How cool would it be if you could just pull into your garage and park over a special pad and a recharge your electric car for your morning commute?It’s a convenience item that would go a long way to making electric cars more attractive to the average US consumer that’s for sure.+More on Network World: World’s coolest concept cars+This week the US Energy Department’s Vehicle Technologies Office, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Hyundai America Technical Center Inc. said that technology they have been working on since 2012 could soon make wireless charging for electric cars more widespread.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Juniper Networks has allied with Chinese IT stalwart Lenovo to build converged, hyperconverged, and hyperscale data center infrastructure products for the enterprise and webscale markets.The non-exclusive arrangement comes as the hyperconvergence market – tight integration of compute, networking and storage into an overall software-defined IT fabric – is reaching warp speed. Cisco entered the market last week via an alliance with start-up Springpath; HPE disclosed plans for an offering this month; and leading start-ups Nutanix and SimpliVity are expanding their product lines, ecosystems and addressable markets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hyper-converged infrastructure in the data center has been all the rage over the past few years. In the data center, hyper-convergence is a system with tightly integrated compute, storage, network and virtualization technology. Its main value proposition is to simplify the architecture of the data center and enables it to be controlled through software. Despite the strong value proposition of hyper-convergence, the technology has remained focused on the data center with little applicability to the branch.
The irony of this is that branch offices are often the lifeblood of organizations and is where the majority of work is done. Despite the criticality of the branch, the technology deployed in these locations is often old, inefficient and performs poorly and can often put businesses at risk. WAN outages cause application outages, which directly costs the organization money.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s that time of year again: Pi Day! Image by Flickr/kok_sexton Pi enthusiasts around the world wait each year for March 14 to celebrate the mathematical constant that represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Check out our tried and true tips for celebrating Pi Day, and be sure to check out our past year’s coverage for even more ideas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco will soon unveil a container “stack” for developers of cloud applications and services, and expects to have one for enterprises over time as well.
The Cloud Native Platform will emerge in April, according to Yvette Kanouff, Cisco senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Solutions. It will be delivered as a SaaS model with continuous integration/continuous delivery, and include containerized automated infrastructure as its base, policy-based management and orchestration as a middle layer, and analytics, development tools, and initial hybrid cloud applications in its framework.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Seagate today announced what it's calling the world's fastest enterprise-class, solid-state drive (SSD), one that can transfer data at rates up to 10 gigabytes per second (GBps), some 6GBps faster than its previously fastest SSD.While there were no specifics with regard to the SSD's read/write rates, capacities or pricing, the company did say the new drive meets the Open Compute Project (OCP) specifications. The OCP was launched in 2011 to allow the sharing of data center designs among IT vendors -- including Facebook, Intel, Apple, and Microsoft -- as well as financial services companies such as Bank of America and Fidelity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Boeing is looking to clean up one of the smallest and dirtiest component of travel—the commercial airplane toilet.With barely enough space to um, sit, and with high capacity usage, the commercial airline toilet perhaps is an engineering marvel but little else. Boeing however is looking to that notion with a self-cleaning aircraft bathroom– known as the Fresh Lavatory -- that the company says uses ultraviolet (UV) light to kill 99.99% of germs in the loo – and even puts down the toilet seat lid.+More on Network World: NASA: “Wild” technology will transform aviation+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Innovation takes time – and money, and people and resources. That’s why it’s common for a company to focus on core business activities and not build an innovation lab – a specific building or department dedicated to working on prototypes and fleshing out ideas. Part of the issue is that it can be difficult to justify and quantify the budget involved. Is it a skunkworks project that will consume resources but not deliver any value? Is it a purely a showcase for engineering prowess, or will the concepts produce real products? For many IT leaders, it’s hard to overcome the stigma of an innovation lab as a financial drain. “Innovation labs are regularly knocked because they often don't have clearly defined links to specific business strategies or goals,” says Charles King, an analyst with PUND-IT. “But that's also the basis of their appeal. In essence, innovation labs create a ‘safe’ space where an organization can explore unconventional, even radical ideas in hopes of inspiring changes or new opportunities that could enhance its business.” 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.cVu 3240NGKey features: cPacket cVu 3240NG is the most powerful distributed Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) solution on the market, delivering proactive real-time analysis, 40G line-rate performance analytics and complete packet inspection across L2-L7. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over the past decade Bank of America has grown by leaps and bounds internally and through an array of mergers and acquisitions. From a technical standpoint, that growth has created a complex and disparate set of data centers, computing architectures and vendor relationships.For CTO David Reilly, there was an obvious goal: Standardize on more efficient infrastructure. For a company that spends $3 billion on technology each year – nearly double the amount it did five years earlier – any reduced expenditures translate directly to improved bottom line profitability for the bank. Transitioning to a shared virtualized computing platform not only drove savings in the IT organization, but net profit for the bank. But soon Reilly realized that standardizing and virtualizing was not enough. He wanted to start all over again.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Using nanotechnology, proteins and a chemical that powers cells in everything from trees to people, researchers have built a biological supercomputer.The supercomputer, which is the size of a book, uses much less energy, so it runs cooler and more efficiently, according to scientists at McGill University, where the lead researchers on the project work."We've managed to create a very complex network in a very small area," said Dan Nicolau Sr., chairman of the Department of Bioengineering at McGill. "This started as a back-of-an-envelope idea, after too much rum I think, with drawings of what looked like small worms exploring mazes."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The massive federal data center consolidation effort has seen $2.8 billion in cost savings and a shuttering or merging of some 3,125 sites but issues remain, according to a report from the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office.According to the GAO, the 24 agencies participating in the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative have collectively made progress on their data center closures efforts. As of November 2015, agencies identified a total of 10,584 data centers, of which they reported closing 3,125 through fiscal year 2015.+More on Network World: In the face of relenting network attacks and it seems that the government’s chief weapon for combatting the assault lacks some teeth+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems is buying in some chip expertise that could help it in the datacenter.The networking giant's latest acquisition target is Leaba Semiconductor, a fabless semiconductor company based in Israel.The company is "in stealth mode," according to its website, which indicates only that it develops semiconductors to address "significant infrastructure challenges."Cisco had little more to say concerning Leaba's field of work in its blog post about the acquisition by Rob Salvagno, head of its mergers, acquisitions and venture investment team.However, according to information provided by Israel's Ministry of Economy, Leaba specializes in the design of chips for connecting memory, storage and compute in data center environments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The US Department of Energy said it has whittled 92 teams down to 9 finalists for its competition that aims to double the current amount of energy captured from ocean waves.Each of the finalists in the Wave Energy Prize and two alternates will now receive seed DOE funding to develop a 1/20th-scale model of their deep water wave energy converter (WEC) devices. The final round of testing will take place this summer at the nation's most advanced wave-making facility—the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Maneuvering and Seakeeping Basin in Carderock, Maryland.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you want to change the world, it might not occur to you to start by getting drunk. At least that’s how it happened for an idea that led to a tiny biological computer which will reportedly be morphed into a “living, breathing supercomputer” about the size of a book.“We’ve managed to create a very complex network in a very small area,” said McGill University’s Dan Nicolau, Chair of the Department of Bioengineering. “This started as a back of an envelope idea, after too much rum I think, with drawings of what looked like small worms exploring mazes.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are beginning to show up as a cause of mobile phone outages, according to respondents of a survey.The Spirient-commissioned report surveyed 54 global Mobile Network Operators (MNO), polling them on their experiences with outages and service degradations. It found that DDoS attacks showed up for the first time in this year’s report. For comparison, cyberattacks didn’t surface at all the last time researcher Heavy Reading conducted the survey for Spirient in 2013.Spirient is a test and service management firm for MNOs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Federal Trade Commission found few surprises in its annual summary of consumer complaints – offensive debt collection activities, identity theft, and imposter scams were the main offenders in 2015.
Imposter scams have been in the news of late because the Internal Revenue Service issued a report in January that said that aggressive and threatening phone calls by criminals impersonating IRS agents continues to plague taxpayers. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration in January said it has received reports of roughly 896,000 contacts since October 2013 and have become aware of over 5,000 victims who have collectively paid over $26.5 million as a result of the scam. The IRS also noted recently that there has been a 400% surge in phishing and malware incidents in this tax season alone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SAN DIEGO – Cisco this week is throwing its hat into the hyperconvergence and software-defined storage ring with a system co-developed with software company SpringPath.
Cisco is also rolling out at its Cisco Partner Summit here a new generation of Nexus 9000 data center switches featuring 25G/50G Ethernet based on custom ASICs. The new products dovetail with Cisco’s acquisition today of CliQr, a maker of “application-defined” hybrid cloud orchestration software for deploying and managing applications across bare metal, virtualized and container environments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco’s reseller event, Partner Summit, kicked off this week in San Diego. The event is normally a big one for Cisco as thousands of its resellers gather to be updated on the latest, greatest plans for Cisco. All eyes are on Chuck Robbins as this is the first Partner Summit held under his watch as the company’s CEO. The event kicks off today and has already seen Cisco make a couple of significant announcements in the data center.This morning Cisco announced its intention to acquired Silicon Valley based, CliQr Technologies for $260 million. The 105-person company provides application centric cloud orchestration that enables customers to model, deploy and manage across bare metal, virtual and container environments regardless of whether the infrastructure is on premise or in a private or public cloud. The technology will be used to help Cisco customers move to a seamless hybrid cloud model where the information can be moved between clouds, and resources can be provisioned across clouds. CliQr’s technology is already tightly integrated into a number of Cisco data center products including ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) and Unified Computing System (UCS). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please Continue reading
White box switching company Pica8 this week enhanced its operating system software to overcome limitations in OpenFlow switching.
Pica8 is adding Table Type Patterns (TTP) to PicOS so it can scale to 2 million flows with Cavium’s XPliant switch ASIC, and to 256,000 flows with Broadcom’s StrataXGS Tomahawk switch ASIC. This will enable larger data center build-outs, Pica8 says, because typical TCAM flow capacity in the top-of-rack installed base today is between 1,000 and 2,000 flows.
+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Crossroads for OpenFlow?+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here