The digital, online world has left the Internal Revenue Service struggling to move forward. The key IRS advisory group, The Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee issued its annual state of the agency report this week that concluded: The erosion of the IRS tax system’s integrity from the proliferation of tax identity theft and inadequate levels of taxpayer service at the IRS caused by an antiquated customer service model that does not adequately apply digital service tools.ETAAC’s wide-ranging report looked at all aspects of the IRS but for our purposes we’ll focus on what the group is recommending the revenue agency do to combat its worst threat – fraud and identity theft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There are countless "as-a-Service" offerings on the market today, and typically they live in the cloud. Back in 2014, startup BlueData blazed a different trail by launching its EPIC Enterprise big-data-as-a-service offering on-premises instead.On Wednesday, BlueData announced that the software can now run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds, making it the first BDaaS platform to work both ways, the company says."The future of Big Data analytics will be neither 100 percent on-premises nor 100 percent in the cloud," said Kumar Sreekanti, CEO of BlueData. "We’re seeing more multicloud and hybrid deployments, with data both on-prem and in the cloud. BlueData provides the only solution that can meet the realities of these mixed environments in the enterprise.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Some of the best technology in the world has begun with a simple "Hello World." I wanted to do the same and introduce myself, along with this new blog entitled "The Agile Data Center." With this blog, I will focus on some of the latest technologies around modernizing data center software and hardware, as well as aligning skill sets and introducing new roles in the IT space. So, what defines an agile data center and why should you care? Growing up in the technology space, I've worked for companies such as VERITAS, Symantec, SAP and EMC. During that time, and especially now, I can see and realize that most companies have not aligned business and IT. While this has "worked" for a number of years, companies are now becoming quickly disrupted by startups that have successfully aligned IT and can keep up with the rapid pace of business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this month I wrote a post asking the question: “Who speaks for multi-vendor environments?” Since then, I’ve had a few vendors reach out to me about their solutions that could indeed meet the needs of a vendor-agnostic data center. One of the most interesting, Apstra, came out of stealth mode this week and has a solution that’s certainly up to the challenge that I laid out in my blog.Apstra’s solution automates the data center operations across the lifecycle of the network—from the design/build phase through deployment/operate. The Apstra Operating System (AOS) takes an integrated approach to managing the data center that starts with business intent and is fed into a closed loop system. The data center operator then selects a pre-configured, and a validated template applies any constraints to it, which creates a blueprint for deployment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the main goals of SDN (software-defined networking) is to make networks more agile to meet the changing demands of applications. A new Silicon Valley startup, Apstra, says it has an easier way to do the same thing.
Rather than control the guts of individual network devices through software that makes them more programmable, Apstra says it can deal with those devices as they are and shape the network from a higher level.
The result is a new approach that might let IT departments bypass some of the complex technologies and politics of SDN and still make their networks more responsive to users’ needs. It's due to go on sale by August.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There has been an interesting change in the enterprise storage world as the increasingly affordable and high-performance world of solid state drives has gradually but inexorably increased penetration into an area formerly the domain of spinning disk drives.Of course, the value proposition for solid state drives is obvious: the fact that almost everyone is toting a mobile device that has its entire storage made up of flash has increased the awareness of the approach. That and the rapidly improving economics of actually delivering flash storage into enterprise customers has meant that vendors such as Solidfire and Pure Storage have managed to grow rapidly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There is no standard definition of software-defined storage, but it typically involves decoupling the management software from the storage hardware (vs. the tight integration of traditional storage products). The goal is to make it easier for administrators to flexibly manage a variety of storage devices via software and automated policies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The U.S. plans to have a supercomputer by early 2018 with roughly double the performance of China's newest and most powerful system. The Chinese system, Sunway TaihuLight, was announced Monday in the latest release of the Top500, the biannual ranking of publicly known supercomputers.Sunway TaihuLight can reach a theoretical peak speed of 124.5 petaflops, and has achieved 93 petaflops on the Linpack benchmark, used by the Top500 to assess the performance of supercomputers. The latest ranking of the world's publicly disclosed supercomputers was released Monday at a supercomputing conference in Germany.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ups and downs of CEO payMedian pay among 62 tech CEOs was $10.6 million last year, down from $11.5 million in 2014. Some tech leaders netted big gains while others saw their compensation slashed. Here are the six most drastic pay raises and six largest losses.RELATED: 20 highest paid tech CEOs | single-page chart of 62 tech CEOs' total payTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There are two new players at the top of our pay tally, and they both work at the same company. Oracle's co-chief executives Mark Hurd and Safra Catz each netted compensation valued at $53.2 million last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Meet the highest paid tech CEOsLarry Ellison often topped our tallies of the highest paid tech CEOs. Ellison gave up the Oracle CEO job in 2014, and now his successors – who made $53 million apiece last year – share the distinction of highest paid tech CEO. See who else made the top 20.RELATED: Biggest raises and pay cuts | single-page chart of 62 tech CEOs' total pay |To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco’s entrance into the data center analytics market with the introduction of Tetration is the culmination of two years worth of wrangling various open source projects and developing proprietary algorithms in the areas of big data, streaming analytics and machine learning.Tetration is an analytics platform that provides deep visibility into data center and cloud infrastructure operational information. Here’s a description from Network World’s story on Tetration:The platform, Cisco Tetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics and machine learning to offer IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources. The system will dramatically simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security monitoring.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Some of the best technology in the world has begun with a simple "Hello World". I wanted to do the same and introduce myself along with this new blog entitled "The Agile Data Center". With this blog I will be focusing on some of the latest technologies around modernizing data center software and hardware, as well as aligning skill sets and introducing new roles in the IT space. So what defines an agile data center and why should you care? Growing up in the technology space I've worked for companies such as VERITAS, Symantec, SAP, and EMC. During that time and especially now I can see and realize that most companies have not aligned business and IT. While this has "worked" for a number of years, companies are now becoming quickly disrupted by startups that have successfully aligned IT and can keep up with the rapid pace of business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Because of a plethora of data from sensor networks, Internet of Things devices and big data resources combined with a dearth of data scientists to effectively mold that data, we are leaving many important applications – from intelligence to science and workforce management – on the table.It is a situation the researchers at DARPA want to remedy with a new program called Data-Driven Discovery of Models (D3M). The goal of D3M is to develop algorithms and software to help overcome the data-science expertise gap by facilitating non-experts to construct complex empirical models through automation of large parts of the model-creation process. If successful, researchers using D3M tools will effectively have access to an army of “virtual data scientists,” DARPA stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's a well-known fact in the IT world: Change one part of the software stack, and there's a good chance you'll have to change another. For a shining example, look no further than big data.First, big data shook up the database arena, ushering in a new class of "scale out" technologies. That's the model exemplified by products like Hadoop, MongoDB, and Cassandra, where data is distributed across multiple commodity servers rather than packed into one massive one. The beauty there, of course, is the flexibility: To accommodate more petabytes, you just add another inexpensive machine or two rather than "scaling up" and paying big bucks for a bigger mammoth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Montreal, Quebec, was named “Intelligent Community of the Year” this week at the annual Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) Summit. In the face of economic decline and political scandals, Canada’s largest French-speaking city began its turnaround with a Smart City plan starting in 2011.The city, home to a 10th of Canada’s population, had endured trade losses, an eclipse of manufacturing, and years of separatist nostalgia. The new Montreal staked its future on a broader economic base of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), aerospace, health sciences, and clean technologies. These sectors now field 6,250 companies with 10% of the region’s workforce.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Looking like the world’s most important and uncomfortable furniture…It’s the six-month anniversary of the last list, which means it’s time for a new one. Terrible shelf-life, these supercomputer lists, but that means there’s a whole new hierarchy of unfathomably powerful computing machines ranked by Top500.org for our ooh-ing and aah-ing pleasure. Here’s a look at the top 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Computer science graduates are in demand. Last year, 76% of computer science graduates were working full time within six months of finishing school -- the highest full-time employment rate among new college graduates and well above the 58% average across all majors, according to a new report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).But as veterans in the tech world know, earning a degree is just the beginning of a new professional’s education. To help this year’s newcomers navigate the transition from academic life to the professional world, we asked tech pros to share their best advice for computer science graduates entering the workforce. Here’s what they had to say.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
China has set 2020 as the date for delivering an exascale system, the next major milestone in supercomputing performance. This is three years ahead of the U.S. roadmap.This claim is from China's National University of Defense Technology, as reported Thursday by China's official news agency, Xinhua.This system will be called Tianhe-3, following a naming convention that began in 2010 when China announced its first petaflop-scale system, Tianhe-1. The first petascale system was developed in the U.S. in 2008.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here