In the scramble for SDN supremacy, Cisco and VMware usually bark about users who opt for one of their solutions over the other.
In all the noise, it’s rare to hear from one that plans to implement both.
But that’s what SugarCreek, a $650 million, privately-held food processing and packing company based in Washington Court House, OH, is doing in its software-defined data centers (SDDC). VMware’s NSX network virtualization software will be used to secure and automate the VMware-virtualized server environment, while Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) will be deployed to manage the physical network infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Back in the day, "rogue IT" typically entailed departments building servers and putting them under their desks in an attempt to circumvent the IT department and all of the pesky security controls that came with IT-approved servers.Often, those servers sat under a desk, inside a closet or back room — unpatched, unprotected, and non-compliant — for long stretches of time before finally being discovered. Those were the good ol' days, compared to the new type of rogue IT that's quickly spreading through today's IT landscape. It's invisible, nearly undetectable, and completely unacceptable, to say the least. The new rogue IT involves departments buying things online (think Amazon Web Services, Google Services, and Microsoft Azure), and setting up off-the-books IT operations outside of your organization's boundaries. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Along with social, mobile and analytics, cloud technologies and models have earned a place as one of the core disruptors of the digital age. And while the cloud market has matured over the years, its interaction with the rapidly growing data and analytics landscape suggests there are plenty more disruptive opportunities for cloud in 2016. As 2016 gets underway, five insiders share their predictions for what 2016 holds in store for the cloud.[ Related: It’s a hybrid cloud world, and we’re all just living in it ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Building a high-speed brain-to-computer interface that would offer “unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world” is the goal of a new program announced by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency recently.
The research agency’s Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) want to develop an implantable device that would “serve as a translator, converting between the electrochemical language used by neurons in the brain and the ones and zeros that constitute the language of information technology. You may recall in the sci-fi film The Matrix, protagonists were plugged into a violent virtual future world though a brain interface.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the future, computers may be able to read your thoughts through a connection with the brain. DARPA wants to create a device that could help make that happen.The device, which will be the size of two stacked nickels, will translate information from a brain into digital signals for use on a computer. The device is being developed as part of a four-year, US$60 million research program funded by DARPA -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which operates under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Defense.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 13 awesome and scary things in near Earth space
The program, called Neural Engineering System Design (NESD), is one of DARPA's many research programs that aims to bring brain-like intelligence to computers. The research program will cover neuroscience, low-power chips, photonics and medical devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Marvin Minsky, a professor emeritus at MIT who pioneered the exploration of the mind and its replication in a computer, died on Sunday from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 88, according to MIT Media Lab.In his prologue to his seminal book, Society of Mind, Minsky wrote that the book tries to explain how the mind works, and "that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself."+ ALSO: Notable 2015 deaths in technology, science & inventions +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two days before a ruling in a patent infringement case between the companies, Arista Networks is suing Cisco Systems for what it alleges are antitrust violations.Arista today filed a counterclaim to Cisco’s 13-month-old copyright infringement suit in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, for antitrust and unfair competition. Arista alleges Cisco conducts a “bait and switch” with its command line interface in which it claims it is an industry standard and then attempts to penalize competitors for emulating it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two days before a ruling in a patent infringement case between the companies, Arista Networks is suing Cisco Systems for what it alleges are antitrust violations.
Arista today filed a counterclaim to Cisco’s 13-month-old copyright infringement suit in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, for antitrust and unfair competition. Arista alleges Cisco conducts a “bait and switch” with its command line interface in which it claims it is an industry standard and then attempts to penalize competitors for emulating it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
2015 was filled with many big technology acquisitions, the most notable of which was Dell dropping a whopping $67 billon for EMC. One of the most interesting questions that has been raised regarding the acquisition is what happens to the EMC Federation companies, most notably, VCE (disclosure: VMware is a client of ZK Research).VCE was founded as a joint venture between three market-leading vendors – VMware, Cisco, and EMC – to deliver a converged solution comprised of products from the three companies. In October of 2014, VCE announced it was acquiring controlling interest in the JV from Cisco (VMware was a minority shareholder).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.Actifio Global ManagerKey features: AGM is a web-scale data virtualization solution delivering instant access and radically simple management of application data for business resiliency and test data management across private, public, and hybrid cloud. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook is setting up a data center in Clonee, Ireland, which will be its sixth in the world and its second outside the U.S.The new data center will be equipped with servers and storage from the Open Compute Project, a Facebook initiative that shares designs as open source with other data center operators to standardize and drive down the costs of equipment."We will outfit this data center with the latest OCP server and storage hardware, including Yosemite for compute," Facebook's Vice President of Engineering, Jay Parikh said in a post on the social networking website. Yosemite is an open source modular chassis for high-powered microservers, designed by Facebook.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A few years ago, you wouldn't have bet much on IBM's Power systems having a bright future. The major Unix platforms have all been on the decline for more than a decade, giving way to Linux servers powered by increasingly capable x86 processors from Intel.The jury is still out on Power, but there are signs that a bold push by IBM to revive the technology has started to pay off. Oracle's Sparc platform is also proving surprisingly resilient, raising a question about whether Hewlett-Packard should have killed its own proprietary Unix chip, PA-RISC, all those years ago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
More guns and ammo foundGuns and ammo continue to be the scourge of the TSA. Week after week of the agency’s own blog report on what its agents find on people looking to travel through the country’s airports are inundated with stories of loaded guns and ammunition. We won’t go into the ridiculous gun situation but will look at the weirder stuff the TSA has found folks traveling with, like meat slicers and Chihuahuas. Take a look (all entries are from the TSA Blog site).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In November, Microsoft released Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4. With the final release due out in the second half of this year, TP4 gives us the latest look at where Microsoft's flagship operating system is heading. There are several interesting spots to look at and some licensing news that is controversial. I put the release through its paces for around a month; here are my observations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Think housing your servers in a data center rather than squeezing them under your desk is a bulletproof solution?Well, they might be safer in a data center, but believe it or not, some of the same pitfalls that can create trouble in the office can affect those secure data centers too. Namely UPS failure, human error, and cybercrime.'Unplanned'
UPS system failure is still the principal cause of "unplanned data center outages," according to a new report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell, one of the industry’s first disaggregators, this week began an initiative to decouple its software.The company unveiled an operating system that separates the applications and services from the base OS platform. Called OS10, Dell plans to make it its strategic operating systems offering, extending from Dell switches to also power its servers and storage products.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Enterprise disaggregation is inevitable+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As researchers try to build more complex computers that get closer to emulating the way the human brain works, one of the areas of focus is memory.Existing chips, hard disks and tape drives are great at storing large amounts of data, but a new breed of memory chip called a memristor could go a step further: helping the artificial intelligence systems of tomorrow actually understand the data and make more use of it.Memristors could help computers connect the dots to identify diseases or help self-driving cars recognize objects based on probabilities and associations. Memristors are best used in machine-learning models to make predictions based on patterns and trends culled from large stacks of information, said Alex Nugent, CEO of Knowm.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Researchers have combined transistors and photonics in a fabricated chip for the first time. The photonics act as inputs and outputs (I/O) and let the microprocessor talk to other chips. That light-based technology could be faster and more bandwidth-friendly than wires.The new chip is revolutionary because the photonics I/O have been made into part of the chip for the first time in a manufacturing scenario, scientists from the University of California Berkeley and the University of Colorado wrote in a letter published in Nature.Photonics is the technology behind the detection of photons, or particles of light. It's the principal building block for fiber-optic transmission of data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you have ever tried to get tax help from the IRS over the phone and weren’t able to get any – you are not alone.That’s because the Internal Revenue Service provided the lowest level of telephone service during fiscal year 2015 compared to prior years, with only 38% of callers who wanted to speak with an IRS assistant able to reach one, according to a report this week from the Government Accountability Office. Perhaps worse yet is that the IRS and Department of Treasury have no real plans to improve the situation, the GAO stated.+More on Network World: IRS warns yet again on scam artist trickery+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Wireless LAN purchases aren't exactly going gangbusters these days, but relative to other enterprise infrastructure product sales, WLANs are where it's at.Synergy Research Group's latest figures show that WLAN sales grew 5% over the last 4 quarters vs. 2.3% for 7 segments measured overall (the others being data center servers, Ethernet switches, unified communications apps, routers and the slowest-growers -- voice systems and telepresence).Synergy Res
Synergy Research Group
While you might think that the general availability of faster and more flexible 802.11ac Wave 2 products from WLAN market leader Cisco, #2 HP/Aruba and others has sparked WLAN purchases, Synergy Chief Analyst and Managing Director John Dinsdale says that isn't necessarily the case.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here