study in the journal Nature Energy this week. The study amassed an enormous amount of data on millions of trips made by drivers across the U.S. The data included a highly detailed set of second-by-second driving behavior based on GPS data, and another broader, more comprehensive set of national data based on travel surveys.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two of the most important tasks in a datacenter are server provisioning and configuration management. At one time, administrators spent a significant amount of time physically deploying servers and network infrastructure, followed by even more minutes and hours manually configuring hundreds or even thousands of nodes. Then they spent an additional chunk of the day troubleshooting and fixing the errors they introduced by configuring all of these systems with their fat fingers.Chef clients are generally installed on Windows machines using the MSI package. Today, a number of resources specific to Windows come with Chef out-of-the-box. For example:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
A compact computer called Euclid from Intel should make the development of robots much easier.Euclid looks much like the Kinect camera for Xbox consoles, but it's a self-contained PC that can be the guts of a robot.It's possible to install the Euclid computer where the "eyes" of a human-like robot would be typically placed. Intel demonstrated the Euclid computer in a robot moving on stage during CEO Brian Krzanich's keynote at the Intel Developer Forum on Tuesday.Euclid has a 3D RealSense camera that can serve as the eyes in a robot, capturing images in real-time. It has motion and position sensors that can help the robot move around both indoors and outdoors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two high-profile airline technology meltdowns stranding thousands of travelers in the recent weeks have prompted two US senators to push carriers to bolster their technology.
Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.)this week sent a letter to the most recent offenders -- Delta and Southwest -- as well as 11 other airlines to get a better handle on whether or not their information technology systems are reliable and resilient.
+More on Network World: Not dead yet: 7 of the oldest federal IT systems still wheezing away+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Prize competitions backed by the government continue to grow with great success, according to a report by the White House Office of Science and Technology.+More on Network World: DARPA $2M contest looks to bring AI to wireless spectrum provisioning+It has been over six years that the government set the America Competes Act which in combination with Challenge.gov has prompted more than 700 public-sector prize competitions that have doled out more than $80 million in prizes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial trade deal supported by many U.S. tech companies, is on death row, with both major party presidential candidates opposed. It's a long shot, but some tech trade groups are hoping for last-minute clemency from Congress and outgoing President Barack Obama. The trade groups are pushing for Congress to vote to approve the deal after November's general election, in the lame-duck session before a new Congress and a new president takes office.The TPP, a free-trade deal negotiated among the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Region nations for seven years, has become a major presidential campaign issue in recent months. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Some small and medium-sized businesses need fast, and flexible storage gear as much as large enterprises. The need to quickly spin up new applications, even without a storage specialist on staff, can drive those demands. The gear for doing so is gradually getting more affordable.On Monday, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise extended two of its storage product lines into more affordable territory, in one case adopting an ARM processor to help cut the cost of a system.HPE says the new systems give smaller organizations a way in on two of the hottest trends in enterprise storage: software-defined storage and flash. The former helps to line up the right storage for each application, even as a company’s demands quickly change, while the latter can give a speed boost to any type of storage arrangement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This presidential election presents one of the clearest choices in U.S. history between two major-party candidates. But one thing has been rarely discussed: Where do the candidates stand on tech issues? Whether it’s net neutrality, investing in tech infrastructure, building an educational pipeline of tech workers, privacy or any of several other tech issues, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton take very different approaches. It’s worth looking at their varied stances.
Let’s start with net neutrality. For Clinton, it’s straightforward. She supports the FCC’s rulings in favor of net neutrality. Trump opposes the concept. His primary statement on the matter came in a tweet in which he called President Obama’s support of net neutrality an “attack on the internet.” His full tweet is: “Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Expedia has grown far beyond a search engine for flights -- it's now the parent company of a dozen travel brands including Trivago and Hotels.com -- but according to VP of global product David Fleischman, machine learning has always been at the heart of the company's operations.The business of delivering quality flight search results is tough, and Fleischman describes it as an "unbounded computer science problem". The reason for this is because flight itineraries and schedules are constantly changing, and Expedia's proprietary 'best fare search' (BFS) has to 'learn' and adapt all the time.The extent of the problem can be summed up by one statistic. The average Expedia.com flight search will take three seconds to deliver results. In those three seconds you will see, on average, 16,000 flight options, in order of convenience or price or time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft made a divisive announcement last month when it revealed that Azure Stack will be delayed until the middle of next year and that the private cloud software will only run on a set of integrated hardware systems rather than a wide variety of hardware. Now, the company is trying to explain that change to customers. On Thursday, Microsoft Principal Group Program Manager Vijay Tewari makes the case for shipping Azure Stack on a small variety of hardware in a video interview. His main point is this: constraining the software to a small set of hardware leads to a better product that's more useful right out of the gate.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here