Hewlett Packard Enterprise is buying SGI in a $275 million deal that it hopes will give it a major boost in big-data analytics and high-performance computing.It's the latest surprise development at HPE, which has continued to make big changes since it was formed in the break-up of the old Hewlett-Packard last year.The deal to buy SGI, announced Thursday, fits with HPE's goal to expand its data analytics business. It will also make HPE a bigger player in high performance computing, a growing part of the server market. SGI has roughly 1,100 employees worldwide. On Thursday, it reported a net loss for its last fiscal year of $11 million, on revenue of $533 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel is buying deep-learning startup Nervana Systems in a deal that could help it make up for lost ground in the increasingly hot area of artificial intelligence.Founded in 2014, California-based Nervana offers a hosted platform for deep learning that's optimized "from algorithms down to silicon" to solve machine-learning problems, the startup says.Businesses can use its Nervana cloud service to build and deploy applications that make use of deep learning, a branch of AI used for tasks like image recognition and uncovering patterns in large amounts of data.Also of interest to Intel, Nervana is developing a specialty processor, known as an ASIC, that's custom built for deep learning. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The market for enterprise flash array storage is highly competitive, with traditional storage vendors battling against innovative startups. Tech buyers are typically looking at factors such as ease of use, improved data management, performance, deduplication algorithms, a small footprint and low power usage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Facebook's Silicon Valley headquartersImage by Martyn WilliamsFacebook used to design its servers and other hardware at labs scattered across the company, but they've now been consolidated in a state of the art facility at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters. The new lab is called Area 404, a play on the 404 error message seen on the web and, presumably, the U.S. military's Area 51 research base. It covers 22,000 square feet and has 50 workbenches where engineers design, build and test their protptype hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Toshiba's been lagging in the race to raise storage capacity in solid-state drives, but has taken a step forward with its new 7.68TB ZD6000 SSD.
The new drive is the highest-capacity SSD announced by Toshiba to date, up from its prior high of 4TB.
But it's still way behind Samsung, which started shipping a 15.36TB SSD earlier this year.
The ZD6000 is exactly half the size of Samsung's highest capacity drive, but Toshiba could exceed 8TB soon. It's a matter of cramming more chips in a drive, and Toshiba has the manufacturing technology to make that possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After ignoring a Congressional directive for more than three years, as well as an FCC commissioner’s direct request, the General Services Administration (GSA) finally produced a report on the status of 911 dialing in federal buildings. Despite the long delay, the content and quality of the report were disappointing at best.On Feb. 22, 2012, the Middle-Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 was passed as Public Law 112-96. As with many bills, the law covered a broad array of topics, one of them being the establishment of a national public safety broadband network expanding high-speed wireless broadband and improving communications interoperability among first responders. Within this section, the law also required that the GSA audit and produce a report on the 911 capabilities of multi-line telephone systems (MLTS) used in the almost 10,000 federal buildings and facilities under their control.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM scientists have created artificial neurons and synapses using phase change memory (PCM) that mimics the brain's cognitive learning capability.
It is the first time the researchers were able to create what they described as "randomly spiking neurons" using phase-change materials to store and process data. The discovery is a milestone in developing energy-sipping and highly dense neuro networks that could be used for cognitive computing applications.
In short, the technology can be used to improve today's processors in order to perform computations in applications such as data-correlation detection for the Internet of Things (IoT), stock market trades and social media posts at a staggeringly fast rate.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. government is spending more than $81 billion on information technology. But only about 24% is spent overall on new systems, with the rest being used to maintain old systems.The Social Security Administration, for instance, has more than 60 million lines of Cobol, the agency’s Office of Inspector General reported last month.And the U.S. Defense Department is running some nuclear weapons support systems on an IBM Series/1 Computer, circa 1970s, the U.S. Government Accountability Office recently reported.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 26 crazy and scary things the TSA has found on travelers
“Legacy IT investments across the federal government are becoming increasingly obsolete,” wrote the GAO in its report released in May. “Specifically, many use outdated languages and old parts.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With an eye towards better handling bandwidth-ravenous video streaming and data center to data center traffic, Juniper today said it would buy fabless photonics manufacturer Aurrion for an undisclosed price.“We expect that Aurrion’s breakthrough technology will result in fundamental and permanent improvements in cost per bit-per-second, power per bit-per-second, bandwidth density, and flexibility of networking systems,” said Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder and CTO of Juniper Networks wrote in a blog announcing the acquisition.+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
There was an interesting exchange between IDG Chief Content Officer John Gallant and VCE President Chad Sakac in an interview Network World published today. In it, Gallant asked Sakac about the company’s converged infrastructure partnership with Cisco in light of VCE presumably soon becoming part of the merged Dell/EMC. After all, Cisco (the “C” in VCE) sold off its stake in the venture some time ago and will likely find itself competing more directly with EMC once it combines with Dell.+More on Network World: Cisco: Potent ransomware is targeting the enterprise at a scary rate+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
VCE has only been in the hyperconverged appliance market since the February launch of its VxRail family, but President Chad Sakac says the company will soon be the No.1 player in that rapidly growing market. Sakac doesn’t lack for confidence, nor will his company – launched as a joint EMC/Cisco/VMware venture – lack for resources to back up his claims. VCE is now the converged infrastructure division of EMC and, if things go to plan, will soon be part of the merged Dell/EMC. That giant company, Sakac says, will boast a ‘superpower’ that gives it a huge advantage over rivals like Hewlett Packard Enterprise: Not being beholden to Wall Street, it can move customers more quickly to true utility models of IT. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
U.S. Bank StadiumA striking vessel of steel and glass, the new home of the Minnesota Vikings is designed for fans with smartphones. The infrastructure and apps are in place: The stadium is blanketed with wireless access points built into handrails and a distributed antenna system to boost mobile coverage, and a Vikings stadium app keeps ticket-holders connected. Fans can order food and drinks from their seats, figure out which restrooms have the shortest lines, and watch instant replays on their own devices. Before they arrive, visitors can view parking availability, determine the least-congested entrance gate, and manage digital tickets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A first-of-its-kind gathering dedicated to re-inventing telco central offices as open source-infused data centers will take place on Friday at Google's Sunnyvale Tech Campus. CORD
The CORD Summit, hosted by the Open Networking Lab (On.Lab) and The Linux Foundation, promotes the use of technologies such as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN) and the cloud "to bring datacenter economics and cloud agility to service providers' Central Office." CORD is kind of an acronym for Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter, and is designed to benefit enterprise, residential and wireless networks. A mini version of this event was held in March as part of the broader Open Networking Summit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IT is moving to the cloud big time, says research and consulting firm Gartner. And while we’ve been aware of that for a while, the firm has also been coming up with some staggering corroborating numbers.It says that by 2020, $1 trillion in IT spending will be “affected” by the shift to cloud. That’s roughly a little under a third of all IT spending, which in 2015 was $3.41 trillion globally and is projected to be $3.79 trillion in 2020, according to Gartner’s Q2 2016 forecast, published earlier this month.+ Also on Network World: Spending on public cloud IT infrastructure to hit $23.3 billion +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Wacky storiesImage by Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/Beck Diefenbach/Stephen LamYes it's that time again…Time to search the old news-feed and find some of the most interesting and sometimes weird and wacky high-tech stories of the year. This time out we feature a look at everything from fireworks displays in space to Starship Enterprise remakes and mermaid robots – just to name a few cool stories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Do you remember David Kernell? If not, we’ll get back to him in a second.First, the Republican nominee for president of the United States, Donald Trump, this morning cheered Russian cybercriminals who are alleged to have hacked his Democratic opponent’s email and urged them to make public whatever they have stolen. Trump did this not over beers but in front of reporters at a press conference, after which he scolded one of the reporters to “be quiet” after she had the temerity to press him on whether a presidential candidate should be encouraging cybercrime.From a report on Talking Points Memo:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
On July 12, Microsoft announced it will release Windows Server 2016 to the world as a final RTM edition at the company's Ignite conference in late September. The software, now in its fifth technical preview, continues to mature, and this date matches the estimations previously released from Redmond regarding the OS's completion date. There were other recent announcements regarding Windows Server as well, and this piece aims to demystify them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
As corporate sustainability increasingly exercises influence on IT decision making, the question becomes how will it affect technology adoption trends. Will cloud adoption accelerate as result?Resources consumed
The public cloud provides a good story for corporate sustainability in its "reveal" of resources consumed.Measured resource utilization (MRU) billing can be easily converted into corporate sustainability metrics of carbon emitted or averted, the equivalent to cars off the road, etc. And with the "shared" nature of public cloud equipment, it also tells a story more akin to public transportation. Meanwhile extant enterprise IT’s reputation of low-utilization assets, comatose equipment and rate card chargebacks seem more analogous to traffic jams of one person per vehicle.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Globally, 63 percent of companies involved in Internet of Things projects are “seeing significant returns on investment,” says Britain-based telco Vodafone.The supplier and network recently published its annual state-of-the-IoT industry report that it calls an IoT barometer. Vodafone interviewed 1,100 business executives around the world via Machina Research to try to gauge companies’ participation in IoT.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 12 most powerful Internet of Things companies
Budgets are increasing, the vendor says. Almost all companies (89 percent) say they are increasing IoT spend, with many (76 percent) believing the tech genre “will be critical to their success,” the report says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ants figure out details related to the size of their colonies by bumping into fellow ants while they randomly explore. But the ants don’t have to traverse the entire colony to know how many fellow ants they’re living with. The insects can figure it out through the number of nearby encounters they have.Ad hoc wireless networks could use the same technique, say scientists from MIT. Just like ants learning about population densities help the creatures decide communally whether they need to build a new nest or not, the same could be true for sensors strewn around IoT environments.+ Also on Network World: Using IoT-enabled microscopes to fight epidemic outbreaks +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here