Getting and enforcing a service level agreement is paramount when employing cloud services – that was the chief conclusion reached in a report out this week by the federal watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office.“Purchasing IT services through a provider enables agencies to avoid paying for all the assets such as hardware, software and networks that would typically be needed to provide such services.+More on Network World: What network technology is going to shake up your WAN?+This approach offers federal agencies a means to buy the services faster and possibly cheaper than through the traditional methods they have used. To take advantage of these potential benefits, agencies have reported that they plan to spend more than $2 billion on cloud computing services in fiscal year 2016,” the GAO stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is one of the key building blocks of next-generation data centers. Originally, HCI was deployed primarily by small and medium-sized businesses that wanted a faster, easier way to deploy data center technology such as servers, storage and networks. Over the past few years, HCI adoption has skyrocketed and is now being deployed by large enterprises looking to shift to a software-defined model.Initially, HCI was driven by start-ups, most notably SimpliVity and Nutanix. But recently Cisco, VCE and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have jumped into the market, and Juniper and Lenovo have formed a partnership that will likely lead to a combined HCI solution.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ONF
The non-profit Open Networking Foundation has announced that its annual software-defined networking (SDN) interoperability event, dubbed AppFest 2016, will be held in May in New Hampshire and will feature a Community Day intended to expand ONF's reach beyond members.The ONF, whose more than 130 members include big names like Brocade, Google and Microsoft, will put the focus on applications working together at AppFest 2016, which will be held at University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab May 16-19. The UNH-IOL is an authorized testing lab for OpenFlow, the SDN standard that the ONF is best known for having introduced.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IT can trace its roots back to arguably the most important computer introduction made 52 years ago today. April 7, 1964 was the day IBM introduced its System/360, the first true mainframe for the masses, or at least that’s what it hoped on that day.IBM said on that day that it announced the S/360 to over 100,000 people gathered in cities across the country.+More on Network World: The (mostly) cool history of the IBM mainframe+It told them: "System/360 represents a sharp departure from concepts of the past in designing and building computers. It is the product of an international effort in IBM's laboratories and plants and is the first time IBM has redesigned the basic internal architecture of its computers in a decade. The result will be more computer productivity at lower cost than ever before. This is the beginning of a new generation - - not only of computers - - but of their application in business, science and government."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Devops staple Puppet, formerly Puppet Labs, is upgrading its Puppet Enterprise IT automation platform and offering new and expanded support for infrastructure like Docker containers and Kubernetes container management.Puppet automates the software delivery process to bridge traditional infrastructure with more contemporary technology, including public and private clouds and microservices architectures. It even has been suggested as a tool for users to build their own PaaS clouds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As a company, Intel has been as notoriously stable as its chips. You didn't hear about much turnover there. Many staff, especially executives, followed in the career path of former CEO Paul Otellini – join the company right out of school and retire from it decades later. That's because Intel was good about promoting people, and they didn't have to jump around the Silicon Valley to get a promotion or a raise.That, however, is changing, as one of the most insular company's in the Valley is seeing some real turnover in its executive suite. The latest shakeup involves the departures of Kirk Skaugen, the head of the Client Computing Group, and Doug Davis, who ran the IoT group, said they would leave the company to pursue new opportunities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Meg Whitman doesn't shy away from a challenge. She led eBay from tiny startup to household name, ran for governor of California and, nearly five years ago, took the helm at Hewlett Packard and stabilized an organization stumbling badly from a variety of very public missteps. Having engineered the split of the Silicon Valley icon into consumer tech (HP, Inc.) and corporate-focused Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Whitman is now HPE's Chief Executive Officer. The IT market is undergoing fundamental and rapid change owing to cloud, mobile and other powerful drivers. The competitive landscape in which this $50 billion startup plays is also shifting dramatically, with a slew of emerging players and the prospect of the largest-ever tech merger of Dell and EMC. No sweat, right? To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Jeff Immelt candidly told Boston’s business and political elite yesterday about what GE hoped to get from the company’s move to Boston. He said GE moved to Boston for two reasons: to win the Internet of Things and rethink how companies work in this winner-take-all technology innovation economy.He also said he liked Boston because of the chip the tech community has on its shoulder; an obvious reference to the Silicon Valley’s domination of nearly every segment of technology. The Boston technology ecosystem, arguably the richest and most diverse R&D center in the world seems to have lost the DNA for growing big tech companies like the personal Internet, social or the sharing economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last week, flying out of SFO northward over the verdant hills of Marin, rising above the tankers anchored off Richmond swinging with the tide and the long plumes from the Sacramento River’s inflow to the bay like ribbons unfurling in the water, I reflected on a visit that touched five Silicon Valley sustainability stakeholders in two days. Enroute to my adopted home of Seattle, I am struck with the commonality of these sessions and an early release of Uptime Institute’s 2016 Industry Survey results. (Disclosure: I work for Uptime Institute and oversee the content group there.)There are new faces at the IT table. And one of them is sustainability. Two years ago, a place at the table for sustainability would have been provocative, and perhaps evoked derision. In 2015, less than a tenth of enterprise IT stakeholders had confidence in corporate sustainability to affect IT efficiency and costs. One short year later, 2016 is a vastly different matter and the data suggests that the time of corporate sustainability in IT is here now: 70% of enterprise IT organizations actively participate in corporate sustainability efforts. The influence of an outside party breaks down the ‘thwart by silo’ effect that Continue reading
The writing was on the wall for some Intel executives after a former Qualcomm executive was hired to oversee the company's PC, Internet of Things and software businesses, and two of them are departing.Kirk Skaugen, who previously led the Client Computing Group, and Doug Davis, who ran the IoT group, are leaving the company, Intel said Monday.Their roles were diminished after the November appointment of Venkata Renduchintala, who formerly worked at Qualcomm, as president of Intel's Client and IoT businesses and its Systems Architecture Group. Renduchintala, who's known as Murthy, is effectively Intel's number two executive after Brian Krzanich.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Being an analyst I’m often asked to look ahead and predict what markets will look like in three to five years. Recently, I’ve been asked that if I were to design a next-generation network, which would be fully operational by 2020, what would it look like? The network industry has gone through more change in the past two years than it had gone through in the previous two decades so a network in 2020 will look significantly different than the networks of today.Predicting the future is obviously challenging but sometimes it’s better to look back to understand what the future will look like. In networking, there are many lessons we can learn from the last 20+ years where networks have evolved to be able to meet ongoing application and business needs. The innovation was obviously necessary but each time something new was bolted on to the network, there was a price to be paid. For example, WiFi being deployed as an overlay means having to manage two separate networks. Below are the top lessons learned from legacy networks over the past two decades.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Billions of devices, lots of opportunityThe Internet of Things (IoT) is still nascent, but growing quickly. Research firm IDC predicts it will become a $1.46 trillion international market by 2020, up from $700 billion last year. A trillion-dollar market means a lot of companies will want a slice. So who are the leaders of the IoT? We consulted with some of the leading analysts to find out. (Note: Companies are listed in alphabetical order.) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The New York Times yesterday had an account of an ongoing effort to modernize the IT infrastructure and end-user equipment relied upon by those whose workplace address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In a sense, the story was rather alarming, as it turns out the White House was in sore need of just about new everything.There were a couple of networking nuggets worth noting in the story.First was the matter of old cabling … lots and lots of the stuff.
One of his first tasks was trying to map the miles of Ethernet cables and phone wires inside the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The team of technicians eventually discovered and removed 13,000 pounds of abandoned cables that no longer served any purpose.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.kiteworks (Microsoft Office 365 Enhancements)Key features: Accellion’s content platform, kiteworks, now extends Microsoft Office Online to content stored on-premise and in the cloud without having to duplicate files. These capabilities are largely enabled by Accellion’s ongoing collaboration with Microsoft and reflect a common interest in making enterprise employees productive and more secure. Features include full text search for documents (folder, name and contents), real-time collaboration editing / co-authoring for Office Online documents stored across the cloud and on-premise systems, and office online integration with access to files stored on SharePoint, Documentum, OpenText, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, Dropbox and other content systems. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Office pranksI know, I know – that jerk from sales deserves it. That snippy attitude last time you showed up to fix his “slowdown problem,” which was obviously just him having like 150 Chrome windows open at once. Still, as tempting as it might be, you can’t just take revenge on the guy’s computer. Please, just go and read something else now. You’ll feel like a better person.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nearly 200 countries signed the fossil fuel ramp-down agreement in Paris at the end of last year. New goals are now in place to end the use of fossil fuels worldwide. No more global warming could be in the cards.Sounds good, right? Well it probably is, but there’s a slight problem: Just how are we going to power our smartphones, homes, factories, and Internets without coal and gas? That’s a lot of solar panels and windfarms needed—and needed quickly.One high school kid reckons he’s got the answer, reported Popular Science magazine a few weeks ago: Just stick a bunch of solar panels on the moon and beam the power back down to Earth by microwave.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Having been to Orlando in August, I know the meaning of the term "It's not the heat, it's the humidity." That was the first and only time I had my glasses fog up for just stepping outside.And it turns out humidity is a greater threat to hard drive reliability than high temperatures, according to a study from Rutgers University in partnership with GoDaddy and Microsoft. In their paper titled "Environmental Conditions and Disk Reliability in Free-cooled Datacenters" (PDF), the team said the most notable result was that all other conditions aside, the effects on controllers and adapters were felt most as humidity levels rose.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IT managers understand the hazards of heat inside data centers. But what about outside it?Cordell Schachter, the CTO of the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT), who went through Hurricane Sandy in 2012, says climate trends will increasingly impact IT operations."At one time, you could go through a whole career without facing one of those situations" -- something like a Sandy -- said Cordell. But he now believes if "you have a career spanning more than a decade" you may see one or two major weather events.Scientists are increasingly connecting extreme weather events to man-made climate change. Insurance claims are rising.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The very first issue of Network World – 48 pages of glorious magazine print – was published on March 24, 1986. To mark the occasion we have assembled a number of reminiscences, including a collection of images from that debut edition, which you can see here.NETWORK WORLD TURNS 30: The networked world |9 ways technology will change within the next 10 years | The most momentous tech events of the past 30 years | 30 years of gadgets, computers and video games from my fabulous life | Network World celebrates 30 years
From having combed that first issue for those images, I can report that back then we were all concerned about network reliability, carrier shenanigans, hackers stealing proprietary information, email privacy and employees goofing off when they should be working. Nice to know we don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Where it all began, 30 years agoNetwork world is turning 30. Don’t be fooled by the “Volume 3, Number 3” printed under the masthead, this was indeed the front page of the very first edition of Network World, dated March 24, 1986. Pre-Internet, of course, it was print-only. The featured front-page story – “Users force LU 6.2 issue” – was written by John Dix, then a senior editor, today our editor-in-chief. We’ve plucked a few other highlights from that issue, including ads, so enjoy the walk down Memory Lane.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here