2016 is set to be a year of shifts for IT – shuffling budget dollars, reconfiguring business processes, and recasting tech talent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Seagate today announced its first use of helium in a hard disk drive (HDD), making it the company's highest capacity drive to date with 10TB of storage space.The new Enterprise Capacity 3.5-in. HDD is being targeted for use in cloud-based data centers. The HDD contains seven platters and 14 read/write heads. It uses a hermetically sealed case and helium to create a turbulence-free interior, which decreases friction on the platters.By using helium, Seagate was able to increase disk density by 25% over previous air-filled HDDs. The HDD also delivers higher performance and reduced power and weight, the company stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The number of U.S. patents granted declined for the first time since 2007, ending a seven-year run of increases.According to IFI Claims Patent Services, there were 298,407 utility patents granted during the 2015 calendar year. That represents a decrease of almost 1% compared to 2014, when patent grants hit 300,674 and surpassed the 300,000 threshold for the first time. IFI, which specializes in patent analysis, tracks utility patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and each year it releases its annual ranking of the top 50 recipients.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This might be up there with the cable connector boot that hit the reset button on Cisco switches…For seven weeks, Cisco’s been shipping UCS servers with a default password unknown to its systems administration customers, the company said in a field notice posted yesterday. The Register was first to report on the situation.The default password when initially configuring these servers is supposed to be “password.” But Cisco changed that to “Cisco1234” back in November, apparently without telling customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the not too distant future many consumers expect autonomous, self-driving cars that repair problems without human intervention, implement cognitive computing to adapt the car to a particular driver’s behaviors and react to the vehicle’s environment.Those are at least some of the conclusions gleaned from IBM’s “Auto 2025: A New Relationship – People and Cars” research involving 16,000 global consumers who were asked how they expect to use vehicles in the next ten years.+More on Network World: 20 years ago: Hot sci/tech images from 1995+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It may be time for the United States to rethink how the smallest parts of its monetary system -- the penny, nickel and dime – are made.According to a report this week from watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office, since 2006 the prices of metals used in coins have risen so much that the total production unit costs of the penny and nickel exceed their face value resulting in financial losses to the U.S. Mint. In fact such a change could potentially save between $8 million and $39 million per year by changing the metal composition of the nickel, dime, and quarter.+More on Network World: 20 years ago: Hot sci/tech images from 1995+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Networking and computing vendors have a long history of using famous songs to help market their offerings, and also have a tradition of reinventing themselves over and over. So it's no surprise that David Bowie's Changes would wind up in at least one major ad campaign.MORE: A history of singing the Big BluesThe music and fashion icon's death on Sunday at the age of 69 reminded me of that $60 million Novell "The Power to Change" marketing campaign that debuted on Monday Night Football back in the year 2000.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has invested millions of dollars into Azure and Office 365, and their competitors are following suit with bona fide public cloud offerings of their own. But public cloud solutions are not for everyone. Organizations of many stripes have legitimate reasons for not wanting their restricted data on systems beyond their total control.For many of these entities, on-premises Exchange Server is a messaging must. Microsoft continues to update the software with the assurance that any improvements made to its cloud-based stack will eventually trickle down. Increasingly, these features are adding layers of complexity to the already daunting task of running an enterprise-grade messaging system. It's easy to get lost when going through hardware capacity planning, setting up DAGs (database availability groups) and site resiliency, configuring mail routing, and making sure your users can actually connect to the system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When you think of leaders in big data and analytics, you’d be forgiven for not listing Syncsort among them. But this nearly 50-year-old company, which began selling software for the decidedly unglamorous job of optimizing mainframe sorting, has refashioned itself into a critical conduit by which core corporate data flows into Hadoop and other key big data platforms. Syncsort labels itself "a freedom fighter" liberating data and dollars -- sometimes millions of dollars -- from the stranglehold of big iron and traditional data warehouse/analytics systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Attacks on major state universities will continue in 2016, according to a non-profit cybersecurity readiness organization that specializes in the public sector.
And the problem is exacerbated because some state or small governments don’t have ‘mature’ cybersecurity plans in place, so they can’t mitigate it.
The vulnerability has been tagged by a cybersecurity readiness organization The Center for Internet Security (CIS). The prediction was quoted in Fedscoop, a government-oriented IT website.Intellectual property
“The universities are home to an awful lot of valuable intellectual property, so a lot of the major research universities are prime targets for attackers,” said Thomas Duffy, chair of the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) that's operated by CIS. He was quoted by Fedscoop, writing about threats for states and localities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Attacks on major state universities will continue in 2016, according to a non-profit cybersecurity readiness organization that specializes in the public sector.
And the problem is exacerbated because some state or small governments don’t have ‘mature’ cybersecurity plans in place, so they can’t mitigate it.
The vulnerability has been tagged by a cybersecurity readiness organization The Center for Internet Security (CIS). The prediction was quoted in Fedscoop, a government-oriented IT website.Intellectual property
“The universities are home to an awful lot of valuable intellectual property, so a lot of the major research universities are prime targets for attackers,” said Thomas Duffy, chair of the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) that's operated by CIS. He was quoted by Fedscoop, writing about threats for states and localities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco is reportedly preparing a hyperconvergence appliance through an OEM arrangement with start-up Springpath. According to CRN and The Register, Cisco has invested an undisclosed amount in Springpath as a prelude to the introduction of a hyperconvergence appliance combining Cisco’s UCS server platform with Springpath’s software, which enables compute, storage, networking and virtualization to run on an x86 server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AMD's new Polaris graphics architecture ushers in a fourth-generation graphics core, unheard of power efficiency, and perhaps more importantly for the company, hope.The company said Monday that Polaris will pack a mostly redesigned GPU including the new fourth-gen GCN cores, a new memory controller, new multimedia cores, and a new geometry processor. Perhaps more importantly, it'll be just as fast as a comparable Nvidia part, while using a lot less power, the company said. In a demo to the press, AMD showed off a PC with an early Polaris GPU running Star Wars Battlefield at 1920x1080 resolution at 60 fps and consuming just 86 watts. The exact same system outfitted with a GeForce GTX 950 consumed 140 watts. AMD used desktop parts to sub in for laptop parts as it didn't have mobile components yet, but the chip will initially be aimed at laptops and more entry-level desktop graphics cards.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.GigaVUE-FM applianceKey features: The GigaVUE-FM appliance simplifies the management and orchestration of visibility infrastructure and enables enterprises to increase the scale and reach of Gigamon’s Visibility Fabric with additional, dedicated compute capacity. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The FirstImage by Reuters/Joe SkipperThey have talked about it for years and had a couple failures but SpaceX this week did what no one has done before – they launched a multi-stage rocket into space, delivered 11 satellites into low-Earth orbit and landed the first stage of the spacecraft back on the launching pad. The Falcon rocket becomes the first of what SpaceX hopes will become a family of reusable launcher systems. Take a look.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Acacia Communications, an optical networking company that boosts bandwidth for cloud and other service providers, Monday filed for an IPO -- a rarity during a year in which the number of tech companies going public is at its lowest since 2009, the year Acacia launched.The $125M filing to go public comes during a year when the rise of the Unicorn, private companies with valuations of $1 billion or more, has blown away the tech IPO market. Tech IPOs this year have included those by First Data, Rapid7 and Pure Storage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A few months ago Salesforce committed to a goal of eventually powering its global operations entirely with renewable energy, and on Monday it took a key step in that direction by signing a 12-year agreement to back a brand-new wind farm in West Virginia.The farm is expected to become operational in December 2016. Once it does, the electricity generated under the agreement is expected to be 125,000 megawatt hours annually, which is more than Salesforce used in its data centers during all of fiscal year 2015.It's also equivalent to about 90 percent of its total electricity use over that time period, putting Salesforce well on the way toward that 100 percent goal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The data center is transforming -- modernizing to meet business demand as technologies such as software-defined architecture, cloud and virtualization take hold. This modernization is also being driven by CIOs and IT executives taking a hard look at their computing needs and asking whether they want to own and/or operate data centers any longer, industry experts say.Managing the transitionTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Tough to chooseWith so many great products on the market, it’s hard to pick the best ones. So we asked our experts, Network World’s independent product reviewers and bloggers to list their favorite products of 2015. What we got back was a list that covers the full spectrum of the networking world, with a little entertainment and gaming thrown in.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here