AppLovin is a 4-year old marketing platform that places advertisements in mobile apps. And it’s a data-intensive business to say the least.When AppLovin learns of an advertising opportunity in an app, the company has 100 milliseconds to decide if it will bid on the spot in a real-time auction. If it wins the bid, it consults a database storing billions of user preferences to serve an ad personalized to that user. AppLovin processes about 30 billion to 50 billion actions per day, all of which need to happen in millisecond timeframes and on a global basis.The company started as a customer of Amazon Web Services' IaaS public cloud. But in the past few years CTO John Krystynak – an early VMware employee - has moved AppLovin’s operations to another platform: Hosted bare metal infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dropbox on Wednesday became the latest major cloud provider to announce new storage options in the European Union.Not only will the San Francisco-based company add two new European offices next year to its current roster of three, but it will also build new infrastructure for storing data within the EU.Customer requirements in the region have evolved, explained Thomas Hansen, the company's global vice president of sales and channel, in a post on the Dropbox for Business blog."This will not only build on the technical lead we have over competitors," Hansen wrote, but "will also give our customers more options about where their data is stored."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An intriguing type of quantum computing is one step closer to practicality with the announcement today that experts at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Stanford University and the Technical University of Munich have managed to solve one of the technology’s major problems using common semiconductor materials.The idea behind quantum computing, in the broadest possible strokes, is to use the quantum state of a small particle to store information. The advantage is that each of these particles, called qubits, can store a large range of values, while the regular bits at the core of electronic computers can only represent zero or one. Consequently, the theory goes, certain kinds of computation could be performed at vastly superior speeds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AMD plans to roll out a hotfix on Monday, November 30 for its new Radeon Software Crimson after some users reported their graphics cards were too hot to handle—and not in a good way.A random assortment of AMD GPU users recently reported seeing the fans in their graphics cards locked to a maximum 20 percent speed limit regardless of the load they were under. Some users report their cards being physically damaged after heavy gameplay sessions as a result of the bug.
Update: AMD has released a new driver to correct the issue, Crimson Beta 15.11.11. The release notes mention several other tweaks, including bug fixes in Just Cause 3, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, and Star Wars Battlefront.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Data breaches are serious and very real threats in today's digital world, and no industry sectors are immune. In the medical sector alone, the cost of client data breach liability, expense, and settlements surpassed the same costs from medical malpractice. Securing data and minimizing the probability and impact of data breaches is at its core a risk-based endeavor.While many businesses have recognized the need for risk assessment and management, there is still a tendency to treat risk assessment and managements as "checkbox" exercises. For a risk management program to provide true benefit, several things are required:
An enterprise-level risk management practice. This is NOT your IT risk management team – it is a standalone and empowered practice that operates at the CXO level. This team is focused on business alignment.
An IT-level risk management practice. This team is focused on the application and testing of applicable risk management frameworks and the controls associated with those frameworks.
Certified and qualified risk management professionals. There are several industry certifications available. CRISC (Certified in Risk & Information Systems Control) and CRMP (Certified Risk Management Professional) are examples. They both require hefty amounts of continuing education, which is critical, given the moving target Continue reading
A report released today by Cambridge, Mass.-based researcher IHS named Huawei, Cisco, Brocade and HP as the four leading companies in the enterprise networking sector.The leaders, according to IHS research director Matthias Machowinski, were chosen in part because of their roles as large-scale providers of a range of networking products and services for the enterprise.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Welcome to the Internet of stupid (hackable) things + Looking into the crystal ball of Amazon’s cloud futureTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Kalinin nuclear power plant's new neighbor will be a data center.The plant, near the city of Tver, is close to fiber-optic lines between Moscow and St Petersburg, providing the future data center with the double advantage of reliable power and fast communications links.When completed, the data center will be the largest in Russia, with a capacity of up to 10,000 racks, the company claims.Construction work will begin shortly, plant director Mikhail Kanyshev said Monday. The first phase is due to enter service in March 2017, and the second a year later, he said.Nuclear reactors need to run continuously, and so are a good match for loads that, like many data centers, run 24 hours a day. RosEnergoAtom expects the Kalinin data center to consume about 80 megawatts. That's just 2 percent of the neighboring power plant's generating capacity: Its four reactors are rated at 1 gigawatt each.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For Intel, the temporary inability to keep pace with Moore's Law -- the foundation of its business -- was a bit of an embarrassment, but the company is trying hard to catch up.Moore's Law is an observation that has led to faster, cheaper and smaller computers, and a concept that Intel has followed for decades. It states that the density of transistors doubles every two years, while cost per transistor declines.Until recently, the company released chips every two years like clockwork. But making smaller chips is becoming challenging and more expensive, said Bill Holt, executive vice president and general manager for Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group, during the company's annual investor day last week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In today's cloud-centric world, we’re seeing an explosion in the number of servers under IT management. Virtual machines made servers cheap, and containers will push prices down further. As a result, businesses can afford to deploy a server for every new need, but they can no longer afford to manage servers individually. Your servers no longer garner individual attention but are simply soldiers in a huge resource pool, dutifully fulfilling the resource requests of the data center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Developing systems to protect the nation’s electric grid has been a key goal for many public, private and government developers for years – yet exerts say the grid is still largely vulnerable of serious cyberattackers.The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking to bolster the nation’s grid defenses with a system called Rapid Attack Detection, Isolation and Characterization (RADICS) that will detect and automatically respond to cyber-attacks on US critical infrastructure.+More on Network World: 21 more crazy and scary things the TSA has found on travelers+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Equinix has, over the past several years, played the role of connector between a number of public cloud vendors and organizations' existing IT assets. It's a natural move for Equinix, which, as a global vendor of data center space, is an important utility provider, but obviously doesn't really play much up the value chain. Direct Connect helps them to change that, allowing companies to connect their privately owned and managed infrastructure to AWS. It also performs a similar role for other public cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure for example.The reasons for providing these connections are obvious - privacy, security, throughput, and application performance all benefit from these high-spec pipes. A recent study released by Equinix, titled Enterprise of the Future, found that by 2017, 84% of IT leaders will deploy IT infrastructure where interconnection – defined as direct, secure physical or virtual connections – is at the core, compared to only 38% today. Don't let it be said that interconnection is not an important part of the modern enterprise IT organization.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.Actiance Supervisory Capabilities for Alcatraz Key features: Actiance released expanded supervisory review capabilities for Alcatraz, its cloud-based archive. The expanded supervisory capabilities employ advanced analytics to enable greater insight into conversations occurring across 70+ communication channels. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While he thinks Dell buying EMC makes sense financially, Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla has little faith in the merged company's ability to innovate."EMC and Dell merging is a really good financial move for Michael, but it will set back innovation and distract from innovation," said Khosla, now a prominent venture capitalist, in an onstage interview at the Structure conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.MORE: Hottest Black Friday Windows dealsAsked about the future for old-line technology companies like Cisco, IBM and Dell, Khosla was pessimistic. In his view, only about half of those tech titans will stick around in the future. What's more, he said, innovation from those companies has been seriously lacking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The rise of virtualization has had a profound impact on the technology industry. In the networking industry, perhaps no vendor has ridden the wave of cloud more than Arista Networks. The company was founded a little over a decade ago, and today it is a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of over $4.6 billion. However, almost all of Arista's revenues today come from selling products inside the data center. The company was one of the most aggressive vendors in pushing the concept of a spine/leaf architecture as a replacement for a traditional multi-tier network. This week, Arista announced its first solution that is outside the data center. The Arista Cloud Connect solution connects public and private cloud data centers. Moving into the data center interconnect market is a logical extension for Arista and highlights just how far merchant silicon has come over the past decade.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
During its testimony on security weaknesses among federal agencies this week, the Government Accountability Office detailed a number of critical elements that make up effective protection systems.Among the systems the watchdog agency detailed was the key components in access control which is typically the technology an enterprise uses to regulate who has access to what resources.+ More on Network World: Watchdogs detail Federal security tribulations +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Making containers enterprise-ready has been a theme at this week's DockerCon EU conference in Barcelona, and on Tuesday Docker itself launched a new tool with that goal in mind.Aiming to give companies operational control while maintaining developers' productivity, Docker Universal Control Plane runs on-premises and is designed to help deploy and manage Dockerized distributed applications in production on any infrastructure."Portability has always been one of the premier attractions of modern application containers such as Docker, so it's no surprise to see the company and community focused on enhancing and extending that portability," said Jay Lyman, a research manager with 451 Research.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security issues continue to confound many Federal agencies keeping tons of sensitive information at risk of unauthorized disclosure, modification, or destruction.That was one of the main conclusions of yet another Government Accountability security assessment, which focused on the Department of Education but included information about other agencies, to congress this week. Since fiscal year 2006, the number of reported information security incidents affecting federal systems has steadily increased, rising from about 5,500 in fiscal year 2006 to almost 67,200 in fiscal year 2014, the GAO noted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As world powers compete to build the fastest supercomputers, more attention is being paid to alternative processing technologies as a way to add more horsepower to such systems.One thing is clear: It is becoming prohibitive to build blazing CPU-only supercomputers, due to power and space constraints. That's where powerful coprocessors step in -- the processors work in conjuction with CPUs to conduct complex calculations in a power-efficient manner. Coprocessors are an important topic at this week's Supercomputing 15 conference in Austin, Texas. According to the Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers, released on Monday, 104 systems used coprocessors, growing from 90 systems in a list released in July.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It would be difficult to overstate the impact container technology is having on the software-development world, so it's no wonder vendors large and small are jumping on board with tailored offerings. The latest example: Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which just rolled out an entire portfolio of Docker-focused products.Making containers enterprise-ready will be a key focus over the next two years, according to Dave Bartoletti, a principal analyst with Forrester."Large users will need the same degree of control over containers that they now have over virtual machines: they need to integrate them into their development processes, monitor them, configure them, connect them to each other over the network, and assign storage and other resources," he pointed out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There's been a slight delay, but the latest version of Intel's fastest processor ever will finally reach supercomputers early next year.The Xeon Phi chip, code-named Knights Landing, offers an array of new technologies that collectively deliver performance breakthroughs. The chip is also a springboard for new memory, I/O and storage technologies destined to reach desktops and laptops in the coming years.Intel didn't provide details on the first supercomputers with Knights Landing. The U.S. Department of Energy, however, said that the chip will be used in Cori, a 9,300-core supercomputer that will be deployed in the latter half of 2016 at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in Berkeley, California.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here