Dell has released a new family of servers aimed at companies that want some of the cost savings of using custom-built hardware but without having to do as much of the engineering work.The servers are aimed at what Dell calls the second tier of hyper-scale customers -- those big enough to buy hundreds or even thousands of servers at a time, but who aren't as massive as a Google or a Facebook. That includes smaller Web-scale companies as well as telcos, financial services firms, cloud software companies and others.The Googles of the world design their own hardware to make it as energy- and space-efficient as possible. That means stripping out management software and redundant components, and building resiliency into their software stack rather than the hardware itself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Who's drivingImage by REUTERS/Edgar SuThe development of self-driving and autonomous cars seems to be all the rage in the automotive community these days. Certainly lots of work remains to be done around safety and communications technologies but there is a heavy push to make car drones a reality. Here we take a look at some of the most recent developments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Robots will have to be flawed if they are to create successful working relationships with humans, new research has found."Judgmental mistakes, wrong assumptions, expressing tiredness or boredom, or getting overexcited," will help humans "understand, relate to and interact" with robots more easily, Mriganka Biswas of the University of Lincoln in Britain says in an article on the university's website.Biswas has been conducting a study for a PhD on how humans interact with robots. Supporting caregivers
Robots are increasingly being used to support caregivers, the article says.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.Attunity CloudBeamKey features: Attunity’s cloud data transfer solution now transfers data between enterprise data centers and Hadoop running on the AWS Cloud, enabling companies to leverage Big Data analytics with Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR). More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Struggling amidst a continued downturn in the PC industry, AMD reported a wider loss than expected, though beating analysts’ revenue expectations.AMD reported a third quarter 2015 loss of $197 million on revenue of $1.06 billion, blaming lower CPU and GPU sales for the red ink. A year ago, AMD reported a profit of $17 million on revenue of $1.43 billion, a drop of 26 percent in revenue. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected AMD to report a loss of 12 cents a share and revenue of $995.87 million for the third quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Getting the innumerable wireless networks the military and some commercial enterprises to communicate just doesn’t work in many cases, creating serious communications and security problems for warfighters and others interacting with those networks.+More on Network World Gartner: IT should simplify security to fight inescapable hackers+Researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are looking for ways to change that problem with a new program called Dynamic Network Adaptation for Mission Optimization (DyNAMO).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We normally think of Intel as the engine of the PC. But as Intel proved on Tuesday, the company can keep increasing revenue even as the PC market declines—and if it ever recovers, Intel’s business is poised to take off.Why? Data centers.Intel’s consumer processor division, called the Client Computing Group, still makes up close to 60 percent of its business—$8.51 billion in total third-quarter revenue, compared to $4.1 billion for its Data Center Group. But while CCG profits fell by 20 percent that quarter, Intel still recorded flat revenue because profits at DCG, which include SSDs and Xeon chips, are up 9.3 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Another made up geeky dayWednesday, Oct. 21, 2015 marks the day in which time-traveler Marty McFly arrives from the past (from the movie “Back to the Future Part II”. The Internet is freaking out about this upcoming “holiday”, and in the tradition of fake geeky holidays like “Star Wars Day” (May 4), Pi Day (March 14) and “Talk like a Pirate Day” (September 19), we now have a day to celebrate everything related to the time-travel movie, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Once upon a time, there was nothing but native, or bare metal, hypervisors (a.k.a. virtual machine managers). In the 1980s, I cut my teeth on IBM System/370 mainframes running VM/CMS, but bare metal's history goes all the way back to the 1960s. With bare metal hypervisors, the hypervisor runs directly on the hardware. There is no intervening operating system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Here’s to hoping that Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, didn’t get off on the wrong foot with his new boss on Monday.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: The Bunch is back - How Dell and EMC could change the IT landscape | How will Dell justify its massive payout for EMC? +Some commenters were quick to point out that Gelsinger was using a Mac during the kick-off conference call to announce Monday’s mega-merger between Dell and EMC. When Michael Dell buys your company, does that mean you have to start using Dell laptops?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell's $67 billion acquisition of EMC stacks up as the largest technology deal in history. But if Michael Dell is gobbling up storage giant EMC in an attempt to stem the tide of movement from on-premise proprietary data centers to the cloud, it might be too little too late. Aside from merely bulking up, what exactly is Dell trying to do with EMC? If he hopes to leverage his new toy and its 83% stake in VMware to move deeper into the cloud, then this deal could end up justifying its enormous price tag. In a conference call about the deal, EMC CEO Joe Tucci reportedly claimed that being part of Dell as a private company would speed the development of cloud-based technologies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Six feet deepGoogle is truly a company that has more technology and products than it can handle sometimes, and in 2015 the company with the recent name change shed a host of tools and products to enable it to focus on more pressing needs. Here’s a look back at what Google this year has offed or announced plans to off (To go back even further, check out 2014’s Google Graveyard.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Despite its whopping price tag, the $67 billion Dell acquisition of EMC doesn't radically reshape the technology market.
The acquisition, announced today, is not as disruptive to the tech market as, say, Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems, or Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of Digital Equipment Corp., companies with competitive platforms and technologies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
HP and SanDisk are plotting new storage technology that could be 1,000 times faster than flash memory, though they’ll face some competition along the way.Details on the new technology are scarce, but the goal is to create a “universal memory” that serves as both long-term storage and RAM, the Wall Street Journal reports. The goal is to commercialize this technology some time between 2018 and 2020.Why this matters: Today’s computers offer RAM and storage separately, because the former is much more expensive and purges its data when the machine powers down. Programs and files are stored on flash memory, but during use they’ll load some data into RAM for faster short-term access. A single type of memory for both short- and long-term storage could boost a PC’s performance dramatically.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell's US$67 billion acquisition of EMC will give it access to a sales force notorious for its ability to "sell ice to eskimos," while EMC will gain a new foothold among mid-market customers. As a private entity, the combined result will face a freedom from market pressures that competitors such as HP can only dream of.Those are just some of the benefits that could follow from the deal announced early on Monday."This industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation," said Crawford del Prete, an executive vice president with IDC. "You can't navigate it with short-term business decisions."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With Dell acquiring EMC for a record $67 billion, it raises the question: What does this all mean for VMware and its customers?Officially, Dell says VMware will remain an independent publicly traded company. The wrinkle is that EMC owns 83% of VMware’s stock; and Dell is acquiring EMC.Forrester analyst Glenn O’Donnell says he expects the impact of the merger on VMware customers to be minimal. “You can basically look at this as some musical chairs at the high end,” he says. But other analysts say there could be significant opportunities for Dell to combine its hardware with VMware’s software.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Dell acquires EMC for $67 billion | VMware CEO hits on network virtualization reality, feuding with Cisco & the EMC Federation's future +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Until recently, a clear delineation existed between Windows system administrators and developers. You’d never catch a system administrator writing a single line of code, and you’d never catch a developer bringing up a server. Neither party dared to cross this line in Windows environments. Nowadays, with the devops movement spreading like wildfire, that line is fading away.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Consummating a deal that was rumored for much of last week, Dell this morning confirmed that it is acquiring search giant EMC and its myriad businesses for $67 billion, a record amount for the technology industry.EMC’s most valuable piece, virtualization leader VMware, will continue as a publicly traded company, according to Dell.From a Dell press release:
The combination of Dell and EMC will create the world’s largest privately-controlled, integrated technology company. The company will be a leader in the extremely attractive high-growth areas of the $2 trillion information technology market with complementary product portfolios, sales teams and R&D investment strategies. The transaction combines two of the world’s greatest technology franchises with leadership positions in servers, storage, virtualization and PCs and it brings together strong capabilities in the fastest growing areas of the industry, including digital transformation, software-defined data center, hybrid cloud, converged infrastructure, mobile and security.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.JIRA Service Desk 3Key features: now a standalone product built on the JIRA platform with added ITIL-ready capabilities. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As expected, Windows 10 provided little if any bounce to PC shipments in the just-concluded September quarter, researchers at IDC and Gartner said yesterday.
"Not in terms of driving volume, no," said Loren Loverde of IDC in a Friday interview when asked about Windows 10's impact. "The main inhibiting concern has been the continuing free upgrade."
Rival research firm Gartner concurred. "The focus of the Windows launch in the quarter was to upgrade to Windows 10 on existing PCs, rather than ship on new PCs," the company said in a statement.
Both IDC and Gartner pegged third-quarter PC shipments as down from the same period in 2014, although they differed slightly on the extent of the contraction. IDC said that shipments declined 11% year-over-year, while Gartner said it was closer to 8%. IDC put shipments at 71 million, Gartner, at 74 million. Part of the difference is how each defines the category: IDC does not include tablets with detachable keyboards, such as Microsoft's Surface Pro, while Gartner does.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here